The story, it is done

Last night I finished the long-overdue rewrite of "Where the Rubber Meets the Road," as short story I wrote more than a decade ago. I specifically wrote it for a Turkey City writers workshop in October of 2009, finishing the first draft a mere day before. Little did I know that my fiction writing would soon be completely upended by my work on the infamous Chicken Ranch book. Little did I know at the time that this would prove to be the last Turkey City I'd attend (I may do so again in the future, but in the intervening years I've attended not a one). Since 2009, I've completed only three pieces of short fiction--the super-short "Mother of Spirits," which appeared in the The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, "A Life Less Illustrated," which has been rejected hither and yon, and "It Gazes Back," a collaboration with Don Webb completed just a couple of weeks ago that has yet to find a home.

I wrapped the rewrite up with a thousand words last night, which is good production by my standards. The original draft was 9,000 words long, and after I chopped off the ending and stripped out several scenes in the rewrite, the final version clocked in at... 9,000 words. It seems old habits die hard. Everything I write tends to lock into a certain length, no matter how much I trim, and that does not seem to have changed. The interval between when I first wrote this story and now is a bit unnerving. I was starting to publish regularly up to 2009, and after that, my sales dropped off a cliff. Following the publication of the Chicken Ranch book, I honestly felt like I'd forgotten how to write fiction. I put in a strong push with Sailing Venus a couple of years ago and produced some good stuff, but when I hit a rough patch in the narrative, the wheels fell off. I'm hoping that with "It Gazes Back" and "Where the Rubber Meets the Road" that I've knocked the rust off and gotten back into the habit of writing. I'd like to think I've regained a rhythm, as the words are coming less sluggishly than they did a month ago. We shall see once I pull up Sailing Venus and attempt to get it back on track. I'm getting too old to wait around on "someday" to arrive. If I ever want to have a writing career that amounts to anything, I have to get that novel done, sooner rather than later.

But that's for tonight and the nights that follow. At the moment, I'm happy to bask in the freshly-minted story happily heading off to face various editors' slings and arrows. It'd been so long since I last looked at it that I'd forgotten much beyond the overall plot, and am happy to report that of the unfamiliar words I read, many of them are good. It's nice to get that affirmation, even if it's weirdly self-serving. And it allows me to do something I haven't done in a long time, share a writing excerpt:

As Lupe's eyes adjusted to the deepening shadow, she saw flits of movement in the cave mouth--bats circling just inside. A hawk swooped overhead, perching atop one of the dead hackberries. Movement around the sinkhole caught her eye. A raccoon ambled up here. A ringtail slipped through the rocks there. Several feral cats paced back and forth atop boulders near the cave entrance, heads up, tails curling.

The first bats came out in pairs and triplets, circling the sinkhole once, twice before disappearing over the trees. Suddenly, as if a hidden switch was flipped, they all came. A river of bats disgorged from the cave, their beating wings sounding like a torrential downpour. The feral cats leapt into the flight, snatching bats out of the air. The hawk swooped in, caught one in its talons and veered off. From the rocks along the edge of the cave, snakes struck, taking down bats with surgical efficiency.

None of it made a dent in their numbers. On and on the colony came, a million bats, two million. An impossible number, more than could possibly be contained in a hundred caves. A tornado of bats swirled out of the sinkhole, an undulating stream vanishing into the pink sky.

"Now I understand why you got those tattoos," Manny whispered at last. "Is it like you remembered?"

"No. Better."

For those of you with morbid curiosities, here are two blog entries I made back in 2009 that are directly related to this story. A time capsule, indeed:

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Happiness is Turkey City in the rear-view mirror

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To the Batcave!

Last week the family and I went on an expedition to Bracken Cave, home of the largest bat colony in North America. It's also the largest concentration of mammals in the world, with 20 million Mexican free-tail bats concentrated in a cavern approximately 100 yards long (the underground complex itself is thought to be somewhat larger, but a wall of guano has blocked any further exploration). There is an old vertical mine shaft at the back end of the cave through which the army used to harvest guano for gunpower manufacture. The pungent stench of ammonia coming out of that hole is staggering, easily burning nostrils and making eyes water uncontrollably.



The main opening to the cave is at the bottom of a sinkhole maybe 50 yards across. The angles of the sinkhole are such that the opening (above) appears to sit on more or less level ground. Not true. The sink hole is pretty deep, and obviously wide. The bats spiral out in a vortex that is very, very impressive. They create their own wind as they emerge. And do they emerge...



The Bracken Cave is a breeding colony. The males arrive from Mexico in the spring. As soon as the females arrive, the males depart for scattered bachelor colonies--one is located under the I-35 overpass at Walnut Street in New Braunfels. The females give birth to their pups in the cave. The temperature in the cave would normally be a steady 70-something degrees, like most Texas caves, but because of 20 million warm bodies packed in tightly and tons of guano decomposing on the floor, temperatures hover above 80 degrees at the floor of the cave and rise to 110 or so at the roof.



Ammonia and CO2 concentrations in the cave are lethal to humans. Doesn't bother the bats, obviously. The floor of the cave is also crawling with carnivorous, flesh-eating beetles, which brings to mind a potential setting for a new Indiana Jones film. With 20 million bats in the colony, it takes nearly four hours for all of them to exit each night. For comparison, the famous Congress Street Bridge bat colony in Austin is home to about 2 million bats. Carlsbad Caverns is home to about 400,000. When the bats exit Bracken Cave, the plume shows up very clearly on Doppler radar. Amazing stuff.

Because days are getting shorter, the bats don't exit until a good bit after sundown, so lighting was problematic for photography. We hope to return at the height of summer, when they emerge before sunset, and attempt some more shots under better lighting conditions. But for not knowing what we were doing, I think our shots are better than could be expected. All in all, it's an awesome sight.

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