writing

Sunday

A quiet day. I wrote this in my free-writing group:

When he put the beast in gear, it purred like a kitten, roared into life, then just as quickly sputtered, coughed a cloud of black smoke, and died.

“I think it’s busted,” Frank said.

Bill grunted, twisting the key in the ignition. “Might’ve flooded it,” he said.

“Might have done,” Frank said. “You check the tank?”

“When the hell was I s’pposed to do that?” asked Bill. “Barely had time to roll the damn thing off the street. ’sides, you see a gas tank?”

“So you didn’t drive it?” said Frank.

“What?” said Bill. “Nah. Took the boys an hour just to crack the door open, dupe this key. No, we used the truck.”

“So you don’t know if it drives at all.”

“What? ’course it drives. That dumb bastard drives the thing all over town, doesn’t he? When he’s not using that, whadyacallit, Bat-plane or something.”

“And you’re sure it’s his?”

“Of course I’m sure. Him and the Commissioner were standing right next to it not ten minutes before we rolled up.”

“How’d you know it was the Commissioner?”

“What? Dude’s got that big mustache, got shot at during the last city parade. What d’ya mean how’d I know it was him? Next you’re gonna be asking how I knew it was the Bats.”

“He was wearing the costume.”

“Dude’s always wearin’ the costume. That’s how we knew it was his car.” Bill tried the key again. “Though it’s not like there are lots of other cars look like this.”

“You check for booby traps?” asked Frank.

“I’m gonna pretend you didn’t ask that,” Bill said. “Like this is some kind of amateur hour.”

“I’m just saying. The last guy who tried lifting these wheels, that Cobblepot guy? That guy’s got billions, big operation, and the explosion still took out half a city block.”

“Dude calls himself the Penguin,” said Bill. “Like I said, amateur hour.”

“So fine, you checked for booby traps. You’re the one said you couldn’t find the gas tank.”

“Look,” Bill said, “this beast is streamlined, custom-made. They don’t roll Batmobiles off the assembly line. They don’t include any user’s manual.”

“You check the glove compartment?” Frank asked.

Bill just stared at him, mystified.

“You did check the glove compartment, didn’t you?” Frank asked. He reached in front of him and opened it up. The user’s manual was right there. “Yeah, you’re real professionals.”

“Hey, it’s an honest mistake,” said Bill. “It’s just — um, hey, what’s it say about flashing red lights? On the dashboard? If there are flashing red lights on the dashboard, kind of a — I dunno, a countdown or something?”

Frank sighed. He undid his seatbelt and opened the car door. “I think it means we’re gonna lose this city block, too,” he said.

“Goddamn booby traps,” said Bill. “I knew we shouldn’t have out-sourced that key duping to the Joker.”

It’s admittedly silly, but I had fun writing it.

That was Sunday.

Saturday

I got word yesterday of some fraud on my debit card — no, I wasn’t at a Charleston service station, thank you very much — so I had to go into my bank this morning to pick up a replacement.

The rest of the day was even less exciting than that. I re-watched Clue for some reason — it’s on Netflix, so, y’know, there — and the latest episode of Hannibal. I read some Kaleidotrope submissions, and I finished reading What Is the What by Dave Eggers, a novel based on the life of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng.

I liked the book, particularly Deng’s voice that comes through as a character, and the way the story is structured, but I’m not sure it’s brilliant or illuminating of the human condition. If it weren’t a true story, for instance, I don’t think I’d have liked it half as much. But still, it wasn’t bad.

I am glad to be finished, though: I’ve actually been reading the book since late February, and it will be nice to move on to something else. According to my Goodreads challenge, I’ve only read 12 of 1 book for the year.

This evening, I watched Akira, which was…strange. On the one hand, it’s a very straightforward post-apocalyptic psychic powers kind of story. But it’s also…strange. I’m tempted to look into the original manga, which apparently goes into a lot more detail.

Anyway, that was pretty much my Saturday. I didn’t do any writing today, though I have been writing every other day this week. It’s not been great — I’ve filled several pages in my notebook but wouldn’t necessarily want a lot of it in the final story — but it’s keeping the story alive for me and moving me in the direction I need to go with it. So there’s that.

Tuesday

March seems to be going by a lot quicker than I anticipated.

On the one hand that’s good. Now that we’re over the initial hurdle of Daylight Saving Time, and I’m a little more adjusted to it, I am enjoying that extra daylight in the evening. The morning sunrise hasn’t quite caught up yet, so it’s still dark when I wake up, and the weather can’t decide if it wants to be seasonably mild or bitterly cold. But we do seem a lot closer to spring than we ever did in February, when I sometimes felt like the world was never going to thaw. And I’m perfectly happy to put a little distance between then and now.

But on the other hand…how can the month be more than half over already? How is that even possible? It does not seem like it should be possible.

It doesn’t help that I have several big projects at work that probably need to be finished before the end of March…and that might not be. Most of the delays I’m seeing, or anticipating, aren’t of my own making, which is something close to (but not exactly) a relief. Still, it’s a busy time of year, and suddenly realizing that April is only two short weeks away isn’t exactly helping.

But it’s not all bad. (Even the bad parts aren’t all that bad.) I’m writing some, which is nice. My weekly free-writing group took this past Sunday off, but I’ve wandered back into a short story of my own and spent some time yesterday and today at launch trying to navigate those wanderings in my notebook. It’s been a while since I’ve written free-hand (except at work), and I’ve given myself permission to be terrible, which is not permission I give myself easily. A fair amount of what I’ve written is crap, there’s no doubt, but it’s crap pointing in the right direction. If nothing else, it feels better than not writing, which is always something to aim for.

The weekend

Yesterday, I got a haircut and finished reading the last of January’s submissions for Kaleidotrope. That maybe doesn’t sound like a full day — and heaven knows submissions have kept coming in all through February and into March — but if you think my Saturday was in any way wasted, I have just two very simple words for you:

Arctic Blast.

I watched this cinematic — or is tele-visual? Wikipedia suggests the movie premiered on screen, but I think it aired primarily on the Syfy Channel — classic over Twitter with friends. On any objective level, it’s a terrible movie, with bad effects and some questionable acting. Michael Shanks gives it his all, or at least whatever percentage of his all he decided the movie was worth, but it’s ridiculous disaster movie. Heather’s already posted a good rundown of the night’s film, including several of the funnier comments. (Keep in mind, of course, that this is a woman who calls Sharknado “a metaphor for modern life, in which chainsaws solve all our problems.”)

I’ve been watching my fair share of bad movies lately, but watching them with friends — even when those friends are separated by several time zones — is a whole lot better.

Today, I wrote a little with my weekly group:

“Do not call me Master,” the doppleganger said. “Call me…Phil.”

He didn’t look like a Phil, but Alison knew it wouldn’t do her any good to tell him that, not with that weird crooked staff, still crackling with energy, held over his head. It had taken only a single blast of that energy to get rid of Nate — which was no big loss, as far as Alison was concerned, but she also wasn’t in any hurry to join him in an atomized spray of used-to-be-people particles. She’d called this weirdo Master out of some instinct — it was what the long crimson robe and dangerous magic seemed to demand — but if Phil was what he wanted, then Phil was what he’d get. She wasn’t going to risk making him angry like Nate had, at least not until she managed to wrestle that magic stick away from him.

It was funny, though, Alison thought. He didn’t look a Phil so much as he looked like…well, Nate. She hadn’t really noticed that before, but the resemblance was a little uncanny. Was that why her now very ex-boyfriend had called the man the doppleganger before they’d awoken him? Then he’d just looked like some old dude propped up on a big rock inside a cave — “entombed upon the altar of Circe’s midnight slumber,” Nate had said, which she was sure was something he was remembering wrong from out of some book. The man had looked kind of peaceful, actually, serene, and she hadn’t seen Nate look like that even once in all the time they had been dating.

True, they’d been hunting magic and legends since their second date — or was the Bigfoot trap officially their third? It had seemed fun at the time. Nate had seemed fun at the time. But that was long before they’d stumbled across this Merlin-wannabe who’d zapped Nate into a cloud of nothingness and then taken his face. Alison had been planning to break the relationship off after this excursion, just waiting for the right moment between the caves and the flight back home to the States. Should she tell him before they cleared customs, or after? Now Nate was gone and she’d escaped having to go through all that, thank god, but she hadn’t escaped this deadly wizard who could zap her too if he wanted, and even worse who looked like her ex.

You know, sometimes I just go wherever the prompt leads me.

Sunday

I wrote this today:

Time travel can be like this: it fractures cause and effect, confuses the linear patterns that seem to govern our lives, and makes a patchwork of our memories, ripped and torn at unexpected seams. You remember things that never happened; you get a life you never lived. Take Abraham, for instance.

“I’m going to write a story about a time machine,” Abraham says. “It’s a mechanical device for traveling to the past that will become its own blueprint when future generations read it.”

“You’ll have to get it published first,” Laura says. She likes Abraham but doesn’t know when or where this talk of writing and time machines started. He still hasn’t even graduated high school. “Hand me that mop,” she says. “Somebody broke a jar of pickles in aisle six.”

“That isn’t a problem,” Abraham says, meaning the story of the time machine, of course. Laura has to reach past him to grab the mop. “I just have to write the right story and the time machine will exist. It will always have existed. And they’ll send it back to meet me.”

Laura likes Abraham. When he first started working here at the start of summer, she thought he was kind of cute. But he has some pretty weird notions, and this time travel business is just the latest.

“Is that important to you?” she asks. She heads back out to the front of the store, toting the bucket and mop, and Abraham follows. “A visit from the future?”

“I want to know how the story ends,” he tells her.

“Black holes are basically time machines,” she says. It’s something she read, maybe for class, maybe not, she doesn’t remember. She knows she probably shouldn’t be humoring him, adding fuel to this fire, but the night shifts are long, and dull except for broken jars of pickles, so she says it. “Maybe your time machine should be built out of a black hole.”

I’m not exactly pleased with it, but sometimes that’s the nature of the beast: you struggle through forty minutes of free-writing only to have nothing much at all to show for it. I’m not saying there isn’t the start of some kind of story buried in this somewhere, just that, if there is, it’s well buried indeed. But in writing, even the wrong words are better than no words.

I’m not watching the Oscars this evening, though I can’t claim to have made a better choice by watching A Good Day to Die Hard. It’s easily the worst movie in the series, rarely even rising to the level of interesting, and I can only imagine how ridiculous any sixth movie in the Die Hard franchise would have to be.

I probably should have spent the evening writing. Even more bad words would have been better than this.