All authors are committed. They are committed in the same way that every craftsman, every artist is. That is, they want to produce the finest work possible and every word is chosen to that end. They are committed in the same way that every artist is and that means applying their gift to every character, every description and every plot. There is no question that they are committed. However, I believe every author needs to understand that, no matter that they are absolutely committed, they will very often be faced with the problem of endurance. 

Stories are fundamentally important and necessary for all of us and have been since our beginning. They teach us, they move us, they teach us empathy and understanding. But crafting them takes, not only craftsmanship and artistic ability but also, an ability to stick to it when the story falters or the character won’t come alive or the resolution is not believable or when rejections are piling up. To stay with it, to endure can often be the most difficult part of an author’s work.

So…with that in mind I have included the first chapter of my next story for you to take a look at. I am up to chapter ten but I am beginning to question whether this is a story I want to tell. I wonder if I should endure. 

CHAPTER ONE

The first to notice the man sitting in a lawn chair outside the school’s main office was Earl the head custodian at St. Cuthburt’s Academy for Young Men and Women. What is about to unfold is a love story of sorts. I say, of sorts, because you shouldn’t be thinking of a Harlequin Romance or one of those Hallmark holiday movies. Still, love is love and that certainly must not be forgotten. Although….. 

Earl Winter arrived every morning at precisely 6:00 am. On his way to his small office space squeezed into a corner of the boiler room three floors below, he turned on the hallway lights, instinctively analyzed the temperature of the building and inspected the restrooms. Of course, the two person night crew made up of Sandy Soddelmyer and Gretchen Storm had already cleaned the boy’s and girls’s restrooms quite thoroughly, but Earl liked to check to make certain the TP, paper towel and soap dispensers were full and that each room smelled sufficiently and noxiously enough of disinfectant. He had been at St Cuthburt’s for most of his adult life and knew every nook and cranny; every cracked piece of tile and every repaired locker dent by heart. He had started as night janitor when the school was simply St. Cuthburt’s Academy for Young Men. The eventuality of young women intruding on this sacred male playground arrived in the mid seventies. Weathering the rise in over excited hormones with the change from all boys to the arrival of girls, Earl had moved up the proverbial ladder to his present height. He was equally familiar with every single person who occupied those nooks and crannies be they teacher or student. That is why he gave little notice to the man in the lawn chair dressed in board shorts, flamingo spattered shirt and flip flops even though an oversized sombrero covered all but the scruffy chin. He was all too familiar with Mr. Moore’s shenanigans. He knew it was the infamous chemistry teacher because he recognized the flip flops that were worn every day no matter how cold or how rainy or how many feet of snow blocked the front doors. The dramatic productions that took place in the chemistry class room, especially in the weekly labs, was well known to all. Smoke billowing out of the windows and doors along with foundation shuttering explosions that sent freshman rediscovering the old 1950’s duck and cover drills were a more or less common occurrence at St. Cuthburt’s so that Mr. Moore’s eccentricities passed with out much notice. His extra curricular activities were part of the school’s plentiful lore. Every year book for the past twenty years recounted at least one bit of buffoonery showcased by Mr. Moore. Just the previous spring an elderly bag lady had been spotted between classes pushing a shopping cart commandeered from the local Safeway slipping little bits of paper into lockers in senior hall. Because their chemistry teacher never bothered to change his footwear from flip flops to something more costume consistent, everyone knew who was slipping the pieces of paper into the lockers and they couldn’t wait to discover what Mr. Moore as an old bag lady, had up his sleeve . They were, of course, baffled when they discovered a single Safeway receipt in each locker. The greatest minds in the senior class went to work. Which meant that one boy and one girl, both at the top of the nerd ladder, discovered that the answers to two out of the five questions on the chemistry final could be found in those receipts. The entire class was stunned to discover that only two of their classmates saw 100% on their exam and that most of the others achieved only a 60%. All of the cries of unfairness were to no avail and Mr. Moore suggested that, for the next exam, they pay closer attention to the world around them. 

So it was that Earl continued on with his morning ritual uninterested in what the teacher in the lawn chair was up to this time. Except for the pop pop of fluorescent lights coming on in the hallways and the diminishing steps of the head custodian, all was quiet for the next half hour. Miss Chancer always entered into the freshman wing because it was close to where she parked her 2007 Saturn. As she rounded the corner toward the main office she also recognized the beach scene by the door and, she too, was not surprised. She snorted a brief chuckle which was as close as Rosemary Chancer ever came to levity. As she put her key in the door she glanced at the flip flops just to make sure and then, with a tisk tisk she opened the office door ready to manage the entire school for yet another day. Rosemary was the office receptionist by title but she, and most of the community, saw herself as office manager/school principle. She carefully placed her purse under her desk just to the left of her feet and just as carefully arranged her ubiquitous cardigan sweater on the back of her office chair. In spite of herself, she puzzled about what Dennis might be up to in that outfit and why was he stationed outside of her office she wondered.

 Rosemary was the only one who called the chemistry teacher Dennis. To the rest of the world he was Dinty. There is no doubt he would have preferred Dennis but, thanks to his pals in the second grade, he was to be forever known as Dinty Moore. He would always introduce himself as Dennis but eventually the old moniker would catch up with him. 

Rosemary carefully arranged her desk for the day. Her favorite pen, always black ink, was picked up and repositioned exactly were it had been resting with perhaps a slight tip right or left depending on her mood of the day. The paperweight that held a tiny purple, Rosemary’s favorite color, flower floating in a clear liquid was turned exactly one eighth of an inch to the left, tapped on top with her index finger and turned back to its original position. She then moved her ergonomic swivel chair to precisely where it would rest all day every day, placed both beautifully manicured hands directly in front of her on the desk, sighed deeply with approval and began her day. She had just pushed the brew button on the office coffee machine when, at 6:46, she heard the fist movement in the faculty room and just minutes after that the muted voices and distant sounds of lockers opening and closing as the first students entered the building. By 7:10 the noise level had increased. The early morning locker sounds and quiet voices had become the banging of hundreds of lockers, louder voices, laughter, giggles and guffaws, clacking heals and shouts all creating a rock and roll symphony that would last until late into the afternoon. Nobody, including the faculty’s prim and fussy English teacher Ms. Dorthy Rizzel (known to the students as Dr. Dot), seemed to notice or be bothered by the cacophony that filled the school every single day. 

At exactly 7:27, as noted later by Rosemary, freshman Colleen Fisher’s scream shattered the noise into silence. For nearly a full minute the halls fell silent as the scream echoed through the building and out open doors into the world nearby. 

Before the echoes had time to dissipate, Rosemary had rounded the corner of her desk knocking her coffee cup to the floor, yanked the office door open and stepped into the hall only to look straight into the open, now silent, mouth of the terrified Colleen Fisher. As Rosemary turned to see what had horrified Colleen, students rushed from every corner of the school toward the origin of the scream. But, the security guard in the freshman hall had already pushed her way through the excited crowd to arrive at the office door just behind Rosemary. Schyman Williams was religious about her daily workout and at nearly six feet tall she was an imposing figure. She swaggered through the halls of St. Cuthbert’s striking fear into the hearts of freshman and seniors alike. When she arrived at the side of Colleen Fisher, however, she seemed to shrink three sizes and was just barely able to hold back a scream that would have put Colleen’s to shame. She had looked first at Colleen and then followed the look in the girl’s eyes to the figure next to the office door. The security guard shook herself and quickly sprang into action. Which meant, with trembling hands, she tapped the radio attached to her lapel. When the second security guard, Frank, answered from the parking lot where he was half heartedly watching for the exchange of product and cash he heard what he would later describe as “a quivering baby voice repeating three words; come, office, body”. Schyman was a formidable woman to look at but she lacked experience and had carelessly allowed some 800 students and most of the faculty to push closer and closer to the scene at the office door while she tentatively reached out to Dennis Moore who had slipped to a prone position on the tile floor. 

“Don’t touch him”, Frank yelled, “Don’t touch anything.”