the carafe before brewing a full measure. My countertop was awash in overflowing coffee — again.
CHAPTER FOUR
At the end of the day, Twitchell and I tried to exit the same door at the same time, creating a human logjam. His elbow jab in my ribs broke us loose and he raced to his car ahead of me.
I didn’t get mad. I left him in the parking lot blinded by a thick cloud of blue exhaust and was soon speeding home by way of the Burger Roundup. That was only because their line was shorter than my first choice, Budget Burgers, and I was in a hurry. I’d finished the fries by the time I pulled in my driveway and was peeling paper from the straw clenched in my teeth as I unlocked the front door.
My computer was set to receive mail while I was away. I had mail.
"Wow, MI.” GQ wrote, “I knew you could write, but I’m impressed. What a fun tale! Imagine a whole story about a broken shoelace! I’ll meet you online at six.”
She logged off with her usual smiley face symbol.
I logged on first, but didn’t have to wait long.
She skipped the howdies and wrote, “Good job!”
“Thanks GQ. That was so much fun I can’t wait to try another one. Made a plot machine for you if you’d like.”
“Do I? This exercise has my creative juices flowing. Gimme. I’ll take number two from column A. Give me one, five and eight from Cast of Characters. And how about six for topic, one for time, three for location and five for dessert?”
“Now I’m embarrassed! I put some silly items on the lists just for fun and you picked every one of them!”
That ought to teach me to give in to my juvenile impulses. Ha! Maybe not.
“Are you ready for this? Your story is a romance. Your characters are a truck driver, a short order waitress, and a two-headed puppy. Your topic is a blizzard, 2,000 years in the past, at the North Pole! And the complication is an interfering boss. Do you want to choose again?”
“You kidding? I accept your challenge. A two-headed puppy! Man, you are eviiiiil! I love it! Give me a little time. Yakatchalater. Bye. ;-)”
Briefly puzzled by that strange word, I finally understood that we’d talk later. As tempting as it was to try my hand at that story myself, I needed to get my mind out of the gutter and go back to work on my book instead.
Soon stories seemed to write themselves. I hated going to work, begrudging the time spent away from my precious computer. Narratives percolated in my head and I asked my characters for their honest reactions.
I created email accounts and sent questions or story ideas to them. Then I answered me as the character. It sounds crazy, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.
For example: Worse than angry, Jess was homicidal after learning of his daughter’s marriage to his enemy. He had some shocking ideas. And in another story Francesca confessed that she’d rather be in lust than in love with the new man in her life. I hadn’t really thought of her that way, but it spiced up the story.
My mind automatically raced straight to cliché and would have stuck there without input from my characters. Internet role playing; who’d’a thunk?
Genuinely helpful, GQ never laughed at my enthusiasm and we became good friends over the next two years. She even tried to persuade me to try my hand at writing magazine articles to help supplement my meager income until I sold a book.
Journalists don’t earn much, not unless they’re famous, anyway, but I should talk. All a journalist had to do was publish one article to be way ahead of me in the game.
My novel was getting rave rejections from all the best publishers who accept unagented material. I knew I needed an agent, but so far none had shown any interest in representing me. I finally decided that my problem was that I wimped out when it came to killing my victim. I needed to be more ruthless, make him suffer. And I’d read somewhere that it should be someone the reader knows and possibly even likes.
“Say, MI-- Been thinking.” GQ wrote to me one evening as we gabbed about nothing in particular.
“We’ve shared story ideas and written some great ones together over the past year. What do you say we try to publish our plot machine stories? I saved all of them. (Didn’t you? ;-) Most of them are really good. I think we should try to make a buck on ‘em.”
I felt like my brain was going to explode. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“I’ve sold magazine and newspaper articles,” GQ continued, “so I’ll talk to people I know, see if anyone can suggest an agent. That is, if it’s okay with you. We could sell them in a series or maybe as a collection. What do you think? Shall we sell a book?”
Silly question! I’m aching to get published and she wants to know if I’m interested? All I could say was, “Who, What, Where, When, How and YESSS!”
In the following weeks, she managed to find someone who knew somebody, who might introduce us to the right people to get the stories published. It was sure to be a bestseller — if we ever connected with half the people who knew people.
GQ was charming and I savored our time spent on the ‘Net. We laughed at the same things and while adhering strictly to our no personal information rule, I felt I was getting to know her. We’d relaxed our rule enough to share a little about our respective projects.
My rewrite had some twists I was almost ready to try on a friendly audience and GQ had some concerns about a story she was investigating.
While I agonized over my struggle to build a believable villain, she understood. I was surprised when she confided that her story was so big 20/20 was interested. Then she suddenly regretted having told me that much, which if you must know, was exactly nothing.
She joked when I tried to make her promise to be careful, so I believed she might be worried, too.
I had the vague impression that money, a lot of money, was involved but that was only a guess. When I asked for an explanation, she changed the subject.
“My Internet bank account is all screwed up,” she complained. “They say that I have to give the bank access to my computer to see where my mistake is. I sure can’t find it.”
I wouldn’t have done that, but she insisted she’d installed the best and most expensive firewalls intended to keep intruders from hacking into her personal files.
“How can the bank get access to your computer?”
“I had to give the woman in charge of Internet banking my password, but she assured me that as soon as she was finished solving my problem that she’d forget she ever knew it. Plus, I plan to change my password the minute it’s fixed.”
I didn’t know enough about computers to argue.
~~~
GQ was sensitive, creative, had a great sense of humor, and was an endless source of motivation. She had answers to most of my questions.
