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Guilty Steaks

8/8/2012

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Tonight I was digging through the *junk drawer* in my room, actually a rubbermaid container still loaded down with the outlier pieces of my last move and whatever bric a brac resisted my attempts to place it fittingly around the room at any given time. In the bottom, amidst the accumulated dust, the precious lost paper clips which could have proved useful so many times, and many escaped batteries, potentially dead, I found the guitar pick pictured below. Across the top, in perfect typewriter talk, it says 'Guilty steak ...' and below that: 'pearls in the sand.'
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I plucked it out of the dust, blew it off,  and pocketed it as personal archaeology. It stems from a period a couple years back when I was editing my novel, Raw Flesh in the Rising, about a sailor wrongfully exiled to the infamous leper colony on the Hawaiian Kalaupapa peninsula.  I don't recall why I was printing those particular pages - perhaps so I could expunge the sentence at hand in a fiery ritual - I only recall that the page came out of my old Canon with a pick-shaped hole in the text. When I dug around, there it was, the proverbial monkeywrench in the works. I like to think that it was trying to tell me something, seeing that the paragraph stamped on the pick is perhaps the worst I wrote in the entire book.


Judge for yourself:

Then, terribly, his hands were anvils again. The men, leering still, grinning still, even up to the moment Eric, worked into a spitting frustrated rage, hit them, their skulls were like eggshells. They burst apart like greasy tomatoes. Guilty steaks littered the ground, and the half-shattered grins of the men glinted like strings of pearls in the sand. In his sleep, legs wheeling, Eric groaned.

Makes me flinch to read it. Portraying dreams in entertainment should be outlawed.

In my defense, the piece underwent a good flaying for defying good sense, order, and taste, and in the final tally was convinced to read like this:

The two together then receded like rocks sunk into the sea, white shards shrinking, until both became as dead and distant to him as the moon; and though he found again that he could speak, too late, he had nothing to say. Half-shattered grins glinted like strings of pearls in the sand and, in his sleep, legs wheeling, Eric’s groans wandered unheeded amongst the broken pillars of the trampled grass.

At first I thought it was unlucky that the pick had been tattooed with one of the worst lines of my piece. I thought perhaps a sequel to the previous fiery ritual was in order. In the end, however, I erred on the side of good ol' fashioned hands-in-pockets deterrence. I figured I'd let it serve as a reminder that not everything shoots out of my fingertips as gems. Usually, it takes time, perseverence, and polishing.

Of course, the next time I get in a literary huff, into the fire it goes.


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    L.S. Burton
    PictureFarewell, third person bio.




    Lee Burton doesn't have cats or kids, but he does have a lot of books, a couple of mugs he thinks are really fantastic, and a good pair of shoes which haven't fallen apart yet despite his best efforts to murder them with kilometers.

    Burton has written almost six books. Almost six as some are still scantily clad in their respective drawers. Each of them had their own goals and were written differently, and he is very fond of them all -- except perhaps for his first attempt at a novel, which remains a travesty.  That one he keeps locked in a dark basement and feeds it fish heads.

    In 2011, Burton won the Percy Janes Award for Best Unpublished First Novel in the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Competition for his novel Raw Flesh in the Rising.

    And just recently, in the fall of 2013, Burton published his first science-fiction novel, THIS LAND, about which he boasts constantly.

    Available at Amazon

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