personal

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.

Saturday

Let’s pretend this past week was just so exciting that I couldn’t even bring myself to write about it, and that’s why I haven’t posted much of anything here in a week. That seems better than just admitting that it was a boring one-day-pretty-much-like-the-last kind of week.

Even today, there wasn’t much to report. The weather turned nice again — windy, but not the slap in the face of winter’s return we had on Thursday and Friday. There was snow in the forecast for Monday, last I heard, but I think most of what hobbled us in February has finally melted.

I bought my plane tickets for my trip in September to Canada and the Banff Centre. Still, it’ll be another half a year before I use them.

This evening, I watched a couple of movies. I started with Grave of the Fireflies, a late-’80s anime set near the end of World War II. It’s a beautiful film, although very sad, and after it I needed something of a pick-me-up. So naturally I turned to the downbeat folk music story Inside Llewyn Davis. (The original thought had been 12 Years a Slave, but maybe not this week.) I liked the movie a lot — it’s not really a downer — but I didn’t quite love every bit of it. I’d be tempted to call it “lesser Coen Brothers,” if even their “lesser” movies didn’t have such style and skill. (See The Ladykillers or Intolerable Cruelty, for instance.)

All in all, a pair of very good movies.

And all in all, while not a super exciting day — I did a little editing, went for a walk, listened to a podcast — a pretty good day.

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.