Entre Bastidores

I should tell you. You deserve to know what’s going on.

Once, in a Spanish version of People Magazine, I read an article about Cantinflas – a 1940s Mexican comedian. The article used the term “bastidores”; I looked it up. Entre bastidores – behind the scenes.

So I want to take you “entre bastidores” over here in the Editorial Offices of joecsmolen.com

Fact is, these posts that I post are sometimes posted to keep Google thinking I’m thinking so that Google searches might “hit” joecsmolen.com and thereby cause me to exist as a writer on a larger scale.

So sometimes, when you read my most recent post it’s going to make you go “Hmmm.”

What follows in this Post is a pin-hole view into Lostine’s life in my 3rd novel - N3. Experimentally, you will start to see me using the working title for N3 as Never. I don’t know if I can make the story live up to a title like that, but “Never” is driven mostly by who and what the character Lostine is.

Lostine - a highly successful thirty-something architect who wants “it all,” but has long lived without what she can’t get – a boy she loved in grade school.

Right out of University, Lostine fell in love with an abandoned 1880s brick and stone mansion. Periodically, over the next ten years, she trespassed on the over-grown grounds of the old house – which was never for sale – just left standing empty, but by the time Never happens, is hers – if she can hold her life together.

In Never, working with a Contractor she has known a long time, Lostine begins the cost-prohibitive restoration. Because a serious-looking man came walking down his dock and asked him if he wanted a job, Never’s wandering narrator Chet, ignorantly hired onto Lostine’s project and unknowingly back into her life after 19 years as “labor.”

But the costs are exploding in Lostine’s face, the County is threatening to seriously curtail her income over her downtown Seattle office building re-purposing project, while her grudging ex-husband undermines her – involving her kid brother in the most insidious illegal activity imaginable.

Lostine’s Contractor tells her, “We can cancel the contract.  I can carry what we’ve spent so far. You can make it up on our next project.”

Lostine has only on word for the idea of abandoning her dream, “Never!”