It all started years ago, in the sleepy little town of Whitewright, Texas...

So I'm back working light industrial at Acor through the Empower temp agency again. Lucky for me I ended up in Finishing again, unluckily back on 2nd. At least I know some of the people still, although they've had a bunch of staffing changes. So yeah, one of the things I love best about working manufacturing is that you get to see how things get made, from soup to nuts. In Finishing we get printed pages from Printing, and run them through various machines to get catalogs, magazines, pamphlets, and, yesterday, a small trifold-and-glued mailing for the Iron Horse Supply Co. This involved unpacking the finished pamphlets, which involved rotating half of each stack so they all faced the same way (they flip half the stack when packing so it stays even, cuz the folded side always goes higher), feeding them into the machine, which printed the address and barcode on, then packing them into post office cartons, generally one box for each city, with exceptions for bigger cities like Austin and Dallas. It was mostly Texas during my shift. Finally you secure the boxes with tape and skid them. A fellow temp introduced me to the chief joy of mailings: watching for weird names, both of people and cities. This, in turn, led to me keeping an eye out for good names, the kind that would be useful in a story. I ended up with three characters who are going to play key roles in a tongue-in-cheek kinda pulp fiction sci-fi, kinda western, kinda contemporary junior fiction: Harrisa Hassenfluke, Buck Peddicord, and Katie Seematter. Harrissa Hassenfluke's personality is going to have shades of Anastasia Krupnik and the smart girl from Recess, she's the smart girl that isn't as pretty as our heroine, the blonde beautiful oceanographer (or maybe just run-of-the-mill scientist) Katie Seematter, who catches the eye of the stereotypical star of the kiddie westerns, the fairly intelligent cowboy Buck Peddicord. There will be a man for Harrissa eventually, he just wasn't in the mailing. (Hogg, Jr. did not sound like the kind of man for her.) Watch for it.