I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. I’m a professional liar. That may sound harsh, but I pull stuff out of my butt for the purpose of profit. Put more poetically, I weave wonder and aether into compelling fictional stories with the intent of entertaining readers such that they insist on paying me to do so again.
And I’m good at it. Lying that is.
My chronically ill friend asked me the other day if she needed to report to her doctor that she had fallen…if her fall had happened to be into her wheelchair. I promptly shook me head and informed her that falling into a chair is called unintentional sitting. And there is no need to report such things.
My youngest son routinely narrows his eyes at me for a good few seconds before turning to his mother to ask, “Is that true?” Ninety percent of the time, the wife responds by rolling her eyes and shaking her head. “You know that nothing your father says is true.” Notice, I said “ninety percent of the time.” To my credit, I do upon occasion tell the God’s honest truth. Otherwise, how else would I keep things interesting?
During my thirteen years as a campus pastor (yes, that was my calling and my passion before turning to professional fabrication), there remains a single famous episode between myself and my staff team that perfectly illustrates my proficiency at duplicitousness.
I believe the conversation began with my attempt to describe a womp rat as a mutant nutria on steroids. For those of you not versed in the Star Wars story bible, a womp rat is a large, nasty rodent thingy from Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine. Anywho, my staff team was so convinced that I had fabricated this so called “nutria” (what a dumb name, right?) by morphing a lesser womp rat with an ROUS (rodent of unusual size), that we derailed the entire meeting (based out of a small hotel conference room) in order to travel down the hall en masse to the business center where we attempted to confirm the veracity (or lack there of) for my pathetically transparent fabrication.
I mean, a “nutria” for God’s sake. It seemed a lazy effort on my part, and they were determined to call me out this time. You know, put me in my place.
Mind you, this was before the era of smartphones and voice assistance, so we couldn’t simply ask Siri to resolve the matter. Instead we had to ask Jeeves, and that meant hiking to a computer with internet connection and getting the password to login. We did so. The entire time, I watched on as smug as a bug in a rug.
Of course once we were able to properly inquire from the turn-of-the-century internet, wikipedia brought up a result similar to this:
The coypu (from Spanishcoipú, from Mapudungunkoypu; Myocastor coypus), also known as the nutria, is a large, herbivorous, semi-aquaticrodent. Classified for a long time as the only member of the family Myocastoridae, Myocastor is now included within Echimyidae, the family of the spiny rats.
At this point, my staff team wished they could have declared, “Oh! The coypu! Why didn’t you say so?” But that would have been a response only I could have pulled off, if I had been in their shoes. Of course, I was in my shoes. And in my shoes I could only shrug and offer to get the meeting back on track.
The rest of the team members were left shaking their heads and laughing in disbelief. “There’s actually a giant rat called a nutria. I thought for sure you were making it up.”
And that, my friends, is the power of the 10% Truth Strategy. (T%TS, known colloquially as “Tots.”) It’s a practice that I believe should be more widely deployed these days and would by default reduce the public bull$h!t rate by approximately 8%. What politics, media, and social media don’t seem to understand these days is that there’s no magic in the storytelling if everything you say is a pile of crap. Oh no. If you want to keep people coming back for more, 10% of that apparent bull-plop has got to be the God’s honest truth.
At the Desk This Week
2,500 words written this week!
That’s how much I used to write every day Monday through Friday…but it felt good to be able to bang out this many words over four hours split between two days this past week. I’m pretty sure I can keep setting aside at least four hours a week to actively typing. This means I’ll need to commit at least an hour or two of my precious mental down time as well. The mental down time is what drives the writing. If I’m not mentally living in the story, then I’ll find myself writing in circles when I sit down to do the work. The mental down time has been the harder space to preserve over this last year, because, well…you know. Mental exhaustion is a real thing especially when routines are kicked to the curb.
For my Lost DMB fans out there, I’m now streaming the third season: McCutchen’s Bones (which actually starts with “Hell’s Womb”).
If You Wish to Start Reading The Green Ones…
[Click here to start at the beginning.]
Thanks so much for taking the time to read these scenes of Boundaries, Season 2 of The Green Ones. I’ll be publishing FREE daily scenes from The Green Ones until…I die…or something terrible happens. Seriously, I’ve got over 100 scenes written so far, and I’ll be writing more until the story reaches its natural ending. You are totally welcome to read the entire story for FREE! If at any point you decide you would rather finish the story in ebook or print format, just click the buttons below and you can do that as well. If you enjoy reading the serial releases, BUT you would also like to support me as a writer (my kids need wine!) please subscribe to my premium content for bonus scenes, exclusives, and insider access to my process. And of course, I’d be grateful if you would share this post with any of your reader friends who you think would enjoy The Green Ones. Happy reading!