The Plot of the Novel... maybe?

Twisted tails and dark mutterings

Reading over my writing so far on the new novel, I find one thing missing that is kind of a game killer. The plot... I like the characters, and the way they talk, what they represent, etc... But to put them into the artificial confines of a story that I think people will want to read is another matter. I now find the dog fighting plot too stupid to keep entertaining. I need a catalyst for my four protagonists to take part in their world, their destiny and time in history... however misguided or noble that may seem to the different viewpoints out there under all those skulls.

After laying awake many sleepless nights too tired to really think about this but going on with the ideas and create the myths anyways as a way to comfort myself to sleeep, mostly, by obliterating all thoughts of my own existence, and that of the world by having carefully edited dreams.... mwhat is comforting on a particular night is interesting to me too -- soemtimes violence, sometimes just a floating feeling between plots, like I was deciding on which women to marry and didn't have to go through the burden of committing yet.

Now, some other frame of mind has been settling over me for the past few weeks. I want the book to have a careful plot, but I am going to make it absurd as hell, leaving behind a lot of the benchmarks of 'naturalist' writing and even perhaps venturing into Marquezian territory... all this as I strive for whether I mean to or not, anyways,...


The little first drafts of short stories that I have been publishing in here have been pleasing me a bit. I know that they need a lot of work, but I have found each time I have taken the time to do some rewriting, the stories fleshed out and got a little better. I am attuning to the idea that I write comics of a sort. In fact, i of course would love to do a graphic novel if I could find the time to draw all that shit myself, or get someone with a cool vision of their own even who can add too...

I have this cartoon I keep meaning to put in here, RLYNN, which I often read as a short story, and once made a huge, cool painting with all these panels in bright oil colors... I miss that one a lot.

So, with all this as an introduction (as opposed to just the wandering words of the weed), I am ready to reveal what the state of the novel is, and even start putting some prose up. The writing so far has been kind of all over the place, rather than centered on the themes or plot (since they had not yet jelled) and is more geared toward character creation and actually inventing the story as I went along, thinking stuff up off the top of the head and all, sucking words out of that dark pit there here writer has all full of them (for good or bad).

So, the characters are Shims, Smegs, Matt, Paul and Ranger X. Three are artists, one is a street kid they let sleep in their studio, and the last, Ranger X, is a bit of a mystery. He arrives one day, having been attracted to their sex drugs and rock n roll website with it's Manifesto and rantings on about a kind of vengence issues, and how the world is going to hell and there need to be more every day heros. Etc. They write this stuff, and half practice it on the street corner where they run a game star, a bar, and a studio -- all which one of them, the most neurotic, inherited from his weed dealing uncle. The artists have practically grown up together... know each others faults, get along sometimes and don't. Strange things happen because of all the bars on the streets, occasionally, like fights and muggings and car wricks. They are always the first to help. They consider themselves to be doing a 'batman.

What they do not know is that Ranger X read their web site in prison, and does not quite realize that these educated artists find thinking about how to improve the world than doing anythng -- other than create art, which is what they probably should be doing, as well as raising the son of a herion addict who is left with them at fourteen, after they take pity on the kid -- a genius gamer, and let him move in with them.


Ranger X enters this little fractured eutopia with a reason. His dog was snatched and killed by this gang, used in a dog fight. He has left college downstate after reading about it, and thinks he can get the artists there to help him. He is a lot more hardcore than the others. In fact, he has a warrant out for his arrest, and it later comes out that he was also witnessed someone being raped when he was in juvenile detention, and never forgave himself for stopping it... which he did after one crazy night of telling himself to mind his own business.

Ranger X feels like criminal humans have destroyed the earth, and now they had even taken his dog... this becomes too much for the radical vegetarian. When he reads that Matt is a vegetarian, he tries to get him involved first, but Matt is too cynical and afraid of pissing off the gangs. This has been his creed as a chicago kid since his youth -- do not piss off the gangs.

Ranger X catchs a couple kids shoplifting and beats the hell out of them, exposing karate skills that he never told any of them he had. Later that night, they ask him if he's carrying num chuks or anything and he admists having a gun.

Getting him to admit what the gun is for takes time.

He finally then explains that he is going to shoot up a dog fight, kill everyone there, and it didn't matter to him if he lived or died afterwards.

He is sober as he says this, and a deadness in his eyes frightens the rest of them, as if no problem they have ever had before could compare to Ranger X's.

Three of them go out with X to find out when the next dog fight is. X makes it out like they are going to be able to get the kid to just tell them, them hits the kid with a baseball and hand cuffs him, throws him into their van and drives out into the country, into a reserve. There they drag him out into the woods and x cuts one of his fingers off, then starts asking him about the dog fighting.... next he threatens the guys eyes and he starts giving them names and addresses and still x kills him.

This is the others first real glimpse into how much X hates the gang. "I grew up always afraid I ws going to jail and have them smear kool aid on my lips and peneaut butter on my asss, or whatever... always the chunky, you know?" This kind of joke makes him laugh hard, but no one really shares his sense of humor, except Johnathon, who thinks that he is kidding.

They go to the dog fight, and shoot the thing up....













ALL WRITING IN HERE IS THE PROPERTY OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY, AND YOU CAN GET MY PERMISSION TO PERFORM AND REPRINT WITH AN EMAIL. Steal from me and you will be cursed in such a way that your hands turn into worthless, jelly fish like appendages that sting your intimates.