notawrimo – Moe Lane

11/12/2024 NotAWriMo, BANSHEE BEACH: 1738/58845

Got more done today. You know what they say: when in doubt, murder a couple of your characters. Your audience will love it.

The city fathers of Red Beach closed all the… beaches… so fast, I didn’t wonder whether they were looking for an excuse. I wondered why they were looking for an excuse.

They meant it, too. All the lifeguard stations got manned by beat cops and militia. Anybody got too close to the water, someone ran out to tell them to go back. Anybody who tried to go in anyway got an involuntary escort off of the beach, and didn’t get to go back onto the sands. When they said “out of the water,” they meant it.

Normally I can ignore rules like that — well, maybe not ignore it, but I can definitely push it for a lot longer until somebody decides to push back. This time? I wasn’t so sure. The cops were acting more like prison guards, and I didn’t know which side of the wall I was on.

Besides, I didn’t know what I wanted to check out anyway. When a Shamus gets a hunch, we’re never just told why, or what, or anything too useful. Because I guess that would be too easy.

That’s why we let ourselves get slugged in the stomach so often, you know. It’s our little way of getting back at our guts for not being more forthcoming about their feelings. Serves it right.

11/11/2024 NotAWriMo, BANSHEE BEACH: 678/57107

I am, yes, very far behind now. But we’re back to it!

Lucas took another bite from his tlayuda, and frowned. “If I didn’t know better,” he commented, “I’d swear this was grasshopper meat.”

“That a problem?” I looked down at my plate. “I probably won’t finish all this turkey.”

“Oh, it is grasshopper? Never mind, then.” Lucas chewed, a reflective look on his face. “I was just surprised, that’s all. The last time I had grasshopper, it was tough as hell. We had to boil them for an hour just to get the exoskeletons off. Nasty bastards, too.”

I stared at him. “What? Were these, like, giant grasshoppers or something?”

“No, these were runts. Only, I dunno, two feet long?” Lucas took a swig of his wine, made a pleased face at the taste. “I’m surprised you guys farm them. They’re mean, and runs in packs of twenty or more.”

“Yeah. Those are the giant grasshoppers. Ours are thumbed-sized.”

“Wow.” Lucas smirked at me. “You must have to make the fences really small, then.”

So, new plan for NotAWriMo 2024.

This week has been one for the books, in terms of dealing with the fallout of the rest of the family being sick at various points during it. Writing has taken the hit. Such is life.

So, here’s the new plan. I lean into it, and spend the weekend watching surfing and beach movies. First up is GIDGET, which is… yeah. I understand that things were a bit different, sixty-five years ago, but… okay. At least the actresses aren’t fifteen and sixteen.

#commissionearned

11/04/2024 NotAWriMo, BANSHEE BEACH: 288/55713

Yeah, I’m really tired. Up too late, up too early, going to bed early tonight and sleeping in.

I wasn’t really surprised when the knock on the hotel door came, except that it took so long. I hadn’t been joking when I told Lucas that trouble followed guys like me around. Heck, this time it had even waited until I had gotten a glass of wine around me. Wine! It really was a vacation.

So it was with only a little bit of an eye-roll that I got up to answer. “Look, compadre,” I started saying as I opened the door, “whatever you’re up to down here, it’s nothing to do with me—”

And that’s when the gal tried to slap a mickey on me.

11/03/2024 NotAWriMo, BANSHEE BEACH: 1677/55493.

Busy day, had to stay up late to finish. But I did!

So. Horses have ropes. Ropes have ends. The ends go in driver’s hands. Easy, right? Sure it is! Especially when the rope ends are right there, flapping around. They weren’t even out of reach. Why, one rope knocked my hat off, with a whir and a snap.

Yeah. Something like that’s not out of reach at all.

A younger, dumber me would have tried to snatch at the hat, then probably ended up clinging to the door frame and trying to keep from sucked in under a wagon wheel. But I ain’t dumb like that. It’s a hat. I could always go back afterward and find it again. I might have to fight a bobcat or something to retrieve it, but Shamuses have a mystic way with animals. That is, they usually prefer to claw, instead of claw-claw-bite. So I kept my eye on the prize.

At least, until Priscilla went for the hat.

She had been watching behind me, and when my headgear went flying she leaned out just a little too far, and got herself off balance. To be fair, she did grab the hat, and for one brief second it looked like she could maintain an even strain; but then the wagon bumped a rut, and the magic was gone. I can still see the look on her face as she toppled back onto the indifferent road below…

…and then I grabbed her flailing hand with one of mine, and concentrated really hard on holding onto the door with the other.

11/02/2024 NotAWriMo, BANSHEE BEACH: 3362/53816.

This is the last day that I randomly just write whatever. Well, until the next time I’m away from my main files. Everything I wrote today is something I can use in the book, though.

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate fighting people who want to kill me? I don’t mean just not worrying if I can’t take a punch. I mean flat-out, no-fooling, want to put me in the dirt. It’s always scary, and kind of insulting. It’s not like I woke up that morning planning to do it to them.

It’s weird how easier the obsidian knives made it here, though. The two guys carrying them felt like shadows, smudgy blobs that didn’t want to do anything on their own, except put muscle behind the knives’ urge to slice through my precious hide. That always makes it easier, when you gotta do what you gotta do.

The poor bastards fought like blobs, too, with the kind of clumsy-looking slashes that looked easy enough to counter until you realized they weren’t gonna stop, and were too numb to feint , or get scared. And what their knives hit as we danced around the room, they curdled. That’s the only word for it. Anywhere that got scored by one looked discolored or slimed, with a mildewed stink that grew as we moved. This was definitely big-E Evil going on.

I still didn’t like smashing my knuckle-duster into the first cultist’s elbow. Some of it was the reek of old, baked-in evil coming off the guy, and some of it was the way his scream was cut off halfway, like the pain wasn’t worth indulging. But a lot of it was how the elbow felt as it fell apart. I don’t care what they tell you about berserkers or terminators, friend. When the joint don’t work, you can’t gut that out.

11/01/2024 NotAWriMo, BANSHEE BEACH: 1710/52164.

And so it begins. This is going to jump around ferociously, by the way: I have whole sections that go [write this later]. Well… it’s later.

Earl knew his stuff; and what he didn’t know, his wife had picked up for him. Between the two of them, and their apparently endless supply of kids, we had the coach unpacked and hidden away in no time. And I mean unpacked, and I definitely mean us. I didn’t wait for somebody to help with my bags, and neither did David and Patricia. I even grabbed Lucas’s for him, since he had gravitated towards helping get the horses back all the way down to just a little crazy.

His frown got bigger and bigger as we all worked, especially when Lucas noticed how we were all just a little frantic about it. “Y’all were looking in the wrong places,” he murmured to me as we pushed the coach the rest of the way into the barn. “The broomers landed twenty minutes ago, but you kept looking up, instead of south.”

“And what does that tell you, Lucas?”“That I was looking in the wrong place. You gotta take it seriously when the locals do something you don’t expect, Tom. They always know the area better than you. That’s why they’re the locals.”

#NotAWriMo starts in two days!

That’s the best I can come up with – anyway, November is when I finally finish BANSHEE BEACH. Regular writing should get all the bits filled in, and once that’s done I can start thinking about, well, everything else involved in getting that book out of the door. And after that?

The next one, obviously. This train keeps running for as long as I do.