Murder, She Wrote, Travis Bickle, and eBay
by Darrell Winfree

Life couldn’t have been greater better for Tommy James Simon.

I stare at the opening sentence of my novel, hoping it will burst into flames and fade away. It sucks, but it’s the best I can do. Now, why could life not have been better for Simon?

His football team had just been victorious won the big game state championship.

Excellent. I know I would be happy if my team won the state championship. But that’s not enough; life could be better if the only good thing that had happened to him was that he had won the big game. And, in Simon’s case, life could not be better. I’ll give him something else to be happy about.

He had even passed gotten an A on an Algebra English paper that he had been dreading wallowing in self-misery over.

I crumple the piece of paper and throw it in the small trashcan near my desk just like the other twenty-odd pieces with half-written stories on them. If I could collect all my incomplete works of fiction, combine them, and call them The Best of Winfree, I’m sure at least one hundred would end up being sold to the morbidly curious, compulsive shoppers, and the elderly. This last attempt, I can see, is going nowhere. I turn to another blank sheet of paper out of my notebook and start to think. My notebook is full of disjointed paragraphs that slowly formulate into long, tedious tales of intergalactic wars and slow-motion shootouts written in various colors of gel pen. They take the tone of the diary of a high school student, only my stories have less swearing and violence. Someone alien to my writing style would say this is probably the way Mein Kampf was written. They would most likely be right, too; except I don’t believe Hitler had access to as many pens as I do.

I used to read my own work. I also used to let people read my work themselves. However, I stopped these practices when the things I wrote graduated from ‘My Summer Vacation’ and ‘What I Like Best About Kindergarten’. At least I had good handwriting back then. Now, every once in a blue moon when I do read my work, I catch myself saying things like "Either he was shot in the head by a deranged criminal from Minneapolis or flew to San Diego to meet her and lived happily ever after, I can’t tell. My ‘U’s look to much like ‘A’s." May God pity any wayward soul who agrees to read it. I would probably be charged with crimes against humanity if I attempted to damage the sanity of some hapless bystander who reads my work.

The obvious solution would be to use a word processing program. However, using so much gel pen tends to make the words swirl together like a twisted Impressionist painting, especially if I leave my notebook outside and it gets wet. I usually end up hitting several keys at once anyway, which either deletes the page, crashes the computer, creates a doomsday computer virus that goes back in time and kills off the Passenger Pigeon, or adds several pieces of clip art onto each other until they blend into something that looks like the Virgin Mary if you hang upside down from a tree branch to look at it. These kinds of pictures have become simple platitudes on eBay, so I have no use for it.

All that aside, you can’t even get a writing project off the ground without a plot. Since most of my stories start with ‘The war that had raged on for _____ years felt like it would never end’, ‘In a time where chaos reigned supreme’, or ‘They killed his family, kidnapped his best friend, and nearly beat his dog to death. Now he’s out for revenge’, It will have to be a slow book year before I’m published. It’s bad enough that I have a deficiency of good stories in my brain, but if I do get a good one, I’m liable to carry it on through two or three dozen books. The story stretches on into spin-offs and back-stories for the main characters until I’m sure whoever is reading my wok is actively cheering for the villain to kill the protagonist(s), and then be killed themselves in an ambiguous manner so that the villain themselves can’t star in a spin-off.

Speaking of protagonists, I can’t ever get a good one. Mine usually evolve into mash-ups of Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Robert de Niro’s Travis Bickle in the movie Taxi Driver. This goes for any type of character, too. My protagonist could be an Irish monk, and he would still carry at least three guns, swear like a sailor, and drive an Aston Martin V12 Vanquish. The same goes for my villains, who all seem like Darth Vader was combined with Osama Bin Laden and some sort of hybrid Alan Rickman character.

Setting is not only also a problem for me, but for every writer who tries to write something that relies heavily on the location it occurs in when the writer does not live or has not lived in that location for sometime. If a story takes place in Boston, where I have never lived, it is difficult for me to name specific streets where action must take place. Wikipedia has lots of articles on it, but I don’t think they have one entitled ‘Complete List of Streets In Boston’. I usually end up cheating by just saying that the story occurs in the ‘present day’ and ‘in an average American city’. This is a technique used by B-grade film producers that make terrible sci-fi horror movies that are forced to compete with infomercials and reruns of ‘Murder, She Wrote’ in the midnight – 4 A.M. range on various cable channels. I know that when Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood he actually went to Holcomb, did interviews, investigated, and whatnot. I would write like that too, but I don’t have that kind of time on my hands.

I look at my piece of paper again, smile, and pick up my pen. I don’t care if it’s

bad, it’s my writing, and it’s who I am. It tells the world, "I am man! I live and I think! I

have interesting things to say, and therefore should be listened to!" I don’t care if it runs

through thirty-eight books, or if the villain sounds like he would much rather be watching CNBC then trying to take over the world, or that I don’t know the exact location of the city where it takes place. I say it’s good, so it’s good! (It’s a little known fact that Mark Twain had this exact conversation with his publisher before he wrote 1984.)

Present Time Day

Lesotho, South Africa

It had been a long time one hundred years since the war that had almost nearly doomed humanity. The small band of mercenaries soldiers freedom fighters traveled through the jungle desert in a jeep truck, carrying M-16s AK-47s. Suddenly, a roadside bomb I.E.D. C-4 charge exploded near the truck.

I can see a Pulitzer Prize sticker on the jacket cover already.