I'm not writing today. I've spent the day watching the NFL draft either from Reliant Stadium or from home. Back to my literary pursuits tomorrow.

This entry is more of a placeholder for my own future purposes. Not like anyone is running to his computer on a Saturday looking for my frag updates. But if you are here looking, this entry is for you, too.

I completely enjoyed the movie Drumline that came out a few years ago. It used a college show-style marching band for the underdog/fish-out-of-water-turned-hero metaphor that we love so much. In one scene, the band was on the football field at halftime for its performance. Devin, the film's fish out of water, swaggered and bragged his way into an unplanned drumline solo, and the crowd went wild, loving it. But afterwards, the band director angrily confronts Devin and Sean (who was originally supposed to perform the solo) and asks: "What was that? What did we rehearse? Why do we rehearse?"

I could see the kids' points: Hey, it worked out. The crowd loved it. What's the problem?

But I could also see Orlando Jones' point: What's the point of rehearsing and planning if you're just gonna do whatever you decide to do while you're out there fucking up my shit?

Discipline. That was the teaching moment in that scene.

Which brings me to my next question. Why do I plan and outline these characters when, once they hit paper, they start doing their own thing? Orlando Jones: "What was that? What did we outline? Why do we have color-coded notecards?"

They are not out of control. I still know who they are and where they are trying to go. But the backstories keep changing for feasibility reasons.

Stillwater can't be around sixteen unless the cool cat place is located in a place where 16-year-olds don't need legal guardians. Did he get himself legally emancipated? If not, why hasn't the state become interested in his movements and his work status?

Parker can't be in her thirties because, originally, she came to meet Stillwater after being forced to leave her aunt and uncle's house. Why is this 30-something woman still living at home? I'd have to give her some sort of financial crisis or mental illness or other impediment/impairment and I don't want to do that.

But I may have to, now that I think about it. Without going all melodramatic this morning, don't we all own some sort of impediment or impairment? I've got several of them on this day alone. If I keep fluctuating their ages or their histories just to make the story easier to swallow, I'll end up with a very boring 27.5 pages.

Back to work. Well, back to my notes, anyway. Thanks for listening.

This is like imposing a deadline on myself. As long as I know this space is here waiting for me, I have to post something everyday and that makes me work work work on the story. I don't really want to post something like: "I'm trying, but nothing is coming out." Which is what I started to do many times today. My two readers and 1000 spambots might get tired of posts like that very quickly. Written on two bags of Cheez-It, here is the latest fragment.

That last sentence would drive my 12th grade English teacher crazy. She was great and I loved her. Of course, I didn't write today's frag directly onto two bags of Cheez-It. Two bags of Cheez-It was my fuel, my food, my calorie source that supplied the energy while I was writing today's frag. High school English teachers are our friends.

I learned something interesting today. While using the word "linchpin", I kept wanting to spell it "lynchpin". But lynchpin sounds like something the KKK hands out at some kind of milestone ceremony, so I figured linchpin must be the right spelling. But, of course, since I'm anal that way, I double-checked the spelling. And guess what: you can spell it either way. Just like judgment and judgement.

For obvious reasons, I'm sticking with linchpin.

Days are months and I am spending more time alone in the shop, a place for odd pairings. It is organized only for those who know what they need in the moment they need it, but for those who wander in to look around curiously, the place is a nightmare. And that’s when my day excites me. On the shelves, in a bin, under useless crap is the exact thing that a person has been missing, causing his life to stall or falter or fall, and it’s my job to help him find it. It’s a common object, clandestine in its real purpose: a screwdriver, a pen, ceramic mug or wire whisk. It’s the object that moves with a person from house to house, childhood to adulthood, that rattles in the kitchen cabinet, toolbox, or junk drawer, always present before or after a purge. We all have one, this linchpin that holds it all together, and once it’s lost, our lives trip end over end until it’s found.

In Ellery’s shop, the girl who was caught in a whopper of a lie by her mother and, seemingly unrelated to the lie, is known soon after as the redhead who hands out on demand orgasmic jobs to the high school football team when it was really just that one stupid boy that one stupid time comes in looking for her peso that is no longer rolling around in her desk drawer at home. She and I find it under a stack of early Hustler relatively quickly.

The father who has yet to learn the difference between being a bad parent and accusations by his three fucked up children of being a bad parent wanders into the shop having no idea why he’s there. His linchpin, which I know to be a silver button off a long ago jacket that belonged to his mother, is safely at home in a box on his top closet shelf. He is kind of shuffling down each aisle, confused about why the motor oil is next to the pain relievers, rebuffing my offers of help with a very sad just looking, thanks. He pauses briefly at the stack of Hustler magazines, I hold in a giggle, he walks out empty-handed. He didn’t need to be in here anyway.

I know it gets confusing trying to keep up with the developing story as the frags are deposited in separate posts. So, occasionally, I'll gather the frags into one post so the story can be read from the beginning to where I've written so far.

What I've got so far...maybe more tomorrow.

Walking away, behind me my mother standing in the doorway in her unwashed housedress, hair sticking out in all kinds of crazy directionless ways, screaming something, screams being nothing to her but usual, but I admit something was different about this scream, maybe she was screaming for me to come back. Not, this time, maybe, screaming motherfucker. Not, this time, maybe, screaming lazy motherfucker. Didn’t sound exactly like stupid lazy motherfucker, could have been a plea. For me. Her son. To come back because today was, you know, one of those brand new days you sometimes read about. Different I’m sorry I promise I love you won’t you please come back. For a second, I adjusted my backpack and, carefully, my considerations. Stopped to capture the rhythm in her hysteria…ah, there it was…I was still a motherfucker. But I was a motherfucker who was now walking fast away from this shit and that alone makes me better than most motherfuckers you know.

Found a bit of a pad somewhere, not not close, not not far. Not sure how I pay for it, if I pay for it. Cool cat with lightning white hair we call gramps works the front desk and takes money from a few people. Mostly, he gives ‘em friendly shit of the workin’ hard/hardly workin’ variety. I like my room, nothing in it but me and a bed. Shower and head up the hall and I’ve counted five dudes walking in and out. No phone around the place. And this won-der-ful woman I feel obligated to call Mom and she has yet to call me motherfucker cooks us breakfast every morning, no fail. Eggs, toast, bacon, oatmeal, Frosted Flakes, and pancakes if we ask. We are on our own for lunch and dinner, but that breakfast can and does hold me all day sometimes.

Cool cat we call gramps tells me about a place maybe I can get a quick gig doing a few odd things, pick up a few bucks here and there. Am I out of work? I ask him this, hoping he knows ‘cuz I don’t. He laughs and slides me a small white card with an address written on it in tiny neat print. I bet it’s Mom’s writing. Guess I’ve eaten one too many pancake without some sort of monetary compensation. Not wanting to get on the bad side of anyone associated with this good place, I accept the card and head on out to find whatever it is I’m looking for.

Two blocks up, three blocks over, I get it, I’m there. New cool cat waiting for me and I like him already. I feel where he’s been, I’m at where he’s at, and I know where he’s trying to go. I tell him nothing of this as I introduce myself. I love how he says my name: STILL water. The Still intoned as nothing but, you know, very un-still as the word rises as an uphill stream. STILLwater Crowe, he says, and I am home.

I do my odds for him: sweeping floors, greeting customers, twirling a mop on such needed occasions. After about a minute, I figure out I’m not the most necessary employee hired in world history. Most of what I do, Ellery probably did himself before I got here or it just as well didn’t get done. Grateful, I work hard and fast, taking a break only when Ellery claims I’m about to give him a heart attack, I’m working so much.

I ask Ellery how he knows cool cat gramps. I ask, but I know. I know this the same way I know everything about certain people I meet. Their lives fold out in front of me a page at a time. I knew next to nothing about my mother even though, after sixteen years, we’d been together for over half her life. I knew nothing of my father since, I guess, his life choices weren’t about meeting me twice. As I sweep, I close my eyes and listen to Ellery and his smoker’s rasp tell the story that began fifty years before I was born when Ellery and cool cat gramps were young boys.

By accident, my laughter at one part of the story sounds too much like I’m very familiar with it, and I catch myself. Ellery barely notices, though, and keeps talking, dismissing my yeah, I know exactly what happens next with his own but you’re too young to know anything about that, aintcha, boy? No point explaining, I’ve learned, that our experiences are universal and I may not have been with him on that particular street corner on that particular day, but, shit, we’ve all had best friends fuck us over. My universe speech gets lost, anyway, in the overall possibility that I just might have been there with him that day almost seventy years ago. Because how I know all this shit about these people, I haven’t quite figured out, yet. I was out of school more than I was in school at some point and maybe metaphysics was covered on one of the days I was out getting my ass kicked by my 103-pound mama.

Ellery asks about my mother and for one hot flashing second, I think he’s asking about my pancakes Mom over at the cool cat place, but then I get it he’s asking about that mother. I give some shitty answer that makes him temporarily defensive and I apologize, but she is no longer the focus, so it’s good.

Days are months and I am spending more time alone in the shop, a place for odd pairings. It is organized only for those who know what they need in the moment they need it. For those who wander in to look around curiously, the place is a nightmare and that’s when my day excites me.

Originally, I thought Stillwater would "know" the lives and events of each person he met or even passed on the street, but that's too great of a burden for his character. So his gift has been downgraded, so to speak. He'll know the lives of only certain people and those people may be random. I'm not sure yet if there is a common thread sewing together each of those people. I do know this, though: in the beginning, he won't know anything about Parker Gale except what she tells him. They have to begin their journey with each of them being as open to the experience as the other.

Stillwater is also now much younger than I originally thought. Right around sixteen instead of the early thirties I had in mind at first. So far, I'll leave Parker in her thirties, but still allow Stillwater to act as a type of guardian. The two people they meet along the journey, Freddie Mercury and Tim Woodman, have their own agenda and reasons for joining the trip. Not necessarily nefarious reasons, but Stillwater needs to be aware of their motives even if he doesn't right away reveal them to Parker.

Just taking notes here. I'm not this far along in the narrative yet. This is a good place for notes and outlines, so bear with me as I throw everything into the cyberpot: notes over here, outlines over there, more than a few random thoughts tossed in with the narrative. It'll all come together eventually.

I am the queen of complete reversal. Forget my plan of drafting in my journal. I discovered it's easier to just type directly into Word, blue screens of death be damned. So it looks like this space will be the only permanent record of the drafts and edits of the piece, and I guess that's okay, just something else for me to get used to.

Back in the day, it was impossible for me to write in the middle of distraction. I had to be in a room by myself, no phone, no TV, no uninvited visitors. Background music was fine, but it had to be instrumental European classical, no words. What a difference a decade makes. It is now not a problem to write with email popping up, answering the email, visitors stopping by. And the background music: Morcheeba featuring Kool Mo Dee on one song, Slick Rick on another. Kool Mo Dee is my partner in subtle change, it seems, since he took the time to alter the spelling of his name from Kool Moe Dee for whatever reason. Maybe he was trying to fit the whole name on his license plate or something. One letter can and does make the difference sometimes.

But, anyway, here's to a first draft continuation...

I ask Ellery how he knows cool cat Gramps. I ask, but I know. I know this the same way I know everything about certain people I meet. Their lives fold out in front of me a page at a time. I knew next to nothing about my mother even though, after sixteen years, we’d been together for over half her life. I knew nothing of my father since, I guess, his life choices weren’t about meeting me twice. As I sweep, I close my eyes and listen to Ellery and his smoker’s rasp tell the story that began fifty years before I was born when Ellery and cool cat Gramps were young boys.

By accident, my laughter at one part of the story sounds too much like I’m very familiar with it, and I catch myself. Ellery barely notices, though, and keeps talking, dismissing my yeah, I know exactly what happens next with his own but you’re too young to know anything about that, aintcha, boy? No point explaining, I’ve learned, that our experiences are universal and I may not have been with him on that particular street corner on that particular day, but, shit, we’ve all had best friends fuck us over. My universe speech gets lost, anyway, in the overall possibility that I just might have been there with him that day almost seventy years ago. Because how I know all this shit about these people, I haven’t quite figured out, yet. I was out of school more than I was in school at some point and maybe metaphysics was covered on one of the days I was out getting my ass kicked by my 103-pound mama.

The only things missing from the photo of my workstation are a bottle of vodka and a box of Crunch n'Munch. The vodka was in the freezer, unavailable for the shoot. I'm out of Crunch n' Munch, but that's only for very late night writing, anyway. Mike's Hard Lemonade is for morning/afternoon writing. The workstation is in my kitchen and my chair is eighteen inches from the refrigerator. I don't have to get up to open the refrigerator door, so I don't. It's a beautiful arrangement.

I've promised myself that I won't introduce another character until I have around three more pages of Stillwater. I'll still write the first drafts in my journal. I'm digitally gun shy after losing so many stories to the blue screen of death. I'll write the drafts then post them. That's the plan so far.

I know, I know...just do it, right? But getting started is half the battle. Can I get an amen from someone who understands that?

Amen.