Rebecca Ruhlman Designs Welcome to the drafting table of RARDesigns. A full-service media design firm.
Okay, so we started this little experiment as a way to celebrate NaNoWriMo. I have been longing to stretch my writing legs again for quite a while. (There is only so many ways to sell an “exclusive new table saw!”) So, I bamboozled some good friends to go with me on this literary ride. It is basically a structured story-swap or exquisite corpse sort of deal. 1,000 words at a time we trade off the narrative and see where the next author takes us.
Below is the first sketch of a protagonist. It is more of an outline of sorts – with numerous jumping off points for following authors to use. Falling back on my old writing style, I usually try to get a character to do just one thing and then fill in between until I pass out or through the scene away.
Writing has always been hard for me. Good or bad, to get ideas out of my head I go through what can only be described as intellectual vomiting. Everything comes out at once and I have to keep going back to clean it up.
Anyway, this project should prove to be interesting, and I promise to not get anything on your shoes if you wish to stay awhile.
Jacob’s hand shot out; groping into the darkness. In the momentary second between wake’s first click and the shrill piercing scream from the alarm clock signaling him to abandon the warmth and joy he had wrapped in the curly parts of his brain, his hand flipped the clock switch and shunked back into its lair. A groan came from beneath a mountainous pile of quilts and blankets.
“Stupid goddamn morning.”
Another grunt and Jacob levered awake, tossing the mountain to the ground.
It was a Thursday. It was time.
Every week, for the past two years, there have been layoffs at work. As he soon learned, the first wave hit the day before Jacob entered Clearwater Publishing. Black Wednesday was marked as the start of the decline.
Just as employees gathered for the annual company picnic, the abruptly angular and gaunt president, Yeseam Yassmen cleft a path from her office.
With her puce, checkered, shoulder-padded pant-suits and an impeccably manicured bowl of mahogany atop her 67 year-old head, she had the cultivated look of a woman bent on stealing puppies from British school children. She joined Clearwater just the year before as head of sales in the quickly expanding custom publishing department. During her tenure, the department grew from nine publications and six major clients to just four. Instead of making sales she leveled her ambitions on CEO Theodore “Bucky” Clearwater III, the mush-mouthed son and heir to Kansas City phone book and entrepreneurial publishing magnate Teddy Clearwater. Three months later, she made her one and only sale and became president.
Yassmen stood in front of the dirt caked, gargling, off kilter coffee machine as the employees herded into a semi-circle.
“These days we need to stay competitive,” she chirped “that is why some of you will be let go. When you return to you departments your supervisor will let you know if you will have the opportunity to move on.”
Richard Danko, Jacob’s boss, later told him that a third of the office had been axed, including dutiful Rose Bishop, Yassmen’s own secretary, who had just planned and organized the picnic.
Yassmen pulled her aside while in her very own buffet line to tell her to pack her things adding, “you know this really in a great little party you put together.”
The deadly surge had continued, relentlessly random at first, but then fell into a steady pattern of Mondays and Fridays. A plan devised to avoid the costly PR problem of returning armed former company devotees.
As the news reported later, this proved to be a useful tactic. An attorney with an office in the same business park had stolen numerous patents from a lower level clerk, selling them as his own. He then fired the clerk on St. Nicholas Day. The clerk returned brandishing one of the ill gotten patents, a high-intensity, ultra-accurate laser night- scope with attached rifle aptly named BlakPedr. By the end of the day his office was appropriately bathed in holiday color.
Clearwater’s problem wasn’t so much Christmas rage, but the ingenuity of the company’s little mice. The management was not able to match faces with names so, Jacob and his colleges started skipping days to avoid the impending doom. If they could not find you, they couldn’t fire you. This game kept going until the lumbering cat finally caught on. The management started moving their “strategic initiative” around. Employees stopped trying to avoid the layoffs. Moral sank as anxiety and neurosis about being unemployed and homeless gave way to fatalism. The gods would crush you good work or bad, revenue generation or not. Yassmen would then mark up a gain in productivity, shown in sunny bright orange, and present the report to Bucky’s gleaming delight.
Lately it seemed as if the norse thunderbolts have been landing closer and closer to Jacob’s realm.
He felt the inevitable orange highlighter of progress was about to wash over him, as he dragged himself from his warm cocoon to the shower. Enveloped in steam, he kept thinking, “when did it get to be like this.” He had had worse bosses before. The time he worked for an adulterous, statutory-rapist city councilman sprang to mind. As a reporter his income was always on edge. With sporadic breaks between publication and publishers that rarely paid on any schedule, he had spent the last year-and-a-half of his life living out of his car and couch surfing his way across the city. But, he never feel as trapped as he did now. Thanks to the outside economy turning inside-out during the upheaval, he was in knots without any prospects. Maybe the army? Not with his flat feet and queer shoulders.
He let the water wash over him.
Jacob then picked a crumpled shirt from off the floor, and still naked from the waist down, poured a morning cup of coffee while buttoning himself up. Slurking down the coffee he sat down to pour over his notes from the previous day. A napkin with contact numbers. A scrawled conversation with a furniture retailer. Some doodles of showroom samples. He transposed them all down to one single pad of paper.
Back he went to find and pull on some usable pants. He cracked open an unmarked bottle on his night stand and tipped out three blue and white pills. He then returned, pills in hand poured the last of the coffee and swallowed the Aderall. He was ready and out the door just in time to see the 6:15 bus pull up.
Tags: cheese monkeys, colab, fiction, fun, outsourced, rough draft, writing
[...] about young, media types dealing with downsizing and outsourcing at a large publishing company. Part 1 can be found here. Come back in a few minutes for my part, Part 2. Oh, and since this is the first sort of collab [...]
[...] promised, moments ago, here is the second part (Part 1 can be found here) of our thrilling, though as-yet unnamed collaborative novel on downsizing, outsourcing, and the [...]
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now. Keep it up!
And according to this article, I totally agree with your opinion, but only this time!
Thanks, I’d like to find more time to return to this project and clean it up. Most of the time I just post about cool crap I’ve found, like most other bloggers. And what?! Is my opinion that far off? Eh, we’re all entitled to ‘em. Mine is only based on my personal experiences within the small areas of my expertise; I’m probably way off base beyond that.
I am not going to be original this time, so all I am going to say that your blog rocks, sad that I don’t have suck a writing skills
Thanks for taking the time to put this interesting information together. I am going to definately bookmark your site to come back again. Maintain the really good job. By the way, your RSS feed does not operate in my internet browser (google chrome) how can I remedy it?
it should be back up to snuff. try http://www.rarmedia.net/feed/rss