Talking “Roscoe Belesprit’s 9 ½ Rules of Writing”

Welcome to the intro video and an excerpt from the third post of my weekly serial, “Sketches from the Café Confictura.” If you’d like to share a comment, please use the comment option at the end of this excerpt. To follow the mystery of Applewood, and get recipes from Mrs. Creaverton, writing advice from Roscoe Belesprit, and fashion tips from the Fastionista, please visit www.ClarissaJeanne.com for new posts every Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. EST.

It’s been three days and none of us still has any idea just what Nessie might be up to going into Pastor Sweeney’s church like she did. I mean, she went in on a Sunday morning, so there’s always the possibility she was just taking in a service. She spends almost as much time telling people how Christian she is as she spends snapping selfies at the soup kitchen, selfies at the children’s hospital, selfies at the Book Mobile…So one would imagine the woman might sometimes, you know, go to church. But Father Jack’s service over at St. Francis is where she’s been going ever since Sweeney was brought up on charges. And that glare she shot at Confictura seemed to virtually scream that she was seeing Pastor Sweeney for some reason connected to the café, or the people in it.

Not knowing what’s going on has us all a little on edge, and so tonight’s meeting of Roscoe’s writing salon was probably not the best time for all of his students to up the stakes of what I guess can be called their protest. They’d been pestering Roscoe about something for a couple of weeks--until tonight, I didn’t know what for--but they wanted something and he said no, and all of it came to a head tonight.

At 7:30, when the salon meets, their big, round table was still empty save Roscoe. He wondered if that had anything to do with Nessie and the article in the Applewood Timber last week that sabotaged Mrs. Creaverton’s dance, which had been set to start last Saturday night at 7:30. I said that it was probably a coincidence. That, or maybe people were just rediscovering their love of the Jeopardy!/Wheel of Fortune hour. Then Clarke walked in, a small white paper clutched in his hand.

Clarke, presumably his last name, is all he goes by because he feels that a writer who goes by only one name carries an air of mystery. He’s twenty-two and wears a short Afro. He has these flashes of genius in the otherwise nebulous thoughts he’s been conveying, both on the page and in person, since the 11/5 quake. I didn’t know him before then, but he was a valedictorian. People say he could quote Langston Hughes, Pearl S. Buck, and Salman Rushdie. His plan was to take five years off after high school to save as much as he could for tuition, since substantial scholarships are about as real as the emperor’s new clothes these days. Now, unless this affliction brought on by 11/5 is cured somehow, it’s hard to see Clarke realizing the education, the future, he was destined for.

Tonight, he was wearing his usual three-piece suit, with one of my favorite ties, this Art Deco design. He also wore a blue ski mask. This is not a usual addition to the ensemble.

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