Potpourri

            The winter solstice.

            Despite my dislike of the cold, winter is my favorite season.  I love the way the hills in Northern California turn green, and my parents’ house spends the mornings cloaked in white mist.  I love the way birdcalls echo sharply through the air, and the smell of plants intensifies after the passing of storms.

            Winter is the time for hibernation or storytelling, depending on your particular species' inclination.  December 21^st, the winter solstice, is the shortest day and the longest night of the year.  Last year’s solstice was accompanied by a lunar eclipse, and that is when my nephew was born.  He’s a wizard, to be sure.

            I once rose at dawn on the solstice, and climbed up a mountain with my brother to greet the sun.  Unfortunately, that particular mountain was drizzly and swamped with fog.  We sat with a man who called himself “Gatherer,” then climbed home, where I, for one, went back to sleep.  I dreamed that I was eaten by a giant glass alligator, who defecated me into a grocery store for refugees.

            Seeing as the northern hemisphere has made the turn toward light and heat again, I thought I’d use this post to talk about beginnings.  More or less.  I’d originally, in fact, planned to rant about why I’m forced to hear “Santa Baby” every time I go out in public at this time of year.  What kind of joy is that spreading, hm?  What kind of peace and goodwill toward man is engendered by me having to listen to a 90s pop version of “Jingle Bells” in the AT&T store?

            I’d intended, in actuality, to make a thorough case for the Grinch.  He’s an unsung hero, for making those Whoville whatsits realize that Christmas doesn’t come from a store (maybe Christmas means a little bit more).  Take that, capitalism!  So what if he’s grouchy?  I’m grouchy.  My computer crashed this morning after I had this whole post written, and I’m rewriting it at a speed that would impress even the career typists of the 1930s.  I gave my nephew an Eeyore doll for his first birthday, just because it’s important to be cranky and disheartened sometimes.  Oscar the Grouch, and the Grinch, and Ebenezer Scrooge knew that.  Sometimes, in fact, being cantankerous and upset is one of the greatest joys of life.

            Anyway…  Beginnings.

            As a writer, the type of beginning that I know best is the story beginning: the art of the first line.  I’m considerably more adept at first lines than last lines, considering that I start three stories for each one that I actually finish.  Many super, zippity-doo-dah ideas get mugged down when I actually try to stretch them into words—but it would have to be a gobsmackingly-awful story that couldn’t even be begun. 

            One mistake that a lot of novice writers make (I know because I made it myself, not too long ago), is to think that an opening line has to be flamboyant or flashy.  It certainly can be—one of my favorite Agatha Christie novels begins, ‘“Hell,” said the Duchess.'  The only real requirement of an opening line, though, is that it makes the reader want to know what will happen next.  Whether the clocks are striking thirteen (1984), it’s the best of times and the worst of times (A Tale of Two Cities), or Catharine Morland was never meant to be an heroine (Northanger Abbey), all the beginning of a story needs to do is make the reader wonder what will happen next.

            To celebrate some of my abandoned beginnings (and in the spirit of giving), I’ve decided to display them here.  Take them and run, Dear Reader.  Maybe they’ll become something in your hands that they never could have been in mine.

            This first one is the start of a story that Greg and I invented while imbibing way too much caffeine.  Enjoy…

            “Last call for supper on the City of New Orleans!” a stentorian voice commanded, upsetting Humphrey’s dreams.  He recognized the voice’s cadence—but from where?  The stretched vowels, the clipped beginnings, had they belonged to his father?  No.  No, they belonged to Hollywood, to the hundreds of the films he’d watched to stuff up the gap in his life where there should have been a personality.  He rose woozily, and realized with his fine, thin eyelids still closed that the ground under him was moving: a steady rattle, a steady quake.

            He was on a train.

 

Gracias.  And another…

            There was magic in the kingdom of Riddle, but it was usually the sort that knotted shoelaces together, or switched sugar with salt.  In the neighboring kingdom of Enigma, now there were some bonified curses: Enigma had princesses whose hair fell out as soon as they turned thirteen, wicked damsels with the teeth of crocodiles, and a king who would lose his toes if he ever said the word “of.”  Their maladies had style, and they were proud of it.  The citizens of Riddle, who only had to worry about their dentures being replaced with soap replicas, were really much less content than their neighbors—because their neighbors could actually claim, with reason and relish, to be enchanted.

And a third…

            The blind queen will gather everyone into the great antechamber, and call me Anoctel the Traitor--even though another has worn that name before.

            To her it will be the Truth.  To the children and the line of children after them it will be the Truth.

            And let it be the Truth!  I will content myself with other words.

            I’m going up into a world of wind.

And lastly (but not leastly)…

            I am a well-traveled tree.

            Intrigued?  I could explain the plots that follow each of these nuggets, but where would the fun be in that?  Make of them what you will.  I’m off to the computer repair store, and a happy Boxing Day to all!