“Welcome to The Mended Mind, Ms. Amano,” said the young nurse with a dimpled smile as she leaned against the door to the waiting room.

Megumi slinked past the scrub-clad woman, head down and eyes on the floor. Her shadow flitted in front of her toward the convoy of fluorescent lights lining the ceiling.

“My name is Haley, and I will be your observer this morning,” the woman said, releasing the door and taking the lead toward the back of the building.

Observer?

Megumi pulled her hands into the sleeves of her forest-green cardigan and trailed after the blonde girl down the hallway. Her shallow heels clapped along the chocolate vinyl flooring and echoed off the beige walls.

“How is today going for you?” the woman asked, looking back over her shoulder.

The shadow sprung from the stainless steel baseboard and bound to the nurse’s sneakers.

Megumi retreated further into her sweater. She stared at the woman's shade-entangled feet through the copse of raven hair hanging around her face.

At the end of the hall, the nurse thrust her hip against the antimicrobial latch of a bulky, walnut-stained door and swung it open.

“Please have a seat,” Haley said, gesturing toward a hydraulic recliner bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. “And we’ll get started.”

Megumi followed her into the room and shuffled to the chair. Padded straps hung from the tip of each armrest, and a metal ring covered in wires orbited the headrest. An enormous cylinder with equidistant strips of light running down its center thrummed behind the seat like a maw ready to swallow.

The shadow slipped across the room and wedged itself under her feet. She couldn’t see it well in the dim room but felt its drain pulling on her. She sat on the bench, kicked off her shoes, and laid back into the machine to escape the floor.

“Isn’t Dr. Bamford here?”

“No need. The CET device handles all the alterations,” Haley said, closing the hefty door. “The only reason I'm here is to buckle you in and press some buttons.”

“CET?” Megumi asked, anxiety fluttering through her heart. “I thought this was a therapy session.”

“It is. It’s called Constructive Engram Therapy.”

The nurse clacked a command into the computer terminal near the recliner's headrest. The wired halo around the headrest began rotating and slid down until it covered Megumi’s eyes. A deep, electrical hum pulsated from the ring, tickling her nose and ears.

“And what do you mean, ‘alterations’?”

“The CET machine rewrites traumatic memories," Haley said, reaching for the strap on the nearest armrest and pulling it over Megumi’s wrist. "These alteration let you experience the choices you didn’t make, so you...” 

“I . . . No! I already know the other choices!” Megumi said, jerking back her arm and wriggling out of the headgear.

“It’s OK. There's nothing…”

“No!” Megumi said as she soared out of the chair, shoving the nurse aside, and ran for the entryway.

She shouldered the massive door into the jamb in a hysterical haze.

Locked!

A shriek clawed up her throat as she gaped over her shoulder at the stunned technician and the shadow looming behind her.

“No!”

She pushed and tugged on the latch with both hands. The bolt popped, and the door swung inward.

“Ms. Amano?” Haily asked, regaining her balance.

Megumi leaped through the door and fled, bare feet slapping against the flooring. She shoved the door at the end of the hall, slamming it into the wall. A graying man in denim overalls and a flat cap gawked at her over the rim of his glasses as she crashed through the waiting room and out the glass door leading to the parking lot.

Once outside, she sprinted to the maroon Nissan parked in the handicapped stall next to the curb and jerked on the door handle.

Why is everything Locked?

Tears bubbled from her eyes as she continued yanking on the latch, warping the surrounding metal. She threw her head back and shrieked with dread and frustration.

“Hey! That’s my car!” said the old man, hobbling out of the clinic and pointing his cane at her. The nurse pushed past the man and ran toward the vehicle.

Megumi stopped and considered the sedan.

This isn't mine.

Her wide-eyed, mascara-streaked face glared back at her from the window. The shadow climbed behind her tousled hair in the reflection until it towered over her. She whipped around and slammed her back against the Nissan, gasping for air.

“Ms. Amano?” Haley said, stepping off the curb with her palms out. “Everything is fine. You’re having a panic attack.”

The shadow dissipated as the nurse approached. Megumi dropped into a squat next to the older man’s car, cupping her hands to her face and crying.

“It’s OK,” Haley said, kneeling beside her and rubbing her back. “I’ll stay with you.”

“Help me. I can't do this anymore."

She twisted the collar of her sweater around her thumb and dabbed her lower eyelids with the inside of the wool.

“CET can help you, Ms. Amano,” the nurse said, standing and holding out her hand to help Megumi up.

I want to go home.

“What do you think?”

But I’m tired of running.

“Should we try it?”

What if it works?

“OK,” Megumi said, peering up and taking the nurse’s hand. “I’ll come with you. I suppose I need to get my shoes, anyway.”

Haley helped her stand, and the two women walked back into the clinic. Megumi peered at her feet as they squeezed past the man in overalls, still standing in the doorway. He grunted at her and trekked out to check his car.

“How does Constructive Engram Therapy work?” she asked as they stepped down the hall.

“It rewrites memories to show you the potential outcomes of alternate choices.”

“How does altering my memories help?”

“Think about today. Why did you flee?”

“I . . . felt scared.”

They entered the room containing the CET system. Megumi sat on the edge of the recliner and rubbed her hands against her thighs.

“Right,” Haley said, entering the command to reset the device. “What if you chose not to run instead?”

“I would have completed the session, I guess.”

The nurse flipped a switch and the Zen sounds of running water and flute music began burbling through hidden speakers, never quite converging into a melody.

“Let’s say you went through with the treatment today rather than fleeing and discovered your fear was unfounded. Would you feel afraid the next time you came in?”

“I suppose not.”

“CET is like that,” Haley said.

Megumi laid back in the chair and rested her hands across her stomach. The nurse typed another set of instructions into the terminal, and the halo slid down over Megumi’s eyes again.

“By altering your memories, we can train your mind to expect positive outcomes. Constructive Engram Therapy builds a catalog of productive experiences for your brain to draw from. So, instead of imagining the worst and letting fear cripple your judgment, you can face choices with confidence.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No, but we need to strap you in so you don’t slap yourself during the treatment,” Haley said, smooshing the velcro straps around Megumi’s wrists.

Megumi swallowed her anxiety and tried to remain calm.

“We're all set, Ms. Amano,” the nurse said. “I’m going to start the CET and see you in about an hour.”

Haley hit a key on the keyboard. The hydraulic recliner lifted Megumi and inserted her into the rotating cylinder up to her waist like a whale swallowing a runaway prophet. The halo orbiting her head began knocking with electromagnetic pulses. She closed her eyes.

“Hello, Meg,” said the shadow, gripping her shoulders. “It’s been a while.”

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APRIL

Francis stared at the corpse in the coffin. Wisps of hair orbited the body's visible scalp in a globe of kinky gray. Makeup and setting spray caked its face and hands, masking the bloodless skin beneath. Rose-colored lips tugged against the sutures, binding them shut. A cloud of blush clung to each cheek with unnatural saliency. 

Oh, Ruth. What have they done to you?

He reached into the casket and took the carcass by the hand. It felt like a refrigerated ham.

"Goodbye, sweetheart."

He released the hand, stepped back, and nodded to the funeral director.

"She looks peaceful, doesn't she?" the man asked, closing the lid on the husk.

"She…"

Francis stuck his hand into his chestnut wool pants pocket and pulled out a crumpled handkerchief.

"She appears . . . dead," he said, lifting his browline frames and dabbing his eyes. "There one second and gone the next."

He turned his back to the bronze box and shuffled across the sunburned carpet towards the viewing room door.

"We have everything ready for tomorrow, Mr. Wolfe," the director said, tugging at his tie. "No need to worry about a thing."

Francis rambled through the doorway and into the hall without a word.

I'm not worried. I'm alone.

Francis unlocked his Ford F-250. Rust bubbled through the banana-colored paint along the bottom edge, making it appear overripe. The door creaked and popped as he tugged it open.

He reached over the threadbare fabric and hauled a small wooden stepping stool with a rope tied around one leg off the passenger seat. He stooped down, placed the footstool on the ground, held onto the loose end of the line, and stepped into the truck.

Francis drew the step into the vehicle with the cord, sat it on the bench beside him, and closed the whiny door.

What am I going to do?

He grabbed the wheel at the midnight position and rested his forehead on his knuckles.

I can't do this.

He leaned back with his head against the rear window and slid his fingers into his white, unkempt hair, thinking.

"Well, Ruth. I never reckoned the Old Chief would outlast you," he said, lowering his arms and caressing the cracked, tri-spoked steering wheel.

He gazed at the backs of his spotted hands, icy veins pushing through the skin.

"Sixty years. Just the three of us."

He thrust his hips forward, dug his key out of his pocket, and twisted it in the ignition. The truck's engine cranked a few times and roared to life, passing a puff of oil into the long hedge framing the mortuary's property line.

"Then, in a flash, you just blinked away," he said, putting the truck in gear and driving out of the parking lot.

Traffic raced past him as he clung to the right lane, going ten miles under the speed limit. A murdered-out Honda Civic with a performance muffler buzzed by, making much less headway than its racket implied. Stop lights came and went and disappeared altogether as he made his way out of the city and into the mountains east of the valley.

Francis bounced up the narrow, zig-zag trail cut into the side of the mountain. The tires drummed a steady beat of small rocks against the floor of his truck. He didn't pass any other cars, and nobody passed him. The canyon appeared as empty as his heart.

He pulled to the left shoulder of the dirt road, parallel with a steep drop, and braked to a stop. Dust from the roadway billowed up through the air vents, filling the cabin with the earthy flavor of nature.

"I don't know if there's anything out there, Ruthy," Francis said, staring down the slope, "but we can find out together."

He wanted to turn the wheel and stomp on the gas, but something held him.

Wait!!!

The word came as a feeling more than a sound, a touch on the heart from some distant hand.

"Wait? Why would I want to survive alone?"

The impression bit into his soul, shaking it and refusing to let go. He banged his head on the steering wheel and wailed. His raspy lamentation bounced off the windows and back into his ears. Tears dropped from his eyes, making splatter marks in the dust coating the horn.

He fished in his pants pockets for his handkerchief but couldn't find it.

Did I drop it at the funeral home?

He checked his shirt pocket and touched the edge of a business card. He pulled it out and flipped it around to read the front.

Jaelle: A spiritual medium for troubles large and small.

"Where'd this come from?" he asked, wiping his nose on his cuff.

Francis dropped his hand into his lap and leaned his head against the window. He gazed through the clumps of trees peppering the bluff at the roiling river a couple of hundred feet below. The thought of turning to crystal balls and tarot cards made him cringe. He knew down in his bones he couldn't drive to his doom, though, at least not today.

“Ruth doesn’t want this,” he said, turning his truck away from the edge.

He tucked the strange card back into his pocket, wiped his eyes on his sleeve again, and drove home to make an appointment.

JULY

"I used to think of death as an event." 

Francis let his words evaporate into the sandalwood haze that softened Jaelle's parlor without elaborating. He drummed his fingers against the dark velvet cloth draped over the round table between him and the wizened medium.

Dot, dot, dot, dot . . . dot, dot, dot, dot...

Jaelle stopped dueling with the drawstrings of a small weathered pouch, letting them fall slack in her knotted hands.

"Isn't it?" she asked, the weight of her thick, age-frosted bun pulling the pile of hair back on her head as she looked up at him.

"What, death?" he said, meeting her gaze. "No. It's a process."

He peered into her dark eyes. Her irises and pupils appeared as two black pools in the candlelight. Ghosts of past joys and sorrows lined her eyes and mouth. Candlelight glinted off the ornate silver scarab set with a radiant emerald that pinned her bun in place.

It's funny how age becomes more beautiful as we mature.

He caught himself staring and dropped his eyes to her hands instead. He had come here twice a week since the day of Ruth's funeral. On his first visit, he expected floating tables and ghostly moans. So far, they just talked while she fiddled with her hide bag, though. The lack of theatrics in these sessions disappointed him, but at least seeing Jaelle gave him someone to talk to.

Dot, dot, dot, dot…

She smiled, studying Francis over the rims of her round spectacles for another moment.

"Explain," she said, looking down and entangling her fingers into the strings of the tiny leather sack again.

"Well, when my… When Ruth died, it didn't happen in an instant," he said, breathing more incense than air. "Her passing took months. She withered as a cut rose in water. Her petals faded and fell. Her stem wilted. Her life dissipated for almost a year until, one day, she left. The processes is still going on."

"I see."

Stop bringing up your wife, you dolt!

Francis looked around the room, bouncing his leg and drumming his fingers, hunting for something to say. The soft fabric muffled each tap, attempting to hush his nerves like a warm blanket might calm a fussy child.

But isn't that why you're here?

The black cloth grew like moss across the table, up the walls, and climbed in folds to a peak in the center of the ceiling. The dense pile swallowed most of the light and sound in the room, creating a cozy, tent-shaped womb.

"It stinks, you know, being alone?" he said. "It's worse than finding a bird dropping in your lemonade or pulling on somebody else's sweaty underpants at the gym by mistake."

Smooth save, Francis.

The hope of a spiritual connection to his spouse drove him here months ago. He still wanted that, but he also discovered parts of the old him resurrecting themselves when he visited Jaelle, bits he thought had perished with his wife.

Dot, dot, dot, dot . . . dot, dot, dot, dot...

"What's with all the tapping?"

 "I'm anxious, I guess," he said, silencing his fingers. "Or maybe it's Morse code for the letter H."

As in, how about dinner?

A torrent of emotions flooded through him. Joy at the thought of sharing an intimate conversation over untouched food with Jaelle and trembling over Ruth punching him square in the essence if he did. No, he couldn't pursue these new feelings.

'Til death do you part.

Could he?

"How Navy of you," she said. "Do you have to do it?"

"Yes, but only because I like how your eyebrows bristle and scratch at each other when I do."

He leaned forward and picked up a blue-speckled cup resembling a hollowed-out cowbird egg. Butterflies bubbled in his chest as he blew on the amber tea Jaelle had given him. A warm plume of steam curled into his nostrils as he sipped. The flavor ran across his tongue like a boiled nest.

What about the mysterious business card and the voice in the canyon? Could those be signs? Permission?

"What's in the pouch?" he asked, trying to stanch his inner conversation.

"Be patient."

"How long are you planning to fondle the bag before we get at it?"

She shot him a look, raising an eyebrow.

"No . . . no! I didn't mean… I . . . I meant the medium stuff!" he said, heat crawling from his collar and up his face. "The medium stuff!"

"We'll get there, Francis," Jaelle said, smirking. "I promise."

He dabbed his embarrassment from his forehead with his shirtsleeve.

She plucked the silver pin from her bun and shook her head. Hair spilled down her shoulders and back, framing her face in soft waves. She nudged the end of the hairpin into the knot. The beetle bobbed, reflecting candlelight as she worked to loosen the drawstrings.

Hold on, what did she mean by "getting there"?

"There are some fruits and fresh corn in the kitchen if you want to . . . cool off . . . while you wait," Jaelle said, smiling. "The door is behind the drape there."

He stood and poked at the black velour cloaking the room, trying to find an opening. The fuzzy material released its captive dust as he wriggled the curtain in search of ingress. He rushed for his mouth, but his hand arrived too late. The big-bang sneeze birthed a cluster of spit and mucous into the velvet universe surrounding him. He pulled his sleeve down over his thumb and tried obliterating the constellation before she noticed.

"Did you know that phlegm is one of the four bodily humors of medieval physiology?" she said, eyes still on her work.

Another wave of humiliating heat ignited beneath Francis's chin and engulfed his face. He continued rubbing his shirtsleeve against the drape, not looking at Jaelle.

"No, but I'm sure it's at my expense."

"Not that kind of humor. Humors, as in bodily fluids. In Hippocratic medicine, humors correspond with temperaments. Phlegm signifies apathetic behavior in a person."

"Well, I'm not apathetic, but I am sorry about the phlegm brulee."

"Don't dirty your shirt," she said, laughing. "There's a towel in the kitchen if you must clean."

Francis stopped scrubbing and tapped the curtain to find an opening, careful not to punch up any dust. He found a crack in the veil and slipped into the kitchen.

Sunshine blared through the windows and ricocheted off the white walls. He shielded his eyes on his way to the sink, the chocolate hardwood creaking with each step.

He cupped his hands under the running water until it cooled and splashed it against his face.

"You're an idiot, old man," he said, wetting his face again.

He pulled a pale towel from the brass hoop beside the sink's window and dried his face. A bright red rooster with emerald tail feathers stared back at him from the embroidered cloth as he drew it away. He ran his fingers through the terrycloth, staring at the bird.

Ruth owned the same hand-towel.

She loved rooster-themed kitchen items; towels, placemats, and salt and pepper shakers. She believed roosters signified honesty, courage, strength, and watchfulness.

Everything a wife should be.

She lived up to all those things during their sixty years of marriage.

Francis used the towel to wipe the memories from his eyes, then wetted it in the sink.

He pushed his way through the drape again and back into the parlor, where Jaelle still tugged at the drawstrings of the little pouch. He rubbed the remaining sneeze stains from Jaelle's curtain, taking care not to soil the rooster.

"You didn't get any corn."

"Oh, I never eat corn. I don't trust foods that can survive a trip through the intestines. You never know if what you're getting is fresh or just rinsed off and served again."

"That's disgusting, Francis!"

"Precisely my point, my dear," he said, attempting to lighten his maudlin mood.

She unbunched her eyebrows and shook her head, a slight grin turning up the corner of her mouth.

Ruth used to smile the same way whenever I said something absurd.

"You miss her, don't you?"

"Yes, you might say I'm ‘Ruthless.’"

She smiled as he lifted the egg-like cup from the table and gulped down the tepid remains of his tea.

"Does the pouch have something to do with why I'm here?"

"You might say that."

"Oh, well, let me untie it for you."

"It doesn't work that way, Francis."

Aegean veins snaked and roiled beneath her spotted flesh as she pushed and rolled the decorative pin into the stubborn knot.

"I once dreamed I passed away," he said, mesmerized by the sparkling scarab.

"An emptiness trapped me as I left, and I couldn't see anything, no matter which direction I turned. I screamed into the darkness, and a door popped open, filling the space with light. A multitude of people jumped at me and shouted, 'Surprise!'

"I saw my entire family surrounding me, celebrating my return. Ruth, my mom and dad, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and loved ones I never even knew in life joined in. Of course, I stood there, bum naked and confused because that's how dreams are. The familial group roared at the look on my face. Before I could die again of embarrassment, my mother pushed through the crowd and swaddled me in a robe of eternal sunshine.

"I didn't feel mocked but rather a perfect love."

"Love at your expense?" Jaelle said with a smile.

"Perhaps," he said, "but isn't that the best kind?"

"What about the pure, unadulterated love of choosing to give everything you are, all you have; heart, mind…" she said, looking up and meeting his eyes, "…soul?"

The conflict raged within him as she poked her toe over the line of vulnerability. She offered him a peek at her yearning, expecting a glint of his in return until desire spilled over the emotional levy in waves.

What about Ruth, though? What about the dream? Could he be with his wife again? What if his marriage vows got things wrong, and they could be together again? Wouldn't that make Jaelle a betrayal? He needed time to think, time to decide.

She's so beautiful, and she's right here, though.

"Do you think people can choose whether to go or stay?" He asked, retreating.

"What do you mean?" she asked, setting the pouch and pin on the table.

"My... Ruth clung to life for months. It seemed the worse she got, the more she hung on. Do you think she chose to do so for my sake?"

"Are you implying life and death are a choice?"

He spun the empty tea cup in his fingers, considering the question.

"Maybe. Everything in life is a choice, so it makes sense if we could choose when to go. Perhaps age and illness coerce us into making that decision."

"Ah, you figured it out," Jaelle said, waving her arms over the leather pouch with a flourish.

Something writhed within the bag, and the drawstrings twisted against each other.

"What in the...? How…?" he said, leaning forward in his chair.

The knot unraveled, and the pull strings flung themselves to either side of the pouch. She picked up the sack and stretched its maw open.

"Are you ready to make a choice, Francis?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do you want to see her again?"

"I . . . I don't understand."

"You must know you have a choice before you can make one," she said. "Now you know. So, do you want to be with your wife again?"

He tipped his seat onto its front two legs, almost dumping himself on the floor, his decision made.

"Yes! Please!"

Jaelle stood and retrieved a glass pitcher of water and an item resembling a chamberstick from a mahogany chest with bone inlays standing behind her. She set the things on the table to the side of the bag.

Francis eyed the odd chamberstick. Instead of a cylinder to poke a candle in, the device contained a crystal pyramid with the top sliced off. Gray smoke churned inside.

She turned the bag upside down and rattled six wrist bones into her hand, each with a different symbol carved into it. She perched the bones on the blunted tip of the pyramid, with the marks facing up. Next, she grabbed the pin and winced a trickle of blood from her finger. She squeezed against the wound, dripping blood onto the bones and filling the markings.

"Stare into this dark glass, dear man, and you will find the light."

Francis gripped the edges of the table and stared into the smoky chamber.

Jaelle wiped her bloody digit on her dress and reached for the pitcher.

"Blood from bone," she said, pouring liquid over the stack of bones.

The liquid flowed down the sides and disappeared into the pyramid's base. The smoke in the pyramid dissipated as the water washed the sanguine fluid from the bones. Light exploded from the candlestick and pierced the room.

"Choose, Francis!"

He stood up, knocking over his chair, as rays brighter than the sun flared from the pyramid. Glory burned through the room, blistering the velvet veil like celluloid against a hot bulb. He expected to see the walls of Jaelle's house on fire. But, instead, brilliant perfection appeared through the drapes as they scorched and fell.

Jaelle kept pouring.

The splendor torched his skin. The flesh on his hands tightened, and his face stretched on his skull. The hair on his knuckles turned from gray to black. He covered his eyes as another flash of brilliance erupted from the pyramid, burning away the final remains of the parlor.

Everything went silent except the sound of trickling water.

He opened his eyes. Only the pitcher and chamberstick remained, suspended in midair. Water from the pitcher trickled across the now clean bones.

He reached for the handle of the floating pitcher, but his fingers touched flesh instead of glass. He pulled away as a hand appeared around the handle. Then an arm. Then shoulders and a face. Her face!

"Ruth? Is that you?"

She smiled and set down the vessel.

An eternity away, Jaelle placed the bones back into the pouch and watched it tangle itself shut. She put the bag in the chest behind her, next to the pitcher, chamberstick, and pin. She walked to the other side of the table, kneeled beside Francis's body lying on the floor, and kissed his forehead.

"This gift is all I am, sweet man," she said, cupping his cheek. "Everything I have to offer."

She pulled her business card from his shirt pocket, stood, and held it over one of the candles.

"Wait!!!" she whispered as the card vanished.

Other stories you might enjoy

The Time Traveler

Bob the Wasp Cleaver

I Don’t Know

I've talked about taking leaps of faith in several posts like I don't know. While writing and posting drafts of the first three chapters of my personal-challenge novel Strangers and my short story The Time Traveler, I realized I needed to take another leap of faith and focus on writing fiction; a lot of it. So, starting with my next post, I will pivot my blog away from writing tips and career advice to posting short stories and novels.

Even with this change of direction, I still want to help others improve their writing, but I will shrink that focus to fiction rather than offering general writing advice.

My near-future plans for this blog are to:

• Publish one or two short stories or novel chapters each week.

• Create a podcast where I read these stories and provide commentary and writing tips related to the tale.

• Create an online writers' group where writers can share their stories and receive constructive feedback to improve their work.

This new direction will allow me to create the community I want to build and share the content I want to make.

I look forward to seeing where this new path will lead and hope you enjoy the outcome.

Michael straddled his two-stroke, 250cc dirt bike and kicked himself over the chasm's edge.

He free-fell down the ten-foot vertical drop along the rim of the gorge. He gunned his throttle to gain speed once the ground's angle sloped in his favor. The high-pitch whine of his engine buzzed like a swarm of angry wasps. A mixture of gas and oil burned in his nostrils.

Gravity and horsepower launched Michael further into the earth's core, his yellow leather suit streaking through the desert brush. Rocks and sand tossed the motorcycle's tires to the sides. He stood on the motorbike's pegs to better absorb the shock, steering a furious series of minor adjustments to prevent the bike from fishtailing.

A flash of tumbleweeds flew by on either side of the route, threatening to seize his wheels and slam him to the earth if he strayed off course. Tracks from previous riders snaked in the path before him, and he strangled the handgrips to keep himself on the trail.

The earth's gravitational pull clutched Michael as he entered the nadir of his descent, dragging him down and making him twice as heavy. He continued wrenching the right handgrip back, flooding his motor with fuel. The dirt bike's banshee-like screech wailed through the canyon as he maintained his speed up the opposite side of the trench.

The incline steepened as he soared up the earthen wall, racing toward the mouth of the abyss. He anticipated the thrill of launching up the vertical face, shooting into the air above the crevasse, and landing on a wheelie of death-defying victory next to his friends.

The handlebars lurched at him as he hit the bottom edge of the ninety-degree finish line. He adjusted his stance to compensate for the new slant. The angle kept increasing, though. Ninety-one. Ninety-five. One hundred. The bike's tires gyrated into emptiness as the wall sheered and crumbled away, throwing him back into the ravine in an avalanche of toppling rocks and soil.

Michael clung to the motorcycle, suspended in a cloud of debris, panic ripping through his mind. The rear tire banged into the solid ground a moment later, tossing him backward off the motorbike. He crashed to the earth in a tumble of terrain, cracking his helmet on a rock on his way down. Pain exploded in his chest as the impact smashed his innards against his spine. The wet crack of snapping tree branches echoed from within as bones shattered.

He slid to a stop near the bottom of the chasm, face down, his mouth full of dust and weeds. The motorcycle slammed onto his back a moment later, burning his leg through the yellow tatters of his leather suit. The bike's engine pooped a few more rotations and died.

The sun draped over him, bathing him in warmth. The wind whispered through nearby weeds. A grasshopper pelted the earth with a soft thump in front of his face. He tried to lift his head and blow the insect away but passed out instead.

Boop . . . boop . . . boop...

Michael moaned at the noise, willing it to stop.

Boop . . . boop . . . boop...

He groaned louder.

The electrical cadence continued, unperturbed. He raised his eyebrows to drag his eyes open, but they weren't long enough. He rolled his eyes beneath the stubborn skin, but the lids held fast. He willed his brows and eyeballs to join forces and opened his eyes with an audible pop after some exertion.

He blinked the crust from his eyes and stared at the grid of speckled drop-in ceiling tiles above him.

Boop . . . boop . . . boop...

"How are you feeling?" a voice said over the electric pulse of the heart monitor.

Michael considered the question. He felt smashed, broken. Medication dabbed at his agony, making him dizzy. He envisioned the drug as a gnat spanking the titanosaur of his suffering into submission.

I feel like bug guts on a windshield! he thought, but only managed a weak "Merrr."

"Sounds about right."

He tried to turn his head, but something pinned his skull in place.

"Don't try to move. You have a cervical fracture, so the surgeon immobilized your neck."

He peered toward the voice. In his peripheral vision, he caught a blur of someone rocking in a blue Naugahyde chair beside him. The older man's white hair and milky, long-sleeved shirt swayed in an odd rhythm with the heart monitor.

"Wwww . . . wh . . ."

He licked the dryness from the roof of his mouth.

"Who are you?"

"My name is Carter," the man said. "I volunteer here."

Boop . . . boop . . . boop...

Bags, tubes, and electronics crowded the bed on the right. A cool stream flowed into Michael's arm from a transparent bag hanging above him. An octopus of wires crawled through the neck of his gown and sucked onto various parts of his torso.

He squeezed his eyes shut and drifted with the drugs.

"What happened to me?"

"Motorcycle accident. Don't you remember?"

"No."

He listed to the side like a sailboat rolling in a sea of syrup. He opened his eyes again, and the room snapped upright.

"How long have I been here?"

"Don't know," Carter said. "I only got here myself a while ago. The higher-ups told me you could use some cheerin'."

Michael hoisted his hands above him. An IV tube stuck out of his right arm, and surgical tape swaddled an oxygen sensor against his index finger. A metal rod held his left hand in place. Clamps and screws bit through his flesh at intervals from his mid forearm down through the fleshy skin between his thumb and forefinger.

"That's the best offer going at the moment," he said, resting his arms on the bed. "I'll take it."

"What're you called, son?"

"You can call me Michael, which, coincidentally, is also my name. At least, I think it is."

"Reckon it'll do as well as any, 's long as you're happy with it."

Boop . . . boop . . . boop...

"How old are you?"

"I imagine I'm a year or two younger than you."

"Gimme a number," Carter said, grinning.

"Twenty-one."

"Darn shame, it is. Happenin' to someone so young. Still, tragedy can guide you to glory if you let it."

Michael coughed. Pain rang through his head, splitting it in two. His lungs collided in his rib cage. He choked and started coughing more. He tried to push his feet against the bed and roll onto his side out of instinct, but nothing happened. Fear punched through his ribs and crushed his heart. He wiggled his toes, but nothing moved.

"I . . . I can't feel my legs!"

"Sorry, son," Carter said. "They came 'n changed the dressin' on your back while you were still out. I hoped for the best but feared the worse."

Michael fastened his eyelids and denied the news. It could be temporary, couldn't it?

"Anything I can get you?"

"Uhhh! Can you invent time travel for me?"

"Well, isn't that an interesting request?"

The older man stopped rocking, stood, and shuffled towards the bed. He towered much taller than his blur suggested earlier, more a Goliath than a David.

"Fascinating, indeed," he said, leaning over the injured youth.

He pressed his calloused thumb upward against Michael's eyelid, forcing it open.

"Look at me."

He gazed into Carter's emerald eyes as the man moved his head back and forth, glancing into the younger man's pupil as though studying his soul. The man let go and pushed the other eye wide.

"What would you do if you could travel through time?"

"I'd go back and sell my dirt bike, for one thing."

Carter studied the right eyeball, shifting his head again in contemplation.

"You're mistaken, of course," the man said, pulling away.

Michael blinked and rubbed his eyes with his good hand.

"What do you mean?"

"For one, you can't 'invent' time any more than you can gravity. It's somethin' you discover, like falling for the first time. It's a law you live."

"OK. Can you discover time travel for me?"

"Second, you're thinkin' about it all wrong," the old man said, standing upright as if victorious in some significant debate.

Boop . . . boop . . . boop...

"Since traveling through time isn't a thing, though, it doesn't matter much, does it?" Michael asked.

"Who says it isn't . . . 'a thing'?"

"Well, the wheelchair dude, for one. Stephen Hawking,” he said. “We watched a show in school when I was a kid. He said he planned a party and sent out invitations after the fact. If time travelers existed, they would have known about the event and attended, but nobody came."

Carter ambled to the end of the bed and folded his arms in front of him. He lifted his right arm and propped his chin against his knuckles, pacing.

"Hawkin' was a smart guy, but he Hollywooded his thinkin' there, the same as you've done," the older man said, stopping and pointing his forefinger in the air to punctuate his point. "You're lookin' at time as a straight line as if you could pull yourself out of today and jump back to 1955. That's silly."

"How else would it work?" Michael asked.

Carter stepped to the side of the bed and leaned on the safety rail. A tuft of white whiskers bristled from his unbuttoned collar. His size made him appear more mighty than a typical octogenarian, and his bleached hair and shirt gave him an angelic appearance.

"You ever play Monopoly?"

"Only once, thank heaven."

"Good enough. Let's pretend you're the shoe. You start on Go and travel straight toward the jail in one direction, right?"

"Yeah."

"You can't turn and go backwards," Carter said. "You keep goin' clockwise around the board, stompin' past the railroads, free parking, and so on. This linear movement is how time works."

Michael shut his eyes and visualized the game's playing area. He scribbled out jail and replaced it with the word hospital. He filled in the orange square with IV bags and heart monitors and an illustrated man with wavy lines for legs.

"Yes!" he said. "And I want to travel through time, back to Go, and buy a hammock rather than a dirt bike. I can't, though, because the absence of time travelers argument proves it is impossible."

Boop . . . boop . . . boop...

Carter stood back up. He grabbed the top corners of the blue chair, wrestled it beside the bed, and sat down. The can light in the ceiling next to the gurney reflected on his white hair, making it glow.

"People discover time travel all the time, son."

"That can't be true. We would know if people traveled through time," Michael said, twisting the palm of his unbroken arm up for emphasis. "Think about it. If the last person on earth discovered time travel billions of years from now, they'd come back. They'd teach other people, and we would have encountered time travelers. The fact we haven't proves they don't exist and never will."

Carter rocked back in the chair, cupping the back of his head in his hands and blowing air through his lips.

"Interesting logic, but you're still thinking like the shoe, son."

He leaned forward again and scooted to the front of the seat.

"You're right. From the shoe's perspective, it is impossible to travel through time. But what if you were the player?"

Michael's eye muscles hurt from straining to see the older man, so he looked away and massaged the ache from his eyes.

"What do you mean?" he said, looking back at the visitor. "Are you suggesting I become someone else? A full me transplant?"

"No, I'm sayin' you have to change your point of view."

The old man held his palms up, facing each other, and angled his hands to stare at Michael through the space between them.

"The shoe can only travel one way through the neighborhood. It must obey the game's rules," Carter said, waving his fingers in parallel to emphasize his argument, "but the player can see everything. He lives outside the game. Monopoly laws don't apply to him. He can interact with the board game in ways the shoe can't. He can also toss the game and do something worthwhile."

The older man gazed at him, nodding as if trying to coax something from him.

"Think it through, son. What effect might your perspective have on time travel?"

Michael's brain felt as bruised as the rest of his body. He didn't want to think about anything. Why was he having this conversation? He rubbed his forehead and stroked his temples with his fingertips. Exhaustion smothered him, and he wanted to sleep.

"I'm not sure. I'm too tired to think."

Boop . . . . . . . . . boop...

Michael closed his eyelids. His pupils drew a street with colorful houses and shops inside his lids. He stomped down the avenue, past the brown bungalows and blue bi-levels. He peered into the boutiques peddling chests and chances.

He limped into the entrance of a new hospital at the end of the lane and rolled out the exit a short time later, confined to a chair.

He wheeled down a neighboring boulevard lined with Painted Lady properties of pink and orange toward a free parking lot.

As he bumped across the railroad tracks, he lifted from his seat and floated out of the wheelchair. He grappled for the armrests to hold himself to the ground but missed. Inch by inch, foot by foot, he flew ever higher above the street, a nascent fear of falling clawing at his mind.

The Monopoly logo came into view beneath him, and cards of chance loomed on the horizon. Soon, all the colorful properties lining the game's streets sprawled out below him, so simple and small. So irrelevant.

Boop . . . . . . . . .

He glanced at his hands, liberated from tubes and screws. He wriggled his feet. They moved! Anxiety fled his thoughts, and he kicked his feet, swimming through the air toward the other side of the board.

He waved his hand at a dog sniffing the base of a light pole, sending the canine running backwards up the street. He willed the shoe from the town and back into the box. Every choice and consequence of the game stood present before him. The board itself moved at his command. He could grab all the wealth and have his victory, but none of it mattered.

Michael laughed, his bosom brimming with joy.

"I get it!" he said. "I understand the presence of time. I know why time travelers never come back!"

"Why don't they return?" asked a voice filling the universe.

"Nobody wants to be the shoe."

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...

Carter stood up and smiled. He touched Michael's face and caressed his cheek with his thumb.

"That's right, son. Well done."

He walked around the bed, flicked off the heart monitor, and faded away before the nurse rushed in.

I've been working on the third scene in my first attempt at writing a full-length novel this past week (here are the links to Scene 1 and Scene 2). As always, I employed my mental GPS to map out the direction I wanted to take in this chapter; however, this time, my preparations steered me squarely into an unyielding wall of writer's block.

I typically get writer's block when I fail to plan upfront or paint myself into a corner. In this case, the conflict and consequence I had intended to use didn't work for me. Instead, I wanted both to be stronger.

I've seen other writers suggest temporarily getting your mind off your writing and returning to it later with a fresh perspective when you experience writer's block. Their suggestions for distraction often include the following:

• Writing a list of your favorite authors and books.

• Reading a novel.

• Writing something else.

• Watching a movie.

None of these options worked for me. Whenever I returned from a brief hiatus, I still couldn't figure out how to end my scene. I also began experiencing procrastination, which always kills my endeavors. So, I took a different approach. I spent three days kneeing myself in the brain, with pages of my story wrapped around my leg for extra rigidity, using the following strategies:

• Even though I knew it didn't work, I wrote the entire scene and highlighted all the weak areas I noticed.

• I read through my outline again and took notes.

• I reread the first two scenes I had already written and took notes.

After completing these three steps, I knew what was wrong with my scene and was able to fix it. I also made minor changes to my first two scenes to strengthen them. Furthermore, this exercise strengthened and changed the ending of my novel significantly.

I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll wait until my story is complete to share my original idea so you can see how it grew and evolved during the writing process.

I've never used these three steps to get myself unstuck, but they worked surprisingly well. My most significant benefits were avoiding procrastination, keeping my mind on my story, and strengthening my novel overall. The only way to solve a problem is to work on it. I couldn't have achieved the same level of success had I distracted myself by contemplating my elbow or watching my favorite film, O Brother, Where Art Thou, again.

So, here it is—the result of my stumbled-upon, three-step strategy for overcoming writer's block. Let me know what you think.

Pickup: Chapter 1, Scene 3

John King pulled to the curb behind Washington Elementary School, yanked his Ford F250 into neutral, and slid his foot off the clutch. The Lariat XLT model had been luxurious when his ancestors sailed it across the Atlantic on the Mayflower, but now it showed its age. The tan seats were threadbare in spots, and he could see metal through a hole he had worn through the floor mat and the stock brown carpet where he rested his heel while working the accelerator.

John picked up his phone and checked the Mōv app to see if he could pick up a quick gig on the way home. Similar to ride-share apps, Mōv allowed John to use his truck to haul beds, sofas, and other household junk for Mōv customers for a negotiated fee.

Three nearby opportunities appeared on John's screen, along with the customers' bids. The proximity of the first listing appealed to him, but the bid price of $20 didn't.

John rubbed the gray streak growing from his bottom lip to the tip of his cropped chestnut beard, then clicked the Negotiate button and suggested $35.

A white van pulled away from the curb in front of John, so he shoved his truck in gear and rolled forward, placing his passenger window even with the alleyway between the street and the school. Then, he cranked the transmission back into neutral and waited for Lennon.

Groups of kids wandered down the alley in their Halloween habiliments. John watched as a parade of princesses, pirates, and poltergeists played down the passage before heading off toward their respective homes once they reached the street. Gerold Rand's Doberman ran back and forth, snarling at the costume-clad children through dying weeds that clung to the chain-link separating the kids from the beast. John couldn't tell which was more ill-tempered, the dog or Gerold.

John's phone buzzed. The Mōv customer countered with $30.

"Hardly worth the fuel," John said, accepting the bid and scheduling the recliner pick-up forty-five minutes out.

The customer acknowledged the time, and an animated dollar sign jumped into the wallet icon at the bottom of John's screen.

John closed the Mōv app and opened a game of Sudoku. He stared at the paltry numbers peppered around the grid. John drew lines in the air over the numbers, silently moving his lips as he counted with his finger.

"Got it," he said, punching a 1 into the grid.

His phone buzzed, and the number turned red, indicating an error.

"Damn game!"

John swiped the Sudoku app closed and checked the alley. Two small girls dressed as salt and pepper shakers moseyed down the passage, each hugging a stack of books. The girls shared a one-armed embrace when they reached the street, then parted ways.

John looked at his silver Casio, twisting the angle of the watch to darken the LCD numbers in the autumn gloom.

"Where ya at, Len?"

John tapped his phone, opened a browser, and searched the school's website for a phone number. Tap. Tap. Tap. Back. Tap.

"Why the hell don't ya stick your number at the top of the main page?" John asked, impotently scolding the school the way he did other drivers on the road when they, too, used their brains as paperweights.

After a few more pecks with his finger, John excavated the school's number from beneath a pile of staff profiles and dialed.

"Washington Elementary School. My name is Skyleigh. How may I help you?"

"Yeah, ya know if my son got held after school?"

"What's his name?"

"Lennon," John said. "Lennon King."

"One moment. Let me check."

A quiver of musical notes shot one by one into John's ear as Skyleigh put him on hold.

John switched his phone to the other ear and impatiently thumped his steering wheel with his free thumb.

"Come on!"

John twisted in his seat, checking for any kids who might have seen Lennon. The only movement along the neighborhood street was the gray, sun-bleached ear of a deflated, Snoopy-shaped yard decoration rippling in the biting breeze; the other half of its head caved in against a shroud of fallen leaves.

"Sir?" Skyleigh said.

"Yes?"

"I checked with Mrs. Anderson, and Lennon left with the other children."

"You sure?" John asked.

"Yes, she said he left with his friend, Paul."

"Thanks, Skyleigh."

John hung up with Skyleigh and called home. No answer. He called Paul's house next. After five rings, Paul's mom, Tarah, invited him to leave a message. John hung up and stuffed his phone between his leg and the seat. He wrestled the old Ford into gear, stomped the accelerator, and raced towards home.

John's phone buzzed beneath his leg as he rolled through a stop sign and into the busy street separating the school's neighborhood from his own. A white Nissan traveling faster than John anticipated bore down on him. John punched the gas to avoid getting hit as both drivers exchanged honks and fingers.

John bounced through the gutter dividing his neighborhood from the main street, then grabbed the phone from under his leg and checked the notification.

It's time to head to your scheduled Mōv. You will arrive in approximately 28 minutes.

John sped down the middle of the street, giving himself a buffer in case a kid sprung out from between the cars lining both sides.

John pulled under the carport of his red-bricked house, slid out of the truck, and unlocked the side door leading into the kitchen.

"Lennon, buddy? You home?"

John rammed his keys into his pocket and grabbed a cold triangle of leftover toast off one of the breakfast plates left on the table on his way to the bedroom area at the back of the house.

"Lennon?"

John took a bite of the stale, buttery wedge as he pushed the door to his son's room open, razing a Lego village Lennon had architected behind the door. The specter of dirty socks and underpants haunted his senses, but no Lennon.

John walked back outside, wiping his greasy hand on his work jeans, then locked the house and climbed back into his truck.

"Dammit, Lennon! Where'd you go?"

John drove to Paul's house, screeching his tires as he raced into Paul's driveway. He slammed on the brakes, nearly smashing into the garage door, and exited the truck.

"When I say I'm gonna pick ya up, son…." John said as he bounded to the front door and banged on it with the side of his fist.

John could hear stirring from within the house, but nobody came, so he pounded the door again.

"Hey, Mr. King," Paul said, opening the door.

"Whoa! What happened to you, buddy?"

Paul stood in the entryway holding the door with one hand and cradling his side with the other. A pork-chop-shaped bruise blossomed beneath tear-streaked grease paint on the left side of his face, and his eye had swollen shut.

"That lard-tard Grundy Pluck body-slammed me after school," Paul said.

"Grundy Pluck?"

"Tonya," Paul said. "She's always tugging wedgies out of her butt crack."

John tried to hide a smirk but failed.

"You got a headache?" John asked, bending down and looking at Paul's pupils.

"Yeah, and my side hurts super bad."

"Lemme see," John said.

Paul lifted his shirt to reveal a plum-colored bruise clawing across his chest and around his left side.

"This hurt?" John asked, gently prodding the area.

Paul winced and nodded.

"Your mom home, or she still at work?"

"She's working 'til eight," Paul said.

John's phone buzzed in his hand again, and he checked the screen.

Based on your location, you may be late for your Mōv. Please depart soon to maintain your Average reputation.

John sighed and swiped the yellow warning away. The Mōv app would ding his reputation if he didn't arrive at the appointment on time. One more blot and Mōv would cancel his account. Unfortunately, the app had already demoted him from Good to Average for being a minute late to a job last week, which limited him to lower-paying tasks, hence today's lousy gig. John needed the extra income to pay for his phone, and rebuilding his reputation would take forever.

Why'd I have to go and take this damn job today?

"I gotta go, buddy," John said, "but is Lennon here with you?"

"No. Len took off right after Grundy Pluck splattered me," Paul said. "I thought he ran home."

"I checked. He ain't there."

John glanced at his watch, then looked back at his truck.

"Look, Paul. I gotta run an errand, but I'll check on you when I'm done, OK?"

Paul nodded again.

"I'll be back in a little bit."

John walked to his truck and opened the door. He paused, clutching the handle.

Where else could Lennon be?

He'd either head home or to Paul's if he was afraid. Could Lennon have returned to the playground to check on Paul, and John missed him? And what about Paul? What if he had a concussion or broken ribs?

John looked at his phone again, then at Paul, still standing in the doorway.

"Dammit!"

John threw his phone onto the seat and walked back over to Paul. He bent down to Paul's level and put one hand on Paul's shoulder.

"It's probably nothing, buddy, but I think we should get you checked out, John said.

"OK."

"Why don't you jump in the truck, and I'll leave your mom a note. Then, we can find Lennon, hurry and do my job, and take you to the clinic."

Paul continued to bob his head in the affirmative.

John entered the kitchen, found a pen and a piece of paper, then scribbled a note for Paul's mom and pinned it to the corkboard hanging on the fridge. Then, he walked back to the front door, pushed the interior knob in on his way out, twisted it locked, and pulled the front door shut behind him.

Paul buckled his seatbelt as John stepped into the truck, yanked on the upper part of the door's window frame, pulled his hand out of the way, and let the momentum slam the door shut.

"Hang in there, buddy," John said, backing out of the driveway.

John drove to the other end of the street and rechecked his house, but Lennon hadn't returned.

"You cover the left side of the street, and I'll take the right, OK?" John said as he headed toward the school.

Paul nodded and scanned his side of the street intently while John studied both.

John parked along the curb next to the alleyway again when they got to the school and got out of the truck. The Doberman yammered and pounced at him through the fence as he walked toward the playground.

"Shut it, mutt!" John said, kicking the fence and exciting the Doberman even more.

John stepped through the galvanized barricade. The revenant wind pushed ghosts of recess on empty swings at the other end of the playground while dead leaves rattled their way toward John.

He's gone.

The realization hit John like a sack of cement.

John returned to the truck; his mind numbed to the brisk breeze and growling dog. He entered the vehicle, closed the door, and grabbed the wheel for emotional balance. He heard Paul say something but couldn't make sense of the words.

He's gone.

The two words pounded into his mind repeatedly, entombing all hope and punching it deeper and deeper into the grave with each hammering repetition.

He's gone.

John knew staying next to the school wouldn't help, but he couldn't abandon his son either. Leaving would make it real. He had to do something, but what? He had checked the school. He had searched his home. He had scoured the streets. Had Paul missed Lennon on the way back to the playground? John felt a resurrection of hope at the thought, along with renewed despair. He had been checking both sides of the street and knew Lennon hadn't been there.

He heard Paul crying in the distance and forced his mind back into the truck; only it wasn't Paul crying.

"Are . . . are you OK, Mr. King?" Paul asked.

John wiped his face with the flanneled crook of his elbow.

"I'm fine, buddy," John said, embracing the lie.

John's phone buzzed.

You have missed your scheduled Mōv, so we have terminated your account!

"Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!"

John swiped the crimson exclamation away and cocked his arm to throw the phone at the dashboard. But instead, he lowered his phone and dialed 911.

"Come on, buddy. Let's get you checked."

John pushed the call button as he pulled away from the school grounds, all hope of finding Lennon squelched beneath a freshly piled cairn.

I shared my first draft of the first scene of my first-ever attempt at writing a novel five days ago in "Is this what a first draft character should look like?"

Since then, I've used a finely crafted combination of the Story Grid, Story Circle, and Three Story Method to plot a large chunk of the tale I have fermenting in my brain. And, by "finely crafted," I mean I got overwhelmed by all the plotting information I read and started smashing my keyboard with my face.

Fortunately, new information and ideas revealed themselves despite the face flagellation, or perhaps because of it. For example, I realized that while my second scene, "Details through dialogue," worked, my first scene didn't. At least not the way I wanted it to. So, I've spent the past two days revisiting and improving it. I'll share my changes below so you can compare and judge whether I've improved the chapter or merely smudged it around on my plate, like so many canned peas, to make it look like I made progress.

Anyway, You'll run into the same thing as you try to build a profession for yourself. Some resumes won't work, and some cover letters may fail to impress. That's OK! Building your career, or any skill, is like rolling a snowball. It is a cycle of creating, testing, and tweaking; your professional snowball will grow with each iterative layer. Each time you revise your resume, for example, you'll pull out something of lesser value and add something greater. You'll learn with each modification, and your resume will grow. Before you know it, you'll discover you have a new, marketable skill that impresses people and gets their attention.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with a well-known and highly successful author (I have yet to ask permission to mention his name, so I'll refrain from doing so until I have). He has published dozens of books in his career, so I imagined him as a guy with a gift from God who casually writes books and flings them into his yard, where publishers have flocked in eager anticipation atop dump trucks full of money. Instead, he told me he constantly tests story ideas, book covers, marketing strategies, etc., with various focus groups. Everything he does is a cycle of modifications and enhancements to maximize his readership, even after years of successful publishing.

I'm grateful for this author's reminder because I got comfortable and complacent for a while and neglected my professional snowball. It's time for me to start pushing again.

This repetitive process is how I started my career. I began with a goal and took measurable steps toward my target. I failed. I learned. I grew. I tried again. Little by little, those efforts snowballed into something far greater than the nothing I started with, and they'll do the same for you, no matter where you are in your journey.

O . . .K . . . Let me step off that soapbox now and share my revisions.

Chapter 1: Preparations

"It'll work this time, Chess," Alex muttered, opening the door. "The Nguyen kid was just bad timing."

Alex leaned into the back of the vehicle, unlatched the two locking mechanisms of a heavy-duty dog crate, and creaked the metal door open with a tug.

A Calico kitten with a black-orange checkered face mewled to its feet and yawned, poking its tail stiffly into the air. Alex lifted the kitten from the fuzzy, sun-colored cushion at the bottom of the cage and scanned the street, stroking the kitten's head.

"Come on. Let's get this over with," Alex said as Chess nuzzled its face closer and started to purr.

Alex tugged on the crate, ensuring the come-a-longs binding it to the floor were secure, then closed the vehicle. Then, after glancing around again, Alex headed down a narrow alleyway between two houses that connected the back corner of Washington Elementary School's playground to the street.

Alex's heart thumped. Dropping off unmarked packages for Jacket had crossed a barbed line, but Alex desperately needed the money. With each delivery, Jacket had angled Alex closer, twisting the cords of consignments into strings of shoplifting, then braiding those strings into ropes of robberies. The more Alex complied with Jacket's demands, the more treacherous they became.

The Nguyen boy hadn't been Alex's fault. His dad had shown up and honked just as Alex moved in. Fortunately, Alex's lure that day had been a bouquet of colorful mylar balloons, and handing one of the tethered orbs to the Nguyen child and a few other nearby children had diffused the situation. Mr. Nguyen looked suspicious but hadn't called the cops.

The failure hadn't sat well with Jacket nor stopped him and his punk parade from driving their disappointment home by shooting Alex through the foot with a nail gun. Alex could still feel the sting of walking three miles out of the industrial district before prying that lesson from foot and shoe with a pair of rusty Craftsmen pliers.

"Jacket," Alex said, scratching Chess between the ears. "His name's probably something plain, like Ted."

Chess mewed and tried to nibble on Alex's little finger.

"Isn't that always the case with psychopaths?" Alex said, stopping before the end of the alley.

As it had when Alex cased the area earlier, the Doberman Pinscher in the yard to the east started running along the fence, barking and growling. The dog had marched the grass down to bare dirt on its side of the diamond-mesh fence running this daily patrol.

Alex fished a spicey Slim Jim from a coat pocket, gnawed the packaging off, and stabbed the peppered meat through the fence. The Doberman barked several times and then sniffed at the beef stick. Finally, satisfied with the scent, the dog tugged the treat through the chain-link with its teeth and wandered further into the yard to enjoy its prize.

"I hope you get the squirts, damned dog."

After silencing the dog, Alex walked to the end of the alley and leaned on the galvanized railing that prevented people from riding motorcycles through the passage. The playground was still empty. Alex checked the time and figured the school would ring the bell to release its students in a minute or two.

Alex walked back a few steps, even with the windowless side of the house to the east, where no one could see. The Doberman had inhaled the Slim Jim but sat quietly in the yard, still tonguing the corners of its mouth.

I should run!

Alex stood, both feet nailed to the cement, mind fleeing through a maze of options. Left. Left. Right. Back.

I should run.

Each revision ended with an image of Jacket pissing on an impromptu grave.

Should I run?

Alex impaled the thought of escape and buried it beneath a mountain of terror as the school's dismissal bell peeled in the distance.

Alex jumped to the other side of the alley and dropped Chess into the narrow bed of spurge and goosegrass that had grown between the chain-link on this side of the student passage and the sun-peeled wooden privacy fence enclosing the yard to the west.

Chess twisted both ends of his body awkwardly against each other on the way down and landed on his feet in the strip of fall-dried weeds with a distressed meow.

"Sorry, buddy. It's just for a sec."

Alex rechecked the time, tugged the coat's zipper against the Halloween breeze, and waited for the grade-school groups of plausible deniability to arrive.

I finished my second scene last night (you can read the first scene in Is this what a first draft character should look like?). In this scene, I experimented with moving the story forward and providing details through dialogue. I've written dialogue in short stories before, but this is my first attempt at using it in a small segment of a larger story.

Since all I've written before are short stories, I have a habit of wrapping everything up in one sitting. As a result, it has been challenging to get into the mindset of working on a project over several weeks. I keep wanting to rush things to a conclusion. I'm still working on my outline, but I had the first chapter's outline finished, which has helped me maintain the correct pacing. I'm planning to work on the story outline more today, so that should prevent me from rushing and destroying the story's pace.

I'm only two days in, and already the process is entirely different than what I'm used to. It feels like writing with my left foot.

Now, on to the second scene.

Bully: chapter 1, scene 2

"Check it out!" Paul said, pulling a jack-o'-lantern eraser perched on top of a black pencil from his backpack.

Lennon checked to ensure nobody was walking behind him, then let the first-through-third-grade door to the school swing closed. The autumn chill nipped through the Zombie Beatles costumes he and his friend Paul were sporting, but Lennon didn't want to cover his outfit with a coat.

"You dork! Tonya is going to murder you," Lennon said, pins of fear fluttering in his chest. "She'll murder us both."

Lennon glared back toward the single-story, white-bricked school waiting for looming doom to explode out the door to the sixth-grade end of the building in frayed jeans and a hand-me-down Iron Maiden T-shirt. Like a few others in their last year of elementary school, Tonya had dressed as herself for Halloween.

"Doesn't Grundie Pluck do that every day?"

"She usually just kills us, not murders us," Lennon said. "It's mostly way different."

"Well, she shouldn't fat-ass my pencil in half during assemblies, then I wouldn't have to steal hers," Paul said.

"She's not fat," Lennon whispered, shooting another nervous look back at the school. "She's three years older than us. Four, if you count the year she got held back."

"So?"

"Duh! That's, like, ten times our age," Lennon said, dragging his eyes away from the school to flash Paul a look of disbelief as they neared the edge of the pavement. "Of course, she's gonna be bigger."

"What's age gotta do with it?" Paul asked.

"I don't know. My dad says she's an 'early bloomer,' and that's why she's all bumpy and stuff."

Lennon pulled the black Beatle mop off his head and scratched his strawberry blond scalp.

The Beatle-themed zombie garb had been Lennon's dad, John King's idea. Paul's mom wanted something with "less death," but since she worked two shifts of single motherhood each day, the ghoulish getup of second-hand tweed jackets, turtlenecks, and green face paint that Lennon's dad had come up with had won out.

"If Elvis was the king of rock 'n' roll, and Michael Jackson was the king of pop," Lennon's dad had said to him and Paul that morning while smudging greasepaint on their faces, "then the Beatles were the gods of all music, and that's why I named my boy Lennon," John had said, rubbing Lennon's head and beaming.

"Your name is just a happy accident, Paul."

Lennon didn't know what his dad meant by that last bit since Lennon's mom used to say the same thing about him before she died.

Paul stuck the pumpkin-tipped pencil back into his bag as the two friends walked across the asphalt between the school and the grassy playground.

"We'll be safe if we can get through the Hall of Freedom and out to the street, "Paul said. "Grundie Pluck never follows us after that. She lives in the opposite direction."

"Only if we ditch her. If she catches us, she'll pound us before going home," Lennon said, wriggling the dark toupe back onto his head, entirely eclipsing his sunny hair.

"We gotta make it there before she gets us, then, right?" Paul said.

Lennon heard the crash of metal against bricks. He turned back and saw Toyna emerging from the doorway to the school, arms out to her sides. The sixth-grade door jutted open, its hydraulic hinge hyper-extended by Tonya's rage.

"You're dead, Paul!"

Panic exploded in Lennon's chest, and he spun around to flee the thundering fury. The toe of his shoe caught in a crack in the asphalt as he turned, though, and he tumbled to the ground before he could take his first step.

"Stay down, Beatle!" Tonya shouted. "I'm going to squash your friend."

Lennon got back up as Tonya flew by, targeting Paul. He took a couple of steps to intervene, then paused. What could he do?

Tonya caught up with Paul as he reached the edge of the grass. She grabbed him from behind by both elbows, yanked his arms behind his back, and then launched herself on top of him like a sled.

Both students hung in the air for what seemed like a month before belly-slamming into the grass. Paul couldn't break his fall, so he took the full impact of the flight plus Tonya's blooming weight in the face, chest, and stomach. Paul bashed into the ground with a grunt. The blow popped his wig off, sending it flying several feet away.

"Paul!" Lennon screamed, thinking the wig was Paul's head.

Paul had to be dead now, a real Halloween zombie. Lennon's brain shrunk until it only contained one thought; survive.

Lennon bolted for the alley between the school and the road, the grassy distance vanishing under his feet. He turned back to see if Tonya was chasing him when he reached the galvanized barricade at the school end of the alley, but she was still kneeling by Paul.

Lennon turned to run through the alley and plowed headlong into a stranger.

"Hey, there!" Said the stranger, catching Lennon before he could fall. "Someone chasing you?"

Lennon tried to respond, but fear and flight had stolen his breath.

The stranger had short black hair and wore a black ribbed jacket, black pants, and mirrored sunglasses. The style reminded Lennon of the pencil Paul had stolen.

"It's OK," said the stranger. "I'll help you."

Lennon bent over, put his hands on his knees, and gasped for breath. He looked back at Tonya over his shoulder. She was standing over Paul, shouting at him. Lennon couldn't hear her from this distance, but she was punctuating her words with Paul's stolen pencil. Paul sat on the ground, staring at Tonya's feet, his head still on his shoulders. He's alive, Lennon thought and relaxed a little.

"Maybe you can help me too, "said the stranger. "My kitten got away from me and ran between the fences here."

Lennon turned and looked down at the checkered kitten through the chain link.

"His name is Chess. Could you climb between the fences and get him for me? I'm too big to fit."

Lennon stood up and nodded, still breathless. He climbed up the chain link border and then used the horizontal rails of the wooden fence to descend toward the kitten, doing his best not to get a sliver from the weathered wood.

Lennon dropped from the lowest rail to the ground, and a dried weed punctured his ankle through his sock as he landed. He pulled the weed from his skin, sucking air through his teeth at the pain. Other students stared at him between the fences as he rubbed his ankle, then looked away when Lennon made eye contact.

Lennon pulled his sock down to assess the damage to his ankle.

"It's not a biggie," Lennon said, pulling his sock back up, then reaching for the kitten.

Chess mewed and stiffened with panic as Lennon picked it up. It clawed at his tweed jacket until it got a firm hold and then relaxed with a meow. Lennon cradled the cat close to his chest, offering the comfort and protection he had craved only moments ago.

"You're OK," Lennon said, stroking the kitten as Chess nestled into his arms.

Lennon turned toward the chain link to pass the kitten to the stranger and saw Tonya stomping toward him. He pressed his back against the peeling wooden fence, hugging Chess tightly, to place what distance he could between himself and his tormenter. She must have finished with Paul and figured Lennon had been an accomplice in the pencil heist.

Just before she reached Lennon, though, the stranger stepped between them and gave Tonya a stare. Tonya paused for a second, then plodded away in burning silence.

"Thanks," Lennon said, holding the kitten over his head. "Here you go."

The stranger took the kitten, and Lennon climbed back up the wooden fence rails until he could jump over the chain link and back into the alleyway.

"It's Lennon, right?"

"Yeah," Lennon said, surprised. "How do you know my name?"

"I work with your dad. He got stuck at work and asked if I could pick you up and take you home," said the stranger. "Good thing he did, it would seem. Does that girl bully you often?"

"Just after school. It's because Paul's always teasing her."

"What did he do?"

"Today, he stole a pencil they gave us during the Halloween assembly because she sat on his and busted it in half."

"I'll have your dad talk to the school tomorrow," said the stranger. "Maybe they can keep her after school a bit to give you and your friend time to get home.

"Cool."

"Do you want me to take you home or to see your dad at work?" The stranger asked.

"Can I go to my dad's work?"

"Sure. Here, you can hold Chess for me on the way," the stranger said, handing Lennon the kitten. "Otherwise, he gets under my feet while I'm driving."

Lennon hesitated, a faint warning about strangers scratching his mind.

"What's your name?" Lennon asked.

"Oh, of course, I'm sorry. I'm Alex."

Alex stuck out a hand and waited for Lennon to shake it.

Lennon stared at Alex's hand for a moment, then shuffled Chess in his arms so he could return the greeting. Alex didn't seem strange.

"OK. I can hold Chess," Lennon said, squeezing the kitten.

Lennon followed the stranger to the vehicle and climbed in the back seat. The stranger closed the door, walked around, and jumped in the driver's seat.

"There's a dog house in the back that has a bunch of toys in it," Alex said, buckling the seatbelt. "You can play with the kitten in there while we're driving."

"Do you mean this cage?" Lennon asked, looking over the seat.

"It's not a cage. It's a regular box with really big holes so my cat can breathe," Alex said with a grin.

"But," Lennon said, "doesn't the kitten just get out through the holes?"

"He can, but he usually stays in there because he likes the fluffy padding," Alex said, pulling away from the curb. "I tied some string to the top of the crate that Chess likes to bat around if you want to play with that."

Lennon reached over the seat and slid one of the strings back and forth along the section of the crate Alex had tied it to. Chess stared at the wiggling string for a moment, then jumped over the back of the seat and into the cage. Lennon kept sliding the twine back and forth with his thumb and forefinger while Chess clawed at it from inside.

"You can get in the cage and play with the kitten if you want to., Alex said, braking at a stop sign. "I think it's big enough for you to fit."

"OK," Lennon said, climbing over the seat.

Lennon climbed into the cage, held Chess in his left arm like a baby, and dangled the string over the kitten. Chess batted at the line a few times, then caught it between both paws and drew the line to its mouth.

Lennon smiled as Chess purred, the day's trauma slipping into benumbed memory. He continued smiling until Alex opened the back of the vehicle, pushed the door to the cage shut, and slid both locks into place.

Today, we dive into my first attempt at full-length fiction. The working title currently is Strangers, though I expect that will change. The section I'm sharing today is the first draft of the introductory scene. I'll post the remaining bits I have planned for this chapter over the next two days.

As I mentioned in my last post, Braving the unknown, the longest thing I've ever written, aside from technical documentation, was a 5,000-word creative non-fiction piece I had to write during college. Everything else has been short stories and essays.

Typically, when writing in short bursts of creativity, I have mentally worked out the entire plot before I start writing. However, this project's process has been different than expected, even though I'm only getting started. 

Instead of knowing the whole story, which I still have to figure out, I've begun envisioning individual characters, motivations, and scenes to put them in. Then, a link between the characters will pop into my mind during the day, and I'll jot it down in my still nascent outline. I may not use all the details my creations have invented for themselves as I go about my day, but each fragment provides depth for me to draw from as I'm writing the characters, which I hope to transfer onto the page.

I already know where I want to end up with this story, which is a good start, but I need to figure out how to get there. So many holes!

I assume we've all had enough of my musings at this point, so let's jump into the initial scene of Strangers.

Strangers: chapter one, scene one

“It’ll work this time, Chess,” Alex muttered, opening the door. “The Nguyen kid was just bad timing.”

Alex leaned into the back of the vehicle, unlatched the two locking mechanisms of a heavy-duty dog crate, and creaked the metal door open with a tug.

A Calico kitten with a black-orange checkered face mewled to its feet and then yawned, poking its tail stiffly into the air. Alex lifted the kitten from the fuzzy, sun-colored cushion at the bottom of the cage and scanned the street, stroking the kitten’s head. 

“Come on, Chess. Let’s get this over with,” Alex said as Chess nuzzled its face closer and started to purr.

Alex tugged on the crate to ensure the come-a-longs binding it to the floor were secure, then closed the vehicle. Then, after glancing around again, Alex headed down a narrow alleyway between two houses that connected the back corner of Washington Elementary School’s playground to the street.

As it had when Alex scoped out the area earlier in the week, the Doberman Pinscher in the yard to the east of the alley started running along the fence, barking and growling. The dog had worn the grass to bare dirt on its side of the chain link running this patrol.

Alex fished a spicey Slim Jim from a jacket pocket, gnawed the packaging open, and stabbed the peppered meat through the fence. The Doberman barked several times and then sniffed at the beef stick. Finally, satisfied with the scent, the dog tugged the treat through the chain link with its teeth and wandered further into the yard to enjoy its prize.

“I hope you get the squirts, damned dog.”

After silencing the dog, Alex walked to the end of the alley and leaned on the galvanized railing that prevented people from riding motorcycles through the passage. The playground was still empty. Alex checked the time and figured the school would ring the bell to release its students in a minute.

Alex walked back a few steps, even with the windowless side of the house to the east, where no one could see. The Doberman had inhaled the Slim Jim but sat quietly in the yard, still tonguing the corners of its mouth.

Alex moved to the other side of the alley and dropped Chess in the narrow bed of spurge and goosegrass that had grown between the chain link fence inside the student passage and the red, sun-peeled wooden privacy fence enclosing the yard to the west. Chess twisted both ends of his body awkwardly against each other on the way down and landed on his feet in the strip of fall-dried weeds with a distressed meow.

“Sorry, buddy. It’s just for a sec.”

Alex rechecked the time, zipped the jacket to block the Halloween breeze, and began pacing.

One of the greatest lessons I have learned in my career is that I fail one hundred percent of the things I don't try. Yes, I know this is cliché, but it's true. Even when I fail nine out of every ten things I try, I'm still moving forward. Unless I'm dancing, of course. Then, no matter how much I try, I look ridiculous and end up standing backward in my date's shoes with my partner lying on her back in barefoot bewilderment, which proves how stupid dancing is anyway.

The project

If you read back a few posts, starting with In the beginning..., you can see I didn't try for a better job for three and a half years while working for minimum wage at the Library of Congress. Instead, I applied myself to learning several computer-related skills, but I didn't use those skills to improve my life, so I stayed in my stagnant job for years longer than I should have.

The same is true of writing. As I shared in my first post, Welcome to Write to the Point, I wrote a lot as a child and won several competitions, but I only applied those skills to improve my life once I started working for Intel in my mid-twenties. So why did I waste the seven years before that?

A lot of people are like me. They have dreams but don't apply action, so their desires remain wishes instead of goals, sometimes indefinitely. People may have different reasons for procrastinating. For me, it's fear. I prefer to watch others and learn from their mistakes, or I'll read about a problem and study it out in my mind until I believe I understand it perfectly. I tend only to take action once I have assessed and eliminated all the risks.

For example, as a teenager, I attended a fair my church was putting on to raise money for youth activities. One of the games involved pushing a giant marshmallow down a course with your nose. I watched dozens of kids, in groups of five or six, crawling behind their marshmallows, nudging them forward with the tops of their noses, in a snail race to the finish line. Unfortunately, some winners were too aggressive, and I could see them dabbing at weeping nose scrapes as they collected their prize candy.

I didn't want to play at first because I didn't want to get scraped up and risk losing. But after watching several rounds, I figured out a strategy to win.

So, I got in line and waited my turn. When my group was up, I got behind my marshmallow, planted my nose against the sticky cylinder, and stuck my bum in the air like every other contestant. I didn't want to give my secret strategy away.

When one of the ladies running the contest shouted, "GO!" I quickly leaped to the side of the marshmallow, snapped my head, and used the side of my nose like a foosball paddle to bat the gooey gob over halfway down the course. Then, I jumped up and ran to the marshmallow, dropped again into the bicycle-rack position, and foosballed my marshmallow across the finish line while everyone else was still only a few feet from the start line. Finally, I collected my peanut butter cups and munched them down while watching the rest of the group inching their marshmallows forward, still unaware that they had already lost.

The problem is that many things in life are too complex to learn by observation and must be experienced and navigated.

And that brings me to today. As mentioned in previous posts, I studied English and writing in college and graduated just before I turned fifty; however, I've never used what I learned to write a full-length novel. I am not confident in plotting a complex tale, developing in-depth protagonists, or creating three-dimensional antagonists. I've written many technical documents, essays, and short stories ranging from five-hundred-word flash fiction to five-thousand-word creative non-fiction pieces; however, I've never written anything longer out of fear of failure and the unknown.

So, I thought an excellent way to illustrate the bumbling process I've used to succeed in my career would be to write a full-length novel in this blog, documenting what I view as my successes and failures along the way and illustrating what I've learned from my experience at the end. I hope that by putting myself out there and showing that any defeats I experience won't kill me, I can encourage others to take leaps of faith in their careers and come out better for doing so.

This experiment could succeed to some degree or utterly fail, but I'll still learn from it and be better equipped for my next attempt. So let's define the project and see where it goes over the next few weeks.

Last night, I had a dream, most of which I've now forgotten. I only remember that Ryan Reynolds assembled a complex tangle of ductwork throughout a large building to blow hot furnace air into a woman's face to make her uncomfortable. I have no idea why I dreamed this or what Ryan Reynolds was punishing the woman for, but it's a weird and curious scene. So I will use this odd dream fragment as the foundation of my attempt at a full-length novel (or at least a plump novella).

Let's see where this goes.

The challenge

Think about something you'd like to do to advance your career but are afraid to attempt. This hurdle could be presenting in front of your peers, applying for a new job doing something you want to do but need to gain professional experience in, or simply asking your manager for a raise.

Whatever your fear, make a plan and then execute it. Then, feel free to share your successes in the comments.

In my last post, I mentioned my interview with Packard Bell, the first stepping stone toward my software engineering career. Unfortunately, the wet pebble was slick with moss.

I spent my first two weeks working at Packard Bell in their mandatory training program. During the class, we spent eight hours a day sandblasting our eyeballs with the technical tome Upgrading and Repairing PCs by Scott Mueller and Mark Edward Soper.

Packard Bell required all new employees to attend this training, whether they were working in technical support or not. So, for example, my group included a seventeen-year-old high-school brunette that Packard Bell had hired to play Solitare as a receptionist.

The only difference between the technical support people and other employees in the training program was that the support team had to pass CompTIA's A+ Certification within their first ninety days. Packard Bell would pay for the first test, but if you failed, you had to pay the $80 fee for subsequent attempts. In addition, Packard Bell would terminate your employment if you didn't pass the A+ exam within your first three months or failed it three times. No pressure!

One day, during class, the middle-aged instructor was hitting on High-school Girl like he always did, even though she was married and had a kid. After emitting one of his perpetual face farts, which I could tell impressed her, he said, "Ya know, you should switch to technical support. It pays three dollars more an hour and'll give you opportunities to advance." High-school Girl said she'd think about it. Finally, after a few more days of gas and goading from the instructor, she agreed to the switch.

Determined to pass the A+ Certification test on Packard Bell's cash, I rolled each page of Upgrading and Repairing PCs to a point, dipped them in Tabasco sauce, and stabbed them into my brain. After a month of cramming, I found my mind filled with weird facts on IRQs, BIOSs, registers, and baud rates. Of course, I still didn't own a computer, but I could now visualize their complex internals.

My first week on the customer hotline was a disaster. I expected to use all my newly acquired knowledge, but Upgrading and Repairing PCs hadn't covered any of the questions our customers lobbed at me. So, I had to put each customer on hold, call the Technical-Support Support line, and ask for assistance. For example, during my first week, a customer called because their computer was burning.

"Hello. Thank you for calling Packard Bell support. How may I help you?" I said.

"I just picked up one of your systems at Computer City and plugged it in," the customer replied. "It seems to be working, but smoke is spewing out of the little slots in front."

"Uh... OK. May I place you on hold for a moment? I'll be right back."

After complaining that he had been on hold for two hours, the customer acquiesced and patiently waited while I called the Technical-Support Support team. I had to wait on hold myself for a few minutes. Finally, a guy named Larry answered.

"What's up?" Larry asked.

"I have a customer who purchased one of our computers today, and now smoke is coming out the front."

"Did you ask them to see if there's a cord touching the CPU?" Larry asked.

"Uh, no. One second."

I put Larry on hold and asked the customer to turn off the computer, get a screwdriver, undo a dozen screws, graduate with a degree in engineering, pop off the case, and see if one of the wires inside was touching the CPU. Then, I patiently waited for him to check.

"OK. I unplugged all the wires, so none of them are touching the CPU," the customer said helpfully.

No! I thought. Why would you do that?

"Uh... One moment, please."

I put the customer back on hold and got Technical-Support Support Larry back on the line.

"Dude! The guy unplugged all the wires inside his computer," I said. "What do I do?"

"Why would he do that?" Larry asked.

"How would I know? I asked him to look at it, not yank everything apart."

"OK. Calm down. I'll be right back."

Larry put me on hold and called Technical-Support-Support Support. A few minutes later, Larry came over to my desk with a schematic for the customer's computer, and I had to spend the next hour blindly working with the customer over the phone to get all the wires plugged back into the right spots in his computer.

We finally got everything stuffed back in and turned the computer on. Surprisingly, it worked. As an added frill, it wasn't smoking anymore. Before anything else could go wrong, I hurried, hung up, and jumped into the next inferno.

Not only did I have to solve my customers' issues, but whenever my boss would seat me next to High-school Girl, I'd also have to solve her customers' issues. She was friendly, but helping her rubbed me the wrong way for two reasons. One, while I toiled at my desk eight hours a day solving problems, she wandered around chatting with people. Second, I also knew she hadn't put in the effort the rest of us had to acquire our skills and only had the position because the instructor during our training class took a liking to her.

On the plus side, I gained gobs of experience helping my customers and hers. On the minus side, I was a petty jerk, even if only on the inside.

After a month or two, I became familiar with the myriad ways a Packard Bell computer could explode. Furthermore, the company began trusting me enough to authorize customer repairs and replacements without going through Technical-Support Support.

I replaced modems, hard drives, and even full computers daily. Then, I'd guide customers through computer surgery, which usually involved unscrewing the case and pressing on one or more internal components with a live trout. I soon went from solving thirty-five to forty issues per week to consistently being the top performer on my shift, solving around a hundred customer issues each day.

I still needed to pass the A+ Certification exam, though.

I dread bubble tests. I always misread the question, pounce on the first wrong answer that seems close, or circle in the correct answer on the wrong line of the answer sheet. Still, my ninetieth day was only three weeks away, and I had to pass the test or lose my job.

While I was procrastinating, High-school Girl took the A+ Certification exam and failed. She then retook it and failed again, setting herself back eighty bucks.

Finally, with two weeks left before my looming termination, I drove to the testing center, waited for the body cavity search, and sat down in front of the secure terminal to take my test.

Bubble, bubble, bubble, there were more bubbles in this test than in a Mr. Bubbles bubble-bath commercial.

After I finished the mind-numbing scrub, I waited around nervously for my results.

"You got 99%," said the motherly woman behind the counter, handing me a copy of my certification to give to Packard Bell.

I stoically thanked the woman and walked out to my car. Inside, I was all giggly and thrilled. I had passed the test and tied one of the other guys in my group for the highest score. Fortunately, the day before the deadline, High-school Girl also passed with a little above 80%.

I continued working the night shift at Packard Bell for nine months. When I started working there, the shift manager assigned me a random seat when I arrived each day. Toward the end, my boss moved me next to his desk and gave me all the complicated issues to solve. I consistently remained the top performer during my shift, solving more problems and getting higher approval ratings than anyone on the team.

One evening, my boss told me they were opening up a position on the Technical-Support Support team and asked me to apply. I did. I was sure I would get it, considering all my impressive work.

A day or two after my interview, my boss approached me and informed me that they had given the job to High-school Girl. The news dumbfounded me. High-school Girl? The one who still required assistance to solve even easy customer issues? Was the company really going to move her into a position to support me?

I expressed my disbelief to my boss, who agreed with my arguments. Still, the decision was final.

I gave my two-week notice later that night. I told my boss that if the company didn't respect my skills, I'd find someplace that did. He tried to convince me to stay but said he didn't blame me for leaving.

I didn't realize it then, but a big part of the Technical-Support Support job was interacting with people within the company. What I had considered wasting time when High-school Girl socialized with others, the company had seen as collaboration. What I viewed as incompetence when she would ask those around her for help, the company considered teamwork.

I focused on the hard skill of technical knowledge to the exclusion of the soft skill of interpersonal relationships. I didn't have friends at the company. I showed up, did my job, and did it better than anyone else. While my hard skills were undeniable, my soft skills were non-existent.

I met people I knew from Packard Bell a few times as the years went by and heard that the company had promoted High-school Girl up the corporate ladder and into a senior management role. I wish I had understood why the company promoted her back then, but I didn't, so the news served no purpose but to irritate me.

It would be many years before I discovered the necessity of soft skills in my career. I hope my experience here will help drive that point home for readers in their early careers, so they can advance more quickly than I did.

Even though I may have set my career back a few years with my decision in The choice, I eventually left the Library of Congress. I didn't go as much by desire as out of resentment and spite, which shows I was a slow learner. Don't be like me.

I liked my original manager, who I've renamed Bob to protect my nether wares from vengeful knees. But, unfortunately, he decided to promote his secretary, Toot, to a managerial position when she placed him in a half-nelson and demanded a raise from minimum to mediocre wage. Then, he wedged me beneath her as her only report to get even with me for the wasp.

Toot and I got along fine before Bob transmogrified her into a pico-manager, which is like a micromanager, only a million times worse. She was funny and had been one of my favorite people to talk to before the change.

For example, before the organizational shift, Toot told me a story about her son Timmy and his cousin Kyle. They had been at a family outing when Timmy ran up and asked, "Mom, how come my wiener is usually soft but sometimes gets hard like a bone?" She replied, "Sometimes, your body causes it to fill with blood, which makes it hard like that." Timmy thought about that for a second, looked satisfied with the answer, and then replied, "Wow! Kyle must have a lot of blood."

All the chit-chat and humor died after Toot became my manager. For instance, I had worked from 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. for three years and had a key to the building to let myself in. Yet, as soon as Bob placed Toot over me, she took my key away and forced me to work from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. because that was her shift, and she "couldn't manage [me] unless she was there to see what [I] was doing." This change almost doubled my commute times due to rush-hour traffic and ate away a significant part of my evenings.

She also stopped allowing me to use the shared computer at work. I'm still trying to figure out why. Maybe she felt threatened. When I started working for the Library of Congress, I didn't know anything about computers, and she was the guru of the office. When Bob made Toot my manager three years later, I was writing programs and solving network issues for the entire organization.

The situation between Toot and I seethed for several months. In all fairness, I was just as terrible a peasant as she was an autocrat. I applied for another position within the Library of Congress to escape but failed to get the part. The conflict finally fried my patience, and after far too many years, I started looking for work outside the government.

Three days after applying, I scored an interview for a technical support position at Hewlett Packard Bell & Howell. Wow! So soon? I thought. I was impressed with myself.

The real name of the company was Packard Bell. Of course, Hewlett-Packard and Bell & Howell were separate companies. Still, half of the customers who called Packard Bell's technical support team would say, "I just bought a Hewlett Packard Bell & Howell computer, and now the sun doesn't rise anymore." I don't know how they did it, but Packard Bell found a way to sell despair in a friendly off-white box.

I didn't know what to expect as I parked in front of Packard Bell's support office. This meeting was my first technical interview. What if I flopped during the interrogation? I walked in and sat nervously by a large plastic fern. Judging by the crowd in the entryway, it looked like Packard Bell had invited half the state in for an interview, whether they had applied or not. I didn't feel as impressed with myself as before, and the odds of getting hired felt more insurmountable.

Finally, after Packard Bell's hiring managers had cleared out half the people in the foyer, an enormous scraggly beard walked over, poked out his hand, and introduced himself as Doug.

Doug walked me back into a small room full of computers and offered me a seat at a small desk. He sat on the opposite side and started grilling me.

"What command would you run to list all the files in a directory in DOS?"

"dir," I replied.

"How would I prevent dir from scrolling a long list of files off the top of the screen?"

"You could add the /P flag to paginate the file list," I answered.

"Good! OK, what does fdisk do?"

I had never used the fdisk command and had yet to learn what it was for. Is this what you shout at your computer when you lose a file? I didn't know.

"I, uh, I don't know," I said with a sinking feeling like I had held the interview underwater until there were no more bubbles.

"OK, next. What does xcopy do?"

I knew the answer, but I was so surprised that my lack of response on the fdisk question hadn't ended the interview that I almost failed to answer this question, too. Fortunately, I overcame my shock a moment later and answered the rest of the interview questions correctly.

I received a call from one of Packard Bell's HR representatives the next day, and she offered me a job for twice the pay. So I walked into Toot's office and gave her my two-week notice with a giant smile so wide the corners of my mouth touched each other around the back of my head.

The team threw a farewell party for me on my last day. Toot seemed angry yet relieved that I was leaving, but there was ice cream, so we both went away content.

Since this experience, I have seen some people honestly answer, "I don't know," in interviews, and others try to fake their way through. The entire point of an interview is for you and the company to see if you'll be a good fit. There's nothing wrong with discovering you aren't. Finding out in the interview is better than getting fired or quitting a few weeks into the job.

Despite my positive experiences admitting my ignorance, I've tried to fake my way through interviews several times. Still, in my experience, the outcome is always better when I say, "I don't know," and move on to the next question instead of wasting everyone's time. More often than not, I get the job anyway, and people don't expect me to know things I don't.

I got married a year into my minimum-wage job at the Library of Congress (which I've written about in my posts In the beginning... and Bob the Wasp Cleaver). Instantly, upon saying, "I do," married life swallowed my bi-weekly influx of living-in-mom's-basement money, and I realized that minimum wage wouldn't cut it anymore. Now that I was married, I didn't so much receive a salary as wave to it as it flew in and out of my account. This situation had to change.

Shortly after I married my wife, my friend Craig invited me to his house—along with my friend Kevin and a few others—to play a Japanese card game called Dai Hinmin, which means Very Poor Man. I've also heard it called Dai Fugō-Dai Hinmin, which means Very Rich Man-Very Poor Man, but I never could relate to the first bit.

The way Craig played the game was to set out a painfully uncomfortable footstool, which he found at a Spanish Inquisition estate sale, for the Very Poor Man to sit on, a great tuft of cloud candy for the Very Rich Man to sit on, and regular couch seats for everyone else. Then, we'd switch seats, depending on who won and lost each hand.

All I remember about the game is sitting on the small footstool and giving the Very Rich Man all my good cards. After all, it's hard to win a card game when all you have left in your hand after paying tribute is a rubber band and an old tooth you found under the sofa, so I spent the entire game with a stout piece of furniture performing the Red Sea miracle upon my bottom.

Mercifully, we stopped playing after a while, and Craig invited me to pluck my medieval wedgie and join the rest of humanity on his cheek-coddling couch. My wife retired to the kitchen with all the other women to be mysterious, so I took her spot.

As was the norm back then, Craig, Kevin, and I started talking about computers. I didn't own one yet, but they both did, so obviously, I had the most opinions to share on the topic.

While chatting, Craig mentioned that a global hotel chain had hired him as a consultant to build a reservation system for their newest hotel in Toyko, Japan. Craig asked if Kevin and I would like to work for him and help program the system. Of course, Kevin said yes and had his car sold, his wife packed, and his lease broken before the question mark could materialize at the end of Craig's question. On the other hand, I hedged.

What was holding me back? Yes, I wanted to go live in Japan. Yes, I wanted to write code for a living. Why was I hesitating?

I started going down the list of reasons why I shouldn't go:

1. I'd have to quit my tedious minimum-wage job dubbing tapes.

2. I'd have to leave my cinder-block, un-air-conditioned, one-bedroom solar stove.

That's it! I thought. There are just too many things keeping me here!

Even though I had made my dumb decision right then, I told Craig I'd think about it. Then, a few days later, I called him and declined his offer. Fortunately, I was married now, and my wife could bandage those gaping holes I had just blown in both feet. I've never been very flexible.

Craig and Kevin left for Tokyo a few weeks later and worked on the project together while I glued wasps to the library floor and made a thousand copies of Whirlwind by James Clavell. I nearly died of whiplash due to the speed at which my career stood still.

Kevin and Craig had a great time on the project, and the experience changed the trajectory of their lives. I've looked back on my decision countless times and been baffled that I opted not to go. It doesn't make sense.

What if I left my job with the Library of Congress to pursue this programming opportunity and utterly failed? Would I have been out anything I couldn't easily replace with a mop or a paper hat? No! It was a minimum-wage job! Was I living in the only cockroach-infested sweat lodge in town? No! So, why the resistance?

After pondering this conundrum for thirty years, I still don't know why I allowed replaceable familiarity to blind me to such great potential. Had I gone to Japan with Craig and Kevin, I may have jumpstarted my career two or three years before I eventually did.

Since this professional flop, I've made several leaps of faith during my career. I may have needed this failure to learn that taking risks is essential for growth. I want to think this wasn't the case, and I could have learned this lesson without slamming a door of opportunity in my face, but I've had blind spots in my career before.

Despite this self-inflicted setback, I'm grateful for my career. I've met many wonderful people, achieved many satisfying things, and learned incredible lessons from the least likely sources, the greatest of which is I can't wait to retire and live, at least part-time, in Japan.

As I mentioned in my post, "In the beginning," I was often bored at my job with the Library of Congress. This tedium occurred because I had optimized my work to the point that it took half a day or less to finish, which left me with nothing to do for the other half of the day.

To fill the time, I read a lot and studied computer programming, but my eyes would get tired after a while, and I'd long for something else to do.

My boss at the Library of Congress was a nice and simple man, devoid of the guile you find in the typical broccoli-haired nose honkers that tend to pile en masse into the Volkswagen Bug of middle management. So let's call him "Bob" to represent his austere, well-roundedness.

Technically speaking, Bob could have been a better manager, but the basics of business sense often escaped him. For example, I asked him for something extra to do during one of my fits of library blahs, and he invited me to write the department's annual report.

When I handed him the completed ten-page document of facts, figures, diagrams, and charts, he said. "Put some flavor in it, son! I like western themes, so fix it up with some of that."

I didn't know what he meant, so I asked his secretary. She smiled knowingly and said, "I'll take care of it for you." When I got my report back, she had littered it with clip art of cartoon cowboys, western hats, and smiling horses. Bob was happy, but I felt embarrassed and removed my name from the document. I'd rather be listless than mortified.

About two weeks later, the higher-ups made him strip out all the clip art and resubmit "something professional looking." I added my name back to the original document and sent it in. This offering placated the federal illuminati. So, we were allowed to continue our high-stress jobs of cataloging the number of seconds between now, whenever that was, and 4:00 p.m., when we could go home.

What Bob lacked in business acumen, he made up for in cleanliness. His clothes were natty, his hair trimmed, his desk an ode to tidiness, and his library section was immaculate.

We didn't have a janitor like other sections of the library did. Instead, Bob would sweep the floors and dust the shelves daily. As a result, you could lick the hallways in our area and not taste a hint of dust, not that I ever tried it; much.

One day, while walking along the dim corridor between the shipping area and my office, I saw a mud dauber wasp crawling on the polished, baby-blue cement floor. They would get in the building during the fall and build nests in the bookshelves. I didn't want it to escape and sting someone, like me, for instance, so I drowned it in Elmer's Glue, which I had been using to fix a binding on an old braille book.

Later that day, I went back to clean up the wasp and found that the glue had become transparent as it dried, so unless you looked at the wasp closely, it looked like it was standing there on its own with its wings raised. I should have cleaned it up, but I liked the wasp's frozen pose, so I left it there to show my friend Nate, which I forgot to do.

When I got to work the following day, I heard Bob muttering "derns" and "dagnabits" on the other side of the door between the offices and the library. I opened the door and saw him violently scrubbing at the wasp with a push broom. The wasp didn't budge.

Before I could say anything, Bob turned the push broom over and started whacking at the wasp with the wooden side of the broom. After a few smacks, the top part of the wasp chipped off, leaving six little wasp legs standing on the floor as if waiting for the top of the wasp to return.

"Who in tarnation glued a wasp to the floor?" Bob asked as he noticed me.

I tried to shrug to deflect blame, but the wasp legs reminded me of the Monty Python song, Eric the Half a Bee. Combined with Bob's Yosemite Sam impression, I couldn't help laughing. Bob was not amused.

"Clean this up!" he commanded as he shouldered his push broom and somehow slammed the air in the corridor shut behind him as he stormed away.

While the wasp incident was unintentional, it provided me with some much-needed entertainment, both in the actual event and later in its multiple retellings.

Had I found my cure for boredom?

Whenever I got tired of studying, I wandered around the library for the next few weeks pulling pranks. On one occasion, I recorded a guitar solo off the radio and then shared it with my friend Nate. Of course, being a guitarist, he seemed into the solo until the chorus started again. Nate groaned at the realization that I had tricked him into listening to Magic Carpet Ride by Steppenwolf. Worst song ever recorded.

The prank payoffs weren't on the same level as the wasp incident, though. So, after scheming with my friend Nate, we snuck into Bob's office while he was away at a meeting, took everything off his desk, flipped it the other way around, and then used a ruler, compass, and sextant to replace the items on the reversed desk in the exact compulsive locations Bob had initially had them. Then, we entered the library and waited for Bob to return from his meeting.

As Bob walked down the corridor toward his office, Nate and I strolled over and engaged him in conversation by asking a question neither of us had.

"So, Bob, we were wondering..."

Bob continued to walk to his office with us in tow.

"...how many years..."

Bob entered his office and sat in his chair.

"...we're supposed to keep braille magazines...

Bob pulled on the top edge of his desk to wheel his chair forward and dock his legs in the leg hanger, now on the opposite side of the desk from where he was sitting.

Bong!

Bob's knees hit the solid metal back of his desk, which rang like a gong.

"...on the shelf before we can discard..."

Bong!

"...them?"

Bob gave the edge of his desk another yank and launched his back into the effort, but again, his knees plowed into the solid back of the desk.

BONG!!!

I couldn't hold it in any longer. Laughter exploded from my gut, which caused Nate to lose his composure too. That's when Bob realized what we had done. We tried to act innocent, but it was the wasp experience again. My laughter exposed our guilt.

Bob utterly failed to see the entertainment value of the situation. Instead, he forced us to spend the next ten minutes fixing his office while he stewed and then simmered from righteous indignation to apathy.

"Get back to work," Bob said once we finished restoring his office.

Bob was a good guy. We never pulled pranks on him again, but he seemed to recognize the mind-numbing nature of our work after the desk incident and provided us with outlets to ease the stress of having little to do. He made the job bearable, occasionally at his own expense.

Since Nate and I were interested in computers, Bob adjusted our job descriptions to include computer-related tasks. As a result, both Nate and I ended up in technology, me writing code and Nate running networks.

Bob came to my grandpa's funeral twenty-five years later, and I got to talk to him and his wife. Unfortunately, he was struggling with his health, and his memory wasn't all there, but he remembered both the wasp and desk incidents, laughed about them, and gave me a grandfatherly, "You rapscallions!"

While at the Library of Congress, I thought Bob could have been a stronger manager; however, I have reflected upon Bob's leadership more than any other manager in my thirty-three-year career. I wouldn't be where I am today without him, so perhaps he had the job down pat after all.

If you've been following the past three entries in this series, you have used the tips in part one, "Writing strong resumes and cover letters," to construct a powerful resume and compelling cover letter to accompany it.

Next, in part 2, you've utilized the "Get out there!" information to splash your resume across hiring managers' desks everywhere.

Then, in part 3, the advice in "Nailing it!" helped you showcase your preparedness, confidence, and enthusiasm during the interview process.

In this last segment of the series, we'll cover what to do when one of the companies you've interviewed makes you an offer. Once this happens, it's time to pack up for a weekend getaway to Bubblegum Alley in San Luis Obispo, California, for a tasting convention, right? Wrong!

You've struggled to propel yourself into this position. So don't slam on the brakes now. Instead, keep your momentum going with these three tips.

Negotiate

We negotiate with each other all the time.

Do you want to order a pizza and watch Netflix tonight, honey?

No, I have a headache. How about a salad and some CNN?

Despite this, most people think companies chisel their job offers into a granite slab before schlepping them over. They don't.

Go through your offer when you receive it and make sure everything looks good. Here is a checklist you can use to help.

• Is the salary within the range you were expecting?

• Do the medical, dental, and other benefits support your existing providers?

• How much of your compensation will it cost to get these benefits?

• How many paid holidays is the company offering?

• How many paid vacation and sick days does the company offer?

• Does the company offer short-term, long-term, accidental death and dismemberment, or group-life insurance?

• How much stock will you get, if any?

• Are there any company perks, like discounts on your monthly cell bill, free food in the breakroom, opportunities to work remotely, and so on?

Even if the offer looks good, there is no harm in asking, "Is there any way we could bump the salary up by $2,500 a year to help cover the cost of benefits?" The worst-case scenario is they say no. Any other response will be in your favor.

Your negotiations don't have to be only about salary. I once asked for an extra week of paid vacation per year and got it. Whatever you want, you'll have a much easier time haggling for it now than after you sign the offer letter and start working. Now's the best chance you'll have to negotiate the terms of your employment; make the most of it and get it in writing.

Make your decision

If you interview a lot while looking for a job, which you should, it is common to find yourself in situations where you receive an offer from one company while hoping for a job with another.

Job offers are like glasses of milk. You can only leave them on the table briefly before they curdle, along with your reputation. You have two basic options to prevent this spoilage:

• Decline the offer and hope the other company comes through.

• Accept the offer.

However, these options are nuanced, so let's review them thoroughly.

I'm not suggesting you take an unnecessary risk or accept an offer you don't want. Instead, it would be best if you quickly decided which route you want to take and move in that direction in a way that minimizes your risk and helps you achieve the best outcome for you and the company that has made you an offer.

My strategy for deciding is to identify why I'm hesitant to take the current position and why I want an offer from the other company instead. If the only reason I can conjure is a fear of missing out, I accept the offer already on the table. Of course, you could get an offer from the second company that includes a pony at some point, but that rarely happens, so take the current offer instead of chasing a mirage and losing both.

Sometimes there are legitimate reasons to wait, such as the promise of more money, better benefits, or more time off. If so, negotiate with the current company to get their offer in line with the potentially better one. For example, if the still looming offer promises more vacation time, you might bargain with the first company like this:

I received your offer, and it is almost what I need. I'll sign the letter today if we can negotiate an extra week of vacation per year.

This strategy is less tacky than pitting two companies against each other.

If you want to hold out on the other job for reasons you can't negotiate to make even, like the resume prestige of working at Apple over working at We Markit Stuf, it is best to decline the first offer as soon as possible. You don't want rumors to spread that you're inconsiderate and unprofessional.

Avoid stringing companies along. They're trying to fill a position, and it isn't fair for them to think you will accept their offer when you don't intend to. By being considerate, you show yourself to be a professional and will maintain the company's respect, even though you aren't going to take their offer.

Show gratitude

Once you receive and accept an offer, email the hiring manager and thank them for giving you the position. Emailing everyone else who took the time to interview you is also a good idea. However, I recommend against blasting out a generic "Thanks!" to the group. Instead, email each individual a personalized message and thank them for their time. This unique contact allows you to start building relationships of trust before your first day.

For instance, consider something you enjoyed about meeting them and tell them how they contributed to your positive interview experience. Here's an example:

Hey, Allison,

I enjoyed our conversation during my interview and have accepted the company's offer.

Thank you for reviewing my portfolio during our conversation. Your suggestions will strengthen my work, and I look forward to learning even more under your mentorship.

I'm excited to begin working together. Thanks!

You should still send out an email to the hiring manager if you decide to reject the offer. They spent time and money interviewing you, so expressing gratitude for this sacrifice is always a good idea, even when declining a position. For example, consider writing something like this:

Hey, Madison,

Thank you for offering me a position with your company. I enjoyed our interview and think you have a great team.

After considering the offer and the day-to-day work, I have found the position doesn't align with my career goals, so I must decline. However, I wish you the best in searching for the perfect fit.

Businesses talk, and people make job changes. If you work in the same area for any period, you'll likely run into the same people at different companies during your career. You want them to remember you as grateful and pleasant, not someone who ghosted them on a job offer.

The challenge

Now that you have received an offer, negotiated, decided, and voiced your gratitude, it's off to the gum tasting, followed by your first day of work. Enjoy!

If you've followed the advice in this series and landed a job, let us know how it went in the comments. If you've gone through the process more than once, have you made any tweaks to fit your style? How did your alternations affect your outcomes?

By now, you've finished your resume and cover letter using the tips in "Writing strong resumes and cover letters" and flooded the internet with job applications based on the information in "Get out there!" Next, you're ready for the interview.

If you recall from the genesis of my career, clawing your way into a profession takes effort. The job interview is no different. Fortunately, career building is similar to strength training, running, or bicycling long distances. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. In addition, you won't need a see-through Spandex outfit, so that's nice.

Below are the three tips I use to succeed in my interviews.

Before the interview

We've already covered the first element of pre-interview preparedness by writing a powerful resume and cover letter. Check! Now, make several copies of both. You may need them during the interview.

Next, research the company and review its job description. Knowing what they are looking for and understanding their values, mission, and culture will help you find a way to fit in.

Many interviewers ask, "What makes you want to work for us?" Suppose you don't know and say something like, "Your corporate leadership in protecting our fragile environment," when their business is to dump toxic waste into duck ponds and public playgrounds. If they sense you don't even know what they do, you will likely get a pat on the head and a polite "Run along, now."

Find a mentor and have them role-play an interview with you or look for questions the company has asked other candidates. An excellent place to find this type of information is Glassdoor.com. If you can't find someone to practice with, review your responses aloud in front of a mirror. This practice will help your answers feel natural and spontaneous.

During the interview

Dress appropriately for the interview (again, no outfits!). During your company research, you should see if they have a dress code and choose your attire accordingly. Business casual is a safe bet if they don't have a dress code. You want to avoid wearing a three-piece suit or gown while the interviewers are sporting shorts and sandals. Doing so will be awkward and show you didn't prepare.

Take several copies of your resume and cover letter. I have had many experiences where the people interviewing me didn't have copies of my resume to refer to during the interview. Being able to hand them a copy of my documents for review made the discussion flow smoothly despite the interviewer being unprepared.

Next, show up ten to fifteen minutes early for your interview. This extra time will give you a chance to relax and compose yourself. Use this time to organize your thoughts, review your notes, and ensure you have copies of your resume and cover letter organized.

If you will be late due to an unavoidable situation, such as a pile of rubber-necking rubes clotting up the freeway trying to gawk at someone else's misfortune, call ahead and let the company know the situation. Get off at the nearest exit and find a phone, if necessary. A dash of consideration will grant you an abundance of grace when problems arise.

Ask the person for their email address during the interview and write it down. We'll discuss this more in the next section.

Finally, be enthusiastic. Show the interviewer that you are excited about the opportunity and are a fun and energetic person to be around. If you get the position, you'll be spending a lot of time together, so assure them that their time with you will be productive and pleasant.

After the interview

As soon as you get home from the interview or as soon as you end the discussion, if it is online or via phone, send a thank-you email to everyone you interviewed with. Thank your interviewers for their time and reiterate your enthusiasm for the position. Let them know you're excited to work with them. By following up, you will stand out and show them that you are serious about the job.

Here is a template you may use when sending follow-up emails:

Hey, People Who Interviewed Me!

Thank you for the time you spent discussing your open Specific Job Title position with me today. I researched as much as possible before the interview. Still, our discussion gave me the details I needed to grasp the company's long-term objectives and understand how best to support the team in driving that vision.

I enjoyed our interview and am thrilled by the potential of working together on such an exciting project.

I stopped using valedictions in my emails since my email address includes my full name, and I like to buck tradition. However, if you feel this style is too stumpy, please add one.

I send two emails to the people I interview with. One immediately after the interview and another if I get an offer letter (more on that tomorrow). I usually send a group thank-you email right after the interview. However, I'll email each person who interviewed me individually if I get an offer. I like to personalize those messages.

You can send either individual or group emails for both the post-interview and post-offer missives if you wish. All that is important is that you thank those who interviewed you. Showing gratitude is valuable and gives you another chance to draw attention to yourself, which is good.

The challenge

These three suggestions will help you set yourself above most of your competition. Of course, everything I've said here is old news, but few people do it for some reason. Making this extra effort will give you an edge over your rivals and could help you beat out individuals who may be the better candidate in other ways. I've seen it happen.

For today's challenge, follow all the suggestions in this post for your next interview. Did you notice a difference? If so, let us know in the comments.

In yesterday's post, Writing strong resumes and cover letters, we discussed how to amplify these documents and catch the attention of recruiters and hiring managers. If you followed the advice in that post, you now have a powerful resume and cover letter to share with the world. 

But how do you share it?

You can release your resume into the wild and get people's attention through methods including:

• Direct company contact.

• Job boards.

• Staffing agencies.

• Job fairs.

• Social media.

• Blogging.

In today's post, I'll focus on the first three.

Company websites

Most companies have a jobs or careers section on their website that you can use to see what positions they have open. There are pros and cons to applying for positions this way.

Pros

The most significant benefit of applying directly to a company is that you'll work with them exclusively; if they decide to interview you. For example, this direct access eliminates the back-and-forth you must deal with when working through a staffing agency or third-party recruiter.

Since you'll be working directly with the company's human resources (HR) department, getting detailed information on the company's benefits, culture, and other information is more straightforward.

Negotiating an appealing job offer is also easier since the HR department and hiring manager have easy access to each other and have a vested interest in building a positive working relationship with you.

Cons

Most companies don't have dedicated recruiters, so people in HR must juggle hiring with all the other wicked shenanigans they're responsible for.

HR departments are busy and only go through some of the resumes. They'll find a handful of applicants they like and stop looking. Therefore, you'll often receive a friendly email from the HR department thanking you for your interest in their company and assuring you that the feeling is not mutual; but please try again later. Keep pushing forward if this happens to you. Look at the situation through the lens of HR being busy, not commentary on your skills.

Job boards

There are a lot of job boards you can use to get your resume online. The two most popular ones are Indeed.com and Monster.com. OK, they may not be the most popular, but they are the two that materialized in my head first, so they win.

I would also like to mention FlexJobs.com. Where Indeed and Monster focus on full-time corporate positions, FlexJobs concentrates on jobs that provide flexible work hours, gig work, remote opportunities, part-time work, etc. There isn't as much competition in this space, so FlexJobs may provide a way to break into the market you want without having to contend against more seasoned applicants.

Unlike company career pages, where posting your resume results in a single view from a single company, job boards allow you to post one resume and have thousands of companies see it. Sounds great, right? It is!

Most of my jobs have come via job boards. However, there are some things to consider.

Pros

Job boards have a vast range of opportunities available. For example, searching a site like Indeed could reveal the perfect job for you that you didn't know existed.

Companies and recruiters can also find you through their searches. For example, I get emails daily from people asking me to apply for their positions based on my Indeed profile.

Most job boards include alerts that let you know when a job that matches your profile becomes available. Pounce on those when you get them. Companies often stop accepting applications after the first baker's dozen, so you'll want to act quickly.

Another recent trend on job boards that dramatically benefits you is salary information. There is nothing that screams "neophyte!" quite like over-selling or under-selling yourself salary-wise (to be fair, though, I don't believe anything has ever cried "neophyte!" in the entire history of the earth). Access to salary information also helps you save time by avoiding jobs that pay less than expected.

Finally, most job boards have company reviews, which can help you to avoid employers that don't fit your personality or other requirements.

Cons

Unfortunately, there are many scammers on job boards. Before applying for a job, check online to see if the company has a professional-looking website, positive reviews on sites like Glassdoor, or an established social media presence. Job listings with spelling and grammar errors can be a clue to illegitimate postings. The best way to stay safe is to only give personal information, like your birthdate, social security number, or address, to a company once you have a signed offer letter and have researched them thoroughly.

Many listings on job boards are stale, so you may apply for the ideal job only to discover the company filled it back in 1897.

Companies list jobs on job boards and their corporate website, so you could double-apply on accident. I recommend using Numbers, Excel, or Google Sheets to keep track of the companies you've contacted and how you submitted your resume so that you only send it once to each place.

Finally, the automation used by job boards will match you up with irrelevant listings. For example, Indeed has emailed me multiple alerts for registered nurse positions because they "match my profile." Unless rendering a Band-aid useless by getting salve all over the sticky part is the only medical experience necessary, I'm confident I fail to meet the qualifications.

Staffing agencies

I owe my initial success to staffing agencies, specifically a recruiter named Lawrence. He saw value in my resume and worked with Intel to get me my breakthrough role. Of course, I had to work hard on my skills and prepare for the interview, but Lawrence opened the door for me and shoved me into my cubicle.

Pros

Staffing agencies make their money by placing people in jobs, and they excel in their craft, so if you're trying for your first professional job, a staffing agency may get you into places that would be closed to you otherwise. They have a reputation that you don't have yet, so you can ride into your first position on their coattails, to be cliché for one glorious moment.

Staffing agencies can also negotiate salaries for you. This assistance is helpful if you haven't yet mastered that skill. They also tend to pay better than market value for contract positions (see cons before getting too excited). Therefore, if your full-time counterparts make $70K a year, you could make $80K for the same job as a contractor, minus government mountebankery.

Staffing agencies have a reputation to protect, so many offer free training and online courses to advance your skills. If you get the chance, take advantage of those opportunities.

Contract positions through staffing agencies will pay you for every hour you work. So while your salaried counterparts are toiling away for free late into the night, you're getting paid for those overtime hours.

Finally, staffing agencies can get you into positions quickly.

Cons

Staffing agencies tend to have limited benefits or no benefits at all. On the plus side, you make more money per hour, but the downside is that your money can disappear quickly in a medical emergency or if you or your spouse gets pregnant.

Since there is a high fee associated with staffing agencies, many companies won't use them, which limits the companies you can get into.

Since staffing agencies make money by placing you in a position, they may rush you into a job you don't want.

The challenge

There isn't a best way to get your resume into the hands of an employer. The point is that it gets there. Use a carrier pigeon if you have to. The fact is that each method of contacting employers has pros and cons. It's up to you to know what those are and balance them to meet your needs.

If you're trying to break into your first professional position, try all these contact methods and take the first position you get, even if it differs from where you want to end up. You're progressing if your first position is a step in the right direction. That is all that's important. Who knows? You may even discover a new path you love more, which would have eluded you otherwise.

For today's challenge, try sending your resume out using the three methods we reviewed today. Then, let us know how it turned out in the comments.

In my origin story yesterday, I mentioned writing a lot of resumes and cover letters once I felt my programming skills were sufficient to convince someone to hire me. There are endless examples of resume and cover letter formats online, so I'm not going to discuss layouts. Instead, I'd like to share three strategies I and others have used to get noticed and land our first professional positions.

Before I share these strategies, it is important to understand that your resume and cover letter are the job equivalents of penciling your name and personal information onto a three-by-five card and calling it a driver's license. Since an authoritative source to verify your skills and experience doesn't exist, what you say on your resume is your word that you can do the work, nothing more, so make the value of your word priceless.

With that in mind, let's continue.

Be authentic

The lack of resume verification may tempt you to claim experience you don't have. We refer to the practice as padding to make it sound innocent. However, it is still dishonest, and falsehoods have a habit of surfacing eventually. Avoid missing out on opportunities you want or getting fired from jobs you love just because you padded your resume. It happens!

So, what do you do if you have a skill but need experience? Say that! Then, demonstrate your skills in some way. For example, if you're applying for your first junior copywriting position in marketing, find a few products you like and write marketing campaigns for them. Then, in the Summary section at the top of your resume, write something like:

I am eager to begin my career as a copywriter and have worked hard to develop my skills. Since I'm seeking my first copywriting position with you, you'll find several examples of marketing campaigns I've written attached to my resume, which you can use in place of past professional experience to evaluate my work. I trust you'll be pleased with my efforts and would love a chance to bring my passion into your company.

Hiring managers are looking for a person to hire, not a made-up entity. Therefore, if what you present to them is authentic and demonstrates value, you will strengthen your chances of success.

Avoid buzzwords and keyword lists

Keyword lists weren't yet trendy when I chiseled my first resume into a stone; however, buzzwords were, and the two are similar. So I'll update my experience to account for modern technology.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was common to see an extensive list of random words crammed into the bottom margin of a website. The idea was that search engines would glom onto these keywords, exclaim, "Wow! This site covers it all!" and push the site higher in their results.

Search engines became wise to this strategy and ignore it nowadays; however, the tools recruiters use to rifle through thousands of resumes automatically are still relatively primitive. As a result, it is common to see resumes with large sections at the top dedicated to meaningless mounds of keywords the applicant thinks might get a recruiter's attention.

Why waste a third of your resume on empty content? For example, if you were applying for a position managing my small business's website, knowing how to use a content management system is far less interesting to me than seeing what you've done with those skills. So, instead of wasting your resume on keyword stuffing like this:

Skills: WordPress, Adobe Illustrator, Yoast.

Showcase your skills like this:

To increase the number of customers in my dog-walking business, I created a website using WordPress and did my graphic design work in Adobe Illustrator. I also installed Yoast to make my site search engine friendly. My site also includes a referral system for customers to refer their friends. Within a week of deploying my site, I tripled my customers. You can visit my site at https://PickItUp.com. I'd love to bring this kind of success to your business.

If I had five applicants, four of which used keyword lists to enumerate their skills, and you gave me the latter example, you would have the job.

Show impact

My wife used to work at a place that milled crowns and dental implants. The company was great, but the pay could have been better. Unfortunately, the company was also nearly an hour away, and the cost of gas at the time ate away heaps of her salary.

My wife is detail oriented and excellent at math, so I tried convincing her to study programming and switch careers so she could make more and work closer to home. Finally, one day, I said, "If you're going to have to sit somewhere for eight hours a day anyway, why not get paid as much as possible?" That won her over.

So, I paid my wife's tuition for a coding boot camp that taught her how to write code using a web development framework called Ruby on Rails.

A few weeks before the course began, the boot camp sent her a book about Ruby on Rails and asked her to read it before the first day of class. So she quit her milling job and made that task her full-time job. She read the entire book, marked it up, manually typed out all the examples, and ran them on her computer.

By the end of the boot camp, my wife's book was crumbling with wear, and she had created a web application that showed the scheduled locations for several food trucks in the county we lived in.

Since my wife didn't have professional experience in programming, she used the top three-quarters of her resume to flaunt her food truck project. Hiring managers could see the work, the technical challenges she had to overcome, and the methods she used to resolve those issues. Within a few weeks, a large international retail company hired her as a junior web developer in their online marketing department.

When I went to pick my wife up on the last day of her boot camp, two guys were chatting by the entrance. I overheard them talking about jobs they would get and the success they would enjoy as I walked past.

I got my wife, and as we were leaving, I noticed both guys were holding pristine copies of the same Ruby on Rails book the boot camp had given my wife. I didn't think about it then, but I discovered later that they had interviewed with the company that hired my wife, but neither received an offer.

For several years after my wife's boot camp ended, I'd see these two together at tech meet-ups and job fairs. Out of curiosity, I'd ask if they had landed jobs yet, but to my knowledge, they never did.

I suspect the root cause of their failure was they put as much effort into building projects to showcase their skills and writing powerful resumes as they did into reading those mint copies of the Ruby on Rails book. 

Unfortunately, they both thought that the barricade to career entry was the high cost of the class. While valuable, boot camps and college degrees are less important than the importance of impact. Of course, you can succeed with both, but I know plenty of college graduates who are no better off now than they were out of high school.

The key to success is to put in the work, regardless of how you go about it, and then use your resume to show hiring managers you can impact their business. If you do, companies will hire you more often than college graduates who can't.

The challenge

Think about a talent you have, then write a strong resume entry for it. Post it in the comments if you'd like help.

My first gig out of high school was chauffeuring copy machines from the company's warehouse to customer locations (how's that for padding my resume?). The work was fine, and I liked my first boss a lot. However, my second boss was the equivalent of dousing myself with gasoline and heading into the hills to roast marshmallows. So, within a month or two after the switch, I watched my minimum wage deflagrate into a pile of ash. On the plus side, they gifted me a lovely pink slip to blow my tears into*.

My second job was working for the Library of Congress. While that may sound impressive, it was also a minimum-wage job where I duplicated audiobook cassettes from master reels. They did have a union, though, whose dues I couldn't afford, so it was a step up.

My favorite part about this job was the decore. There were two entrances. The interior designers had paved one in asbestos tile and carpeted the other with a Berber that looked and smelled like mold.

My office was the aristocratic apex of the designer's work. The creative master had bathed my floor in disco shag, at least a foot deep; the color an eye-peeling orange that only the 1970s could muster. My three-step workday involved:

• Hacking through the tangerine jungle to my desk.

• Copying cassette tapes.

• Wading back out to my car.

I consistently took my brain to work with me, but I could have left it at home and performed the same.

Completing my tasks took the entire forty-hour slog each week when I started this job. However, within a few months, I figured out how to finish all my assignments in about four hours.

I usually don't get bored because I can conjure a thousand things to do; however, there are only so many ways to entertain oneself with magnetic tape. So, after mastering the art of spinning a cassette tape from one end of the reel to the other using the tip of a pencil, I went to my boss and asked for something to do. He said, "We're a library. Go read a book." Before he could summon some other chore for me, I jaunted over to the book section of the library and started browsing.

The first book I read was about a time vampire and a box canyon. Those are the only two fragments of the story I remember, so it must have been exceptional; maybe a geological romance. After that, I continued reading novels from various genres.

One day, while returning The Phantom of the Opera (my favorite of the monster classics), I stumbled upon a book about computer programming in a language called C because it was sticking out of the bottom shelf too far. Something about it piqued my interest, so I checked it out and started reading.

I worked at the Library of Congress in the early 90s, so, being the federal government, we used a knotted Inca Quipus for all our computing needs. Fortunately, C runs on those too.

I didn't own a computer then and wouldn't for another five years. So, I'd read the C book after finishing my tasks and wait until nobody was using the shared computer to practice what I had learned.

When I started the book, I barely knew how to turn a computer on. However, within a few weeks, I had replaced the hundred-and-three-character Novell Netware commands we had to type to start various programs with a friendly menu written in C. Each little success encouraged me to learn a little more.

Reading library books is only half the story, though. Once I felt I knew enough to be taken seriously in a job interview, I started writing resumes and cover letters and sending them around using a friend's America Online account (which was to the internet what a grape is to a bicycle).

At first, companies rejected my resume, so I bought a book at Barnes & Noble. It was a Dean Koontz thriller about a golden retriever who was more intelligent than humans, showing he had researched his subject material well. Then, I returned to Barnes & Noble and bought a book about writing resumes, where I learned what padding meant.

Soon, I got a callback from Packard Bell, who made home computers with the same functionality as those computer-shaped shells they use in furniture store displays. Surprisingly, they offered me a job in tech support. It wasn't writing code, but the job was a step in the right direction. So, I packed up my C reference books and a small statue of a cowboy that one of the other Library of Congress employees had sculpted for me during their boredom and joined Packard Bell at twice the pay.

After a few months of answering the phones and sending out replacement hard drives, I grew bored. So, I started writing resumes and flooding the internet again.

I landed three other jobs after Packard Bell; one building PCs, one administering a network, and, at last, one writing software. Unfortunately, I was still a neophyte and got fired after a few months. However, I learned a lot and was better prepared to try again.

As with learning C, each microscopic success in my budding career masked a flurry of rejections and drove me forward. Finally, two and a half years after I left the Library of Congress, I landed a software testing job at Intel, which paid more than six times the library salary, and did it for the cost of a handful of computer books I couldn't find at the local library.

I'm not the best software engineer, but I've managed to slalom halfway down the right side of the bell curve without a degree in computer science. Eventually, I did go to college and graduated just before my fiftieth birthday with a degree in English and Creative Writing. I went to college to improve my prose, not because I had to, but because I wanted to.

I built an exciting career through reading, writing, and perseverance. But the most beautiful part of this story is that you can too.

If you want any tips on growing your career through reading and writing, let me know in the comments, and I'll do my best to help.

You can read more about my time at the Library of Congress in Bob the Wasp Cleaver.

* Yes. I end many sentences with prepositions because I like to roll Latin-speaking folks around in their graves, and, more importantly, I'm not speaking Latin. Besides, saying, "They gifted me with a lovely pink slip into which I could blow my tears," sounds more stuffy than a nose with a cold. Take that, Poole and Dryden**!

** Joshua Poole and John Dryden are the two people who, not content with all the Latin words in English, also tried to schlep over its grammar.

I loved the character Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh when I was a tyke. His self-deprecating humor always appealed to me. Even today, I'll occasionally search for Eeyore quotes online and laugh across time with the toothless blond kid I used to be. Doing this tonight is what prompted me to write this post.

Two of my favorite Eeyore quotes are "It's not much of a tail, but I'm sort of attached to it" and "It's an awful nice tail, Kanga. Much nicer than the rest of me." I like how the first one starts negative and then flips into a noncommital positive. The second quote surprises you with an uncharacteristically buoyant outlook from Eeyore, then slips back into the mire of his self-deprecation.

Communication is down!

As an adult, I've met a few Eeyores. I've even been one myself at times. OK, fine! Most of the time! Just stop holding that raisin cookie to my head.

While amusing in Eeyore's wry modesty, self-deprecating humor can wear on people when it becomes how you think about yourself deep down. For example, I used to work with a guy who made this remark about a presentation slide he had worked on, "Go ahead. Use my slide as an example of how not to do it. Then, at least, I won't be utterly useless." While he was a nice guy, he never made many friends at work because his negativity tended to drain people (Rest in peace, my friend).

The same is true of writing. If your writing is unnecessarily negative, people may feel the gloom in your prose and put it down.

Take the cheerful path

While it is easy to identify downer language like, "I've got a face for radio, a voice for blogging, and the writing skills for a nap," other downbeat issues in your writing are harder to spot. Let's consider a couple of examples.

"Marc didn't want the vanilla cone and reached for the chocolate instead."

While there's nothing wrong with chocolate ice cream (it's certainly better than rum raisin), the sentence could be more cheerful.

"Marc considered his options, then seized the chocolate cone."

OK, I cheated on that last one using a stronger verb, but trust me, it's the better sentence either way. In the first example, it sounds like Marc is settling for the chocolate ice cream because he doesn't like vanilla. However, in the second sentence, Marc is most excited to have the chocolate cone out of all his options. See the difference?

Here's another example of dialogue you may have written in a short story about my mom's new living room furniture once while you were in college.

"Please don't sit on the coffee table."

Your professor may have suggested you change the sentence to make my mom look less of a nag. I'm sure you took her advice and came up with something like this next sentence, but we'll have to ask you, won't we?

"Please have a seat on the davenport."

The first example sounds like a command, whereas the second example feels like an invitation. Good job!

The challenge

Using negative words isn't necessarily a bad thing. For example, you may be writing a tragic drama about your cousin's inability to bear children, who weren't total butt cheeks, and want your audience to feel your pain. However, in most cases, dusting your prose of don'ts, won'ts, can'ts, and shan'ts will go a long way toward conveying a subconscious vibe of optimism that your readers will unknowingly love.

For today's challenge, look through things you've written for any bits of negativity you inadvertently included in your prose. Then, if you find a hint of negativity, post it in the comments, along with how you fixed it.