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The Stupid 365 Project, Day 42: Messages from Madison November 12th, 2010
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The Stupid 365 Project, Day 42: Messages from Madison November 12th, 2010 
Last night I stayed up late, writing a first draft of the Thanksgiving story, so when I went to bed I didn’t even have a subject for this morning’s blog. The Thanksgiving story, most of you will probably be happy to know, will only be one day long — it’ll begin and end on Thanksgiving Day. I should also say, well in advance, that it’s the dumbest Thanksgiving story ever written, so dumb that it’s not completely impossible that I’ll have second thoughts about it. But now that I’ve said out loud (so to speak) that there will be a Thanksgiving story, I’m committed to having one. So that’s progress. Of a kind. Anyway, I went to bed with no topic for this morning, and all night long I had awful dreams. No monsters or scary houses or anything kinetic, but numb, static dreams of inaction and inertia, and I woke up a couple of times on the verge of despair. The details of the dreams had faded, but what remained was the sense of having been powerless to change anything, of having failed. When I went downstairs this morning, my wife, Munyin, asked how I’d slept and I told her about the dreams. She said, “Maybe they’re messages from Madison.” Well, how come she’s so smart? Madison (last name Jefferson — her domineering father was a patriot) is the female protagonist of PULPED, the first Simeon Grist book in 16 years. Since Simeon is (for the first part of the book, anyway) stranded up in literary limbo, the half-imaginary hinterland to which series characters are sent when the last book in their series is pulped, someone on earth needs to solve the murder of Ferdy Carvalho, one of Simeon’s last readers. Characters up (or down — nobody knows) in limbo can see their readers on earth when a book in the series is open and being read, and Simeon is actually watching — as though he’s looking up from the page — when someone wraps a pair of very big hands around Ferdy’s neck and squeezes the life out of him. So — with Simeon up there, participating only through the glimpses he’s catches when someone opens one of the six books in which he appears, someone down there needs to track Ferdy’s killer. And that falls to Madison, who works in the used bookstore in Joshua Tree where Ferdy worked, who was the largely unwitting object of his affections, and who discovers the body. And, bang, just like that, I walked into the trap I’d set for myself, I was sentenced to write my least favorite kind of character in all detective fiction: the amateur sleuth. I hate amateur sleuths. First, because there aren’t any. Amateur sleuths are about as common as amateur brain surgeons. For one thing, if people yielded frequently to the impulse to become an amateur sleuth, many of them would probably be dead in short order. This is the topic of a talk between the cop in the book, Detective Barnes, and Madison, when he first suspects she might be nosing around on her own. “Maybe we’re not.” He raised an admonitory finger. “Here’s what I don’t want it to mean. I don’t want it to mean that you have aspirations to play amateur sleuth.” “Of course, I’m not –” “Breaking into a crime scene. Questioning witnesses. No amateur sleuthing on my patch. Clear?” “Fine.” Madison knew she was good at icy, and she gave him the full arctic version. “Forget what it says in the books Mr, Carvalho was pushing at you. Do you know how many actual amateur sleuths there are in the world?” “It’s not of the slightest –” “None. And you know why? Because the only real amateur sleuth is a dead amateur sleuth.” (And then there’s a footnote leading to the bottom of the page, where the reader will find this data point:) Vocational data from the 2010 Census — Amateur sleuths : zero. Dead amateur sleuths: 217 But still, mortality rate aside, why would any sane person become an amateur sleuth? This question pushed me into writing a young woman who is agonizingly conscious that she’s a passive people-pleaser, someone whose approach to life so far has been to go where she’s been kicked, who came to Joshua Tree in the first place because she fell for a totally useless man, and who remains there out of the inertia that’s been her defining characteristic as long as she can remember, a woman who gets hit on the Achilles tendon every day by her screen door when she comes home and can’t be troubled to fix it. But she’s entering a new stage, in which she is consciously questioning herself, about pretty much everything. Here she is, coming home the day she finds Ferdy’s body. The screen door has already hit her Achilles tendon, prompting her to swear aloud. Madison said a word of which her father heartily disapproved. Then she shouldered the front door open and scooted through it before the screen door could attack again. She stood there, centered in the rectangle of yellow desert sunlight falling through the door, feeling the weight and heat of it on her shoulders, and surveyed her once-tidy living room. But what she was thinking was, Poor Ferdy. A quick internal hyp-check rated the thought as 70% hypocrisy and 30% sincere. But, she thought, since she hadn’t said it out loud, and since there wasn’t anyone around to hear it even if she had, it wasn’t real hypocrisy. It was faux-hypocrisy, not meant to fool anyone. Except herself, she thought, observing herself thinking, except herself. “I am spending too much time alone,” Madison said out loud.’ And she is, too. Way too much. And Ferdy’s death — and her dawning awareness that he’d been sweet on her while she was languishing over the worthless blue-eyed cowboy who’d brought her here in the first place — gradually leads her to the conviction that she can’t sidestep Ferdy’s death, especially since she doesn’t respect Detective Barnes. That, in fact, it might be the event that would take her out of her passivity. The temperature in the room had dropped into double digits, and she went to the cluttered couch, cleared a Madison-size space, and sat, the book on her lap. It definitely did not exert the solid, reassuring pressure of the Balzac she was reading in the bedroom. The evening yawned in front of her, as featureless as the desert on the other side of her windows. Dinner presented itself as one time-consuming possibility, except that she’d overeaten at lunch and felt like her entire lunch, plus the lunchbox she’d carried it in when she was a child, were lodged sideways, just below her breastbone. The Fatal Lunch. She’d turned the shop over to Ferdy at the usual time – Poor Ferdy – and gone to the Carousel, as usual, for the usual lunch, hoping, as usual, that she wouldn’t run into Jake there, and she hadn’t, and that had upset her so much that she’d had a piece of peach pie.
Other people, she thought, real people, didn’t worry about how to fill their evenings. Other people didn’t have enough time left over from the fascinating, all-engaging, world-changing things they did. They leaped up at the last moment and ate standing at the sink, their minds still engaged in something bigger and more interesting than they were. Or than she was, at any rate. She gazed ahead into time, thinking it was probably straight but hoping it was actually curved so that the thing that was coming toward her, the thing that would change everything, that would broaden and enrich her life, was just around the bend, just barely out of sight. Coming into view any minute now. Without even looking down, she opened the book. The book is Skin Deep, and Madison is on the cusp of committing to becoming an amateur sleuth. Everything you just read is first-draft and I have no idea how much of it will appear in the book, if I ever finish the book. But Munyin was right — for the past few days, Madison has been languishing unwritten, just at the moment she’d finally put her foot down. So today belongs to her, and I have to say this: even if none of this winds up in the final draft, I’m having a wonderful time writing it.
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This sounds like it’s going to be FUN!