Taxi Adventure
The ride is the destination.
Hold On To Your Seats
You’ve taken taxi rides before—you know the drill. You get in, the seat springs are worn flat, the car sags to one side, the driver doesn’t look like his picture and he doesn’t seem to know his way around the city, and eventually you get where you’re going and he doesn’t have change. This time, instead of the ordinary, do something memorable. Let Taxi Adventure spin you around the city in style.
Taxi Adventure was my project for the 2007 Three-Day Novel Contest. I had a great time in the contest, and the story became a lot of fun, but, alas, my effort came up short. In the coming months, I’ll be finishing the manuscript and working to get it into print. Until then, read my recaps of the Three-Day Contest here, and watch for further developments.
- Day One Report
- Day Two Report
- Day Three Report
- After-Action Review
- Favorite Music from the event: Magnatune Mysterious or Strange Mood
Status
I’m hoping to continue the momentum of the Three-Day Novel Contest and to finish the discovery draft of Taxi Adventure before the end of this year. Watch the progress meter in the sidebar, and watch this space for character profiles, previews, and, hopefully sometime in 2008, publication information.
News
Pre-Contest Goals
- Develop characters, along with the roles of the staff in the taxi company.
- Outline plot, act by act, hour by hour, scene by scene.
- Describe taxis, each of which will have its own personality.
- Describe locales.
- Write warm-up preludes.
- Re-read past winners of the Three-Day Novel contest.
- Read other great short novels.
Characters
- Race Rivera
- His real name is Horatio, but his friends have been calling him Race all his life. Race is 25. He takes care of his mother and lives with his kid sister.
- Tiara Banks
- The 20-year-old daughter of the owner of Taxi Adventure, Tiara loves to drive, but she isn’t very good at it. Her father will not let her drive, and in fact he would rather have her in school. She works as a dispatcher part time and does the books for her father the rest of the time. She has begun seeing Race secretly, because she and he are certain that her father will not like it.
- Lucius Banks
- Owner of Taxi Adventure. He drove a taxi for many years, working double shifts and saving his money with the goal of starting his own company, a taxi company with personality and attitude, where a simple taxi ride becomes something bigger: taxi tourism. That company is Taxi Adventure. Lucius still drives a cab, a black hearse converted to a limousine. He loves to drop names, and one of his favorites is Alice Cooper, who (he says) likes to ride in his hearse-cab when he needs a ride in town.
- Eugene Roberts
- A white guy with corn rolls, Eugene is a schemer who wants to schmooze the owner and would love to get in with the owner’s daughter. Why build a company when you can marry into one? Eugene drives the tricked-out taxi that is not a pimp-mobile.
- Clayton Wise
- Kind of a nasty, two-faced, pasty, pudgy, southern guy. Nobody but Lucius thinks he deserves the chance Lucius is giving him, and Lucius wouldn’t if he knew the truth. Clayton drives the red Monte Carlo with the fake 8 on it.
- Coralee Harper
- Coralee is an old lady with a fondness for naked yoga in the red rocks of Sedona, Lucius didn’t want to hire her, but when she threatened to sue him for age and sex discrimination, he gave her a job. Watch for the new age mystical taxi driving with its blinker going on and on until it turns the other way. That’s her.
