What We're Writing: Hank takes a short story challenge!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: It’s Tuesday, and since I am second alphabetically, Tuesday is my "what we’re writing" day.

My current writing adventures include the final glorious edits of The House Guest, slogging through the hideous middle of One Wrong Word--and the release of a short story in an amazing anthology!

The story all began with the most wonderful email I’ve gotten in a long time. From CJ  Box and Harlan Coben. (!!!) Inviting me to be one of 11 authors to contribute to their short story anthology called Birds of Prey, under the imprimatur of International Thriller Writers. Each story had to be about a bird of prey.  It took me about zero seconds to say yes.

Followed by days of existential angst as I tried to figure out what the heck to write.

As it turned out, the story is a perfect example of an idea that did not work!

When Harlan and CJ asked me to participate in this, I tried to think of something as weirdly exotic as I could. And decided I would write about an extinct bird. A bird that did not exist anymore. 

How would I do that? I didn't know, but it seemed like a plan. So, I researched extinct birds. And found the Haast eagle, supposedly the biggest eagle that ever existed, which fell into extinction because it could not feed itself enough. Something like that.  

Oh, I thought, that sounds, metaphorically, like "corporate." A super-big company, devouring everything in sight, and yet, still could not sustain itself.  And that seemed like a brilliant idea. 

However. Apparently not. I could not write that story. I could not figure out, not at all, how to do that. And I was a little bit worried. Really really worried, in fact.

At some point, I walked into our family room and my husband was watching Dr. Zhivago. He has watched that movie countless times. His daughter is even named Lara. I said to him. 

"Are you watching that movie again?" And he said, "Yes, I love this movie."

 And I said, "I know you love it, honey, but how many times can you watch the same movie?" And he said, "I could watch this movie forever."

I burst out laughing, and said "I can just see that, you’re 150 years old, and all you do is watch Dr. Zhivago."

 And he said, "That doesn’t sound bad to me."

 So then I thought--and this is the writer process--what if there were someone who watched the same movie over and over? Over and over and over. Why would they do that?

And that was fascinating to me. And since the bird book was preying on my mind, I thought: how could I made that a bird story? What movies have birds of prey in them? And first, my brain said "The Falcon and the Snowman."

 

And the other half of my mind laughed, and said "No, Hank, that is not the one."

 Exactly. Because of course, there’s only one movie that a person could watch over and over that features a bird of prey. 

And that is The Maltese Falcon. And that is the story I wrote.

It stars Robyn (an ex-con, now senior citizen/nursing home attendant) and her boyfriend Jay, newly released from prison. Robyn has managed to get Jay a job at the home where she works. One of their charges is a resident named Finnian Webley, who has never said a word, or responded to anyone. He just watches The Maltese Falcon all day. Over and over. It's on mute.

Robyn and Jay are walking down the hall toward his room.

(I have to say, this story does not sound like "me" at all. I was so surprised at the way it came out.) 

Here's a tiny bit  from "Jailbirds."

                                                         ******

She remembered when Jay said goodbye that day, or not said goodbye; he’d just turned and walked away. And she had no idea how long 32 months would turn out to be. But it was long enough for her to get angry, then sad, then miserable, then enraged, then forgiving. Now, she didn’t know what she was. Thirty years old, and in love—whatever that meant—with this person, this person with no future, and they were walking along a godforsaken hallway, with godforsaken people, who just waited here to die, and what she was doing here, she didn’t dare to try to understand.

“I can’t wait for tonight,” Jay told her. “The last thing we’re going to do is watch TV, right, Birdie? I may never freaking watch television again. I don’t want to turn out like this guy.”

“Hush. We’re here.”

“I thought you said he can’t hear.”

They knocked on the door of Apartment 410, Robyn assembling her words, assembling her face, putting on the demeanor of a person who cared. She did, actually, if she faced it. Her own parents had died before they got old enough to be in a place like this, and sometimes she wondered whether they might have been lucky.

“Why are you knocking?” Jay asked. “If he can’t hear, what difference will it make?”

She loved his voice, even asking that moronic question. She had longed to hear it, nights and mornings and, sometimes, just walking along Riviera Beach, listening to the waves and the stupid seagulls and thinking about decisions people made.

“I think he feels the vibrations or something,” she said.

The door clicked open, and Finnian Webley sat there, looking at them, or not looking at them; it was hard for Robyn to tell. His short-sleeved plaid shirt, fraying once-blue plaid, hung across his thin shoulders, and a sparse scrabble of spiky white hairs seemed to sprout randomly across his splotchy pale face. She worried about him, kind of, his sunken eyes and the hollows in his forehead. The way he licked his thin lips, as if he were thinking about something that she could never know.

                                       ******

HANK: The anthology  BIRDS OF PREY came out less than a week ago! And it is now an Amazon Bestseller, and the number one mystery anthology! It is an audio only, an Audible original, and is absolutely fascinating.  It includes 11 stories,  by, among others, Tess Gerritsen, Robert Dugoni, Kathy Reichs, SA Cosby, and me.

Here are some of the authors on a zoomcast about it.

Here’s the link to the Audible book! It is quite astonishing. There are owls, and falcons, and seagulls, a condor, a Ford falcon car, and mine, starring predatory jailbirds and a movie.

What bird of prey would you have chosen?