Sunday

So let’s see. I finally did my taxes yesterday, which is good, because it’s apparently already April.

You wouldn’t necessarily know that from the weather we’ve been having lately, though it did warm up slightly yesterday.

Which may explain why the landscapers showed up and spent an ungodly amount of time running mowers and leaf-blowers directly below my window. Practically all afternoon. (They also mowed a lawn not really in need of it and killed a bunch of flowers along with the nascent weeds.)

I didn’t do much else yesterday, now that I look back on it. I went for a walk, read a little for Kaleidotrope. There’s a review of the current issue at the Locus website, by the way, if you were worried this zine wasn’t actually a thing. Lois Tilton says, “the prevailing tone is dark, the situations compelling, moving” and calls the last two stories “a diptych of suffering.” But, you know, in a good way. There are also silly horoscopes and a fake advice column I had genuinely pleasure writing. (One of my goals going forward with the zine is to put more of a personal stamp on it.)

Then I ended the day by watching the latest Doctor Who, which was sweet and beautiful and rather disappointing, and the first episode of Hannibal, which surprised me by being really very good.

And today, I wrote this with my writing group:

The golden woman did not look happy.

“Listen,” I told her. “I shouldn’t be here, I get that. I got lost in the alleyway and couldn’t find my way back home. I was looking for a doorway when your goons dragged me back here. If I could just have my books and my pack, I’d be on my way and –”

She said nothing, but I could see the shadows shift in the corner of the room when I mentioned the goons. For all their strength and speed, they were not subtle. I didn’t know what she was, exactly, only that they’d called her their queen, but it worried me, this patience, this deceptive calm. Brute force I understood; my bloodied lip and bruised pride both would heal. But her, the golden queen, her I could not read.

At least for the moment she had closed her terrible, terrible eyes.

“It was a mistake,” I said. “A…what do you call it? A miscast? A spell gone wrong.” I worried I might be tipping my hand too much here, but I had to tell her something. I’d seen worlds where spellcasters weren’t welcome — or worse, were hunted, rounded up, even killed. I’d heard stories, some of them even credible, about death squads that wandered between the worlds, about extermination camps. I was barely a mage myself — if I was, I’d have found that damn door — but I knew there were dangers in the Great Tree’s branches for the inexperienced magician traveling out on his own.

Not that I believed all that Great Tree multiverse mumbo-jumbo. I wasn’t exactly what you’d call a religious man. There were other explanations for where I was, after all, for the shadow-things that had grabbed me off the street, for the golden queen and the terrible things I had glimpsed for just a moment hidden in her eyes. This was easily just another planet, one even in the Protectorate of Worlds, and if that was the case…well, a little diplomacy was all I’d need.

“I don’t know how you feel about mages,” I said, because the queen so far had said nothing. “But I don’t much like them.” This was not completely a lie. The Council had never been much help to me; membership had bought me nothing but citizenship in the Protectorate. And I’d bought the spells that had landed me here in the first place from another magician. He’d never done a damn thing to help me, even if he was my brother.

I think it got a little away from me near the end, when science fiction started to bleed into the fantasy, but I feel like there is a story here of some sort.

I need to spend more time writing, I really do. I didn’t do my morning pages at all last week, and I’ve let work on short stories slip. Part of that’s because I’ve got a couple hundred stories by other people to read for Kaleidotrope. I was so glad on April 1 when I could both announce the new issue and say I was closed to new submissions for the year. I don’t have to read all of those stories front to back — that might upset some people who submit, but it’s true; I give up on stories if they’re not working for me; a reader would too. But it’s still time-consuming.

But that’s still no excuse.