Seems to Fit

WIP Excerpt: Al Castle Meets… Someone Important

June 6, 2009 by John 4 Comments

Background: This passage’s action takes place in 1959. The “Al” here is Al Castle, who owns a metalworking company in southeast Pennsylvania, in a small town named Caerleon. His company has been acquired by a big multi-national corporation named Sarras, which also owns a Welsh firm which brews a particularly elegant, powerful, and pricey ale. Sarras has asked Al to arrange the manufacture of a one-of-a-kind corporate emblem for the brewer: a mug, or a tankard — something like that — which they plan to feature in a series of TV commercials and print ads, at ceremonial corporate functions and the like.

One problem: Al’s company is a manufacturing firm, geared to mass production. He’s terrified that he’s taken on a job that he can’t perform, has promised more than he can deliver. He needs to impress his new board of directors. What can he do?

He’s pondering all this while he finishes up a cup of coffee in a local luncheonette, called Mr. Bill’s. And he’s pretty much decided he’s going to have to admit failure to the people at Sarras. He gets up from his table and leaves Mr. Bill’s.

—-

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Brief Fable for Our Time, Maybe, from the WIP

April 18, 2009 by John 3 Comments

Emrys ap Rhys, an 18th-century Welsh brewmaster-to-be, is bidding farewell to an old man he has met on his return from London to Wales. He and Charlie met during a steady rainfall, in the shelter of a lean-to attached to the back of an English family’s barn; they’ve shared what food they have, and Charlie has spoken mostly (but not entirely) unintelligible nonsense, without end, as they ate. Emrys himself has feigned muteness, lest his accent betray him, but wants to thank Charlie somehow for a favor he believes Charlie has done him. But how to do so, if he can’t speak…?

He reached up, removed the floppy cowhide headgear with the rough threadwork and narrow brim. It was soaked; he might as well go bareheaded, truly, though the sun would eventually come out and he might miss the scrap of shade. He had worn the hat on his way out of Wales, four years ago, and he had put it aside and not worn it again until setting forth from London. It was a poor thing, but — he reminded himself — he was a poor man for now, and Charlie a poorer man than he, and in such circumstances even a poor thing can be a very great thing. He held the hat out in his benefactor’s direction, looked at it and then at Charlie, and grunted and nodded.

Again the grin broke across the lower half of Charlie’s face, and his damp silver whiskers glittered with a brief bit of light from somewhere behind Emrys — a lantern in the farmhouse window, perhaps. The old bent fingers reached up greedily, latched onto the hat, twisted it a bit to wring some of the excess water from it, and perched it upon his head.

Emrys was never sure in later days and weeks, months and years, because except for the brief interlude of lucency Charlie had spoken little sense, or at least little that was sensible. Yet he managed to convince himself that the last words he heard from Charlie were grateful ones, long unheard, especially with such an assured tongue and throat: Dioch yn fawr.

Or so he told himself even as he nodded in reply, touched his forehead, and walked again in the direction of the rain-chilled woods, leather-clad feet squelching in the farmyard’s soggy ground.

WIP Serendipity

March 19, 2009 by John 8 Comments

In a side conversation on a recent post here, my pseudonymous occasional correspondent known as “Froog” recently undertook some research for me. I’d come across this extremely cool wallpaper (well, I think it’s cool; that’s it at the right, and you can click the image to see a larger version); alas, I knew nothing about it except (and this is all merely alleged at this point):

The scene is in the Vale of Glamorgan, in Wales.
These are “restaurated” monuments.
They are about two meters — roughly six feet — in length.
The person who’d created the wallpaper could remember only that she’d come across the image on a page linked to from somewhere on Wikipedia.

I myself had been able to learn nothing further about the image or about what seem to be these three six-foot swords buried, tip-down, in the earth. Froog, likewise, came up empty-handed, despite a no doubt valiant effort.

(He did make an interesting suggestion, though: check Google Earth. Great idea; anyone who thinks that Google Earth is just for geology or geography nerds clearly has not laid eyes on the product recently. It’s already led me to Cadw, an organization responsible for managing historic monuments and sites — what they call the “historic environment” — in Wales.)

But he also said, almost by the way, that he’d grown up in a town close to the Vale of Glamorgan, a town named Monmouth.

At which point I started to whimper for The Missus to come pick me up off the floor. (Well, not really.) As I said to him in my reply, “I don’t want or need to know anything about your real name; just reassure me that you’re not a seven- to eight-hundred-year-old man named Geoffrey.”

Cryptic, eh?

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Paying Attention to History

November 9, 2008 by John 1 Comment

If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta kinda like about writing? Oh, well, all right, yes I do post — but less often! — about tech stuff, and politics, and art and photography and poetry…

When working on a large-scale project like a book, similarly, I sometimes wander off the main road, suddenly absorbed in distractions of landscape and weather and architecture.

Oddly, this sometimes works to the advantage of the book in question (although, all right all right fine, it sometimes does not — and probably just as oddly).

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