writing

Monday various

  • Here’s a question: Who inherits your iTunes library? Maybe a follow-up to that: would you want someone to inherit it?

    There’s a significant difference between shelves of books or stacks of records and folders of e-books or mp3s. There’s no re-sell value to the latter, for instance, either because of the difficulties of transferring the files or because of restrictions inherent in the licensing agreements we sign. So the only reason to bequeath your digital media is if you feel the person receiving it in your will actually will want it.

  • Ass-whooping on NPR.
  • In other news, they were still printing Nintendo Power Magazine?
  • Writing credits in documentaries: apparently a bigger issue than you might think.
  • And finally, Space Stallions!

    More information here.

Red Dawn of the Dead (or Sunday, Bloody Sunday)

I find it amazing, quite frankly, that it was a whole year ago that I was in Canada.

I have to say, just based on the short week I was there, Banff is definitely a place I would like to revisit. But, alas, not this year.

Nor did I try my hand again this year at the 3-Day Novel, despite the occasional e-mails that came in reminding me about it recently. I actually didn’t do any writing today, despite meeting with my weekly writing group. We spent more time talking about comics and books and the terrible, terrible abuses of adverbs. (Seriously, “He frowned moodily”?)

I have been, sort of, revisiting for the first time the novel I wrote that week. Not so much to wonder if there’s anything I can do with it, and certainly not to admire the writing craft on display in its pages, but simply because it’s been a year and I haven’t looked at it all since then. Maybe I’m just feeling vaguely nostalgic for that time, that freedom to just write, and the environment so conducive to doing so.

Anyway, for whatever it’s worth, here’s how that story I spent three days on starts off:

On the morning of April 37th, an unexpected chill in the air and the artificial sun just starting to rise, the last man from Mars fell to his death.

There would be no investigation, or at least nothing of any substance, even though suicides of this sort were exceedingly rare and almost impossibly difficult to pull off. The corporate owners of the Astraeus Building assured the local authority that they would give their full cooperation, even offering them unprecedented access to the rooftop gardens from which the Martian man had jumped. Only a select number of employees (and of course the AI responsible for tending these gardens) had this kind of access, and both the Astraeus Corporation and its parent company back on Earth were naturally eager to learn how the dead man had fallen from their site.

There was nothing to indicate corporate espionage; Astraeus had no direct competitors in the drug trade aboard the world-station, and anyone admitted to the hub was screened and tagged well before they would reach even the Building’s lobby. Beyond the novelty of the dead man’s origin, a fact that could only be proved conclusively after the initial DNA tests had been unsuccessful, there was nothing to suggest that he was anything other than a random malcontent. Astraeus was well within its legal quota of on-board addiction and overdose; statistically, there had in fact been fewer fatalities from their prodct this month than in any April on record. All the necessary paperwork was already on file with station central and at corporate headquarters. But of course there were always the occasional protests, the odd individual whose physiology — usually because of some undocumented, ill-advised, or illegal body modification — reacted poorly with whatever growth he or she had been sold and ingested. Astraeus was not immune to these difficulties. They were simply the cost of doing business in the orbital free-market.

Perhaps, then, that was all this was: the cost of doing business. Did it really matter, in the end, if the man was the last refugee of a dead red planet? Who even remembered Mars nowadays?

In the end, station authority agreed that it did not matter. A minor glitch in the AI system, which Astraeus promised to duly investigate and, if necessary, debug, was blamed for the Martian being on the rooftop in the first place. The drugs in the man’s own system — of which there were many varied growths and strains, all of which were easily cataloged against the company’s inventory — were a convenient excuse for the suicide. If anyone thought to ask why the gravitational containment field atop the Building had failed, allowing the Martian to fall thirty stories instead of just a few safe and customary inches, or how the last man from Mars had been admitted to the station hub in the first place — no fanfare, no warning flags — neither of these questions were noted in the final report. Brief mention was made to the slight chill in the morning air, with a note to the climate techs to look into it if they had an opportunity. No one suspected the station’s own safeguards had been tampered with.

And no one suspected that the last man from Mars had been pushed.

So that was today, more thinking about writing than writing itself. Plus the Sunday crossword, a pretty decent new episode of Doctor Who, an okay but still kind of disappointing Dawn of the Dead remake, and of course a brief run up and down the street in just my socks when my sister’s dog got off the leash and decided she didn’t want to come back inside after all.

Yep, just your average Sunday.

Shave and a haircut, two bits

I had what you might call a small mishap this morning.

I trim my beard every Sunday, which is only mildly annoying considering that I grew the thing initially just so I wouldn’t have to shave. I had to be clean-shaven throughout high school. If you weren’t, you would be handed demerits, along with a cheap electric razor to remedy the situation — as I once was — in front of a mirror in the men’s room. But laziness finally overpowered me my senior year of college, free from the shackles of Catholic high school. I let five o’clock become stubble, then beard, and aside from a brief madness that overtook me right before graduation, when I shaved the first beard off for reasons that now escape me, I’ve had a beard ever since. That’s some twelve years now. Laziness is a mighty powerful force.

My beard trimmer has different settings, depending on how close a trim one wants. I invariably go with seven out of nine, which isn’t very close at all, but which seems to work well enough for me. (The lower numbers don’t seem like a trim at all, actually, and I think are designed less for guys who wear beards than for guys who just want their chins to look slightly dirty.) It’s not perfect, and heaven knows a barber could probably do a better job, but along with a pair of scissors and an electric razor, I can emerge from the bathroom each Sunday looking at least mildly less scruffy and mountain-mannish.

The trimmer was not set on seven this morning. It’s always a good idea to double-check these things first. You can maybe see it better in this picture, but after just one quick pass with the trimmer, the right side of my face is looking a little patchier than usual. It could be a whole lot worse, I suppose, but it’s definitely not the look I was hoping for when I woke up this morning.

Rather than try to even it out on the other side, or go crazy and shave the whole thing off, I’ve decided to go the let-it-grow-out-and-hope-nobody-notices-between-now-and-then route. It’s not terrible looking. It’s not a bald spot, and the beard will continue to grow, just as friends and co-workers will continue to awkwardly notice it without saying anything about it. If I were actively dating, out and about on the singles scene, it would probably hurt my chances with the ladies. (And considering how little game I have otherwise, how awful I am at flirting, it’s maybe best not to chance that.) But you know, it could have been worse.

Now that I think about it, I’m thinking maybe that first beard got shaved off because of another trimming mishap. One wrong move and all that refusal to work can go right down the drain.

Other than all of that…it was a pretty ordinary Sunday. I did the crossword puzzle, and I joined my weekly writing group. I managed to write nothing about beards that entire time:

She was not a torturer by trade, only by happy accident.

The knives she had smuggled aboard when they refueled at Gethsemane, kept them well sharpened and out of sight of the Captain and XO, or any of the other crew who might eagerly report her and confiscate the contrabanded weaponry. They were holy relics, for one thing, to be removed from the space station only under penalty of death — or so she had been told during the ship’s brief and uneventful stay in its port. She cared little for the Gethsemans’ superstitious ways, had only admired the gleaming curves of the blades, the cracked leather stitched around each hilt. Crew aboard the Alexus were supposed to content themselves with a simple service-issue stun pistol, but here were weapons that could be truly useful. No, here were tools, she had thought, gorgeous and priceless in their utility, and she was amazed at how easily they slipped from the glass case in the alcove of the station’s temple. She had kept them hidden all these months, kept them ready, knowing that eventually they (and she) would be needed.

And now here was the prisoner, shackled to the far wall of the brig, unwilling to talk until the glint of sharpened steel had loosened his tongue, the words finally spilling as effortlessly as his blood on the prison cell’s floor. She would not kill him, she was sure — she had too much control for that — but she had come close, a knife’s edge away, in fact. But a body would lead to questions Captain Barton wouldn’t want to answer. He had not officially sanctioned her to do this, to undertake this interrogation; he was as easily shackled to the Corps’ regulations as the prisoner was to the bloodied wall. But he had not looked away when she stepped forward, seemed at first surprised, perhaps, but then gladly accepted her help. She could do what he could not, what as an officer he should not be expected to do.

Monday various

Sunday

I tried to watch some of the Perseid meteor shower late last night, but cloud cover — and what was probably not the best vantage point anyway — meant I didn’t see anything. (Beyond, y’know, clouds.) It’s okay, but I keep hearing such wonderful things about them and yet don’t think I’ve ever seen them for myself.

I didn’t sleep terrifically after that, for whatever reason, and it took a little while this morning to get Sunday firmly under my feet.

The crossword puzzle wasn’t much of a challenge this week, though clever enough. After lunch, I joined my weekly writing group and came up with this:

“Why are you so afraid?” the woman in the mirror asked.

The old witch stared back, anger coiling in her throat. She choked back what she was tempted to say, held back the rage knotting in her fists. Fury would not serve her well here, and she would not be goaded by this bothersome spirit.

“I am not afraid,” she said after a moment. “And you would do well to remember your place, djinn, lest you wish to gather dust in the tower for another thousand years.”

“I meant no disrespect, my queen,” said the golden-haired face hovering in the glass. Her face, reflecting all the beauty she had lost, showing none of the age and wear that ran like dusty rivers across the visage she now wore. The spirit dared mock her with this image.

“Then show your true form,” she spat, “and tell me why the girl yet lives. She ate of the poisoned apple, and you said — ”

“Which formula did you use?” the djinn asked.

A swirl of mist clouded the mirror, grayed it over like thin frost on a windowpane, then was just as quickly gone. The face was no longer the witch in her stolen youth, but was now the featureless, stony blank of the djinn’s true form — or what it had claimed was its true form. It had claimed many things, hadn’t it? Told her secrets of the dark crafts, spoken of prophecy and revelation, shown her the key to that meddlesome girl’s downfall. And yet where had it gotten her? The girl had not died, and she, the queen, was now a hag, hunched-back and broken, caught in this glamour, in no way the fairest of them all. She should have left the mirror where she found it, listened to the servants’ warnings rather than the riddles and rhymes so favored by the mirror’s sole inhabitant.

But the girl… It was bad enough that she should vie with the queen for her father’s attention, but that her beauty should be said (in some corners) to rival the queen’s own? No, that was intolerable. And that stupid huntsman had done nothing, had spared the girl’s life, bloodied his axe on a stoat or wolf rather than the girl’s slender neck. And the girl — her step-daughter, she thought with some revulsion — had escaped into the woods. And she lived. If the djinn could promise to undo all that, then what other choice did the queen have?

“What formula?” she asked. “The very one you spoke of, in the old books. I spoke the ancient spell, and she ate from the apple, but all she does is sleep.”

“Ah,” said the djinn. “Just another lesson learned.”

The ending doesn’t quite work — I was rushed trying to squeeze in that final sentence prompt — but I had fun with it.

Afterward, we went to see The Bourne Legacy…whose ending also doesn’t quite work, and which doesn’t do anything too remarkably. But what it does, it does intelligently, and I think it’s a solid B-minus.