writing

Is it really over?

It seems insane that I’m going back to work tomorrow. It’s absolutely necessary, I understand that much. I have several huge projects I need to finish as soon as possible, and I need to squeeze in as much work as I can into the next three very short weeks. Which would be difficult even if this wasn’t the end of the year — and moreover the end of the semester for the academics from whom I’m trying to secure reviews and meetings. But I’ve been out for over a week, and the little bit of work I did in that time notwithstanding, it’s very easy to get used to being on vacation.

I have to make sure I find the time to write. Even Thanksgiving sort of threw me for a loop, and I haven’t touched this short story since last Wednesday.

Today, I mostly read other people’s stories, submissions for Kaleidotrope. Everything I accept now will go into 2014, or even later, and so I’m trying to be even more critical about what I accept, both for my and the writer’s sake. I’m not paying a lot of money for what I accept — relatively, pro-ratedly speaking — but I am spending money. (This is what I do in lieu of travel, I suppose, or a social life.) And I also don’t want to have to start telling people, “I like your story. But I can’t publish it for another couple of years.”

It’s a learning process, a work in progress. There are things I truly love about it — things I increasingly love about it — and there are also times when I’m tempted to walk away from the zine altogether. I already have enough for the next five or six issues, though, so maybe that won’t happen just yet.

No James Bond today. After the last three fairly disappointing outings, I think I’m going to give them a slight break. (The Man With the Golden Gun was pretty dismal.) I’m still interested in the rest of Roger Moore’s tenure, as well as Timothy Dalton’s outings. I’m less keen on Pierce Brosnan’s, though only because I remember how not very good a lot of them were. But I have the collected set. So I’ll get around to it. But I’ve watched four — five with the most recent Skyfall — just in the past week alone. So I could use a Bond break.

That, and the crossword puzzle, was my Sunday.

Do I really have to go to work tomorrow?

Saturday

I’m pleased to say that while I did absolutely bring my laptop home with me from the office yesterday, and while I have glanced at a few e-mails since then — on the iPad, not the laptop — I have yet to do any actual work beyond that. I still might, if only because I have so much of it to do, and because the end of the year is fast approaching. (I also feel like I need to justify bringing the computer home with me in the first place, after Windows Update caused me to miss my earlier train.) But today I largely ignored it. I don’t officially go back to work until a week from Monday, and I am, technically, on vacation.

It’s a vacation more in spirit than in deed. I had paid time off I needed to take before the end of the year. My sister, who’s visiting this weekend, recently went on a cruise to Turkey and Greece, and my parents have taken to travel in recent years as well, now that they’re both retired (or weeks away from it, in my father’s case). It must be nice. Apart from a day trip to Danbury, Connecticut, and a few days on campuses in Maryland, I haven’t been anywhere all year. Even my next work-related trip, if I can set it up, will probably only be somewhere out here on Long Island. The last time I went anywhere, it was to Canada for a week a year ago. And before that, Vegas, which — and I had to double-check this to be sure — was way back in 2009. I’m not looking for any great globe-trekking, but something a little more exciting than a week stuck at home — of which I’ve had, several this year, thanks to sickness, weather, and PTO — would be nice.

This evening, my parents, my sister, and I drove out to Port Jefferson for a birthday dinner for my aunt. The restaurant was okay, but unremarkable — a dessert sorbet was basically a large, unappealing dish of frozen cranberry juice — but it was a nice evening.

The rest of the day I spent doing not much of anything. Though I actually wrote some, working on the start of a short story, which I haven’t been doing in way too long. Maybe it was Heather‘s tales of her recent writing residency, maybe I was just feeling inspired by the prompt I stumbled upon. But it felt good to flex those muscles again, even if I didn’t end up writing very much.

As much work as I have to do — and I do — I think I’d be rather pleased if I actually spent more of the coming week writing something that didn’t involve textbook pedagogy and using my “vacation” that way.

Wednesday various

  • A lot has been written recently about the “film,” Innocence of Muslims, notably its offensiveness to Muslims (and film lovers), the violence that’s erupted in its wake, and the duplicitous nature with which it was made. Now, via Neil Gaiman one of the actresses speaks out:

    It’s painful to see how our faces were used to create something so atrocious without us knowing anything about it at all. It’s painful to see people being offended with the movie that used our faces to deliver lines (it’s obvious the movie was dubbed) that we were never informed of, it is painful to see people getting killed for this same movie, it is painful to hear people blame us when we did nothing but perform our art in the fictional adventure movie that was about a comet falling into a desert and tribes in ancient Egypt fighting to acquire it, it’s painful to be thought to be someone else when you are a completely different person.

  • I’m not quite sure I buy into the idea of Breaking Bad as a “White supremacist fable” entirely — it’s probably true the show doesn’t get the drug trade right, but, then, it’s not really about the drug trade, is it? — but there’s some interesting food for thought here:

    White-washing the illegal drug market involves depicting it like markets wealthy viewers are more comfortable and familiar with, namely those of the farmers market or the local pharmacy. Walter White combines the ostensible moral complexity television audiences demand in a post-Soprano protagonist with a cleanliness that allows him to market expensive cars. The U.S. is still very much a white supremacist country, but classic cowboys-kill-Indians narratives don’t play with wealthy viewers or the critics who help determine those tastes. And Jack Bauer can drive only so many cars. For the credulous viewer who likes to imagine he’s a couple of life crises from being the Larry Bird of meth — and for the people who sell him stuff — White is right.If nothing else, the article makes me want to re-watch The Wire.

  • John Green on self-publishing and Amazon:

    Here’s my concern: What will happen to the next generation’s Toni Morrison? How will she—a brilliant, Nobel-worthy writer who doesn’t have a huge built-in audience—get the financial and editorial support her talent deserves? (You’ll note that there’s no self-published literary fiction anywhere near the kindle bestseller lists.) Amazon will have absolutely no investment in that writer, and they won’t need to. Over time, I’m worried this lack of investment will hurt the quality and breadth of literature we actually read, even if literature remains broadly available.

  • This isn’t new, but: Jonathan Coulton on the future of music, 3D printing, and scarcity:

    This is my bias: the decline of scarcity seems inevitable to me. I have no doubt that this fight over mp3s is just the first of many fights we’re going to have about this stuff. Our laws and ethics already fail to match up with our behaviors, and for my money, those are the things we should be trying to fix. The change is already happening to us, and it’s a change that WE ARE CHOOSING. It’s too late to stop it, because we actually kind of like a lot of the things that we’re getting out of it.

  • And finally, PBS asks, “Can fandom change society?” [via]

Sunday

A pretty average day. The New York Times crossword and the writing group. I wrote this:

The man in black couldn’t sing a note, which is how Julie says you know he couldn’t be the devil. Lucifer, she tells Jack, was the angel of all music. He was also the father of all lies, Jack wants to say, but doesn’t. He has his own reasons for not believing what the townspeople have said about the man, the rumors that have started to spread, and he doesn’t need to argue the point with his sister. The devil can go get his own damn advocate.

Jack’s locked the man up, of course. As sheriff, and after what happened last night at Grady’s, how could he not? But running the man’s prints and sending his photo up to county is one thing; putting stock in what some of the survivors have claimed is another. He opened fire, that much is clear. Jack took the guns off the man himself, emptied the antique things into evidence, and saw first-hand the bloody handiwork they’d done. Eight dead, at last count, and Bill Grady himself still touch and go, a bullet busting ribcage, piercing lung, and then lodging itself in the empty wall above the bar.

That’s where Jack found it this morning, digging it out of the plaster and wood with a penknife. Not that there’ll be much call for matching ballistics, or that they’ll even be able to do it here, on site. The bullet and guns will be shipped, along with the man himself if Jack has anything to say about it, downstate. And the bullets will be a match, there’s little doubt of that in Jack’s mind. Homemade, from the look of the slug sitting bagged on his desk, and the guns themselves at least a century old. Amazing they didn’t just explode in the man’s face.

No, they’ll send the man down to county to be arraigned. If Judge Keach tries to give Jack any grief over that, he’ll just tell her some of the stories he’s been starting to hear, the crazy talk that’s sprung up in the wake of last night’s bloodbath. Blood on his hands or not, the man deserves a fair trial, and that’s not going to happen in a town that’s half-convinced he’s the devil himself.

“Have you even listened to him sing?” Julie asks. Like Jack needs this now, like he needs even more crazy, this time from his sister. “Can’t sing a note, worst I’ve ever heard. And that’s not the voice of the Morningstar.”

He really doesn’t need this. Of course Jack’s heard the man sing. It’s loud and off-key and hasn’t stopped for more than hour since last night. Nothing Jack can recognize, but that’s for the county psychiatrists to puzzle out.

The whole thing pretty clearly was influenced by this week’s Western-themed Doctor Who. (“Anachronistic electricity, keep-out signs, aggressive stares — has someone been peeking at my Christmas list?”)