11:55 p.m. }} Friday, November 8, 2002

In terms of excerpts and cheesy lines.
After a Not Good Epilogue and a Very Bland Chapter One, I re-worked the first chapter into first person. I'll deal with the epilogue later -- honestly, I'm making up this tale as I go along.

Anyway, I do have another excerpt -- George, the man in the previous excerpt broke into his friend Jimmy's apartment only to find it covered in ooze and in a state of disarray. The door swung open, and according to cheesy horror code number 299, a scary figure said something dire and mysterious and the epilogue ended on a predictable cliffhanger.

This next excerpt is the first few paragraphs of the revised Chapter One. The entire novel could still do with some editing or reworking, but not until I reach 50 thousand words. That being said, here's the new excerpt:

I needed an umbrella. A cute umbrella. A sickeningly cutesy umbrella dipped right into the middle of my cocktail, and I wasn’t going to give up until I got one.

“I didn’t get my umbrella,” I said to the man, pointing to my nude drink with distaste.

“Your… what?” He still had that smile plastered to his face. Obviously, he still thought he was getting a tip.

“Umbrella. For my drink. Like in da islands, mon.”

By this time he was hoping if he backed up real slow like I wouldn’t attack. Seeing how my day had gone, he was probably making the right choice.

“Listen, buddy – if you look at this pretty little picture right over here,” I picked up the drink list and tapped my pinky on the photograph of my drink, the Drink of Drinks, the beautiful, photographically umbrella-adorned Pink Squirrel. “you will notice, good sir, that this picture, this one right here – it has an umbrella. I, too, would like an umbrella.”

“Oh.” He was still looking at my little finger as it rested so very determinedly on the menu.

“Yes, right away, you gorgeous fox, I’ll get you your umbrella this very instant.” I prompted, nodding my head encouragingly as suddenly remembered visions of tips danced before his eyes.

He nodded, stammered out a “y-yes” and darted for the back room where, I assume, his selfishly hoarded umbrellas lay.

I rested my chin on my hand, arm resting limply beside my untouched drink. It wasn’t even so much the umbrella, or the drink itself. I really didn’t need the drink. I needed to buy the drink, sit at the bar, stare at said drink and enjoy as the liquid burned down my throat like last night’s regurgitation, washing away everything bad and leaving me light-headed, thoughtless, properly umbrella-ed.

The waiter returned to the table and gingerly placed the blue umbrella into the cocktail. I was nice. I didn’t ask for an orange one instead.

Cupping the icy glass in my hand I thought about my life – the life of a failure. Where had it all gone wrong? I didn’t have any fated baseball game to blame it on, no missed love opportunity – not even a failed exam or police record. I had no one to blame but myself. Me, sitting in a restaurant on a Tuesday afternoon, contemplating a cocktail dubbed the ‘Pink Squirrel’ and reliving the terrible retrospective of my Life.

It honestly hadn’t been my fault that the vacuum had exploded. Perhaps if there hadn’t been so many damned paper clips on the floor it wouldn’t have happened. All I know is that someone carelessly dumped the box onto the carpet and it was my job – was being the operative word – to clean it up. My job, and there’s that ‘was’ again, to vacuum. And so I did. And so it exploded. I don’t care what they screamed at my face. There was no way I was going to pay for it. At least, not without violence being involved.

The thought almost brought a smile to my face. Mr. Carridy, waxing gangland poetic about his ‘turf’ and how’d I’d sullied it with my debauchery and unlicensed vacuuming. Then he’d draw a pistol and I’d draw mine and at the end we’d see who was left standing and who was willing to pick the helpless pockets of the dead.

What was I doing in the bar? I didn’t need to be in the bar. The bar was the place that drunks went when they were feeling low. I was fairly certain I wasn’t a drunk, although the thought marginally worried me because liquor had been my first and most important thought (aside from punching Mr. Carridy’s fat face) after the Big Firing of 2002.

I frowned at the Pink Squirrel.

I frowned at my blue umbrella.

I slammed a ten dollar bill onto the table, gathered my purse and headed purposefully out. I suppose the w-w-waiter was going to get his precious tip afterall.

Consoling? I didn’t need no stinking consoling.

__

(The umbrella-demander being Ava Loams, the protagonist of the story.)