Liner Notes for Opals
Liner Notes for Opals Schneemann in Australia was a note I’ve carried around for many years now. A good hook, now all we need is a plot, characters, some period detail, and maybe a joke (sorry). Instead we've got this, one scene, the memory triggered by the framing story. The framing story of course shows Schneemann’s carelessness, his failure to live up to his obligations, how all this can slip the mind. I’m sure none of this will come back to bite him. What I tried for here was to convey an intense feeling of heat. If you’ve never been to a desert then it can be hard to describe it; still I’m trying here. The sun is pleasant in the early morning, hot later, and even before noon it hits like a hammer. You can stay in the shade, yet it’s too powerful, sapping strength from you, sucking out the moisture. And this is me as a tourist, I don’t have to be out in it, at any moment I can return to somewhere cool, get a cold drink, rest, even catch a bus back to an air-conditioned ...
