Chapter 1 - Part 2

Jessie sighed.  Her eyes narrowed like little blue icicles on me.  “Fine, I’ll go fifty yards into the old tunnel but no more!  Don’t forget, you were the one who didn’t want to come last time.”

“Ah, shove it.” I tried to hide the red in my face.  “I’m ten  now, and I’m not afraid of the dark like when I was eight!” 

I glanced out into the darkness. Everything felt deathly still as we slid down the embankment scattering gravel beneath our feet.  The night seemed colder.  Even the moon had vanished behind a shroud of clouds.  It was pitch black except for the dim beam cast upon our path by my flashlight. 

“Let’s get going, Jessie.”

Slipping down the slope, I rolled into a crouch at the flat base of the ravine. The moon rose like a specter along the cold iron bars shimmering like the belly of a slain dragon.  The rails led along rough gravel choked with weeds and straight towards a gaping hole like a dark mouth in the side of the hill.  I stepped carefully over rusted rail ties balancing myself carefully on one side of the steel bars polished smooth with travel long ago.  Behind me the huge gnarled branches of the birch forest wove a dim opening where the rail vanished into the overgrowth.

I stepped over the track only to trip over a rusty cross bar.  My pants sunk into something thick.  Reaching down, I realized I’d fallen into tar.  I glared at my sister who stifled a giggle.

 “Come on, Justin.  We don’t have all night to sit around.  It’s not like you have to worry about trains since the line’s been abandoned for years now.”

The cavernous black orifice groaned with the passing wind through its empty fissures.  The night was very cold biting into my skin like tiny pins of chill.  I noticed Jessie bundle herself deeper into her parka.  A gust of wind escaped the gaping maw chilling me to the bone. 

Jessie stopped on the side of the tracks and shook her head.  “Justin, I don’t like this.  Let’s just go home.”

 I tried to hide the fear in my voice.  “Fine, just take the picture of me outside.  That will be good enough.  The guys won’t be able to top that.”

“OK, back up a little bit.”

I followed her instructions and walked back into the darkness outside the tunnel mouth a few yards from Jessie.  I felt nervous standing there as she reached into her pocket and held up the camera. 

“Back a little more … OK!  Perfect!  Now hold still.” The camera flashed.  “Great!  Let’s go!”

“Wait!”  I said.  “I need to take a look.”  I started toward her when I felt an icy chill through the flimsy canvas of my sneakers. 

 Looking down, I noticed a creeping fog floating out of the tunnel mouth, a swirling river of vapor that filled the entire gorge.  “Justin,” I heard the worry in my sister’s voice.  “Why is there fog coming out of the tunnel?”

The Opening for Phantom Express

I think the opening of the book is the thing that has changed the most over the years.  This is mostly the result of critique groups where I could only bring ten pages for others to read.  As such, I always chose the first ten pages because it needed little explanation like the rest of the book would have.  I cannot say how many reiterations of this particular page I went through in fifteen years of sharing it.  Part of me wonders if the rest of the book should have gone this deep under the microscope, but in a way I am glad it didn't.

There came a point maybe six years ago where I decided enough was enough and I basically scrapped everything I had up to the previous point and rewrote the whole book.  I kept the same two main characters, the same basic idea of the story but I was so tired of seeing just the first chapter that I needed to write a completely new book.  I suppose I could have shared much more, given background of other chapters for critique but I wanted the opening to be the best it could be so that it would catch a publisher's eye. 

Looking at it now, I'm very happy with the result, though its the process which I lament.  I hear about authors taking years to write books but I never imagined that this project would take this long. 

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!