Son of 500 Words A Day

The Same Old Story, a mystery novel set in 1951 and starring a pulp and comic book writer whose father was a famous NYPD homicide detective, is moving right along (here, here, here, here and here) at way better than 500 words a day. The way things worked out, I was able to devote several full days to the project and, as a result, I've just crossed the 50,000 word mark, almost 30,000 words since I began this on August 16.

Don't misunderstand: The Same Old Story is not about churning out a specific number of words to a schedule. They still have to be words I'm pleased with, or at least that I know I can work with to reshape and fix in the revision stage of the writing. If I wasn't happy with the quality of what I was writing, I wouldn't be producing the quantity I am. When something's not right, I can't go forward with the story until I've fixed whatever pothole it is I've run into. Anyway, I don't mean to get into the writing process; that's a whole other blog. Instead, some of the latest from the story, picking up after protagonist Max Wiser has taken a beating from two toughs asking tougher questions:

THE SAME OLD STORY

© Paul Kupperberg

Chapter 17/ DOCTOR NIGHT

I came to a couple of times, once with some old guy yelling in my face, again just as a couple of ambulance attendants were lifting me onto a stretcher, and then at various times during the mad dash to the hospital, catching incoherent snippets of conversation and weirdly drawn out sounds of wailing sirens and traffic. Fortunately, Saint Vincent’s was only a few blocks from where I had taken my beating, so I was on a table in the emergency room within ten minutes of being picked up.

The rest was a blur. I remember a nurse finding my wallet and saying she was going to call my next of kin. I was just conscious enough to stop her from calling my mother now, in the middle of the night, and get in touch with Uncle Mick instead. It seemed as though whole scenes shifted, like in a movie, with every blink of my eyes. All of a sudden I was gazing up at a giant glass eyeball, which I later realized was the X-ray machine taking pictures of my battered skull. Blink. I was in a white room. Not an operating room. The doctor and nurses aren’t wearing masks but they were gathered around me, doing things.

I was numb.

Blink. This time it was am operating room. A big plastic mask wielded by a man with a face that was a pair of black horn rims glasses surrounded by a green ball was looming over my face

Count backwards

so I did, fortilly-seven, ninety-two zillion

Blink. Uncle Mick’s big, goofy face was in front of me, his eyes black-ringed with worry and fatigue “How ya feelin’, kiddo?” and I croaked “Ma?” and he nodded. “She’s fine, lad. She’s downstairs getting’ a cuppa but she’s been here the whole time. Docs say”

Blink.

Someone was wiping a cool, damp cloth across my forehead. It felt good. I didn’t even bother opening my eyes. “You awake, Mr. Wiser?” a woman asked me and I made a positive sound but I think I was lying because

Blink.

I woke up with the sun in my eyes, a throbbing headache, and a belly that sent me into spasms of pain just from taking a deep breath.

Hospital bed. IV stand hooked to my arm, oxygen mask strapped to my face. A monitor that beeped along with my heart. A woman in white was by the window, her hands still on the drawstrings from opening the blinds that let in the sunlight that woke me up.

I blinked. I was awake. My swim in and out of consciousness was over. In spite of the pain, I was amazingly clear headed. I remembered every moment of the assault, from the first blow to the college students pretending to ignore the puke splattered alky in their path.

Where’s that bitch hid the money?

I remembered Tall asking the question. The beating beforehand was all just to soften me up for the question.

“Mr. Wiser?” the woman said. She was a nurse, of course, in white from head to toe and looking concerned and compassionate.

I nodded and tried to say yes but my throat was too dry to work.

“Don’t try to talk yet,” she said and bustled over to the bed, where she unhooked me from my oxygen mask and produced little chips of ice in a cup to moisten my mouth and throat from the nightstand.

“Suck on these for a few seconds,” she ordered. “You’ve been on oxygen for a while. It dries you out.”

As soon as I could work up enough spit to swallow I said, in a voice still rusty, “How am I?”

“You’re just fine. Dr. Young will be by in a little bit to explain everything. In the meantime, you just work on those ice chips and relax. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

Where’s that bitch hid the money?

Another “distraction”? I wasn’t even sure what money they were talking about: her split of the quarter of a million or Bob Konigsberg’s missing cash.

Who the hell was she hiding the money from and why did whoever they were think he knew enough about it to be worth beating up?

Dr. Young turned out to be the horn rim-wearing green beach ball, only without the green surgical cap and mask and the benefit of being semi-conscious, he was actually more of a wild-haired George S. Kaufman type with a long, horsy face and a toothy smile.

“Good morning. Max,” he said as he came into the room, trailing young men in white coats like a mama duck her duckling and speaking to the clipboard he was reading from. “You’re looking well this morning.”

“On paper, you mean?”

He glanced up from my medical chart and smiled. “And in person, as well.” He handed the clipboard to the nearest resident and said, “How are you feeling?”

“Depends. What day is it?”

He chuckled. “Saturday, 8:30 a.m. You’ve had a rather rough couple of days, but your prognosis is excellent.”

Dr. Young did a few tests, had me follow his finger with my eyes, squeeze his hands and various other things to prove my brain hadn’t been too badly scrambled.

I tried to adjust myself, gingerly, on the bed, grimacing from the effort. “What was, oh, jeez, what was the damage?”

“Oh, on the surface lots of cuts and bruises. A concussion, about a fifteen stitches all told to close up some gashes in your scalp and two broken ribs. On the more serious side, whoever did this did damage inside. I had to go in and sew up your spleen, which took care of that problem. As surgeries go, this one was relatively straight forward. After you’ve healed up, you shouldn’t have any problems from any of your wounds.”

500 Words A Day, Continued

Progress on The Same Old Story (here, here, here and here) continues at a steady pace, with the word count up to 45,000 or so. The Same Old Story is a mystery set in the early-1950s whose protagonist is a pulp and comic book writer. Part of the conceit of the novel is that chapters of the fictionalized version (starring his pulp character, NYPD homicide detective King Solomon, who is based on his father) of the mystery our hero, Max Wiser, is investigating are mixed in with the "real" story. Here's one of the "make believe" chapters:

A New KING SOLOMON Mystery!
“THE LAST SHUTTLE TO TIMES SQUARE” by Max Wiser

© Paul Kupperberg

The boss obviously didn’t believe in wasting his money on offices to impress visitors, or cockroaches for that matter. Apex Publications was about as bare bones as an operation got, walls painted institutional green, desks and chairs from an office surplus house and filing cabinets, none of whose drawers could any longer close properly. Dennis Arnold, president and publisher of Apex Publications, sat in his little ten foot by ten foor office with a single window overlooking the airshaft. He appeared to King Solomon to be a very practical man, the kind who went around shutting off lights and retrieving paperclips from the trash cans after everyone had gone home at night.

He also seemed fairly well shook by the death of Ray Koening.

“I bought Raymond’s very first stories, when he was just a kid, still in high school,” Arnold said, shaking his head and staring at his desktop as though the riot of papers and comic books spread across its surface held some secret, if only he could dig it out of the chaos.

“Would you say you were friends?” the King said.

“Friends, with Raymond?” Denny Arnold asked, almost surprised by the question. He smiled sadly. “I suppose as much as he was capable of having a friend, I would be it. He came to me for advise and help several times on a personal matter.”

“Would that have been his commitments to Stony Hill?”

The round little man shrugged and met the King’s eyes. “What difference does it make now? Does it have a bearing on the reason he’s dead? I thought he fell from a train.”

“So he did,” King Solomon said. “But the question remains, why did he fall? Mr. Koenig was not popular among his peers…”

Denny Arnold sat forward. “That’s nonsense. Sure, he was difficult to get along with, but everyone respected him.”

“I’ve spoken to a few of his fellow writers. The nicest thing any of them had to say was that he was always clean.”

“Well, there was some jealousy at work. Raymond rose very quickly to the top of his profession and I’m sure you’ve heard plenty about that attitude of his, like he believed he deserved special treatment. And maybe he did. He was a natural born storyteller, very original and prolific. Back when Apex first started publishing, he was writing most of our output. Eventually, he was offered work from other publishers at a higher rate of pay than we could afford to match and we lost his full-time services.”

“He had a check for seventy dollars from Apex in his wallet, dated two days before his death.”

The little publisher smiled. “Raymond was under an exclusive contract with Dynamic Comics, but he still wrote for me sometimes. For old time sake.”

“And extra cash?”

“I was just happy to have him writing for me,” he said with an innocent shrug.

“Why did he need the money, Mr. Arnold?”

“How should I know, detective? As I said, Raymond was very forthcoming about his personal life.”

“I understand he liked women,” the King said.

“So?” Shrug. “So do I?”

“Other than your wife.”

Arnold heaved a sigh into the air and shook his head. “No. Now Raymond, on the other hand...”

“Any woman who might have gotten him killed?”

The little man blinked in surprise. “Dear lord, I can’t imagine such a thing. I mean, doesn’t that only happen in movies or our comic books?”

“You’d be surprised, sir.”

“Well, no. He ran around with all sorts of women, but no one actually dangerous. Actresses, receptionists, secretaries, airline stewardesses. He liked gals who were easy on the eye,” Arnold said. “He may have made up stories about them, for his own reputation, but he stayed far away from trouble. “

“Was he seeing anyone you know about?”

Arnold paused. “Well...”

The King smiled. “It’s okay to tell me, Mr. Arnold. I’m the police.”

“I know, Inspector. I’m sorry...it’s just that I’d hate to involve an innocent party in something like this.”

“If they’re innocent, there’s no harm in your giving me the name.”

“Yes...well, one of our editors, a young woman named Sandra Daniels. I’ve heard rumors she and Raymond have been seeing one another recently. I don’t know how serious they were, but knowing him, I’d say not very.”

“What can you tell me about Miss Daniels?”

“Nothing much to tell. She’s in her early thirties, single, very friendly and efficient. I hired her about six years ago as an assistant and she was so good I fired the guy I had hired her to assist and gave her his job three years later.”

“Is Miss Daniels by any chance a redhead?”

“No, sir. She’s a blond.”

The King nodded. “Tell me, Mr. Arnold, do you think Mr. Koenig’s reputation was deserved? I’m getting the sense he was a bit of a talker.”

“He liked to talk tough,” Arnold said. “But talk was all he was. He was no hero.”

“Puffed himself up, did he?”

“I’ll say. He had more fight stories than Lardner but I’ll bet you can count on two fingers the number of times that guy threw a punch as an adult. And probably wound up on his back both times. You could tell. He was a flincher?”

King Solomon nodded.

“You know the type, right? Gives it away right from the get-go, flinches when you put out your hand to shake hello.” He stopped and chuckled at a thought. “Raymond had this scar on his right cheek, about three inches long. For years he’s been telling everyone who’ll listen that he got it in a duel with some Baron Von Humphf-humphf or other in Austria. Big duel, honor of a lady, the countryside at dawn, two men and their swords, the whole nine yards. You didn’t ask about it, he’d point it out somehow, ‘Whenever my dueling scar itches like this, I know it’s going to rain.’

“Anyway, he had this story of that duel, sounded like a scene from the Three Musketeers. He’s slashed, bleeding, first blood to the baron, but the sight of blood makes the blackguard overconfident and Raymond takes advantage and tags the guy in the shoulder, the guy concedes, Raymond’s the hero. The scar’s his badge of honor.”

The King smiled. “’Blackguard’?”

“What can I tell you, he talked that way. So, the whole world knows about his dueling scar. One day, I stop by his apartment to pick up some scripts on my way downtown, who opens the door but his mama, old lady Koenig herself! Raymond’s not home, but he left the scripts for me and Mrs. Koenig invites me in for a cup of coffee. She’s visiting for a few days, she lives in Ohio somewhere, Cincinnati? Cleveland? Anyway, she lives in Ohio now with Bob’s older sister, Ilsa, who’s apparently not in the best of health. So Mrs. Koenig is so happy to meet one of Raymond’s colleagues, Raymond this and Raymond that. Lovely woman. Anyway, over coffee and strudel, I make a passing reference to his dueling scar. Mrs. Koenig seemed to find it amusing when I called it that, although she was quick to point out that it wasn’t funny at the time. Seems as a boy in the Bronx, Raymond was pretending a discarded automobile radio antenna was a sword, slashing it around in front of the mirror when it whipped back into his face and cut his cheek. He was never, she added, terribly adept at physical activities, but he did excel at the cerebral.”

“She talk that way too?”

“Like mother, like son.”

The King drummed his fingers on his knee. The picture he was putting together of Raymond Koenig was not a pretty one, but nothing so ugly as to suggest a motive for murder.

“Tell me, sir,” he said, “were you the only publisher for whom Mr. Koenig was writing, in violation of his contract with Dynamic Comics?”

“Oh, I doubt it. Raymond was very, very prolific. He could bang out a six-pager over lunch. You want to have seen something amazing, watch him type! He had these long, slender fingers, like a piano player’s, and he made a typewriter sound like a machinegun. I once saw him type something on one of those new IBM electric typewriters...my hand to the Almighty, he typed so fast that the machine kept going for a full five seconds after he stopped, catching up with him. However many pages of story a week his contract called for, I’d bet Raymond could produce double it. He knew people all over town who were happy to buy from him and keep quiet about it. Not that it really mattered. Everybody knows everybody else’s business in comics anyway. It’s a small community, Inspector, and these guys are all yentas.”

“Didn’t sound like Mr. Koenig was doing so bad for a man so unpopular.”

Denny Arnold shuffled through the papers on his desk. “He was a bit of a mad genius. People cut some slack for people like him.” When he looked up, his eyes were wet. “I think I’m actually gonna miss him. Who knew?”

500 Words A Day: This Just In

A couple of weeks back, I decided to pick up the manuscript of a mystery novel I had started some time back but which has sat for years untouched. I had about 21,000 words written and I reasoned if I wrote an easy 500 words a day on the book (on top of my ongoing paying writing), I'd have a completed novel in two to three months. In the first 16 days of this program, I've written 17,830 words, or about 1,115 words a day. Here's the most recent several hundred:

THE SAME OLD STORY

THE SAME OLD STORY © Paul Kupperberg

Chapter 14/ PORKY PUPPY, THE WORLD’S FATTEST DOG

Mick was waiting for me in front of the precinct when the radio car deposited me downtown thirty-five minutes later. Without a word, the cops left me at the curb. Just as silent, Mick held out his hand, palm up.

I fished the packet of pass books from my breast pocket and placed it in his hand.

Sgt. O’Connor sighed at me like a disappointed mother, shook his head, and turned and marched inside.

“I’ll assume this means I’m dismissed?” I called after the closing door. I took his silence as acquiescence and turned and walked away. He was right, of course. I had no right hanging on to those pass books as long as I did. If someone else had pulled that, Mick would have popped him on an obstruction charge. I got disapproval which was, in some ways, worse.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Shelly. I couldn’t get the faces of Etta Konigsberg and Rena Schindler out of my head and their sadness out of my thoughts.

If Shelly is guilty, I told myself, she’s responsible for their grief. That deserves punishment, doesn’t it? No matter what she looked like. How she smelled and the way she felt against me.

That was picture I was trying to block from my mind. Last night. That was the moment that could override any suspicion and all reason. What the hell was it about her that made this so difficult? I’ve been with women before...but none like her. There was something sad about Shelly that got under my skin and I just couldn’t shake.

“Shit,” I said, out loud I suppose, because the man I was passing on the street stopped and gave me a look. I was so tired of everybody’s sadness, but I was deep inside it now and didn’t know how to shake it.

I headed for Hale’s. I could start trying there.

# # #

After my third shot of whiskey, I took a dime off the bar and walked it over to the payphone in the rear. It was six-thirty by my watch. Plenty of time for Shelly to make believe she had just gotten home from a job she hadn’t gone in to today. I dialed her number and listened to it ring.

No answer.

Maybe she was pretending to still be stuck on the subway.

I retrieved my coin and returned it to the puddle of damp change in front of my seat at the bar.

“Another one?” Raymond said, coming over and nodding at my empty shot glass.

“Keep ‘em coming,” I said.

He reached around and found the right bottle without even looking and refilled my glass. He set the bottle down on the bar.

“You don’t usually drink like this, leastways not by yo’self,” he said.

“It’s been a crappy week, Raymond.” I downed the shot and, while I followed it with a slug of beer as a chaser, he poured me another without being asked.

“Mind if I do some’a that bartender bullshit that al’ays pisses me off when I’m trying to get a good drunk going?”

“We all appreciate the wisdom of your silence,” I said. “But by all means. Advise away.”

“This look like a woman’s involved.”

“She is.”

“Makin’ you think thoughts you don’t like thinkin’. Do stuff you wouldn’t normally be doin’.”

“I’m impressed with your powers of deduction, Raymond.” And I was, in a way that four shots of whiskey and two beers can make even the corniest parlor trick seem impressive.

“That the easy part, man,” he said. “Wouldn’t be depressed if some dame didn’t have you all twisted around. Thing is, what should you do about it?”

“She’s gorgeous, Raymond.”

“Ain’t they always. Just makes it harder to do the right thing.”

“Which is?” I asked, like Dorothy waiting for the Wizard to deliver the answer to all her problems.

“The right thing,” Raymond said. Then he moved down the bar to refill someone else’s beer.

500 Words A Day: An Update

On August 16, I decided to return to The Same Old Story, a novel I had started a while ago on which I had written about 21,000 words. The book is a mystery, set in the early 1950s and features a pulp and comic book writer who is the son of a late and legendary N.Y.P.D. homicide cop who solves crimes on the side. The plan is to continue working on The Same Old Story simultaneously with my paying assignments, shooting for a manageable 500 words a day on the novel in addition to whatever else I happen to be working on for a check. In the seven days since I started this program, I've written a 12-page comic book script for The Simpsons comics, researched and plotted a 4,400 word Phantom story, wrote two-thirds of another project (this one's also on spec but it's a specialty book that I think has legs), and pitched ideas for my second Superman young reader chapter book to the publisher...all while adding 6,125 words to The Same Old Story, averaging 875 words a day.

At this rate, I'll have a finished novel no later than Thanksgiving.

There's something to be said for this slow-and-steady thing. Here's some of what I've written in the last couple of days:

THE SAME OLD STORY

THE SAME OLD STORY © Paul Kupperberg

Chapter 9/ FIRST DATES
...

“Besides, why hurt Moe?” she asked. She looked away, staring at some memory I couldn’t see. “He was harmless.”

“How well did you know him?”

“Well enough, I suppose,” she said and smiled fondly. “We worked in that same damned little cubbyhole of an office together for six years. It’s hard to have secrets under those circumstances.”

“Do you think Moe did?”

Shelly blinked at me over the rim of her cup. “Do I think Moe did what?”

“Have any secrets?”

“Oh, good lord, no,” she laughed. “Morris Schindler was as easy to read as an open book and twice as pale as its pages.”

“So no secret gambling?”

“No. Moe, blanched at the thought of flipping a dime to see which one of us paid for coffee.”

“Booze? Dope?”

“Straight as an arrow.”

“How about Bob?”

Shelly blinked at my sudden change in direction. “Konigsberg?”

I nodded and gave her time to answer while I sipped the bitter little cup of espresso.

“Bob was a lot of things, but he didn’t drink. Not even socially. He couldn’t tolerate alcohol, for medical reasons.”

“And yet he had a small amount of it in his system when he died.”

Shelly Davis shook her head` and said, “That’s not possible. He was on medication. He never touched the stuff. Besides, I was with him, at some chop suey joint, about an hour before he,” and she paused, swallowing hard and revealing the briefest moment of sorrow, “about an hour before he died. I’ll confess to having had a few shots myself.” She laughed self-consciously and hid her face in her cappuccino until she could regain her composure. “It was very stressful, Max. Bob couldn’t accept that I had ended it and he kept looking for ways for me to forgive him and get back together.”

“That wasn’t an option?”

“No, not at all. I don’t know what ever possessed me to take up with him in the first place.” She lighted a new cigarette and blew the smoke at the ceiling. “I guess it was because he was witty.”

“Witty?” I smiled.

“Hmm, yes,” she said around her cigarette. “Debonair. Worldly. He said things I didn’t understand. Deep.”

Now I laughed. “I’m sorry. I know he’s dead, but…”

She held up her hand like a traffic cop. “Please, I know. It hit me after a while, once the intoxicating effects of the Bay Rum aftershave and aged Scotch wore off. He wasn’t deep. He was just sad.”

“He was crazy, Shelly.”

“Because he was so sad. He couldn’t always live with his own thoughts. And me,” she said, drawing on her smoke and watching the tip burn red. “I couldn’t live with him.”

“Any chance he took a drink later, after you last saw him?”

“It’s possible, I just don’t think it’s likely. He’s not a drinker. He’s never liked alcohol or been able to drink, so he didn’t immediately think to reach for the bottle when he was unhappy or scared. It wasn’t how he was conditioned, you know?”

“How was he conditioned?”

“To go off on rants. Sometimes funny, sometimes crazy. To find fault with everyone else and set them straight on their shortcomings. To find a conspiracy everywhere he looked, including an international anti-Semitic organization’s connection to a busy restaurant that was unable to seat us for half an hour.”

“Paranoid?”

“Sometimes. Mostly, though, he was fine. Just full of himself and his superiority, which would have driven me off eventually, anyway.” She looked me in the eyes. “I can tolerate assaults to my self-esteem for a while. Bob used up his allotment of abuse faster than most, that’s all.”

Shelly flicked some ash into the ashtray and leaned back, half closing her eyes and looked, all of a sudden, soft and vulnerable, like a dream. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I haven’t been sleeping very well, I guess. I know it’s ridiculous, but I almost feel like a target, pinned to a fence. There are a bunch of us, lined up in neat little rows, right alongside each other, and bang, the target to my left gets hit, and bang, the target right below me takes a bull’s eye, and bang, the one to my right….” Her eyes popped open wide and she sat back up. “Am I crazy to think that I may be next?”

“You’d be crazy not to act as though you might be,” I said.

“What do people think of me, Max?” she asked, out of the blue.

“What people?”

“The…” she said and made a vague, all-encompassing gesture. “You know, people. The gang.”

“I wasn’t aware you had a gang,” I said with a dubious shake of my head.

“I don’t. You do. So? What do they say about me? Older woman who keeps to herself? Office tramp?”

“Probably something in between those two. We don’t spend a lot of time talking about you.”

“But you do spend some time. Everyone at Blue Chip knew I was seeing Bob, didn’t they?”

“Apparently I was the only one who didn’t.”

She favored me with the flash of a smile. “Aren’t you sweet. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that Bob told everyone about us himself. That bastard liked to brag about his conquests, real and imagined.”

I looked at her with an inquisitor’s raised eyebrow. “That sounds cryptic,” I said.

“His medication,” she said with a shrug. “It often interfered with certain otherwise...normal functions. He wasn’t quite all the man he liked to brag he was. Mostly he was after someone to decorate his arm and listen adoringly to him ramble on.”

I started to signal the waitress for another round but Shelly shook her head. Instead, I stole one of Shelly’s Old Golds. Everything she told me seemed to make sense, but nothing suggested any reason for both these men to be dead. Maybe just having Shelly Davis in common was dangerous, but I’d take that chance.

There was a reason I hadn’t told Uncle Mick I was off to meet one of the principles in his double-murder investigation for coffee, but I’ll be damned if I had it figured out yet. A tiny little voice was shouting somewhere deep in my head not to trust her, that she wasn’t the woman she was making herself out to be. I didn’t want to listen, though. Maybe I’d never pursued Shelly, kept our relationship friendly, but this wasn’t a woman you wanted as a friend, not once you saw past the mask she wore at the office. Of course, I always knew she was beautiful and I understood why she made the men over fifty sigh and the ones under trip all over themselves opening doors for her. I suppose since I’d never given her a signal, she’s never turned on the switch with me.

But now she had. And I still had not given her a signal. I could assume my familiarity with Detective Sergeant Michael O’Connor had been a motivating factor. Or maybe she was just tired of going home with jackasses and jerks like Bob Konigsberg and was looking to take a chance on a nice guy like me for a change. Whatever her reasons, I wanted to believe her and, for tonight, at least, I would.

“I live just a few blocks from here,” she said, starting to gather up her cigarettes and lighter. “If you still want that second cup of coffee, I have an espresso pot.”

“I don’t need any more coffee.”

“I still live just a few blocks away,” she said and looked at me in a way that made the back of my neck feel warm.

Even though she lived close by, we took a taxi anyway. We didn’t talk about murder any more that night.

500 Words A Day or Bust!

My hard drive is full of bits and pieces of incomplete stories, novels, characters, bits and ideas. Some of them will never go anywhere, some will wind up cannibalized and used elsewhere, and others are far enough along that I really have no excuse not to do something with them...like, maybe, finish them. One of the latter is The Same Old Story, a mystery set in the early 1950s world of the comic book industry from which I ran an excerpt on August 2 (containing my beloved Pincus the ribbon salesman joke). I had about 21,000 words written on the book, eleven or twelve chapters, and a pretty solid idea where the story was going, but I hadn’t touched the thing in more than a year.

It occurred to me that if I’d written even 500 words a day on it during that year, the book would have been finished months ago...as would a second book, with a third one in progress. Five hundred words a day, even on top of regular schedule of paying work, is no great strain. So on August 16, I sat down to inaugurate a 500-words a day regiment aimed at finishing this novel in the course of the next three to four months; I ended up totaling 1,200 words that first day and between 600-800 words each day since. These are those first 1,200:

THE SAME OLD STORY

THE SAME OLD STORY © Paul Kupperberg
BIG TOWN © the respective copyright holders

Chapter 8/BIG TOWN

It was after lunch by the time I got back to Brooklyn, so I took the cold brisket on rye mom had left for me and a mug of reheated coffee into my room and ate while I got to work. I’d spent so much time during the week looking for work, I’d hardly gotten anything done on the assignments I already had. First up were the Big Town story pitches for Schwartz at National. Since I’d practically grown up listening to the radio program, I was pretty much up to speed on the relationship of newspaper editor Steve Wilson and his gal pal Ona Munson, but I read through the issues of the comic book I’d been given anyway. I was guessing there was a formula of some sort that the writers followed, just like the program it was based on could be counted on to tell its stories in a certain way.

It took me all of two stories to get the formula, which wasn’t really much different from every other crime comic on the racks. Introduce your characters, throw a criminal plot in their path, take them through a couple of twists and turns that winds up with them facing the wrong end of a gun or hanging from the face of a building, than provide an incredible last-second save based on their knowing something the bad guy did not or some slip-up on the villain’s part. I jotted some notes as I read; crimes with interesting twists, compelling bad guys, a few death traps, some obscure forensics trivia. From what I had heard and could read for myself, Schwartz was a gimmick-guy. He loved a great bit, a twist, preferably based on some scientific or historic fact, always fairly introduced somewhere in the story. “That so-called jungle orchard in your hothouse produces the chemical surgeons use to paralyze and immobilize their patients on the operating table!” Writers I knew who worked with him said he was a challenge, always twisting the story out from under you, taking the rough lump of your idea and polishing it until it glistened with all the facets of what he thought this type of story needed. It also made me understand Al Roth’s comments about how they wanted him to draw like “everyone else.” Everyone wrote like everyone else, at least on their crime books. Everyone was squeaky clean, even the cartoon gangsters pulling outlandish crimes too incredible to be taken seriously by even those brain dead hotheads talking censorship in Washington.

But, as my grandfather, Chiam the peddler, liked to say, “You sell what people are buying.” It used to be I was selling pulp stories. Right now it was crime comics, but look where that was going. The 25¢ paperback was looking good as the next big thing; all I needed was a solid novel to peddle to one of the publishing houses, not that I had the time to work on something like that. Whenever I sat down at my desk, and I spent an awful lot of time parked there, it was to work on a paying job. I was too busy scrambling to pay the rent and have something resembling a life to concentrate on anything like a novel on spec. Sooner or later, though, I’ll have to do it. Better I should be writing it now, two, three, even five hundred words a day, than start sweating it out with no time to do anything good...

Except that was just my mind trying to divert my attention from what I should be doing, procrastinating at the thought of having to tackle something new like the Big Town stories. The hypothetical novel would have to wait, at least until I was caught up with my story outlines and scripts.

I rolled a sandwich of carbon paper between two sheets of white bond into my trusty old Underwood Noiseless Portable 77 and started typing. I figured I would come up with six or eight springboards, jumping off points for stories that Mr. Schwartz and I could mold and shape together in reasoned dialog. Why spend all the time to construct tight little eight-page mysteries that will unravel at his first change anyway? I was willing to go in, offer him the raw material with which to build a story he was comfortable with then work with him to finish as something we both can live with.

The act of typing was enough to raise my confidence. I always figured I could write anything...I just needed to get to it and put the actual words down on paper. Typing meant I’d gotten to it, on the same typewriter I’d been getting to it on since 1937. I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands or even millions of words I’d logged on that old Underwood. The E, S, and RETURN keys were practically worn out and the bell that rang at the end of each line was starting to sound a bit tinny, but we worked well together. I wasn’t a fast typist, poking away at a reasonable speed, about as fast as I know what the next word is going to be, so the keys never jammed on me and were always just the right amount of springy under my fingers.

I’d paid Mr. Baum at the pawn shop on St. John’s Place $13.50 for the Underwood in 1937. Or maybe it was more accurate to say I rented the sleek black machine from him for 5¢ a week for over three years until I’d paid him his asking price. Mr. Baum had seen me wandering past the store several times a day for almost two weeks, pausing to stare forlornly at that machine before moving on. One day, he happened to be outside sweeping the sidewalk when I came by and he and his broom joined me at the window.

“You like that typewriter machine?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “But I ain’t got thirteen and a half bucks.”

“You do know ‘ain’t’ isn’t a real word.”

“I know, but that’s how everybody else talks so I do too.”

“So, this typewriter. What’s so special about it?”

“I don’t know. I just really like it.”

“What I’m asking is, what do you want it for?”

“Oh. To write. I’m a writer.”

“You are?”

I nodded. “Well, I will be when I get a typewriter. Right now, I write everything on nickel tablets, but that’s just until I can get a real typewriter. All the real writers use them.”

“I’ll tell you what. Since I too would like to see you become a real writer, and because I know your father, I can let you take this magnificent machine home on a special time payment program of one nickel a week, when you got it. When you don’t, you come sweep up the sidewalk or the floor inside, do some errands, you’ll work it off. And if after a few weeks you decide you don’t want to keep it, I’ll give you a…”

“That’s okay, Mr. Baum, that won’t happen. This is a final sale.” I stuck out my hand and shook on the deal with Mr. Baum before he could change his mind. With extra hours on weekends, I owned the Underwood outright in three years and I let Mr. Baum read everything I wrote with it. He called that collecting interest payments on the loan.