Skateboarding Giraffe (Nano)
The body washed up on a Tuesday.
Doctor Harris knew this because he was due to have his wisdom teeth pulled on Tuesday, and had to ring S--------- to cancel the appointment. He rang her as he was pulling the boat out of the boat house, tugging it onto the back of the police truck used for carting around the boat, and down to the river. He needn't have done that, it turned out, as the body had washed up just near the sandy shore, just below Converse Bridge, in the center of town. The caller had failed to mention that part.
Doctor Harris wasn't an actual doctor. He was deputy detective of the Waterfield Police Department, in charge of, today, bodies washed up on the shores of the Aberjona River. So far this morning he'd notched one body, the one he was about to haul out of the water, the photographer having done her part. He didn't expect to have any more, but then he hadn't expected to have any at all, so he kept his expectations fluid.
"You get enough?" he asked. He came over to S--------- and put a hand on her shoulder, looking at the little LCD on her digital SLR.
"I think so. This is slightly different than a wedding, so I'm not quite sure how to guage." This was S---------'s first body fished out the water today, as well, as official crime scene photographer of the Waterfield Police Department by virtue of being 1) a photographer and 2) married to the deputy in charge of this particular crime scene.
Doctor bent over to give S--------- a kiss, from which she backed away. "Not here. Jesus, Doc, there's a dead guy at my feet." She nearly slipped into the river, backing away. "I'll see you back at the house, I'll go put these on CD for you." And she headed off, back to her car.
Deputy Harris waved over a couple of the volunteer police who had congregated over by the boat truck. "Guys, come on. We need to get this guy out of the water. Let's go."
The men lifted the body out of the tiny clump of weeds. To make the volunteers a little more comfortable, Doctor had them lay out a white sheet on the shore, and let them take an arm each, while he waded knee deep into the river, and grabbed the legs. These guys had day jobs down at the hospital, doing similar things to mostly living patients from gurney to gurney, so he figured the routine would keep them from getting squeamish. On the count of three, they heaved and shuffled the waterlogged body on to the sheet, which they quickly covered over, and that's as far as they got before the kid with the snorkel gear came up out of the water.
He was a short little guy, swim trunks, snorkel mask, and snorkel, emerging from the, well, not the deep, but from the shallows like the Creature of the Black Lagoon. The volunteer with the nervous disposition - whom Doc had identified as the one who fell over when the kid came splashing out of the water - fell over.
"Um. You know that's not safe to swim in, right?" In the 1800s, tanneries and chemical companies had dumped enough tanning by-products and chemical waste to leave a generational impression that however nice it may be to look at, the Aberjona was not a place you'd think of swimming, and certainly not submerged. Some scientists had cleared the river for swimming, others had not, and so most people refrained from swimming, out of pure habit, born of going on one hundred years of solid abstention from the water. The silvery-brown muck on the young man's feet, as he fully emerged, was further evidence for the three men watching him against bathing in the river.
"I'm looking for Babe Ruth's piano. Or maybe I'm not." He pushed the mask up onto his forehead, which made him look like a... well, like a snorkeler, just out of the water.
"I don't think Babe Ruth's piano is in there. Wasn't that in Baker Pond? Which, by the way, is nowhere near here."
"Have you checked?"
"Um, no. Because it's not safe to swim in there. Look at your feet, man." Doc pointed at his feet, just in case the young man was suffering from delirium and the first thing to go for him was the ability to locate his feet.
disclaimer:
Again, only: NaNoWriMo. Oh man, and old Tommy Boy's novel is out Tuesday. Ouch. Productivity killer.
From Q.I. Software: Writer.app.
It's a drafting tool to help you bang out those difficult chapters when your agent has barricaded you in a room with nothing but your laptop and the ultimatum that you are either going to emerge with enough pages for that novel you promised him/her or you will die in that room. It'll lock down your network, it'll mute your sound, it'll turn iChat off. So those are the typical distractions taken care of for you... what about all those damn choices with these fancy schmancy word processors these days? How the heck are you going to concentrate when you can delete everything you've just written? Or move some words around like magnetic poetry? Or play with italicizing that word for hours on end? Well, we've taken care of that for you, too.
Based on Khoi Vinh's idea at Blockwriter.com, it's about a word processor that's more like a typewriter than you've ever... well, okay, if you've used a typewriter, it's a bit like that. But if you haven't, then it's more like a typewriter than you've ever seen. You can go select text with your fancy mouse, by if you type over it you'll only strike out the text... you can only type at the end, so there's no going back, no worrying about editing too much. It encourages you to get writing. Well, not actively. That'd be distracting. It does it in an eminently non-distracting way.
You can save your work as rtf, and open it all up, strikethroughs and all, you can print it out, strikethroughs and all, or you can export it, without strikethroughs, to import into Tinderbox, or Mellel, or Microsoft Word (they don't need our helps with links, to be honest). And then you can polish off the novel, slip it under the door for your agent to verify, and then you're free! Run free! Wait for the thing to get published! Get ready for your big book tour!
So go on, download Writer.app, check it out. It's Mac OS X-only, like all the Q.I. Software stuff, and it'll run on Intel or PPC Macs, if that means anything to you. If it doesn't, it means it'll run on your Mac.
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