First draft description of the Pilot Butte Inn,

Woke up at 5:00 in the morning with a two page description of the Pilot Butte Inn running through my head.

I don't know if you can start a book with two pages of description anymore, but the Inn is the main character of my story, Ghostlander, so maybe it will work.

I also probably shouldn't expose my first draft scribblings to the light of day, but I wanted you all to see how it looks when it first comes out.

Does it give you a sense of the building?  Does it create any foreshadowing?




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Ben Jones circled the city block again and again in the cold early morning hours.  The ‘new’ Pilot Butte Inn was nearly finished.  A few more hours of clean up and it would finally be out of his hands.  The huge building that filled the corner was both his crowning achievement -- and the probable end of his career.  Construction floodlights lit up the massive structure.  It felt separate and apart from the rest of the more modest surroundings -- as if a giant chunk of the Old West had suddenly time-traveled onto a prime parcel of real estate anchoring downtown Bend. 

Jones both loved and hated the building.

Privately, he called it ‘The Puzzle Palace.’  To him, the bark of the Ponderosa pine looked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.  When they had sawed the last planks of the giant logs from the early century sawmill (the largest pine sawmill in the world) on the banks of the Deschutes River (just a few hundred yards away) they had left the bark on.  They had proceeded to face the Inn with those raw planks, treated and glued and painted black.

The bark should have been chemically treated on a regular basis, but instead was left neglected for decades.  The bark had begun to peal, eaten by insects, dropping the jigsaw fragments onto the crumbling sidewalks below.  Jones bent down and picked up a five inch wide section of the old bark siding, and idly tore it apart as he contemplated the almost complete reconstruction.

The bark siding gave the huge structure a kind of shaggy look, like it was a giant hibernating beast, curled up in a square mound taking up an entire city block.  Inset a few inches in and below the lumber, the lower third of the Inn was the reconstructed lava rock siding, which originally had bleached under the relentless sunlight and had been a softer, lighter dark shade of black .  The new rock facing was also a ‘puzzle’, fit carefully together to look seamless.

Another reason Jones called it the Puzzle Palace was because it had been the biggest puzzle in the world to put back together.  By the time he’d gotten the job, the building was falling apart, a ghostly hulk, looking impressive and bulky, but in reality a flimsy husk.  He’d naively bid for the contract, thinking all he had to do was gut the place.  Instead, he’d been forced to also completely deconstruct the simple appearing but insanely elaborate exterior of the Inn, too.  There was no way to find Ponderosa logs as big as what covered the Inn -- they simply didn’t exist any more except in a few environmentally protected stands of old growth forest -- so he’d needed to carefully remove them. 

So they’d taken the planks off -- re-treating them and gluing the falling pieces back on.  Like a molting beast, the planks were bare in places and the rotting bark had to be replaced with plaster that was sculptured to look like bark.  Once they’d taken off the siding, he’d realized the mortar holding together the black lava rock beneath was also decayed, and he’d been required to take those off as well.   Then, taking twice as long and costing twice as much as Jones had estimated, he’d fitted the rocks back together -- hiring the few (and expensive!) rock workers who could do an adequate job of connecting the new jigsaw puzzle.

Reassembled, the rocks had been every shade of shadowy black.  He’d resorted to sandblasting the rock to an even color.  Emily Moore, the new owner of the building had been watching every step from the sidelines, unexpectedly knowledgeable about construction and an impatient and demanding taskmaster.

The final ‘puzzle’ of the Puzzle Palace was the financial patchwork of loans and cost overruns and lawsuits -- what remained of his once thriving construction business.  If he was extremely lucky, he might avoid bankruptcy.  He certainly wasn’t going to make any money off the deal.  That bitch Emily Moore hadn’t given an inch, had held him to every fine line in the contract. 

The Puzzle Palace was the both the ruin of Jones Construction -- and the most magnificent thing he’d ever done.   He'd lost three members of his crew to freak accidents -- as if the old building was cursed.

              In the morning his crew would sweep up the sidewalks, wash the last of the windows, and vacuum the rugs in preparation to the Grand Opening Banquet.  He was invited, of course, but he wanted nothing more to do with the Friends of Pilot Butte committee -- especially, the guiding force, the grand dame, that consummate bitch, Emily Moore.

So the fools thought they were going to auction off the ‘First Night’ lodging.  To hell with that, Jones thought.  I deserve to be the first guest.  

 It was 3:00 in A.M. in the morning, and the President’s Suite beckoned.  He’d sleep a few hours and be gone by the time the morning crew showed up.  No one would ever know -- except him.  He'd know for the rest of his now blighted career that he had been the first-ever overnight guest of the new Pilot Butte Inn.  At least he'd walk away from this disaster with that satisfaction."