Souvenirs of Starling Falls

“I guess I’ve never asked you,” said Barnaby to Tom, “and I hope it’s not too late for me to come out and ask now, but Prissy and I were talking and we realized we aren’t sure exactly what kind of writing it is that you do.”

Tom took another long swallow of beer, nodding, waiting, letting the moment linger. Finally, he said, “I’ve had some of my articles on men’s health and fitness published in a few magazines in the past…”

“Oh? Which magazines?” Barnaby interrupted.

“Mainly regional ones,” said Tom.

“Regional ones? Like what?”

“Nothing from this area. Nothing you’ve probably heard of, since they’re not from around here. I’ve written a couple of financial investment pieces, you know, from the point of view of a young, average guy, not from an expert…” Tom had started out strong but already sounded confused and defensive. His face was getting red. “But right now I’m working on a novel.”

“A novel!” said Barnaby. “What’s it about?”

Priscilla came back into the room and sat down in her indent in the couch again. “You’re writing a novel, Tom? Ooh!” She looked at me and made an exaggeratedly supportive kind of face. Like, How about our Tom! Would you look at him! I smiled weakly and sighed a quasi-pleasant, bland little bleat.

“By the way, I love your hand towels,” she whispered to me. “Where are they from? Sandi-Mae’s General Store? Right?” she asked, naming one of the little shops downtown.

I shook my head. “They were a wedding present I just pulled out of a box.”

“Oh.” She looked disappointed that she couldn’t go out and get her own locally-sourced matching set.

“I’m kind of… superstitious about saying too muc

h. I don’t like to talk about my work so early on,” Tom said.

“Aha, the method behind the madness,” said Barnaby. He nodded, impressed.

“Are we in your book?” asked Priscilla. She twisted her blonde ponytail around her fingers, smirking at him with one raised eyebrow.

Tom turned redder. “You’ll have to wait and see.”

“So that means we are!” she exclaimed.

“Not necessarily,” said Tom.

“How far along are you?” asked Barnaby.

“Oh, well…” Tom squirmed.

“What chapter are you on?” asked Priscilla.

“I’m at about seven thousand words,” said Tom.

“Seven thousand words. That sounds like an awful lot!” said Priscilla.

“It’s not that much,” Tom said. He shooed the words with his hands like someone downplaying a great deed.

This was more information about Tom’s novel than I’d ever been let in on. He refused to discuss it with me.

Seven thousand words. I thought to myself that it really wasn’t that much.

Nearly every day since mid-July, he’d been disappearing upstairs for about six hours. I did some quick math and realized that even if I subtracted a day or two off from each week, he’d still been writing for over fifty days. At this rate he was writing about a hundred thirty-some words per day. Maybe twenty words per hour. What would that work out to be? A sentence or two an hour. Was that fast? It didn’t seem fast. How fast could Stephen King write? At least a couple of paragraphs an hour, right?

“I can tell you’re a real writer because you tell us how many words you write instead of how many pages,” said Priscilla.

“Yeah, I noticed that too,” said Barnaby, nodding his usual guppy nod. Glup glup glup.

He had no chin, I realized. No chin at all.