Chapter 1: Arrival

A Chapter by John

Miami Detective Rush is tired of going through the same things every day, but he is in for an encounter he won't ever forget...

Miami, Florida. 2017.
Some people spend their entire lives trying to move here. Gamble entire fortunes, and often fail. All for the neon lights, the casinos, the debachery... How could any of it ever get old? The answer, is of course, routine. You can get used to even the craziest things in life with routine. Detective Jefferson Rush, from the Miami Police Department was one man used to dealing with crazies every day. Some could say he even enjoyed it, in a twisted game kind of way. It's how he made it to the next day sane. But even he was starting to get bored, worry he had seen everything... But Rush was about to see something he would never forget.

Rush was putting the finishing touches on his last call, Escorting the reported instigator of a bar fight into a cell, the man was clearly drunk, brused, and beaten.
"THEY ALL GOT WHAT WAS COMING! I'LL KILL THEM ALL FOR DISRESPECTING ME! YOU CAN'T STAND UP UP FOR ANYTHING IN THIS SOCIETY ANYMORE!"
Rush barely heeded the man as he locked the cell and headed over to do paperwork. He was mumbling to himself.
"I've seen this s**t a thousand times already. Screaming men. Men who say their innocent. Bar fights. Dead bodies. Same tragedies over and over. Can I just get something DIFFERENT for once?"

As Rush was ranting to himself, he noticed his colleagues running out in a hurry, and an announcement came out out on the PA system: "We've got an APB on a 207A for the Dean at the Florida Interstate University. Suspect is armed and highly dangerous." Rush raised his eyebrow in a sort of amusement, wondering if it was bad luck or that the universe actually humored his request. "Lance! Hope you're ready! You're with me on this one!" Rush said to an greenhorn cop who was assigned as his partner.
"Y-yes sir!" Lance nervously said.
"Now come on Lance. You damn well know you don't have to be so formal with me. It's the guys out on the streets you need to worry about." Rush replied.
Lance was nervous, but excited for some real action, and hurried up to Rush's car. They speed off to the scene.
Rush and Lance pulled up behind a cop car that was already on the scene to find a cop attempting to arrest a man with ruffled blonde hair, eyes obscured by some kind of welding goggles, wearing a light brown trenchcoat, blue jeans, and weathered cowboy boots. The cop on scene had just started yelling at the man to surrender, when, in the blink of an eye, faster than most men can move, the strange criminal headbutted the cop, broke his arm with an audible crack, and took the cops gun and disassembled it. Two other squad cars had pulled up on the scene, Rush and Lance took this as their cue to get out to the car and draw their guns.
"Surrender now or we will use lethal force to the fullest extent of the law if you keep this up!" Lance yelled.
The man, staring straight at the pair and the two other cops who had arrived on the scene with their weapons drawn as well, slowly turned around and put his hands up, but not before drawing a strange, shiny gray cube, similar in sheen to a polished gravestone from his belt and throwing it up into the air. The object started floating in the air and emitting a small hum, twisting and reassmbling smaller cubes in and out of itself. The man drew what appeared to be a firearm, and turned around, the muzzle and barrel length was clearly too long to legally be considered a pistol but too short to be a rifle, with a glowing blue light cutting diagnally on both sides of the weapon.
"Stop or we WILL shoot!" Rush and another cop yelled in tandem.
"Did you know bullets are a rare commodity where I come from?" The man said sarcastically, in a deep, yet nasally tone.
The man shot a warning shot with his unorthadox sidearm, and a blue laser shot out at an impercievable speed. The shot singed the concrete, leaving a black mark in the parking lot. The four cops attempted to shoot back, but found that it took an unusual amount of force to press in the trigger, and when they did, no bullet left the muzzle.
"Our guns are jammed!?" Lance said in a worried tone.
The man laughed in a low, hushed sort of way, and drew and shot Lance, the bright blue laser hitting him center mass, knocking him back a few feet. Lance was knocked out from the shock and a there was a low smell of singing clothes in the air.
One cop went and threw his gun at the man, which he handily dodged, and attempted to bullrush him, the man steadied his footing and the cop got a pistol whip to the face, a broken nose, and punch in the liver for his trouble. Rush and the remaining cop attempted to double team the man, and were met with heavy resistance, Rush drew his baton and swiftly struck the man while the other cop tried to hold him from behind, but the man, surprisingly, barely flinched despite the baton leaving bruises on his face, the criminal headbutted the cop holding him and kicked him in the groin, stunning him, and caught Rush's hand mid-strike, using his other hand to knock Rush back. "You're getting annoying", the criminal said, and he shot the cop who had previously been holding him back with his sidearm, and ran up to Rush, giving him a quick, but brutal beatdown enough to knock him out. Rush was barely conscious, but he could see the man walk into the nearest door of the college, and come out with the hogtied dean, the criminal hopped on a stolen motorcycle, inserted some glowing key, and drove off.

© 2022 John

Author's Note

Leave reviews if you enjoy.

My Review

Would you like to review this Chapter?
Login | Register

Reviews

JayG

Leave reviews if you enjoy? You're ASKING for praise. If there's something not working you don't want to hear about it?

Ahh well, I made the mistake of thinking you might want to know how to aboud the new writer screwups that are holding you back, and doing a critique before I saw that. So...

• But Rush was about to see something he would never forget.

Bad news, I’m afraid. This is one of the top: “Reject it right now,” items Why? Because you’re telling the reader what you’re going to tell them. And ALL stories are a surprise, and life-changing for the protagonist. It’s why we read fiction. So this paragraph does two things; First, it tells the reader what they already know. But second, the format is a transcription of you, talking to the reader as if telling a story. But storytelling ONLY works in person. And fiction on the page is presented in real-time, not in summation and overview by a dispassionate external observer. Have your computer read this to you, to hear that.

What we forget is that when we tell a story in person we’re substituting for all the actors in a film or stage version. On film, the reader would see the setting, every movement, and every expression change of the actors, plus the body language of everyone on the scene. And they'd get that in real-time, and all at once. They’d hear every nuance of voice, background sounds, and more.

But on stage? The only performer is you. And because you can’t show the audience the expressions of all the missing actors, YOUR performance provides the substitute—what I call, The Storyteller's dance. And it works, if the one telling the story knows the tricks of verbal storytelling, knows the story, and, how you expect them to perform it.

But does that describe the reader? And how much of that performancemakes it to the page? Not a trace. You’ve assigned the reader the task of performing the role of storyteller, using your script, but how many readers are skilled storytellers? And making it worse, you provide no performance notes, no clue of how you would perform, no rehearsal time, or knowledge of how the story is going to go. Unlike you they don’t know the characters and their background before they begin. Nor do they have any context but that which you provide.

See the problem? We cannot use the tricks of one medium in another, when that medium doesn’t support the norms of the original. In this case, sound and vision.

Remember, the reader has no context, and only the emotion that punctuation suggests. When you read this piece it works, because you have context, your intent, and your foreknowledge of the story, filling in the blanks that the reader can't fill in.

Here’s the deal: They offer four-year majors in Commercial Fiction-Writing. And lots of what they study is necessary. On the other side of the coin, none of the writing skills we’re given in school work for fiction, because all those reports and essays we were assigned made us good at reports and essays—nonfiction. Reports report, they don’t entertain. They’re every bit as exciting as a history book. So, you’re facing a double-whammy: You’re using an approach to writing that doesn’t work for fiction, and, a set of skills that depend on things that aren’t reproduced on the page.

Yes, you have a LOT of company. And yes, it’s not a matter of talent or writing skills. But still, if writing is your goal, you need to do some digging into the tricks of the profession—the things the pros take for granted.

The library can be great resource. Personally? I’d suggest starting with Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer, which recently came out of copyright protection. It's the best I've found, to date, at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader. The address of an archive site where you can read or download it free is just below. Copy/paste the address into the URL window of any Internet page and hit Return to get there.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

Give it a try. Like the proverbial chicken soup for a cold, it might no help. But it sure can’t hurt. And I know more than one or two people, myself included, who were offered contracts by publishers only after reading it.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

Posted 1 Year Ago

Leave reviews if you enjoy? You're ASKING for praise. If there's something not working you don't want to hear about it?

Ahh well, I made the mistake of thinking you might want to know how to aboud the new writer screwups that are holding you back, and doing a critique before I saw that. So...

• But Rush was about to see something he would never forget.

Bad news, I’m afraid. This is one of the top: “Reject it right now,” items Why? Because you’re telling the reader what you’re going to tell them. And ALL stories are a surprise, and life-changing for the protagonist. It’s why we read fiction. So this paragraph does two things; First, it tells the reader what they already know. But second, the format is a transcription of you, talking to the reader as if telling a story. But storytelling ONLY works in person. And fiction on the page is presented in real-time, not in summation and overview by a dispassionate external observer. Have your computer read this to you, to hear that.

What we forget is that when we tell a story in person we’re substituting for all the actors in a film or stage version. On film, the reader would see the setting, every movement, and every expression change of the actors, plus the body language of everyone on the scene. And they'd get that in real-time, and all at once. They’d hear every nuance of voice, background sounds, and more.

But on stage? The only performer is you. And because you can’t show the audience the expressions of all the missing actors, YOUR performance provides the substitute—what I call, The Storyteller's dance. And it works, if the one telling the story knows the tricks of verbal storytelling, knows the story, and, how you expect them to perform it.

But does that describe the reader? And how much of that performancemakes it to the page? Not a trace. You’ve assigned the reader the task of performing the role of storyteller, using your script, but how many readers are skilled storytellers? And making it worse, you provide no performance notes, no clue of how you would perform, no rehearsal time, or knowledge of how the story is going to go. Unlike you they don’t know the characters and their background before they begin. Nor do they have any context but that which you provide.

See the problem? We cannot use the tricks of one medium in another, when that medium doesn’t support the norms of the original. In this case, sound and vision.

Remember, the reader has no context, and only the emotion that punctuation suggests. When you read this piece it works, because you have context, your intent, and your foreknowledge of the story, filling in the blanks that the reader can't fill in.

Here’s the deal: They offer four-year majors in Commercial Fiction-Writing. And lots of what they study is necessary. On the other side of the coin, none of the writing skills we’re given in school work for fiction, because all those reports and essays we were assigned made us good at reports and essays—nonfiction. Reports report, they don’t entertain. They’re every bit as exciting as a history book. So, you’re facing a double-whammy: You’re using an approach to writing that doesn’t work for fiction, and, a set of skills that depend on things that aren’t reproduced on the page.

Yes, you have a LOT of company. And yes, it’s not a matter of talent or writing skills. But still, if writing is your goal, you need to do some digging into the tricks of the profession—the things the pros take for granted.

The library can be  great resource. Personally? I’d suggest starting with Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer, which recently came out of copyright protection. It's the best I've found, to date, at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader. The address of an archive site where you can read or download it free is just below. Copy/paste the address into the URL window of any Internet page and hit Return to get there.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

Give it a try. Like the proverbial chicken soup for a cold, it might no help. But it sure can’t hurt. And I know more than one or two people, myself included, who were offered contracts by publishers only after reading it.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

Rating /100