Hello, my incredible Gidsciples! I realize it’s been a while since I slapped a post up here for your fawning adoration, but I’m going to do something a little different this time around. Is it genius? Probably.
Quick update for everyone: I attended the La Jolla Writer’s Conference in San Diego last weekend, and it was fantastic. I’ll be doing a slightly more in-depth post about that soon, but for now, I’m way overdue for an update, and I realize it would behoove me to do two things:
1.) Start posting samples of my writing on the blog, beyond my regular blog posts. My blogging voice is quite different from the voice of my typical writing style, and I think I should have a little more of my writing samples here for people to peruse.
2.) Use the words “behoove,” and “peruse” more often. Those are some pretty, fancy, snooty-sounding words right there.
Anyway, getting back to the “different thing” I’m going to do here, let me give you a little backstory. At the conference, I met Heather Graham, a very successful writer who wrote so many books it makes my head spin. She was such a nice person, and at one point, she ran a workshop that did a particularly fun writing exercise.
Once I realized who was running the workshop, I fled the class I was originally planning on sitting in, while quickly sputtering apologies and half-truths about ‘being in the wrong place.’ Don’t judge me; it was a blur of last-second decision-making.
Author’s Note: Last-second decision-making is what made me the fantastic man I am today. If it weren’t for last-second decision-making, I wouldn’t own a golden lucky cat statue, own a VCR I paid $20 for, or know how it feels to get dragged behind a four-wheeler in the dead of snowy winter by a rope tied around my ankle. Good times.
So, after sprinting to the other end of the conference hall, I sat down just in time to hear the instructions for the writing exercise: Nouns and adjectives were put into two cups, and passed around the room. We were to draw three nouns, and three adjectives, and pair them up. Each noun had to be attached side-by-side to a drawn adjective, and all of them had to be used in our work. We had one hour to write whatever we wanted, but everyone’s work had to start with the same sentence:
“The blood dripped slowly down the wall.”
The words I drew from the cups were:
-Professor
-Wedding Singer
-Medical Examiner
-Beautiful
-Grumpy
-Crotchety
I did what I could with what I had, and after I read it, Heather Graham said that I had to keep doing something with this, which I took as high praise. So, without further ado, (…Unless you guys prefer ado? You know what— I’m not going to risk it. No further ado. It’s decided.) Here is the short sampling I came up with. I hope you enjoy it. If not, there are no refunds; please stop asking.
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The blood dripped slowly down the wall. For a time, it was the only movement in the dark, spacious dining hall of the abandoned hotel. The twenty or more faded wooden tables in the room still had old, mildewed tableclothes on them, as if struggling to give the room an air of class; fighting the reality that the hotel been dead for nearly half a century.
The air in the room hung thick and musty, which made breathing unpleasant; but since he was one of the only two people in the room who were still breathing, Nick took it in stride as best he could. His friend Maggie, on the other hand, seemed to be using most of the air for a borderline fit of hyperventilation; caused by the blood-soaked corpse in the tweed suit laying on the floor right in front of them. The dead man’s crimson-stained suit jacket had easily a dozen small holes peppering the man’s back, to the point that he nearly resembled a cheese grater.
Nick tried to examine the corpse further, but the only sources of light in the room were the flashlight function of Nick’s cell phone, and the surprisingly bright streaks of moonlight forcing their way between the boards nailed over the large arched windows. As he eyed the body, he found himself distracted by the noisy, rapid inhale and exhale of Maggie’s breath. “Will you calm down?” he said. “It’s just a dirty old room, and this guy is very, very dead—you’re perfectly safe. Stop being such a baby, Mags.”
“Some of us aren’t jaded by looking at dead people all day long for a living,” she said. “You’re used to this horrific stuff. I tear tickets at a movie theater. Not a lot of dead bodies there, okay? Now, if the day comes when you’re terrified of a bucket of popcorn, then maybe I’ll have a more level head than yours, but for now, THAT is a dead guy, and the walls are dripping with blood!”
Nick conceded the point with a nod. Maggie was absolutely right; despite being a younger man in his early twenties, Nick’s career had already shaped him into a fairly grumpy medical examiner. He hated the idea that he was examining a corpse on his vacation, and doubly hated that he was doing it in a place as far removed from a decent lab as possible.
“I really need a morgue,” he said as he hunched over the body. “I have no tools, I have no decent light… this is ridiculous.”
Maggie hunched beside him. “…Also, in case I didn’t mention it before, the walls are dripping with blood,” she said.
“Yeah, about that…” Nick said, suddenly curious about the walls. “This guy’s been dead for a while…” He swept his light around the room, at the creeping trails of blood. “…This blood is way too fresh to be from our victim here. Plus…” he shined the light up toward the ceiling. “…I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.”
“Do we need to know that?” Maggie asked, scooching closer to Nick.
“Maybe,” Nick said. He handed the light to Maggie. “Hold this, and shine it down here while I roll him over.”
“Ew! What for?” Maggie asked.
“I need to know more about this body,” Nick said. “Do these holes go all the way through, does he still have a face; you know—stuff like that.”
“Does he still have a face?!” Maggie asked. “Is ‘missing face’ a possibility?”
“I won’t know until I check,” Nick said, as he slowly, carefully rolled the body onto its back.
As soon as his face could be seen, Maggie gasped. “That’s my psychology teacher!” she said. “He was always a crotchety professor, but I can’t imagine anyone would deliberately do this to him!”
As soon as she finished speaking, the room suddenly lit up. The lamps weren’t coming on, but the dead bulbs glowed with an etherial aura of light. Nick and Maggie jumped to their feet as spectral people began to appear, sitting at the tables, one by one. In seconds, the room was filled with ghosts and spectres, attending a wedding that looked like it happened long ago. A ghostly bride and groom danced together as a beautiful wedding singer in a cocktail dress crooned “It Had To Be You,” with an echoing chill to her voice. She clutched the microphone in her hands, along with an ice pick from a nearby champagne bucket.
“…Aaaaaand, we’re leaving,” Nick said. “Right now.”
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And that, ladies, gentlemen, and every other gender in the rainbow, is a little look into the sort of writing I typically do, when I’m working on actual stories instead of amusing blog posts about my brain and advice.
The convention was definitely an energizing experience, and I intend to attend more of them from now on; not only to push my own career, but to expand creatively, and meet more of my peers.
At this point, I think I’m going to leave this here, and work on the next post. I’ve fallen a little behind this month, and I’ve definitely got a lot more work ahead of me. Until then, I remain your ever-amazing, High-Brow Book Scientist, Gideon U. Eklund.
Nick and Maggie are just a couple of crazy kids getting into crazy trouble. Like the Riverdale gang, if Riverdale had more ghosts and slightly less ice pick murders.