Poor Penmanship

I assume I come from a short line of authors. There may be some greatly acclaimed literary works by some of my forefathers, but I doubt it. Most of my family reads nothing but the Sunday comics and writes only under duress. My Sister is the exception. She was published as a featured writer in a small community newsletter in Eastern Washington some years ago and while she didn't receive an award or compensation, so far as I am aware, her grammar was quite good. The newsletter is now out of print, if you were thinking of looking up some of her articles. I tried to google it, but I don't think her published short stories made it into the electronic age.

My father was a business letter guy. He didn't waste time or effort with verse. For him, writing was a tool. He wasn't skilled, but he was well practiced. My father's letters were without preamble or opening salutation. His letters are lost now, since they were mostly wadded up and thrown in the trash by the recipient, but if any had survived, they might have gone something like this:

To Mr. James Oldham,

Please be notified that on three separate occasions, your cow has entered my farm without invitation and eaten a large portion of my wife's flower and vegetable garden. On each of those three occasions, I have notified you and so far, you haven't fixed the fence to keep your cow on your side. If your cow comes through the fence again, I will shoot her dead and you can retrieve her at that time.

Looking forward to seeing you and Sally in church Sunday next.

Sincerely,

Mert

Now, I don't know if my Dad ever sent that letter, but it would be something he might have sent. Short and to the point.

I have made some three or four attempts to create a novel, each attempt ending poorly. Once I did get forty or fifty pages into an adventure/spy novel set in post WWII China, but I ran out of characters. In order to create a sense of suspense, I killed off the protagonist and his entire family right at the beginning in a fire that was of a suspicious origin, in an “isolated monastery situated at the top of a cliff, on the coast of a ever-tempestuous sea”, but it put me in a bind with the plot. It didn't seem fair to kill off the handsome hero with the angular chin and washboard stomach and not kill the antagonist and his family and all the greedy monks, so I had everybody die in the fire except the villain. The fire was a good idea since the villain needed a diversion to get away with the loot, but I forgot that the only way out of the monastery was a steep, slippery path that proved to be too much for the villain, since he had the requisite limp and fell down a lot. Of course it was a rainy night with lots of lightning and a semi-magical dog that appeared and disappeared without a purpose other than to add suspense, so the villain promptly slips and falls off the edge, but has just enough time to reach up and grab the ghost-grey dog by the throat, so now the villain and the dog both fall off the path onto the sharp rocks that looked like dragons teeth with some weird lichen on them that made them look like they were dragon's teeth, but with with some pretty serious gingivitis.

Anyway, the villain and the dog fell. No way would they survive that, because it was like a thousand feet down to the lichen infested rocks, so now the only remaining character was a fat, mute bartender who lost his vocal chords in the war but hadn't yet learned sign-language.  He was one of those bartender characters that doesn't have a purpose other than to be interesting and serve cold beer to weary travelers.  Being mute and fat made him unique and interesting, but I didn't think ahead when I had the villain start the monastery fire and kill off everybody else, so now I am really stuck since you can't fill five hundred pages with one chubby mute character who can't speak. I tried, it can't be done.

I was thinking about bringing the dog back by claiming he could travel like in the transporter in Star Trek. Nobody liked the fat mute bartender, since he had a sour disposition, as all bartenders in novels must and he needed a friend.  I thought if the dog could be a good friend to the bartender, maybe the dog could now be the central character with the bartender being his sidekick and they could travel around and save babies and orphans from all manner of disaster, but that seemed just a shade past plausible, so the dog had to die permanently on the rocks while the monastery burned.

That ended my first novel.