writing

The dark ages

If you’re wondering where I’ve been the past few days, why no Song of the day posts or daily write-ups, the quick answer is: we lost power.

If you haven’t been wondering, the answer’s the same, but you wound me. Truly, you wound me.

As you may have heard, the east coast of the U.S. recently experienced…well, let’s call it a semi-severe hurricane. It certainly wasn’t as severe as hyped, but all told it caused a fair amount of damage — I think estimates put it at the eighth most destructive recorded hurricane, but I don’t have those estimates in front of me — with several deaths and extensive property damage. Here in New York, we escaped relatively unscathed, with Irene reclassified as a tropical storm by the time in made landfall sometime on Sunday.

But also sometime on Sunday, around one in the morning, we lost electricity in the house, on the block, and pretty much across the island. Here on our little street, we’ve yet to get it back, some three days later.

My iPad conked out on me Sunday afternoon, and my office was closed because of all the problems with the trains and buses (which NYC had shut down on Saturday, in anticipation) the storm had wrought. So it wasn’t until today that I got my hands (not literally) on a working electrical outlet, so I could recharge what needed recharging. Namely, everything.

Which is good, because my last day in the office for a while is tomorrow. On Thursday morning, crack of dawn, I’m headed to Canada for a week at the Banff Centre in, appropriately enough, Banff. I’ll be meeting Heather while I’m there, attempting to write a three-day novel, and quite possibly riding a horse. The first of these sounds quite nice, but the other two are quite possibly the early stages of madness. We shall see.

And not to worry, while I’m gone, there will be some posts here. On Saturday, as the rain picked up outside, I spent some time post-dating stuff. That’s where the daily link posts have been coming from, and there will be songs of the day aplenty while I’m gone. Maybe even a Random Friday Guess 10. If time permits — and I’m not thrown dangerously from either the horse or the novel — I may even check in from time to time. I’ll certainly be checking in via my Twitter page. Now may be the moment you’ve been waiting for to join and follow me there. C’mon! I thought Twitter was dumb before I started, too!

Anyway, one more day of work, possibly several more days without power, and a long morning of traveling to Alberta on Thursday. Till then, it’s mostly reading and games of Monopoly — we played, my parents and sister and me, on Sunday; I won — by flashlight. It’s shaping up to be a weird week.

Spiderday

Let’s see what I did today…

I started but didn’t finish the Sunday crossword. There wasn’t much of a theme to this week’s puzzle, and overall it was disappointing. Not what I’d call difficult — and plenty of others have, perhaps rightly, been quick to call it easy — but nothing to really engage my brain.

I watched this week’s episode of Torchwood, which was surprisingly good after an increasingly disappointing — and last week fairly disastrous — run. The episode was not without its flaws, particularly in its ending, but I think they were flaws typical of Torchwood, actually. (Even the stellar Children of Earth miniseries is not without its missteps.) I think I’d hang this episode alongside any of the other fairly strong second season episodes. It underlines some of the real problems with the new miniseries, of course — namely, that it’s five episodes too long and the move to America has gained them practically nothing — but it was nevertheless quite good on its own. When Rex says, “I’m sick of Torchwood acting like amateur clowns,” it was like he was speaking for the audience.

I watched an episode of The West Wing. I’m slowly working my way through the first season again. I think I gave up on the show some time in the fourth or fifth season. (That sounds early, but I have distinct memories of being distinctly disappointed in “The Long Goodbye,” which is apparently a fourth-season episode.) I feel like I’d like to make it through the show in its entirety this time.

And I wrote this in my weekly writing group:

“So if I understand you correctly,” said Pierce, eying the large shape on the medical gurney, “you sewed a robot’s brain into a zombie.”

Dr. Wills sighed. “That’s a fairly crude way of describing our work here, Robert.”

Pierce nodded. “But not wholly inaccurate,” he said. “You’ll have to grant me that. I’m just wondering about the horror show that happens when you switch it back on.”

“We’ve seen an 80 to 90 percent decrease in cognitive impairment when the subjects are connected to the AI network,” Wills said. “And moreover, we’ve documented increased susceptibility to traditional conditioning measures. The fact remains, Robert: we’ve tamed them, made them serviceable.”

“They’re still carriers, though. They’re still infected.”

“Well obviously. We weren’t tasked with finding a cure.”

“And their…aggressive tendencies…?”

“Within acceptable levels. We’ve sustained very few losses since the start of the program. A few careless techs, the occasional bite. And, not to be crass, but those losses were actual increases to our subject pool.”

“So they’re ready to be deployed, then.”

“Absolutely. Besides — ” Wills waved his hand absently at the gurney ” — here, we have a dozen soldiers ready to go.”

“And they can pass for civilians?” Pierce asked.

“They won’t fool a blood test,” Wills said, “but there’s nothing about any of them to arouse immediate suspicion. Visible wounds obviously won’t heal subsequent to infection, but those we’ve connected to the network look perfectly human. They’ll slip past the enemy border without incident.”

“And then?”

“Well then, Robert, we just turn them off.”

“And let zombies be zombies.”

“That was the plan, wasn’t it? Infiltrate, decimate. You and your taskmasters — why, Robert, you sound disgusted, surprised even.”

“No. I just…” He stared again at the infected body struggling against the gurney’s restraints. “Your daughter was very beautiful.”

Oh, and then this evening I got really creeped out by what I think was a wolf spider crawling on the curtains by my bed…which appeared just long enough to do the aforementioned creeping-out, and then promptly vanished. It’s not exactly newsworthy or anything, but if I awake with radioactive web-slinging superpowers, I just want you all to know why.

Rain city

It poured rain for most of today.

I didn’t sleep terrifically last night, still feeling some of the effects of the Allegra, which will probably take a couple of days to fully work itself out of my system. If my allergies continue to be bad in another week or so — and my red and itchy eye, cough, and persistent sneezing suggest they just might — I may try the Claritin again, since the active ingredient’s different, and in the past I’ve taken it without incident. But the other still has me feeling a little antsy at times, and it’s a feeling I don’t really enjoy.

I spent the day working (though not yet finishing) the Sunday crossword and watching Torchwood (just awful) and Breaking Bad (terrific, though not, y’know, in any way calming). I also went out to Huntington for my weekly writing group. We spent several hours, my friend and I, talking about books and movies and TV, discussing our writing, and I wrote this:

Jake stares at the hypnotic display of readouts on the wavecycle’s computer screen, wishing, not for the first time, that he had paid closer attention in that morning’s flight class. He knows, almost instinctively, and from the pressure readings up and down the arms of his own flight suit, that the cycle wasn’t built for altitudes like this. The wind shear alone would have sent a saner man back to the ground. There are already ice crystals starting to form along the front engine block, and probably more on the underside of the cycle, away from even that much radiant heat. But Jake doesn’t know what any of the lights on the computer display actually mean — if a flashing red bar indicates danger, if a blinking yellow number suggests the fuel reserves are running low, if a swirling block of taupe means —

Who the hell designs a computer readout in taupe?

Jake knows he shouldn’t be this high up, but short of the fiery obvious, he doesn’t know how to reunite the wavecycle with the ground. The radio’s been shorted out for at least a thousand feet, not even static; and while he’s somehow managed to slow his ascent, Jake and the cycle are still rising. Soon enough, he’ll have to switch to the oxygen tanks to keep breathing, and soon after that the oxygen will run out altogether, seeing as how the tanks both are less than half-filled and Jake’s never mastered that Zen-like slow-breathing crap they tried spoon-feeding them in flight class. If Jake can’t figure out how to turn the cycle back around, and soon, he’s going to run out of air, and ice crystals are going to start forming on his underside as well.

He thinks back to that morning, less than two hours ago now, and his stupid insistence on taking the wavecycle out on a solo flight. Captain Demond hadn’t been looking for volunteers, but Jake had volunteered all the same. He wasn’t looking to get up in the air so much as for an excuse to get off the base. The wavecycle itself quite frankly bored him, archaic and clunky in its design, largely abandoned by most of the branches in favor of larger troop transports or more aerodynamic aerial attack craft. It was old and looked unstable, just another random relic dumped here with all the rest. But it would take him up and out, and that morning Jake had somewhere else he desperately needed to be.

This was more a writing exercise than a piece I’d develop into anything else. There are lots of places it could go, sure, but nothing I feel really compelled, or even particularly interested, to write. It was more for the practice of crafting sentences, rhythms, phrasing, that kind of thing, than the development of any real story. Sometimes that’s all these are, but sometimes that’s good enough.

That was Sunday

A quiet day, a rainy evening. I spent it doing the crossword, watching a couple of Torchwood episodes — I think I’ve revised my opinion of the new miniseries to “mostly awful” — and writing. For instance, I wrote this at my weekly writing group:

“Someone is killing our spies,” said the prefect, sipping at his tea. “It’s getting on Consul’s last remaining nerve, I can tell you.”

“I thought officially you didn’t have any of those,” Marcus said. He let his own tea grow cold on its saucer. “Spies, I mean. Isn’t that Consul’s position, that espionage…what was it? Is detrimental to a free and open society?”

“That is the party line, yes,” the prefect said. “Regrettable, but a political necessity. And yet we still have enemies, as you are well aware. The Nelgreb, for one, have been encroaching on our space for years, to say nothing of the Praxium Affinity and their deathships, who would gladly wipe us from the face of the earths if given the chance.”

“Hence the spies,” Marcus said.

“Hence the spies. Yet now, they appear to be turning up rather…well, murdered.”

“Enemy agents?” Marcus asked. “The Affinity doesn’t usually like to get its hands dirty like that. And even the Nelgreb don’t often stoop to kill individuals…unless your boys and girls got sloppy and provoked them?”

“They did no such thing,” the prefect said. Marcus enjoyed watching him bristle. “These were our elite cadre of intelligence officers. But you misunderstand me. These were not field agents.”

“But I thought you said — ”

“Someone is killing our spies at home,” the prefect said, well aware he now had Marcus’ full attention. He even smiled, damn him. “Someone is murdering them one by one within the Citadel walls.”

“That’s not possible.”

“And yet…” The prefect reached for a folder in the open drawer behind him, then spread the contents on the table beside the teapot. “Eight officers in total have already died, in rather a gruesome manner. You’ll find vidgraphs in there, detailing the attacks…although, I warn you, they’ll likely put you off these delightful cucumber sandwiches.”

Marcus let the man eat. Eight officers, and in the Citadel no less. Such a thing shouldn’t be possible. There was Homeworld conditioning, for one thing; he’d undergone that himself before the long exile, and he knew for a fact the psychological blocks were nigh impossible to break. But there were also external safeguards against it. There had been no real violence in the Citadel for almost two hundred years, much less a murder, much less eight. Off-world he had seen violence, quick and brutal death aplenty, but here in the heart of the empire’s government, he’d never seen anything like what was in the vidgraphs playing out now on the sheets before him.

“So you can see why we requested your particular set of gifts,” the prefect said, dusting crumbs from the side of his mouth. “Why we allowed you to come back.”

It was an odd attempt to mix the genres of international intrigue, space opera, and slasher horror of all things, but I had fun with it.

Then this evening, I watched The Joneses, which was decent.

That was Sunday.