On the day Tokyo was being destroyed by giant robots, Ichiro Ramone was 5,470 miles away enjoying a nice sandwich. Ichiro was born to Anzu Watanabe, a supermodel Japanese mother and Ricardo Ramone, a rich, industrialist Mexican father 22 years ago in Tokyo. He was an outcast to both countries. So naturally, as soon as possible, he left his family in Tokyo and moved to Los Angeles, where he now makes a living working in a ticket booth at a Hollywood Boulevard pornographic movie theater. A job that had its share of obvious drawbacks, certainly, but it was not without certain perks. The owner, Mr. Perkins, was an ex-scientologist who had hit it big working at a startup during the dot-com boom and left it all behind to buy the theater from its previous owners, a transvestite named Denise (formerly Dennis) and her wife Charlene, a retired porn star. In addition to paying Ichiro a salary, Mr. Perkins allowed Ichiro to stay in a room just off of the projection booth, so Ichiro was spared the expense of an aparment in LA, which saved him a considerable amount of money. Ichiro was saving all of his spare money so he could go to culinary school and one day open his own restaurant. He needed to do this on his own, without his parent’s money, to prove to his father that he was a worthy son. When he had last seen his parents, it had been a heated, angry exchange, and he had stormed out of their penthouse apartment and not seen or spoken to them since. He eventually bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.
This post is a test of the facebook notes feature, to see how long it takes to update the post on my facebook.
Also, it’s pretty amazing the people I’ve found on facebook in just a few days of using it. Old childhood friends, former Synapse people. Amazing!
This is more of a note to myself, on what I’m trying to accomplish with my experiments with Tiny Fiction, and may likely be very disjointed. The creative process for these things often starts with the first line of the story, and proceeds from there. Often, I’ll have no idea where the story is going to end up. Sometimes, I’ll have an idea of the tone I want to set (in Spies Like Us, for example, I wanted the tone to be bleak, and show how tired and worn Dmitri was by the process of being a spy). Also, in each of these little nuggets, I want the reader to hunger for more. I try to do this by including little interesting bits of detail, things I might reference in passing and never explore. I’m sure I’m breaking all kinds of rules, and if I had bothered to take any writing classes in college, I might learn the “right” way to do this stuff, but I’ve read a lot of books and short stories, and I know what I like and don’t like.
I also want to use these small pieces of fiction to explore character development, and dialog. I haven’t really had much dialog in either of them, but I’m going to work on that. Dialog is hard to do in only 500 words or so (my self-imposed limit to these stories), but I think that makes it more challenging — each word has to mean *just* the right thing.
This whole process has been interesting so far — now, all the time, I’m thinking up new ideas for Tiny Fiction. As I type this, I’m looking at 6 drafts that I’ve started, all in various states of completion. One of them only has a title “The Short and Tragic Life of Archibald Turner”. I have no idea what that story is going to be about, I just liked the title so I started a draft to capture the idea. I guess that’s one of the exciting parts for me, having a place to capture all of these ideas, and actually bring some of them to fruition.
I’m not doing so great on my goal of writing a “short story” once a month (i.e., something more substantial than Tiny Fiction). I have two ideas that I’m toying with for my first short story, and maybe I’ll just start throwing stuff out there for both and see what sticks. Both are perfect for serial fiction — they’re ripe with ideas and characters begging to get into a series of adventures and mishaps. Hopefully after next week things for me in my personal life will begin to “settle down” (ha!) a bit more into a pattern and I can figure out how to fit these activities into my life.
Ah well, enough blathering on. I’ll maybe work on a story now.
