This week, I’m sharing the opening chapter of a novel I wrote set in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of piracy.  This chapter introduces you to my two main characters, Red and Tam.  I will probably share a few more of their adventures in later Fiction Fridays.  I hope you enjoy meeting them.

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            “Are you Captain Red Ballantyne?”  I tried not to sound eager.  I failed.

             He studied me, brown eyes looking over the rim of his drink, and one corner of his mouth twisted up in a sardonic smile.  “That depends, lad,” he drawled.  “Did a woman send you, and did she look mad?”

            I had expected something less colorful.  Something like “yes.” The truth was, I already knew that he was Red Ballantyne.  That had been obvious the moment he came into the tavern.  The tavern girls knew him by name, had greeted him with enthusiasm, and several were sitting giggling at the back corner table with him.

            “Red, be nice,” the blonde on his left said, in a scolding voice that wasn’t really a reprimand.  I didn’t know her name.  The girls in there mostly ran together for me. “Don’t tease the poor boy.”

            “Who’s teasing?  A man’s got to watch his back,” he said, giving her a look entirely different from the one he’d flicked towards me.  It was the kind of look that meant he was going to forget I existed in another four seconds.

            It had taken me an hour to find a chance to sneak out of the kitchen, where I was supposed to be washing dishes.  I wasn’t willing to be forgotten that fast.  “A woman didn’t send me,” I said.  “The British Navy didn’t either.”  I figured those were the ones he really ought to worry about, so maybe I should rule out their involvement too.

            “I am an honest businessman with no personal interest in the armed forces of any country,” Red said, even more quickly than I’d spoken.  All of us, him, me, and all three girls—based on their expressions—knew that he was lying.  “I am interested in more drinks, though.”

Continue reading “Meeting Captain Red Ballantyne” →

This is a story I wrote for my Senior Thesis at the University of San Francisco.  I don’t think I was ever so profoundly glad that I had chosen to be a Writing Emphasis major as when they told us we could write fiction for our final project.  The Literature Emphasis English majors had to write analytical papers.

For my last semester, one of my classes was a Senior Writing Seminar, where we only met a few times but were supposed to be “living and breathing” our writing project the rest of our time.  Don’t tell my writing professor, but that semester, in between writing this 20-page final project for him, I also wrote the 250-page first draft of my novel.

I was already pretty sure that a story about fairies and dragons and glass slippers was not quite what the English department was looking for, so instead I gave them a story set in the sometimes no less bizarre world of retail.  This is one of the rare times in my life when I decided to “write what I know,” as I spent several summers working in a very similar store.  I do want to say, though, that while the store is modeled on the one I worked on, the characters are fictional, and Carin, my narrator, is not me.  We share a love of musicals, but not all of her experiences or personality traits are mine.  And the store I worked for (which I will leave nameless…) was actually pretty good to me.

I hope you enjoy Part One, and Part Two will follow next week.

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            Bad things happen when customers aren’t greeted as soon as they enter our store.  I was submerged in medium-size jackets and tangled in tags when a new customer strode in the door.  All I registered was that she was wearing a sweater with too much embroidery; it looked silly but probably cost a fortune.  She went past me, coming through the front entrance at a steady pace and heading directly for the sale section in the back corner.  I hurriedly abandoned the clothes rack I was sorting by size and followed her at something between a walk and a trot.  You can’t run in a high-end women’s clothing store; sometimes I sorely regretted that.  It would make catching customers easier, and that was something management firmly expected me to do. 

            Once I was within range I fired off my usual greeting.  My line for this situation was, “Hello, my name’s Carin.  Looking for anything in particular today?”

            “Fine, thank you,” she responded and kept walking.

            I watched her continue her straight line to the back corner. 

Continue reading “From Each According to Ability (Part One)” →