Short story for Kat
Extracted from Scrivener backup: Short story for Kat.bak2018-07-01T17-45
Draft
Meta
A guy is travelling through middle ontario to muskoka from montreal. The further he gets from Quebec the bilingual signs disappear. He is running out of gas as he approaches Algonquin park. He get’s stopped by a cop. Doesn’t find a gas station. Pulls over to the side of the road near an open field so he won’t run into any animals. There is an electric storm around him due to the humidity. He watches it as he waits until the morning. There is a gas station in the town nearby.
Why is he on the road. He is heading to a cottage. Is he running away from something or is he running to something? Think about this long and hard as it will be the twist that sells the story.
Ideas:
A tech genius heading to his retreat.
A musician heading to record his magnum opus.
I like the musician idea. Let’s run with it. His band is going to meet him there. He’s an eccentric so he’s travelling alone when he doesn’t have to. He also likes to get as much solitude as he can. The whole idea of the youtube star so likes to keep his time as unstructured as he can so he can be the most creative. Throughout the trip he’s constantly getting inspiration. There are subheadings like Track 2: Pantheon - a loud cymbal crashes and dims, with nothing else to replace the void of sound it creates.
His struggle is finding the inspiration he needs to create art. He is compelled to create and is frustrated whenever that is stifled, either by deadlines, social interaction or logistics.
Final line: He’d probably arrive around 11 am. He’d call ahead and make sure the boys were up, the studio was alive and there’d be a glass of orange juice waiting for him on the console.
Keep in mind the limitation of not having sound in literature.
What do the song titles mean? - Have the album title and song titles be expressive.
What is his catharthis?
Another gas station, this one’s closed too.
Plot
The gas station is closed. He estimates how much longer he can survive. He comes up with a game plan.
He thinks about the studio and what is waiting for him. He wishes he could get there and just decide not to make music, but his financial success probably wasn’t robust enough yet to weather too many offences like that.
The cop pulled him over - He acts super nice. You can’t be too careful around someone who’s only seen 20 black men in his life.
Where are the track titles? - I think I can get away with 4 or 5.
One at the beginning to establish that he is a musician.
2
nd
one to show he is relatively famous.
3
rd
one to show his eccentricity.
4
th
one to show the vision behind the album.
5
th
one to show his attempts at growth (or insecurity).
Story
I Can See The Spires of Moscow
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Track 1: Railhead - Soldier feet marching. I can sample from old Red Army parade footage. Drums start beating in lock step. A flute can come in to make things a little annoying and incongruent.
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I slow down abeam another gas station. This one’s closed too. A quarter-tank remains; enough to get me clean through Algonquin Park, with fumes left coming out the other side. The cottage was 2 hours of highway driving beyond that. My band would be napping with their phones on full volume in case I ring. I didn’t give them an ETA. Due dates are the death of genius.
Someone of my intellect can also overlook things when on a mission. I last filled up on gas along the Quebec border. Since then, the road signs had switch from French to bilingual to English as of five towns back.
The rental company would staple a few hundreds to the bill for all the rock chips now tatooed along the lower half of the car doors. The road might have also eroded the blue of the Quebec license plate. I hoped that would make me a bit less conspicuous on the deep country. At least until someone cared to take a purposeful look into the driver’s seat window.
There had been fewer and fewer bilingual signs since I’d crossed the Quebec border until they’d disappeared all together. I was no definitively in English Canada. My accent would be another incongruency to anyone I spoke to. I had the stroke to fill the 70% of the Bell Centre the previous night but it was a challenge to get people to recognise me outside of the belle province.
I drive on past Primrose. There were a few other towns
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Track 2: When The Cold Sets In - Monster bassline. Crying electric guitars. I will rap on this one. I have to rap on at least one track this time around. No matter how often you bungee jump they make you keep the cord attached.
Track 3: Tin Buttons - Weird and entrancing. No can flip Tuvan throat singing and harpsicord into a electronic song. I can.
Track 4: They Crash Against Us - Strings and dutiful snares. An ode to those who choose to keep fighting the losing battles. It all needs to come together on this one.
Track 5: Reinforcements - A disjointed piano solo that I first scribbled down two years ago in Naples. The soldier feet come stepping back in at the end.
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