David Thayer

Wellington Leg: a recent study of brain wave activity caused controversy in the Leg when it was revealed that researchers used illegal search methods to conduct their study. The matter was bound over to the Right Honorable Hamilcar Frist, an active opponent of brain activity in all its forms. His own medulla oblongata has been replaced by flan cultivated at a Mexican restaurant near Henley Hornbrook. “I make more money than ever,” he said. “And I’m more satisfied at work.”

“Humans don’t really need a brain anymore,” noted scholar and anthropologist Big Andy. “Try the flan. That’s my motto.”

Flan powered people excel at group activities. Professor Moriarity whose Jello Head theories have stirred controversy, demonstrated that by adding whipped cream to the flan the brain stem becomes inflated, filling with extraneous information. For instance the Professor once knew all the zoning regulations for Santa Clara County but now isn’t sure if San Jose has a hockey team or San Luis Obispo. He’s formed a hedge fund whose guiding principal is to forget who gave him money. “It’s great,” he said. “Hey, who are you?”

Despite the seriousness of the matter DCI Borchardt vows that no menu will go unturned until all the flan in Wellington Leg is accounted for. Flan production soared last summer as an alternative fuel source after circulating bed technology revolutionized flan production. “Everyone enjoys flan,” Borchardt said. “However drilling holes in people’s heads is another matter entirely. That’s where we draw a line in the flan.”

Off shore drilling is not impacted by the investigation because of jurisdictional issues. Judge Frist tried rowing off shore but was driven back to shore by what he called “waves.” The existence of these lunar driven waves is controversial although Well Bots have been seen bobbing up and down “for no apparent reason.” Concetta Comedia della Arta reporting for Science on Sunday.

  I’ve noticed a villainous tendency toward unblended scotch in popular fiction: those plotting to overthrow the government from within drink the good stuff while those in the field are likely to use single malt as the primary fuel in a boilermaker. PIs don’t drink anymore so it’s up to the amateur sleuths to knock back a few after discovering a corpse in the kitty litter. ( Not again, Henry. Another dead guy.)  This brings me to scenes we don’t see enough of.

A really loaded English Professor at a small but prestigious school discovers the body of his Dean riddled with bullets but he’s got Dusty Springfield on his I-pod and a bottle of single malt which he swigs and chugs while debating what to do. He passes out and the cops arrive and charge him with murder. His fingerprints are all over the tommy gun and Lord Have Mercy it wasn’t his scotch.

His attorney wanted to be a rock musician but took the bar under an assumed name, Al Capone. His band, the Capones, are embroiled in an IRS investigation while his ex-wife plots to have him killed if she can just figure his real name. She’s killed a bunch of guys named Dean in a kind of round robin elimination approach that’s drawn the attention of a fat guy in a pork pie hat. He’s trying to figure this dame out; yeah, she’s dangerous but he’s had a few boilermakers and needs studded tires for the winter.

A brilliant but troubled prosecutor is assigned the case. For the defense we have a rookie who turns to the fat guy for advice while the cops frame the professor for blowing away the dean. The judge has a five dollar bill on his forehead and a note from his doctor that says “bribe me.”

Another murder, this one during a Capones Concert, seems to exonerate the Professor but the ex-wife made his bail and the fat guy saw him buying a tommy gun from Tommy’s Haus of Guns along with forty boxes of ammo and a crate of single malt scotch. It looks bad for the Professor but a deus ex machina arrives in the form of the Goddess Athena who intervenes at the last minute. She smacks down the troubled prosecutor, gives the fat guy abs of steel and brings the dean back to life. Case closed. Time for a drink.

Once again the boundaries of the mind are stretched a bit if only to accomodate the latest scientific evidence that a correlation might exist between spewing chemical waste into the atmosphere and climate change. Decades before Katrina crushed New Orleans, the city of Niagara Falls, New York, experienced the EPA’s verdict that certain of the town’s neighborhoods be plowed under. Where once stood houses there is a large earthen berm, a new brand of urban renewal, a Rust Belt tribute to the old slogan better living through chemistry and its codicil the land will renew itself in a few thousand years. Tiny microbes inside the berm are busy eating PCBs which conjures images of food eating contests, bald men in bibs, and mountains of peach cobbler. But what about the honeymooners, you ask?

They go to Niagara Falls, Ontario, across the gorge from the US city of the same name. As a child your reporter dwelled on the American side developing a hearty PCB fueled immune system while over on the Canadian side, young couples enjoyed a romantic view of the Horseshoe Falls, the Bridal Veil, and downriver The Whirlpool. My pal Lenny and I were way ahead of the global warming issue as reflected in this exchange:

Lenny: It’s hot today.

Me: Yeah.

Lenny: It’s gonna be hotter tomorrow.

Me: Hotter than today?

Lenny: Yeah.

Me: Are you gonna finish your PCBs?

Lenny: I’m full.

Lenny died at the seige of Khe Sanh in 1968. This what happens when I write about global warming which makes me think of Niagara Falls and that makes me think of him. You don’t have to be a scientist to know there are as many ways to die as there are reasons to impose the collective will whenever the urge arises. Unfortunately, fear of global warming may prove to be a form of optimism.

Gastropod Alley: The Island of Gill, a windswept volcanic cone, has selected the earl’s masterpiece VOLTAIRE’S MIASMA as book of the year. The island, once thought to be uninhabited, is a critics refuge designated by the Dowager Princess as “Her Blessed Sanctuary, Aviary, and Potting Shedde” allows no construction or banging of hammer upon nail. The four year round residents live in caves under an agreement of condominium with the Crown, Her Assigns, Bailiffs, Wastrels, and Appointees. Previous winners of the coveted Bipectinated Gill Award include Aldous Huxley, Reggie Jackson, A French Guy, Sonny Bono, and the front line of 1954 Baltimore Colts.

The Earl, resplendent in traditional chain mail, set foot on the island bearing news from loved ones. He was greeted at the shoreline by a penguin and a wind-battered Toyota. They set off with the penguin at the wheel making a course across the Rocky soil into the churning waves of Gastropod Alley. Unbeknownst to the earl, penguins are  drawn to the sea. Fortunately for all, the Spanish Galleon Balboa lurked nearby, no doubt plotting yet another assault on the unsuspecting citizens of Wellington Leg.

The Earl, hoisted aboard by heavy duty crane, was allowed to “drip-dry” while Viscount Panza interrogated the penguin. After cigars and brandy the penguin was put ashore with a warning about staging literary contests under false pretenses. A photo of the penguin was dispatched to Wellington Leg Police Headquarters where CSI Caruso agreed that, “this is the guy who promised me literary fame during a sting operation near Tierra del Fuego.”

Queen Isabella has promised to return the earl “as soon as back taxes are received from the Californias.” Fearing the earl may become a political football, NFL officials promised to review the tape and consult with the Players Union before demanding his unconditional release. CSI Caruso vowed swift justice noting “we are unique among mammals in that we play football. But there are rules. That’s where I come in.”

The Penguin appeared to be smiling on the windswept security video. “He’d had two or three glasses of cognac. That’s a lot for a penguin,” said DCI Borchardt. “The Toyota was stolen,” he added. “In 1978.” He carried a valid drivers license, the only endorsement being “the driver is a flightless bird who feels compelled to plunge into large bodies of water.” Pierre Trudeau reporting.

Thanks to the Roman numeral I can do sequel after sequel of this particular post; this is not a form of recycling, merely a guide to understanding the nature of this blog. At its heart this is about the aspiration shared by novelists and would be novelists to find an audience. Michael Blowhard of 2Blowhards provided a checklist of all the things that have to happen to get a book sold, the several points of sale imbedded in the process. Step one is to write a book. This is not optional although many aspirants seem to stumble here, preferring to float ideas for books to assorted publishing professionals. Wouldn’t it be fun if the business worked that way? Having ideas is relatively painless, often involuntary.

This model works this way: you’re taking a shower and an idea for a book hits you. Not yet dry, you’re on the blower to the William Morris Agency where an Ueberagent takes your call. She listens, rapt, puts you on hold, then sells your idea to Random House for a million dollars. It’s okay to dry your hair now, you’ve hit the jackpot. Nice work, by the way.
Option two is to write a book, read a lot, write another book, read some more, write a third and a fourth. The pitfalls of this approach are legion, of course, because writing books is time consuming. Years will pass. No outcome is assured.

I created Wellington Leg as a means of channeling the vagaries of Option Two into something fun. Everyone in towne is an aspiring author. The Earl sets the tone with his blundering. You may recall his being dragged across a train station platform clinging to Ian Rankin’s pantleg or swinging from a chandelier toward an agent in a ballroom. He can do these things, try out for the Yankees, thwart a Roman invasion, commune with his hogs, battle ravenous gastropods while surfing and still produce a novel as compelling as VOLTAIRE’S MIASMA. These are things aspiring writers do.

Few things are more liberating than writing a novel. At the same though few things are as constraining. Rules must be followed. Form must follow function; Gott im Himmel you’re building the Ultimate Reading Machine, smooth, fast, nice to look at, familiar yet different, not no much pushing the envelope as licking it. So many masters to serve with only the edge of the precipice as your guide.

This is my own NaNo moment. And the blog started it. Puzzled over Romanian spam I searched my own archives which is a lot like cleaning out the closet only to find a lurking Romanian in amongst the tweed jackets and fashion gaffes of yesteryear. I found the fragmentary remains of a novel I’d started, more than started, half completed, like one of those freeway overpasses going nowhere. What better time than now to finish?

And so I plan to finish The Black Forest by November 30. If I fail to complete on budget and on time I will clean my closet, in earnest this time, and get rid of the funny jacket and empty my briefcase as well. This will make a better writer. Why didn’t I think of this sooner?

If one metric for blogging success is the amount of Romanian spam received then this blog is a “runaway train with the dead man switch disabled” ( Wellington Leg After Dark). The post with the most from the archives is Mystery Solved: The Earl Fell Victim to an Abalone Attack. Spammers from around the globe have focused their attention on the aftermath of the Earl’s ill-advised surfing adventure off Santa Cruz. Faithful readers will recall that the earl fended off a Great Red, the most feared abalone. Red Abalone often reach a circumference of ten inches; if one calculates the distortion salt water provides, factors in the curve of the world, allows for global warming and the side-effects of cheap sunglasses, it’s easy to see why a Great Red in the wild would be really scary.

Skeptics thought the abalone incident was a “cheap publicity stunt” ( Wellington Leg Before Dark). If that was the case why are spammers from Western Australia, the Outer Hebrides, and Alberta so convinced otherwise? Professor Moriarity, an expert in Inadvertant Communication observed, “I think it’s obvious that the earl’s adventures have leap-frogged its intended audience to reach a dedicated cadre of Google bots in search of freedom of choice.”

Prudentia Chalfont-Smythe ( Her Lyrical Poetry) believes that under her stewardship One More Bite of the Apple would achieve a measure of respectability heretofore denied: “I think this abalone nonsense has kept us out of the New York Times.” Repeated calls to the Gray Lady went unanswered she said.

Prudentia will traveling this week, she goes on to say, which means the blog will lie fallow until she returns. The rest of the staff will be composing a mission statement to be presented to Management on All Hollows Eve. The dowager princess likes the Tigers, but that may be a ploy to curry favor with Detroit PD. She does hope her memoir will be selected by Starbucks although there are some racy bits from her days as an LA real estate developer. Century City, C’est Moi is a no holds barred if substantially false account of her adventures as a studio chief.

I’m sure by now our corner of the blogosphere is bursting with articles about the literary-genre divide which, for the average person, is an invisible crack in the sidewalk. I’m sure you recall avoiding sidewalk cracks, I certainly do, but the invisible variant was created by Billy, the only kid I knew equipped with 3D glasses. Billy called you out for stepping on invisible cracks. I had no idea he would go on to a career in marketing, or that he would wear his special 3D glasses many stories above the pavement in Midtown as a guru hired by industry so that Billy could tell them what it was they did for a living. This is how hedge funds were created. The Shopping Network. Billy did away with tokens to create the Metro Card; tokens were fun because you could stack them on your night table and feel prepared for the week.

Right after he dropped acid, Billy became a publishing guru. Believing  the stop lights on 57th Street to be the Aurora Borealis, he set out to bring clarity to the book world. He saw four thousand pin holes in his ceiling tiles and knew that if bookstores were divided into four thousand sections, he could spend the rest of his days drawing helpful diagrams, maps really, to navigate his burgeoning creation with the help of teenagers hired to direct traffic. Thus the wandering customer would be directed to the subcategory their interest demanded, or be told “we don’t carry that,” if the whim struck.

It has occurred to Billy that his device may be confusing to some and that many a weary customer, most of them middle-aged, lack the pioneer spirit to comb through the sections in search of that elusive book. Some are discouraged and leave without buying anything other than water to combat dehydration. Under fire, Billy created a New Releases Table heaped with all sorts of books with only their newness in common. New is the best genre of all. New: it even sounds good.

Elections in the DR Congo took a turn yesterday when one candidate sent tanks and troops to the home of the first runner up in the hopes of blowing his brains out. The object of this attention was holed up with more than a dozen foreign ambassadors including MONUC officials from the UN. A runoff is scheduled for October and it should be noted that over 70% of eligible voters cast ballots. Joseph Kabila is in the lead: his father, Laurent, overthrew Joseph Mobutu several years ago. Laurent Kabila was assassinated after he refused to honor pledges to the troops who fought for independence, choosing to import soldiers from the Great Lakes Coalition as a palace guard. The DR Congo used to be called Zaire and before that, the Belgian Congo. This is the first free election since independence in 1963.

When Mobutu was overthrown troops from the provinces entered the capital, Kinshasa, their first trip to a modern city. They rode elevators up and down in the city’s hotels while Mobutu slipped across the Congo River to exile in the ROC, the Republic of Congo. Mobutu’s sons drove around collecting gambling debts that night before they too escaped. Mobutu pere made off with a few billion dollars in American aid money, funds we have never been able to locate. We want our money back. Consider it a refund.

Kdogos are boys forced into military service by various armed factions. They are rounded up in refugee camps and given weapons along with an amulet to signify their status. Needless to say the atmosphere in the Congo has been dangerous for women and girls with shifting groups of soldiers and militia controlling towns and villages. Weapons are modern and plentiful, unlike most things. Let’s hope this election brings the Congolese people some peace after more than a decade of institutional insanity.

I’m reading Kate Atkinson’s CASE HISTORIES and enjoying her somewhat disjointed portrait of her private detective. She takes on the madness of vanished children from the points of view of surviving loved ones and then distills her character’s reaction through his experiences with these special people; Atkinson does a wonderful job of making this difficult group accessible despite the circumstances or, better yet, more accessible because of what has happened in their families.

With the earl imprisoned ONE MORE BITE OF THE APPLE has taken on a more professional tone, more of a literary blog than the mad blatherings of a novelist without portfolio or with the sort of portfolio that might land Newt on the cover of Vogue. This alteration had driven fans in some countries, Japan, for example, away while pulling some of the Eastern Bloc, Italy and Germany. Again our solid coterie of retirees in Costa Rica seem to visit no matter what’s going on, a tribute to the effects of retirement or the diminished state of daytime television. I don’t think Oprah discusses Mothra that often because if she did this blog would be out of business.

I’m trying to think of a creative way to make this more interesting, to focus on authors featured here even when they don’t have a new release. This thought is enshrined in its very own paragraph since it is unrelated to Mothra, Oprah, things to do in Costa Rica. What shall we do with this thing?