Norah was supposed to be Arlo for Halloween...but she kept wiping the face paint and wouldn't leave her ears on. So everyone thought she was a kitty. By the fourth house...I just started agreeing.
I was worried she'd be afraid of this mask...but she just giggled and focused on her very first lollipop. When I took the mask off later that evening, she kept trying to put it back on me.
Arlo, our very own church grim
Queasymodo
"I got my costume ready...let's go get some candy!!"
Note: For those of you following along with Piper and the Gren, Part 3 has been posted. The link on the left-hand side menu will keep you up to date on the story posting.
Saying that I’ve been working on a story for almost 10 months makes it sound like a pretty impressive story, yes? As if for these past 10 months, I’ve been hunkered over my keyboard, tweaking sentences in an artistic quest for just the right word to make my audience burst into spontaneous applause there in their distant cubicles and home offices. The truth is somewhat less thrilling. The story whiled away most of its ten-month life sitting unloved and untouched. Oh…I spent a great deal of time thinking about it in my car or as I drifted off to sleep. But actual work has been pretty sparse. Unlike previous stories I’ve attempted, however, I never lost my love for the characters or the story premise. See…some one had asked me, early in my life as a blogger named Moksha Gren, what in the world “gren” meant. After mulling over the best way to answer that, I fell in love with the idea of simply introducing everyone to the twisted, little creature called a gren. So, after a few months of neglect, I would always slink back to my computer and peck a few extra words here and there before drifting away again. Then, I made a deal with myself. Since the events told in the story take place in October, I figured October would be a good time to post it. And since I came to this conclusion in July or so…it fit nicely into my natural inclination toward procrastination.
And suddenly it was late September and I hadn’t opened the story in months. Panicked, I began rushing around, squeezing in writing time wherever I could, forcing my poor wife to edit at a frantic pace. My cousin Tony out in Reno had agreed to draw some sketches to accompany the story. But my lack of time management now means the story will be posted sans artwork since Tony hasn’t even seen the story yet.
But……the story will be posted.
And that in itself is an amazing thing for me right now. It’s the first story I’ve completed since I was in college. And though I tried valiantly to follow my usually routine…I did not let this one slip silently into the forgotten recesses of my brain without ever seeing the light of day. I’m proud of that. True, it’s got some cumbersome sections. The linguistic artistry is not what I had hoped and I don’t think I was able to capture everything I had wanted. But, I still love the story and my wife tells me that it’s “better than she expected.” I’m taking it as a complement.
So, I’ve set up a new blog called From Erebus to house this and any future fictional writings I do. It’s just an empty shell as I type this, but on October 11th I’ll lift the curtain on the first section of my first story, Piper and the Gren.
I’m a bit nervous.
Simon has so labeled me...and who am I to disagree? To me, however, it just seemed painfully obvious what needed to be done.
A little while back, as you may recall from my initial telling, I conducted the wedding of my dear friends Taltap and Elsa. However, what I was careful not to mention in my original reporting was a particular coincidence that occurred there. During the rehersal, I was chatting with the various members of the wedding party, many of whom I had never met. 
The bridesmaid was a delightful, red-headed girl who mentioned that she lived in Edmonton, Alberta (that’s in Canada, eh?) Now, there are many possible responses to this bit of trivia, but I, being the sort of person who is constantly looking for a way to talk about the friends I’ve made out here in web-land, immediately told the bridesmaid (who I will henceforth refer to as Laegren for reasons I will explain later) all about Simon. Plus, I was well versed in odd little details about her city, having conversed with my ice-bound friend many times about his environment, and so was interested to get her take on the same city.
Over the course of the weekend, it occurred to me that I was sitting on a golden opportunity. I had just met a person who apparently lived only five minutes away from a friend of mine who lives over 1500 miles away from me. Plus, her kids go to some sort of play group even closer to Simon's house. The odds were staggering and made me want to break out into a few rounds of “It’s a small world.” But more than that...it made me want to mess with Simon’s head.
I quickly scribbled a message on a piece of notebook paper and gave it to Laegren, asking her if she would be willing to post it to Simon’s door. She seemed excited by the prospect of a practical joke...then she saw the letter. She seemed a bit concerned since it was vaguely threatening and didn’t have my real name on it. I would have been worried as well…were I her. “Is this going to get me into trouble?” she asked. My wife quickly vouched for me, trying to explain that Simon would, indeed find this amusing. Laegren seemed convinced and all was settled.
Upon returning to St. Louis, I quickly wrote the tale of my weekend, carefully avoiding any reference to Edmonton so as not to give Simon any clues to work with when the note was posted. However, I had overlooked one detail. I had forgotten to tell the groom, Taltap, about the impending prank. This hadn’t seemed such a large oversight since he rarely posts here, but as soon as the story hit the web, Taltap swooped down and mentioned to Simon that one of the guests had been from his neck of the woods.
Drat!!
I ignored it. Refused to enter the conversation. Hoped it would die down.
Laegren, meanwhile, was waiting for me to send her Simon’s physical address and could not deliver the letter until I did. I figured this was my one chance to salvage the game since I had some control over the timing. I’d just wait. Give Simon some time to forget this seemingly minor detail.
A month went by. Some would politely call it delayed gratification. I would call it torture. Finally, about a week ago, I sent the address to Laegren (Long Arm of an Evil Gren) and waited.
For the completion of this story, visit Simon or his wife, Amy.
Currently, I’m sitting in my new, slightly smaller office, looking out the odd little window that opens into our much smaller warehouse and crunching on a baby carrot. “But wait,” you say. “Where have I been for the last two weeks? You can’t just dissapear like that and pop back in talking about windows.”
Well...I’ve been getting here. I’ve been fighting and struggling and gnashing my teeth so that I could sit here in relative relaxation and tell you that I have an odd little window in my office.
About two weeks ago, the president of the company I work for let me know that we’d be moving our corporate office. This I had already known. There was a loose contract on our building, but he wasn’t too concerned about the timing…so I wasn’t too concerned. I figured everything was under control. Then he mentioned casually on Wednesday, August 29th, that the new owners would be taking possession of the building we occupied on September 14th. Two weeks. Prep work done at that point…none. New location to move to…hadn’t even started looking. Panic level…stratospheric.
There’s a part of me that would love to go into excruciating detail on all the hurdles of the move, but two things prevent me. First, while we are now nestled into our new digs…the move isn’t really over. Folks want their voice mail and their printers to work. The warehouse evokes a 300 lb man squeezed into sweatpants designed for a man half his size…it demands some compressing and Tetrisizing. And there’s all that pesky work I was ignoring while focusing exclusively on the move…it didn’t magically disappear as I had hoped it would. Secondly, if my wife’s glossed-over eyes were any indication…the minute details of my battles with telecom, my attic crawls, my shelving assembly, and all the other skirmishes that made this such an ordeal are slightly less interesting in the retelling. I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty.
Besides, all that minutia were only tangentially related to the more important aspects. The new office itself tells nothing of my wife and daughter, left home to await the return of some semblance of normalcy. There were days in which I saw Norah for less than 20 minutes total. There were days when Moonshot nearly lost her mind from boredom and loneliness; unable to leave the house due to an illness Norah was fighting.
So, instead of telling all the details, I’d rather take these precious moments of remaining lunch break to thank a few people who really made a difference in all this.
Thanks to MoMa for coming up on short notice to keep my family company in my absence. Thanks to Panache for meeting Moonshot and Norah in Hannibal last week just to get them out of the house. Thanks to Jet, for shouldering the burden of our store with absolutely no help from his suddenly absent business partner. And a huge thanks to my wife who worked every single long hour I did…with no co-workers to keep her company.
