Another scene (just after the murder at the Sunset Bar). Introducing a main character.

Raymond Chandler's ghost may come haunt me for this.

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McCrary, LAPD Homicide, was one of those guys you'd expect to see checking out the nudie rags at the stands off Hollywood Boulevard. Big, rumpled, with eyes so small you'd wonder how he could see past the end of the cheap stogies he always chewed.

That was crap, though. He was sharp as a razor. Those small sleepy eyes never missed a damned thing. Right now, he was staring at the back door of the Sunset Bar.

"Marlowe. Hey." He jerked his head at the door. "You know what? My guys are morons. The killer didn't get out this way."

An intro drabble from a piece with a paralyzed narrator that I've started working on recently (my grandfather was paralyzed from the neck down due to polio for the last 40 years of his life, so it's a topic I've kicked around before):

There’s something joyous about water in motion. Think about the way water seeps up from the ground, too buoyant to be suppressed. The way it splashes over the edge of the tub. Sweat. But when water stops moving, something essential is lost. Ice has no life. It can be beautiful, but it is a hard, rigid beauty. A beauty of distance.

Imagine you have two choices. You can live a short time immersed in water in all its danger and movement, or you can live forever encased in ice. Which would you choose?

I would choose to drown.

"I hold with those who favour fire...."

That piece reminded me.

That's awesome, Kristin.

Yeah, really.

It's really powerful, Kristin. Do you know where the piece is going?

"I hold with those who favour fire...."

That piece reminded me.

Deb, yes! If this goes anywhere, I actually want to use that poem as a recurring theme. How interesting that you thought of it.

P-C (edit, and others!), thanks for the compliment!

My narrator is a little bitter, but she changes throughout the story. In my mind's eye, it's a story about what it means to be human when you are unable to do the things that most people think of as most human -- eat, have sex, be active, etc.. In my grandfather's case, he couldn't eat or write or type or even breathe for himself. He could barely talk. I think there's something there I want to explore further, and this narrator may be my gateway to do so.

It's really powerful, Kristin. Do you know where the piece is going?

Not entirely. The beginning came to me all at once one night, but I haven't mapped it out yet.

I think it's going to be an interesting thing to work on. I've been temporarily paralysed from the waist down (post car crash, the big one I was in, off the mountain) and the things it does to your head, if it happens suddenly, as an adult, are profound. And the iron lung version of, done when I was a child, was an entirely different story.

They won't be comfortable shoes for you to walk in while you're working on it, but I'm betting you've already considered that.

And the iron lung version of, done when I was a child, was an entirely different story.

Yes. He was in an iron lung for years.

They won't be comfortable shoes for you to walk in while you're working on it, but I'm betting you've already considered that.

Oh yes. Lots and lots of research--including talking to my grandmother, if she'll talk about it (this is not the Gram who lives with us)--and many painful truths to face and questions to ask.

I think that is why I haven't invested in it yet. I don't want to start working on this when I can't really focus on it, because it's bound to take a lot of energy.

Yeah, I was an iron lung for eleven days the first time (polio) and four days the second time (what used to be called double lobar pneumonia, a complication). I hadn't turned seven yet and the memory of lying there hating everything, everybody and deciding that there was no Big Kindly God, is vivid and ineradicable. I basically got out physically functional out of pure spite.

I can't even imagine dealing with it for years. But the emotional investment that's going to take, if you're to do it honestly, is going to burn.