Aboard the Phantom Express - Chapter 1 - Part 1

 

A cold wind crept in with the late hour rustling restless as a child through the birch trees of the long ravine.  It leaped from branch to branch slipping around me like an opaque coat of auburn colors. I made my hiding place in the gravel beneath the dark roots of an old oak, my hands tucked into the furrows of my oversized red sweatshirt against the sudden chill.  The noise of my watch alarm clicked jolting me out of near sleep.  I glanced down at the illuminated numbers there.  Midnight!  Where was Jessie?

Reaching into the big pocket of my jacket, I found the cold steel shape of my flashlight and switched it on.   Everything around me was inky black except for the faint light I now had.  Below me I could just make out the shimmering outline of train tracks at the very bottom of the ravine. 

“You’d better not stand me up, Sis,” I thought.  “Would be just like her to leave me out here while she stays all nice and comfy back home.” I felt something clinging to my head.  Reaching up I brushed it off, a few leaves falling to the muddy earth.

Suddenly, bony fingers grasped against my shoulder from behind.  I felt my hair stand on end.  A prickle went up my spine.  I came up like a rocket whirling around with my flashlight ready as my only weapon of defense and stopped dead still.  It was only Jessie.

“Did I scare you, Justin?”

“You just startled me, Jessie,”  I said glaring her down. She looked like she was going to Antarctica dressed in a bulky parka and scarf over those same blue-grey overalls of hers.   “You look like a yeti in that get up.  Where are you going, Alaska?”

 “Oh, that’s funny coming from you, nature boy.  I warned you that the news said it would get cold tonight and here you are in just your jeans and that measly little sweatshirt.”

I rolled my eyes and lied like the good twin brother I was.  “It’s not that cold.   Besides,  you were supposed to be here at midnight, Jessie.”

“It’s not like I can just waltz out right under Dad’s nose.  You’re lucky he didn’t ask where you were when he got home and just fell asleep on the couch like always. We shouldn’t even be out here this late.  He’ll go ballistic if he finds out.”

“He won’t find out!  Did you bring the camera?” 

“That was my end of the deal.   Now if you don’t mind, I’m going back home.”

 “Hey, hold on!  Who’s going to take my picture so I have proof I did this?”

 “You’re the one who made the stupid bet with the kids in your class.  You take the picture, Justin.”

I held onto her arm. “I can’t take a picture of myself going into the tunnel.  It’s too hard to get the image right if I can’t see it.  Come on.  It will be quick … I promise.” 

{So begins my posting of some parts of Aboard the Phantom Express}

For the Birds

So, I decided to go off on a tangent today.   Last Sunday my father dug out the old bread making machine to try to make bread.  Unfortunately it came out like a brick with the top sort of mutilated and looking like it fallen out of a mixing machine and then just hardened into clumps.    The bread itself was awful and he was about to throw it out when I suggested I take it home.  I wanted to let it harden and feed it to the birds that frequent my garden.  I figured that birds will eat just about anything.  Boy was I wrong.

This darn bread lived up to every bad expectation.  I put the hardened chunks in the feeder and the birds wouldn't even peck at it.  When I sprinkled seed about in the pan they pecked around the bread to get at the seed.  Finally the local blue jay stopped by.  Now this little fellow is quite the character and he eats almost anything I put out there.  He took one peck of that bread and then tossed it aside to get at some other juicy morsel the other birds had left behind.

Ultimately, my dad's bread turned out to be fit for neither man nor bird.

Some Fresh Ideas

Recently I joined the wonderful San Fansisco Writer's Online University  after the suggestion from an editor for another project.  This page is an inspiration, a wonderful resource for myself and anyone who is a writer in this day and age.  Joining is free, and there are online lessons for podcast that you can download for free.  You can also pay a minimum fee for more robust subjects of podcast.  Both areas cover anything from blogging, to editing, to inspiring characters to just writing in general. 

After taking a moment to look through some of the ideas, I have decided to incorporate them into my blog.  I am going to try to start blogging every day, if not three times a week or more, talking about Aboard the Phantom Express and my ideas surrounding it.  I want to see my blog grow with this site's help, and I am certain it will do so. 

One of the things I am most excited about is to start blogging my book.  As a self-published novel, this will be a great way to expose my book to the public so that everyone can see what I've been talking about all this time.  My first post will be my hook, of course, to get readers.  From there, I will try to talk about passages of the book and discuss how and why I wrote them. So, here is to  Phantom Train back on track!

The Publishing Gamble

Well, I have just submitted Phantom Express to Chronicle Books in the hope that they will see what so many people have in my little book.   It's always such an exciting prospect sending to a publisher or an agent, but there's also so much nerves at stake.  I think the best I can liken it to is playing poker.  I know, I know, publishing and gambling are nothing alike, but they share many things in common. 

Like gambling, publishing takes a lot of luck and a lot of nerve.  You have to know how to play your cards right, to read the table.  The publisher is the house, they hold all the stakes and the house nearly always wins when it comes to accepting your bet.  As a writer its so easy to try to steel your nerves and then have them utterly crushed when you get a rejection letter.  A rejection letter is as much a blow as losing a big hand.  You can be so sure of winning, only to have just a slightly lower hand.

In my case, I hope that I'm holding a flush when it comes to Chronicle. I hope they'll see my gambler's mentality in approaching an independent publisher for my unique work.  I think they'll look at my hand, see what I have and see how they can benefit by it.  After all, in gambling and writing, the house always wants you to come back and spend more.

Switching tracks

For a while now I have been lacking what might be the most important thing in a writer's life, a spark of imagination.  Its so easy to get distracted in life, what with tv, internet, radio, work and just general life.  So often I read about writers and how writing is an almost religious experience.  Writers spend hours just finding the right location, they stick to a steady schedule of writing, break and more writing. 

I suppose it is easy for a writer who writes as their one profession, they can devote endless hours to preparing for writing, but I have little bits of time here and there with work and other things.  It becomes a struggle to put thoughts together, to coordinate them.  Its easy to become discouraged as well with a lack of other writers to work with.  So many groups meet at times that are completely different from what I can attend.  It seems like the whole writing world is on one schedule and level of life and I am on another that is the exact opposite.

I draw once again to my analogy of a train for this blog.  At the moment, I am chugging along at a slow pace, regaining my momentum.  Ahead lays a switchboard of opportunities, and I need to decide where I need to go and what I need to do to get there.   There's plenty of room for mistakes, for chances taken or lost, but that's the way it is with any thing in life. 

I think and hope that this blog will help me continue to flesh some of my own frustrations or thoughts about writing.  I just have to remain on track!

A Last Night in Lake Tahoe

It is with a sense of sad nostalgia that I write this tonight.  As I sit here with the window open, I hear the smooth sound of the waves of Lake Tahoe splashing upon the shore.  I feel the bitter, wonderful bite of the icy cold, and see the reflection of white snow upon trees, buildings and ground.  Far beyond, I see only twinkling of the distant lights of the far side of the lake.  Everything else is eerily quiet, cold and still. 

It is the last night here, the last night of my 29th birthday vacation.  Tomorrow we will take the long drive back home, back to work and reality.  It does feel like the waking of a long and wonderful dream.  We've done so much, and so little in our short week here.  We've taken a walk through the touristy nature trail, seen salmon swimming up the rapid stream, the fall colors.  We toured around the old mansions and homesteads of our fore-bearers, those who came up to enjoy this lake in the past centuries.

We walked up the side of a great mountain, Mt. Tallac, about 5-6 miles by reckoning, along a rocky path.  We stopped for lunch at an old resort camp, sat down upon the rock with nothing but the wilds of the mountains, just us for miles and miles.  Peanut butter and jelly never tasted so good.

We did a lot of nothing too, sitting and reading.  Walking and enjoying the freshly fallen snow.  We sat and watched it cascade down, and watched the wind whip up the dark waters of the lake.  We ate well, enjoying meals at such wonderful restaurants and home.  

At long last though, it is time to go home.  I wish we didn't have to leave.  I could die tomorrow and probably be very happy.  This is what it must feel like to retire, to have no worries or concerns.  I could stay up here forever, within the reach of the wilds of nature but also comfortably in civilization.  Alas, I cannot for now at least.  But here is to dreaming.

The First Snow

It is only November first, and already soft drifts of snow float down outside my window.  I am at home, in Southshore Lake Tahoe just three days after my 29th birthday and as I watch each tiny fleck I feel as if I am gazing out into a large and wondrous snowglobe.  The snow seems to hover in the darkness as if borne on tiny wings, the wind casting it to and fro to land upon the roofs in thick clumps.  It has only been an hour and it is already thick as a pillow blanket. 

This is the best weather for writing that I can imagine.  There is nothing quite like sitting in the black of night, with snow whipping outside.  There's a fire in the fireplace, hot cocoa ready at my convenience, life is pretty good.  I can sit without a worry in the world and concentrate upon my work.  Its Christmas kind of weather, so far from the sunny and probably warm and hot of San Luis Obispo where I live. 

We don't really have seasons back at home, which is something I do miss terribly.  We basically have summer, indian summer, a semi-winter, and an allergy season (which is part of summer.)  There's no fall color, there's no snow.  We sometimes get hail or a freeze, but nothing like this.  I think that this is the sort of weather that appeals to most of us when we think of warm and cozy. 

Tomorrow, I will wake to a world of white.  Where everything will be clean, cold and crisp.  Everything will be blanketed in a thick waist high layer of snow.  Kids will be out sledding, making snowballs, and animals will probably be gathering what foodstuffs they can for this strange "early" winter.  I can step outside for a moment and take in the lovely white, cold, and then step back into my comfortable space and look out to the wonders of the first snow.