Monday, September 21, 2009

The Midas Touch: Everything Turns to Mufflers

You found out what he wants.  He wants to do something he enjoys without having it make money.  The last thing he enjoyed and which he thought would not make money was running a used book store.  He thought to be quite snobbish and exclusive about the titles he would take into the used book store, thinking then to have the opportunity to be surrounded with titles, authors, and subject areas that he could spend time reading.  Unfortunately, this, too, made a profit, modest to be sure, but nevertheless, the monthly sales always amounted to enough to pay the rent and utilities.  He is, of course, the filter through whom your increasingly wants-to-be-written novel is seen.

One of his favored writers was the suspense novelist, John Shannon, who has as his protagonist Jack Liffey, a man who specializes in tracking down lost children.  (After you reviewed Palos Verdes Blue, Shannon emailed you and you became chums.)  Your man enjoys discovering solutions to puzzles and resolving conflicts because life continues to puzzle him and although he has friends whom he admires and who admire him, the results of his relationships often leave him bewildered.  He is your longtime character, Lew, with perhaps a touch of Jim Fadiman thrown in as a leavening.

To this calculus, you have him living in Casa Jocasta, which he can well afford because of his past history of Midas Touch, a touch that has brought with its finances a consequence of guilt at having it come with such apparent ease.  He enjoyed very much, thank you, cleaning up what could have been a real mess at Casa Jocasta, with two of its residents having sneaked a third friend, now in her 80s, out of a private institution where she had been stashed by her children, hiding her for nearly a year on the CJ grounds.  Now CJ wants to reward Lew by upgrading his living arrangement from the Alcove Casita of his purchase to a Ranchito, which he does not want.  But he is interested in the conundrum presented him by Rita (Margarita), a CJ cleaning woman whom he suspects is in the U.S. illegally and whom he knows holds  Ph.D. in North American Literature from Universidad Veracruziana.

You are closer to launch forth date than you were yesterday.  At the moment, you are using him as a carrot to lead you through a few editing projects you took on, unlike Lew, with a serious eye cast toward an income stream.  Much of you is Lew, but not that financial part, not at all.

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