Hey y’all,

Two performances coming up this week that you might be interesting in coming to.

First of all, Hecho a Mano is playing at the Workers’ Defense Project’s 4th Annual Music & Movement dinner. We’re going to be premiering at least two new songs, which is a lot for a single 45 minute set! Come on out to enjoy yourself and support a good cause at the same time.

Thursday, June 7th
7pm – 10pm

And then on Saturday I’m playing again with my favorite band in Austin (except Hecho a Mano, of course) — Orquesta Trabuko — at the Salsa y Bomba festival. This is going to be quite a night of dancing, so bring good shoes. https://casita.prfdance.org/2018/05/celebrando2018/

Saturday, June 9th
6pm – 11pm

See you soon!

“Do you believe that Donald Trump and Barack Obama deserve the same amount of respect?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because they are both presidents of the United States.”

“So we should afford them respect because they chose to run, and win, the presidency? We should respect them because they took this action?”

“Yes.”

“Can we then say, more broadly, that we should afford people respect based on the actions that they take?”

“Yes.”

“Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump have taken actions other than becoming president. Should we also consider these actions when deciding how much respect to give them?”

“…”

“Moreover, as these actions have been very different from one another, is it possible that these two men should then be afforded differing levels of respect?”

“…”

“Finally, is it then possible that Donald Trump’s actions have led him to be deserving of a different level of respect from, say, Colin Kaepernick, than Barack Obama?”

“… … really I just meant that people should respect anyone in a position of power, because I’m one of the 30% of individuals in any given society who harbors a subconscious inclination toward authoritarian hierarchy and I needed a rhetorical prop to beat up on liberals with.”

Zach Weinersmith (of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal fame) was here in Austin for the Texas Book Festival this morning. His talk dealt mostly with Soonish, but at the end there were a few interesting nuggets about his creative process.

1. Zach reads 3-5 books a week when he’s not on a promotional tour.
2. The reliability of the comic comes from setting aside an hour every day to write, even if that time is spent staring at a blank page.
3. When stuck, it’s vital to read something that’s difficult for you to understand.

He expanded on these a bit at the signing.  I’m paraphrasing, but:

“Some people say they read a lot, but it’s all fantasy and science fiction.  That’s fine, but maybe go back 200 years to the source material that those things come from.”

Hey y’all, long time no see.

It’s been quiet around here because I’ve been working on a new manuscript.  Good news: it’s almost done!

Draft 4 is complete, and I’m looking for a handful of beta readers (anywhere from 5-10) to read the manuscript and provide some feedback.  I’ll be sending on the file this weekend, and then compiling feedback the weekend of May 28th.

The manuscript is about 275 pages (82,329 words / 300 words per page in your average paperback = 274.43 pages).  It’s a science-fiction adventure story about a washed-up war “hero” who (in a fit of reckless, drunken self-loathing) saves the life of a wanted alien convict.  Things get complicated when they realize that they fought on opposites of a brutal war . . . and if you want to know more, you should drop me an email about being a beta reader!  Seriously, the link is right up there ^.

The gig doesn’t pay much, but I’ll buy you a pitcher of beer if you’re in Austin sometime.  Scout’s honor.

And if you aren’t interested in doing that, I’ll be putting it up in chapters here (just like the last one) sometime in June.  Er, June-ish.  Summer, at least.  Let’s call it summer-ish.

Hit me up.  davidsmcwilliams@gmail.com

(Go back to Part 2)

There was a boy on the bandstand when she came back.

He was small, brown-skinned, and definitely not a Kolanth. His hands and eyes were too big for the rest of his body, and his body was too small for the bass. He sat on a stool and pulled the end pin all the way in to reach the tuning pegs.

She said one word. “Pfrancing.” It was a blues from an old Miles Davis recording, one of the first transmitted via FTL communicator to Klio after The Accident. The Ministry of Historical Culture had pulled it up for her after a liberal application of palm grease.

The boy nodded and said nothing.

She played the first 12 bars solo, thinking of Wynton Kelly playing the same tune six centuries ago. Wynton Kelly sounded great. This was going to be shit.

Sal came in on the second chorus. Tariq joined him, hesitant, playing so softly that Carla had to strain to hear him. His time wavered; he dropped a beat. Sal covered for him. She sighed, but was mostly beyond caring.

Carla banged out a dissonant chord on the piano at the end of the form, and then launched into the melody for a third time. She wanted to get Tariq’s attention. “Just play, dammit!” was what she would’ve yelled if there weren’t paying customers sitting a few feet from the piano bench.

“Enough,” Sal was saying with his playing as they neared the end of the third time through the melody. He could feel her frustration, but he was going to push her off of the melody whether she liked it or not—whether Tariq was ready for it or not. The drum fill built up, a press roll hissing like escaping steam or a wave cresting above the beach.

That’s when in happened. Carla actually saw it; Tariq heard something in the fill, or in her playing, or in his imagination. His eyes closed, he stood up on the bottom rungs of the stool, and when the fill crested–

–he played.

The tempo immediately jumped up. It was like an electric shock to the base of Carla’s spine. Surprisingly, Sal didn’t try and rein the youngster in. He let him have his head, leaving Carla to either catch up or get run over. She recovered, playing something bluesy to find her feet in the new tempo.

Tariq was playing. The bassline drove forward like a boulder rolling down a hill, inexorable and undeniable. It had power and poise. In some distant part of her that wasn’t trying desperately to play something halfway decent, she could hear Sam Jones driving Cannonball Adderley’s Quintet like a force of nature. The ghost image of Tariq’s hypothetical record collection started to fill itself out in her mind, but the greater mystery remained:

How was that sound coming out of a fifteen year old?

There was no time to wonder. The music was happening, and she had to either get on board or get run over. She got on board, and she felt the swing deepening, the pocket spreading and sucking their three instruments deep inside.

–

The band stayed there for a while, like unfamiliar lovers finding their rhythm for the first time and hesitating to abandon it for something else. The crowd in the Emerald Room perked up. Heads turned their way. Conversation stopped. Feet started to tap under tables. The music was good.

But there was more. Carla could feel it lurking under the surface. Every time they got to the end of the form and were about to go back again, Tariq hesitated. There was something else that needed to come out, somewhere he wanted to go. Carla tried to get his attention, to nod that it was okay, but his eyes were closed.

Eventually it happened anyway. Tariq went down low on the instrument for a pedal point and never came back. He was somewhere else, somewhere totally different, playing some kind of long drone across multiple strings. It had its own rhythm, a heavy loping uneven thing, slow against Sal’s frantic forward drive. The music felt like it had suddenly downshifted into a new, deeper, more powerful gear that Carla hadn’t known existed.

And . . . Tariq was singing. It was a wordless song, full of jagged intervals and long held notes. It was a prayer, Carla realized later, something that she’d heard coming from the marble halls and tower spires of old alien temples in the city. It was not a song that a human was supposed to know.

The form had been left in tatters somewhere far behind them. She had a foot in either boat, now – one in Sal’s furious drumming (he was drenched in sweat—how long had they been playing?) and another in Tariq’s rich droning prayer. And she had no idea what she was playing, but it was something jagged and smooth and melodic and rhythmic all at once. Tariq was playing notes on some quarter-tone scale that she just didn’t have in the piano, and she wanted to tear out clumps of keys and throw them at him. Instead she played great circular clusters of notes that rolled and writhed within the changes around them.

She didn’t know what they were playing, but they were playing. And, maybe for the first time in 600 years, they were playing something new.

–

“Come here tomorrow afternoon, and we’ll learn some tunes. Skip school if you have to,” Carla told him. The set was over. They were drenched in sweat. She was exhausted.

Tariq nodded. He still hadn’t said anything. Carla looked around for Bernard.

The Kolanth appeared from the back of the room. “What, you can’t even stick around to hear your brother play some music?” she ribbed him.

“I heard some of it. It was good,” said Bernard. He seemed distracted. “Come with me, Tariq.”

“Yes,” said Carla, “it was good.” She watched the “brothers” leave together. Bernard was moving a little funny; she’d have to ask him about it later.

“Are you sure that’s wise?” asked the bartender. He was wiping down glasses and stacking them. The room was nearly empty.

“What?” asked Carla.

“Letting him and Bernard leave together. Isn’t that what happened to the other guy, the night he got shot?”

“What do you mean?” asked Carla.

“Oh . . uh . . . I thought you knew.” The bartender was nervous now.

“Thought. I. Knew. What?” asked Carla, more distinctly this time.

“You must’ve been gone already. Bernard got your old bass player drunk and talked him into going down to the Viceroy. You know, the–”

“–the whorehouse. Where he got shot. Right.”

The bartender said no more, and made a tactful withdrawal. Sal joined her at the bar.

“Well?” asked Sal.

Carla shrugged. “Some people just want to hear good music, I guess.”

(Go back to Part 1)

“Something for everyone,” muttered Carla under her breath.

She was outside the main entrance to Beelo’s, looking up at the sign. Under “Beelo’s Showroom and Private Lounge” was the club’s motto in green neon: “Something For Everyone!”

Hopefully that includes live performances of 650-year old art music from Old Sol, Carla thought.

Underneath that was another sign, “All Species Welcome!” and then a list of the different performance venues inside. Humans and aliens alike perused the list with a variety of sense organs; she had to go to the bottom third of list to find her name. “Live @ The Emerald Room: The Carla Gutierrez Trio.”

Beelo’s musical director had tried to get her to change the name, but she hadn’t budged. “I know it’s a boring name. It’s part of the tradition. The guests will expect it.” When she was honest with herself, she knew that more of their audience was there for the pricing scheme at the bar than the music.

Carla went in.

The Emerald Room was half-full with the upper crust of Zero’s lower half. It was a mixed-species room where the bar served cheap champagne, imitation caviar and middle shelf vodka. The patrons wore suits, but the suits were not well-tailored. They started playing; polite applause followed some of their tunes.

She noticed Bernard halfway through the first set. He stood out from the threadbare crowd, sitting at the bar in a tuxedo sharp enough to cut glass. Carla nodded to him during a sluggish bossa nova, and he nodded back.

He approached the bandstand after the first set. “You found a new bass player.”

“Yeah. How’s he sound?” she asked him.

“He is not as good as my brother. You should fire him.”

“Look, I know you’re trying to get your brother a gig . . . but give it a rest, Bernard.”

“I am trying to help you make good music.”

“And how would you know what good music is?” asked Carla.

She could see instantly in his eyes that she’d hurt him. He looked away under the pretense of keeping an eye on the room. “I am not a musician,” rumbled Bernard, “but I know good music when I hear it. My brother is good music.”

“Bernard . . . I’m sorry. I’m just touchy tonight.” He didn’t say anything, so she tried to change the subject. “Where are your boys at tonight?”

“Driving out to run an errand,” he said. He didn’t expand on this.

“Alright,” she said after a moment. “I should get back on stage. Try not and shoot this one, ok?” she joked, but it came out wrong and Bernard didn’t laugh. Not that he would’ve laughed anyway, Carla reminded herself.

The second set was . . . acceptable. Shane didn’t try and jump in front of the band at any point, but she felt like she kept bumping into him. Growing pains, Carla told herself, just inevitable growing pains. We’ll get used to each other. It’ll get better. I hope it gets better.

Sal frowned the whole set, but he didn’t say anything. They finished to lukewarm applause, and he was out from behind the drums before it finished.

“I’m going for a smoke,” he said. Carla let him go without pointing out that it was perfectly legal to smoke inside the Emerald Room.

“Shane, let’s look at the first ending on Inner Urge,” said Carla, referencing a tune that they’d botched earlier in the set. She reached for her binder of lead sheets.

“Nah, I’m going for a smoke, too.” Shane left, and Carla was alone on the bandstand. She could feel her temperature rising, but she clamped down on it and went to the bar for a drink instead.

The bar was packed now, except for a stool on either side of Bernard. They remained conspicuously empty, as if the big lizard was emitting a force field. Carla took the one on his right. He didn’t say anything, and so she didn’t either. He bought her a drink. Finally—

“It sounds like shit, doesn’t it?” she asked him.

He said nothing.

“No matter what I do, it always sounds like shit.” How many drinks had she had already? One too many, maybe. “It always sounds like shit. I sound like shit, and Shane sounds like shit, and Sal sounds good but that’s not enough. Two-thirds shit rounds up to one big shit.”

Bernard still said nothing.

“All I want is to make some music that isn’t shit, Bernard. Just once. That’s all I want. But nobody listens. No one wants to hear it, or play it. Nobody in this damn city gets in, Bernard.”

He turned to her. “I have the solution.”

Before she could say anything, Sal barged up to them. He was more grim than usual.

“What?” she asked him.

“You’re not going to believe this.”

“What?” asked Carla, her heart sinking.

“Shane just got hit by a taxi. He was in the crowd by the stairs, and he slipped right as one of them pulled away from the stand. The asshole didn’t even stop.”

“Is he alright?”

“Well, I could count the number of bones in his arm without an X-ray, and it wasn’t the right number . . . so, no. They took him out in an ambulance.”

Carla had no words. She wanted to vomit. She thought about just leaving, abandoning the piano and the gig and walking out into the night. She thought about never playing the piano again. She thought about going out into the port and swimming out into the ocean as far she could until she’d never have to compare her shitty stride playing with Oscar Peterson’s ever again.

Bernard was still looking at her. She remembered his last words, and turned to him.

“You. You.”

“Me?”

“This is your fault, isn’t it?” She jabbed a finger in his chest. It was like jabbing an iron plate.

“What?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Bernard.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about. I have been right here the whole time.”

“I—just—fine! You know what? Fine!” Carla was definitely a bit drunk, and far beyond caring at this point. “You want your brother to get a shot as this gig? Fine! Where is he?”

“Nearby,” said Bernard.

“What’s his name?”

“Tariq.”

Carla paused. “. . . Tariq?”

“God works in mysterious ways sometimes,” explained Bernard.

“How old is he?”

“Fifteen.”

“Christ. Get him up here. He’s got the gig, tonight. I don’t even care.”

Sal was looking at her with genuine concern. “Carla—”

Carla cut him off. “I’m going for a smoke.” She left.

(Go on to Part 3)

“I didn’t mean to kill him.”

“No?” Carla glared at him. “Then why shoot him?”

“He needed to get shot. Living or dying, though—that was between him and God.”

“Call me a skeptic, Bernard, but I think the holes you put in him might’ve had something to do with it,” said Carla.

“Do you know what he was doing when I found him?” asked Bernard.

“Yes, and I don’t care. What I do care about is what he won’t be doing ever again – playing bass in the trio. And that’s between you and me, Bernard, not God nor anybody else.”

Bernard’s eyes flicked left and right down the hallway. Carla could tell that he didn’t like the amount of noise she was making, but she didn’t care. It was her apartment building, dammit, and he was the one who’d show up unannounced at three in the morning after shooting her bass player dead in a whorehouse. She’d only just changed out of her work clothes, for god’s sake.

A few inquisitive neighbors poked their heads out of doorways along the hall. About half of them were human, while the rest were a mix of different species. That’s what Carla got for living on the slope between the Old City and the New City. Even the city had different names here; the non-humans usually used the old Kolanth name, Kannan, while the humans called it Zero.

The building was a narrow wedge slipped in between two mismatched city blocks. Sal found the place originally; over lunch at the Cafe Sin Nombré he described it to her as “a leftover building, in an accidental city, on the inhospitable continent of an overlooked planet.” But the rent was cheap, and the residents of her building usually refrained from eating one another in public. Carla had dealt with worse.

“That is why I am here,” continued Bernard. “I am here to settle up.”

Carla tilted her head up to look Bernard in the face, and raised an eyebrow. Bernard was big, even for a Kolanth; if he tried to come in without stooping, he’d hit his head on the doorframe.

Bernard had two other Kol with him, dressed in dark suits that were too rich for the shabby building. He waved to one of his associates. “Albus.” The other Kolanth brought forward a tall, black instrument case.

“His instrument,” explained Bernard. “It is unharmed.”

Carla stepped aside and waved Albus through. He was slightly smaller than Bernard, and probably weighed twice as much as she did. She could feel the floorboards flex under his talons; Kol did not bother with shoes, but instead shined their black talons to match the dress shoes of men in suits and tuxedos. The practice made her wish that she also had eighteen-inch blades instead of toes . . . but that would probably complicate using the piano’s pedals.

Albus set the bass against the wall carefully, as if it was made of priceless crystal. Bernard knew to enough be careful with the old upright, she’d give him that.

“Thanks,” she said, grudgingly, “but unless you’ve been working on your scales recently, I don’t have anyone to play it.”

It was meant as a joke, but Bernard took it seriously. “I have a brother. He is an excellent player. He will join you tomorrow.”

“Wait—wait, that’s not how it works, Bernard.” She liked saying his name, because he never said hers and she could tell that it gave her words power. “You can’t just pick up some schmuck off the street and drop him into the middle of the gig. He has to know our tunes. He has to know our style. Do you know how hard it is to find a decent bassist in Zero? Or on Klio, anywhere?”

“He is an excellent bass player,” repeated Bernard, “and he will join you tomorrow. You will make good music together.”

“I appreciate the gesture, Bernard,” she said his name again. “Have him come to the audition, if he’s so good. We’ll be in the Emerald Room at two.” She was tired, and her left hand hurt from covering basslines all night. She wanted Bernard to leave.

“He cannot be there at two.”

“Why not?”

“He’ll be in school.”

“Christ, Bernard, how old is he?”

“He is old enough that God has revealed his gift.”

Carla shook her head. “Tell him to talk to me when he’s old enough to buy a drink.” Bernard tried to say something, but she cut him off. “Thanks for the bass. Just don’t shoot my next bassist, alright?”

Bernard bowed his head. “I will not shoot your next bassist.” The Kol left.

Carla went inside to make a sandwich and put on a Bill Evans record, still bouncing between anger and exhaustion. Hopefully the 650-year old recording would help her calm down enough to sleep.

–

The baby grand piano in the Emerald Room was a decent enough instrument. Some of the other rooms at Beelo’s Showroom and Private Lounge had better instruments, but most of them were worse and Carla considered herself lucky. If she ever got the gig in the VIP lounge, she was never going to let go of the piano upstairs.

She came in early to practice. Carla had started taking her coffee in the local style, brewed thick like motor oil in a tin kettle and then strained through a wire mesh into a cup with brown sugar and a dash of cardamom. Somehow the scent of the coffee had become one with the yellowed keys and the quiet mornings spent with ancient Horace Silver recordings. After being stuck in Zero for three years, the coffee was seeping into the music through the cracks in harmonies and the tiny distances between beats. The taste of the music was changing, the longer she lived here.

“G minor,” she said to herself at the keyboard. “This is a G minor coffee today.” The ceiling fans hacked out a weird polyrhythm in response, spinning over the stacked and upended chairs.

Carla took a minute to wind up the old mechanical metronome. She worked through scales and arpeggios, major and minor, moving keys by fourths, then fifths, then half steps. Carla played them fortissimo, filling the room with two-handed patterns, and then pianissimo, tiptoeing through the exercises until the boy with the mop on the other side of the room had to strain to hear her. She stopped a few times to rewind the metronome; it was old and nearly worn out, and she’d had a replacement on order for almost five months now at the shop down the street.

“They’ll get the new gate up before that damn metronome gets here,” she said to herself when the mechanism slipped and threw her off.

Twenty years ago, Klio was just another end point on the vast network of FTL gates anchored around Old Sol. It was one of the furthest, at the edge of the Sol master gate’s range, but otherwise unremarkable. They had one transit a week; two, if the exchange price for lithium warranted it.

Then, of course, there was The Accident.

The replacement gate was somewhere in deep space, decelerating in preparation to enter Klio’s orbit five years from now. Some nights, Carla went up on the roof of her building drunk and wished it speed. Maybe when it got here she’d be able to buy a decent metronome.

Fortunately a number of FTL data relays had survived The Accident, and when bandwidth allowed the Ministry of Historical Culture would send important works of art through onto the mainframes in the Volksland. Local industry was a decade away from being able to reproduce optical disks or solid-state memory (the discs were easy, it was the lasers that were causing them problems), but there was another medium that was within their reach:

Vinyl.

Three crates of LPs were tucked behind the piano. Carla pulled out an Art Blakey record with Horace Silver on piano; she knew the A side already, but there was an unnamed blues on the B side that might have some useful material. She set up the record player on top of the piano.

Carla played the track until it reached the piano solo. After a few seconds, she lifted the needle, and then worked out what Silver had just played on her own. It was suspiciously easy; she set the needle down again and did another few seconds, and then a few more. Finally she let the needle stay, and played along with Silver through the end of the blues.

Carla sighed; she’d already transcribed this solo, and then forgotten that she had. It was happening more and more often these days.

Maybe there was something worth learning in one of the other solos. Carla started over from the beginning of the blues; the alto solo didn’t make much of an impression on her, but Clifford Brown was playing a lot of trumpet and she spent an hour dissecting a few of his turnarounds.

Around 1:30, she set up for the audition. Carla had arranged for one of the servers to come in and manage the applicants in exchange for a few Francs under the table. It felt like everyone in Zero wanted to work at Beelo’s, and she didn’t want to deal with the crowd.

Sal showed up with his cymbals and stick bag about the same time. The kit was still on the bandstand from the night before.

“Morning, Salvatore. You ready for this?” she asked him. Sal had been working the same Italian liner that Carla had gotten stuck on, and they’d jumped ship together. He had the face of an old basset hound and forearms like cured leather.

“Can’t wait. I haven’t been to the circus in ages,” he deadpanned. Sal punctuated his observation with a quick, goofy polka two-step. It dissolved into a brief cacophony of snare drum rolls before coming back together as an Art Blakey-esque tumbao pattern on the toms. He stopped. “Well?”

“First victim, please!” called Carla to the girl outside.

–

There was an old cello with two strings left in the back room. Carla and Sal left it on the bandstand, up front. Anyone who came in and reached for it was immediately disqualified. This took care of about half the applicants.

Anyone who brought their own instrument or looked confused and asked where the bass was got a shot.

Carla thought it was a poor showing even by Zero’s standards. The form got lost, tempos dragged and rushed, and famous songs were butchered one by one. Carla started cutting them off in the middle of tunes. “Next.” “Next.” “Next!”

The 17^th applicant was a tall, greasy-haired man with long callouses on the first two fingers of his right hand. He picked up the bass, adjusted the tuning slightly, and then looked at Carla.

“Body and Soul,” she said.

“Stock key, or something else?” he asked.

“Let’s do it in D,” she said, moving it up a half step. If he was bluffing, they’d know soon enough.

Carla played a short rubato intro, and then came in on the melody. Sal joined with his brushes on the snare, and the newcomer came in right on time with no cue. Carla nodded.

The second time through she started altering harmonies. The bass player followed her and even anticipated one of her tritone substitutions. Carla nodded again.

Sal hinted at a double-time feel when they reached the bridge, and with a hop-skip-jump they were off. The newcomer followed adroitly enough through the rest of the form, and as they got ready to loop around into the next chorus Carla stepped back to let the bassist solo.

She listened carefully through the first 16 bars. The newcomer was running a lot of notes up and down the bass. It was fluent enough and worked with the changes, though there wasn’t any discernible melody that she could pick up on. She shrugged and got ready to come back in with the melody as they approached the bridge.

But the newcomer either didn’t hear her or chose to ignore her musical cues. Carla stepped back again and let him continue to noodle through the rest of the form. “Bridge,” she called out, intending to finish the tune with the melody. The bass player nodded, but started playing the melody before Carla could step in. She let him have the bridge, then stomped in over him on the last 8 bars to finish the song. The bass player huffed a dramatic sigh, but let her do so.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Shane. I get the gig?”

“Depends. Are you going to try and play over me on every song? Because nobody’s coming to the Emerald Room hear bass solos.”

Shane shrugged. “Yeah, whatever.”

Carla pulled Sal aside to talk. “What do you think?”

“You know, in the shower, when your washcloth gets all dried out and stiff in the shape you left it in?”

“I guess so.”

“And then you get in the shower and get it wet again, and it gradually unbends and sags into a wet floppy rag?”

“What does this have to do with–”

“That’s what his time is like.”

Carla sighed. “I know. But he has ears. Can you live with it? I think it’s the best we’re going to get.”

“Hire him. But let me call him Washcloth. It’s only fair.”

Carla and Sal came back. Shane was practicing something complicated and inscrutable. They waited for him to stop, but he didn’t. “Well?” he finally asked, continuing to play.

“You’ve got the gig, if you want it,” Carla told him.

“I want 200 Francs a night.”

Carla laughed in his face. “I’ll give you 75.”

(Go on to Part 2)

“All of the best stories are traveling stories.”

So proclaimed the tipsy Texan on the night train to Munich. We were sitting on the floor in the bicycle compartment, drinking Heineken out of glass bottles supplied by the steward. It was an hour and a half before my 23^rd birthday.

I asked him to explain.

“Stories are interesting when the characters change, right?” he asked me. “Well, what’s the easiest way to get characters to change? Send ’em away from home. They can’t help but change if you do that.”

We exchanged traveling stories until the small hours of the morning (one of which carried the germ of an idea that turned into Lela’s American Cafe). Later, the train broke down, and I lost track of him in the shuffle of carriages and replacement locomotives. The next night, propped up on an air mattress in a Vienna basement, I noted what he had said in my journal.

“All of the best stories are traveling stories.”

And you know what? I firmly believe that this anonymous Texan (I neglected to note his name and the beer makes things hazy) was right.

Now, of course there are lots of good stories that don’t stray from their home counties. I’m not going to argue that (although many are at least internal journeys). But time and time again, I’ve found myself sucked into books at exactly the moment that the protagonists are forced or finally allowed to hit the road. The pretense can be flimsy, the setting shallow, or the characters flat, but if the author can just get them out the door I’ll forgive a lot.

That’s the essence of storytelling: change. Everything else is details.

–

Tolkein wrote thousands of years of history for The Lord of the Rings, and yet the trilogy covers only the few months in which Frodo and Sam are on the path to Mordor. Coincidence? I think not.

Luke gets less than one day on the moisture farm before George Lucas burns the whole thing down and sends him out into the galaxy. Do we care about the years of agricultural drudgery that preceded Star Wars? Of course not.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a traveling story, else why would we have the iconic red-line-on-map scene breaks?

Treasure Island has a few static chapters at the beginning, but they’re just setup. The parts of the story that everyone remembers happen after the map is found and a ship is procured.

And Brian Jacques (whose Redwall books I consumed voraciously in intermediate school) always features a brave hero who must make a difficult journey in time to come back and rescue the good creatures of Redwall Abbey.

Watership Down is a traveling story. Ender’s Game has a strong traveling subplot (the Dream Game). Paulo Coelho’s career-maker, The Alchemist, is a traveling story. Huckleberry Finn is a traveling story. On The Road and Roughing It are traveling stories. Looking at my bookshelf right now, I see Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, In Patagonia, Shantaram, and Two Years Before The Mast. You get the idea.

Storytelling is change, and traveling stories can’t help but change.

–

So I decided to write a traveling story.

Of course there are swords, horses, power struggles, ancient ruins, and the shambling brain-hungry undead that have run the risk of becoming a little stale as of late (they’re overused, but I don’t care). I was reading World War Z and A Song Of Fire And Ice around the time that I started this manuscript, and both of those influences are there. I’d also visited a few of the old Templar fortresses in Spain, built to protect the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, and that’s in there too.

But it’s really a traveling story. A young woman leaves the only life she’s ever known in order to save her friend, ignorant of the fact that the journey will change her in ways that are both permanent and unavoidable. It’s the same story that’s been told a million times and will likely be told a million times over again; the story of a hero on a quest for their deepest desire.

The zombies are incidental.

So that’s what I’ll be putting up in this space, section by section, starting next Friday. Two-Minute Tuesdays will continue as well. Enjoy, and I’ll see you then!

(Update: get started right now with Part 1).

. . . because I’m in the middle of my annual personal review.

I’m writing this from my parents’ house in Michigan where it’s been a fairly warm, soggy Christmas (Detroit had the smallest amount of December snow in the past 125 years).  Today, though, with a high of 21 degrees, I’m feeling a bit more at home.

Anyway, I started these annual reviews a few years ago after reading about Chris Guillebeau’s own review process.  The things that are worth doing in life invariably consist of a large number of small, repetitive tasks, and it’s easy to get side tracked if you don’t keep the larger picture in mind.  You can learn more about the annual review process via this link.

I have big plans for the coming year (including a manuscript that should be appearing in this space soon!).  Best of luck on your own reviews and I’ll see you all in 2015!