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Any given Sunday

Just your average Sunday in these parts, what with the New York Times crossword puzzle, getting caught up on Eureka, and my weekly writing group. This week, we took as our prompt a pair of sentences picked at random from two random books, and the result, for me, was this:

The man on the beach was not moving. The slave looked at him and thought that he was one of the shipwrecked, who had made his way to the island. But if that was the case, where were the others, the man’s compatriots, and where was the wreckage of their ship? Where, moreover, were the shadowmen, who usually kept close watch over the shores and made quick work of any castaways unlucky enough to wash up on them?

The slave stared for a moment, then began to climb down the cliff to the rocky beach. It would not do to wonder. Dr. Kidder would be angry if he did not investigate; if a body had somehow escaped the attention of the shadowmen and their bloody rituals, that alone was worth any danger the slave might face. And if the man were somehow still alive…

But no, best to put that thought out of his head entirely. No one shipwrecked on the island had survived more than a single hour in almost forty years. The slave himself had been the last of them.

And yet, there the man was, his back to the slave and to the cliff, still facing the ocean. He was sitting up, but if he was breathing, the slave could not tell. Dr. Kidder had made many adjustments to the slave over the years, but so far eyesight had remained oddly resistant to the woman’s genetic manipulations. He had carried with him through the jungle a spyglass, but the man’s position on the beach made it difficult to tell if he was alive, even through its scope. The slave would need to examine the body up close to learn why it was still there.

“You needn’t come any further if you intend to kill me,” the man shocked him by saying. “I’m afraid I’ve already beaten you to it by being gutshot.”

And so it was. Coming around the rock, it was now clear to the slave that the man was still alive, but also that he would not be for much longer. Blood was everywhere, and the wound in the man’s stomach was obviously beyond repair. Even if the slave could somehow transport the man to Dr. Kidder’s laboratory, and he somehow survived the journey across the island, there was little hope that her science would be of any use. More likely, it would kill the man if the initial wound did not. And then he would belong completely to the shadowmen, and the slave would not wish that on anyone.

Perhaps he could lie to Dr. Kidder, say that he had not found anything. The vultures would get the man’s body before long, if the scavengers among the shadowmen did not. But the idea of lying to the woman…

Yeah, I think that story has some legs on it. I’ll be interested to keep working on it some.

Meanwhile, Heather has a really good story in the current issue of Bartleby Snopes. You should definitely check it out.

The Twentieth

The day got off to kind of a weird start when I logged on to Twitter under my Kaleidotrope account and tried to follow somebody, an editor whose work I admire and respect, and discovered that this person had preemptively blocked me. Well that’s strange, I thought, but there it was at the top of the screen: “You have been blocked from following this account at the request of the user.” We’ve never had any run-ins that I’m aware of, and I hope it’s just an accident or a misunderstanding. I’m disappointed that I’m blocked from seeing this person’s updates, but worried that the Kaleidotrope account is coming across as some kind of spammer. I honestly don’t update it as often as my personal account.

But, nothing really to be done about it, so I put it out of my mind and went to work. And of course, the half day on Friday turned out to be my busiest day of the whole week. I had corrections to make and reviews to solicit and a couple of other tasks I wanted to complete, and luckily I managed to do so just as the one o’clock hour was drawing near. I got home around 2:30, spent some time playing with the dog and watching this week’s episode of Top Chef, and generally just remembering why it’s more fun to hang out in the backyard with my iPad than in my cubicle at work.

Then this evening, I went to the mall and bought eyeglasses. I have the prescription, and while I didn’t get as good a deal as I might have at the eyeglasses factory outlet, I wound up with a decent price and what I hope are a nice pair of frames. I should have them in 7-10 days, so we’ll see I like them as much then.

And that’s really it. More than anything, I’m just shocked it’s already the 20th of August. Where does the time go?

Wednesday various

  • You know, if you’re going to get a tramp stamp lower-back tatoo…
  • The other day, I posed a question on Twitter and Facebook: grammatically, should it be the Beatles or The Beatles? I wasn’t interested so much in this particular example, but what people thought about the capitalization of the lead-in article. My question brought in a flurry of responses, some very well thought out, most in favor of capitalizing the “The,” only one (not in favor) citing an actual style guide, but I don’t think we reached anything like a consensus. It’s one of those things that boils down, for the most part, to personal aesthetics. I almost always write the Beatles, lower-case t, just as I almost always don’t italicize the “the” before “the New York Times.” You can find lots of people (and style guides) that dictate one or the other, but it pretty much comes down to personal preference. This particular example wasn’t work-related, so I didn’t have the APA style guide to fall back on. Despite what I usually do, this time I went with the capital T.

    I bring all of this up simply because I was amused to see my initial question listed among Wikipedia’s lamest edit wars. You have to know which battles are worth picking. [via]

  • No E-Books Allowed in This Establishment. Just lame.
  • On the one hand, I’m intrigued by the idea of an Outer Limits movie. On the other hand, maybe a financially troubled studio and a pair of Saw writers aren’t the best people to see it through.

    I do find it curious that none of the reports I’ve seen mention the more recent ’90s adaptation of the show — which, for better or worse, ran 5 years longer than the original.

  • And finally, Jacob Weisberg on Sarah Palin:

    The non-Sarah Dittoheads among us have to decide whether to regard this babble—favoring creation science, aerial wolf-shooting, and freedom of the press, so long as the press is “accurate”—as scary or funny. During the 2008 campaign, when there was a real chance that Palin could become the automatic successor to an impulsive, elderly cancer survivor, I found it more scary than funny. After McCain lost, and after Palin terminated her governorship in the effusion of furious gibberish known as her resignation speech, I have found it mostly funny. To be alarmed by Palin today presumes a Republican Party suicidal enough to want her to do more than run its weekend paintball games.

    Me, I’m still a little scared. In today’s politics of the right, crazy is quickly becoming the new sane, and crazy seems to love it some Sarah Palin, you betcha. [via]

Monday various

“Oh, this Twinkie thing, it ain’t over yet.”

I woke up pretty early this morning, even if you discount the weird dream that woke me up around 4 a.m. half convinced a pizza delivery was at the door. In my dream, I was searching for cash I didn’t have, and I think my own shout of “I’ll be right there!” may be what woke me up. I can’t say with any degree of confidence that I didn’t actually shout it in real life, too.

But no, it wasn’t just imaginary pizza delivery that got me out of bed early on a Saturday. My father wanted to take the car in for its annual inspection, and right before 8 a.m. on a Saturday is the best time to bring it to our local mechanic, just as he’s opening up shop. There used to a very convenient Saturday morning train between the station a block from his garage and the station a block from our house, but about a year ago the Long Island Railroad discontinued that train. (Which I found out the hard way when a five-minute train ride became a five-minute train, ride plus a twenty-minute walk, one early weekend maybe two years back.) So I drove over in the other car so I could offer him a ride back.

Only, they didn’t have any inspection stickers today. This is not an infrequent problem, but it’s really the only one we’ve ever had with this mechanic, so I guess we can’t complain. This morning we were delayed getting to the garage, first by a car in front of us that seemed convinced green meant stop, then by a car blocking our turn because he was pulled alongside a taxi cab and was chatting to the driver, and then finally by police cruisers blocking the railroad crossing that runs near the shop. We got there just before the owner did…but there was already somebody else waiting…and he got the last of the remaining inspection stickers.

So I guess we’ll try again next weekend.

Beyond that, I spent a lot of the day reading. I finished No Dominion, the second of Charlie Huston‘s “Joe Pitt Casebooks,” which I guess you could describe as hard-edged, vicious vampire noir. I liked it, same as the first book, Already Dead, and it was definitely a quick read. With it (and a novella or two that may or not really count), I’m only up to 25 books for the year so far, out of my hoped-for annual 50. So maybe it’s a good thing that this morning I bought a copy of the third Joe Pitt book, Half the Blood in Brooklyn. Like I said, they’re quick but entertaining reads.

I also read a few stories still kicking around in my slush pile for Kaleidotrope. I’m closing the zine to submissions in a week, for the rest of the year, so I’m trying to get through what’s still sitting in my in box not yet read.

I went for a walk, did a tiny bit of writing, and then had an idea completely out of the blue that makes perfect sense for the story I’m writing…but of course does mean I need to re-write and re-think pretty much everything I’ve put down so far.

I watched a couple episodes of Breaking Bad — which I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to discover — and then this evening Zombieland –which, if not remarkable, was a whole lot of fun.

And that was pretty much my Saturday.