Location, Location, Location

This continues the saga of where the action is in Security & Exchange. There were some really good comments on the various circuits that I suggested earlier. Among them, the most significant was making sure that Brenda and Dag are in a position where they can meet. In other words, they either need to live in the same city, or she needs a really good reason to seek him out.

Because it will be the major scene of action, I've decided that either Seattle or Minneapolis should be the hub of activity. These are two cities that I know pretty well. Minneapolis has two advantages: It is an airline hub with <3-hour flight time to anyplace in the US and it is just a few miles north of the Mao Clinic which would be a good place for Dag to have heart evaluation. Seattle's main advantage is that I live there now and can scout out locations, time from one place to another, and exactly visualize the places where action will occur (even though I'll idealize it slightly). Unfortunately Seattle is >3 hours from almost everywhere. I really hate the thought of such a lot of flight time unless I confine everything to the west coast. Still a possibility.

So, next I need to come up with appropriate motivations to get from one city to another. I've got a few ideas jotted down in the synopsis below, but I want to make it more concrete. I might even cut the number of places down and have multiple units of action occur in fewer places. For now, I'll spend some time with maps and flight schedules and see what comes up.

Dag on Security

Well, the working title is Security & Exchange so it seemed appropriate to have Dag comment on some of the issues regarding security and what is its currency of exchange.

"Most security is based on the puffer fish. If you look big and scary, most will leave you alone. To others it's just a challenge."

"The data on your computer is only as secure as the computer is. If I have your computer, I have your data."

"The worst-kept secret in the world is a spy convention."

"Is his bow-tie really a camera? No. It's his cufflinks."

"If you sacrifice freedom for security, you deserve neither. If you sacrifice both, you deserve what you get."

"You are only as free as your willingness to walk away."

"Don't worry about me stealing your identity. From what I've seen, I prefer being me."

"All my life I've played it safe. Safe investments. Safe job. Safe relationships. Then I find out I need a new heart and none of it matters."

"Real security isn't closing your eyes chanting 'I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe.' It's having the courage to open your eyes and look at what's coming."

Ouch. I detect that Dag is making some discoveries that are changing his life since he found out how sick he is.

Dag on Young Women and Older Men

Dag had a lot to say this weekend and I'm still transcribing the hurried notes I made. Here's another installment.

"I try not to date women less than half my age. Unfortunately I usually succeed."

"I don't need a hot twenty-something assuming I'm turned on just because she walked into the room. At my age she needs to at least smile at me."

"Just because you can't cut the mustard doesn't mean you can't lick the pot."

"She packed a size-12 personality into a size-8 dress."

"I'm getting married this fall," she said. "Oh dear," I answered, "does your mommy know?"

"A woman doesn't need to have been around the block a few times to interest me. But she does need a drivers license."

I know there are more notes from the family barbecue this weekend, but there's red sauce sticking the pages of my notebook together. As soon as I pry them apart, I'll let you know what else he had to say.

Dag on Aging and Hair

Please don't confuse me with Dag. These thoughts have nothing to do with the way I'm reacting to graying, balding, sprouting, and generally aging.

"Back when Drew Carey was funny, he said that his pimples and hair had all marched off his head, down his back, and had taken up residence on his ass. Come to think about it, that wasn't all that funny either."

"They've got to find a way to transplant ear-hair to the top of your head."

"Having been fair-haired all my life, turning gray went by almost unnoticed."

"I don't have eyebrows. They've always been so thin and fine that you can't see them. So it's doubly irritating when one suddenly sprouts out long enough to curl around and poke me in the eye."

And so he groused spoke.

Daggisms Again

Here are a few stray thoughts from Dag.

"Mother taught me to always take my hat off when a lady gets on an elevator with me. You never know if you might be standing next to your future wife--or mother-in-law."

"Dad had his share of instructions, too. Always carry a clean handkerchief. Your date may need it."

"Why is it that after living with them for so many years, those are the only two things they said that I remember?"

I'm thinking of some other stuff about Security & Exchange that may help to move some of my character sketches and the general storyline forward. I'll post them later.

Thoughts

I'm trying to map out Dag's travels. I'd like each section to take him to a different city so he's really having to get around. I wrote the initial portion so that he is hanging from a window sill six stories above the Seattle Waterfront at the beginning, which is where the end of the fifth section has to leave him so in the sixth we come current with the beginning and finish out to the end. But does Dag live in Seattle? Or is this simply a place that he has visited during the investigation. I am considering the possible locations as Boston, Washington DC, Miami, Chicago, Phoenix, and Seattle. Some alternatives would be to focus all on one coast with say, Atlanta, Savannah, and Bars Harbor. Or maybe march across the north a bit more and do Boston, Washington, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Seattle. Or I could stick with something a little more western with a loop that went from Las Vegas to Phoenix to San Diego, LA, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle (eliminate one, I think). I'm tending more toward one of the latter two. I want to choose cities with which I'm reasonably familiar. I've mythologized Indiana quite enough, and besides my real knowledge of that state is thirty years past.

I like including Las Vegas, because I'm thinking of including a scene with a detectives' convention there. It's hard to get a detective license in Vegas, though, so I'm thinking that he shouldn't actually live there. Does he begin and end in the same place? I think so. Also, the idea that he's following a trail is good, but I want him to return to his home after nearly every adventure. He has to keep in touch with Maizie and Mrs. Prior, after all.

Well, that's just a bit of musing for now.

Mrs. Gabriela Prior

Pet psychic and landlady, Mrs. Prior is all too happy to watch Maizie when Dag is away. Mrs. Prior hurries about in a caftan with beads around her neck and a kerchief in her hair. She often sits pets, in addition to having a menagerie of her own. Maizie paces outside her door like a penniless man looking through the windows of Old Country Buffet.

Mrs. Prior says Maizie loves all the little animals that she keeps. Dag thinks Maizie would love to eat all the little animals that she keeps. Mrs. Prior gently explains to Maizie that the rabbits are elders and she needs to respect them. Maizie retreats to her bed and lies down, tongue hanging out on the floor in a small puddle of drool.

More Crusty Quotes from Dag

He speaks to me--honest he does. I'll be quietly working at my desk drinking a cup of coffee and the next thing I know I've got coffee dribbling down my chin and onto my tie as I hear him toss off another of his little isms.

"As soon as she opened her mouth I could tell: She was all package and no product."

"Men are notoriously poor planners. They always under-estimate the task or over-estimate their resources. Just look at the floor around any urinal."

"I have five gray suits, 19 white shirts, and one pair of blue jeans. I don't have anything against jeans. If I worked on a farm I'd dress like a farmer."

Well, that's what he said!

Character Map-v1

Here are some quick character sketches of the main players I've got in mind for "Security & Exchange" at the moment. These are all very subject to change as I'm still several months away from the November writing time. Just want to get ideas down as they come to me.

1. Dag Hamilton. A private investigator specializing in accounting and computer tracking. He is the MC and narrator of the story, and you can read several of his comments in other postings below. I won't spend a lot more time on him at the moment.


2. Brenda Barnette. Brenda is the client. She is an attractive fifty-something with a great deal of self-possession and "command presence." For all her active life, she has been emotionally estranged from her husband for years, but really didn't have any other ideas about what to do. When he comes up missing, she finds that a number of negotiable securities are also missing which pisses her off. She doesn't tell Dag about the securities, just that she wants him to find her husband. Her financial condition turns out to be somewhat more tenuous than she lets on. The search for the money is not greed but survival.


3. Simon Barnette. Simon never enters the picture as an actual character, but Dag pieces together a great deal of his life as he investigates his disappearance. It may well be that things in Simon's life trigger memories of Dag's own life as he encounters them. Simon has the opportunity to play a major role in the story without ever actually appearing in it.


4. Angel Woodward. The other woman. Angel is still a bit of a mystery to me, but probably will turn out to be the sweet, sugar-won't-melt-in-my-mouth, villain of the story who if not actually disposing of Simon, certainly absconded with the funds after he died. In order to fit the stereo-types, she needs to be a younger (how much?) woman who is clever (or thinks she is) and proud of her ability to lure Simon away from a "homelife that he was never happy with anyway."


5. Mrs. Gabriella Prior. Mrs. Prior is the pet-psychic landlady who cares for Dag's dog when he is away. She is just a colorful character who often goes on about the various animals she has spoken with during the day. She always watches for Dag to come home, and frequently adds frilly accessories to Maizie's (the dog) attire. This may involve anything from ribbons around her collar to painted toenails. In every instance, it is contrary to the tough image of a pitbull that Dag wanted to convey by having the dog.


6. Maizie. Dag's pet pitbull. The motivation in having the dog was to make an impression on people that he runs a tough, no-holds-barred, investigation agency. But Maizie would be more likely to hide under the bed if someone actually threatened Dag. That would be the only time she was under the bed instead of on top of it. Add to that her obvious enjoyment of being pampered by Mrs. Prior and you get a tough-looking sissy-dog. The key element, however, is that when Dag is working on a case, he talks to Maizie about what is going on. He uses Maizie as his sounding board as he sorts ideas and arrives at conclusions.

It strikes me that all the (living) characters that I've outlined besides Dag are women. In a way, I like that. However, I don't think Angel is going to be adequate to put Dag in all the jeopardy that I've outlined in the synopsis previously posted. So I'm thinking that at each successive step of the story he may be encountering someone else who has an interest in finding Simon, Angel, or the money. There could be a gambling debt with a gangster out to collect, an ex-boyfriend looking to recapture Angel or at least to cash in on her good fortune, and if I can work it out, a charitable foundation that has an eye on funding its work with Simon & Brenda's money (or maybe with Dag's life insurance??). Obviously there are a lot of holes to dig before I find the treasure, but this is a start.

Three strands to braid together

Now that I've dumped a synopsis, I can start really analyzing what I want to say in this book. As I see it, there are three strands that evolve here. (If I think of more than that, you'll see it in the numbers.)

1. The driving mystery. Dag gets a client. Client is missing a husband. Dag chases down leads. Finds husband dead. Client then tells him about the missing money. That's what its really all about. In process of chasing down the money, Dag and Client fall in love. Dag finds the money, but instead of returning it to client, sets up a fund to provide heart transplants for children. (Something client indicated she would do.)


2. Life and death. Dag discovers he needs a heart transplant. Doctors give him little time. He chooses to give his money and potential heart to a child who needs it. The choice is a death sentence. He knows it, but chooses anyway.


3. Life review. As Dag chases down his mystery and confronts his own impending demise, he is drawn further and further back in his memories to expose what kind of person he really is. Did he change somewhere, or was he always the kind of guy who would choose to save a child's life at the cost of his own? Each episode of his memories exposes another layer of his character.

Now I have another thing that I should be considering. In Accidental Witness I developed a character that was incidental to the main storyline, but that constantly provided clues to it. She was a character in the form of Mad Aunt Hattie. She could say anything, and often did. I remember Dr. Pretentious saying "Every story should have a Mad Aunt Hattie." I'm thinking that maybe she is right, at least to a certain degree. So I'm toying with the types of characters that could take the form of Mad Aunt Hattie for "Security & Exchange." An obvious possibility is a secretary that Dag employs in his business to make the appointments and run the office when he is investigating. I like this because it is a cliche of the detective mystery genre. I could do a lot with a secretary who was "mad". Then there is the possibility of a mentor, a police detective, a lawyer, a judge, a father or mother, or even an invalid sibling that he takes care of. The latter two or three would give me a way to expose that soft marshmallowy filling, but it could also become easily maudlin and call into question the altruism of his act. If he dies, who would take care of the aging or invalid?

Maybe Dag should also have a dog. That would certainly complicate matters if he has to be constantly leaving the dog behind while he travels on his detective work. Maybe his landlady is Mad Aunt Hattie and she takes care of his dog. Maybe she also speaks for the dog. "Dagget, Maisie says you aren't eating right." (Maisie just for Diana.) Hmmmm. There's a thought.

Well, just some thoughts to ponder at the moment. No real decisions. I'm just exploring the possibilities.

Section by Section Synopsis

I've decided to create the next book, tentatively "Security & Exchange," in six sections, each of which is has a theme set by a different decade in the MC's life. He works backward through the decades from when he was 55 to when he was in kindergarten, while the story progresses forward. Event's in Dag's life that he remembers from earlier years lead him deeper into the solution of both the mystery he is working on and the solution to his own life mystery.

I've posted below a section by section synopsis of how I think the story is going to progress as I envision it now. I posted it as a different post for each section of the book. If you have time to read through it, I welcome your comments.

Section 1: I was fifty-five when I decided to become an acrobat.

In this section, we open with Dag hanging out a window six stories above the Seattle waterfront with one foot on a telephone wire. We don’t know how he got there, but he proceeds to back up to the beginning and introduce himself as a private investigator. He doesn’t go into how he became a PI, but we gather that he likes the freedom, he is single, and he is pretty happy with his job. He’s not a depressed boozer trying to forget the past. He does more shuffling paper in his investigations than footwork, doesn’t carry a weapon, and is dealing with all the problems of aging into his mid-fifties. He introduces the start of his story with the entrance of his client, in classic detective story prose. Something like:

She walked into my office without knocking, smelling like a spring breeze in a lilac garden. Her maturity and command presence made you forget that we live in a world that idolizes youth and beauty. She was the kind of woman that made you want to stand up straight and say “Yes ma’am.”
“Are you Dag Hamilton?” she asked looking me square in the eye.
“Yes ma’am,” I said, standing behind my desk. I completely forgot to say “Who’s asking?”

So we get the commission from the lady to find her missing husband. She has a box full of clues (to be determined) that lead her to believe he was not completely in his right mind when he left, even possibly under duress. But, of course, the police would think that was the obvious complaint of a woman in denial over her husband leaving her.

We get into the first phase of the investigation and Dag discovers that this isn’t going to be a simple matter of checking flight records. He’s going to have to go into some places at some times that he doesn’t trust. On one such outing, he discovers he’s walked down a blind alley. Realizing his mistake, he starts to retrace his steps but is clobbered over the head and is knocked out. End of Section One.

Section 2: I was enlightened the day after my 40th birthday.

Here we learn that when Dag got out of the army with a tour in Viet Nam, he used his GI bill to go to school and get an accounting degree. He joined a large firm (like AA or maybe H&R Block) and spent the next fifteen years happily filing people’s tax returns. He suddenly realized after his 40th birthday or after 15 years behind the same desk that he could “answer any question to his own satisfaction.” That included the question of what did he want to do with his life. He quit his job and became a PI, specializing in accounting-type investigations.

After all his recollections, we discovered that he has a question that he can’t answer today: “Where am I?” He is confined someplace and has to find his way out of captivity. Doesn’t know who has gotten to him, but he manages to escape. (or they have let him escape—“It was just difficult enough to get away that I could feel proud that I managed it, but had to doubt if it was my own doing.”) He is now on a fresh trail, but his meetings with his client, which she insists on having more frequently than he’s used to, start bringing up feelings that he believes are inappropriate. She, too, seems to be caring for him but denying it.

Dag follows a trail to Chicago and starts prowling around, discovering that his quarry has in his possession negotiable securities that are showing up on the market in Chicago. Just as he comes to this realization, he is grabbed again, tied up, and thrown in the Chicago River. End of Section Two.

Section 3: My mid-life crisis began the day I realized 33 was exactly half-way through my life expectancy.

Of course, Dag has to say that his life expectancy as an accountant should have been much longer since he’d already survived Viet Nam and was in a low-risk business. But today it was looking like he’d over-estimated.

This time, it is a tour boat on the river and the Chicago police that intervene to rescue him. He’s taken to the hospital and resuscitated. But during the exam in the hospital they discover that he has a heart anomaly that he should have looked at when he gets back home. He files the information away to follow up on when he gets back to Seattle without much further thought. The trail he is on now leads him to Minneapolis. Here he discovers some bizaare link to the theatre industry that takes him backstage at a play he finds has been backed by the missing husband.

The play is a murder mystery, and while investigating the play and the investment in it, the husband turns up dead. Now there is a body. He can close the case. The widow/client comes to Minneapolis to claim the body and Dag figures he is about to close the case, but she springs the real news on him. Her husband left with $1.5 million in negotiable bonds. She was not just interested in finding him, but in getting her money back. She wants Dag to continue the investigation.

Dag makes what he believes is an important discovery chasing a suspect up the witch’s hat tower. When he gets to the top, he finds no one there and no trace of the suspect. He is winded, though and his heart is thumping dramatically. He is about to go back down the tower when he realizes he is having a heart-attack and keels over at the top of the tower. End Section 3.

Section 4: I made my first mortgage payment when I was 26 and my last one two months later.

We discover as Dag regains consciousness in a hospital again that he bought a house when he was 26, but it burned down. We discover that he lost his wife in the fire and couldn’t bear to either build or sell. He’s simply held the property and paid the taxes for nearly 30 years.

The hospital Dag is in this time is the Mao Clinic. Someone reported his heart-attack and Aid got there in time to keep him alive. His client found out he was in a local hospital and had him airlifted to Rochester. This is where Dag discovers that he needs a heart transplant. Reasons to come. It’s an expensive process, but the alternative is death. He goes back to Seattle to recover and contemplate liquidating his assets to pay for the transplant. He has huge decisions to make. He now realizes that he’s living on borrowed time and he starts thinking about what he should do with his life and how he is living it. Throughout it all, his client is becoming more and more a companion, though they aren’t “doing” anything. She is working closely with him to put together the clues. They are sharing more and more about themselves.

While Dag is recovering, he catches a news story on the internet (news of the weird or some such) that gives him a big lead on where he should head next. A real break in his investigation. He has also been researching his heart ailment and has discovered a story about the line of children waiting for transplants that are uninsured or can’t be paid for. He starts thinking about selling his property and paying for his own uninsured transplant, but starts thinking more and more about what kind of good he could do in the world now that he knows for sure that any day could be his last one on earth.

Dag is torn by his desire to chuck the investigation into his client’s missing funds so that he can focus on getting healthy and his deepening feelings for her. Somehow he manages to get going, and track down this one last lead.

This one turns out to be “the other woman” that he suspected all along might be behind the husband’s sudden disappearance. When he finally tracks her down, she attempts to seduce him. He resists her advances, but ends up drugged and unconscious. End Section 4.

Section 5: When I was sixteen, I knew I’d never love another girl like I loved Paula.

I’m guessing that Paula was an unrequited love, but loved with the devotion of an adolescent who never approached her.

When Dag wakes up, he’s traveling tied up in the back of a garbage truck on the way to the dump. There must be some symbolism or parallel in that. He will get dumped, manage to escape from his bonds and crawl out of the dump as it is about to be bull-dozed into oblivion. He manages to get to a phone and call his client who comes to get him. It’s when she throws herself into his arms as he is still smelling of garbage that he realizes that he’s in love.

She takes him back to her place to clean him up and have a touching love scene. He tells her that he wants to donate his money to a fund for children needing transplants. She says she’ll throw in the money that is left from her husband if he finds it. This tacit permission figures in in the last chapter. He tells her that he has to get back to Seattle. He knows now who the “other woman” was and needs to track her down.

This scene, of course, will end with him jumping or being thrown out a window which leaves him hanging from a sixth floor ledge over the Seattle waterfront with one foot on a telephone wire. We’ve caught up with the beginning of the story and are ready for the final action. End Section 5.

Section 6: My third year in kindergarten, I discovered magic was real.

Okay, so there are a couple things. Dag has to explain why he was in kindergarten for three years. Then he gets to talk about magic all being about the interpretation of symbols. When he learned magic it was being able to put letters together to make words, and to interpret words written by other people. He applied this logic to numbers as well, so while he is hanging from the window ledge, he sees words reflected in a window across from him. These provide the final key to where the bonds and securities are located. But to get to them he has to survive the fall from the sixth story window. Somehow he’ll make it. Then there is the race to get the dough and foil the thief.

Just as he’s finally telling the client/lover that he has found the money, he has a heart-attack and ends up in a hospital where he has one last opportunity to philosophise to himself about what his life was like. When the client/lover tells him he is in intensive care and that they are hoping for a heart for him, he tells her that there is no money for a transplant. She tells him she’ll use the money he found for her, but he smiles and says she can’t. Then he explains that when he found the money, he combined it with the revenue from his house that he sold and assigned it to a charity to pay for children’s transplants. There is nothing left.

She tells him she’ll sell the rest of her property, she’s not entirely penniless, and he touches her hand and says simply, “Don’t worry. It will be okay.” End Section 6.

The voice in the book changes and she writes that she is following his last wishes to tell people this story, and that on this first anniversary of his death, she is proud to say that four children have new hearts thanks to the donation of a Crusty old detective with a marshmallow heart. End the book.

Jason suggested that maybe Dag is a Figure Skating fan

After reading the entry about my daughter's victory this weekend, Jason suggested that it would be just the kind of unexpected thing from this crusty old detective to find out that he likes to kick back in the evening with a beer and watch figure skating on TV.

"Man, if I knew when I was ten what I know now, I'd have become a figure skater. What a dream place for a healthy boy, no matter which side of the plate he swings from. You've got access to some of the most beautiful girls, and boys, on the planet. And there's no competition!"

"When I get up on a good day, I can stand up straight by the time I get from my bed to the bathroom. Most days it takes till I get to the kitchen. Damn! Age sucks."

"When I finally get into bed at night, after all the prep work, I'm wearing my retainer, an NTI device to keep from clenching my teeth, and a C-PAP mask to keep my apnea at bay. I fall asleep instantly and sleep soundly until the alarm rings. It's a miracle of modern medicine, but it sure puts a dent in your social life."

It's an idea worth considering, and might set up some of the comments about wanting to be an acrobat. I'll put it in the hopper. One of the star's guy friends in "Stick It" turns to his buddy at a gymnastics meet and says, "Man! How did we ever not know about this?!"

"Dag" has taken up residence

He is occupying the spare bedroom in my mind and filling it with Dag-isms. Here are a couple things he's mentioned regarding my 2007 NaNoWriMo, tentatively titled "Security & Exchange".

"I know you want to hear about a hard-boiled detective in this story. But that's not me. I'm more sort of crunchy on the outside with a soft marshmallowy filling."

"I won't deny the right of people to play by a different set of rules. They've got the right to ignore stop signs, traffic lights, and pedestrians in the crosswalk. I just think that they should all have "EXEMPT" tatooed across their foreheads so those of us who are trying to cross the street can watch out for them."

"I have to tell you, when I see a young sexy lady near me, I can't help but imagine what it would feel like to make love to her. Hmmm. Okay. I can't help but imagine what my right hand will feel like when I imagine I'm making love to her."

"I think of myself as being an athletic, fit, good-looking 25- or 30-year-old. So I avoid mirrors. Shaving in the morning is a grim reminder of what used to be."

Who knew he'd be so deep?

The benefits of terminal illness

One of the ideas I'm toying with for my hero, Dag, is the discovery that he is terminally ill. There was a very small news blurb on the radio last night about a 1-year-old child who desperately needs a new heart. She is on the "waiting list." What interested me was the parent's plea that the child's only hope to live is a new heart. Wow! Yeah, I understand. If you've got this ticker that isn't, the only way to survive is to get a new one. But you can't just run down to WalMart and get one in the Heart Department. (I don't think.)

What struck me next was that they are setting up a fund to help pay for it and it had already raised $60,000. Yay!... Untill I heard the next part. The insurance company has agreed to pay $500,000 of the costs, which is ABOUT ONE-THIRD! My nephew just had a kidney transplant from his brother, and my brother-in-law is awaiting a liver transplant that they think may come about in the next year or so. I knew these were expensive, but... Wow! ("That's all he could say."--Lilly and the Purple Purse)

So I got to thinking. If my guy discovered, in the midst of his investigation, that his heart was failing and he needed a new one or he would die, then what? What would happen when he discovered that he needed $1.5 million to pay for it? What if that happened to be the value of the funds that his client is trying to get him to recover? What would he change in his life if he knew that imminently any day could be his last?

As I start to reflect on these questions against the backdrop of this rather tongue-in-cheek detective story, I start thinking that this could be the thing that sets things apart. It might be what I need to really make a storyline. I'm pretty sure, though, that he wouldn't find out he was in that bad of shape until at least half-way through the story.

Now I have an incredible amount of research to do to find out all about heart transplants, what kinds of things happen to you that make you need one, and what your prospects would be if you couldn't afford it. I've painted my detective to be a bit of a loner in my mind, so there wouldn't be that instant outpouring of support from his friends and relatives. He's really facing this alone... or with his client, as it were.

Lots of noodling to do here.

Some possible titles to work with

“Confederate Bonds”
“Securities & Exchange”
“Silver Threads”
“Stocks & Blondes”

Well, you can see these all have something to do with money or securities of some sort. I have the vague notion that the storyline goes that a woman approaches the detective to find her missing husband. The husband turns up dead, but what it really turns out she wanted to find was the valuable property that he took with him when he left. The property is something that is not that common to have but that you could feasibly have enough of to make someone kill you for them, blackmail them out of you, or just plain steal them. Also something that you might keep in a personal safe at home (if you were wealthy) rather than trust a bank or broker with.

I have a vague notion that the MC’s name might be Dagget Hamilton, ostensibly named after UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. Dag wasn’t elected to the UN position until 1953, though, so maybe I just shove my obsession with historical detail accuracy into a dark corner and use it anyway, or maybe not. I have to figure out if there are any other connotations to the name Daggett. We’ll see.

The six lines

Okay, I like the concept above so of course I’m going to work on the main things first. No, not the plot—that will come later. What are the six key statements that I want to use that will be the events he hangs his story around? Here’s my first cut at them.

1. I was fifty-five when I decided I wanted to be an acrobat.


2. I learned the meaning of life the day after my fortieth birthday.


3. My midlife crisis started the day I realized that 33 was halfway through my life expectancy.


4. I made my first mortgage payment when I was 26 and my last one two months later.


5. When I was sixteen I knew I would never love another girl like I loved Paula.


6. My third year in kindergarten I discovered the alphabet was more than a string of meaningless symbols.

These may change when I actually have a story to go with them, but it is a start. At this rate I figure I’ll have the entire structure of the story finished before I figure out what the plot is. And, in case you were wondering, these have very little to do with my actual life story. So don’t go reading any autobiographical hoohaa into it. It’s fiction, remember?

Maybe a detective story???

With NaNoWriMo just five months away, I'm already figeting about what to write. I'm thinking maybe I could try a detective story, sprinkled liberally with slightly absurd humor. I'm not sure what the crime is, but basically we work backwards through the detective's life of oddball experiences as he finds himself in various precarious predicaments. Ultimately, it's something he learned in kindergarten or some such that enables him to crack the case. I don't have a title for this yet. In fact, what I have is a first line that I thought of a while back and which came back to me after I watched Cirque du Soleil's Varekai show last Friday. So here's the first line:

"I was fifty-five when I decided I wanted to be an acrobat." In each decade there will be another opening sentence as we work backward through his life to the time when he was four. So, in six parts, and in six situations that remind him of a particular event in his life, he unravels more and more of the mystery. I'm trying to come up with the life events that he remembers, get him a name, a series of dangerous situations that spark the memory, and, of course, a mystery for him to solve. Then I'll have to decide on a setting for the story. I've worked in Indiana for my past two NaNoWriMo novels because that is where my memories are strongest. But maybe I'll branch out and create a story in a different city, or maybe he travels to six different locations as he's reliving his past experiences. Hmmm.

I like this for a concept. Now I just have to get a storyline.