Chapter 1 - Sunlight

The room was large and not brightly lit, a feature that had obviously been designed to create a relaxing ambiance and induce a meditative state. 

Its calming features worked in concert with the soft muzak tunes and the cozy leather chairs, whose generous width and soft cushions cradled the body into a state close to sleep. 

On the back wall there was a bar with under-lit glass shelving and strange looking bubbly bottles in unusual shapes and colors. They were all filled with liquids that looked better suited for a chemistry lab than for cocktail ingredients. The dark wood of the bar was topped with a bright white marble slab, streaked with deep green and bluish veins. 

Oriental carpets, which looked a little worn but definitely expensive, covered every inch of the floor, overlapping in places, so there was no telling what kind of flooring lay underneath. 

Here and there, on dark wooden side tables, generic ambient lights, elegant but subdued, cast a gentle glow. 

The walls were the only element in the room that seemed designed to draw attention. 

They were covered in intricate wooden inlay panels, not dark like the furniture, but in a range of warm golden oak hues, no two designs the same and with no discernible theme: exotic blossoms and twirling vines, geometric motifs, circular labyrinths, grids and landscapes, trompe l’oeils, flower garlands and abstract art. 

The entire wall was lit from the floor with wall washers, the way they illuminate important buildings and monuments at night and with the same eerie effect. 

High up close to the ceiling where the light of the floor lights was fading, the motifs seemed to come alive in the flicker of the buzzing bulbs, in an illusory motion so distracting that one would forgo even the slightest curiosity about what lay above. 

He couldn’t remember how he got there. He just knew he’d been in this room before, more than once, judging by the familiarity he had with its features. Without hesitating, he downed the oily turquoise cocktail in one gulp, ignoring the fact that it gleamed in the low light like it was radioactive, he placed the glass on the side table next to his chair, got up and went straight to the wall on his left. He took a few minutes to pick one of the design patterns and pressed his hand against it. A perfectly concealed door in the wood paneling creaked open and a burst of cold air rushed in, carrying with it the scent of barren leaves, mushrooms and rain. He shuddered, displeased by the bone chilling ghostly breath, and took his hand off the panel, which slammed shut, revealing no trace of where the door used to be. 

He sighed, dejected, poured himself another drink, a weird bright pink concoction this time, picked another chair close to the newspaper stand and smiled in anticipation of a half hour of enjoyable reading. 

He didn’t reach the chair before the light levels in the room dimmed so much that they made reading impossible, so he threw the newspaper back in the stand, frowned at the lights that were continuing to dim and walked towards the other wall, irritated. 

His hand had barely touched one of the patterns, one which he hadn’t actually had time to choose, when the lights dimmed all the way down and the room was engulfed in inky darkness.

The familiar creaking, accompanied by an enticing coffee scent, marked his path through the void clearly, even in the dark. 

He cussed under his breath at the absurd choice in front of him, very much like that of Adam choosing a wife, and walked begrudgingly through the dark opening, a little comforted by the scent of coffee.

“Honey,” his wife raised her voice on her way to the door, without turning around, “could you be a dear and pick up a parcel from the delivery locker? I’m so busy today I won’t have time to breathe!”

“What parcel? Which locker?” he uttered in her wake, confused but loud enough to be heard.

“I left the note on the kitchen counter. Love you!” she replied, consumed with the anticipation of daily events, as she closed the door behind her.

He took a moment to figure out where he was and whether he’d been there before. It only took one quick glance to realize he hadn’t. He went for the ultimate test, trying to guess which one of the many cupboards in the large and fancy kitchen was holding the coffee cups, picked one that seemed to him like the best candidate and found it filled with cloth napkins.

“Darn!” he frowned and gave up on the coffee; he grabbed the note from the counter and his face lit up with relief when he saw the name of the city: Juneau, Alaska. “Earth! Nice!” he thought, walking towards the door eager to take in the sights. It was the middle of spring at the height of the morning, but the sunlight hadn’t breached the horizon yet and he walked halfway to the delivery locker under a pastel-color sky filled dotted by the brightest stars. The Northern Lights were putting up quite a show. 

Encouraged by the familiar surroundings, even though he’d never been to Juneau before, he charted with ease the simple grid of the streets. It made him feel at home somehow. Random fragments of memories about this place flashed inside his mind for fractions of a second and then dropped back under the surface of consciousness before they had had the time to imprint themselves on his brain, like a dream forgotten in the morning. 

He took a turn down the main street and the comforting warmth that was still running through his veins, compliments of the familiar city and the turquoise and pink libations turned to ice in an instant. 

Rising above the horizon, glorious in its splendor, a ringed sun glowed aqua blue, bedazzled by an unknown number of visible satellites. 

“Not my Earth. Let me guess: the parcel contains fire dragon eggs,” he commented, bitter, dragging his feet to the delivery locker, drained of hope. 

The clerk at the front desk was particularly cheerful, chewing gum and talking up a storm into a phone she held flat, like a plate, over the tips of her fingers, to a person one had to guess was her boyfriend, about deeply personal matters that held absolutely no interest for a stranger. 

She stopped for a second in the middle of the dialog to acknowledge his presence and greet him with a “wonderful weather we’re having today”, smiled and went back to her conversation.

He gestured a question towards her to inquire about the location of the lockers, and she pointed decisively to a corner in the back while still engaged in conversation.

The locker was empty. 

He stepped outside to wait for the daily drop since he had nothing better to do and sat on a curb to admire the jewel-tone sun which shone brightly now and cast a cool hue on everything in his current world. He had built his life from these little unexpected moments of awe, when the beauty of the universe revealed itself to him like a capricious mistress, these moments that were elusive and ephemeral, and for this very reason so much more worth beholding. What else was one here for if not to see, feel, and understand the mysterious songs of creation? As best one could, anyway.

The spring sunshine hadn’t had time to melt all the ice, but it carved out deep rivulets criss-crossing each other and creating intricate designs of variable scale endlessly repeating - Mother Nature’s template for all the things that move and all the things that live. 

The working diagram of being. 

A crash of careless footsteps smashed his little painting on ice, leaving the muddy threads of boot soles in its place. Harmony and will power had clashed right before his eyes and neither of them won. The mail carrier kept walking all the way to the back of the office, where the lockers were, and started dropping parcels in their black boxes, absentminded, with gestures that had become automatic after so many years.

“Oh, look, your parcel is here,” the clerk commented, filled with glee as if the parcel contained a wonderful surprise, something special, unexpected, and unique.

“Who knows, maybe she’s right,” he thought. 

“I’m sorry, but we have to open it, you know?” she smiled apologetically. He nodded in agreement, kind of embarrassed that he had no idea as of the contents of the package and was saddened to hear her say.

“Ink cartridges, right?”

“Aah, yeah. Yeah.” The glory of a Lilliputian ice world had been trampled under foot and ink cartridges had emerged from its dissolution, like a Phoenix from its own ashes. “What an absurd metaphor,” he thought, because there was no myth or glory to ink cartridges, was it? On the other hand, who was to say what was more important, or whether anything was important or unimportant? Maybe everything just was, without an assigned usefulness value.

“You’re all set,” the clerk dismissed him with the same cheerful attitude and he had to wonder what was it that this woman possessed that fed her zest for being and enticed her to bite into day-to-day life like one would into a juicy fruit and have it dribble its essence all over her hands and cheeks.

He took the parcel and went home, not failing to notice that the days in this realm, wherever it was, were unreasonably short, and when he arrived at his residence, he found a frazzled message on the answering machine. 

His wife had a meeting that was going to run long into the evening and she wasn’t going to make it home for dinner. 

She mentioned the rice casserole in the freezer and accompanied this detail with an excessive set of instructions on how to use the microwave.

He dropped the ink cartridges on the kitchen counter, made himself a sandwich instead, and crashed on the couch. He couldn’t tell how long he’d been napping, but he awoke to the soothing sounds of muzak.

Reviews

[JayG]

You open with 304 words of the narrator talking TO the reader about what can be seen were this a film So what the reader would notice in a few seconds takes several MINUTES to read, during which, nothing happens.

Were this a submission, that’s nearly the entire first two standard manuscript pages. Why would a reader care enough what a room in an unknown place looks like enough to spend three minutes learning what no one in the story is paying attention to? We don’t learn where we are in time and space. We have no protagonist, and don’t know either why we’re in the room, why what we're being told matters, or what’s going on.

My point? You’ve given the reader no reason to WANT to know this.

In short, you’re wasting the reader’s time by talking about visuals in a medium that doesn’t reproduce sight or sound. And I say that as someone who owned a manuscript critiquing service.

• He couldn’t remember how he got there.

He? This make person isn't important enough to have a name. Could you be more dispassionate? This is HIS story, not yours. But this isn’t him waking, looking around and wondering what’s going on. That would be presenting it in his viewpoint. Instead, it’s you talking about him in a voice whose tone the reader cannot hear. You’re trying to tell a reader who cannot know what emotion is in your voice, a story, using the nonfiction, report-writing skills we’re given in school.

But the skills of verbal storytelling cannot work on the page because storytelling is a performance art, where HOW you tell the story matters as much as what you say, because the emotional componant of the story is provided by the storyteller's performance. And none of that performance makes it to the page.

They offer degree programs in Commercial Fiction Writing because the skills they teach are necessary. Use the report-writing skills we’re given in school and the result will read like a report. It has to. Nonfiction tells the reader that the protagonist cried at a funeral, Fiction gives the reader reason to weep. Nonfiction is used to write history books, and who reads them for fun?

You have the desire. You’ve demonstrated the perseverance; But all your dedication and good intentions mean nothing if the talent you possess is given none of the professional skills needed to bring the story tom life.

To write fiction you need the skills and knowledge of the fiction writer. There is no way around that and no shortcut.

There’s no reason you can’t acquire those skills, and it’s not a matter of your talent or how well you write, just training.

And in fact, if you’re up to it, the best book I’ve found to date on the basics of writing fiction is out of copyright and free on the archive site I link to below. So grab a copy. It’s an older book, but still, His focus is on making the students understand the whys and hows of capturing the reader’s full attention. And as a bonus, once you do master those skills, the act of writing becomes a LOT more fun.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

And for what it might be worth as an overview, you might check my articles and videos.

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334