writing

Easter parade

I went into Manhattan last night, with my parents, sister, and my sister’s husband, for dinner and a Broadway show. We saw Nice Work If You Can Get It, starring Matthew Broderick, which is still in previews. It was pleasant enough, good fun if not particularly memorable, and if Broderick himself was maybe a little stiff — my sister thought he was “clunky,” which I think is a little unfair, if not completely inaccurate — the show was entertaining. It’s a jukebox musical of Gershwin tunes, some of them awkwardly shoehorned into a silly, paper-thin story — and not all them, I’d wager, either of the Gershwins’ best — but most of the cast (including, for the most part, Broderick) is game, and I think we all had a good time.

Of course, when we arrived in the city, we discovered that the restaurant where we’d had our reservation was closed for the holiday weekend. There was a sign on the door, apologizing for the inconvenience and redirecting us to one of their other restaurants around the corner, but it was still something of a shock. We’d discover today that they’d sent an e-mail (complete with a 30%-off coupon) to apologize and let us know, but in the end it worked out okay. I still prefer the first restaurant to the second, but we had a nice meal nonetheless. (I had roasted duck breast to start — creamy lentils, duck confit, sherry caramel — and then suckling pig — with bacon onion marmalade and toasted almonds. Although the goat cheesecake with sherry poached pears for dessert was probably the best part of my dinner.)

Anyway, that was yesterday. We got home late, after midnight, so I didn’t post anything here about it. Today, we didn’t do much of anything. I did the crossword puzzle, watched Community, went with my sister and her husband to buy Easter plants for my mother, and probably ate a little too much candy. No writing group again this week, because of the Easter holiday, but hopefully we’ll start meeting up again next week.

In the meantime, I still have a lot of Kaleidotrope submissions to get through. I’m starting to get queries — rightly so — asking about submissions I may not have even had a chance to read yet. It’s not quite at the point where I’m seriously thinking about hiring on a slush reader — what guidelines would I give them? — but it is a little overwhelming.

At least I’m temporarily closed to submissions, so I can get something of a reprieve. Meanwhile, the latest issue is still there for your reading pleasure… Just saying.

Happy Easter! (Or Passover, or Sunday, or whatever.)

Sunday

I didn’t finish the Sunday crossword this week. I didn’t even get very far in it. The theme, which you can read about here — yes, I read a crossword puzzle blog, but only one, and usually only once a week — was challenging without also being that other thing. You know, fun.

I did watch a few more episodes of The River, which I guess is okay if a little too episodic. It’s a bit like Fringe, in a way, in that there’s lots of weird things happening — in The River‘s case, scary things, shot in shaky-cam and found-footage style — and it’s all supposed to be connected in vague, undefined ways. (It’s telling, I think, that Fringe was a genuinely bad show before it figured out how those things were connected and stopped being freak-of-the-week.) Still, The River is surprisingly entertaining, even if there do seem to be some diminishing returns since the premiere.

Oh, and I wrote this little thing in my weekly free-writing group. It took me forever to get there, of course, thanks to bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Southern State Parkway. There appeared to be an accident on the other side, meaning traffic in my three lanes might just have been caused by rubbernecking — which makes me angry — but there also seemed to be several cars that were drag racing or something close to it, complete with cameras — which just makes me angrier.

Anyway, based on three randomly selected prompts, I wrote this:

There were some aboard who called her the Tempest, though never to her face, or even within earshot, knowing too well what she did to those who displeased her or questioned her judgment. The crew need only remember their former captain, and the few mates who had rallied behind him, to know how easily she, the stormbringer, the demon woman, could turn to violence and anger; they need only remember the fire that had flared, so briefly and yet so hideously, in her jet-black eyes as she relieved the captain of his command; and they need only gaze at what was left of the old seadog’s bones, bleached from the sun and the harsh ocean waves, strung above the cabin the stormbringer had since taken as her own. None of the crew, even those who dared whisper this name or others in secret, dared cross the woman — they dared not even wonder aloud if she WAS a woman — and they would not dare suggest that they turn the ship back now. There was not a man aboard who had not given the shores of England up as lost.

The Duchess Maribel was, of course, another matter entirely, although only because, to her, a life in London society had seemed the worst possible fate, to which the stormbringer’s whims, however dangerous and unpredictable, could hardly compare. Had she been among the enlisted crew, she might have thought differently, but she too was a stowaway. She would have gladly remained the only one, and moreover have remained undiscovered in the ship’s hold, stealing passage to the new world, a new life — and likely would have done so, had it not been for that meddlesome elder apprentice and his conjuring gone wrong. He had paid for it with his life, the first of the summoned demon woman’s victims, but Maribel had paid for it with her discovery, and by a crew of men already pushed quite literally to the edge. Maribel feared not only return to England, nor the murderous intentions of the strombringer, who had seized control of the ship and diverted them away from it, but that she, Maribel, would be forced to sacrifice her virtue, the only bargaining chit she had left.

Thankfully the men had been distracted by the storms that raged on all sides for most of each day, the storms that sped them on to whatever destination their bringer had in mind. But surely these storms — these tempests — could not last, and in a quiet or stolen moment, she would find herself cornered in some part of the ship by a crewman with too much drink and too little sense pushing him on. She would find herself at the end of his blade, her virtue forfeit, if not her life, and then all was lost.

Though perhaps Kincaid, the young tactical officer — the one they said spent his nights in the stormbringer’s bed — perhaps he…perhaps she could go to him for protection, or…but no, she would not do that. She would sooner die.

It gets away from me a little bit, especially near the end, as I rushed to fit all of the writing prompts into it. But I think there might be something here, and I had fun writing it at least.

And there were only a couple of crazy, hotrodding drivers on the parkway on the way back home.

That was basically my Sunday.

Sunday

I was back to my normal Sunday schedule, despite the pox on all our houses that is Daylight Savings Time. (I’d give up that extra hour in autumn and accept a more gradual transition to longer days, no problem, if we could call DLS quits altogether.)

I did the Sunday crossword, and I went to my regular writing group. Here’s what I free-wrote in the time alotted:

“The race is not to the swift,” said Father Bellowes, not for the first time quoting his favorite Ecclesiastes to bore his already half-comatose students. As always, if he noticed their vacant stares and drooping eyes, chins propped up with hands to keep them from thunking against desks, it slowed his oratory not one bit. “Nor is the battle to the strong. You all would do well to remember that.”

He paused, perhaps for breath, and in unison the boys in the class nodded — “yes, Father” — and as one hoped that the priest would use this moment to remember himself the results of their midterm exam. The fifth period bell was only five minutes away, by the clock hung above the door, and in the last hour so far, Father Bellowes had done little but quote scripture at random and sketch obscure mathematical proofs on the chalkboard. (The fact that he was ostensibly teaching 18th-century European literature had never seemed to prevent his doing this.)

“I suppose,” Father Bellowes seemed to muse, “I should take this opportunity to share with you the results of last Friday’s exam. Though, as the Bible tells us, in its way, exams are not the sum of a man. Despite this exam, of course, being worth half your grade for the year.”

It was at this moment, to the boys’ collective dismay, that the sky shattered. The sun split in two, the hands of the clock spun crazily in reverse, and Father Bellowes became suddenly frozen in place.

This HAD happened before. The computing power needed to keep the school’s virtusl environment operational was massive, dwarfing even the great super-processors of old. When they’d escaped Earth, they were supposed to have left limitations like this behind them; in embracing AI aboard the station and ceding it control, they were supposed to have worked bugs like this out of the system. At least, that was what their parents kept saying.

But here was Father Bellowes, a piece of the AI’s program, locked in place, mid-sentence. A giant tear ran across the length of the sky outside the window, a jagged scar splitting the sun and its twin, and revealing a stream of what looked like ash-gray static beneath.

Collectively, the boys sighed — though only some out of real consternation and some just mimicking the crowd. (It was an open secret that almost a third of the class were themselves digitized. There were hardly enough children in the millenial enclave to fill an entire school.) They’d been warned never to panic when hiccups like this happened, but also not to leave the room or, if possible, their seats. The AI would right itself; it always had. A few patient minutes was hardly asking too much, was it?

After all, things were much worse in the other enclaves. The boys didn’t want to try their luck with the warlords, did they?

I’m not really happy with it, but such is often the nature of free-writing off a prompt.

After writing, my friend Maurice and I went see the surprisingly quite fun John Carter of Mars. It was a nice end to what’s been an exceptionally long week.

I go back to work tomorrow, so let’s keep our fingers crossed for no return of the pneumonia.

And the lack of Oscar coverage goes to…

I suppose today was Sunday, wasn’t it? I did the New York Times crossword — though was taken a little aback to find “sext” as one of the answers, to the even worse clue “Send some pixxx?” — and I wrote something:

[removed]

No mean feat, that, considering how cold and noisy the Panera Bread my weekly writing group meets in these days was.

Tonight, I’m reading comics and turning in early. The cold, or at least the cough, is still there, though much improved. (Or, rather, I’m much improved, and the cold…well, you know what I meant.) I’m not even bothering with the Oscars.

A many-storied life

This morning, I took the train to Mineola, to pick up my parents’ car, which had been in the shop for its yearly inspection and some repair since Saturday. My father would have picked it up, but he took pretty ill with a stomach bug yesterday and is only now really recovering. Plus, I was going out after work in Manhattan this evening, and it’s always easier to get a train to Mineola in the evenings. So I paid for the repair (admittedly, with my father’s pre-signed check) and parked the car, then caught the next available train into the city.

It was a pretty normal day after that, although I still dealing with this cold, which just won’t let go, and whose accompanying cough has gotten phlegmier and worse as the day’s gone on. I feel bad that I probably gave my father this cold on top of his stomach bug, but since yesterday I’ve been worried the stomach bug was going to hit me. We really have no idea what caused it, and there’s little that he ate that we didn’t that might have caused food poisoning. So I’m still on the lookout for germs, nervous when noon rolls around and I decide, nah, I don’t really feel like eating lunch. (I think it’s the cold, screwing with my appetite, especially since I was hungry by around 2:30 and had no real problem with dinner.)

Anyway. This evening, I attended An Evening With One Story Magazine at Symphony Space. Thanks to Heather, I’m a subscriber to the magazine, and I’ve long been a fan of Selected Shorts. Tonight’s event, with four actors reading stories (and all four authors in attendance) was really great, and I definitely plan on checking out more of their work in the future.

I’m really bad about keeping up with reading One Story issues, but they do some fine work.

Oh, and then on the train home a pair of drunks sat down next to me, obviously just from a game — probably hockey at the Garden — and being really obnoxious. I got up and switched cars before it turned into anything, since I just wasn’t in the mood — when is anyone? other than when drunk themselves, that is? — but I was…I don’t think amused is the word, but it was interesting when a police officer stopped me as I left the train and asked, “Did that guy say something to you?”

“No, he’s just an annoying drunk,” I told her. Which was true. He looked like the sort of guy who would have continued saying something, maybe even done something, which was why I moved.

Right into a car with a young woman who’s cough, amazingly enough, sounded worse even than my own.

Ah, Wednesday.

It is Wednesday, right?