To Keyless Joe.

As if to commemorate his departure, he showed up keyless again Friday and I had to put my phone call on hold to go let him in the office. Then, however, he packed up all his little toys and playthings and removed himself from the premises.

The family business is calling him home and he's moving to Pittsburgh. If my family said I had to move to Pittsburgh, I'd get a new family, but that's me.

If I'd had any sense, I'd have started months ago, when I found out he was leaving, saving all of my phone calls and teleconferences for the hours when Buehler is in the office. If I'd been inconvenient enough, he might have decided to move me to Shoeless's now-empty space.

This is why I'll never be a major success in life. I never plan ahead. Just think...a private office! I could have done like Extension 17 was doing the other day and just napped out halfway through the afternoon!

I could have had potpourri, little scented candles, pictures of nekkid men...oh, wait. This is a business office.

And, speaking of nekkid men, not that we were, precisely, but it's my darned blog and I'll take a sharp u-turn any time the mood strikes me, I'm still brooding over my latest pair.

I mean, I gave up politics because the strain of pretending to be intelligent was getting to be too much for me, okay? And now I'm realizing there's a mental strain around putting together a "case file" story that I was previously unaware of (never having done a proper one before).

I mean...you need plots and subplots and a theme and if you're really committed you use metaphors to emphasize your theme. You need descriptive expositive that sets a mood and you need a series of scenes that are both mini-stories in themselves and that link together cohesively to create an overall storyline that builds to a satisfying climax.

I'm just not sure I care that much, you know? My ambition really stops at writing snazzy dialogue.

Of course, it could be a combination of PMS and being back on the diet, but that combination doesn't necessarily mean it's just my imagination that this story does not sparkle.

I'm not giving up, though. Not yet.

I've outlined the major plot points for the main (case) plot and the secondary (slash) plot. I'm dabbling with whether to use comic relief in the linking scenes, wondering if the story has room for yet another character, and uneasy about whether or not a weirdo homeless guy is just too much of a cliché. I've figured out that my story is too linear and made notes about improving the pacing. I've determined where the weak points in the action were and restructured the plot to take care of them. I know what needs to happen for the characters emotionally and I have an arc drawn that shows where and when the steps will take place.

That was just yesterday. When I realized that large chunks of the existing 35 pages will need to be re-written to make the story work, I gave up and watched Alien movies, then went to bed frightened.

And that's what I did with my sunny Sunday afternoon.

After this, I'm going back to the PWP.