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shadowkatOkay...having another one of those late night panics which keep me up until the wee hours of the morning. Alongside a whole long list of things no one wants to know about, I'm trying to figure out what product, service or idea I should devise a marketing plan on. I need to come up with something and email it to my Marketing teacher prior to September 30.
If anyone has any ideas? Please help! No guarantees I'll use them - but would be mucho appreciated since my mind is a complete and utter blank at the moment. It can be a business I'm interested in starting (yeah right) or just something that sounds like fun. All I can think of at the moment is marketing the tv show Angel, which somehow I can't see flying, plus the embarrassment qoutient.
To distract myself from the late night panic, I'm going to post a little of a story I'm fiddling with...nothing major, just a little something I thought I'd play with in live journal. Have no idea where I'm going with it. As you can see - I don't outline, I just let the characters pull me where-ever, then I go back and revise and try to make sense out of it. By the seat of your pants/stream of consciousness writing style - more or less.
Connor Griffiths lost his sight when he was sixteen years old, a freak accident with a bunch of chemicals in photo lab. He dreamed of becoming an animator, a creator of cartoons. Not that animation required photography, but it helped to understand the film development process or so he had believed at the time. Gifted with a photographic memory, he remembered every single thing his eyes had seen within those years. Most of those ingrained images had been cartoons, all sorts of cartoons. Just by the sound effects, he could tell you what was happening, which characters were being chased, which characters were losing, what they looked like. Because cartoons didn’t change much over time at least not the classics.
Now over thirty years later, Connor Griffiths collected vintage cartoons. Collectors asked his advice regarding the price and quality of cartoons. Restorers consulted him regarding the sound effects and proper cuts. In return, they gave him first editions of their restoration efforts; he didn’t want money. In his spare time, he worked as an archivist for a New York firm in Manhattan. Losing his sight enhanced other qualities, such as hearing, smell, touch, and taste. He had learned in the intervening years that one did not always need eyes to see. With his ears he watched the rain patter against the windowpane and with his nose he saw his mother move languidly across a room.
The law firm was an odd place with a variety of sounds and smells and touches. He’d gotten the job a few months ago – after he moved there from Kansas City to take care of his invalid mother. She protested of course, but he told her they could take care of each other, the blind leading the infirm. She stopped protesting. The last year had, she admitted, taken its toll on her, what with the two weeks of total darkness and then the week of complete bliss followed by utter chaos. People didn’t leave their homes for at least three months. Manhattan and the surrounding environs had become a town of agoraphobics. His mother, Connor thought, had always had a vivid imagination – but her descriptions of some of the things she’d seen in Manhattan even gave him pause. “And here I thought I was the one supposedly living in a fantasy world,” he’d muttered to her.
“Come to Manhattan and see …” She caught herself, with an apologetic gasp and quickly covered. “ I mean find out for yourself.”
He chuckled. Blind for over thirty years and Mom still struggled with it. Odd that, considering he’d made his peace with it ages ago. “I may just do that…not like anything keeping me here.” Ain’t that the truth, he’d thought at the time. Single. Working in the bowels of the City Archives, coming home to an empty apartment each night. And of course the constant patter of rain. It seemed to rain more than anything else in Kansas City this year. Be nice to go somewhere with some sunshine. His mother was always raving about the pleasant weather in Manhattan. Said outside of those two weeks, it had been sunny every single day, not a cloud in the sky, almost as if the weather was making up for the absence of the sun. So he packed his meager belongings, hopped a plane and flew out to New York. One week later he meet with some Brit, who smelled of mint aftershave, musk, and stale leather, regarding the upkeep of the big Winters’ law firm’s archives. The Brit asked him the craziest questions – like how he’d lost his vision, if he had any paranormal experiences, and whether he believed in demons. He wondered if the Brit was simply bonkers and almost turned down the job. But it paid well, the hours were good, and people mostly left him alone. Besides – the law firm had some connections in the cartoon world – so he got to add to his collection.
* * * * * *
Nancy Littleton wanted to disappear. She had erased her name, her fingerprints, and all traces of her identity with a few clicks on a computer screen. Hacking into the government records had not been all that difficult, no more difficult than hacking into the social security files or any other database, although it helped that she was an expert when it came to computer programs, used to build mainframes for a living. Now she worked as low-level office clerk typing in documents for a bunch of lawyers. Her appearance was different too, instead of contacts, she wore maroon rimmed glasses, her blond hair was now a mousy non-descript brown, and she seldom if ever wore makeup. She gave up her comfortable silk dresses and fashionable pants-suites for drab tweed, deliberately buying clothes at the local thrift store. She chose the drabbest and frumpiest garments she could find. Each outfit consisted of a dark navy polyester sports jacket, a long, just below the knee-length skirt, a non-descript oxford shirt, sweater or vest. She wore her hair below her shoulders in a long schoolgirl braid. Occasionally she added little touches like a brown floppy hat, a long weather-beaten wool jacket or dangling earrings. On her feet, she wore penny loafers or low heels. She also made an effort to slouch as much as possible, providing her with the overall appearance of a mouse scurrying beneath a shell. As a result, her co-workers tended to ignore her, allowing her to effectively fade into the woodwork.
No one would recognize her from her former life as head of programming at LeHigh Industries. That woman, as far as the world was concerned, no longer existed. Nancy had effectively erased that identity and with it all of her problems. The only person at Waltham, Winters and Byrd who noticed Nancy was the blind man who managed the archives. For Nancy, for all her effort, possessed the musty scent of rain-washed rose petals on a warm spring morning, a peculiar scent to be sure, but one that brought back all sorts of wonderful memories to Connor Griffiths who saw the world through his nose and ears, not his eyes. Nancy’s voice had not completely changed, except for an nasality and a harsh slurring of “r’s”; she still retained the Midwestern twang she was born with.
* * * * *
Kyle Mann liked sleeping next to the brick walls of WW and Byrd or what he liked to refer to as the Byrd Cage with a sarcastic cackle. The warmth of the subway grates and the shelter of the stacked bricks made a nice crib for a man without a place to call home. Homeless since The 2001 World Trade Center disaster, Mann made due. No job to speak of, just what he could grab begging on the subways or on the streets, these walls were the only home he could afford. Food he grabbed from trashcans, sympathetic passers-by or the people who worked in the Cage.
The Cage wasn’t all brick and mortar of course, only the back end of it that braced two alleys. The front was tempered glass, which screened out the harmful rays of the sun. Solid steel girders framed the glass windows and rose twenty stories into the sky, they crisscrossed each other back down again creating the effect of a gilded Cage. Mann would gaze up at it and marvel at how the sun reflected off the sides casting the windows in shades of gold. His little pad was at the bottom between two trash bins and over a subway grating which was warm in the winter and cool in the summer. He used left over cardboard boxes and discarded umbrellas to shield himself from the elements. For a bed, he’d grabbed an old weather beaten mattress. Milk cartons made a table. To cart his stuff around, he used an old grocery store cart. It was, he thought, amazing how well someone could live in New York if they put their mind to it.
* * * * *
Daria Cavendish stood on the edge of the subway platform contemplating for the second time that month what it would feel like to step off of it and in front of a coming train. In her purse she had a .22 revolver, with two bullets lodged in the chambers. But stepping in front of an oncoming train almost seemed more inviting. Would her death be quick? Painless? Or long and agonizing? Would she break every bone in her body? What, she wondered would it be like to be smashed into hundreds of pieces or just squashed? And once she was gone, would that be it? Would it finally be over? This meaningless existence of scanning the net for job after job after job. Even the online discussion boards she frequented no longer held much appeal or relief, all it was doing was compounding her internal frustration. Not to mention all those hours she’d spent thinking about her ex and his rich successful attorney girlfriend, Lilah Maitland. She shivered in revulsion just imagining the two of them together was enough to make her want to heave. Looking down at the metal tracks and the small stream of water that trickled between them, a solitary rat ducking in and out of the holes along the wall, she considered the roar of the on-coming train. One quick leap, she thought. It would be so easy. And far less haphazard then shooting herself or her skunk of an ex-husband –what if her aim was off? She teetered on the edge, but just before the train roared into the tunnel, a blind man hobbled towards her with his walking stick, lightly nudging her leg with the tip. With a muffled apology, she quickly side-step out of his way, sinking back against the column as much to avoid colliding with the man as to avoid falling into the gap. She hated her life. She hated what it had become. There were times she wondered if it meant anything at all. If there was a purpose for her to even be here. Tonight was one of those times.
The train whizzed to a stop in front of her and she climbed on board, sinking into one of the plastic bucket orange and yellow seats. She averted her eyes from the woman who sat opposite her in her slick white sleeveless blouse, tight black skirt, pumps and fashion model looks. Opening her copy of Anne Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, she found her mind wandering over the last two hours as opposed to paying attention to the words on the page. Her life felt like a series of bolted doors in a long hallway, which she kept trying to open over and over again with no results. The friends she’d gone out with tonight had been kind but inquisitive, asking her questions she didn’t know how to answer and didn’t really want to.
* * * * *
Josiah W. Pike, alias the Preacher, sucked on a cigarette while the train rolled to a stop. Garbed in a long black leather coat, black wife-beater t-shirt, and black jeans, pale white hair, he looked like a punk rocker from the West Village circa 1977. He dropped the cig stubbing it out with the bottom of his boot heel. He seldom took the subway, preferred cabs, or the motorcycle, but tonight necessity demanded it. Sauntering through the doors he whooshed to the other side of the car and leaned against the closed doors and metal seat divider. The train smelled of human flesh and blood and it made his hands twitch. After all this time the cravings still lingered, making him grit his teeth. The chit who sat across from him seemed as twitchy as he felt. He glanced at her through lowered lids, pretty, he thought. A little thin for his taste, but pretty. Reminded him a bit of…his thoughts drifted, best not to think of her. The bit of a thing that changed his life, caused him to go down this road to begin with for all the good it was doing him. Wasn’t like she chose him now was it, what with all her talk about salvation. Course…when he thought about it, he never really did it for her. Nope this was about saving what little there was left of his immortal soul. Making a contribution, that was it. A difference. He sighed, wishing he could smoke on the train, if no one else was on it he would – fuck the consequences. But the girl across from him made him pause so just played with his lighter instead, flipping it open and closed in his pocket.
The chit seemed fidgety, he thought, in her long sleeved cardigan sweater and black slacks, a purse propped on her knees beneath a blue and white jacketed book. She kept glancing up from her book every five minutes checking the black windows across from her then glancing down again, clearly re-reading the same paragraphs over and over. She wore almost no jewelry, not even a cross. Also no perfume. Nice legs though beneath the skirt which rose just above her knee. Always appreciated a nice pair of gams on a chit. Breasts not all that big, he noted, but the gams made up for it. He smirked, leaning against the doors, as she nervously crossed and uncrossed her legs.
At the twenty-sixth and third avenue stop on the number 6 train, the chit got up, tucked her book into her bag and pressed her way past Pike. In her rush she hadn’t zipped the bag close completely and the butt of her gun peeked between the folds as the bag brushed against Pike’s arm.
**************************************
Well that's as far as I got so far.
Let me know if you liked it. Thanks.
If anyone has any ideas? Please help! No guarantees I'll use them - but would be mucho appreciated since my mind is a complete and utter blank at the moment. It can be a business I'm interested in starting (yeah right) or just something that sounds like fun. All I can think of at the moment is marketing the tv show Angel, which somehow I can't see flying, plus the embarrassment qoutient.
To distract myself from the late night panic, I'm going to post a little of a story I'm fiddling with...nothing major, just a little something I thought I'd play with in live journal. Have no idea where I'm going with it. As you can see - I don't outline, I just let the characters pull me where-ever, then I go back and revise and try to make sense out of it. By the seat of your pants/stream of consciousness writing style - more or less.
Connor Griffiths lost his sight when he was sixteen years old, a freak accident with a bunch of chemicals in photo lab. He dreamed of becoming an animator, a creator of cartoons. Not that animation required photography, but it helped to understand the film development process or so he had believed at the time. Gifted with a photographic memory, he remembered every single thing his eyes had seen within those years. Most of those ingrained images had been cartoons, all sorts of cartoons. Just by the sound effects, he could tell you what was happening, which characters were being chased, which characters were losing, what they looked like. Because cartoons didn’t change much over time at least not the classics.
Now over thirty years later, Connor Griffiths collected vintage cartoons. Collectors asked his advice regarding the price and quality of cartoons. Restorers consulted him regarding the sound effects and proper cuts. In return, they gave him first editions of their restoration efforts; he didn’t want money. In his spare time, he worked as an archivist for a New York firm in Manhattan. Losing his sight enhanced other qualities, such as hearing, smell, touch, and taste. He had learned in the intervening years that one did not always need eyes to see. With his ears he watched the rain patter against the windowpane and with his nose he saw his mother move languidly across a room.
The law firm was an odd place with a variety of sounds and smells and touches. He’d gotten the job a few months ago – after he moved there from Kansas City to take care of his invalid mother. She protested of course, but he told her they could take care of each other, the blind leading the infirm. She stopped protesting. The last year had, she admitted, taken its toll on her, what with the two weeks of total darkness and then the week of complete bliss followed by utter chaos. People didn’t leave their homes for at least three months. Manhattan and the surrounding environs had become a town of agoraphobics. His mother, Connor thought, had always had a vivid imagination – but her descriptions of some of the things she’d seen in Manhattan even gave him pause. “And here I thought I was the one supposedly living in a fantasy world,” he’d muttered to her.
“Come to Manhattan and see …” She caught herself, with an apologetic gasp and quickly covered. “ I mean find out for yourself.”
He chuckled. Blind for over thirty years and Mom still struggled with it. Odd that, considering he’d made his peace with it ages ago. “I may just do that…not like anything keeping me here.” Ain’t that the truth, he’d thought at the time. Single. Working in the bowels of the City Archives, coming home to an empty apartment each night. And of course the constant patter of rain. It seemed to rain more than anything else in Kansas City this year. Be nice to go somewhere with some sunshine. His mother was always raving about the pleasant weather in Manhattan. Said outside of those two weeks, it had been sunny every single day, not a cloud in the sky, almost as if the weather was making up for the absence of the sun. So he packed his meager belongings, hopped a plane and flew out to New York. One week later he meet with some Brit, who smelled of mint aftershave, musk, and stale leather, regarding the upkeep of the big Winters’ law firm’s archives. The Brit asked him the craziest questions – like how he’d lost his vision, if he had any paranormal experiences, and whether he believed in demons. He wondered if the Brit was simply bonkers and almost turned down the job. But it paid well, the hours were good, and people mostly left him alone. Besides – the law firm had some connections in the cartoon world – so he got to add to his collection.
* * * * * *
Nancy Littleton wanted to disappear. She had erased her name, her fingerprints, and all traces of her identity with a few clicks on a computer screen. Hacking into the government records had not been all that difficult, no more difficult than hacking into the social security files or any other database, although it helped that she was an expert when it came to computer programs, used to build mainframes for a living. Now she worked as low-level office clerk typing in documents for a bunch of lawyers. Her appearance was different too, instead of contacts, she wore maroon rimmed glasses, her blond hair was now a mousy non-descript brown, and she seldom if ever wore makeup. She gave up her comfortable silk dresses and fashionable pants-suites for drab tweed, deliberately buying clothes at the local thrift store. She chose the drabbest and frumpiest garments she could find. Each outfit consisted of a dark navy polyester sports jacket, a long, just below the knee-length skirt, a non-descript oxford shirt, sweater or vest. She wore her hair below her shoulders in a long schoolgirl braid. Occasionally she added little touches like a brown floppy hat, a long weather-beaten wool jacket or dangling earrings. On her feet, she wore penny loafers or low heels. She also made an effort to slouch as much as possible, providing her with the overall appearance of a mouse scurrying beneath a shell. As a result, her co-workers tended to ignore her, allowing her to effectively fade into the woodwork.
No one would recognize her from her former life as head of programming at LeHigh Industries. That woman, as far as the world was concerned, no longer existed. Nancy had effectively erased that identity and with it all of her problems. The only person at Waltham, Winters and Byrd who noticed Nancy was the blind man who managed the archives. For Nancy, for all her effort, possessed the musty scent of rain-washed rose petals on a warm spring morning, a peculiar scent to be sure, but one that brought back all sorts of wonderful memories to Connor Griffiths who saw the world through his nose and ears, not his eyes. Nancy’s voice had not completely changed, except for an nasality and a harsh slurring of “r’s”; she still retained the Midwestern twang she was born with.
* * * * *
Kyle Mann liked sleeping next to the brick walls of WW and Byrd or what he liked to refer to as the Byrd Cage with a sarcastic cackle. The warmth of the subway grates and the shelter of the stacked bricks made a nice crib for a man without a place to call home. Homeless since The 2001 World Trade Center disaster, Mann made due. No job to speak of, just what he could grab begging on the subways or on the streets, these walls were the only home he could afford. Food he grabbed from trashcans, sympathetic passers-by or the people who worked in the Cage.
The Cage wasn’t all brick and mortar of course, only the back end of it that braced two alleys. The front was tempered glass, which screened out the harmful rays of the sun. Solid steel girders framed the glass windows and rose twenty stories into the sky, they crisscrossed each other back down again creating the effect of a gilded Cage. Mann would gaze up at it and marvel at how the sun reflected off the sides casting the windows in shades of gold. His little pad was at the bottom between two trash bins and over a subway grating which was warm in the winter and cool in the summer. He used left over cardboard boxes and discarded umbrellas to shield himself from the elements. For a bed, he’d grabbed an old weather beaten mattress. Milk cartons made a table. To cart his stuff around, he used an old grocery store cart. It was, he thought, amazing how well someone could live in New York if they put their mind to it.
* * * * *
Daria Cavendish stood on the edge of the subway platform contemplating for the second time that month what it would feel like to step off of it and in front of a coming train. In her purse she had a .22 revolver, with two bullets lodged in the chambers. But stepping in front of an oncoming train almost seemed more inviting. Would her death be quick? Painless? Or long and agonizing? Would she break every bone in her body? What, she wondered would it be like to be smashed into hundreds of pieces or just squashed? And once she was gone, would that be it? Would it finally be over? This meaningless existence of scanning the net for job after job after job. Even the online discussion boards she frequented no longer held much appeal or relief, all it was doing was compounding her internal frustration. Not to mention all those hours she’d spent thinking about her ex and his rich successful attorney girlfriend, Lilah Maitland. She shivered in revulsion just imagining the two of them together was enough to make her want to heave. Looking down at the metal tracks and the small stream of water that trickled between them, a solitary rat ducking in and out of the holes along the wall, she considered the roar of the on-coming train. One quick leap, she thought. It would be so easy. And far less haphazard then shooting herself or her skunk of an ex-husband –what if her aim was off? She teetered on the edge, but just before the train roared into the tunnel, a blind man hobbled towards her with his walking stick, lightly nudging her leg with the tip. With a muffled apology, she quickly side-step out of his way, sinking back against the column as much to avoid colliding with the man as to avoid falling into the gap. She hated her life. She hated what it had become. There were times she wondered if it meant anything at all. If there was a purpose for her to even be here. Tonight was one of those times.
The train whizzed to a stop in front of her and she climbed on board, sinking into one of the plastic bucket orange and yellow seats. She averted her eyes from the woman who sat opposite her in her slick white sleeveless blouse, tight black skirt, pumps and fashion model looks. Opening her copy of Anne Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, she found her mind wandering over the last two hours as opposed to paying attention to the words on the page. Her life felt like a series of bolted doors in a long hallway, which she kept trying to open over and over again with no results. The friends she’d gone out with tonight had been kind but inquisitive, asking her questions she didn’t know how to answer and didn’t really want to.
* * * * *
Josiah W. Pike, alias the Preacher, sucked on a cigarette while the train rolled to a stop. Garbed in a long black leather coat, black wife-beater t-shirt, and black jeans, pale white hair, he looked like a punk rocker from the West Village circa 1977. He dropped the cig stubbing it out with the bottom of his boot heel. He seldom took the subway, preferred cabs, or the motorcycle, but tonight necessity demanded it. Sauntering through the doors he whooshed to the other side of the car and leaned against the closed doors and metal seat divider. The train smelled of human flesh and blood and it made his hands twitch. After all this time the cravings still lingered, making him grit his teeth. The chit who sat across from him seemed as twitchy as he felt. He glanced at her through lowered lids, pretty, he thought. A little thin for his taste, but pretty. Reminded him a bit of…his thoughts drifted, best not to think of her. The bit of a thing that changed his life, caused him to go down this road to begin with for all the good it was doing him. Wasn’t like she chose him now was it, what with all her talk about salvation. Course…when he thought about it, he never really did it for her. Nope this was about saving what little there was left of his immortal soul. Making a contribution, that was it. A difference. He sighed, wishing he could smoke on the train, if no one else was on it he would – fuck the consequences. But the girl across from him made him pause so just played with his lighter instead, flipping it open and closed in his pocket.
The chit seemed fidgety, he thought, in her long sleeved cardigan sweater and black slacks, a purse propped on her knees beneath a blue and white jacketed book. She kept glancing up from her book every five minutes checking the black windows across from her then glancing down again, clearly re-reading the same paragraphs over and over. She wore almost no jewelry, not even a cross. Also no perfume. Nice legs though beneath the skirt which rose just above her knee. Always appreciated a nice pair of gams on a chit. Breasts not all that big, he noted, but the gams made up for it. He smirked, leaning against the doors, as she nervously crossed and uncrossed her legs.
At the twenty-sixth and third avenue stop on the number 6 train, the chit got up, tucked her book into her bag and pressed her way past Pike. In her rush she hadn’t zipped the bag close completely and the butt of her gun peeked between the folds as the bag brushed against Pike’s arm.
**************************************
Well that's as far as I got so far.
Let me know if you liked it. Thanks.
