writing

Saturday and Sunday

Yesterday was warm enough to sit out in the yard for a little while, reading Kaleidotrope submissions. So that’s what I did. I sometimes worry than I’m being a little too choosy, after I’ve rejected a dozen or so stories in a row, and then one comes along that I don’t want to reject and I think, “Nope. Just choosy enough.”

After dinner, I watched American Hustle, which I wish I could say I enjoyed more than I did. At this year’s Golden Globe Awards, Tina Fey joked that the movie’s original name was “Explosion at the Wig Factory,” which really isn’t far from the truth. There’s some good acting in the movie, but a lot more over-acting, and a lot of over-the-top hair and costume design, all in service of a fun but kind of thin story — a very loosely adapted version of the Abscam investigation. It’s not hard to see why the film was nominated for ten Oscars last year. But it’s also not hard to see why it didn’t win a single one.

After that, I watched Area 407, which I can’t even pretend was any good. It’s exceptionally terrible, even by the low standards of found-footage monster movies, apparently ad libbed over the course of five days, and man does that show! It so very, very bad…and for that reason, it was absolutely wonderful.

I watched it with friends over Twitter, which is something we do semi-regularly — Heather has a rundown of some of the comments we made — and it was kind of magical. Heaven knows I’ve seen my fair share of terrible movies, but every now and then one comes along that’s terrible in all the right ways. This was definitely one of those, and I had a blast live-tweeting it with everyone else.

This afternoon, I went to see Captain America: Winter Soldier with some in-person friends. I enjoyed the movie, which is fun and has some nice little moments from its leads interspersed with all the acting — I don’t Steve’s ever going to get to ask out Kristen from Statistics — but there’s not a whole lot to say about it, really. I mean it’s no Area 407.

Anyway, before the movie we had our weekly writing group, and this is what I did:

“You gotta write it down,” Trevor Kettleson said. “His speech recognition software isn’t working at the moment.”

“This is the robot?” Dean asked. “Your investigator?”

“He doesn’t like that word,” Kettleson said. “Either one. It would be more accurate to call him a…’cyborg consultant.’”

“From outer space?”

Kettleson sighed, sat forward in his chair. “While technically accurate, detective, pre-judgmental language like that will only make it more difficult for Roger — “

“The robot. Roger the robot.”

“ — our consulting cyborg to adequately assist you on this case. It’s true that Roger’s cybernetic components were outfitted on a space station orbiting an abandoned planetoid, but the fact that this all happens three hundred years in the future — “

“I’m not here to prosecute your cyborg, Mr. Kettleson,” Dean said, all smiles, “just trying to get a lay of the land. Everyone who came through the time vortex was granted immunity, that’s the law. How I feel about it doesn’t matter.”

“It might matter to Roger,” Kettleson said.

“I’ll try not to step on anyone’s toes,” Dean said. “Especially if they’re made out of titanium.”

“Our firm has the utmost respect for Roger’s investigative skills. I urge you to turn to him as an asset.”

“He just doesn’t talk.”

“Oh, he talks. He just can’t process speech presently. We’re doing everything in our power to remedy that, but…well, we are talking about technology three centuries more advanced than our own.”

“And was Paige Caldwell working on this remedy?”

“Was — ?”

“Dr. Caldwell. The victim. Was she spending a lot of time working directly with Roger?”

“Well…I — it was one of her projects, yes. It’s been a team effort. Certainly you don’t think that’s what got her killed, or that Roger — ?”

“You said yourself she didn’t have any enemies.”

“That I knew of, yes. But, detective, that’s a very wide leap to naming Roger as a suspect.”

“I’m just thinking out loud, Mr. Kettleson” Dean said. He stood up and moved towards the door. “If I start making allegations, believe me, I’ll put them in writing. I wouldn’t want Roger to miss them.”

Three hours later, with the cyborg’s pneumatic-powered hands at his throat, Dean Hendricks thought he might have made a mistake.

“Make it look good,” he croaked. “We need her to think you’re really trying to kill me.”

Silently he cursed himself, remembering Roger’s speech recognition problem. He just hoped the cyborg remembered the plan. Those steel-tipped fingers were pretty tight around his windpipe. But they weren’t going to flush Caldwell out of hiding if they didn’t put on a good show.

And that, pretty much, was my weekend.

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome

Third time really is the charm.

After unexpected snowfall in January, then unexpected illness last week, I finally went to see a Broadway musical last night.

I actually don’t go to the theater all that often, despite this being the third attempt in almost as many months — and the second in less than a week — but my parents had for whatever reason purchased tickets to see Cabaret, starring Alan Cumming and Michelle Williams. So they trekked into the city and I met them a couple of blocks from my office for dinner.

My father still isn’t always feeling well, so he unfortunately opted to head home before the show, walking over with us to the theater but then taking the subway and train back. It’s a shame, too, since he was feeling better not long after — I called him at intermission — and the show was really very good.

I had only a passing familiarity with the show, and then only with Joel Grey’s lead performance in the original. Cumming’s quite different in the role, less elfin and more dirty, and the musical definitely has a very risque edge. But Cumming and Williams were both terrific, as was all of the supporting cast, and I had a great time.

The rest of the week — is it really Thursday already? How? — has passed by very busily at work. I do a little bit of writing every day, even if yesterday proved the exception, and I watch a large amount of The Good Wife on streaming video. (Cumming’s in that, too, as it happens, but playing a very different character.) A night out at the theater notwithstanding, I lead a rather boring life.

Sunday

A quiet day. Not that yesterday wasn’t, really, but at least today was relatively free of health problems.

I had my weekly writing group and wrote this:

The city below them lay in ruins, or at least it did from the vantage of command, where the smoldering rubble flickered in the static of the ship’s main viewscreens.

“You can’t put much stock in that,” said Tendall. “Those images are from at least twenty-four hours into the future.”

Bergen grunted, it seemed in assent, but then just ask quickly she asked, “And how many hours until we make actual landfall?”

Sighing heavily, Tendall said, “Thirty-seven. Even if we push the engines to the breaking point, we won’t be back in same-time for another day and a half.”

“So we’ll miss being concurrent with the disaster?” Bergen asked.

“That’s assuming it happens, ma’am,” Tendall said. “But yes. I’m afraid if these images are the future, we won’t exit the probability stream in time to prevent this disaster from happening. Or even to ascertain its cause, most likely.”

“Can’t we turn around, then?” Bergen asked. “Or exit the stream earlier?”

“You’ve never flown in a timeship before, have you, ma’am?”

“No,” she told him. “We don’t have much call to in the Ambassadorial core. This trip was…unexpected.”

“Well, we’re fighting more than the usual tug and drift of spaceflight,” Tendall said. “We’d just as likely tear the ship apart if we tried adjusting course once we’ve entered the stream.”

“Can’t we even send a message ahead?” Bergen asked. “If we know in twenty-four hours the capitol city is going to be destroyed, we have an obligation to send them a warning.”

“You’re free to talk with engineering about that, ma’am. I don’t see how it would work, but that kind of physics is a little above my pay grade.”

“You seem remarkably calm. Don’t you have family in the capitol?”

“I’ve had family in most of the cities I’ve seen destroyed in the future, ma’am. After a few relative-centuries, I’m afraid it’s an occupational hazard. If I let not being able to do anything about it bother me, I couldn’t pilot the ship.” He offered her a smile which he knew she would not return. “I suppose that’s why time-flight isn’t recommended for you folks in the core.”

I dunno. The prompt was “When we lose our innocence, how do we regain it?” Yeah, I dunno.

Sunday

A quiet, rainy weekend.

I spent a lot of it pulling together the next issue of Kaleidotrope, which should be more or less ready to launch later tomorrow. I’m really happy with the stories and poems in this issue, although I do hope in the Summer issue I can make a return to the fake horoscopes and advice columns that let me put a little more of my own personal spin on the zine. I mean, why else am I continuing to do it otherwise?

Oh, and I haven’t mentioned this here, but one of the poems from last Summer’s issue — “Leaving Papa” by Darrell Lindsey — was recently nominated for a Rhysling Award. That made me happy.

I spent the rest of the weekend out at dinner, it seems. Last night, I attended a surprise party for my aunt’s seventieth-something birthday, and tonight I went out for dinner with my parents to celebrate my own birthday earlier in the week.

Somewhere in there, I managed to watch several episodes of The Good Wife, and the latest Hannibal, and write this:

They come out when the sun goes down.

They don’t talk, or not often, even among themselves, for to talk would be to reveal that they don’t belong there, their accents thick like oil splashed across the water of their words. They are not worried that their meaning will be lost, but that who they are and where they’re from will be found out. The others, these so-called natives, are a superstitious lot and quick to violence, and they have seen, from weeks now of quiet study, what happens to those who are not as careful when threatened with such violence. Mannerisms and mistakes can give a man away — they have seen at least one man hanged for no more than a single gesture — and their mission is too important to jeopardize in such a careless way. They dress according to the local style, the finery and golden beads strung around their necks a sort of camouflage that would be unthinkable back home, perhaps even a kind of sacrilege. They are often glad that no priests were selected to join them on this mission; the test to their own shared faith has been difficult enough. But they also know that they must not reveal themselves, must look no different than the natives themselves. These beads are the custom, and they really are no more than baubles — hardly the sort of thing to truly anger the gods — and so they wear them in this place.

When they first arrived, they were shocked by the sight of the moon in the evening sky, a harvest moon larger than any they had ever seen before. Back home each of them had seen slivers of the moon in the sky, and they are not as ignorant of basic astronomy as some might think, but they have only seen it against a backdrop of blue sky and cloud. To be outside after dark, for hours after the moon has stolen that sky from the brighter sun, that too would have unthinkable. And yet it is a sin that each of them knows is required. If they are damned for it, then they are damned. The natives — or rather those who have taken this valley and now call themselves natives — these people do not come out except after dark. It is their way, the peculiar nature of what these people are, have allowed themselves to become in turning away from the old gods. And they, the dayrunners, have learned that they must mimic this to stay alive.

I’m thirty-seven! I’m not old!

We didn’t get the snow that was forecast last night, unless you count a weird, light dusting I noticed around the car windows this morning, but the weather has definitely put the lie to the idea that we’ve finally entered spring. I suspect I’ll finally be able to stop wearing my winter coat by late April, but late March seems to be pretty much off the table.

It’s been an interesting week, albeit not always interesting in ways that I’d like. One of the editors I work with told me the other day that he’d had an anxiety dream about this one book, and I’m close to having a few myself. There’s some small comfort in knowing the big issues that are keeping a couple of projects from moving forward aren’t of my making, but…well, not a whole lot. Still, I think we’re further along today than we were yesterday, so there’s that at least.

Meanwhile, I had one of them birthday-type things again. It seems like I had the last one only a year ago. It’s been mostly uneventful, although I received some very nice gifts — almost exclusively books — and well-wishes, and it was a good day.

I even did some writing, which I’ve managed to do most every day for the past week and a half. And while it’s still very scatter-shot and meandering — very first-draft-y — some good ideas and forward momentum may have snuck in while I wasn’t paying attention. (They’re not wrong when they say a big part of writing is just showing up.) Today’s few pages didn’t bring any great eureka moments, and showing up isn’t always fun, but I never regret writing, only when I don’t.

Anyway, it’s been an odd sort of week, but not a bad one, even kind of good in its way.