writing

Sunday

A pretty ordinary weekend.

Last night, I watched North by Northwest, and then today Pacific Rim. I liked both movies, although I think the latter I would have loved if I’d come to it with any great fondness for monsters and giant robots, of the sort of movies that director Guillermo del Toro is referencing with the film. I heard a recent interview with him, where his enthusiasm for the subject is both clear and infectious. But this isn’t something that speaks as loudly to my inner eight-year-old as it does to his. Nevertheless, some of it’s remarkable, and in general it’s pretty good.

I mean, it’s no Sharknado, but then, what is?

I also had my writing group again today, and came up with this in the forty minutes of free-writing:

We call them lycans, for lack of a better word, but it’s always sounded false and pretentious.

“Just call them werewolves,” says Baxter. “That’s what they are.”

But not all of them; lycanthropes are the commonest breed, giving rise to the name of the entire clan, but there have been shapeshifters of all other sorts for as long as the dark arts that create them have existed. Bear-men, wendigo… Only a month earlier I’d been cornered in an alley, a steel blade pressed to my throat from behind, by what turned out to be more salamander than human. (Why the old witch had ever cast such a spell — or what she had done to piss off whoever threw the were-lizard curse upon her — I never learned. I left her in that alley, still alive but only barely, the blade stained black with her own blood and scales.)

But Baxter is right, as he all too frequently is about this kind of thing: most of them are wolves, either by tradition or because they think it looks cool — the were-lizard certainly didn’t — and so we call them lycans or werewolves out of simple convenience. They’re only a third of the threat, and a dumb, lumbering part of it at that, so it’s hardly worth my time arguing over the name.

The real danger, as anyone entrusted with the guild’s ancient secrets knows, are the vampires. You’ll see some people spell that with a “y,” or even of all things a “ph,” which has always seemed to me like the very height of pretentiousness. They’re bloodsuckers, plain and simple, too cunning by half and wily, loathsome but skilled at their own survival, but throwing around Latin phrases or old-world spellings just plays into the inflated image they have of themselves. It makes them cocky, even reckless, which is something you can’t afford when there are civilian lives to consider. Better just to recognize them for what they are and drive a stake through the heart of every last one of them.

It’s the third threat, that last half of the triad, that worries any good guild assassin worth her salt. The one you don’t know, can’t recognize or name because all its names have been carefully erased from our books. The guild’s history is long, longer even than the dark arts we exist to patrol, keep off, destroy. This is our responsibility, whatever its cost. But part of that cost, perhaps, is not knowing even the name of the enemy dedicated to inflicting the damage. The nameless foe that shepherds others into the lycan and vampire clans, that’s worked for centuries in the shadows while were-lizards do their dirty work in dark alleys.

And that, more or less, was my weekend.

Monday

I didn’t do morning pages today, because I forgot, but I’m going to try again tomorrow. Mostly because it really did seem to work, tricking my brain into being able to write, and because I can no longer remember any valid reason I had for stopping it. (It does require that I get up a little earlier in the morning, so there is that.)

Otherwise, a pretty average, work-from-home sort of day. No mountains of e-mail waiting for me after the holiday, thank goodness.

Sunday

On Friday, I had an appointment with the dermatologist that turned out to be more waiting than appointment. This wasn’t a bad thing, really, since it meant that what I was there for turned out to be nothing. (My primary recommended I have some spots on my back looked at.) I mean, I’d rather have a doctor surprised to see me — I almost felt like I was wasting his time — than shocked and dismayed that he hasn’t seen me much sooner. But it did kind of eat into my Friday afternoon.

I spent most of Saturday putting together the Summer issue of Kaleidotrope. And actually a fair bit of today, when I finished the advice column and horoscopes. (Yes, the zine regularly has both.) That didn’t leave me much time for anything else — I still haven’t done the Sunday crossword puzzle, and that’s an itch I simply can’t not scratch — but I’m really happy with this issue. (Well, it’s one story lighter than I expected, but I’m still hopeful that author will get back to me in time for the Autumn issue.)

I did manage to watch a movie last night, the strange and terrifying and sad and beautiful Upstream Color. The film, from the same writer/director as the intellectual time travel movie Primer, is almost impossible to really describe. The IMDB tries its best with:

A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives.

Although even that might be saying too much, and certainly doesn’t say half enough. The film is complicated and odd, but I liked it a whole lot.

And then today, I had my weekly writing group. I wasn’t expecting to, but apparently this week’s postponement was postponed. So I wrote this:

They had enough money to keep him in quarrantine indefinitely, the resources necessary to lie to anyone who came asking, to keep up the false pretense that the man himself had never existed. Not that they expected much trouble; he had been an unpopular man, and though well-embedded in the news coverage of the time, he was disliked enough by his peers and his constituents that it was hardly difficult to expunge him from the record. It had been twenty-five years since the man had been President, and a quarter century goes a long way towards erasing collective memory. They only had to resort to physical erasure — the special blend of chemical and cortical manipulation the boys in the lab would have patented if that had been an option — on a handful of occasions, and with the prisoner himself only once. That was when he’d nearly escaped, although the warden would have refused to use either — “escaped” or “nearly” — and would have instead referred to it only as the incident. It was an incident that had itself happened over three years ago now, and as there seemed to be little chance of a recurrence — the man was, in his way, now a model prisoner — there was little reason for anyone to call the warden on his euphemisms. Let him call it an incident, and let him downplay just how far out of hand events had actually spun, just so long as they kept Daniel Chambers locked in his ten-by-ten square cell and forgotten by the world. Let Chambers rot, make sure any investigations withered on the vine, and the warden could call what had happened three years ago anything he wanted. Moreover, they would continue to supply him any new funds he requested, anything that kept the prison and their plans humming along. The prison’s continued success would forgive its momentary failure.

Of course, it probably wasn’t Chambers who was sitting in that cell. Had it been the man himself, the prison almost certainly would have seen additional escape attempts. Chambers had not been a model prisoner, and they kept him on too few drugs to explain how docile he had become in the three years since. The warden knew this, and certainly the boys in the lab knew this, but it was a truth you didn’t want to go poking at too much. Had Chambers actually escaped three years ago? Was this was this some kind of simulacrum, what the lab techs had even money on as being a robot? Or a hologram? There was a theory floating around downstairs that the prisoner was actually a coherent assortment of photons, given physical form through…well, some kind of process. This, obviously, where the theory tended to break down. How would Chambers have managed such a thing? The robot theory at least had legs; it didn’t require any great scientific prowess, none of which Chambers was known to possess, just the right components smuggled in from the outside. It was true, every theory floating around suggested the involvement of someone else — an inside job — which was another reason why the theories never floated very far. The Chambers in the cell was almost certainly a robot — he did everything but clank when he walked — but nobody wanted to be the first to test such a theory.

You might very well be asking yourself a number of questions at this point. What about bloodwork, for instance? Surely in the three years since the “incident” the prisoner must have undergone a routine physical. The powers that be that owned the prison, that tossed the necessary (and even arguably unnecessary) money at it, would have certainly inisisted. But there are ways for a crafty robot to deceive such tests, especially when they are conducted by those with a vested interest in keeping its secret.

Where, then, you might also be wondering, had Daniel Chambers gone? He could have escaped into the world at large, a world in which he was largely forgotten, and he likely could have done so quite easily. You forget that while his name had been expunged from that world’s history, he would have still retained a wealth of knowledge, leverage, and contacts. One did not rise to become the leader of the free world without making a few friends, however wealthy or cunnning one’s enemies. Chambers could have escaped, with the aid of a little inside help and on-the-spot robotics, and no onewould have been the wiser. By the time anyone at the prison began to suspect, he could have been long gone.

The warden and the lab boys, they knew this too, and it was all the more reason not to look too closely at the incident. If Chambers was out there, he was keeping quiet; he was not going public or causing trouble; if he was in here, still, they had nothing at all to worry about. They’d keep cashing their checks and assume, robot or no robot, that the man they held was still the man they’d been paid so handsomely to keep. And they’d just refuse to look too closely at that assumption in case he wasn’t. Maybe the robot could have an “accident” happen to it, if that became necessary.

Fewer people came asking about the man every year.

I can’t claim to be really happy with it, above and beyond the fact that I just wrote for the forty minutes. There’s some crafting here — it’s not quite stream of consciousness — but there was less staring off into space and thinking than tapping away at the keys. (I write these on my iPad.)

Anyway, that was the weekend, more or less.

The Walking Zed

I wish I could say I’ve been exceptionally busy since last Sunday, and that’s why I haven’t written here much since then, except to post the occasional song and song lyric. But it’s really more that one day has been just like the last, and there hasn’t been a whole lot to write about. Lots of things happening at work, lots of projects underway, but nothing that necessarily bears mention.

Yesterday, I finished reading World War Z, which was surprisingly entertaining. Today, I went to see the movie version, which, maybe unsurprisingly, was not.

The movie has its moments, but far too few of them, and I was bored more than anything else by the end. (“More like World War Zzzzzzzzz,” I joked on Twitter, until some madwoman suggested it should be pronounced “Zed.” I know, right?) The book works a lot better than it ought to, given that there are no central characters or even, really, what you would call a plot. Brooks is great at introducing a lot of neat ideas, and surprisingly adept at wringing tension out of stories that we know, right up front, are going to end at least reasonably well. (It’s an oral history told by the survivors of the zombie war, after all.) He’s not quite as skilled at making the authors of each of those stories sound like a different person, but it’s a clever concept overall and engaging enough that I could forgive the book its occasional faults.

I’m less forgiving of the movie, which bears only a passing resemblance to the book. Not that I think the book is especially cinematic, or that I can’t understand all the changes that they made to it. It’s just that those changes don’t add up to an exciting summer spectacle, or a good time at the movies. There are hundreds, if not thousands of extras on screen — super-fast zombie swarms, one of many deviations from the text — but it’s remarkably bloodless for a zombie movie, with only a few genuine scares. (That’s what you get with a PG-13 rating, I guess.) It’s not an awful film, and I don’t think it quite unseats Survival of the Dead from its place in my heart as most disappointing zombie movie. But I honestly think I would have been better off going with my first impulse and seeing Fast & Furious 6.

Yes, that was my first impulse. What? Don’t judge me.

Last night, I watched another somewhat disappointing movie, The Awakening. As the AV Club review says, “the film does include a few effective chills, thanks to its elegantly creepy setting—an old manor house turned boarding school—and its use of period paranormal-detection equipment.” It takes a real turn near the end, however — one that’s impossible to discuss without spoiling the entire movie — and one that I’m not at all convinced really works. As the AV Club also points out, “the unraveling is a letdown, not just because it diffuses the frightening mystery, but because it treads on the wistful, doomed sense of longing the film built up.”

Today I also had my weekly writing group, where a set of pictures and words pulled from a magazine prompted this for some reason:

In theory, he was already dead. He could stay inside the capsule for another year, maybe longer if he managed to stretch what was left of the supplies, or he could swing open the hatch and let what would inevitably happen, happen now. There would be no rescue, even if Tabitha reconsidered, and he knew there was little chance of that. And even if she did, even if right this minute she was telling the others where to find him, and they were plotting a course, it would be the better part of a decade before they reached him, at best. He had only two options: face death now, the brutal cold of the planet’s surface, hypothermia or asphyxiation — he was not entirely sure which would claim him first; or delay the end, for a little while, push it off with few short months of solitude and exile and nothing but his own thoughts and corps rations for company. There was only one logical choice. And yet, it was logic that had found him in this place to begin with. He would be an even bigger fool not to realize that. There was only one choice, but that did not mean he had to make that choice today.

He was lucky the rest of the crew had died on impact or in the explosion before. It would save him from the tiresome chore of having to kill them.

There was still the on-board AI to contend with, only a vestige of what had been destroyed in the main ship, more child’s toy than super-computer, but it could still pose a threat if it was running the code that Tabitha had written into it. He had heard nothing from the AI since crashing; the capsule’s internal diagnostics suggested it was inactive, likely inoperable if not destroyed, but he did not know how far to trust that. The diagnostics had already been fooled once by his wife’s clever sabotage.

He didn’t think she had meant to kill McKenzie or Parish, who had escaped in the capsule with him, or any of the ship’s modest crew. The AI had disabled the fire suppression system during a routine refueling, then allowed a short-circuit in one of the hydroponic bays. If the bay had been empty at the time, if they had been using the refueling stop to also restock their supplies, they might have remained at the station long enough for everyone aboard to escape. Instead, he had…

It feels rushed near the end, not least of all because it literally trails off, and I don’t really have a handle on the character (much less the others he mentions). But what can you expect from forty minutes in a crowded Panera Bread?

Oh, and I started reading Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I’m about a third of the way into the novel and really quite enjoying it so far.

Until next Sunday, then?

Sunday

Last night, I watched Æon Flux, which was not very good. I mean, not awful, except perhaps in all the ways that it was awful, but not a successful movie by any stretch. It’s best when it rises to the level of interesting and colorful mess. I can’t really blame it for being so very untrue to the original cartoon, if only because the original cartoon was so often untrue to itself. (It’s not exactly a spoiler to say none of the episodes are directly connected…or even that Aeon dies in a lot of them.)

Today, I went to see Man of Steel with friends. It’s an entertaining summer movie…and apparently it has something to do with Superman? In all serious, I enjoyed it. (And a whole lot more than that other summer blockbuster that pretended to be the thing in its title.)

In between all that, I wrote this from a couple of prompts:

When they found it, when Jacobs split the final stone with his pickaxe and pulled the artifact from the rubble, none of the others knew that this would be the thing that made each of them famous. They were concerned just with trying to survive the discovery.

“Do you feel that?” asked Jacobs, who would not be so lucky. He held the object up to the light so that there could be no mistake. He was just as shocked as all the others to see this impossible thing. But none of the others, and perhaps not even Jacobs himself, noticed that his hands were shaking or that the impossible thing he held in them was starting to glow. “It’s kind of a hum, you know, kind of low-level. I think maybe it’s — “

But they never learned what Jacobs thought. The artifact, which should have been destroyed — if not by the cave-in that had trapped them there, or by the pressure that had trapped it for centuries inside of rock, then certainly by the clumsy swing of Jacob’s axe as he’d tried to force his way out and back to the surface. It was an impossible thing, ridiculous even, and Jacob had been an idiot to go picking it up.

He had no one to blame but himself when it exploded.

At least, that’s what they would tell themselves in the days and weeks to follow. Murdock, who’d been close enough to Jacobs that she was knocked backward by the blast, then knocked unconcious when her head thudded against the cave wall, would blame Jacobs most of all, even if she knew in her heart that she probably would have done exactly the same thing.

“It was a lightbulb,” she said. “It was a goddamn lightbulb hidden inside the stone. Buried for a thousand years, how did a lightbulb even get down there?”

None of them could say; none of them even would say for sure if that was the thing they had seen in Jacobs’ hands. It was too ridiculous, and whatever it had been, the artifact was now gone. The explosion had taken care of that. Dawson had his theories — he was the one who’d started calling it the artifact, and who would later popularize the term when the media started calling, when their powers were revealed. But his theories were only guesses — born out by a little research, he would say, even if he seemed unwilling to share that research with the others.

For the time being, they had their powers, and if it had been an ancient artifact, or the energy expelled in its explosion, or dark matter, or time travel, or even mad experiments from the future gone horribly wrong — again, Dawson and his theories — what did it matter? They couldn’t go back to what they had been. Even Murdock, with her fangs, wouldn’t have wanted that.

The blast hadn’t just killed Jacobs, or tossed Murdock against the wall, it had cleared the way for them to escape. That’s what they told her, when she regained conciousness in the woods outside the cave, and she saw bo reason for any of them — Dawson, Phillips, or van Houten — to lie to her. They’d never found their way back inside, of course, even when she suggested there might be some value in investigating the scene, even after their powers had started to emerge and they had good reason to investigate. She knew she was quicker to distrust — sometimes it took all her strength to just not tear them literally apart — so she decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. If they were lying…

I don’t know either.

Anyway, um…happy Father’s Day!