writing

The last three days

Friday was pretty uneventful, and even yesterday wasn’t terribly exciting by any real standard. It was warmer, certainly, to the point where you could wander outside in short sleeves and not feel uncomfortable — a far cry from the past few weeks we’ve had. There’s a chance of snow again in next week’s forecast, but hopefully it won’t impede my work trip to Stony Brook, which thanks to illness and weather I’ve already had to reschedule twice. And it also won’t impede my grumbling about how my parents managed to escape the worst of winter, leaving it all to me to enjoy.

Last night, I watched the 1977 horror movie The Sentinel, which is probably most notorious for casting genuinely deformed people as denizens of hell. That — spoiler warning — comes late in the film, and it’s just the one long scene, but however effective it might have been it’s also in very questionable taste. As for the rest of the movie…well, I call it a horror movie, since that seems like the obvious choice, but by the end of it I wasn’t entirely sure what it was I watching. There are parts that are ridiculously campy, some terrible acting — sadly, much of it from the film’s lead — and yet there are also parts that are really fairly creepy. Burgess Meredith is rather good in it, and Eli Wallach and Christopher Walken show up as a pair of detectives. But it’s such a weird movie, with such a strangely varied cast, even beyond Meredith, Wallach, and Walken. The trailer doesn’t really do it justice, and while I do think it was a terrible movie, I’m not entirely sure I didn’t enjoy it.

Then today I went to my writing group, and I penned/keyboarded this:

They found her outside the cabin, what was left of the old Wilson place out on the end of North Hadley Road, just half a mile from the edge of the woods and the county line. She had been left there overnight; the ME wouldn’t commit to a time of death, but preliminary tests suggested sometime between nine and ten the night before. That explained the rigor, Stock thought, and more importantly the dress. It had turned cold overnight, an unexpected frost that still hung in the morning air, but the girl was dressed for summer, her clothes a flimsy, gauzy white. Like an angel, Stock thought, and then quashed the thought down to the back of his mind. It wouldn’t help him any to start thinking like that again.

She had been strangled. Meyers thought they might get prints, but Stock wasn’t too hopeful. The body was too well staged, too precise, to expect that the perp had been that sloppy. The girl looked almost peaceful, if you ignored the bruises around her neck where the air had been cut off, ignored the too complete stillness of her body propped up against the oak tree. There was no sign of a struggle beyond all that, which suggested that she’d been killed somewhere else and moved, despite there being no other tracks but their own leading up this way. Meyers already had the sherrif’s men cordoning off a wider area, bagging anything that might look like evidence. Stock had just shrugged when the other man asked him if he’d had any theories.

The cabin was abandoned, half burned down in ’91, and nobody, least of all Red Wilson, had lived out here since then. Stock didn’t even know if Wilson still owned the property, which had stretched all the way to Potter County when he, Stock, had been a boy. But if he did, it wasn’t doing him much good these days, half-senile and bed-ridden like the man was reportedly supposed to be. Stock knew there were places that fall into disuse because nobody wants them, wants to be reminded of what happened there; there are places where darkness sets in, makes itself comfortable, sets up shop. The Wilson place had been well on its way to becoming one of those places even before the fire. The dead girl just made it clear the transformation was now complete.

“You recognize her?” Meyers asked, and Stock looked up.

“What?” he said. He tried keeping the surprise off his face. “Nah, why’d you ask that?”

“Dunno,” the other man said. “You just had one of your looks, is all.”

Can you tell I also watched a couple of True Detective episodes today as well?

That, more or less, was my weekend.

Sunday

[deleted]

There’s a lot I like about that, and where it took me, even if I don’t think all the things I like about it work successfully together.

This evening, I thought about sending out some rejection letters for Kaleidotrope, but I wound up watching Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters instead. I should have gone with my first instinct. The AV Club said the movie was “much like watching a shiny hammer hit a shiny nail over and over and over again. There’s something vaguely satisfying about the impact, and it throws up a few pretty sparks from time to time, but there’s nothing unexpected in the encounter between the two surfaces, and the repetition gets dull.”

I think that’s probably over-selling it, to be honest. I didn’t much enjoy the movie.

I am looking forward to having tomorrow off from work, even if I don’t plan to do anything more exciting with than send those rejection letters and maybe do some laundry.

Saturday and Sunday

Last night, I watched a couple of movies.

First there was Escape Plan with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, which turned out to be surprisingly entertaining despite — or probably because — it was so ridiculous. I felt like Stallone was fighting the silliness a little bit, but Schwarzenegger was embracing it wholeheartedly, and as such was really good in the movie. I wouldn’t call it good, but it was a lot of fun.

After that, it was a real change of pace with Dallas Buyers Club. The movie wasn’t exactly remarkable, but it told its story well, and Matthew McConaughey was very good. So was Jared Leto, who I didn’t recognize until the movie was almost over, and both he and McConaughey deserve the Oscar nominations they got for the movie.

In between the films, I discovered a cat living in the garage. I’d been hearing noises off and on for the past couple of nights and discovered the blinds on a couple of the windows mussed up. But I chalked the former up to the wind, and the latter up to imagination…or more wind. (Well, the rational part of my brain did, anyway.) But I heard the noise again last night and although it was only for a second, I saw a cat creep into the far back corner. The garage is full of stuff, including furniture and boxes I moved back from Pennsylvania a decade ago with, so there are lots of places a small cat like that could hide. I gave up on trying to find it last night, partly because I didn’t want to chase it out into the cold, but I saw it again this evening. I tried leaving the garage door open, coaxing the cat out with soft words and tuna fish, scaring it out with loud noises, and the most I seemed to do was to chase it from one inaccessible corner to another.

It’s not so much that I mind there being a cat in the garage. I got a better glimpse at it tonight, and I think it’s a stray, so I want it to be warm. I just don’t want it to set up shop out there, think it’s a good place to go to the bathroom or have kittens, or get stuck in one of those inaccessible corners with no food to be had. I think I might have chased it out this evening — into what’s unfortunately become a snowy night — but I also thought I’d maybe done that last night.

So hopefully I chased it away and it will find a better place to hole up. Or if it’s still out there, I’ll be able to find and catch it, so that I can somehow take it to the vet. (I say somehow because we don’t own any cat carriers anymore.)

Anyway, that was most of my weekend. Today, after a prolonged absence, I joined my writing group again and wrote this:

“There are no ghosts here,” Jimmy said. I didn’t know which one of us he was trying to convince.

“Sure, there are stories,” Jimmy said. “The old house, the caretakers murdered.” He walked over to the shelf behind his desk and pulled down a book. “That was in 1908, three years after the house was first built. Then there was a fire in the barn, that family who rented the place and went missing in the ’70s.” He handed me the book, which was older than the paperback I knew he’d seen me tuck into my backpack, and was probably a first edition if I knew anything about Jimmy Bell.

“It’s all in Trevor Burnam’s novel,” he said, “if you can get past the lousy prose. And some of it’s corroborated by press clippings — of which,” he added, “there aren’t for that time and this area. But that’s a far cry from saying the house is haunted.”

“Then why aren’t you living there?” I asked. “Your family owns the house, you’ve been living in town for six months, and yet you’re still renting here, in this place.” It hadn’t escaped my attention that there had been a fold-away cot stored in the closet, or that Jimmy had shut the closet door when he noticed me snooping.

“You’ve done your homework,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased. Looking at him from across the desk, I thought maybe he couldn’t tell either.

“I just want to know what happened there,” I said. “Don’t you?”

“’They drank the milk and ate the butter,’” he said. “That’s the first line of Burnam’s book.” He nodded at it in my hands, and although I pretty much knew the thing by heart I flipped to the start of Chapter 1. “’Miss Abigail returned to the kitchen that cold October morning to discover the pantry door unlatched, the fire in the hearth gone out, and the little dead girl waiting for her at the top of the cellar stairs.’

“It’s not great writing,” Jimmy said, “but sure, I can see why people liked it at the time. After the Wilson family ran off in ’76 –”

“Disappeared,” I said. “There were five of them, and they weren’t ever found.” I handed him back the book. “There are press clippings about that.”

“And about Ken Wilson’s drinking problem, too,” Jimmy said. “Look, I like you, Clara, and we went to school together, which is the only reason I agreed to meet. But you’re seeing this from a distance and missing the details. And the details say there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“I just don’t think you believe that,” I said.

I took the writing prompts from this magazine cover. Imagine if I’d gone with the picture!

Saturday and Sunday

It’s been a pretty quiet weekend.

Last night I watched Riddick, which turned out to be surprisingly entertaining, given how remarkably terrible its predecessor turned out to be. It’s not a brilliant movie, and hardly original, but I quite enjoyed it.

Today, I went to my weekly writing group, where we each spent our forty minutes working on a prompt from Writer’s Digest, from their monthly contest. Using their first sentence as a jumping-off point, this is what I wrote:

“If you can guess what I have in my pocket, you can have it.”

She says this like I’m supposed to be impressed, when we both know the pocket and whatever she’s tossed in it are stolen. She wants me to think she’s learned to fold space, that’s fine, but she knows as well as I do that this particular pocket of it isn’t her handiwork. It’s too polished a job for that, the seams too neat. It hardly shows up on her ship’s sensors, probably wouldn’t show up at all on mine, and there’s nobody outside the core planets who could have done this kind of work so well. What it’s doing all the way out here, or why the core might have abandoned it, I don’t know, but she’s not fooling anybody if she thinks I believe she did this herself. This little pocket, and whatever she’s got hidden inside it, are like everything else in my sister’s life: an unhappy accident she wants to make somebody else’s problem.

“What makes you think I want it?” I ask. “Even if I guess right, I’ve got cargo of my own left to unload.”

“You’re running light and you know it,” she says. She adjusts the screen with a few random taps and the pocket is outlined in a dark angry green. It’s nothing you could see with the naked eye, if you tried staring out into the blackness of space, but Claire knows I trust the ship’s readings. After all, this salvage tug used to be my own. “And you’re gonna wanna guess. It could earn you millions.”

“If it’s so tasty a haul why don’t you sell it?” I ask. “What’s with the hide-and-seek, the guessing games? That’s not why I agreed to come out here.”

“No,” she says, “you’re just checking up on me for the core, reporting back on my movements. Just like Dad would’ve wanted, right?” She’s angry when she says this, even though she knows it isn’t even half as simple. “But, don’t you see, Nick,” she adds, “that’s exactly why I can’t be the one to unload this. The core’s already got it in for me. They’d take me before I even got planetside.”

“If you’d just talk to them,” I tell her, “I’m sure they’d drop the charges.”

“If I just let Dad talk to them, you mean. Let him pull a few strings, rehabilitate his smuggler daughter. That’s what the core wants, Nick. I set one foot back in the system and that’s what they’ll get.”

“So what, you want to off-load this on me, whatever smuggled goods you’ve got to hide in pocket of space all the way out here in the ass end of nowhere? I’ve got cargo, Claire. I’ve got a reputable business.”

“You could also have millions,” she says. “And all you have to do is guess.”

I don’t think I have any intention of trying to submit that to the contest, not least of all because it isn’t yet a story, and yet at 480 words it’s well past half of the magazine’s 750-word limit. But I had fun writing it, even if it took me a long while to get into anything like a groove.

I noted on Twitter yesterday that I occasionally get stories that were very clearly written based on writing prompts, most notably for the Machine of Death anthologies. Those books had such a distinctive premise, no matter how very different the stories that were written for them, that I always feel weird when I encounter it again in my own submissions. I understand the impulse to try and take a story you’re proud of, one that for whatever reason didn’t make it into either of the two anthologies, and try to sell it elsewhere. But even if I loved the story, I don’t know that I would feel entirely comfortable accepting it. For one thing, you’re admitting the story has already been rejected elsewhere, although, really, that’s hardly a factor. I have to assume that Kaleidotrope isn’t the first stop for a lot of the writers who submit. But, more importantly, it’s such a distinctive premise that your story can’t help but be seen as a cast-off, a reject, by the reader. That’s maybe unfair, but I think that’s the reality. I less frequently see stories clearly based off the prompts from The First Line, which I’ve noted in the past, but I think that’s much different, easier to work around, maybe even less central to the story. I don’t reject stories out of hand just because they clearly were first intended for someone else. But I’m probably more likely to pass on stories where a machine that predicts the cause of everyone’s death is a central concern.

Finally, this evening, I read What now? by Ann Patchett. I liked it, although it’s maybe a bit of a cheat as an actual book. It’s the text of a commencement speech that Patchett gave at her alma mater Sarah Lawrence a number of years ago, and while it’s a good speech, the book is really quite short. It’s full of large print and white spaces, as well as many full-page stock photographs of mazes, footprints, puzzle pieces, and other things that would probably put Patchett well above the “cliché quota” she mentions at the top of the speech. It’s the sort of book you give as a gift, mostly to graduating seniors, and while fifteen bucks seems a little pricey for that gift, it’s a gift of kindly good advice. It’s a very short book, hardly a book at all, but it ends well:

The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way. What now is not just a panic-stricken question tossed out into a dark unknown. What now can also be our joy. It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance. It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow. There’s a time in our lives when we all crave the answers. It seems terrifying not to know what’s coming next. But there is another time, a better time, when we see our lives as a series of choices, and What now represents our excitement and our future, the very vitality of life.

Friday

It was a long week, thanks in part to the conference that took up my Monday (and the nearly full work day I put in over the weekend to try and make up for that). It was a good week, though, and while the next couple of months still promise to be incredibly busy, I squared away the most immediate and time-sensitive of my deadlines and managed to do some real work.

I also met this morning with the young woman I’ll be mentoring, as part of my job objectives for 2014, who I only got to chat with very briefly at the office holiday party. I’m hoping I can give her some insight into the development process, assuming I have any insights to give, and I think once we’ve settled on a project she can take the lead on that’ll be easier.

I was supposed to go this evening to a “write-in” — basically, the kind of free-writing group I got to every Sunday, only this one with more people, and with a small price tag. My friend Maurice suggested it, but when train troubles prevented him from getting into Manhattan himself, I took it as a sign to take my tired body home and watch episodes of Babylon 5. (I also watched the last How I Met Your Mother episode, but that was really underwhelming.) I haven’t done a lot of writing in 2014 yet, though I’m going to turn my attention back to it this weekend.

I was so happy not to be taking my computer home with me this evening, I can’t even tell you. We’re only two weeks into January, but I’m so glad this is a long weekend. I’m looking forward to not evening thinking about work until Tuesday.