I Had Small Dennis in a Headlock

  • by jenruled out butterflies, moths, and fungus
  • eyes did pry and tongues did wag
  • his eccentricities, average looks, and careless dress
  • It was a bizarre message
  • brave enough to pee in the bathroom all by myself

Tune in next time part 879      Click Here for Earlier Installments

I had Small Dennis in a headlock inside the horse costume, when the bathroom door opened and someone entered. Small Dennis and I froze. We were so tangled up inside the costume that neither of us could see who it was.

The only voice that I less wanted to hear than Titania’s spoke. “Honestly,” my wife said with a chuckle, “Don’t you think I’m brave enough to pee in the bathroom all by myself?”

It was a bizarre message to hear from Fleur. She wasn’t normally one for repartee.

“Stand up,” she said, and when we’d done so she unzipped our costume and pulled it off. The fresh air was amazing, but my wife’s incredulous laughter stung.

“What are you laughing at?” I asked.

She pointed at Small Dennis and his lack of pants. “I’m laughing at his eccentricities, average looks, and careless dress. And you, in such a compromising position with him. The last time something like this happened, eyes did pry and tongues did wag. I’m sure you remember.”

Remember I did. It was an exceedingly embarrassing memory, and it made my stomach feel fluttery and strange. I tried to figure out how best to describe the sensation, and I ruled out butterflies, moths, and fungus, but couldn’t pin it down.

“Do you actually have to pee, Fleur? Or do you want to hear about what the clowns are planning?”

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The Land-Speed Record Is Safe

Our recent output has been nil.

We got off a roaring start on Ghost Book 2, making good headway because we were doing a good job of sticking to our schedule. And then, well, stuff came up. Life intruded, which it does all the time, but for a couple of weeks now it’s been downright pushy. We’re fine, in fact it was mostly good news! It’s just a lot.

Not that we can claim that we were straining in the traces to put in more of those solid multi-hour work sessions that keep a project on track. Nah, we got a little lazy and took advantage of having some legitimate excuses.

This week we’re recommitting to the schedule, the lifestyle, the dream. Well, that first one mainly. That’s the key: having a schedule. We’re also dabbling with some ideas about carrots and sticks, and maybe shifting back to composing on the laptops for a change of scene. We have humongous desktop monitors, which can be a tremendous boon to productivity in a lot of ways but can also backfire. It’s too easy to leave scads of distractions open all the time.

A bit of archeology in the files for the previous manuscript suggests that these ups and downs are pretty normal for us, and that our net progress is basically right on track. Which is… good to know. Bit disappointing, though. Now that Kent’s retired, our pace was supposed to increase substantially. That hasn’t happened so far. But we’ll figure it out.

A writing partner is still your partner even when you’re not doing a lot of writing.

Anyone Who Came Upon Me

  • by Kentif the raccoons *did* escape
  • no record of it in the archives
  • life without mayonnaise
  • and everything was frozen!
  • as edgy as a beachball

Tune in next time part 878      Click Here for Earlier Installments

Anyone who came upon me and Small Dennis in the midst of our tussle would have thought they were seeing a dozen raccoons trying to fight their way out of the slipcover for a tacky loveseat. That’s not just idle speculation on my part, but based on how eyewitnesses reacted to an incident at a county fair in Dubuque in the seventies, which one of my classmates recreated with actual raccoons for the Academy’s science fair. She got an A, but if the raccoons *did* escape there’s no record of it in the archives.

“Is it worth all this mayhem?” I asked while being pummeled by Small Dennis’s small fists. “Just to carry on an affair?”

“What? No!” Small Dennis cried. “This is a real mission, and if it fails you’ll need to get used to life without mayonnaise, like back before civilization when you’d get chased by sabertooths and everything was frozen!”

“Are you sure it’s not saberteeth?”

“Just stop interfering.” He dropped his voice to a growl. “Let me finish the job.”

I knew he was trying to sound all dramatic, but Small Dennis is about as edgy as a beachball so I couldn’t take him seriously.

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I Assure You

  • by jenentirely appropriate for you to laugh
  • screamer extraordinaire
  • The weird part is what I *do* with the pizzas.
  • did more than have dinner together. Duh.
  • rub his mouth on my head

Tune in next time part 877      Click Here for Earlier Installments

I assure you, dear reader, that it is entirely appropriate for you to laugh when you picture me attempting to cut my way out of a two-man horse costume using a battery-powered nose hair trimmer. Go ahead and laugh even harder when I tell you my attempt failed. You see, Small Dennis was a screamer extraordinaire, and as soon as he saw what I was up to, he let loose an ear-splitting yelp. While the corduroy costume we shared, and the bathroom walls, would dampen his cries somewhat, I couldn’t take the chance of him drawing Titania to our position. I turned off the trimmer.

“Dude!” I whisper-yelled. “Doesn’t it feel like we’ve been trapped in this horse costume together for months?”

“Yes,” he hissed back. “I could swear we’ve been sweatin’ it up in this thing since, like, November. But that doesn’t matter! The mission matters!”

I sighed. It had been a long time since I’d worked with anyone so dedicated to his cause. “Tell me about this mission of yours.” I hoped he’d be so distracted in the telling that he wouldn’t notice me trying to unstick the zipper. I cautiously slipped my hand out through the hole under the tail.

“I can’t tell you the details, but it involves the pizzeria code. I have to send a message. The weird part is what I *do* with the pizzas. You know, after the message has been sent.”

The pizzeria code was popular among philandering spouses. They wanted their pizza parties to look innocent to outside eyes, but of course the cheaters did more than have dinner together. Duh. My own father had developed the code years before I was born, and he was one of the few to use it outside of extramarital shenanigans (he used it for those, too, of course). Was Small Dennis in league with my evil father? Or just having an affair?

I managed to get the zipper unjammed, and inched it slowly along. I was trying to keep Small Dennis from noticing, but I failed. He tried to whirl around indignantly, but since we were confined together inside a constricting cloth prison, he did something much more like rub his mouth on my head.

He then pounced on me and we fell to the floor in a tangle of sweaty brown corduroy.

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Golden Oldies

To help set the mood for the era we’re writing about, the late 1960s, we’ve been listening to a bunch of music from that time. Or rather, Jen’s been listening to most of it, and Kent has been indulging her when she comes across something particularly cool or particularly weird that she just needs to share.

The music is a mix of incredibly familiar songs and total headscratchers. For every Beatles classic, there’s a Pigmeat Markham or a Peppermint Trolley Co. For every Beach Boys song we know, there are two we were completely unaware of (that, incidentally, sound nothing like the Beach Boys).

Kent has observed that once enough time passes, a decade becomes its own musical genre, and songs that never would have been played on the same station all get lumped together because they’re of a similar vintage. This experiment is like that on steroids. We’ve been listening to Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Aretha Franklin, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Frank Sinatra, Englebert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, and a bunch of artists we’d never heard of. Did you know that Ray Charles had a cover of Eleanor Rigby? Or that The Tijuana Brass had a version of My Favorite Things? We didn’t! But we do now.

A writing partner will ride shotgun in your musical time machine.

Small Dennis Slapped My Hand Away From the Zipper

  • by Kentcut off into shorts
  • clothing choice that I would be comfortable with
  • very soggy newspapers
  • a matching, facing toilet for when you can’t get off the john but have to lean over one at the same time
  • Three words… Nose Hair Trimmer.

Tune in next time part 876      Click Here for Earlier Installments

Small Dennis slapped my hand away from the zipper. “You’re jeopardizing the missions!” he hissed.

I ground my molars. The horse costume might have been tolerable if it had been cut off into shorts, but that still wouldn’t be a clothing choice that I would be comfortable with under the circumstances.

The best I could do was keep backpedaling and drag Small Dennis along with me. He put up a bit of a fight about that, but his resistance was comparable to a curtain of very soggy newspapers. I managed to bump open a door with my hip, and dragged us through it into what turned out to be a bathroom. But its setup was unconventional to say the least. There were two toilets and no partitions, meaning (possibly) that your conversational partner would have someplace to sit, or (more likely) you’d have available a matching, facing toilet for when you can’t get off the john but have to lean over one at the same time.

I hurried to explore the rest of the space before Small Dennis felt inspired.

On a shelf under the mirror, at last I spotted something truly useful in my current predicament. Three words… Nose Hair Trimmer.

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I Needed Two Things

  • by jennot *that* devoted to the future of air travel
  • and wiggling it, just a little?
  • not happy gargoyles
  • multiple kinds of puppets, all operated by
  • it would be a shining white box

Tune in next time part 875      Click Here for Earlier Installments

I needed two things: fresh air, and time to think. If I could get out of this blasted horse costume I’d have both, so that became my priority. Without Big Dennis across my back, I stood a better chance of eluding Titania. I stepped backwards as fast as I could toward the corner, dragging Small Dennis along for the moment.

“She was about to say where the ninja-clowns keep their blimp plans!” Small Dennis whined.

“Well my dude, it turns out I’m not *that* devoted to the future of air travel espionage.” I tried to stand up, but the horse costume didn’t release and I was still attached to Small Dennis.

“It’s not all about you, you know.”

I was getting really frustrated at still being tethered in close proximity to Small Dennis’s sweaty naked bum. “I need to get out of here. Can you try grabbing the zipper and wiggling it, just a little?”

“No.”

“No? Don’t you want–”

“What I want doesn’t matter. I’m on a mission. Something I thought you would understand. But I guess everyone was right at the Academy. They always said your family was a bunch of gargoyles, and not happy gargoyles either!”

This was news to me. I didn’t remember ever being called a gargoyle. The closest insult I could recall was when we were compared to multiple kinds of puppets, all operated by feral chimps. Which, you may note, is nothing whatsoever like a bunch of gargoyles.

“I’m on a mission of my own, Small Dennis.” That wasn’t exactly true, but if he believed me it would get me out of this humid tube of corduroy and give me a chance to decide whether the bigger threat lay in the clown-ninjas and their hot tub parties, or in their plans to abscond with all the airship’s bananas. I didn’t know where I would go to do my thinking, but wherever it was, it would be a shining white box of clean fresh air compared to my current surroundings.

I tried to get a hand free to jiggle the zipper before Titania rounded the corner and found us.

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System Is Working As Intended

For the Ghost Series, we made a very deliberate choice to get all four books figured out before writing any prose for the first one. Our approach is to consider the project as one big story. Ideas that arise later on in the process might necessitate laying some groundwork in earlier books, and we aimed to give ourselves the most flexibility to do that without getting stuck in an infinite loop of rewrites.

Without an over-arching plan, without making lots of decisions up front, what would happen is we’d wrap up Book 1 and send it out for feedback, and then meanwhile we’d be working on Book 2 and discover a bunch of shiny new ideas that don’t match what we’ve written already. Meaning when our beta readers send us their comments, half of them have been obviated upon arrival. And once we started in on Book 3, the same situation would replay — only twice as bad, because now we’re trying to retroactively account for stuff in two prior books.

Ask us how we know. (Never mind; we’re about to tell you anyway.)

Our previous series grew organically. We’d write a book, and then discover that there was more story to tell using that world and those characters. So we’d write another book, and then another. So far, that progression has always led to trilogies. In one case, we did actually plan out books 2 & 3 in tandem rather than separately. We were starting to get the message even then. With the Ghost Series being a tetralogy, the benefits of advance planning are multiplied because so are the impacts of doing it inadequately.

So, we did a lot of planning. Lots of writing sessions that produced no writing per se.

At this point, we are working on Book 2. And so far? No major revisions have come up for Book 1. Several minor changes, and we’ll surely have more tinkering to deal with. But it’s likely to all be small-scale stuff like which tarot card gets drawn, rather than anything huge like swapping which characters are living and which are ghosts.

A writing partner is someone who helps with all the pre-writing as much as with generating pages of manuscript.

I Had To Stop Worrying

  • by Kenttaking a dip in the chocolate fountain
  • make the standard criss-cross pattern
  • have to walk past the planetarium
  • it’s my least favorite part
  • topped with garbage bubbles.

Tune in next time part 874      Click Here for Earlier Installments

I had to stop worrying about how close I’d come to taking a dip in the chocolate fountain and deal with Big Dennis. One well placed twerk was sufficient to send him sliding head-first onto the floor. The impact appeared to knock him out again, unless it killed him. I couldn’t get a good angle to see him, and anyway he wasn’t a cartoon, so I doubted his eyes would make the standard criss-cross pattern to signify his demise.

There was one place on this vessel where clowns like Titania and BimBam could hold a hot-tub party, but to reach it I would have to walk past the planetarium. Most Contrarian travelers enjoy visiting it during their voyage, but it’s my least favorite part of the airship. There is a long, sorrowful tale to explain my dislike of the amenity, but for now just understand that to me, it’s like a sewage sundae topped with garbage bubbles.

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My Encounter with Small Dennis’s Naked Rump

  • by jeneyes stinging
  • I don’t like this woman for a variety of reasons
  • no choir boy
  • gymnastically arranging their bodies
  • in a relatively sanitary fashion

Tune in next time part 873      Click Here for Earlier Installments

My encounter with Small Dennis’s naked rump left my eyes stinging and my ears ringing. I stepped backwards as quickly as I could and strongly considered just taking my half of the horse suit and bolting. But I couldn’t do that. It was my job to collect intelligence and figure out what Titania was up to. I don’t like this woman for a variety of reasons, but chief among them at this moment was that her presence kept me trapped inside a corduroy tube with my face mere inches from another dude’s ass. I’m no choir boy, and I don’t care about other people gymnastically arranging their bodies in whatever configurations please them (as long as it’s done in a relatively sanitary fashion), but Small Dennis was very much not my type.

On my back, Big Dennis stirred.

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