Proximity Muse

Every writer has a head full of useless facts and zany trivia. We pound so much garbage into our skulls that some of it is bound to stick. When I know something random and someone asks me how I know, I’m frequently forced to admit I have no idea. Every once in awhile, though, I’m at least able to say that I know because it was part of the research I did for Project X. So research, yeah. That’s what this post is about. It just took me awhile to get there. Specifically, we are gonna talk about using the Interwebs. Start by memorizing this phrase. Just Fucking Google It.

How Much?

How much research needs to be done depends entirely on what you are writing and what your audience is. If I’m writing short pulp stories in the vein of Two-Fisted Tales, the amount of research I’m gonna need to do will be light. I may need to know how to spell the name of some exotic locale properly (hey, that is research), what sort of folks live there and what the nastiest animal around is. That should take like 20 minutes, tops. I’m not gonna be taking a ton of notes (though I make some bookmarks for later reference), because the genre doesn’t really require a great deal of verisimilitude. Now, if I’m doing a freelance bit for the WWF (environmentalists, not wrestlers) and they want me to write about the same area, I’m gonna need to dig a little deeper. I’m gonna need to spend more time reading, more time documenting sources and more time making sure of the quality of my sources. This seems like common sense, yeah? Do the amount of research your work requires – don’t be lazy – but don’t do more than you need too.

Where?

Wikipedia. There I said it. It has a lot of good information that can help you get started with your research. If nothing else, Wikipedia should give you an overview of whatever you’re researching. Obviously, you don’t want to take everything posted on Wikipedia as the absolute truth, but a reasonable amount of the content is sourced. Go look at the sources. Them things is gold mines, son. I use Wikipedia to find sources that are more reliable. Those sources generally lead to other sources, and so on. I’d also suggest working on your Google-fu. I’ve found full academic .pdf files online that my professors said they couldn’t get hold of. No, I’m not advocating piracy here (arrr!) I’m just saying know how to work the system.

Here’s an example of how to work the system and find obscure shit. Let’s say I want to find a picture of Chuck Wendig naked. Stop making that face at me, it’s hypothetical. Fine. A poem about Chuckles naked form then. The worst thing you could ever do is type “Chuck Wendig naked poem” into the browser. I don’t know what you’d find and I don’t want too. My guess would be pictures of woodchucks banging to bluegrass music. I digress. The important part of a poem about naked Wendigs isn’t the naked part. The internet loves the word naked so much that you’ll get 3 million hits on crap that has nothing to do with a nude Chuck (I’m guessing here). You need to learn what sort of words Google likes but doesn’t love. A better search would be “poem chuck wendig artistic” or “poems about chuck wendig.” Either of those should let you find what you want, assuming such content actually exists.

Plagiarism

Just because I can’t spell the word doesn’t mean you don’t need to watch out for it. I know how tempting it is to just copy/paste stuff directly from a site into your work. Resist. Even if that wasn’t completely unethical, the internet is filled with millions of howler monkeys looking out for exactly what you just did. God forbid you ever become famous and someone finds that shit. We’ll never hear the end of it. Make the information work for you, don’t just work the information.

NOTE: No poems or pictures of naked Wendigs were produced during the making of this post.

I’m still plenty sick. Don’t expect much from me quite yet.

Unsurprisingly to anyone with even the vaguest idea of world geography, Mr. Kobe hails from the magical land of Japan. Mr. Kobe is the youngest of our poker players at a mere 25 years of age. He wears those thick-rimmed glasses popular with the hipster crowd and dresses in suits that probably cost than might be apparent.

One of the themes of our tale is how the mobile phone has changed things over the last decade or so. Each of our players has one, The Dealer has one, and even some of the cronies have ‘em. In Mr. Kobe’s case, his is a super slim Japanese model that makes the iPhone look like the primitive software it actually is. The phone has all the usual bells and whistles, but the one thing about it that stands out is its audio and video capture abilities. His phone is basically skinnier version of the Flip, and Mr. Kobe uses this aspect of his phone more often than any other, much like the iconic buck toothed Japanese tourist from the 80s. He takes pictures of people. He takes pictures of places. He takes pictures of food. He samples the music playing in a bar. The phone is nearly constantly in his hand.

Mr. Kobe is actually Yakuza, naturally, and is painted from throat to wrists to ankle with Irezumi, the old school method of Japanese tattoos. Because it’s generally frowned upon to show your tattoos around other people that aren’t gangsters, Mr. Kobe keeps his shirt buttoned to the very tippity top, won’t roll up his sleeves (no matter how hot it gets), and is unlikely to so much hike up a pant leg to scratch his calf. To American eyes, this gives Mr. Kobe a sort of nerd-esque or conservative flair that dovetails nicely with the Japanese tourist image.

The Yakuza originally formed around the activities of two groups: gamblers and wandering merchants (steal stuff in one place, sell it in another). Although Mr. Kobe definitely hails from the gambler end of the family, he knows a thing or two about moving cattle quickly and quietly in the dark of night. He’s killed men before and has a particularly low tolerance for cheaters, which, thanks to his family history, he’s quite good at catching.

Mr. Kobe is accompanied by two younger Japanese guys that look as though they might have come directly from the set of The Fast and the Furious. These kids don’t have the tattoos, or the sense of honor of real Yakuza, but finding decent recruits to add to the family has become harder and harder as Japan (and Asia in general) continues to advance economically. Like I said, they may not have Yakuza “class,” but they still have guns stuffed in their oversized fanny packs. I’m not even giving them names. They won’t last long enough to need ‘em.

The Yakuza have fairly impressive organizations already at work in the US, and Mr. Kobe is just here on vacation. There might be a few other Yakuza around as well, but they are more likely here to gamble than they are to engage in a turf war for drugs, prostitutes, etc.

So, meet the only player at the table with a gun. Meet. Mr. Kobe.

Continuing with the character work for my next project.

Mr. Vegas

Mr. Vegas looks his name. He wears designer shades indoors, has expensive, lounge-lizard kinda clothes (complete with alligator/shark skin shoes) and slicked back hair that is just starting to thin to a widow’s peak. He’s slightly overweight as well. Not so much you could call him fat, just enough to give him the look of being soft. A nervous habit is to use the 100% cotton handkerchief in his pocket to mop his sweaty brow.  His fingernails are manicured and he has that orange spray-on tan. He tells loud, bad jokes, and smokes a stinky cigar. His cell phone goes off at the most inappropriate times possible and has Livin’ La Vida Loca as the ring tone.

Mr. Vegas tells the ladies he isn’t married, but thanks to the spray-on tan it’s pretty easy to white ring around his finger where a wedding band should be. In short, Mr. Vegas is a walking, talking cliché of all the things you’d expect from a Vegas douche bag. He should be. He’s spent a lot of time perfecting his act. The bit about not being married might be the only truth he speaks all day.

The truth is that Mr. Vegas is a cheat and a card shark. He’s so obvious that people underestimate him. Mr. Vegas isn’t just counting cards or scuffing the edges of aces with a sandpaper ring, no sir. He’s high tech. It’s not common knowledge, but a few years back, a Japanese company put out a cell phone with camera that was pulled from the market. The camera had all sorts of goodies and filters, and combined in just the right way it literally became the sort of X-ray camera teenage boys have fantasized about for decades.

The jerkwad shades Mr. Vegas wears are a variation on the cell phone. They provide just enough of an X-ray picture to let him see what cards folks are dealt. Obviously he can’t just walk around with his X-ray shades on all the time. Someone would become suspicious sooner or later. That’s where the hankie comes in. Each time he wipes his brow, he is actually turning the X-ray function of the shades on and off. The hankie contains a tiny chip that has a very short transmission range, which communicates with a similar chip in the shades.

Even with the shades, keeping track of multiple opponents’ hands is tough work. To help him out, Mr. Vegas has a toe-tapper counter that transmits to his cell phone. Any time someone has a really good hand, Livin’ La Vida Loca blasts out and he receives a nonsensical text message. The wording of the text message relays hand and opponent to Mr. Vegas.

Mr. Vegas rarely steps out of character around other people, but everyone has a weakness and his is booze. More often than not it’s the free drinks rather than the cards that defeat him.

Meet Mr. Vegas.

In the midst of finals and helping out other folks edit their stuff. Longer post tomorrow. Likely I’ll move on to a character study of Mr. Vegas.

Today I thought I might start working on a new project, and I thought I’d share some of that work with the class. We’re going to take a stab at a character study. One Mr. Idaho.

Mr. Idaho isn’t this fellas real name, of course. It’s just what I’ll be calling him. In fact, I have no intention of actually giving him a real name. I asked myself what the most boring state in the union might be and the answer I got back was Idaho. If you live in Idaho, I apologize. Give the potatoes a hug for me.

So, Mr. Idaho is very much like the picture I posted. A boring, suit and tie, wage-slave for the insurance industry. He probably went straight to a state college right out of high school, did the requisite amount of partying (not enough to get him in a frat, though) and scraped through with a C+ average. What? A C+ average isn’t bad. We had a president with a C+ average. But I digress.

Mr. Idaho marries the first woman to give him a hummer. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s unattractive or 40 year-old virgin material, that just means the girls in Hometown, USA had firm ideas about where a penis should be placed. He and the missus pop out the usual 2.5 children, buy a house with a white picket fence and settle down into American stupor.

Right now, Mr. Idaho is a boring motherfucker. That’s fine. Most people are boring. You ask a crowd of people what they do for fun and you’ll get way more “I watch TV” type answers than you will “I ski naked” type answers. Further, for the purposes of my study, boring is what I want. Now let’s tie boring to the theme I’ll be working with, which happens to be poker.

Mr. Idaho watches every poker program on television and DVRs the one’s he misses. He enjoys poker so much that he organized a weekly poker night, where the guys sit around, drink beer, curse, (but no smoking in the house) and play cards for penny ante. It turns out that Mr. Idaho is a pretty solid poker player. He ends up with way more pennies than he loses. He dreams of playing poker in a real casino for big time money.

Last Tuesday, Mr. Idaho’s boss asked him to accompany him to a insurances sales convention. The town the convention’s being held in just happens to have a casino. As an aside here, there’s no good reason to always make that town Vegas anymore, either. Hell, Pittsburgh has a casino. If you feel you must go all in (as it were) with the glitz of Vegas, cool, I’m just saying you have alternatives. Anyways, Mr. Idaho knows about the casino and decides to go to the convention. He spends the next few months saving up as much extra cash as he possibly can, maybe even quietly siphoning off some of the savings account, to make a credible stake for some serious poker.

What actually happens to Mr. Idaho while playing poker is the meat of the story, so that doesn’t really need to figure in the study. We will want to know seemingly trivial things like the names of his wife and children. My initial temptation is to name the wife Gladys, but I’ll resist. Mr. Idaho isn’t nearly old enough to have a wife named Gladys. Speaking of age, I figure Mr. Idaho is mid-30s. So, names. Here’s the thing about names. Sometimes a name should mean something, and sometimes it really doesn’t matter. Mr. Idaho doesn’t have a name because I want him to have a certain anonymity. I want my audience to be able to stick the name of whoever Mr. Idaho reminds them of on the character. I’m also tempted to just leave the wife with a cutesy nickname, like Honeybuns or Snookie. This is the only name we’d ever hear Mr. Idaho refer to his wife by (he will, of course, just call her “my wife”). It would even be on his iPhone. The kids need real names though. Simple names will do. Mr. Idaho and his Snookie Bear aren’t really that imaginative. We’ll go with Matt and Ashley.

Now we need something in Mr. Idaho’s background that would make him willing to take a risk. To this point he’s a pretty boring and low risk kind of fellow. For him to do something crazy, like snort coke and bang a hooker over the balcony railing in his hotel room, he’s going to need a shove. Maybe Mr. Idaho is a really bad winner. He’s a trash talker. The more he wins, the more excited and self-confident he gets. Eventually he passes the line from vaguely annoying to egomaniac. The penny ante games at home aren’t enough to bring out the worst in him, but if he won some real money, he might start to behave like a real jackass.

Meet Mr. Idaho.

Mike takes Althea and attempts to flee, but James and Sam cut him off. Mike releases Althea and hides in the shadows. Still under the control of the shadows, she attempts to stab James, but he stuns her with a Taser. While James is busy subduing her, Mike pops out of the shadows and attacks Sam, seriously injuring him. James is forced to shoot Mike to save Sam, but Mike isn’t killed by the shot. James tells Sam to take Althea and leave, which Sam does.

James and Mike fight among the shadows. Initially, Mike has the upper hand, seriously injuring his brother, but James eventually forces the shadows to possess him, draining them from the room and leaving Mike revealed in stark, colorless light. Even without the advantage, Mike attempts to attack James and James shoots him in the knee. Although his brother urges him to give up, Mike continues with his efforts to kill James and is killed himself when SWAT bursts into the room and guns him down. As Mike dies, the shadows abandon him and drain from James as well, returning color and darkness to the room, much to the surprise of the SWAT team.

Finally, James and Althea are seen exiting a courthouse on a sunny day. Leahy and Sam are waiting for them. James relates that all the charges against him have been dropped and our heroes walk off into the sunset, shadows stretching out behind them.

_____________________________________________________________________________

And that’s that. I’ll start posting more random thoughts soon. Finals are over on the 15th.

James advances further into the basement and finds most of the backup emergency lights have been smashed. Near the body of a uniformed cop, he finds a Maglite. Eugene attacks James with a crowbar. Eugene is at least partially under the control of the shadows, and is totally insane. He appears to think James is one of the nursing home residents. James and Eugene fight and James is eventually forced to shoot him.

In a parallel sequence, Mike shows up at James’ apartment. He attacks Althea and she clocks him with a desk drawer. Eventually he manages to overcome and abducts her.

Meanwhile, back at the police station, James meets back up with Sam. James attempts to call Althea, but only gets her voice mail, which is a recording of the whispers and laughter of the shadows. James and Sam boogie back to James’ apartment only to find it empty. James walks around his apartment, turning off lights until only one remains on. He cautions Sam to stay in the light, then calls out to the shadows. The shadows reply, taunting him about losing both Mike and Althea. The shadows eventually reveal their goal of breeding humans they can use as hosts. James mocks them, angering the shadows and tricks them into possessing him. He manages to retain control of his body and forces them into showing him where Mike and Althea are.

Mike has holed up at Sal’s mansion and has his thugs patrolling the grounds with SMGs. James calls Leahy for backup. While Sam and James wait for the backup, James explains a bit more about the shadows. He tells Sam that he’s figured out the shadows are basically powerless unless given a purpose, and wonders aloud if his brother has figured that out. SWAT backup arrives and engages Mike’s thugs in a gun battle. James and Sam use the distraction to sneak into the mansion.

Upstairs in the mansion, Althea and Mike lie asleep in bed, entwined like lovers. The gunfire from the battle between the thugs and the SWAT team wakes them and we can see Althea’s has have gone the solid gray of someone possessed by shadows. The shadows tell Mike that James is in the mansion and Mike decides to beat it.

Back downstairs, the shadows distract James while Danny tries to shoot him. Danny misses, but Sam shoots and kills Danny. James forces the shadows to tell him where Mike and Althea are and he and Sam go looking for them.

James and Sam go to see Julio, who lives in a warehouse that is being renovated into apartments. The parking lot of the warehouse is full, but the place seems oddly deserted. James and Sam find Julio’s apartment – the only finished apartment in the building. The apartment door is unlocked and slightly ajar. Inside the men find a corpse they assume is Julio. The dead man has had his throat sliced. James steps forward (turning on a lamp to make more light) and the corpse turns to look at him. The shadows have animated Julio. He attempts to shoot and kill James and Sam. He manages to shoot Sam, but Sam has a Kevlar vest. James shoots out Julio’s kneecaps and drags Sam out of the apartment. The two men attempt to escape the warehouse when the shadow-animated bodies of murdered construction workers attack them. James notices that one of the workers is using a cutting torch for a weapon and shoots the gas canister it’s attached too, starting a fire and freaking out the shadows. This give James and Sam a chance to scoot and they take it. Outside, they block off the exit, trapping the dead workers and the shadows flee from the light and fire.

Back in their unmarked police car, Sam asks for an explanation for what he just saw. James explains about the shadows as best he can. He tells Sam that the shadows have no real will of their own and require someone to give them a purpose before they can do anything other than whisper. Rickles calls James and tells him to come into the station. Kelly’s body has been found and James and Sam are under suspicion for murdering her.

James and Sam go to the police station. On the way in they pass a cluster of uniformed cops struggling with a skinny man in a pink bathrobe. Rickles talks to another cop about the man in the pink bathrobe and we discover the fellow’s name is Eugene and he’s responsible for the slaughter of nursing home residents. Captain Leahy and Sgt. Rickles interrogate James and Sam about Kelly’s murder (Rickles is present as James’ union rep). The interrogation is interrupted by a report about an escaped prisoner (Eugene). The power dies in the building. Leahy locks James and Sam’s guns and badges in his desk, and tells them to stay put until the situation is over and the interrogation can resume. James tells Sam he suspects the shadows are behind the prisoner’s escape and they go looking for him.

James and Sam head downstairs to the basement and hear gunfire. In the basement they find the seriously wounded body of Rickles. James has Sam take Rickles to safety and, after taking Rickles’ sidearm, goes after the escaped prisoner alone.

I missed a day, didn’t I? Sorry!

A switch in narrative focus shows us three thugs (Danny, Fab and Unzio) hanging out in an alley, talking quietly and looking nervous about something. Shortly, the leader of the thugs, Sal, shows up and beats up Danny for interrupting him while he was chasing tail. The thugs report to Sal that a dirty cop (Mike) is attempting to poach some of Sal’s people. The cop is holding a meeting, right this second, at a nearby chop shop. Enraged by this revelation, Sal takes the three thugs in tow and goes to confront Mike.

The meet is actually a setup. Sal steps into the chop shop, gun leveled at Mike and Danny stuns Sal from behind with a Taser. While Sal is unconscious, Mike ties him up with chains before hoisting him to the ceiling. Using an auto lift to raise a semi truck engine block high above the floor, Mike attaches a chain from the engine block to Sal’s legs. Mike tells Sal he brought this all on him self by being such a douche bag and Danny pulls a lever, releasing the auto lift. The weight of the engine block tears Sal in half. With Sal dead, Mike takes over the gang. Saying he has a girl he wants to impress, Mike asks Danny to help him move into Sal’s mansion.

Back at James’ apartment, James, Althea and Sam are going over the IA files Sam brought over looking for leads. With an assist from the shadows, James turns up the name “Kelly” and an apartment number for her.

James and Sam go to visit Kelly, who is a high priced call girl, with a black eye. She tells the men that Mike was her part-time pimp and full-time police protection. Sam asks when the last time she saw Mike was and she tells him it was when he stopped by for his cut. Kelly says that Mike beat her and hints that he raped her when she didn’t give him as much cash as he wanted. With some prompting, Kelly tells James that she thinks Mike has holed up with a dealer named Julio and gives him an address. James and Sam leave the apartment, cautioning her to stay home and lock the doors. Seconds later Mike kind of oozes out of the shadows behind her. Mike and Kelly talk and it becomes clear she told James what exactly what Mike wanted her to. Mike backs Kelly into a corner as they talk and then kills her with a knife.

If you are just tuning in for the first time, I’m posting a page of my treatment each day. This helps me out during my end of semester antics, and hopefully people will comment!

At Mike’s apartment (which is lit up nearly as much as James’), James first attempts to figure out where his brother has gone through conventional means. He searches the apartment for clues and compares pictures of the scene from a police file to the actual scene itself. Oddly, the pictures show Mike’s closet and dresser as both overflowing with clothes, but now all the clothes are missing. James calls the police station, but they haven’t entered Mike’s clothing into evidence. Frustrated at the lack of clues, James gives in and contacts the shadows, who once again refuse to answer questions about his brother. Desperate, James allows them to possess him to show him what happened to Mike. After the shadows have finished flowing into him, James’ blue eyes turn solid gray.

In a series of flashbacks, James watches his brother on the night Mike disappeared through the eyes of the shadows as a sort of detached observer. Mike receives a phone call from a man named Neil, asking Mike for help. Pulling a .45 from where it was taped under the couch and sliding a pair of wicked looking knives into his boots, Mike leaves the apartment. He drives to a strip club and goes inside. The doorman and bouncers at the club seem to know Mike, nodding to him as he passes and heads for a door marked employees only. Still an unseen spectator, James spots Sam at the club, and his new partner seems to be watching Mike. Passing through the door and climbing a set of stairs, Mike meets up with Neil, who owns the club, in a tiny apartment.

Neil is revealed to be a pimp and drug dealer that’s supposed to be under Mike’s protection. Shortly after Mike shows up, two thugs arrive at the apartment. They accuse Neil of being a police informant and threaten to kill him. As the thugs move to attack Neil, pulling out guns, Mike intervenes, pulling out the .45. The thugs easily disarm and defeat Mike, and turn their guns on him. Behind the thugs, the shadows are bouncing and boiling, agitated beyond anything we’ve yet seen. Faced with death, Mike calls on the shadows to protect him and they swoop in, possessing him. Bolstered by the shadows, Mike pulls the knives from his boots and kills the thugs, and then Neil for good measure. Before fleeing from the murder scene, Mike seems to turn and look directly at James. Mike smiles and laughs the creepy laughter of the shadows. His eyes are gray.

Back in the present, James accuses the shadows of stealing his brother and they laugh, telling him he should be grateful they saved Mike’s life. The shadows try to hijack James as well, threatening to visit Althea while in control of his body. Unable to drive the shadows from his body by force of will, James pulls the magnesium flare he threatened them with earlier from his pocket and holds it up in front of his own face before lighting it. The sudden brilliance forces them out, screaming in rage and James flees the apartment.

James goes to Sam’s house. Sam answers the door wearing a hockey mask, a Maple Leaf’s jersey and carrying a hockey stick. Seeming unfazed by this spectacle, James asks if he can come in. Sam admits him and the two men drink beer and watch the end of the hockey game. Game over, James asks Sam if he was investigating Mike. Sam eventually admits he used to be IA and that he was at the strip club on the night Mike was there. James tells Sam he knows about the murders and asks Sam to help him find his brother. Sam tells James that, no doubt, Mike was a dirty cop. He tells James that even if they find his brother, the best Mike can hope for is a long jail sentence. James agrees that is the best possible outcome, but still wants to find his brother. After some wrangling, James convinces Sam to hand over the IA files on Mike and to help find his brother before more people get hurt.