As the week goes on Jeremy expects to slow down. This is normal
with him: first sprightly, then dedicated, then (on Wednesday)
restrained, then slovenly. On Fridays he cannot or will not work. The
chef packed him up in a barrel with Thursday's beet trimmings once and
he did not perceptibly complain. The next Monday Jeremy once again
performed all his duties at double speed, but his skin still shined
purple.
	Jeremy, the chef Poole, the archivist Sybil and the headsman
Cornell have not seen Her Majesty in over six months. This is not
normal.

	His Majesty requests Sybil's assistance with his family tree. If
he can demonstrate a Turkish lineage it is worth ten points in a game
the other monarchs have designed to keep themselves amused. His working
copy of the genealogy bears no markings on the right-hand side, where
Her Majesty's information belongs, except for a single name floating
where a great- or great-great-uncle might go. That name is "Muggs".
Sybil, by the way, secures the points for His Majesty.

	Thursday again. Jeremy's broom holds him up more than it cleans;
he provides safe-keeping for items more than he transports them to their
destinations. Poole flicks shreds of carrot at him when he comes around
the kitchen to inventory it, but Jeremy manages a discouraging moan.

	A plan is hatched. This is normal with them.

	Her Majesty is caught sneaking into the castle on Tuesday night.
Luckily for her she has chosen to crawl in (muddying royal knees never
so dishonored before) at the corner patrolled by Poole. Had it been
Cornell that found her he might have chopped something off--not a head,
and perhaps not off Her Majesty, but at best an important piece of
masonry or the signature off a proclamation. This is normal with him.
Poole does not call the others, though he has agreed that he would. He
engages the queen with pastries while simmering her beggar's robes in
the beet stew to restore their regal coloring. She has stories for him
about places you could not pay him to risk going.

	That Friday Her Majesty puts Jeremy in a suit of armor and
considers selling him. Sealing the deal before he revives might be too
much trouble. She feels a pang of regret for her poor planning. This is
not normal with her.

written for Leonie Mann in Philadelphia Marriott 1209 11/6/02

I wanted to write while away from home, so I reluctantly left my typewriter behind in favor of the laptop. Having no network connection while doing this one, I couldn't check to see how many lines a standard page had. It's a little short.

Present tense is a disaster I should avoid. It's tempting for describing a more-or-less static state of affairs that precedes the minor action of a story, but the very place it becomes a disaster is where I try to get that action going. It infects the whole thing, but it also creates odd technical problems like the way that "once again" and "still" interact at the end of the first paragraph. "Once again" sounds like it should refer to something that happened on both Friday and Monday but not over the weekend. I wouldn't call it incorrect, but it's a strain on the adverbs and a bad idea.

I really wanted to do this in first person, but resisted because that had been pointed out to me as a habit that I indulged more than maybe is good. I didn't quite have it in me to be totally cold, though, which I think this needed -- not just because coldness is the opposite of friendly first-person writing and I'd decided to take that route, but because the "this is normal" bit demands a narrator who seems omniscient and yet just distinctive enough that "normal" might be a value judgment.

I noticed while still writing that the fourth character being a headsman made Jeremy/Poole/Sybil/Cornell much like Trappy/Portia/Jeanie/Zeller, your hosts here at pastemob.org. To quote Ben Marcus, from a section of _Notable American Women_ that seems to be about the act of writing, "If I had my way, I would supply people for everyone to have intercourse with, people that other people could tie or dress up, chase, undress, kiss, touch, squeeze, manuever into position, throw off a horse and tackle and rough up, pamper, drape in cotton, in linen, in gauze, in cashmere, in fleece, rub with butter, cover in oil. I would have these people delivered every morning in a van or dropped off by trucks, sold on the street, displayed in windows, used as props in the park like public sculpture..."

This has the disjointed "plot" that I often end up with when I'm trying to summarize something I've got in my head instead of creating something that naturally occupies no more than a page... but I avoided the trap of drifting toward blandness just because I wasn't sure where I was going, which I'd been doing too much.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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