SHORT ATTENTION SPANS and your chapters' lengths_IWSG Post

 

Michael Crichton, creator of Jurassic Park, ER, Twister, and Westworld, had a passion project he’d been pursuing for years, ahead of his untimely passing in 2008.

Knowing how special it was, his wife, Sherri Crichton, held back his notes and the partial manuscript until she found the right author to complete it:

James Patterson, the world’s most popular storyteller.

Right Author?

Two-page chapters, tons of white space, and a 400 page book that's more like 200 pages.

But it got me to thinking ... attention spans aren't getting longer ...

Should we start making our chapters shorter to keep the attentions of our readers?

What to do?

1) Give them a sense of the road ahead

2) Learn from Strip Teasers ... don't disrobe your plot all at once.

3) Don't hoard your dynamite ... use all the good stuff while you can to keep them turning the pages.

“You have whole generations being trained for shorter attention spans than books require.” 

What do you think is a solution?

THE UNWISE DON'T THINK IT TWICE_Chapter Five_The Girl With Silver Eyes

 

"Strange how paranoia can link with reality every now and then." 

- Lucas

Moira, now that she was sure Lucas wasn't going to kill her, grew bold.

Lucas smiled bitterly. How undisturbed were the thoughts of the foolish. 

He wondered how it felt to sleepwalk through life, to look and not see.

Moira sneered, "Afraid of those spook eyes, are you? Me, I like to live dangerously."

'You and Kierkegaard. And you know what happened to him?"

She paled. "What?"

"He died."

She snorted a laugh. "We all die, mister."

"But not all of us live. Take you. I doubt your hungers allow you to live one moment ... in peace."

"You're nuts."

Lucas shrugged, "What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding? What if laughter were really tears?"

"Like I said: you're nuts."

Lucas smiled wearily. 

"Insanity runs in my family. In fact, it practically gallops. Besides, I am not afraid of that dryad. It's her book that unsettles me."

It's just a book, for Heaven's sake. It can't hurt you."

Lucas fought a shiver. "Heaven has nothing to do with that book. It can do more than hurt you. It can damn you."

"How? If you don't read it, you're safe, ain't you?

"No. It is sentient."

"What?"

"Living, self-aware, bored ... and hungry."

"You're shitting me."

Lucas somberly shook his head.

"Long before hieroglyphics, Sumerian, or Akkadian symbols were carved upon temple walls to be swallowed by the sands of time, this book existed to damn all who opened it, touching them mind to mind."

"Quit calling it THE book! What's its damned name?"

"The wise do not even think the title."

"And the unwise?"

"They do not think it twice."

A Pointed Gun Is Not A Question Mark_Chapter Four of THE GIRL WITH SILVER EYES

 

"He who measures a person's worth grasps only illusion." 

- Ancient Basque proverb

Lucas wore the veneer of civilization easily as he did all of his disguises.

Inwardly, he was as wild and fierce as his mother ever was ... if not more so. Perhaps it was a remnant of his unknown father.

He cared even less about his father than he did about the gun held steadily at his heart, the least vulnerable part of his body.

His utter disregard of her gun obviously bothered Moira.

"I could kill you right now and get away with it, you know,"

His eyes became hard, and his voice irritable. 

"People kill one another for so many inane, shallow, pointless reasons. And ultimately, they destroy themselves doing so."

His words became little more than a whisper. 

"A pointed gun is not a question mark, Moira. It is an exclamation point."

His right hand became a blur ... and suddenly, her gun was in his hand.

"This is a prop gun. The safety is on. You've been shouting -- Please kill me!"

He flipped open the cylinder, showing her what he had already seen: there were no bullets in the gun.

"Pl-Please don't kill me."

"Why would I? I don't want your life. I just want to know where I can find the girl with silver eyes."

Her pale face puckered as her thumb jerked up over her shoulder to the mock-up movie poster on the wall behind her.

"You mean Deirdre Manes?"

As Lucas took in the poster for the movie still in production, an image of himself with long donkey ears flashed before his eyes.

A Bible verse came to mind: Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

He sighed. It was a great life if you didn't mind making a fool of yourself every so often ... like now.

He cursed himself in Basque: artaburu : corn head, idiot.

A girl with eerie silver eyes looked down on him from the poster, clutching the most cursed book in all of existence.

Donovan didn't want that girl at all. He wanted to damn his soul for her book.

THE WIND HAS ITS OWN FREEDOM_Chapter Three_ The Girl With Silver Eyes

 

"When Ortzi put madness in the wind and loosed the bridle on the lightning, He called it Woman." 

- Ancient Basque proverb

For a woman holding a gun on a man, the blonde didn't seem to recognize Lucas. But then, she had only seen him the one time.

But Lucas recognized her. Moira wore sexuality like some women wore expensive perfume.

The barrel of the gun was rock-steady, and to unbalance her, Lucas said,

"Is this the Bureau of Indian Affairs?"

"Huh? Funny man, aren't you? Though you do look Indian."

"Half-Basque actually."

Lucas made a show of looking at his wristwatch. 

"As in half-Basque Two. Speaking of which, isn't this after hours even for a workhorse like DeMille?"

Recognition widened her azure eyes, 

"Hey, I know you! You're the numb-nuts who thought giving DeMille that tiny working model of a guillotine would make up for not being in the prop makers union."

Lucas shrugged. "It was worth a shot."

"You disappeared on us. What happened?"

"I got drafted."

"There's a lot of that going around ... dying, too."

Moira pulled back the hammer. "What brings you back at this hour?"

Lucas didn't have to ask her that question: her left fist was filled with the petty cash from the open safe behind her.

"This was the last place a fellow draftee, Lt. Eileen  Henderson, was seen alive."

"Aw. don't tell me: you were in love with the broad."

"I am incapable of love."

"You and every other man I've ever met. At least you're honest about it."

"My memory's too bad to lie."

Her gun steadied on his chest, "You ever not a smartass?"

"Sometimes I sleep."

Her eyes narrowed. She leaned towards Lucas with a curious malice that carried with it an undercurrent of sexual heat.

Lucas reminded himself that an affair that starts with a woman pointing a gun at you always ended badly.

"You know what's going to happen to you?," sneered Moira.  "You'll grow old and run out of yourself. That will be justice."

"No, I'll die first, and that will be mercy."

Run OF DeMILLE_Chapter Two of The Girl With Silver Eyes

"When you try to tell DeMille something, he doesn't hear you. He hears your motive for saying it or what he believes your motive is for saying it.

He hears some of the implications. But he doesn't hear the obvious meaning. It is the occupational hazard of being a movie director."

 - Lucas to Major General William Donovan

Turning the corner

That's what Lucas called it when a child. If he desperately wanted to go some place he had already been, 

he would reach inside himself, picture the place, and shift his thoughts ... and he would be there. 

It was not easy by any means, more like forcing a reluctant antique car into third gear.

A damned nuisance is what his Basque mother called it.

And it scared her to death.

The villagers in Wyoming called her Sorginak ... and witch is the closest thing in English for that term ...

but it was close only as the moon is close to the earth.

She had been a fierce, wild woman and to see her frightened had shaken the little boy.

Lucas still felt her fingers as they had dug into his shoulders as she shook him.

"Never! 

Never do this again. I am allowed to live for I am useful. This thing you can do comes from your father, and they will kill the both of us if they find out you can do it."

And he never had ... as long as she lived. 

His only regret was that Sheriff Danvers' death agonies had ended so quickly.

A woman's voice snapped behind him. "What the hell are you doing here?"

Lucas grimaced.

That was the drawback about "turning the corner." You couldn't peek around it before you did.

The Girl with Silver Eyes

"He knew his measure and the full measure of the person he longed to be."

 - Major General William "Wild Bill" Donovan of his enigmatic O.S.S. operative who went by only one name, "Lucas."

Donovan appraised the prisoner with cold eyes and gestured for the M.P.'s to leave his office.

As soon as the door closed, the man casually tossed the handcuffs on Donovan's desk.

"They chaffed my wrists."

Donovan remembered one of Lucas' legends, 

(an alias lived long enough that a cursory examination would be fooled)

was that of a stage magician.

"You're AWOL, out of uniform, and your hair is not regulation." 

"Your sin is greater. You killed Henderson."

"I gave her a graduation assignment that is all. She died attempting it. The O.S.S. is not for girl scouts."

"And I attended her funeral. Sadly, it was held in Wyoming ... a state where I am still wanted for the murder of Sheriff Danvers. So I had to go incognito."

Donovan tapped a manila folder. 

"It says here you were cleared ... that Danvers hanged himself after writing a confession for your mother's murder."

Lucas shrugged. "The governor was friends with the sheriff and knew Danvers would gleefully get into everything ... except a coffin."

Lucas flashed a papercut smile. 

"So there is an unofficial 'Shoot On Sight' order on me. I prefer not to be unofficially dead hence my showing up as Eric Strauss, famed magician."

"Are you saying the sheriff was assisted in his hanging?"

"Of course."

Donovan stiffened, and Lucas continued. "Gravity."

Donovan sensed a calm, pent-up violence in the man ... much like the eye of a hurricane which heralded terrible destruction to come. 

Donovan had seen Lucas, upon entering, coolly assess the entire office and all it contained ... even himself.

It unsettled him, and it goaded him to uncharacteristically ask a needless question.

"What do you think of my office, Captain Lucas?"

Lucas' eyes flicked over the walls lined with yellowed photos of dead comrades, old mentors, and faded medals awarded for forgotten deeds of valor. 

The walls, dense with the past, formed a sad kind of insulation against the present world and all its dangers.

He kept all that to himself and instead said, "The past fills this room like a tide of whispers."

Donovan growled, more mad at himself than at the captain, "Rather melodramatic."

"I do not apologize for the way I think, sir."

"The shrinks say you are sociopathic."

Lucas shrugged. "Psychiatry is in its infancy. But I do admit my moral compass usually points to self-interest."

"Then, why attend Henderson's funeral? The coffin was empty."

"But it represented my only friend." 

Lucas ironed his face with a palm. 

"Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind. You do what you feel is right, or you're a weather vane."

"The doctors say you don't feel."

"Don't trust doctors who go by the book, Major-General. One day, you may end up dead due to a misprint."

Donovan looked off into the distance, seeing things Lucas was just as happy not knowing, then gruffed, "You want revenge for her murder?"

"No. It won't bring her back."

"Too bad. Your graduation assignment is to finish hers. Find the girl with silver eyes."

"Where do I start?"

"Where else? Hollywood, the land of false fronts, empty dreams, and emptier souls."

"Now, who's being melodramatic? And could you be a bit more specific? Where in Hollywood?"

"Her last communication was that she was going to burgle the office of director, Cecil B. DeMille ... then nothing."

"Speaking of nothing ...."

Donovan blinked twice. Lucas had simply vanished.

 No smoke of flash powder. No glare of mirror. He had simply disappeared.

A coldness took him bone-deep. The perfect cover for a true magician would be to pose as a fake one.

What had he just unleashed upon Hollywood?

THERE ARE MOMENTS THAT TRANSCEND POLITICS

 

I am ancient enough to remember when John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed.

Sadly, I believe Mr. Gingrich is mistaken.

The hate, the prejudice, the corruption is too strong.

WASHINGTON POST:

"Trump leaves rally after loud noises erupt."

CNN:

"Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally."

FORBES:

"Will surviving gunfire (not being shot, mind you) be Donald Trump's next appeal to black voters?"

Perhaps they can't help themselves ... literally. Their paychecks depend on writing and saying things like this.

The Secret Service is now blaming the local police.

Oh, really? Where were the drones? 

The Secret Service snipers had the gunman in their sights for 2o seconds before firing ... after he had already fired.

As Hamlet once said:

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."