writing

Pennywise lives

I don’t know what it is about this week. Maybe it knows that next week, and even the week after, are going to be considerably busier and it’s over-compensating. But oh man has there ever been nothing to write about this week.

I finished listening to It finally this afternoon. As I said here, it’s not a perfect book — it’s too big, in length and subject both, for anything like that — and it maybe is a little too long in places. Also, some of the characters — okay, Beverly mostly — get a little short-changed if not outright abused.

(There is, however, a nice moment nearer to the end when King takes what seems to have been his forgetting a character for several long chapters, and in fact maybe even confusing him with another character, and turns that into a feature. That the characters are interchangeable actually becomes somewhat important to the plot, and it’s a moment when you can maybe see the craft of the writing at work: King turning a first-draft mistake into an asset. Of course, it’s possible I’m just imagining that, and he had the whole thing planned out from page one. But, having read enough of King’s thoughts about writing, I don’t think that’s the way he works.)

Anyway, I really did enjoy revisiting it. I thought Steven Weber did a really excellent job reading the book, and the parts I hadn’t remembered well — I read it when I was a teenager — were some of the best parts.

Sunday

I did the crossword, I donated blood, and I wrote this on a free-writing prompt:

“There are no spaceships in the Bible.”

Praetor Corothas says this angrily, the menace unmistakable in his voice, and the young woman who has brought him the early-morning reports from the front backs away slowly. I wouldn’t have pegged him for a believer, much less one so quick to bristle at a perceived blasphemy, but he’s clearly struggling to contain what I think would — outside the burden of my presence, of course — be a white-hot, blinding rage. He knocks a half-empty coffee cup on its side and curses.

I’ve seen these reports, the missives the generals under the Praetor’s command have radioed in overnight, and the news is not good. Rebels attacking the northern cities, several dozen more Alliance troops dead, the command gates on Mount Aronson for the first time in a half-century breached. And yet what Corothas has decided to focus on, to the exclusion of all else, is this one tiny footnote: a small rebel encampment, three days hover-travel from central command, where Frank Bane and his followers have set up what from all accounts is their own private religion.

I shake my head at the nonsense of it all. Not at the religion, which for all I know is no more harmful than the Christianity of the planet’s original settlers (and which Corothas has apparently inherited), but at the thought that this tiny sect is even worth worrying about. Frank Bane is nothing. Charismatic, of course, and prone to violence; as a former soldier in the Alliance command he will bear watching — but that’s the only reason he’s in the morning’s reports at all. He left his commission with nothing, no allies, no support; so what if he’s scrounged together a few tundra-rats during his subsequent exile in the north? He’s sold them a bill of goods on which he can’t possibly deliver, and moreover I think everyone involved knows it. Everyone except for Corothas, that is. Our ships are secure, and we will honor our treaty with the Alliance. If a handful of rebels sees our ships as emissaries of God rather than the death that they are, doesn’t that make them less dangerous, not more?

It wasn’t a bad day.

“I love you but you have no idea what you are talking about.”


[deleted]

I went to see Moonrise Kingdom. It’s almost a parody of Wes Anderson movies, or, maybe more forgivingly, the apotheosis of them, but I quite enjoyed it, for all its quirks and affectations.

After, I came home, and joined my parents next door, for a barbecue in our neighbor’s backyard. It was nice. I met someone I went to junior high with, now the girlfriend of another neighbor, who I also went to junior high with. I don’t know what was weirder: realizing that junior high school was twenty-plus years ago, or realizing at the same time that it feels like at least twice that.

It’s Monday

Except for about ten or fifteen minutes this morning, when my subway train was stuck on the platform while someone in another car, apparently, received medical assistance, today was pretty much just an ordinary Monday. And to think, if I’d risked squeezing on to the over-crowded train that had pulled in five minutes earlier, I probably even had this much to report.

I spent the day mostly collating reviewer reports, contacting potential reviewers for other book projects, and combing the internet for syllabi and course listings and enrollments that might match the kind of instructors I have in mind.

And I did most of it while enjoying the audiobook of Stephen King’s It. It’s been years since I read the novel — which clocks in, across several audio files, at about 45 hours — but I had credits from Audible and wanted to revisit the book. So far, I’m really enjoying it, particularly actor Steven Weber’s reading. It’s not King’s most tightly plotted book by any means, but it’s maybe one of his best, and scariest, and it’s one that has some genuinely interesting things to say about childhood and fear. King reportedly wrote of the book later in a letter, “Never write anything bigger than your own head.” Which I’ve always liked to take both literally and figuratively, though perhaps also as advice not worth heeding.