Brazening It Out

I am suspending normal order for the month of November. No inspirational songs, probably very few photos. What photos I use will have little to do with the blog, most likely. I'm going to try something very, very stupid -- stupid because I have done almost zero prep for it. November is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. I am not deluding myself that I will write an entire novel in 30 days. But I have hopes and dreams of writing a story in that amount of time. If I stick with my typical pattern, there will be roughly 90 paragraphs worth of a story before December. That's probably enough to fit in a developed arc, but who knows? I certainly don't. I thought I knew which story I was going to tell, based on one I started a year ago. But I decided to bail on it somewhere in the last 24 hours, and I didn't even have a basic idea what I wanted to write about until sunset tonight. I pulled a main character name out of thin air on a ride out to the eastern plains, and so far I have a title and a skeleton of a premise. I have the bad guy named and her personality chosen. I have very little faith that this will pan out. But I am frequently up for a challenge, so before I can talk myself out of it, let's see what falls out of my fingers.

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Black coffee spread in a hot puddle around the base of the coffeemaker, as sludge ran down the side of the carafe, with some of the larger grounds floating in the mess on the counter. It had been dripping steadily on the floor for almost a minute before Frederick noticed the sound and looked up from his notes. "No, no, no! Not again!" He grabbed a handful of brown paper towels off of the stack near the break room sink, and started throwing them into the scalding remains of his one chance at breakfast. These days he was so stressed out as the deadline of his project loomed nearer that he never got to eat real food in the mornings, relying instead on the sugar and half and half in his coffee for the calories to get him through until noon. This was the second time in two days that the coffeemaker had overflowed. He had been very careful to rinse out the basket and drip valve well, but the grind was too fine and it clogged it up anyway.

Frederick pulled the mostly empty carafe out from the machine and set his coffee mug on the wet base. Gritty liquid dripped and splashed into the cup from the outside of the basket. He didn't even pretend that he was going to strain it before he drank it. He didn't give a shit anymore about quality. He just needed caffeine and comfort. This project was one of the worst he had ever worked on. It's not that the drug under development wasn't worthwhile. It wasn't even that the results of the clinical trials were significantly negative, although there were some things that troubled him. It was because of her. The woman who Frederick had to report to by the end of the month was the biggest sociopath he had ever met. He swore her biggest source of glee was lying brazenly, whether to shareholders, prescribers, or the public at large. The former received at least a veneer of civility from her. The latter were held in contempt.

With enough sugar and cream, the murky coffee was almost palatable. Frederick was putting the mug to his lips for only the second time when his phone buzzed twice and lit up. He could feel his face clench as stress hormones flooded through his body. The name was there on the email notification: Cindy Lace-Platte. He considered not opening it, but he did that once. A twenty minute delay in reading one email last summer caused a three week delay in the conclusion of his study. He would never do that again. He reached for the phone.