Month: December 2013

Twenty fourteen

2013 was an okay year, if a little ordinary in retrospect. There were assorted highs and lows, and probably more of the former than the latter, but I’m not sure there was anything to really make the year truly stand out.

I think I’d like that to change in 2014. I’m not usually one for sweeping resolutions, but I have a few general ones in mind for the new year.

I’m going to write more. I have a residency scheduled for the Banff Centre in September. I still need to send in some forms and the payment, officially book the time off and buy my plane ticket, but I am going back there in the fall. It’s a great place, encouraging to artists and really conducive to writing, but I don’t want the eight and a half months between now and then to just be me wishing I was writing more. My plan is to get back into writing morning pages every day, and then try to carry that momentum forward in the evening. It worked last year, and this isn’t strictly speaking a new resolution, but the trick will be to keep that momentum going.

I’m going to put more of a personal stamp on Kaleidotrope. (The Winter 2014 issue is available to be read, by the way.) Right now, I’m not entirely sure what that means yet, beyond returning to the fake advice column I wrote for a couple of issues, but I don’t want to spend the year just reading submissions and copyediting the ones I accept.

I’m going to exercise more. I very much want to lose weight. And while that’s a bit of a cliche as far as resolutions go, it’s nevertheless true.

I’m going to find an apartment and move out. This was also something I’d hoped to do last year, but I feel like it’s something I really have to do now. This coming year will mark ten years since I moved back home from Pennsylvania, and I think it’s well past time I found a place of my own. For a couple of reasons, it will likely need to wait until the early spring, but with luck I’ll be writing my 2015 resolutions post next year from my (no doubt over-priced and small) apartment.

I’m going to read more.

And I’m going to do at least one thing that scares me. No idea what that is just yet, but I don’t think I can call 2014 a success unless I figure it out.

Anyway, it’s been a long year, even if it hasn’t always been exceptional, and it’s been a long vacation. I’m still off tomorrow, with the office closed, but I go back to work this Thursday and Friday. (Just in time, apparently, for huge snows.)

Happy New Year, everyone, and thanks for reading the blog!

A year at the movies

I watched 107 movies this year. Fully a quarter of those have been in this past month alone.

I find it difficult to pull together “best of the year” lists. I mean, some of the most fun I had watching movies this year was with films like Equilibrium and Mongolian Death Worm, and I’m not going to claim either of those were good movies.

There were a lot of very good movies on my list, and even a few from this calendar year like Captain Phillips, Gravity, Before Midnight, Upstream Color, and The World’s End. (I’d include Frances Ha, but I think technically that first came out at the end of 2012.)

Most recently, the best movie I’ve seen has definitely been Beckett, with terrific performances from both Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. The worst, on the other hand, was easily Jonah Hex.

I saw a few really great movies this year, a few really terrible ones, a few really terrible ones that were made great by live-tweeting them with friends, and the rest kind of a normal mix.

Favorite books of 2013

I read too few books this year, down considerably — laughably, even — from last year. I’d be tempted to blame the longer novels on my list for eating into my time, and they did, but I also saw my attempts to zip through a pile of very short books from the library backfire. (Seriously, a couple of those two-hundred-pages-or-fewer books seemed to take me forever.) There was also some re-reading, listening to audio books of the first four Dark Tower novels, and submissions to Kaleidotrope that also ate into the final count, but whatever the cause I reader fewer books than I wanted to this year.

With a good fair-sized helping of comics and graphic novels, I managed to get the count up to fifty. Of those, these were probably my favorites:

Winter vacation, day 15

It dawned on me this morning just how close I am to the end of my vacation — only two days left — when I realized I had to buy my monthly train ticket. It also occurred to me how long I’ve been on vacation — more than two weeks now — when I finally opened up my work laptop and realized I’d completely forgotten my log-in password.

(It’s okay, it was on a small post-it note in my wallet. Though maybe we don’t tell my IT department that that’s where I was keeping it?)

I’d changed my password a day or two before leaving the office, since it was about to expire, and I really did think I’d have some call to use the new one while I was out. But except for a couple of e-mails answered way back at the start of my vacation — a couple that hopefully kept a book from slipping in the production schedule to February — I haven’t really done any work. I’ve been checking in occasionally, as I’d already updated the e-mail password on my iPhone, but nothing that really justified my going back to the office after the holiday party to pick up my computer.

In my defense, I was a little drunk then.

Of course, in retrospect, there’s not a lot of work I could have been doing, which I confirmed when I actually logged in and compared chapter reviews that were due against chapter reviews that have actually come in. I knew this was going to be a difficult time of year for instructors to take deadlines seriously, but in the past two weeks I received very few of the responses I need to get anything done. I could start collating what little feedback I have, before I go back to the office, but that’s not going to save me a lot of time in the long run. And saving myself time in the long run — preparing for a January that’s going to be front-loaded with so much to do — was the only reason I took the laptop home with me.

I can think of better ways of spending the next couple of days, like maybe reading a book.

I spent a good part of today mostly working on Kaleidotrope, whose new issue will be ready for launch tomorrow or Wednesday, if all goes according to plan. I want to do more with Kaleidotrope in the coming year, really make it work the considerable out-of-pocket investment of time and money.

I’m okay with the time, even if I’m a little scared about re-opening to submissions in two days. But it’s the money part that’s a tougher sell sometimes. I pay a cent a word, way below what’s considered a professional rate but still pretty steep for a project that takes in no money — beyond a couple of very generous and welcome donations — and it’s a cost I want to justify by making the zine more than just a collection of other people’s work. I did that a little last year, and I want to look for new ways to do it this.

Because right now, I’ve already filled the next two and half years’ worth of issues with last year’s submissions. It would be too easy for the fun of producing the zine to disappear on me.

This evening, after writing fake horoscopes — that’s something I do for the zine, something I started when I was editing the weekly newsletter for the Penn State Monty Python Society (and something I almost certainly stole from The Onion — I watched You’re Next. It’s an okay movie, mostly because it mixes up a couple of horror genres and isn’t just your standard home invasion scary movie. It gets off to a slow start — which is probably necessary, in retrospect, even if it could have used some better acting there — and ends poorly, but it takes a couple of interesting turns along the way. (Not surprising turns, necessarily, but ones that keep it, at least, from being something more than similar movies I’ve seen.)

And that was Monday. It was Monday, right?

Black Sunday (aka Winter vacation, day 14)

This afternoon, I drove to Farmingdale for my weekly writing group. The weather was pretty bad, raining hard, and the visibility on the road was pretty low, but I wasn’t too worried about it until the empty gas tank light came on in my car.

I was already about halfway there, so I decided to risk it, knowing there was a gas station less than a block from the parkway exit. And I got to that station without any problem. I pulled my car up to one of the self-service pumps, got out and opened the tank, reached for my wallet…and realized I didn’t have my wallet with me.

Luckily I did have my cell phone. I called my friend (and fellow writing grouper) Maurice and asked if he could drive back a few blocks and do me a really big favor. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have enough gas to drive all the way back home, so Maurice came and lent me some cash so I could fill up the tank. It’s nice that I can laugh about it now, but nicer still that Maurice was willing to do that — and that I didn’t get pulled over or get in an accident without my driver’s license on the way there or back.

After all that, what I actually wrote at the free-writing group seems almost incidental, but here it is:

“So you want to be a genius,” Teddy says. “Okay. We can pump you full of adaptogens, a whole catalog of herbs, some we’ve only just discovered, and we can let the brain take over. We can let your body learn to heal itself, forgive the physical and mental abuses you’ve heaped on it over the years, and go the whole holistic route. You’ll think clearer, at least, I guarantee it.

“Or,” he says, holding up a syringe, “we can give you this.” The liquid inside is a thick, jaundiced yellow, and Teddy taps a finger against the plastic cap at the needle’s tip. “It’ll make sick as a dog, maybe kill you. It’s killed lots. But it’ll also rewrite your DNA, and if you survive the process, one of the perks is increased brain power. I won’t kid you, most of the people who take this don’t survive, but every one who does is card-carrying member of Mensa.”

“So,” he says, “which is it going to be: forgiveness or illness?”

Marcus hasn’t really thought this through. Teddy’s reputable enough, comes highly recommended; Marcus doesn’t doubt the man’s discovered new herbs or that the stuff in the syringe can do what Teddy claims. The people Marcus had to go through just to get this appointment are all the proof he needs that this is legit. But the man’s still a salesman, so while Marcus thinks he’s already made his decision, he feels like he should probably ask at least a couple more questions.

“When you say ’rewrite my DNA,’” Marcus says, “do you mean like evil genius lizard people?”

“Ah,” Teddy says, “you heard about that. That was this, I won’t lie, but the formula’s been refined since then, and Dr. Andersen — “

He sees the confused look on Marcus’ face.

“Professor Cobra?” he says. “Of the Evil Snakes Gang?”

“Oh, right,” Marcus says.

“Well, anyway, he wasn’t monitoring his intake. Took way too much, shared his needles. That’s a big no-no. If I had it to do over again, I’d steer him onto to the herbal route. Might still, if the those Redemption Society super-hacks ever let me near him.”

“Uh huh,” Marcus says, “so you’re saying that isn’t going to happen now?”

“Well…” Teddy says, “again, I’m not going to lie to you. Everybody’s different, but there’s always a risk when you throw alien pathogens into the soup.”

“Alien path — “ Marcus starts to say.

“Yeah. Ancient Martian stuff. Rumor has it, it’s what killed them off. In its purer form,” he adds, seeing the worried look on Marcus’ face. “This is a lot more dilute, and Martians weren’t the heartiest of stock to begin with.”

“No…” Marcus says. He’s seen the footage like everybody else, that army unit from Mars the Redemption Society accidentally unfroze at the North Pole. They turned out to be pretty easily defeated, but Marcus still remembers how tense those weeks were back as a child. “And this is from Mars?”

“Born and bred,” Teddy says, “then cultivated here on Earth, nurtured. It’s a living thing, and like I said, it might kill you, but if it doesn’t it’ll definitely make you smarter.”

This evening, I made a double-feature of Black Sundays — first the 1960 horror movie, which is a lot of bad dubbing but great atmosphere, and then the 1977 action thriller about the terrorist plot to commandeer the Goodyear blimp at the Super Bowl. It’s entertaining, even if there aren’t many real characters in it. (Robert Shaw and Bruce Dern do their best, and their best is pretty good.) They made for an odd double-feature, but for some reason I had my heart set on it when I noticed they were both available on Netflix streaming.

Yeah, I don’t get me either sometimes.