writing

Some kind of Sunday

A pretty average Sunday. An enjoyable episode of Fringe, a disappointing crossword puzzle, and a fun bit of writing:

“Step away from the teleporter,” says Dupree — or maybe it’s his clone. Has that even happened yet? I glance at my watch, but of course it’s stopped — not just stopped; a large crack splits the face of it, the numbers beneath not just frozen but obscured by broken glass and chipped paint — and there’s no reason to think it would even be accurate if the hands were still moving. I can’t tell you the amount of trouble I’ve caused for myself lately by putting my trust in clocks. I look back at Dupree for some kind of telltale sign — his clone has…had…will have a thicker beard, doesn’t he? Or maybe a prosthetic leg? — but between the thick haze that settles in my brain every time we go through this dumb routine, and way he’s shouting and waving that gun at me, it’s hard to concentrate on much of anything but the most immediate concerns.

It’s only an hour later, when I’m tied to the chair in his cabin, that I realize, hell, what does it matter if he’s a clone or not? Dupree’s always hated my guts whichever version of him I’ve run into. I should just be glad this time he managed not to shoot me.

I should maybe back up. You find yourself saying that a lot when you’re a time traveler, especially when it’s of the accidental variety and you’re slingshotted back and forth without any real sense of control. You find yourself saying things like, “I should maybe back up,” and “Haven’t we had this conversation before?” and “Jesus, Dupree, for god’s sake this time around don’t shoot me in the goddamn head.” And yet you still find yourself repeating things, explaining yourself, and instructing Dupree’s clone on how best to pull shrapnel from your brain.

This is clearly an earlier Dupree. I should have known by the way he smells. Before I got here, he was living alone, in this badly heated shack in the woods, his own private Siberia, and he almost never bathed. It’s tempting to call him a mad scientist and just be done with it, but that implies some kind of basic understanding of the science he was toying with. Mad tinkerer is probably more accurate. He barely understood the principles he was building upon, much less the practical applications of his inventions. Take the “teleporter,” for instance. Before I got here, it just sat in a heap of other junk out back. It wasn’t until I stepped inside it — which, from the odors still wafting from the Dupree sitting across from me, I’d say is still months away — that he learned it was really a time machine.

A piece of crap time machine, if you ask me, but a time machine nonetheless.

I’m doing a little better cold-wise, but I still haven’t quite got it beat yet.

Sunday

A quiet day, spent mostly watching some television and muddling through the Sunday crossword. And then there was my weekly writing group:

“This muscular depressed woman has unruly strawberry-blonde hair, light brown eyes, and a mild case of acne. She wears a forest green turtleneck.”

“Bloody hell. Well, we did fear the worst. I won’t call him then.”

“Her. It’s a woman. Weren’t you listening? She’s a little muscular, but — ”

“How muscular is he?”

“She. Look, it’s like you’re intentionally misunderstanding everything I say.”

“Could the muscles and the acne be related somehow? Is this miscreant some kind of habitual steroid abuser?”

“Miscre–what? Who even talks like that? No, look, it’s just a mild case of acne. It flairs up whenever she’s under stress. She’s a bit self-concious about it and — ”

“I should bloody well expect so! What with the police investigating him and everything.”

“Her. And the police? What police?”

“You said he was under arrest.”

“Stress. Under stress. She’s not — Look, I just wanted to let you know, so that when she comes in here for the interview you’re not surprised and don’t start…well, being you. We don’t need a repeat of what happened with the last applicant.”

“Bloody villain that was! He threatened to kidnap the mayor!”

“He said you had something in your hair. And you did. What was that anyway, dried squid?”

“Nobody kidnaps the mayor of this city on my watch! Just tell that to what’s left of Johnny Octopus!”

“Yeah, I’m sure he and the whole Cephalopod Gang were a real menace to society. What was Johnny, like 87?”

“He was a wily old mollusk!”

“Maybe back in the nineteen-forties.”

“They led the Fuhrer to Atlantis!”

“Whatever. Look, the point is, you need a new sidekick, and you can’t go bad-mouthing, sucker-punching, or freeze-raying every last person who applies for the job.”

“Did I freeze-ray Mr. Forest Green Turtleneck here?”

“Ms. And no, but only because she hasn’t got here yet. And your freeze ray’s in the shop.”

“Bloody batteries.”

“Look, I’m just saying, don’t do anything crazy. Just be…job-interviewy. She comes highly recommended, the acne notwithstanding.”

“Refrerences?”

“Impeccable.”

“Dr. Charles Impeccable? Really? Hmm…Powers?”

“Acrobatics, mostly. She trained with the Mystic Zafir in Nairobi. So basic combat skills: knife-throwing, hand-to-hand, killer robot. But there’s also a rumor that she’s secretly the crown princess of a telepathic alien kingdom from the Marqu’andic Galaxy.”

“You made that up.”

“It’s on her CV.”

“Hmph. Turtleneck’s not much of a costume.”

“Look who’s talking, Mr. Sweatshirt and Blue Jeans.”

“I told you, woman! Casual Friday! Besides, the cape’s at the cleaners.”

“Look, I’m not saying you have to hire her. I’m just saying, keep an open mind. You have to hire someone. The agency isn’t going to keep insuring you with this lone wolf act you’ve had going since Benji died.”

“Allegedly died! The androids never found his body in the space vortex!”

“Fine, whatever. But for now he’s gone, and you need somebody out there with you, helping you to not be so…well, you.”

“Fine! I’ll see this so-called sidekick! Send him in!”

The first two paragraphs were a pair of (yes, quite odd) writing prompts, but the rest is all me. Not quite sure if that’s a good thing.

Some kind of week

I don’t quite know how this happened, but I wound up with more work at the end of today than I had at the beginning of yesterday. It’s really shaping up to be that kind of week.

I took a quick break in the middle of it to attend one of our regular “brown bag” lunches, this one with pizza — good, if cold, and with a real shortage of plates — and screenwriter Richard Vetere. It was okay.

Then this evening, it started to snow. Not a lot, and it’s already tapered off, but it’s sometimes nice to be reminded that it’s actually winter.

Monday various

  • Fringe wasn’t originally meant to have alternate universes. I am not even a little surprised by this. It’s only when the show settled on the alternate universe storyline, when it started having an ongoing plot that wasn’t based in creatures-of-the-week, that it went from being one of the worst science fiction shows on the air to being one of the best. (I highly recommend io9’s primer to anyone looking to get into the show for the first time. There’s a lot early on you can, and will probably want to, miss.)
  • In case you missed it, the best New York Times correction ever. [via]
  • Genevieve Valentine on suspension of disbelief (particularly in the movie In Time:

    If your movie is super high concept, and I decide to see it, I have probably, to some degree, already accepted the concept, you know? “Everyone in the future has a puppy surgically grafted to their chests.” Okay, fine, I promise not to spend a lot of the movie going, “Surgically grafting a puppy to your chest is a weird thing for a person to do.” I will, however, question every piece of outerwear that does not have a dog-head flap in it, or any moment in your movie where a character is like, “Well, now my dog has grown too big for my chest cavity and medical science didn’t allow for that in the many generations we have been living with these grafted puppies, so now it’s too late for me, you go on!” Because that is worldbuilding, and that you need to do. And the higher the concept is, the more work you need to do. (Moon, for example, requires little. Dark City requires more.

  • See also: Why fiction’s freest genres need its most rigid rules:

    In these genres, the fundamental realities of a world can be anything imaginable: There can be wizards, or dragons, or intergalactic spaceships, or time travel, or dragon-wizards in time-traveling intergalactic spaceships. Nothing can be assumed. Which makes it mighty easy for authors to cheat by changing the rules whenever it’s convenient to the plot: “Oh, did I not mention that dragon-wizard time-travel spaceships are sentient and can crossbreed to produce baby spaceships? Well, they can.”

  • And finally, Writers are Like Porn Stars. There, that ought to bring in some more comment spam. (SFW — it’s another io9 link — though the image is maybe a little risque for the workplace.)

Sunday

A quiet day, spent mostly failing to finish the Sunday crossword and joining my regular free-writing group. I wrote this:

It was the year of the dragon, which meant the restaurant was closed. There had been talk about a private party, local businessmen renting out the back rooms with their wives and children, sampling a fixed menu of platters and drinks, but in the end the cook refused — “Not for what you pay me,” he’d said as he walked out the door, taking most of the wait staff with him — and the businessmen’s families had gone somewhere else. Dao-ming had reluctantly shuttered the front doors, sent the rest of the staff home to be with their families — with pay, of course — and switched the restaurant’s phone line to voice mail.

Not that there were a lot of regular customers calling for reservations these days, or that she herself had anywhere else to be. Dao-ming stood in the door of the darkened kitchen, listening to the stillness of her father’s restaurant. The one he had opened in the year of the rat — how many years ago was that, now? Neither of them — nor her mother, nor her two brothers, all of them gone now — had ever paid much mind to astrology. “A bunch of old country crap,” her father had said; it was the kind of thing Americans liked, that customers expected to see: the red lanterns and gold Buddhas he had openly detested but still decorated the restaurant with on any occasion.

Only at the end, after he’d been diagnosed, after the cancer had spread through his liver like an oil slick across the surface of a lake, had her father found religion. Only then had he talked of omens and curses and fate, inauspucious signs he said he should have recognized, on which he should have acted. They never openly talked about the fire, about her mother, about Chang and Baoqi. He never blamed her; not once in five years had he ever blamed her. And like a good little drone, her father’s daughter, she never dared mention it herself. She kept the restaurant open, even as it continued to fail, and she buried him in the family plot where her mother and the two boys all were laid.

She was still here, still managing the books, though they saw a lot more red these days than ever before. She would have joked, had there been anyone to joke with — anyone but the staff, the cook and waiters, the hostess who most nights still worked the door — that it was red for the new year, the year of the dragon, each debit and loss secretly an omen of glad tidings. She didn’t believe it — that’s what would have made it a joke — but what else, really, could Dao-ming do?

That is all.