JSA: The Novel, Part 3

In 2005 I wrote a novel, JSA: Ragnarok, which was to be published by Byron Preiss' iBooks. Byron's tragic death in an car accident ended iBooks and, while the company's assets were bought by a new owner, the fate of Ragnarok remains up in the air. I've run an excerpt or two here in the past. Here's another, from a chapter set in May 1945:

JSA: RAGNAROK

JSA and all related characters and elements © DC Comics

Sandy Hawkins, in blue slacks and a white shirt with rolled up sleeves, turned the corner onto the Coney Island side street where Wes had parked and now waited by the car after ditching his Sandman get-up and Sandy’s Golden Boy costume.

Wesley closed the trunk of his 1936 Duesenberg SJ coupe. He checked the knot of his tie in the gleaming chrome bumper, then waved at Sandy.

“I brought you something,” said Sandy, handing Wesley a hot dog covered in mustard and sauerkraut. “I ate mine on the way over, I was starving.”

“It’s...what is it? A hot dog?” Wesley asked, scrutinizing the assemblage of foods in his hand.

“It’s not just a hot dog. It’s a Nathan’s.”

Wesley looked at him.

“You never heard of Nathan’s?”

Wesley shook his head.

“You’ve been to Coney Island before, right?”

“Of course.”

“And you’ve never had a Nathan’s hot dog?”

“We usually catered our little jaunts.”

“You’re trying to tell me that in your entire life, you’ve never had a Nathan’s hot dog?”

Wesley shrugged.

“You’re that rich?”

“I am that rich,” Wesley grinned and took a massive bite of the frankfurter and kraut. “And you are that gullible, my friend. I’ve been downing Nathan’s dogs, only the best frankfurter in the known world, since I was a third your age.”

Sandy laughed. “I knew you had to be kidding me.”

“No you didn’t. Listen, kid, just because I happen to be filthy, stinking rich doesn’t mean I’m not human. What’d you think, they fed me lobsters and caviar when I was a kid?” Wesley took another bite of the hot dog. “And if you know so much about fine dining, how could you even think of coming back here without any of their french fries?”

“I couldn’t carry it all and eat at the same time. Guess we’ll just have to go back for them.”

“Let’s go, kid,” Wesley said, popping the last bit of hot dog in his mouth. “The next round’s on me.”

* * *

Several hot dogs, fries, cotton candy, rides, popcorn, attractions, and ice cream later, Wesley and Sandy found an empty bench on the boardwalk. It was too early in the season for sunbathers and swimmers, but strollers filled the beach, many of them young and in uniform, hand in hand with wives or girlfriends, watching younger siblings or their own children, gathered in groups, all celebrating the end of the part of the conflict that required they wear those uniforms.

“Wesley,” Sandy said.

“What, kid?” Wesley couldn’t remember the last time he had been this tired this early in the day. Tromping up and down the boardwalk, waiting in endless lines to mount dizzying rides and pass through goofy funhouses, eating all that food that tasted so good but was so bad for you...unless you were a thirteen-year-old boy with an endless capacity for getting dizzy and eating junk. His stomach was begging for a bromo, his pants felt too tight and his feet were hot and throbbing.

“Thanks,” Sandy said. “This was a lot of fun.”

“Well,” Wesley said, suddenly not quite so bothered by his sour stomach and aching feet, “that was the plan.”

“Sure, but you know what it’s like for guys like us.”

“Guys like us?”

“You know, mystery men guys. I mean, before we could even ride the Cyclone, which is only the best roller coaster in the world, we had to go chase after that Bullwhip goon.”

Wesley nodded. “It’s not easy, Sandy, I know. Everyone else gets to go on with their lives while we have to break off from ours to do what we do.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Wes,” the blond boy said earnestly. “I wouldn’t trade being Sandman’s partner for anything, but it’s just that me and you don’t get to spend a lot of time together, y’know, when I’m not the Sandman’s partner.”

“Just plain Sandy, huh?”

“And Wes. Yep.”

“Okay, Sandy.”

“Thanks, Wes.”

They watched the waves roll onto the beach for a while.

“Wes?”

“Hm?”

“You’ve been dating Aunt Dian for a long time now, haven’t you?”

Wesley, his eyes closed as the sun warmed his face, said, “Did your aunt get you to badger me to marry her?”

Sandy’s laugh was a short, amused bark. “If Aunt Dian was that crazy to get married, she would just ask you herself.”

“Yes,” Wesley said. “Yes, she would. And, yes, we have been seeing one another for...well, we met at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Half a dozen years. And, yes, I do love her madly and completely and, I suppose, one day we will get married but so far neither of us is in a rush. Plus, I might add, I’m rather pleased that she has a nephew who, for a pain in the neck, is otherwise a pretty swell kid.”

Wesley glanced at Sandy, who looked straight ahead, but now with a big grin on his face.

“A bunch of us in the JSA were talking earlier in the week,” the older man said. “We all agreed that with the war winding down, now would be a good time to spend less time as our costumes and more time as ourselves. I know almost everything about Sandy, the Golden Boy, but I couldn’t even tell you Sandy Hawkins’ favorite baseball team.”

“The Giants,” Sandy said.

“Ouch,” Wesley winced. “Yankees here...although sometimes, and usually in secret, I’ve been known to root for the Brooklyn bums from time to time.”

Sandy looked up in surprise. “Me, too! Even when the Dodgers play the Giants, I hate to see ‘em stomped too bad.”

“All right, then,” Wesley said, “we’ll alternate between Giants and Yankee games...and an occasional Dodgers every month or so. Agreed?”

Sandy shook his hand. “Deal!”

“Next, favorite authors?”

Sandy grinned. “Who’s the guy who writes the General Glory comic book?”

“At last,” Wesley said in mock relief, “something we can agree on!”

* * *

The Duesenberg’s 240-hp engine rumbled happily under the hood as they idled at the traffic light on Surf Avenue, parallel to the Boardwalk.

The day had, Wes thought, been a complete success. Sandy was a good kid with a lot of heart and it was high time Wes started treating him as such and not as just another tool in his crime-fighting arsenal. He should, in fact, encourage the boy to spend more time being a kid instead of saddling himself with the grown-up responsibilities of catching criminals and defeating despots. Besides, what if something were to happen to him during one of their adventures? When Sandy had first joined the Sandman just a few short years ago, the world had been such a different place. Now, the war had somehow upped the ante and made it that much more dangerous. Bad guys were no longer disposed to surrender so quickly, the weapons seemed to have gotten bigger, and the costumed villains were turning insane and seriously dangerous.

Wesley said nothing of this to Sandy. Why ruin a great afternoon with something so serious? And the kid had had a ball, that’s for sure. Sandy had no father, no big brother to look up to. And here was Wesley Dodds, bachelor, man-about-town, bon vivant...auditioning for the part. Was he a sap or what?

Wesley glanced to his left as he waited for the light to turn green. He was stopped in front of the Half Moon Hotel, a rundown fleabag with a history. “See that place?” Wes asked, pointing to the painted brick façade. “About a month before Pearl Harbor, New York’s D.A. William O’Dwyer had a Murder Inc. stool pigeon named Abe ‘Kid Twist’ Reles under police custody in the Half Moon.”

“I read about Reles,” Sandy said. “His testimony was supposed to send half the Brooklyn mob to the chair.”

“He helped get a few convicted, until someone pushed him out of the sixth floor window. They called him ‘the canary who could sing but couldn’t fly.’”

“I guess the only thing worse than a crook is a crook who turns rat, huh?”

“Like they say, Sandy, there’s no honor among thieves.” The light turned green and Wesley started to let out the clutch. He took one last glance at the old Half Moon, his gaze almost passing over the man with the carefully groomed goatee and string tie walking up the street. He hesitated a split second before putting the car in gear, looking straight at the bearded man.

He knew that face.

The man turned into the lobby of the Half Moon and was gone. Wesley frowned and then, at the urging of the horn of the car behind him, slipped into first and drove on.

Steven Sharpe III, the Gambler. Wesley wondered what brought him to town, all the way out to the farthest reaches of Brooklyn, no less. He would find out later, tonight, after he had gotten Sandy safely home.

JSA: The Novel, Part 2

The sad, sad story of my poor never-(yet)-published Justice Society of America novel JSA: Ragnarok is related here. Here's another excerpt, set in the days right after Germany surrendered, a charming little chapter that follows superheroes Ted (Wildcat) Grant and Queen (Wonder Woman) Hippolyta on a night out on the town, JSA-style:

JSA: Ragnarok

© DC Comics

Chapter 11/ May 1945

Hippolyta still wasn’t quite sure how she was supposed to behave.

Back home, on the island of Themyscira with her Amazon sisters, her role was well-defined by both tradition and heritage. She was the queen and that was all there was to it. Forms of address, access to her person, acceptable comportment, all were taken care of for her. The structure was a blessing, considering her tendency towards passions that could be a considerable disadvantage to the fulfillment of her royal duties.

Those passions unchecked were always the cause of misery for her and the Amazons.

Although they had also been responsible for the best thing that had ever happened to her and her people as well: Her daughter, Diana, who grew to become the champion Wonder Woman. She had turned her passion to raising her daughter and so it seemed only natural that when Diana’s life was threatened, Hippolyta did what was necessary to save her, putting another Amazon in Diana’s place to die. Yet shortly thereafter, in spite of her efforts, Diana’s life was lost anyway. In penance for her sins, the gods demanded Hippolyta take up the heroic mantle of her fallen daughter. After traveling back to the days of the conflagration in Man’s World called World War II in pursuit of a foe, Hippolyta chose to serve out her sentence there, alongside the JSA.

And then there was Ted Grant.

Hippolyta could not deny it. Another of her passions was handsome, strong and powerful men. Heracles had been the first, and look what that had wrought! Conquered and bound, the warrior women of Themyscira, who had seen their fair share of slaughter on battlefields across their lands, had been humiliated and accepted banishment from mortality and from the world.

Of course, Ted was no Machiavellian godling on a quest to impress his father Zeus, king of the gods, with his cunning. Ted was a man. A noble and kind man, but underneath it all, just a big, sweet...lug?

“Lug?” she said. “Is that the word?”

“I dunno. You talking about a wrench or me? ‘Cause if it’s me, I ain’t no lug.” Ted Grant sat up straight and proud, pointing at himself with a thumb and beaming a brilliant smile at her. “I’m a palooka.”

“A palooka.” Hippolyta nodded in approval. Heracles hadn’t been a palooka, she decided. If Ted was a palooka, a palooka had to be sweet. Heracles had been...ferocious, a mountain of a man with enormous appetites and small honor.

“We’re here, babe,” he said. With an effortless spin of the wheel, Ted maneuvered the sleek black roadster to a flawless stop at the curb. He had cut his headlights halfway up the block.

Hippolyta took in their surroundings. The street was deserted, storefronts dark and gated for the night. Maybe a third of the streetlights worked. They got broken so regularly, the city finally just stopped repairing them. Abandoned cars were everywhere, great shadowy and menacing heaps, stripped of anything of value and left to rot here, in a piece of Gotham City that seemed to have embraced something dark and entirely unpleasant.

“That’s the little joint I was telling you about,” Ted said. There was no need to point. The only sign of life was the candy store, midway up the block. It splashed a patch of light the color of old snow across the cracked sidewalk. A green Breyers ice cream sign hung at an angle over the glass front, the counter open to the sidewalk. A newsstand rack piled with newspapers stood just outside the door.

“Can’t say much for the ambiance,” Hippolyta said. “Shall I bring any accessories?”

Ted shrugged. “Don’t think you’re really gonna need ‘em,” he said. He reached into the backseat and felt around until his fingers closed around the hilt of Hippolyta’s short sword. “But what the hell. Bring the damned thing anyway. I do love the looks on their faces when you come at them with the sword.”

Wonder Woman opened the car door and took the sword from Wildcat’s hand. “For you, dear Ted,” she said. “Shall I take the front door?”

# # #

Everybody called the place Sid’s but no one could tell you who Sid had been. No one particularly cared, either. Not even the gray men and women who worked at Sid’s, selling cigarettes, racing forms, newspapers, chewing gum, and, for customers particularly in the know, some reefer, some horse, and, if you had the price, a lot of guns.

Hippolyta had pointed out that any one of those items alone would be reason enough to shut down this establishment and volunteered to join Ted in doing just that.

She decided to go in making as much threatening noise as possible. That was often enough to paralyze the average felon, especially one who wasn’t expecting trouble. She imaged what it must be like for them, seeing a woman who looked as she did, dressed as she was in a not immodest red, white and blue costume, sword in hand, deflecting bullets off her silver bracelets, charging at them bellowing Amazon war cries. As Ted said, the looks on their faces were worth the trouble of bringing the sword.

Wonder Woman announced her arrival at Sid’s by heaving the wooden newsstand that stood outside its door through the storefront.

The sound of shattering glass and splintering wood seemed to wake the place up.

Behind the counter that cut down the center of the cramped space, a mug in a fedora with an apron over his shirtsleeves pressed against the wall. His eyes were wide with terror and he had not yet gone for a weapon.

Neither had the pair who had been occupying the last of the three small booths in the rear of the store. What Ted would call “professional muscle.” What she called mercenaries, soldiers who hired themselves out to the highest bidder. The newsstand had landed between the first two booths, but the muscle goons were already going for their guns, trying to scramble around the obstruction for a shot at her.

“You—stay put!” she warned Fedora as she ran past him, the sword up in her hand.

With a savage cry, Wonder Woman’s sword cleaved the weathered wood of the newsstand. That stopped the muscle for a moment, long enough for her to leap over the booth and knock the closest one cold. By the time the other one remembered it would prove useful to have a weapon in hand, the tip of a finely crafted Amazon short sword was pointed at his throat.

“Who’s back there?” she asked the muscle, whose eyes had doubled in size, pointing with her chin at the doorway at the rear of the store.

Slowly and carefully the muscle shrugged.

“Loyalty to your employer?” Wonder Woman said, surprised to find any honor among these thieves. “I’m impressed.” Then she slammed her fist across his chin, sending him slumping across his two companions.

Wonder Woman turned to Fedora. He still hadn’t moved. She pointed at him with the sword. “You!”

“Ye-yes ma’am?” he stammered.

“Who is back there?”

He shrugged and spoke quickly, “A guy, says his name’s Lou, ain’t never seen him other than when he comes in to work the back room there, but I don’t know nothin’, okay? I just work the counter, selling smokes and gum, see? Back room’s none’a my business. I ain’t even packin’.” He pulled off his apron, spreading his arms and pivoting like a ballerina to show her he wasn’t armed.

Wonder Woman nodded sharply, then turned her back on him. He was a non-combatant, no longer worth her attention. “Go,” she said. He went.

The door at the rear of the store opened. Wildcat stepped through it, an unconscious heap in a cheap suit dangling from the end of one of his fists. He glanced around approvingly at the destruction left behind by Wonder Woman’s entrance. “Nice,” he said. “Anyway, backroom’s packed with hot goods, from guns to drugs, plus a nice pile of cash. This one’s named Lou, but he’s just hired help manning the contraband concession.”

“Then we’ve hit a...dead end?”

Wildcat grinned, “We hit the mother lode, doll! Lou wasn’t alone back there. He had a pal visiting him on other business.”

“Which is...?”

Wildcat let his unconscious burden slump to the floor and, still grinning, beckoned his star-spangled partner into the back room. She followed.

The area behind the candy store was easily twice as large, with every spare inch filled with stacks of wooden packing crates. A wobbly card table and two folding chairs sat by the door under a single bulb dangling by a frayed wire from the ceiling.

Also dangling from the ceiling, suspended by one foot attached to a hoist used to move the heavy crates, was a second man. He was in his mid-thirties, with receding hair, and a narrow, stern face.

“Wonder Woman, meet Herr X,” Wildcat said by way of introduction.

“Herr?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah. When I popped in through the back door, this one here started spouting off in German. I didn’t catch all of it, but apparently, my mother and father were never married but that doesn’t really matter, I guess, because I’m pretty much just a pig anyway. He also pulled a Luger on me, but that didn’t hurt near as much as the name calling.”

“So this is a front for a Nazi set-up?” She stepped up to the man hanging by his ankle, looking into his upside down eyes. “Is that it?” she asked in flawless German. “The master race is selling drugs and firearms to America’s children?”

“I have nothing to say,” the man answered in heavily accented English through clenched teeth.

Wildcat crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame. “Gosh, he’s got nothing to say. What’re we gonna do?”

Wonder Woman unhooked the glowing golden lasso that hung at her side. “Perhaps I can convince him to talk.”

“I have nothing to say to...” the man said fiercely, then stopped speaking as Wonder Woman looped the golden rope around him.

“Just relax,” she told him. “You can fight my lasso of truth but you won’t win. Its touch compels you to speak the truth.”

Muscles twitched in the German’s face.

“What is your name?” Wonder Woman said.

“St-Steiner,” he stuttered, his voice squeezing through a throat clenched tight.

“Hermann Steiner.”

“Hermann,” Wonder Woman said. “How long have the Germans been running this operation?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head convulsively. “Not ours.”

“Then what is your connection to it?”

“Operation Ragnarok.” The words tumbled from his mouth against his will.

Yeah, I'm Talkin' To You!

Back in July and September, I ran a couple of excerpts from Hey, Sophie!, a YA novel I wrote based on someone's intellectual property. Alas and alack, the book has not seen publication and likely never will, which is a shame. I thought it turned out well and it received a good reaction from others who read it (including a focus group of 10-12 year old girls, the target audience). Here's some more...

HEY, SOPHIE!

© Stirred Water Studios

Chapter 7

Sophie waved and ran off up the street, through the crowd of Saturday morning shoppers. As she passed food and grocery shops and clothing stores, a pharmacy, a bookstore and a shoe store, it came to her that Hebert wasn’t really so different from New York, at least not where it counted. Maybe the little Louisiana town lacked the big name chain stores that lined the streets where she and her mother shopped, but other than that, the scene was little different from what she was used to, with grown-ups and kids going in and out of the various shops, juggling their bundles of groceries and whatever. Throw a few tall buildings into the background and drain the air of some of the humidity and she could have been back home.

Except, of course, she wasn’t.

Midway up the bustling street, Sophie came to a small storefront. Painted in fancy gold letters on the spotless window was “Bayou-Gazette, Serving Hebert Since 1921. Delson Esponge, Proprietor.” Sophie put her face to the window and peered inside, where she saw two old wooden rolltop desks, both with large black typewriters on them nestled among precariously balanced mounds of newspapers, books, papers and file folders. Tied up bundles of printed newspapers were stacked everywhere. Behind the desks a waist-high wooden railing divided the space in half, on the far side of which stood a massive and, to Sophie’s eyes, ancient, printing press.

“Well,” Sophie said to herself, “it’s not exactly the New York Times.”

“No, don’t suppose anyone would ever confuse the Gazette for the Times,” said a voice behind her. Sophie jumped and spun around. The man standing there, a newspaper folded under one arm and holding a steaming mug of coffee, was about half a head shorter than Sophie, with a shiny brown and round smiling face topped by thick, black framed glasses that were pushed up on top of the few wispy hairs that covered his bald head. He wore wrinkled dark slacks held up by fraying suspenders, an ink-stained white shirt with rolled up sleeves and a dark and hastily tied necktie speckled with bits of what Sophie imagined were his last dozen or so meals.

“On the other hand,” the man said, “I’ll wager you no one at the Times knows the name of every single one of its subscribers.”

Sophie swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t mean any disrespect,” she said quickly. “I was just, you know....”

The man chuckled and waved the hand holding the coffee cup, some of the dark liquid sloshing over the side onto his hand. “Not to worry, young ‘un,” he said. “Man publishes a newspaper and sells all of four hundred and sixty-two copies a week’s in no position to be easily insulted.”

“Are you Mr. Esponge?”

“I am indeed he, owner, publisher, editor, writer, advertising manager, typesetter and printer of the Bayou-Gazette, at your service,” Mr. Esponge said, bowing his head in her direction. “And, unless I miss my guess, you would be Miz Sophie Boudreaux.”

“How did you know?” Sophie asked in surprise.

“Elementary, my dear Watson,” he said with another chuckle. “A good newsman makes it his business to know what’s going on. Now, as we have but one newcomer in town, that being the aforementioned Miz Boudreaux, and since you and I have never had the pleasure of meeting before, you would, ipso facto, be she.”

Mr. Esponge shifted the coffee cup to his left hand, extending his right to Sophie after a quick swipe to his trouser leg to wipe away the spilled coffee. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

Sophie shook his hand. “Hi.”

The smiling newspaperman swung open the door to his office and gestured for Sophie to enter. “To what do I owe this honor?” he asked.

Sophie walked into the newspaper office, followed by Mr. Esponge. The air inside was cool and the large space smelled like pulp paper and printer’s ink.

“I guess you could say I’m also a reporter...well, I want to grow up and be a reporter. But I, you know, write for my school newspaper back in New York, and, well...”

“Ah, yes, of course, a professional courtesy call,” Mr. Esponge said happily as he settled on the wooden swivel chair behind the nearest desk and balanced his coffee cup atop a stack of papers. “Splendid. Please, Miz Boudreaux, have a seat.”

Sophie looked around. The only other chair in view was practically invisible under a confusion of paper and books. She chose instead a stack of bundled newspapers.

“First, young lady,” he said, his bright round face growing momentarily serious, “May I say I know of your troubles and wish you a swift and happy resolution to them all. I knew your papa quite well when he was a boy. Indeed, he used to deliver the Bayou-Gazette about town. But as fine a lad as he was, he grew up to be an even finer man. If there is anything in my power that may be of help to you or your grandmere, you have but to ask. In the meantime, I can only pray for the safe return of your dear parents.”

Sophie swallowed back the lump in her throat and blinked back tears, taken aback by Mr. Esponge’s kindness. “Thank you, sir,” she said softly.

The smile returned to his face as quickly as it disappeared. “Now, then, young lady, about you. When I heard a fellow journalistic was coming to town, I naturally checked out your credentials.”

“Really?”

“Certainly! The Lincoln Center Middle School’s Monitor, isn’t it? Quite a nice website. A lovely showcase for your very enjoyable columns.”

Sophie eyed the ancient manual typewriter on the desk in front of Mr. Esponge. “You have internet access?” she asked in a voice that carried a little more surprise than she had intended.

Mr. Esponge, who seemed to chuckle almost as often as he blinked, said, “Pretty surprising for a backwoods rag, huh?”

“Oh, no, sir, I wasn’t...”

“Just joshing with you, Miz Boudreaux. I may still like to write on my trusty ol’ Smith-Corona typewriter, once the property of my illustrious predecessor, my own papa and founder of this fine paper,” he said, fondly patting the side of the black hunk of metal, keys and typewriter ribbon. “And the Gazette is indeed yet printed on a press introduced not long after the turn of the previous century, but I am a man who is not afeared of embracing progress. I am a long-time subscriber to the nation’s wire services which supply me with news of the nation and the world via the internet.”

Sophie sat up straight, eyes going wide. “High-speed?”

“Top of the line DSL,” he said with a wink.

“Mr. Esponge,” Sophie smiled, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Stick a Fork In It...

...'Cause The Same Old Story is done! I typed "the end" last night, 46 days and 57,000 words after I got back to work on the already-started manuscript on August 16, averaging about 1200 words a day, for those keeping score. But, really, this exercise wasn't about clocking words and tallying a score; it was about finding a rhythm and setting a goal that allowed me to be more productive with my time and energy.

Today, I'll zip copies out to a few trusted friends for a first read and comments, as well as to an agent who I've had looking at my stuff.

In a couple of weeks, once I've heard back from those readers with their comments and critiques and I've had time to clear my head so I can look at the manuscript with fresh eyes, I'll go back in to smooth some of the rough edges and fix all the continuity gaffs and other errors that have inevitably crept into the story.

But...it's done!

Today, I'll clear my psychic pallet by cleaning up all the stuff that's accumulated around me while I was focusing on the book, catching up on e-mails, respond to some interview questions that have been waiting, check on the status of other work, file paperwork, etc. Tomorrow, I'll be ready to get to work on my second young reader Superman storybook for Stone Arch Books, the plot of which was approved a week or so ago. After that, I'll be starting on a non-fiction book for young readers about Jerry Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo!, for Chelsea House.

And, in a day or three, I'll start on my next 500-words a day project: a YA novel called Supertown. I've already got about 16,000 words, or about a third of it, down on paper and the rest of the story outlined.

If nothing else, this line of work sure keeps me from getting bored.

500 Words A Day and the Temple of Doom

Bits and pieces of The Same Old Story, my 500-words-a-day-novel-in-progress, are scattered through previous postings (here, here, here, here, here and here). Of course, once things got rolling, I was averaging more than that (better than double) and, for the past several days, I've been concentrating exclusively on finishing this up. Today will likely be the day, so here's an excerpt from one of the later chapters:

THE SAME OLD STORY

© Paul Kupperberg

Chapter 23/ HILLBILLY HANK

The local law was more than a little perturbed when I showed up splattered with another man’s brains to report a suicide. I left out a few pertinent details, especially the part about the $80,000 in cash, which I’d stowed under the DeSoto’s seat cushion, one half-hearted search away from discovery but the best I could do under the circumstances. I didn’t know these local cops from Adam and eighty grand was a tempting target for anyone. I had carried the case back out through the woods to where I’d left the car, then drove back the way I came until I hit something that resembled a town and asked the first person I saw for direction to the police station.

Sheriff Billy Van der Hooven was a beefy but hardy looking specimen with a round face, shining cheeks and an honest desire to want to understand what the hell it was I brought with me when I walked into his office. I told him to call Uncle Mick in New York, tell him it was about me. The sheriff looked none to happy about having to make a long distance telephone call but he took another look at the gore I’d been unable to wipe off my clothes and face and dialed.

The rest was sort of a blur. Sheriff Van der Hooven confiscated my clothes as evidence and left me with a pair of dungarees and a jailhouse shirt to change into it. My number was 877. Two deputies were sent to investigate and, if necessary, secure the cabin. He let me wash up and I scrubbed at my face with lye soap until the skin was stinging and raw and I could no longer feel the little bits of Jimmy’s life that had clung there.

I spent the next three hours telling Van der Hooven what exactly it was that had brought me here. He took extensive notes, breaking only to take a report from the deputy who had been sent back for reinforcements and orders, confirming the dead body. The young deputy said it sure looked like a suicide to him but the sheriff wisely pointed out that such a determination should be made by wiser and more qualified heads.

When there was no other way to tell my story, the sheriff left me in a small locked interrogation room with a table, two chairs and an egg salad sandwich and coffee. I drank the coffee and ignored the sandwich. I couldn’t imagine the next time I’d want to eat again.

I stared at the wall, trying not to replay the sight of Jimmy’s head exploding like a melon, flinging blood and bone and gore all over the cabin. There was nothing left. Jimmy just ended at the shoulders. But that was all I could see. Over and over.

I closed my eyes and thought about Shelly.

She was innocent. Of everything. How come I couldn’t see that? How come I didn’t just believe her when she told me?

Because criminals lie, I told myself. If she had been guilty, she’d have lied about it. How was I supposed to know until I had the evidence.

The testimony of a dead man.

In my mind’s eye, Jimmy Noonan kept killing himself. The click of the trigger, the booming eruption of gunpowder, the slow motion disintegration of his head, like a popping balloon popping balloon full of water.

And then silence, except for my screaming and heaving and crying.

And then I see it again.

So I try looking at something else. The moment before he died.

I’m guilty of a lot of terrible things, he said just before he pulled the trigger, but Bob Konigsberg death ain’t one of them.

Click. Boom.

Dead.

I’m guilty of a lot of terrible things, but Bob Konigsberg death ain’t one of them.

Jimmy Noonan had just confessed to one murder. He knew he was just seconds away from ending his life. Why would he deny killing Bob if had?

He wouldn’t.

I blinked and in my head, all the pieces of the puzzle tumbled into place and made a perfect picture.

Oh, god.

Shelly.

Click. Boom.

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.

A Kid Named Merlin Barnstorm Noble Gleeznak Riboflavin Shakespeare Krebbs-Part 2

Taking up a dare from his friends, young Merlin Krebbs now finds himself locked inside a rocket full of corn flakes speeding towards his planet's sun (or you can just read it, here). Boy, is he sorry now he didn't listen to his parents!

WAYSTATION

© Paul Kupperberg

chapter one (continued)

They probably knew what had happened to him by now. His friends, who had witnessed the ship blasting off from the Factory spaceport with Merlin onboard, had likely spent a few hours debating whether or not to tell what had happened. But in the end, they would’ve done the right thing. Which meant that Mom and Dad were, even now, both worried sick and angry as all get out. No, this would definitely not go over well with them, especially in light of their family discussion, just the night before, about Merlin's chronic lack of responsibility. They’d forgive him, of course...

...If he got out of this alive.

For the six hundred and twenty-seventh time since the ship’s massive steel hatch had slammed shut behind him and he had been slammed to the floor by the tremendous g-force of lift-off, Merlin looked desperately around the cargo hold. There had to be a way out of this, he thought. Humanity had been travelling in space for... well, a real long time. Thousands of years. Merlin wasn’t sure exactly how many thousands, but it was a lot of them. And in all that time, it had become routine, so there had to be a way to...to do something in his current situation. A way to steer. A radio to call for help. Something!

There had to be, but, really, there wasn’t. Not in this ship. Why would there be? It was never intended for anything but hauling surplus corn flakes to the sun for incineration. No one was supposed to be on board. Especially Merlin.

“Why’d I ever take Waldorf’s dare?” he groaned. He knew better than to be fooling around at the spaceport. How many times had his father warned him? “Don’t go fooling around at the spaceport,” his father would say. “It’s dangerous.”

Well, d’uh!

But Waldorf kept teasing him, calling him a scaredy-kilcth. “C’mon, Merl,” he said as they sat on the apron of the spaceport on their duocycles with the rest of the gang, looking up at the huge cargo ship that was still being loaded with corn flakes. “All of us have been inside one of ‘em. Except,” he said, giving Merlin a meaningful look, “you.”

Even as he dismounted from his duocycle, Merlin knew this was a bad idea. He still knew it as he looked into the grinning faces of his pals, and grew even more certain of it as he edged his way towards the waiting ship. The enormity of the sheer badness of this entire idea only grew as he slipped around the robo-loaders dumping ton after ton of corn flakes into the cargo hold and glanced back at his waiting friends. They had all done this and they were all okay.

Any yet...this was still a bad idea on so many levels.

“Just because everyone else jumps off a building doesn’t mean you have to as well,” his mother had often said to him.

Except, when you’re fourteen years old, you kind of do have to.

Or be branded a scaredy-kilcth and spend the rest of high school the object of mockery, various varieties of wedgies, frequent Wet Willies, and the occasional but painful beating.

So, Merlin took a deep breath, crossed his fingers and, hoping for the best but expecting the worst, climbed into the great ship. He figured hanging inside by the hatch for a full ten second count before jumping out should do the trick.

He had just silently mouthed the number five when the hatch closed.

Which brought him, true to Mom’s wisdom and Dad’s warnings, to a collision course with the sun.

Because he was a total weiner, more afraid to tell his friends he was afraid than he was afraid of something like, oh...this happening.

Because of corn flakes and his having the misfortune of being born and raised on a whose sole purpose was making flakes for this sector of the universe. Huge colony and factory ships had been sent out ahead of the settlers bound for neighboring Sectors to settle Riboflavin and begin the immediate production so as to have boxes of breakfast food ready for shipment to every newly settled planet within a thousand lightyears as soon as the colonists landed.

Just about every major company of everything from soft drinks to clothing to pet food owned manufacturing planets in every corner of the Known Universe. Wherever there were to be humans, there’d also be a market for consumer products. It had been done this way since mankind had begun its migration to the stars.

The Riboflavin team had landed, and even as the massive factory-cities were being constructed from the starships that had carried them across the thousands of lightyears from Earth, began planting every farmable acre of the planet's fertile surface with genetically enhanced corn. The orders from the home office were to begin immediate and full production in each of the six factory cities and keep it going.

Riboflavin's factories did as they were ordered...

... And the corn flake planet never heard from the home office again. No word to cease production. No orders on what to do with the corn flakes they had already—and continued—to produce. Nobody called. Or came to tell them to wrap it up, show's over, everybody go home, thank you very much.

So for six hundred Terran Standard years Riboflavin made corn flakes. Tons and tons of them, every day. Pretty soon, there was no place left to put them, which lead some brilliant committee to come up with the idea of building huge transport ships to rocket the massive overload of flakes into the sun. Ever since he was four years old, Merlin wondered why they had not instead:

(1) Just stopped making corn flakes altogether, or
(2) Built ships to take everybody home...or send even someone to Earth for instructions.

But when he had asked his parents about this, his father—a quality control inspector in Plant 17, Flaketown-4—had simply fixed him with a disapproving frown and said, "Because corn flakes is the reason Riboflavin exists, and following instructions from the home office is the way we do things around here, young man. Now finish your flakes and get yourself to school!"

Right.

So, he was millions of miles out in space, on his way to becoming a crispy critter in the heart of the sun. Merlin had to admit that, as bad as he always believed his life was, he had finally hit the absolute bottom on the “life sucks” meter.

There was something strangely comforting about that thought. At least he was off Riboflavin and would never have to spend another boring second thinking about boring corn flakes. And, once the air in the ship gave out, it would probably be over pretty quickly anyway. It wasn’t much comfort, true, but it was better than nothing.

Well, you know, other than the situation being hopeless.

And that was the thought that ran through Merlin’s head as a Slarkbogger Salvage-Destroyer came up behind the sun-bound cargo ship and trained its massive ion-cannons on its tail.

A Kid Named Merlin Barnstorm Noble Gleeznak Riboflavin Shakespeare Krebbs-Part 1

Here's the first half of the first chapter of a silly science-fiction young adult book I was playing with several years back. The rest of the chapter tomorrow:

WAYSTATION

© Paul Kupperberg

chapter one
"I am in deeep trouble!"

Merlin Barnstorm Noble Gleeznak Riboflavin Shakespeare Krebbs had a lot of reasons for making what was probably one of the all time biggest understatements to ever be uttered in Known Space. Considering the number of inhabited planets and the width and breath of their locations across the cosmos, that was quite an understatement indeed. But the enormity of his comment was the last thing on Merlin’s mind. He was way more concerned with the reasons for it. Like, for instance:

He was trapped in the hold of a robot cargo ship filled with one hundred thousand metric tons of corn flakes.

A robot cargo ship that was locked on a collision course with Riggit-14, the star around which his home planet, Riboflavin, orbited.

A collision course that, even if he could break out of the hold, was the very purpose for which the ship had been built.

A purpose which meant that the ship was built without any controls he might get to in order to override the auto-pilot.

And even if there were any controls capable of overriding the auto-pilot, Merlin, at fourteen years old and with no experience at piloting anything more complicated than his duocycle through the streets of Flaketown-4, wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to operate them.

In other words, Merlin was in deeep trouble.

Which, unfortunately, seemed to be the story of his life.

Starting with his having been born on what was probably the worst planet in the whole Known Universe, Riboflavin. The corn flake planet. The forgotten corn flake planet. A planet Merlin hated more than even homework. He knew, of course, that there were other planets in the universe, including Earth, from which the ancestors of everyone on Riboflavin had migrated over six hundred Terran Standard Years ago. To make corn flakes. But he was willing to bet his entire collection of magno-ball cards that none of them were as boring, as totally and completely devoid of anything of any interest whatsoever as Riboflavin.

Where all anybody did was make corn flakes.

Come to think of it, Merlin hated corn flakes more than even homework. And Riboflavin.

But, right now, Merlin would have eaten a whole truckload of corn flakes and done a whole school years worth of homework on Riboflavin just to be off this ship and back home with his parents.

His parents!

Merlin groaned and slapped his head as he thought of his mom and dad. “They’re gonna kill me,” he moaned.

Which was, of course, silly. Merlin was shortly going to be dead and incinerated in the fiery heart of Riggit-14 and therefore well out of the murderous reach of his parents.

to be continued...

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.

JSA: The Novel

I finished this novel in July 2005 and it was due to be published sometime in 2006 by iBooks. The sudden death of iBooks publisher Byron Preiss caused a whole chain reaction of events that resulted in bankruptcy for iBooks and the cancellation of this—and many other—books. DC is currently in negotiations with the new owner of iBooks and there is some hope that JSA: Ragnarok will be resurrected and published...indeed, that it will even be followed by two more novels to complete what was originally planned as a trilogy.

In this excerpt, taken from the last chunk of the book, Michael Holt, aka Justice Society of American chairman Mister Terrific, is, along with his teammates, in the clutches of the bad guys and things don’t look good for them. Michael’s remembering back to his pre-superhero days, to the last time he let himself get distracted:

JSA: RAGNAROK

JSA and all related characters and elements © DC Comics

The 400 meter was the last event of the first day of the decathlon and Michael Holt felt nothing but good about his chances. The 400 was his event. He had already taken the 100 meter, the long jump, the shot put, and high jump, breaking one personal best and three Olympic records in the doing. He was well ahead in points and the odds-on favorite to take the gold. The whole stadium seemed to be on his side as he took his place at the starting line.

The closest thing he had to competition was the Kenyan, a whippet thin young man with densely corded muscles and deadly serious expression, currently in second place. He had gone over to shake the other man’s hand and wish him luck before the race, but instead of being a gentleman about it, the Kenyan had instead given him only the most perfunctory of handshakes and then turned his back on Michael.

Well.

If that didn’t call for some serious butt kicking, Michael didn’t know what did. He glanced over at his competitor, but the other man had his eyes fixed on the tape, 400 meters, just a shade under 361 feet down the track. The Kenyan was giving away nothing. He had to know he was up against a superior athlete. Any other year, he would have been a cinch for the gold medal. Just his luck to qualify the same year as the one competitor in the world who outclassed him.

Michael took his position, steadying his breathing. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the Kenyan. The Kenyan ignored him. He only had eyes for the finish line. Too bad Michael’s back was about to block his view.

The starting gun barked and the runners pushed off.

Michael Holt sailed into an easy lead, legs and arms pumping in perfect rhythm, breathing in through his nose, out through his mouth. Every bit of technique he had ever learned and had trained into himself so deeply that it was as natural as the beating of his heart came into play. He wasn’t just running, he was flying, fractions of seconds ticking off in his head with the accuracy of a Swiss timepiece. The world record in the 400 belonged to Michael Johnson at 43.18 seconds. Michael’s best in competition was 43.32. The Kenyan’s was 43.55.

He needed to shave only .14 second to tie, .15 to beat it.

And teach the Kenyan a lesson.

He allowed himself a glance at the Kenyan’s lane to his left. He saw the African was matching him, stride for stride. There was nobody between them. It was down to just them. The damned Kenyan was running the race of his life.

And the spectators knew it. Suddenly, the cheers were no longer for Michael Holt but for the Kenyan.

And then Michael stumbled, not much, just a half-step, nothing anyone but another runner would even notice, but enough to cost him less than a tenth of a second. Less than the blink of an eye.

But enough to lose him the race and cost him the world record.

The Kenyan broke the tape at 43.21.

Michael was right behind him at 43.26.

The stadium went wild. And just before he took his victory lap, the Kenyan turned his head and caught Michael’s glaring eyes, giving him an almost apologetic half-smile and a minute shrug.

Michael Holt went on to win the remaining five events the following day, giving him nine out of the ten and setting a still-unbroken Olympic record for the decathlon. Nine out of ten. The Olympic gold. But what he remembered most about his victory was that .05 of a second loss, all because he got cocky and allowed himself to be distracted by something else, taking his eye off the prize, off the finish line where it belonged.

Losing your focus. That’ll kill you every time.