Volume 5, Number 45  Friday, November 19, 2004

Life Imitates Art

When the week began, I figured that in this week's column, I would regale you with tales of our misadventures in Mexico, Missouri, as we cruise toward the 50,000-word finish line of our novel that we're writing this month. And then something terrible and surreal happened:

There was an actual murder in Mexico.

Now, some of you might think that Mexico, Missouri, is some sort of fictional city, but it really exists. I am making up fictional stories about fictional characters, many of whom live their fictional lives in fictional places (like the fictional Mexico State University) that I've concocted, but there is a real city there -- I've been there -- and many of the landmarks I refer to in these goofy novels really do exist. So you can imagine that when someone was flipping through the channels on the TV Wednesday, and I heard a news reporter say something about a murder in "Mexico, Missouri," she had my attention.

Gus Karellas, the 60-year-old owner of the G & D Steakhouse, was robbed and shot outside his restaurant Tuesday night.

Here's the surreal part: When I took a field trip to Mexico with my friend Brian two years ago to do some research for the novel, we ate lunch at the G & D Steakhouse. We loved the place so much, we thought it should play a role in the novel, and so in Soy de Mexico, Stella, Hiram and Emo have several of their meals at the G & D Steakhouse. In A New Mexico, Emo talks about how he and Glenallen Plad, the sheriff, used to meet at the G & D for chili all the time.

While reading a story about the Mexico community's remembrances of Gus in the Mexico Ledger (alas, the newspaper in Mexico is not called The Daily Mexican), I read about his popularity with everyone in town, his friendliness to all his customers, and his penchant for practical jokes, "his most famous one involving a trick coffee cup he would use often to pretend to drop in customers' laps." And that's when I realized that I had met Gus Karellas -- he had played the coffee cup trick on Brian and I, and he'd gotten us good.

I dug up my notebook with the notes from that trip. Amongst lots of scribbles about random, odd things in Mexico -- "Lakeview Lake," "Fire hydrants are blue + white," "Train whistle can be heard all over town" -- there are my notes about the G & D: "G & D Steakhouse. Yanni on radio -- NASCAR on TV." I made no notes about the coffee cup, but as soon as I read it in the article, I remembered.

Which is to say, this is terrible and surreal on many levels. I've written these ridiculous, absurd murder mysteries set in Mexico, Missouri, for three straight years, mostly because half the joke was that there weren't murders in Mexico -- and the story on the Fox News website Wednesday night confirmed my suspicions: "This is the first homicide of the year in Mexico. It's been a couple years since the last murder." So to have the first murder victim in years be a man I met on my one trip to Mexico, a man whose restaurant I've featured in both previous novels, and for it to happen in the month when I'm thinking about Mexico, Missouri, every day as I try to write this third novel . . . it's disorienting.

So let me say this -- Gus, I only met you once, but it's clear you touched the lives of many, and you certainly got me good with the coffee cup trick. As such, I'm dedicating Mexico: Revolutions to your memory.

And now, with a bit of hesitation, I'll proceed to more normal column fare: the novel update.

Squirrel Power Indeed

First of all, don't ever doubt the squirrel. Remember last week, when I told you I'd only written 4,081 words in 11 days, but that was all going to be rectified because I was putting the NaNoWriMo 2004 squirrel icon on my desktop? And remember when you all laughed at me?

Well, let me say this: in the week since last Friday -- since the squirrel icon took up residence on my desktop -- I've more than doubled my production from the first 11 days combined. Since last Friday, I've written 8,038 words. I wrote 2,047 of them in one spastic stretch of 56 minutes and 41 seconds on Tuesday. In other words, things are picking up. Our total now is at 13,019. With only 12 days to go, that may not seem like much to you. But it means we're over one quarter of the way there. And we're heading into Thanksgiving break -- prime writing season. This thing is so done. Don't ever doubt the squirrel again.

But what, you say, hath this squirrel wrought? Here's our progress:

We've learned about the creation of the Mexico Tourism Bureau, a.k.a. the MeToBu (it's a bacronym -- beyond acronym), where Dallas Weingarten and Tyrone Murphy cook up this idea to have a music festival called the Children of the Soy right there in Mexico, Missouri.

They even find a place to hold the event -- on the farm of Warren Lambert, who was conceived at Woodstock in 1969, and is hoping to have his own little version of Woodstock on his farmland in Mexico. They don't have any bands booked yet, but they're going after bands who are vegetarian-friendly. Why? Because the Children of the Soy Music Festival will celebrate Vegetarianism and the Power of Soy.

Meanwhile, back at the future site of the Doniphan Memorial Library, the workers come across a box that had been buried underground. It's a huge box -- eight feet long by six feet wide by five feet tall -- and it's heavy. Wyatt La Grange, who you'll recall is an Associated Press reporter and Mexico State alum who'd come to report on the story of the library groundbreaking, is intrigued, so he climbs down into the hole in the ground to investigate. After wiping some of the mud off with some towels liberated from the Holiday Inn Express, Wyatt finds something alarming -- hieroglyphics on the side of the box. For help interpreting them, he pays a visit to his old anthropology professor, Dr. Lafayette Pulaski -- known to everyone as Fay P.

Prospects

Ahead lie the development of the Children of the Soy Festival, with its lineup of vegetarian-friendly bands (Radiohead? Beastie Boys? Moby? Maybe. 6-Legged Mark Twain MethLab? Robot Monkeys? Definitely), and the discovery of what exactly those hieroglyphs say on the side of that box, and, of course, what's inside the box. (We know it's the Mexican Soy Scrolls, formerly known as the Mexican Sea Scrolls, but what, exactly, lies inside?) And then there's Yaggi, dirty-truck artist and friend to revolutionaries everywhere. Or is he just a truck driver?

Needless to say, there are many words left to write, and many things yet to figure out. That's why I'm looking for your ideas. Read the novel in progress, and then send your ideas to join this illustrious list of contributors:

Susan Banashek, Dorothy Gregg, Katy Homar, Ben Kaplan, Rachel Keech, Steve Jones, Valerie Lasko, Nicole Leapley, Braden Levit, Lance Moen, Gary O'Brien, Scott Ratinoff, Brian Schultz, David Skiba, Conrad Warmbold, Bill Watson.

It's easy. Just email me. I await your brilliance.