Two Sentence Tuesday: Lingerie Edition

As I wrote yesterday in my vacation wrap-up, a few stories I didn't see coming showed up in my brain while in Central Texas last week. I've started the first one and here are the opening lines:

Texas Park Ranger Renee Richards was holding up a thin gauzy piece of see-through nothingness that was supposed to be lingerie when her cellphone sang out the latest Kenny Chesney tune. One by one, Renee leading the way, all five women at the bridal shower stopped cackling as the inevitable nature of the call dawned on them.

The manhunt had reached the state park.

I've got the entire story plotted. I intend for it to be a short, fun, light, and, perhaps, eerie tale of a park ranger in Texas and how she solves the puzzle of the escaped convict's whereabouts.

As far as reading is concerned, I finished William Colt MacDonald's The Comanche Scalp last week. It's a Gregory Quist story, the inspiration for my western published at Beat to a Pulp, and I'm glad it wasn't the first one I read as I wouldn't have read anymore. So, no excerpt from there. However, I did read Volume 1 of Dynamite Comics' rebooted Lone Ranger trade paperback. Now that is a fantastic story. I'll blog about it, soon. Very entertaining and highly recommended.

For more Dos Oración el martes, Women of Mystery is the place to be today.

Two Sentence Tuesday: Superhero Edition

Even though I'm on vacation, I'd still like to participate. Thus, from the depths of the My Writings folder, a few lines:

The woman who sat across the coffee table from me took a cigarette out of her metal cigarette case and placed it between her luscious, pouty lips. She replaced the case in an interior pocket of her red cape at the same time she ‘flicked’ her thumb. A small, still flame emerged from the tip of her thumb. She brought the flame to the end of her cigarette and lit it. She inhale deeply, eyes closed. Absently, she shook her thumb as if she were extinguishing a match. She opened her eyes and looked at me. As she spoke, the smoke trickled out of her mouth.

"People accept me a little better if I just shake my thumb out rather than if I just turn off the flame."

Don't know where that came from but I chuckled as I wrote it a few years ago.

Don't have a twofer from a book as I won't know what book I'll be reading in four days (I'm writing this on Friday).

For more twofer fun, head on over to Women of Mystery.

I expect to get some writing done on my vacation so look for something new next week.

Two Sentence Tuesday: Police Edition

I just finished reading my first Max Allan Collins novel this past week. It's one of his Hard Case Crime entries, Deadly Beloved. Man! I couldn't get over how action-packed his sentences are. Collins always, always introduces a character with a description, something I tend to neglect in my urge to get to the action and/or dialogue. I listened to the audio version from Audible.com so I don't really have a twofer sentence from the novel. But I learned a lesson: take a sentence or two and describe a character. When Collins did it, I had a perfect picture of a certain character and, from then, the action flowed.

For my few sentences, I've plucked a few from my crime novel featuring Anne Chambers, my police detective from Houston. Here, she's in a pickle.

Something inside me changed the day I killed my sister. Holding her bleeding body, watching the lucidity melt away from her eyes, I cried. I vomited. I had to be sedated. In the days after, I came to terms with my actions, my guilt, my rage. I knew who was to blame. I made a vow: I would never miss again.

These thoughts raced through my mind as my hand flexed around the butt of my gun, steadying my aim. The barrel of the Glock centered on the man’s forehead, the sight a fuzzy black rectangle between his eyes.

I had him cold.

For more Two Sentence fun, Women of Mystery is the place to be today.

Two Sentence Tuesday: Pulp Edition (30 June 2009)

One of the neatest things I picked up at Apollocon over the weekend was a collection of SF short stories published by Audio Text, AKA Infinivox. They recorded the best SF from 2008 and I listened to the first one this morning, "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" by James Alan Gardner. The story is up for a Hugo and available online.

It's a charming story filled with good characterization and a pretty big sweep, human-wise. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Here's the opening twofer:

This is a story about a ray-gun. The ray-gun will not be explained except to say, "It shoots rays.

So simple. Yet, as the story progresses, there's a lot to this story, just under the surface. But the point is that you don't need to know how the ray gun works. It just does. A common theme I write about it that too often, writers think you want to know how certain things work. Isn't it good enough to know that it does and move on?

For my addition, I'm throwing up a few lines from my steampunk story. At the writer's workshop at Apollocon (discussion of the workshop coming soon at SF Safari where I'm blogging about the panels I attended), I received some good feedback. Patrice Sarath, the leader of my small group of five, liked my story but thought I should have started later in the chapter. For those keeping score, the opening sentences were these from a previous Twofer Tuesday. (If I'm not careful, I'll be submitting the entire chapter before long.) Here's her suggestion as to where the chapter really starts:

In fact, when the murderer had been thrown in his cell, Kionell remembered the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach and the sweat that almost instantly dampened his palms. He had cried out to the guards that he was innocent, that there must be some misunderstanding, that he was in the wrong cell. He even reached between the bars and swiped at the retreating guard’s back. All they had to do, Kionell screamed, was contact his master, Gregg Landingham.

This, of course, brings up other questions (why is Kionell in prison at all being the first one) but I'll fix all that later. One of my fellow reviewers, after reading what Serkis did to Kionell, considered Serkis 'crazy scary.' I smiled at that as I think the same thing.

If you want more Twofer goodness, the Women of Mystery blog is the place to be today.

Two Sentence Tuesday: Pulp Edition

After watching "They Were Expendable" the other night (my review), I'm still in the mood for World War II stories. Thus, I picked up Louis L'amour's Night over the Solomons (1986). I've never read any L'amour so, naturally, I start with a non-western. Go figure.

The title story was published in 1943 and, according to the author's note preceding the tale, had a bit of precognition (or coincidence) to it. The island in the story, Kolombangara, was the perfect place for the Japanese to build an airstrip. L'amour knew it from his time in the Pacific and, evidently, so did the Japanese.

Here's a twofer describing an action scene between the American hero, Mike Thorne, and a Japanese soldier. The "blade" in question is a bayonet at the end of the Japanese soldier's rifle.

"Instantly, Thorne slapped the blade aside with an open hand and moving in, dropped the other over his opponent, at the same time hooking a heel to trip him. With a quick push, he spilled him and snatched the rifle away."

What I like about this passage is the sheer amount of action contained in two sentences, especially the first. We modern writers are told to break out with short sentences to promote the action quicker. Not sure you always need to do that. L'amour does just fine his own way.

My twofer (slightly more, really) involves a supernatural western. In a bit of ironic timing, Chris over at the Louis L'amour Project, posed a question yesterday about 'supernatural westerns.' The timing is ironic since I was already working on one. So far, my two characters are contemplating a large pile of dung.

I indicated the dung pile. "I ain't never seen shit that big. What the hell kinda animal lays turds like that?"

Miller rose and spat. He tossed the wood down on the dung. The flies grew more irritated. Miller didn't care. He reached out and patted his horse on its neck.

"Not animal, Kendrick. Dragon."

We'll see where it goes.

For more twofer goodness, take a trip over to Women of Mystery.

BTW, I guess it's okay that I do these Two Sentence Tuesday posts as I am, not that I'm aware of, a woman.

Two Sentence Tuesday: Fun Edition 2

Okay, so I'm not going to post the steampunk stuff I've posted for the past couple of weeks. I'm back to the fun story, "Lullaby." This is the story of four women, at night, with guns, about to do their job. This passage comes immediately after the last segment.

“Jogger.”

The three women joined Jamie at their strollers, pistols and silencers stowed out of sight. Instantly, they started talking about schools and teachers and principals and the high sugar content in Capri Sun beverages.

The jogger, a middle-aged man with a ring of hair around his head and enough hair on his back for a rug, entered the spotlight of the streetlamp and glanced at the four women. His huffing was ragged and wet.When he saw the women, he changed his posture and puffed out his chest a bit. The effect looked like a gorilla trying to run a marathon.

Again, slightly longer than two sentences but what the hey. Who's keeping score?

I'm still listening to The Lies of Locke Lamora so I can't isolate just two sentences. Might finish by next week so be looking for the review.

For more Two Sentence fun, Women of Mystery is the place to be today.

Two Sentence Tuesday: Fantasy Edition

I've finally started reading a book that's been on TBR pile for a long time: Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora. The jacket blurb describes this book as one part Robin Hood and one part Ocean's Eleven. It was the latter that attracted my attention and led me to read the opening two lines of the novel:

Locke Lamora's rule of thumb was this: a good confidence game took three months to plan, three weeks to rehearse, and three seconds to win or lose the victim's trust forever. This time around, he planned to spend those three seconds getting strangled.

Turns out, there is a prologue that gives some background to Lamora's character. I'm only 50 or so pages into the book and, so far, I'm enjoying it.

My twofer is a blatant breaking of the two sentence rule. But, seeing as this is my blog, I'm not too conflicted about it. These are the opening two paragraphs of my new steampunk/fantasy tale. Part of me thinks these 'graphs sound pretty darn pretentious and the other part agrees with me. But, with Charles Dickens as my inspiration, I'm trying to emulate at least part of his style. Not coming close, I agree, but there it is.

Had he been able to turn away, Kionell Watson would have missed the thin blade of dawn's light as it cut through the bars of the prison cell, illuminating the dust swirling in the breeze. Had he been able to close his eyes, Kionell Watson would not have seen the pigeon light upon the small ledge, squeeze through the bars, and begin pecking at the crumbs scattered along the alcove. Had he be able to cry out, Kionell Watson would have warned the splotched bird to flee, get away, anything to get its attention and scare it away.

He could do nothing but watch as the murderer Serkis, his cellmate, reached out with a hand so fast it was a blur, grabbed the bird's wing, and hurled it across the dank room. The bird's wing snapped, the stones of the cell sucking the sound away as if it never even happened. Out of his field of vision, Kionell Watson listened to the pitiful flutterings of the wounded bird, its feathers sweeping dust on the floor where usually they unfurl with the wind.

Even now, I'm cringing a little, especially on the last line. But, hey, that's part of the life as a writer: write something and edit later.

For more Two Sentence Goodness, head on over to Women of Mystery.

Two Sentence Tuesday: Fun Edition

I just finished reading John Scalzi's Old Man's War (review over at SF Safari tomorrow) so I don't have any SF sentences today. My current book is my first Neil Gaiman novel, The Graveyard Book. I'm particularly fond of opening sentences and how well they hook you into reading more. Here are the opening lines of this YA novel.

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.

The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.

I particularly appreciate how the menace of murder is still there but lessened to an off-screen moment. And the detail of the blade and handle being "wet" gives you all you need to know. That Gaiman himself is the narrator of the audiobook is even better.

As for my two/three sentences, these are from the I-don't-know-what-it-is story I started in last week's Pulp Edition of Two Sentence Tuesday. For some reason, when I looked at those four women affixing silencers on their pistols, four names came to me: White, Snake, Jaime, and Bill. Yes, Bill is a woman's name. I'm working on the origin of that name. I hope it's funny.

Anyway, after the four women put their silencers on their pistols, they realize that one of them is going to have to 'babysit' the infant while the other three do their job against the father. Two of the women, Snake and Bill, are refusing because they have kids at home and they don't want to be stuck babysitting another kid on their 'girls night out.' Here is Snake's reason.

"I'm already paying my own sitter for tonight," Snake said. She shook her head. "Had to call in a favor just to get the little bitch to my house tonight."

"What was the favor?" Bill asked.

"Pay her double."

Again, I'm not sure what kind of story this is or where it's going. But it's fun and I'm going with the flow.

Interesting side note: when I read the four pages I have to my critique group, the guys didn't have a lot to say. The three women, however, all enjoyed it and I got the most (only?) chuckles from them. They all liked it and wanted to know more. Me, too.

For more Two Sentence Fun, head on over to Women of Mystery.

Two Sentence Tuesday: Pulp Edition

I'm currently reading two books, one a grand pulp adventure and one a fantastic SF novel. Since this is a crime/pulp blog, I'm posting one edition of Two Sentence Tuesday here. Head on over to my new SF blog, SF Safari, Two Sentence Tuesday: SF Edition.

James Reasoner's Gabriel Hunt at the Well of Eternity is hands down the most fun I've had with a book in a long, long time, probably since last year's The Dawn Patrol. There are so many twofers I could choose--including a brilliant inside joke that I am *not* going to excerpt here because I don't want to ruin the surprise; you'll know it when you get to it--but I'm going to highlight a couplet that exemplifies the type of humor that spices up this fun work.

His [the guy driving the air boat] moved with assurance on the controls. The airboat wheeled to the left--to port, Gabriel corrected himself; this was a boat, after all--and kept turning until it was headed straight back at the airboat that had been pursuing them.

You'll just have to read the book to find out how--or if--Gabriel makes it out of this dire predicament. And come back here tomorrow for a full review of this fun, fun book.

My crime/pulp sentences today are inspired by a word choice Jay Stringer gave to me as a writing exercise. He said it would be a fun challenge to take a certain word and each of us write a story around it. Kind of like the new Flash Fiction challenge Patti Abbott's started. The word Jay suggested was "lullaby."

"Brilliant," White said as she dropped her binoculars and rubbed her eyes, "We got a baby in there." Without another word, all four women reached into their vests, pulled out silencers, and attached them onto their pistols.

BTW, Jay Stringer's story, The Hard Sell, is the featured story over at Beat to a Pulp. I've read it, folks, and it's a fun story. It had me laughing and entertained all the way through.

For more Two Sentence Tuesday goodies, head on over to Women of Mystery.

Two Sentence Tuesday: 10 March 2009

I'm taking a bit of liberty with today's blog. Instead of posting one passage from my own work and another passage from something I'm reading, I'm going to post two passages from my current to-be-read pile. Why? On the surface, I like them both and I can't choose. Underneath the surface, I don't have anything ready.

Awhile back, on David Cranmer's blog, we all had a discussion about how many books, if more than one, we read at the same time. At present, I have about five I'm working my way through. It just depends on my mood really.

Here are two sentences from Dan Simmons' latest opus, Drood:

The date of Dickens' disaster was 9 June 1865. The locomotive carrying his success, peace of mind, sanity, manuscript, and mistress was--quite literally--heading for a breach in the rails and a terrible fall.

For a book that 771 pages long, the work reads quickly. Wilkie Collins is the narrator and the incident in the above passage really happened. Dickens' train car was the only first class car to survive when his train jumped over a broken span of a bridge. The event changed him and he never completed another book (his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, remained incomplete when he died five years to the day in 1870.) In Simmons' imagination, Dickens, as he tended to the wounded of the train accident, encounters the dreadful visage of a man known only as Drood and becomes obsessesed with finding him. That is the crux of the story and, one hundred pages into it, it's a work of art.

On another plane altogether, I am finally getting around to Theodore Judson's The Martian General's Daughter (2008). I read Lou Anders' blog (what is it with people whose last names end in 's'?) regularly. He's the editor of Pyr Books, a SF/F imprint. I had read a lot of good reviews about Judson's book and wanted to pick it up. What astounded me was it's size. If Drood tells its story in 771 pages, Martian General Daughter does it in 252. I have lamented that there is no SF version of Hard Case Crime, good, quick reads with SF tropes and not all that world building stuff that weighs down a rapid narrative. Judson's book seems to be just that. And I want to know how he did it.

Thus, the opening sentence:

When the word of Pretext's fall came to Peter Black's camp the general was seated beneath a conveyer belt on the Twelfth Level, watching a sales presentation made by the scrap men of Antioch Station. Many hundreds of workmen in small electric carts were parading past General black and his staff officers while they displayed samples of the supposedly uninfected metal they were hoping to sell to the army.

What I appreciate about sentences like these is the broad paintbrush. The sentences evoke something grand and big, big enough, to be sure, to hold 'hundreds of workmen.' And there are enough questions ('scrap men'?; 'uninfected metal'?) to make you want to read more without one of those gotcha opening sentences we are so accustomed to write. The hook is there, but it's subtle. I like that in a book.

I shall report on these books at a later time.

As y'all read this, I'll be on a golf course celebrating my wife's birthday. For more two-sentence fun, head on over to Women of Mystery.

Two Sentence Tuesday: 3 February 2009

I'm reading Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason, a beautiful yet somber murder mystery set in Iceland. The prose in translation in not Dostoevsky nor even Chandler but its evocative of the weather, the gloom, the somber cadence of a main character who seems to be walking under his own personal gray cloud.

However, there is, so far, one laugh-out-loud funny line at the end of one of the chapters. It surprised me and helped me to realize that every story needs a laugh or two, especially one with such dour characters. Sigurdur Oli is the main character's partner and he's trying to question a man in connection with a murder.

At this, Sigurdur Oli redoubled his efforts, arched himself and stood on tiptoe and shouted at the top of his voice at the very moment everything fell completely silent and his words echoes in all their glory around the walls of the gigantic warehouse and out into the yard:
"DID YOU SLEEP WITH HOLERG?"

For my own two sentences, something different. The crime scene in this story involves a statue, here in Houston, memorializing the collaboration of the armies of South Vietnam and the US. Of my two police detectives, one is Vietnamese-American and this is how he verbalizes his distaste at what he sees:

“This monument honors all the brave ones who stayed behind and held off the Viet Cong when there were no more rafts or boats to get people off the beach after the US chickened out. And now it’s desecrated.”

For other Two Sentence Twofers, head on over to Women of Mystery.

Two Sentence Tuesday

Today, I break the rule. Here is a three-fer from a piece I started writing a year or two ago. I’ll probably dust it off sometime this year and work up something. In fact, I’ve already an idea about what to do.

Griffin Lynne is the main character. He’s a black, ex-con, trying to go straight but finding the path not quite straight and much too narrow. Griffin is atop his motorcycle in Houston traffic and has just noticed a preppy guy in a late-model sedan, listening to insipid pop music, with a set of golf clubs in the back of the car. Naturally, Griffin thinks him a prick.

Mr. Golf Guy locked eyes with me and smiled, admiring, apparently, my bike and my gear. I got those kinds of looks all the time from preppy guys who think the mere act of riding a motorcycle—Harleys, usually—made them into some kind of rebel. When the hell did owning a bike make you a rebel?

I’m currently reading Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, one of the most elegant novels I’ve ever read. I’m NOT finished (that’s for anyone out there who reads this and then spills some secret you think I should already know but don’t yet). The story can be boiled down to this: The Canterbury Tales in Space. It’s much more than that, really (I’ll review it when I’m finished). There is subtle grace and magnificent, mind-expanding ideas and realities.

Nonetheless, there is a poet character and he’s an acerbic, profane man. When he’s telling his story, he has these words of wisdom for folks, like me, who consider themselves writers

Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality. And the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

It’s the first time in my life where I actually want to do acid.

For more Two Sentence Tuesday doubles, head on over to Women of Mystery.

Two-Sentence Tuesday: 13 January 2009

I just finished reading Lawrence Block's Killing Castro, the latest installment from Hard Case Crime (review arriving tomorrow or Thursday). I appreciated that in four paragraphs (the last being a single sentence), Block has hooked you. Here is the last sentence from paragraph three and the single-sentence paragraph four:

He had bigger things on his mind than corner loungers or early-bird whores.

He was thirty-four years old, and he was wanted for murder.

For my own entries today, a couplet that just jutted itself in my head this morning as I was commuting to work. Dunno what'll come of it.

With tears in his eyes, the chef reached for the meat cleaver and stared down at the body. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and set to work, doing his best to ignore the man with the gun who watched on impassively.

(Yeah, it's an adverb but this is off the top of my head.)

For more two-sentence goodness, head on over to Women of Mystery.

Two-Sentence Tuesday

Taking a cue from The Women of Mystery and David Cranmer's The Education of a Pulp Writer, I playing along with the fun project.

After the response from my post yesterday about old-school pulp fiction, I started reading my copy of the first Doc Savage story, The Man of Bronze. Boy, I have to tell you, there are quite a few couplets I could have picked. I think these two, from Chapter 1 no less, will do nicely. The "forest" in question consist of the girders from an unfinished skyscraper.

"It was in this forest that Death prowled. Death was a man."

I'll say more when I review the book but I love Kenneth Robeson's use of catchy, action-oriented "Pulp Verbs." Death didn't just hang out, he "Prowled." It really moves the story along quickly, which, of course, was the point.

My own two-fer is from a story I'm aiming to submit to Cranmer's Beat to a Pulp ezine later this month. It's from my first western story.

The man shuffled forward a pace or two, limping, the dust curling around the man’s feet. Carved into the dirt street behind the man, in a sort of Morse code repeating the same feeble refrain, Prescott saw the man’s footsteps—one longer, ragged rut where the man dragged his left foot for every clean boot print of his right—trailing away back across the street.

Can't help but note the irony of this story, a western. It goes like this: I grew up a SF geek so naturally, the first novel I write is a historical mystery. Having fixed on crime fiction as my medium of choice, the first short story I write is a western. Go figure.

If anyone else want to play, contact The Women of Mystery and get your name thrown in the hat.

Two Sentence Tuesday

I discovered a fun little thing going on in the writer blogosphere last week: Two Sentence Tuesday. I first noticed it at David Cranmer's blog but, I think (and forgive if I'm wrong) The Women of Mystery started it.

For my own entry, I'm listing the last two sentences of an essay I wrote for the Houston Chronicle back in 2003 reflecting on the death, in Iraq, of NBC News reporter David Bloom:

But on Sunday, upon learning that I'd never again hear his voice, upon learning that he left his family to go and do something bigger than himself, upon learning of his ultimate sacrifice for his country and his profession, he was Mr. Bloom. That is the nature of heroes.

And my entry written by someone else, here are two from Dennis Lehane's The Given Day:

She kept her hand on the wall and lowered her head and her dark hair fell over her mouth and her teeth were clenched into a grimace tighter than Danny had see on some dead people. She said, "Dio aiutami. Dio aiutami."