I’m holed up working on Salvatore Martirano tapes. Digitizing yesterday’s baked batch, while baking up today’s batch. Not to bitch, but this group of these tapes has been a real bitch. Many many busted splices and half in need of ‘dehydration.’ (The term ‘baking’ is a bit over the top. 120-130 degrees for four-six hours in a hopped up food dehydrator, it’s not quite like ‘baking.’ The variables are atmospheric temperature, humidity, and the number of spools in a stack.  Since it’s summer in March (!), I’m needing to ‘bake’ the full time. The music on these tapes is spectacular. So it’s hard to just babysit the process and not get distracted. All I can do is blog. I can’t compose fiction while Sal is yelling in my ear.

I woke up today thinking up novel plots. I should be working on stories, but when one’s asleep and the mind is roaming free, the canvas is as large as the cosmos and the imagination has an unlimited energy source. It doesn’t easily fit in five thousand words or less. So there I was, out in the outer reaches of solar system, looking wistfully towards mother earth. I’d been to Alpha Centauri and back, just to see the sights. Along the way, there had been many adventures, most of them cliché. Funky cosmic dragons vanquished, dramatic equipment failures resolved, internal rivalries among the crew all patched up, and even the nefarious Wikken Warriors, those amazonian females with spectacular appendages and appurtenances  put in an appearance. Even while sleeping I could not stifle a yawn.

What was needed was a transformation of some sort: some flaw in my character’s character that resolved in the course of all of that action. Was he a kleptomaniac? No, he’s the man who has everything. Did he lack courage? C’mon, he just whacked the heads of half a dozen Dingle Dragons and slept with at least three Wikken she devils. They smell like chocolate, by the way. Some of ’em like pizza, but hey, some people can resist that stuff better than my character could. So courage was not in short supply. What then? Our man has the roving eye. He’s a sucker for a comely wench, and when the woman is fierce, intelligent and articulate, he finds it very difficult to maintain strict non-fraternization protocol. There you go. So one member of the crew is a woman named Killeesta. She’s part Wikken and part human. She’s one hundred parts beauty and all tricked out with advanced degrees in the astro-glide propulsion system and cosmic literature. On their first casual encounter, your character can only stammer. Some women just cause the man to fall all apart.

When she first came on board, she accidentally rammed Ronald the business class passenger, along to get in on the Alpha Centauri ground floor, with her bayonet. “Did I hurt you?” she most apologetically asked. “You didn’t hurt me. Try harder,” was Ron’s instant inappropriate come back. Some guys get all the good lines. Overhearing this, our hero winces. “I’m sorry,” he stammers, “Ron’s a bit crude.” Eventually – it’s a very long trip – these two, Killeesta and our hero, fall into chess games and conversation. The transformation occurs when, instead of indulging in hanky-panky with this woman, who plainly welcomes it eventually – a very, very long trip – he decides that in the interest of maintaining harmony among the crew, he’ll do right by the rule book and commend the woman to her fantasy and perhaps her vibrator. He takes a few cold showers and gets on with the mission, transformed.

Well, maybe not. These transformations – and the above is certainly a lame if close to home example – work ok in fiction. You expect something like this to happen. In fiction, people learn, they grow, they change. The nice guy has to kill. The innocent woman has to explore carnality. The procrastinator has to act. The blocked writer has to unleash a load of Pulitzer prize winning crap, and so on. The world will be saved, the corner will be turned, and the light of day will be seen.

As I awoke, I was thinking, that might work in fiction, but it doesn’t work that way in real life. How many times, once started down, does the flirtatious road does not end up where it naturally goes? How many times does the man who can’t flirt finally get down to it? Precious few. The exact opposite is true in fiction. In a story that the general population will adore, there must be a transformative experience, if not a moral. So while we’re being careful to cultivate believability, we are also thinking of cultivating fictional transformations that everyone accepts. You can’t put it down, fine. If you get to the end, however, and there’s been no transformation, you might just throw the book at the television set where the movie channels are playing one transformative story after another.

We must ponder this. In our dreams.

OK, tapes done. Time to get dressed!