"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
This week marks the end of our summer hours at work, and we move back to our regular week after Labor Day. Me, I’m taking all of next week off while my parents are on vacation in England — partly because I only need to take four vacation days to get a nine-day weekend out of it, and partly because I haven’t had a full day off from work since the 4th of July.
I’m looking forward to it. I just need to get through the rest of this week intact.
This morning, my flash story, “Man on the Moon,” was published at 365 tomorrows. There’s a little question about the formatting — the underscores are meant to be italics and for all the dialogue — but overall I like the piece. It’s just under 300 words.
Then this afternoon, at my weekly writing group, I came up with this in our forty-minute free-writing time. We had this prompt, where one of us supplied a subject, the other a verb, and the third person an object. So we wound up with “tiger,” “swung,” and “shuriken.” And I wound up with this:
Tiger swung a shuriken at the large man standing in the doorway. He told himself he had intentionally missed.
But there was nothing to be done about it now, not with the flying star embedded in the door frame and the man’s fist about to be embedded in Tiger’s face. He was a mountain of a man, a hulking cliche of a henchman, every steroidal inch of him a goon through and through. The Jackal Brotherhood must grow these guys in vats, Tiger thought. Twenty tons for the price of one.
Tiger checked his pockets for an extra star, a weapon, anything. His only hope was to be quick on his feet, quicker than the goon, reflexes like a cat, pounce through the door and —
The man’s fist collided with Tiger’s chin.
My god did that hurt!
But the goon was going to have to be quicker if he planned to keep Tiger from —
And again. This time with the right side of Tiger’s face. He felt his teeth rattle, jar a little loose. He spat blood onto the dojo’s matted floor.
“Well that’s just rude,” he told the henchman. “Can’t a professional ninja try and kill a lackey without an unnecessary pummeling?”
He winced as the hulk of a man’s other fist swung into his gut.
“Was it the trying to kill you thing?” Tiger coughed. “That was just a joke, I promise.”
“Buddy,” the goon said, not yet even breaking a sweat, “you talk way too much.” He threw a kick at Tiger’s head. “And me killing you, that ain’t gonna be no joke.”
So Tiger had underestimated the goon. He could talk, for one thing. He might be little more than a thick wall of brute force and fists — which, even now, were acting like meat tenderizers against Tiger’s torso and lower body — but the Jackal Brotherhood hadn’t lobotomized him like they’d done so far with all the rest. Tiger must be getting closer. Jessica couldn’t be too far away now. If he could just get through that door…
“Your shoe’s untied,” Tiger said.
“Nice try,” the henchman said, knocking Tiger’s body to the floor. “But if you think I’m going to fall for that, you’re even dumber than you — ”
Tiger grabbed the laces, tugged, and, with his other arm, aimed an uppercut at the man’s unmentionables. If there was one thing ninja training taught you, it was to improvise.
The goon collapsed with a surprised oof, his fists now forgotten at his sides. The bigger they come, Tiger thought idly, getting to his feet. He tugged the shuriken free from the frame and raced out the door, leaving the muscle moaning behind him.
Now comes the hard part, he thought.
Other than that, it was just your typical Sunday around here.
Woke up first thing this morning to the sound of a barking dog, our barking dog, wanting to be taken outside. When you make a habit of occasionally stealing things off the kitchen table like, say, several rolls, you can maybe expect a little gastrointestinal distress a few hours later. But we came back in, and I went back to bed. I left him downstairs, but I can only presume Tucker did too.
I didn’t do too much with the rest of the day. I went to the library. I got a quick haircut. I read a little for Kaleidotrope. I wrote a little, too. And tonight I watched The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was okay but not great.
And that’s really it.
It was a slow day at work, but at least it was a half slow day, so there was that. I did manage to get several hundred books pulped before the end of the day, so I guess it wasn’t all wasted.
Actually, what happened was, earlier this week, I noticed by chance that one of our older titles, inherited from another publisher, was being sold in both its first and second editions. This isn’t standard practice; when a new edition publishes, the previous edition automatically goes out of print. So, by bringing it to the attention of production and getting the remaining stock of the first edition pulped, I was essentially just facilitating a process that should have happened a few years ago as a matter of course. Still, it feels kind of strange to be sort of directly responsible for destroying all those books.
But it was just a half day at work. The rest of the afternoon, I spent seeing Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Which, you know, is just ridiculously silly and infectious fun. I think the things that have sort of been turning me off from the comics — I’ve been halfway through the first book for many, many months now — are the characteristics of the title character we’re supposed to not like. I’m not really much of an old-school gamer or indie music/comics geek, but the movie was great fun. I’m having a tough time thinking of a recent movie that’s handled its special effects so expertly. (You could almost call the movie the anti-G.I. Joe in that respect.)
I figured I should see it now, before it’s gone from theaters altogether. There were only two shows on one screen at my local multiplex. The movie has been kind of a bomb (and not a Sex Bob-Omb) at the box office, and lots of people have been wringing their hands about why it’s a huge financial failure. It’s a shame, because the movie is a lot of fun, but it’s also not entirely surprising that it hasn’t caught on with a wider, more mainstream audience. I mean, the fact that a big-budget Hollywood movie was even made from a quirky indie relationship comic about twenty-something musicians in Toronto is kind of remarkable. And maybe it’s just that geeks have been getting spoiled by the mainstreaming of ComicCon and superhero movies and the like, but it’s not exactly like an indifferent mass audience and disappointing box office are unfamiliar territory. Yeah, the big box-office winners are increasingly drawn from the geek crowd, but it’s the Star Treks and the Iron Mans, not the Serenitys and the Scott Pilgrims.
That said, I had a blast. Probably not quite as much as the half dozen other people I saw it with, some of whom were reciting dialogue and singing along with songs, but I’d definitely recommend it. Hopefully it will play as well on the small screen as it did in theaters, because I think that’s the only place most people are likely to see it.
And that, really, was my Friday. Last night, I finished reading the last book in the Joe Pitt Casebooks — not bad, and a fitting enough ending — and today moved on to Paul Auster’s Invisible, after buying a copy on impulse at Penn Station. Auster used to be a real favorite of mine, but his recent novels have been a case of ever-diminishing returns. But the reviews on the jacket copy were quite positive, and so far it’s not bad, so we shall see.