writing

Sunday

The Sunday crossword puzzle and my weekly writing group. I don’t ask a lot out of Sunday.

She had been interrogated. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, Sergei thought. There was not a spot of blood, for one thing, and although her left eye was blackened and swollen shut, he knew for a fact that she had arrived here like that. A souvenir of the front, he’d been told, though possibly self-inflicted. Already the medics had seen to it and her other wounds, and she was in better health than most of the other prisoners that had arrived the same day. There was nothing about her now that bespoke of hardship or captivity, much less the fist and boot of a proper interrogation.

The recruits they sent him, these young boys from the country, were so helpless and timid. They handled her with kids’ gloves, if they handled her at all. The duty sheet nailed outside the cell door said she had last been visited three hours ago, shortly after the noonday meal, and questioned. He saw the word forcefully penciled in beneath that but knew it was a joke. The boys meant well, even those who were enlisted only because the farms held no more work, but they wouldn’t know forcefully if it slapped them across the face. They would put their questions to the woman, dutifully repeat the scripts they had been handed, but they did not recognize her danger. They did not understand that you needed real force to loosen the enemy’s tongue, that you survived this war only with cold steel in your veins, and that you should never suffer a witch to live.

He had not seen the witchcraft himself. Even the soldiers who had delivered the prisoners, had faced this woman and her compatriots on the field of battle, would speak only hesitantly about what the hag had done. Darkened skies, a river turned to mud. Sergei had seen these things himself in the war’s early days, before the enemy’s mages had been killed, before he’d lost his leg and had been re-stationed here. Now, though, these magics were less common, more woman’s work, and the soldiers who encountered them were perhaps less prepared to act. They could not even tell him if she’d lost her eye in the volley of fire or…

Sunday

It’s been a couple of days.

I took Friday off again, mostly just trying to make it feel like a Friday instead of a Saturday — mostly because that makes Saturday feel like a Sunday, and I don’t need two Sundays in my weekend. (I like Sundays, but I don’t need two of them.)

That evening, I watched Before Midnight, which I really liked a whole lot. While I think it can be enjoyed without having seen Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, it’s absolutely a companion piece to those two films, and it’s a delight to dip back into these characters’ lives — even when those lives themselves aren’t always delightful. (Watching them fight is like watching good friends, or your parents, fight and almost as uncomfortable.) I’m surprised to discover I was hoping they wouldn’t make the movie a couple of years ago. This, too, seems like a fitting end to the story…and yet I could see coming back to them again in another ten years. This film is sometimes less fun than the first two — it’s less about falling in love than struggling to maintain in — but it’s still terrific.

Yesterday, I thought about watching a movie, but ended up just watching a bunch of television. Scandal, Agents of SHIELD, the new Doctor Who. Mostly that’s because I went to dinner with my parents and aunt and uncle to celebrate a birthday and got a home a little later than I expected. (A short but furious snow squall that made driving almost impossible for a good stretch of road didn’t help any.) And today’s it’s mostly more TV, trying to avoid the ridiculous cold and wind outside.

My writing group got canceled, thanks to a friend’s car troubles, but I decided to make use of the writing prompts he posts every Saturday and do some free-writing on my own. I really do need to get back into writing more regularly, above and beyond the forty minutes of it I do most Sundays.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote:

She was staying at the cabin, the one her father bought before he died, when she saw the thing that might have been a wolf.

There wasn’t any heat or running water at the place, and only candlelight or a beat-up lantern by which to see. But she was only staying the one night, packing up the last of the old man’s books and papers because nobody else in the family wanted to. There were ten months of notes and ratty journals squirreled away up here, maybe more; and although she and her sisters were just as likely to burn it all, Karen had agreed to travel the three hours north to box and tag everything she could find. She wasn’t sure if anyone outside the family even remembered her father’s novels, and whatever he’d been working on here, it sure as hell hadn’t been another book. But maybe there were still some collectors out there, die-hard fans who would pay good money for a glimpse of his later writing.

God knew the old man hadn’t left them much of anything else. It was only chance that Karen had even found out that he was dying.

He’d come back to Chicago for some reason. She didn’t think it was to die — she couldn’t even say for sure if he’d known he was sick — but that’s how it had played out. Almost a year without contact, not even a word, and then one morning Deb called her from the hospital and said, “Um, Kar? I think they just wheeled Dad into the emergency room downstairs.”

Karen was tempted to think of it as destiny, or maybe karma. Those were the kinds of words that Deb had used at the funeral, and like always Maggie had echoed her, but maybe there was some kind of truth to it. All Karen knew was that the man was dead, and there was a strange satisfaction in knowing that he’d breathed his last in a city that he’d always hated.

Not that the cabin revealed anything more about her father. She’d glanced at the writings she was bundling for the drive back home, but it seemed like there was more of his madness than answers in there, and the building itself anonymous and ramshackle. He’d apparently been there since last October, paid in full, but it was a lonely shack in the woods more than anything else.

Not quite sure where it’s going, but it’s something that wasn’t there before I started, so that’s something.

Some kind of weekend

So it’s been a couple of days. I wish I could say I did anything more productive than watch a couple of movies, fail to finish the Sunday crossword, read some comics, and go to my writing group, but that would probably be lying. Why is it that when I take off on Friday, I feel like I’m getting an extra Sunday, and not an extra Saturday? Believe me, I think I’d prefer the latter.

I did buy a new television, which was something. I don’t have cable, but the TV has an internet connection (for Netflix, YouTube, etc.), which I can combine with my Roku and Blu-Ray player and more than enough entertainment. I picked it up at the local Best Buy, which made me glad I hadn’t gone there to buy a PlayStation 4. They were answering phones with “Thanks for calling Best Buy. We’re all sold out of the PS4,” and lots of people with me in the long pick-up line were worried their own purchases wouldn’t be there.

If and when there’s a Portal 3, I’ll consider buying a gaming system — maybe for a new Bioshock — but I haven’t actually had one in years, the original Nintendo. I think I sold it at a garage sale, which is a shame. I never did figure out how to get that robot to work.

Anyway, the movies were Kiss the Girls and Jack Reacher. The former wasn’t great, and then was unbelievably bad in its last twenty minutes, while the latter was entertaining but very forgettable, with more talk about how amazing Tom Cruise’s character was — “Who the hell is Jack Reacher? Well…let me tell you…” — than action.

And then there was my writing group. I wrote this, from a few randomly chosen writing prompts:

In the past, I’ve tried to kill this woman. It was nothing personal, mostly politics; I was just a hired gun, doing a job, and most of the times our paths crossed her name could have easily been any of a hundred others. That doesn’t make it any easier, realizing in the heat of battle that you’re only there because some bureaucrat flagged her name a little higher on that week’s kill list — some Congressman wanted to make a point, or more likely just stumbled on her name at random — and I’m sure it wouldn’t have made her feel any better about the whole damn thing. My intentions were still the same. But it wasn’t built on anything specific, no personal feelings. If anything, I kept accepting the contracts because I respected her too much, respected her skills, wanted yet another chance to match them against mine. I could have walked, or let some other agent tangle with her for a change. Sometimes I wonder why nobody ever forced me to do that. A hundred times we must have met, squared off either face to face or across the divide of rifle scopes, and there we were, both of us still alive. There’s no honor among thieves, they say, but maybe there’s too much among assassins. Maybe you shouldn’t send one killer to kill another. Sometimes I wonder. They had super-soldiers and black ops programs that might have settled the account more quickly and completely than my own self-taught skills, but I guess no one in charge ever learned the power of no. Let’s just keep sending her out, these senators must have said — just as they must have been saying about her on the other side — and eventually it’ll sort itself out. Law of averages. That’s if they even thought about it that far. After all, these were the same men who’d built the Abomination Project — actually called it that, like that wasn’t just asking for trouble — then tried burying it and the evidence when it all went predictably south. I’d tied up a few of those messy loose ends for them myself. The pay was always good, and their checks cleared — you couldn’t always say that in this line of work — but thinking far ahead wasn’t exactly my employer’s strong suit. After all, they hadn’t told that this time me she would be…

And that was my weekend. I also spent some time on Friday coordinating a meeting for tomorrow morning at the office — is it good or bad that I can do work from my phone…on my day off…while on line? — which I’m not exactly looking forward to. But we’ll see.

Who’s Thor-y now?

Today I went to see the Thor movie, which I quite liked, and I wrote this:

They killed another of the savages last night, brought it up deck, lashed it tightly to the mast, and took turns with the captain’s whip until the poor frightened beast bled out. This morning, none of three men would claim the killing blow for himself; they hemmed and they hawed and they refused to set their stories straight, though Mr. Murtha and I questioned them each for the better part of an hour, both together and separately. As for the captain, he would claim only the whip, taking it back from the men with half-hearted admonishments I knew were more for my benefit than for theirs. He does not like me, Captain Androse, and I think that would be the case even without Mr. Murtha’s intimidating bulk constantly at my side or the crew’s natural displeasure at having a dead man sailing with them. The captain is as close to another man of science as I am likely to find aboard his ship, less frightened by superstition or believing of rumor, but I know even he would be just as glad to be rid of me. If he could kill me twice, he no doubt would have done so.

If only he knew how little I wish to be here myself.

And yet I go wherever His Majesty sends me, serving at the pleasure of the crown.

The native boy’s death is a distraction — not worthy of our time, the captain says — and what’s worse I know that he is right. What do I care that the men took a little sport with the heathen, took it all too far, and ended his life? As a slave, he would have fetched little profit, and so it is not the destruction of His Majesty’s property that galls me. Nor is it even the principle of the thing… I am bound, not only by royal decree but by the wards the king’s necromancers carved into my skin, to uphold the laws of the realm, but I am free to choose how I do so. We have better things to do than punish these men for spilling a savage’s blood.

And yet why, then, can I not let this go? Is it as a dead man myself that I take offense?

It was, whadyacallit, a Sunday.

Ender of days

This afternoon, I went to my writing group and wrote this in the time allotted to us:

“If you’re going to raise a demon,” said Howard, “then you raise a demon. You do it right and by the book. This is no time for half measures.”

Daisy nodded, and mmhmmed, although she wasn’t really listening, and moreover she didn’t care if Howard knew it. This was her show as high priestess; she’d earned that title for whatever it was worth, and she wasn’t prepared to cede her authority to Howard just because he’d spent a few more lonely nights in the council library than anyone else. If the council had been looking to reward bookishness, then they would have given the book to Howard, now wouldn’t they, instead of handing the litany of rites and arcana over to her. Daisy respected his knowledge, and lord knew she’d have to lean on it a little when the time actually came, but for now Howard could take all his talk of half measures and demon raising and shove it up his pompous ass.

“Have we heard back from Cairo yet?” she asked him absently. The dig was a good three hour’s drive over land from the capital, she knew, but by now they should have heard something, anything, even rumor. What was that archaeologist’s name again — not the lead, but the one the council had secreted on to the team three months after their arrival in-country? Was it Winsome? Winstone? Daisy could ask Howard, but god, he would love that, wouldn’t he, her not knowing some key piece of information. And Cairo was critical to the success of the ritual, even more than any garden-variety demon raising that might need to be undertaken stateside, and Howard would have no hesitation reminding her about that over and over. It was just the woman’s name Daisy couldn’t remember — it was definitely something with a W, she was sure of that — but she wasn’t about to admit to any ignorance here and now.

“Nothing,” Howard said, “which as I’m sure you know is unusual. If they’ve run into some kind of difficulty at the tomb — “

“It’s too early for contingency plans,” said Daisy. “And you worry too much. Last we heard, everything was going just peachy.”

“That was before the dreamer awoke,” said Howard. “They’ve been transcribing new prophecy for the better part of an hour.”

“The dreamer,” Daisy snorted. “You old guys put way too much faith into the things that man says. If I smoked a half pound of hashish before bed I’d have some weird visions too. What was that one about all of the women with arms slicked to the elbow with oil and rice and tiny cubes of diced vegetable matter? It’s crazy. Show me a single ’dream’ of his that has led to anything tangible.”

“He found the old one’s tomb,” Howard said.

“That’s debatable,” said Daisy. “It’s a lot more likely the old one’s the one who found him.”

It’s probably not too difficult to figure out one of the writing prompts, shoehorned-in as it is there. (I picked it, so I have no one but myself to blame.)

After that, I went with the group to see Ender’s Game.

Before seeing it, my feelings about the movie were pretty complex, owing mostly to Card’s odious politics and extreme right-wing views. I thought about buying a ticket to a different movie, or boycotting it altogether. Although that would only be symbolic at best — John Scalzi rightly points out it would be hard to monetarily hurt Card at this point with one, or even millions, less ticket sales — there was a certain appeal to it. But I wasn’t really looking to make a symbolic gesture, and I think I can see the movie without it reading as an endorsement of Card’s backward views on homosexuality.

Then people on Twitter started talking about the book itself, and how it was bad, with its own breed of noxious politics. While less of a screed than Card’s more recent political writing, they argued that the book itself was worthy of derision and boycott.

I haven’t read the book since I was about Ender Wiggin’s age myself. I was tempted to try to find my old copy — I think it might be buried in a box in the basement — that temptation came only sometime this morning. (I mean, I did have that extra hour, but it was not to be.) From my memory of the book, though, I think those people are wrong, if only because the terrible things that are done to, and ultimately by, Wiggin in the book are not necessarily presented as a good thing. And — spoiler warning — he spends most of Speaker for the Dead, the sequel, trying to atone for the brutal genocide he’s ultimately (albeit somewhat unwittingly) responsible for in the first book. I’ve read Speaker (and Xenocide) more recently, and Card the man, with his baggage of views and politics, doesn’t really rear its ugly head.

The book’s not perfect, and I think maybe it does deserve a re-read from me at some point to better unpack those imperfections, but I remember liking it a lot, even if I was only about twelve at the time.

So my feelings were complex. A couple of days ago, on Twitter, I wrote: I will/won’t go see Ender’s Game because it doesn’t/does reflect the author’s original intent. Yeah, I think that about covers it.

After seeing the movie…well, it was okay.