A Long Taxi Ride

Here it is, in its entirety, my short story A Long Taxi Ride! Its was published in the 2009 edition of the Milwaukee Area Technical College Literary Magazine, The Phoenix. I have posted it here in the form that it appeared in the magazine. I am interested in hearing any feedback that you have about it. So, without further ado, here it is!

A Long Taxi Ride

It is a long taxi ride from Derrick’s apartment in Shinjuku to Narita Airport, and I am dead tired. Well, maybe not dead tired but exhausted all the same. The wake, the funeral, the cremation, the spreading of his ashes in the ocean, the memorial services, and the nights out in his honor are all behind me now. I have been in Tokyo for 14 days, 14 long days, and now I want to go home so I can mourn the loss of my best friend my own way.

It is hard to believe that Derrick is gone. He has been my best friend for 30 of my 35 years on this planet, and now he is gone. The little black boy that lived next door to me is gone. I just can’t seem to wrap my mind around the fact that I will never hear his quirky laugh again. It was his laugh, which sounded almost exactly like Goofy’s laugh, that allowed us to meet in the first place. I had overheard his laughter while he was playing next door. I thought Goofy was in the neighbor’s backyard. I was a little disappointed when I found out it was not Goofy, but the cuteness of his laugh keep me entertained for hours. Derrick always did make me laugh. That is what kept us close: laughter.

But it was not all laughter. I deeply respected Derrick. Coming out at age 15 is not an easy thing to do, especially for an African-American in a small Midwestern town. In recent years I asked him why he came out so early and he said that he just did not want to live a life that was built around a lie and that he wanted to be accepted and loved for the person he truly was. I loved that about him. Always honest. Always true to what he believed. Even when his family turned their back on him for being gay and he came to stay with us, he did not let it bother him much. He simply looked at it as it was their loss.

He had a strength that just shone so brightly that I just knew he was special. After high school we went to school at NYU. Derrick majored in East Asian Studies, which after graduation led to him moving all the way here to Tokyo. I would come and visit him and we would discuss old times back in Minnesota and at NYU. He would take me to his favorite places and we would eat at all of the neatest restaurants. We went to the hottest dance clubs and hung out with some fabulous people. We had fun.

But now it is all gone.

Now all I have left is one last Japanese cigarette left from the pack that Derrick bought hours before the accident that took him too soon. That, the memories of our 30 year friendship, and one long taxi ride.

Copyright © 2008-2009 Billie Guthrie

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Being My Own Nemesis

Yesterday, my wife came home and handed me a manuscript. I asked her where it came from and she told me that the author was a relative of one of her clients who thought that either she or I should give it a once over to tell him what we thought. Since this was the first manuscript I had seen besides my own, and I had been given the green light to tear it a new butt hole, I was really excited. I started on it immediately.

The first thing I noticed about the manuscript was it was bound like a spiral note book. However, when I considered this was a copy given to a family member I though there was no need to ding him on it because it was given as a gift, not to impress an editor or agent. The next thing I noticed was the entire manuscript was single spaced. I usually don’t get bothered by things like that, but I think because it was a fiction novel written by another unpublished aspiring author, and I was asked to give an honest critique, I am honor bound to take it seriously, more serious than my own work. I finally started reading it and immediately had all kinds of bells going off in my head for both the good and the not-so-good aspects of his writing. Once I realized how seriously I was taking this young man’s work, I realized what was missing from my own writing process; brutally honest criticism.

I need to become my own worse critic, my own nemesis. I do look over what I’ve written currently, but not in the same way I looked at that manuscript. I was critical of any and every little thing from the obvious spelling and grammar errors to the nitpicky things such as sentence structure, word choice, use of foreshadowing, and parallelism. With my own writing, I am lucky enough to have a wife that is a walking grammar and spelling checker, but because she is not a big fan of fiction, and because of the relationship that exists there, I’m sure that she is not as hard on me as she should be. Having access to a live-in editor was fine when I was flitting around from idea to idea and not genuinely ready to make the leap to being published, but at this stage I really need to do it for myself. I need to be willing to tear out my own heart, look at it, throw it up in to the air, hit it with a baseball bat, catch it, throw it to the ground, stomp on it a few times, dust it off, make the necessary alterations, and then shove it back where it belongs and see if all of that makes it work better now.

Batter Up! Let the heart ripping begin!

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Linearity

I just watched a good movie earlier. It was a Spanish film called Lucía y el Sexo (Sex and Lucía). I am not one of those people who despise films that are in a foreign language because, god forbid, I have to read the subtitles. If I hear that a movie has a good story to it then I’ll watch it. My wife was about to watch the movie and asked me to join because she thought I might enjoy it. And enjoy it, I did.

Lucía y el Sexo had a nice story; full of emotion and very sexy. The thing that caught my attention was the sequence of the story. The story started off near the end, flashed back to the beginning, then returned to the present, several times briefly, only to return to the past. When it finally caught up to the present it progressed to the end and finished with an unseen glimpse of the past.

I love when writers, be it screenwriters or novelists, play with the linearity of the story they are telling. It keeps you in suspense as to what led to the events that you witnessed in the beginning. It also keeps you guessing about how the events will resolve. Most of my stories are linear. I love a good steady march from beginning to end. But every now and then I come up with a story that just begs to be told in a non-linear fashion. It is fun to walk the line between revealing too much and not enough, while at the same time jumbling the story so the climax, that would be near the middle in a linear story, is now at the end.

Even when I am writing my linear stories, I find myself jumping around within the story as I write. Sometimes I get a scene from the middle of my book in my head and just have to write it down even if I am no where near that part of the story. I have pieces of the end, the middle and the beginning swirling in my head. It is my job to lay out the story in a nice straight line from beginning to end. Some days that is easier said than done. Some days I don’t feel like adding to the pieces without first trying to link them together. Of course, once I get started on the in-between parts the urge to write soon passes and I move on to something else, usually less productive, until the next writing mood comes.

Speaking of the urge to write passing and moving on to something else…

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One

Today I start a new chapter in my life.
Today I begin a new journey.
Today I become… a blogger.

For those of you that did not feel like reading the blog description, my name is Billie Guthrie and I am a fiction writer. I have written several short stories, and am currently working on a science fiction novel that is about the Multiverse, hence the name of the blog. I have been writing on and off for over 10 years, but only recently have I submitted any of my work to be published. Unfortunately, the likelihood that you have read either of my short stories that has been published is slim to none, unless you are a college student in my hometown that just so happened to read the English department’s literary magazine this year. Yeah, didn’t think so.

The Multiverse Singularity is the first phase in my attempt to change that. This blog will document my attempt to go from ‘kinda-sorta-not-really’ published to ‘novel-on-bookstore-shelves’ published. This will be my place to share my experiences, good or bad, as well as any pointers that I come across along the way. Who knows what the end result will be? Whatever it is, I’m sure the journey will be quite entertaining. I look forward to it.

Since this is my first attempt at blogging, my apologies in advance for my lack of picture, empty profile and any other blogger ‘no-nos’ that I am probably committing at this point. Hopefully I will be able to work on the details in the next week or so and get everything shipshape. In the meantime, feel free to leave me a comment, positive of negative, and let me know how I’m doing. Any tips and pointers on the blog would be greatly appreciated. I am excited about my new endeavor and I eagerly await all that is to come.

Oh! Before I forget…

…welcome to the Multiverse Singularity!

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