Smokey Mountain Breakdown

Well, I'm working on a few stories for November. But I'm prolly not going to post them on the blog. I'd like to...but it seems that submissions people don't like you to do that. I'm shopping "The Dark Hole" around now...and it's very limiting where I can send it since they don't like you to have put stuff up on your blog. But...I may break down and share some of them.

The first story I'm working on is called "The Ghosts are Dancing". I’ve been working on it for a while, but haven’t gotten my ending yet. The title comes from the Cherokee myth of the great flood. It goes something like this:

This is what the old women told me when I was a girl. The dog came to the man and said, “You must build a boat for a great deluge is coming.” The man expressed some disbelief at this and the dog said, “If you do not believe me, look at the bones on my neck. And the man looked at the dog’s neck and saw that the bones were showing. So, he built a great boat and he and his family rode out the storm in it. The waters rose until they covered the mountain tops and then receded. When the man and his family finally left the boat after the waters had receded, they built a great fire and had a celebration. While they were dancing, they heard drums in the distance over the next mountain. The next day, they tried to find where the drums were coming from, but all they found was a huge mound of human bones. And it was then that they realized that the ghosts were dancing.

I’ll go in and do some research tomorrow at the library while Fat Buddy is getting his teeth done and try to get it tied together. I know the main events in the story, which is about a devastating flood that happened here, but I don’t know where it’s going. I like to have my beginning, middle and end in my head before I get a story together.

The second story that I’m working on is called, “Jo-Jo and the Chicken Boy”. Think The Yearling meets Old Yeller in a cock fighting ring.

The third story and the one I’m having most fun with is called “Porn and Donuts”. I got the idea last Monday when I was going to Newport and as I made the turn to I-40 there was an inflatable sex doll laying there on the verge of the exit ramp all by its lonesome. And I started thinking about all the weird news stories I’ve heard in Tennessee. The porn/adult novelty store hold-up... the robbers who made their getaway in the Krispy-Kreme delivery truck. Stuff like that. So…I’ve got a couple of hapless pill pushers on an increasingly absurd crime spree across east Tennessee. It should be funny.

So...that's what I have planned for right now. Didn't do much today. I keep putting off making the appointment for the biopsy. But I sort of need to do that.