I sent the first 37 chapters of Missing Persons to my agent yesterday for his review while I work on the final approximately 60 pages. I fully intended to tackle the remaining segment today, but this short story idea infested my mind yesterday, demanding that I at least get my notes down on the page…and I ended up with something like 1700 words at the end of this morning’s writing session. The working title is A Certain Kind of Personality and it’s my attempt to write something with a truly absurd concept without treating it as if it were absurd. I was probably inspired by a tale called “Pop Art” in Joe Hill’s collection Twentieth Century Ghosts, and I hope like the dickens I’m not just imitating him.
I’m not entirely sure where the story is headed. I headed to the shower after I turned off the computer, hoping that my mind would work on the next stage of the plot, but instead it got locked into coming up with the structure for my next Storytellers Unplugged essay, which was going to be about dialog until I saw that Beth Massie wrote on that topic this morning. Drats! And I had such a great title for my essay, too: The Debate at the OK Corral, which was going to compare static conversation scenes to talking heads scenes in movies, which was going to segue into this great parody of the famous shootout using words instead of bullets. Ah, well. Back to the drawing board. I just wish I had better control over what my mind cogitated about when I’m showering, but I guess I shouldn’t complain about the productivity I achieve there.
A PayPal success story: I bought some ink cartridges on eBay early last month and they never arrived. The seller had a decent feedback rating, all positives, and he sent a tracking number. However, the product never arrived and the tracking number provided no helpful information. So I asked the seller what was up and he shrugged and said I should have bought insurance. Not acceptable sez I. What do you want, asks he. A refund, asks I. No way, tough luck, sez he. Do whatever you want, continues he. Filed a complaint with PayPal on Saturday, money cheerfully (?) refunded by seller today. I love it when the system works. Now I live in fear that the package will show up, like today, and I’ll have to hang my head and pay the guy again!
