November 30, 2013

From “The Muse Rides Into the Sunset, For Now” by Altos Wexan

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“Who’s this strumpet?” asks my muse as he walks into my writing den–otherwise known as the single room comprising my kitchen and living room.

Sure enough, a young woman in a duster and hat, both heavy with dust, is sitting on the couch, arms folded, and glaring bullets at me. Luckily, the revolvers heavy on her hips are loaded with strictly imaginary bullets.

“This is Virginia McNeill, the heroine of my National Novel Writing Month novel for 2013,” I say. “I’ve been toying with her as a character since 2007 and finally got her story underway this year.”

“Uh, okay, great, sure,” says my muse. “I’m very happy for you. But why is she here, on your couch, which ought to be my place of honor? I am, after all, the imagined personification of your muse, shamelessly ripped off from an author so much richer and more powerful than you that I’m surprised you haven’t been sued back to the stone age?”

“If anyone asks, you’re fair use,” I say. “Or one of Stephen King’s Dollar Babies.”

“Whatever boats your float, slick,” says my muse with a hearty belch. “Now answer the damn question. What’s Annie Oakley doing in my ass groove?”

“I’m cross at him,” says Virginia. “I don’t like how my story turned out.”

“Ohh, and the crowd is crestfallen!” crows my muse. “All those years of thinking about Virginia’s story in the shower and you whiff on it like Casey?”

“I didn’t do any such thing!” I cry.

“I beg to differ,” snorts Virginia. “I thought my characterization was trite and two-dimensional, my character arc was more like a straight line, and that more often than not you were making fun of me.”

“Sounds like she has your number, slick,” says my muse. He tosses the cowgirl a cold beer from the fridge. “Here, have a brewski.”

“I for one think her story turned out well,” I say. “Sure, there are always edits and revisions, but-”

“Did you finish it?” snaps my muse.

“-I feel that I did enough justice to the outline of the tale that-” I continue, trying to ignore the question.

“DID you FINISH it?” my muse says again with exaggerated emphasis. “That WAS your resolution, wasn’t it?”

“It’s finished enough for now,” I say airily, evading the question.

My muse rolls his eyes afresh and turns to Virginia. “Did he finish it?”

“Far as I’m concerned,” she drawls acidly, “he never started it.”

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October 31, 2013

From “The Muse Rides Again” by Altos Wexan

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“So, it’s that time of year again,” says my muse through a fog of cigar smoke and with cheap Pabst heavy on his breath. “What are you going to fail to finish this year?”

I don’t like the tone of my muse’s voice, or the various odors issuing from his maw, and I could do without the stained wifebeater and torn sweatpants he’s sporting. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking like that,” I riposte. “I’m beginning to regret ripping you off as a concept from Stephen King.”

“The process of ripping off, be it from On Writing or your own blog posts from last year, is irreversible,” my muse replies, punctuating the remarks with a throaty belch. “Ripping off is like heat transfer, it only goes one way until the eventual, and inevitable, Ripoff Death of the Universe. Now answer the question.”

I sigh. “A western,” I say. “I’m going to try writing a western. A heady tale of humor and betrayal, gunslinger grrls and black-hatted villainesses.”

“A western?” chortles my muse, frabjously. “Well callooh-callay, aren’t we fancy this time around. Who the hell writes westerns anymore? The genre’s been dead as a doornail since the Sputnik launch.”

“It’s a genre I’ve never tried before,” I reply, more than a little defensiveness in my voice. “Would you rather I wrote a Harlequin romance?”

“At least then you’d have an excuse for female characters all over the place,” my muse snorts. “They didn’t have female cowboys there, hoss. I mean, that’s encoded right there in the name cow-BOY.”

“I’ll think up an explanation,” I shoot back. “And the western isn’t all about historical accuracy. Sergio Leone had a gun from 1889 in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and that was set in 1862.”

“And when you have the track record with westerns that he has, maybe you’ll get away with it. Maybe. But if you want to cough up an unfinished western when the genre is deader than Louis L’Amour, don’t let me stop you.”

“I’m going to finish this year, too,” I say. “NaNoFiMo, National Novel Finishing Month. Set in stone.”

“Just like the last 5 novels?” My muse laughs. “Or the one you actually did finish…six months later? Or the only one you finished by November 30, by undoing all your contractions at 11:50pm, but refuse to speak of?”

I roll my eyes. “I don’t refuse to speak of it, I just openly admit that it was dog crap. That’s what happens when you try to expand a 1000-word story by 50 times. Now are you with me or not?”

“Fine, fine.” My muse opens a fresh can of rotgut and clips the head off a fresh cigar. “We’ll see who was right in 30 days on the dot. Happy National Novel Writing Month, my rootin’, tootin’ friend. Good luck–you’ll need it.”

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October 29, 2013

From “The Schiller Family Tree” by Altos Wexan

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Family history: originally minor nobility in the Electorate of Hanover, descended from a line of horse-breeders. Accompanied George I’s court to England in 1714, and served in various minor posts in both the English and Hanoverian governments. Served the Hanoverian government-in-exile during the Napoleonic Wars before returning to Hanover permanently in 1837 with Ernest Augustus when the union of Britain and Hanover came to an end.

Thomas
Father (1841-)
A Hanoverian diplomat who frequently shuttled between Hanover and London. After Hanover’s annexation in 1866, he was retained as part of the new Prussian delegation due to his contacts and experience, and remained with the embassy when the German Empire was founded in 1871. Served first as an aide, then as an attaché, and finally as a consular agent before retiring to Germany in 1905. Was married twice: first to the daughter of a minor Hanoverian noble (1861-65) who died in childbirth, and later to Anna Gregory.

Anna Gregory
Mother (1861-)
A British woman of Scottish ancestry. Fluent in several languages, she found work as a secretary, interpreter, and governess in London’s diplomatic community. Met Thomas, two decades her senior, at a reception in the German Embassy in 1882; they were married the following year. The family maintained residences in London and Hanover, but gradually increased their time in Germany until moving there permanently in 1905.

Tobias
(1895-)
Born in London, and split his time growing up between a variety of English and Continental schools before moving permanently to Germany in 1905 and enrolling in gymnasium. Entered the German Army with a lieutenant’s commission just before the start of the First World War.

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October 7, 2013

From “The Deerton Boards” by Altos Wexan

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“Did you hear that? The way the buffet seemed to creak and settle?”

“Yeah, almost like a sigh.”

The buffet had started life as a stand of trees in what later became Tecumseh County, Michigan. After the brushfires of war with the natives and the British died down, lumber men had come up from the south with their axes and saws. The area was well-served by rivers which were deep and wide enough to float logs on, and when the lumber boom came in the 1880s, the trees found themselves in the center of a large logging camp known as Reid’s Slashing.

Cut down in the first expansion of the camp, the logs were floated downriver to Muskegon, where they went through a riverside sawmill and emerged as rough lumber. Then it was up the Grand River to Grand Rapids, the great Furniture City and boomtown of the hour. Berkley and Sons, a fast-growing furniture maker destined to become the state’s greatest carpentry concern until its collapse in the Great Depression, bought the lumber. Finished into a buffet in the then-fashionable style, it was loaded onto the Grand Rapids & Indian Railroad, ultimately destined for Chicago.

Gilded Age Chicago was booming in its own way, a center of railroads, meat-packing, and other heavy industry. The buffet quickly found a buyer in an up-and-coming district, changing hands several times before winding up on the South Side just before the second World War thanks to a pair of newlyweds and a garage sale. It held everything from knickknacks to wedding feasts over the next 40 years, before the crippling urban decay of the late 1970s and early 1980s forced the buffet’s owners to the suburbs.

30 years later, one of their grandchildren and his wife found the furniture in a storage unit where it had lay for almost a decade following the deaths of its owners. They loaded it up on a truck for their vacation home to the north–up in Michigan, in the blighted buckle of the Rust Belt, the boom days long since past. Setting it up in their second home, an old lumber baron’s mansion in the Tecumseh County seat of Deerton, they had both been startled by the strange, earthy noise it had made upon being set down.

Thing is, Deerton had grown up from the nucleus of the Reid’s Slashing lumber camp. The old house had been built in the heart of the Slashing, where the first trees had been logged long ago. For those old boards, sitting where they had once grown, they weren’t just decorating another living room.

They had come home.

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September 7, 2013

From “The Royal Tecumseh” by Altos Wexan

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Paulsen, head of the Auctions Unlimited team that had hired me, thrust a pitted and flimsy set of keys at me. “Here. First key’s for the main door, second’s a skeleton for the bar and restaurant, third’s a skeleton for the upstairs. No key for the basement; there’s black mold and our liability won’t cover it.”

The Royal Tecumseh had been Deerton’s shining jewel in the boomtown days, lying as it did astride both the road and the rails, within spitting distance of the sawmills. The salad days of cutting and shipping wood south to be made into furniture gave way to a leaner but no less golden age as a rail transshipment point, and the thriving restaurant, bar, and hotel served as the community’s focal point.

“You’re to prepare a written inventory of the contents and photograph each item. Multiple views.” Paulsen took a fresh, deep drag from his cigarette and rubbed out the stub on one of the Royal Tecumseh’s old No Smoking signs. “You can combine them into lots within reason. Every item or lot gets a tag from the stack in your bag.”

It had all ended so subtly that I was scarce able to notice it at the time. The last trains had come through in 1985, and they’d torn up the rails in 1990. The demand for wood had withered away, with what little remained of the furniture industry further south now reliant on cheap foreign timber. In an attempt to remain relevant, the Royal Tecumseh had undergone renovations in 1980. They’d been a disaster, slathering stucco and paint over the intricate brickwork and aluminum siding over the ornate pediments that had been common to all buildings of the 1870s (to say nothing of slapping cheap pressboard panels and kitschy artwork over the old wallpaper and woodwork).

“The auctioneers arrive in two weeks and demolition starts in four. That’s your timetable. You can stay in one of the rooms upstairs if you want, but there’s no heat and no water and the place is lousy with rats.” Paulsen offered no alternatives; the Royal Tecumseh had been the only hotel in town, after all. I figured I could walk in from my parents’ old house, since I’d already arranged for the water and sewer to be temporarily reconnected.

A minor bribery scandal had been the end; it had come out that the proprietors, the sixth set of hands the Royal Tecumseh had been in since its inception, had been quietly avoiding inspections through payola. They’d lost their liquor license, and with it the last vestige of business. The doors had shut for good in 2002, with a few half-hearted attempts at revivals. A 2004 attempt to reopen the restaurant as a deli had folded in six months. A plan by a couple of out-of-towners, the Patels, to remodel a bed and breakfast out of the place had failed when the tax assessor had shown up with a $40,000 bill in arrears–a gift from the last owner they’d failed to mention when handing over the keys.

“Payment is expenses up front–keep your receipts–and then a lump sum afterwards, plus five percent of the auctioneer’s premium. You do a good job, there might be more work for you in Petoskey at our next job.” I forced a smile. With the Hopewell Tribune belly-up along with a lot of the other newspapers statewide, and an unemployment level closer to Gaza than anywhere else in the USA, I was lucky to have found a gig that allowed me to use my camera and pen at all. If nothing else, the job would delay the inevitable for a few months. Most people who limped back to Deerton wound up working at McDonald’s.

Looking around the dark and musty confines of the Royal Tecumseh as Paulsen finalized his paperwork, I wondered how someplace once so prosperous and still so historic could have been so mismanaged. The entire east part of town had all but withered away with it, and persistent rumors that the place was haunted hadn’t helped. There were ghosts there, all right. Just not of the sort that made the walls bleed.

They were the ghosts of wasted potential, of squandered history, of the Rust Belt still quietly oxidizing as people like me stood by and did nothing.

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August 10, 2013

From “Spambot Poetry” by 192.74.244.97, adapted by Altos Wexan

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Almost for Valentine’s Day, a gift basket
She gives marriage tips just to use famous food quotes
Of far-off movies with stock options
Brought together in estate planning trust
She has his life insurance policy, here
For the bookkeeping service
We all wish for an inflatable escape slide at our jobs
Airplane style out into the street
She thinks 80% of us would quite like that
Anybody out there?
There is an opening for a stockbroker at my job
She is smiling and weeping

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July 16, 2013

From “Park of Life” by Altos Wexan

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When people are angry, they tend to overlook small details.

The other day, for instance, I was so angry at unannounced road construction making me late for work that I blitzed into the first available spot that I saw without looking, even though it was across campus from where I usually park.

My car was only there for an hour before I got a polite but firm phone call asking me to move it. It had a big fat ticket pasted to the windshield by the downpour I’d had to walk through, too. Ordinarily I’d fight the ticket, or at least try to weasel out of it, but that wasn’t going to work this time.

I’d parked in a space reserved for parking enforcement, after all.

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July 12, 2013

From “The Last Desk” by Altos Wexan

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I saw a man flirting with a girl behind a desk
Leaned over to suggest the casual amid a careful pose

I wanted to hate him for it, lips curled silently
For I envied him that pose, that desk, that woman

(For she seemed lovely and intelligent, in as much
As observation suffices for such qualities)

But I could not

For I have too often been leaned over that desk
A thousand, ten thousand of its sister desks

Striking the same too-obvious pose
Fumbling for the same words

Listening without listening
Smiling without smiling

A mirror’s brutal truth

The same hollow act, the same hallowed act
I saw myself in him, and my ideal in her

I left them be without a word, a sound, a gesture
Not with hate, but with hope

I hope he has better fortune than I
I hope this desk will be his last leaning

Lean no more, my brother; lean no more

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July 3, 2013

From “Sirius Rising in the Midwest” by Altos Wexan

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This post is part of the July 2013 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “Dog Days of Summer.”

When it comes to sultry, eggs-on-the-street summer heat, folks tend to think of the torrid south, the arid west, or the artificial asphalt ovens of the east coast city-states. The Midwest is not on that list; we are the Great White North, Canada Junior, avoided and overlooked except in election years.

But that Midwestern summer heat has an edge to it that the others lack.

We see some of the greatest temperature variations anywhere, from -40 (on any scale you might use) to 100+ Fahrenheit, my preferred scale if only because the most blistering days are in excess of a century of degrees which makes them all the more sweat-misted. These forces, from freezing to broiling, mangle our roads into Pollocks of pavement and make weather prediction even more a casting of bones than ordinary. April might still see snow and June might usher in a roaring hundred-degree drought–or vice-versa.

I still remember a Middle School day in May, when it was 80 degrees in the morning and snowing by the final bell. Running home through the snow was my only option, since I was in shirtsleeves and shorts. I also remember lying out in my parents’ house under a fan, sticky from heat and unable to rouse myself. We had no air conditioning, like many, since the heat would only last a month or two at most. For the longest time I thought those long-ago dog days were named after the neighborhood mutts, laying on porches or in doghouses and panting away what heat they could.

There were few pools, since most weren’t worth the hassle of draining and covering after only a fortnight of use, so the kids would often go down to the river to cool off. Not by swimming–an old creosote plant upriver had all our parents forbidding us to dip so much as a toe–but by soaking in the cool air that collected in the hollow of the old drained lake, trapped by the overhanging trees and shady parks at either end. We used the riverwalk–before the term even existed in trendier circles–paved with woodchips and gravel.

Of course there were other remedies. Being boys, water balloons, hoses, and squirt guns often figured quite prominently. Whoever had the largest and most pressurized cannon was always at a major advantage…until the others ganged up on them, or until everyone became so soaked that further shots had no effect. Nearsighted, I was never a good shot, and never willing to escalate the battles. That meant forever losing to whoever was ruthless enough to deploy the hose first, or whoever resorted to dirty warfare by flinging unconventional projectiles like pinecones, lumps of sod, or even (once) dog poo.

When I sit, an adult, in my air conditioned cubicle, shivering as if in a meat locker, the lens through which those old dog days are perceived grows rosier. Such is the way of all things, though it is hard to walk those same paths today and not feel a twinge of regret or golden longing.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Ralph Pines
articshark
Sunwords
Diem_Allen
U2Girl
robynmackenzie
Lady Cat
MsLaylaCakes
pyrosama
Angyl78
SuzanneSeese
Diana_Rajchel
HistorySleuth
AshleyEpidemic
SRHowen

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June 15, 2013

From “The Persistent Waterside” by Altos Wexan

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I used to come here as a child, but not to appreciate it. This park was my playground, site of pirate adventures and long-winded fantasy stories that never existed anywhere but between my ears. While the other kids preferred the swings or slides or sports field, for me it was always the trail, the bridge, the river bubbling merrily past.

When a person reaches a certain age, they find themselves returning more and more often to these places of memory. I’ve been back in person, but more often than not I return solely in my memory. The sunlight is stronger, the shadows darker, and the possibilities broader. I can be any age, any person, anywhere, so long as it is through the lens of an eight-year-old wearing an old blazer like a pirate coat.

It’s sad, devastatingly sad, that those days are now fixed like graven statues in the past. At the time, it seemed like that world was there, always there, forever for the asking and the taking. At times it seems almost unfair that those days nearly twenty years ago have cast such a long and deep shadow over the rest of my life, that all my years since are like a faded daguerreotype beside their brilliance.

As we age, it’s only natural to look back with regret; regret is in many ways the most human of emotions, the longing tug that connects us to our pasts. There are times when I feel I’d trade anything to go back and do it over again, do it right this time.

And then there are times when I just wish I could live it over again, the riverside trails and my childish games unchanged for all the time I’ve mulled them over.

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