For one reason or another, while sort of spiraling down the drain toward the end of this draft of Seems to Fit, I’ve been thinking some about Merry-Go-Round.

Don’t fret if you don’t recognize the title Merry-Go-Round. This was the novel I wrote back in 2007-08, and apparently last mentioned here at RAMH in a post about two-and-a-half years ago. In response to a hypothetical question as to its genre, I once offered:

Well, let’s see. It’s sort of a thriller. It’s sort of a near-future or parallel-world kind of story. There’s some funny stuff. And it’s also political. Does that help?

Now that it’s been at arm’s length, so to speak, for a few years, I doubt that it helps… but I still can’t think of a much better way to describe it, not without leaking a whole lot of plot details. You can read its prologue (here) and know a little more — at least maybe get a sense of the sort of world the action takes place: why it’s a “near-future or parallel-world kind of story.”

I don’t know what if anything I’ll ever do with Merry-Go-Round. At the time, it felt to me like a warming-up exercise. Maybe it will someday justify working on some more. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking particularly about a passage from about two-thirds of the way through.

All you really need to know to read the sample yourself is the following (repeated in a text box at the start of the excerpt):

This excerpt from Merry-Go-Round leads into a “big reveal”: what exactly has happened to one Walker Bryce, citizen of an unknown country — not quite the USA? (Of course it’s not the USA. It can’t be the USA, can it? Not with the dome of the Capitol building in the capital city, clad in stark gray steel armor?) All Walker knows is that he’ recently been… kidnapped, hasn’t he? or rescued? after being held… held… a prisoner, was it? Yes, rescued… yet kept in some sort of hospital… And now he’s being escorted out, finally, by a woman he knows only as “Tex.”

Not sure why I’ve been thinking of this passage in particular; it doesn’t have anything to do with Seems to Fit, nor with my work or personal life. I have to say that I do like the depiction of the scene — the details — especially given that they’re mundane, but being regarded by someone who at least believes he has never seen anything like them previously.

Maybe that sense of wonder — the shock of the familiar, the strangeness of the expected and hoped-for — is just a metaphor for what every writer hopes to induce in every reader. Maybe we can’t always (sorry, Herr Kafka) write books to stab our readers’ souls, to wake them up with a blow to the head — or to make them happy, for that matter. But at least we can write sentences and story lines that make them go: Whoa. I’ve never seen that before, have I?

The password for accessing this excerpt is the full name of the character first mentioned there (capitalized just that way, and yes, with the space between first and surname).