Buckets and Buckets of the White Stuff
January 22, 2016
Reaching Out For The Brass Carousel Ring
February 19, 2016
As the guys from Monty Python’s Flying Circus used to say, “Now for something completely different.” I’m madly trying to carry out all sorts of tasks related to my attendance at the writer’s conference in San Francisco next weekend. The main job related to my participation is pitching the most recent novel manuscript for possible representation by a Literary Agent. With that in mind, I’m posting the two page synopsis for the novel on this week’s blog publication. I want to use this as part of my pitch.
Been working on the manuscript for awhile now, and it’s been a hugely entertaining experience-more fun than most people have in a year!! Sounds like a tired cliche, but that’s what I love about writing.
FRIENDSHIP HIGHWAY
ADRIAN STEWART (aka Ads) and PATRICK DAUGHERTY have a friendship that’ll last till the day after the Apocalypse. After college, they decide to blow their conservative parents out of the water by signing up as U.S. Peace Corps volunteer teachers.
Ads is assigned as a language instructor at a small college in Chengdu, China, and Patrick gets a teaching job at a school in Lhasa. They discover that coincidentally, Ads’ colleague, the Han Chinese LI BAI CHOU, has a deep, life-long friendship with a working companion of Patrick’s, half-Tibetan LHAGBA.
Patrick and Ads are shocked to discover their respective colleagues are close friends, but Li Bai and Lhagba immediately decide to take advantage of this, and set up a covert communication link with assistance from the two Yanks.
It turns out that Lhagba and Li Bai have been forcibly separated for years due to unfortunate political circumstances. At an earlier stage, they both attended the same college in Lhasa. While there, Lhagba’s curiosity inadvertently has him walking into a protest rally against the Chinese occupation of the Tibet. Li Bai notices his buddy sauntering into a house fire with his gasoline suit on, and attempts to deter him. They’re both arrested and even shuttled into the same jail cell.
Unfortunately, email is only available by using public computers at teahouses. A paranoid colleague of Adrian’s named YONG BAO, begins to suspect something unsavory is going on. Yong believes Ads is a covert spy for the CIA and begins a bumbling, over-zealous investigation of his PCV associate.
Eventually Ads discovers Yong’s snooping and decides he and Patrick must now hide their actions by donning disguises. The success of this choice leads to the Chinese buddies deciding to push their luck. Bizarre covert escapades include a “Wives Meet-and-Greet”, and Lhagba’s wife spending the summer in Chengdu. When she leaves for home, Yong tries to catch them red-handed, but the train station arrest fails, and his spy credibility disappears like a 100% accurate drone strike target.
At this point the two Chinese couples decide they want to secretly leave their home country so they can live near each other. With the Americans help, they plan an escape into Nepal.
Thus unfolds the “Underground Railroad-Chinese Version”scenario. The couples and Li Bai’s young son travel covertly by train from Chengdu to Lhasa. Their route from there to the top of the Tibetan plateau, hidden in coffin-like containers attached to the underside of a vehicle. The final phase into Nepal, they are secreted behind an invisible wall at the front of a supply truck.
Like an inept, paranoia-obsessed stalker, Yong tails the secret refugees all the way to the border, and tries to put a stop to the secret escape. He almost pulls it off, but a hastily discarded diaper fortuitously decoys the border guard’s tracking dogs, and the escape succeeds.
