writing

Sunday adjustments

This afternoon, two friends and I went to see The Adjustment Bureau. It was kind of meh, decent if unremarkable, with some good chemistry between its leads but a little too much boredom and platitude in its action sequences. (Keith Phipps calls it “like The Matrix, as remade by the Hallmark Channel.”)

After the movie, the three of us went to a nearby bookstore for our weekly writing group, where I wrote something vaguely inspired by the movie:

There are three doors, none of them locked, even though strictly speaking at least two of them are supposed to be locked at all times. That, at least, is the tradition, and a tradition old enough that it has long taken on the appearance of formal law. There is no provision in the station’s written orders to suggest the origin of such a tradition, but all the same the station keepers have for centuries kept a log of the sequence and semi-random order in which they lock and unlock specific doors at the close of each and every night. Were such a log book to fall into your hands, you might at first appear perplexed, feel at sea in the face of such a knot of numbers and dates, stretching back through unlined pages for months or even years. But soon enough a pattern would emerge; you would learn an individual keeper’s idiosyncrasies, the specific ways in which she or he thinks about the doors, writes of their myriad destinations, and which specific destinations are most often kept under lock and key. Soon enough, you would learn how to anticipate these decisions, to recognize the patterns before they happen, and to know when the door you want — and you would not be at the station if you didn’t want a door — is unlocked. And then you could just slip inside and be gone, wherever it is that you wanted to be.

Faced with such limitless possibility, which door would you choose?

This is the fear that until now has kept two of the doors locked at all times: that if the doors are not locked, if some sequence or pattern or law is not unnaturally imposed — if only by the keeper’s whim — then all the station will be left with, in the end, is anarchy. Only by limiting the choices of its travelers can the station’s keepers impose some kind of order and balance. So says tradition, and tradition is one of the strongest forces in the world.

But tradition can be circumvented, short-circuited, and even burned to the ground if you know the way, if you have the means, and if the door you truly want is the one that leads straight to anarchy.

If they’d known what was good for them, they never would have hired me as the station keeper. Of all people. But I suppose they would have viewed it as some kind of fitting punishment for my original crimes. There, too, they were locked into the dictates of tradition. They would have viewed my appointment as an act of clemency, my tenure as keeper as rehabilitative, the very thing I most needed. I viewed it simply as the final seed of their destruction.

I suppose, in the end, all of us were fools.

There are three doors, leading anywhere and everywhere, and none of them are locked. Which door, then, would you choose?

Sunny, chilly, day-offy Friday

I took the day off from work today and managed not to do a whole lot with it, beyond a little reading (Kaleidotrope slush, Steve Martin’s biography), a little television watching (this week’s touching, if not hilarious, Community), and a little faxing (some confirmation forms for my residency at the Banff Centre in September).

That last one took a little longer than anticipated, as I first thought to mail them, then ran into confusion and resistance at the post office — I FedEx stuff internationally regularly from the office; I’ve never needed a commercial invoice unless there’s something of value and weight enclosed, and certainly never for two sheets of paper. But whatever — and then went to the local Kinko’s to fax it instead. I don’t think it would be the end of the world if I faxed it from work on Monday, or even it arrived near the end of next week in the mail, but they did say “within two weeks.” So anyway.

Of course, the fax number just rang and rang, and when I tried calling the Registrar’s Office directly, I just got a recording. The two-hour time difference might have been working against me, as I was likely calling on their lunch hour. But I finally got through, and the woman at the other end confirmed the fax number, then told me she’d switch it off then on, and I should try again. And that seemed to work. I sent an e-mail following up, and now everything should be confirmed and paid for.

I think now with this, and buying my plane tickets earlier in the week, there’s no denying that I’m actually doing this quite possibly crazy thing. I still have to book my hotel stay in Calgary, but I am looking forward to it — to the week of writing, to the inspiring scenery of Banff itself, and to the chance to meet Heather in person. She’s the one who recommended the residency in the first place, and honestly no slouch as a writer herself.

And she sent me this for my birthday! The first of the books won’t arrive until early summer, unfortunately, but they look like an interesting enough mix that it will be worth the wait. Seriously very cool and thoughtful, and a nice way to ease into the fact that tomorrow — in just a few short minutes from now, actually — I will be thirty-four years old.

As little as I did with it, the day off helped with that, too.

Another ziney day

I spent the day mostly getting my butt kicked by the Sunday crossword and working, again, on layout for Kaleidotrope. Some minor tweaks, and final approval from some authors on my edits, I think I have an issue.

I also wrote a little something, as my weekly free-writing group:

She was having a drink at the bar when the man approached her.

“They got lost looking for the right train,” he told her. “I don’t think they’re going to get here on time.”

“That’s too bad,” she said, turning to face him. He didn’t sit, and so she slipped her gin and tonic back onto its napkin. “But tell me, do I know you?”

“Caster sent me,” he said. “From headquarters.”

“Headquarters…” she said, as if tasting the word in her mouth. She sipped her drink as if to wash the taste out. “That sounds terribly official. But I think you have the wrong person. I don’t know any Caster.”

“Caster said you might say that.”

She turned again and eyed the man carefully. He didn’t appear demonstrably crazy — well groomed enough for a cold Thursday night out in the city, and his eyes seemed focused and clear. But you could never tell these days, could you? Even nice guys could be villains. Take her now-ex-boyfriend Jake, for instance. Laura, her roommate, had this theory, that you should just throw the crazy back at them, double down on whatever weirdness the creeps trolling the bars liked to spout, and scare them away with the intensity of your own brand of nonsense.

“The dancer found the warp code when she picked the zombie’s pocket,” she told the man.

“What?” he asked, genuinely confused.

“Nothing,” she said. She sighed and swished the last of the gin from her ice. “Just testing a theory. Didn’t expect it to work.”

“We have to hurry,” he said. “If they’re not going to get here on time — ”

“So this Caster…” she said. She herself was in no hurry at all, not after the night she’d already had so far, and she tried signaling the bartender for another drink. “He told you what I looked like?”

The man laughed, actually laughed out loud, at this. She knew she was maybe a little drunk — enough to play along with this thing, whatever it was — but she didn’t see what was so funny about that.

“It’s not like I could miss you,” he said. “You look just like your portrait.”

“My — ”

“The one in headquarters. I’m sorry. Caster briefed me, but I keep forgetting you’ve been in the field all this time. He said you might not remember. He said you might need some convincing.”

“Did he?” she said. What I might need, she thought, is another drink. “And how do you plan to do tha –”

But she never got to finish, because that was when the man reached into his coat, pulled something from the pocket, and the room exploded into a kaleidoscope of pain and light.

“The hell?” she managed, before everything went black. So much for that next drink.

We had to take three sentences, made up by the three of us, on the spot, and work them into a story. I think it’s pretty obvious what at least one of those sentences is.

I don’t feel like I got nearly enough sleep last night, so I think it’s early to bed with me tonight.

Back from Boston

Oh, the day that I’ve had.

It started with the first truly nice weather we had all the time I was in Boston, yesterday’s quite pleasant evening excluded. The sun-dappled river made a lovely, if perhaps at times a bit too sun-dappled and bright, view from our exhibit booth. I spent the day selling books, more or less the same as I’d done the days before, and then started cleaning up a little before three o’clock.

Clean-up went well. We’ve started bringing only a display copy or two of most of our books — and offering free international shipping in exchange for not being able to take the copy with you. It saves us considerably on shipping, and on sending books back that might just get pulped. Today, our last day at the conference, I was selling everything left on the table, display copy or not, so in the end I definitely had fewer boxes going back (some to Kentucky, some to New York) than were delivered. Which is almost always a good thing. Our shipping carrier showed up early, while I was still boxing everything up, and then the hotel staff they sent to collect the boxes — two of the same who’d been really helpful on Wednesday night finding our books — started hovering. But I got everything boxed up and ready to go by about 3:30, and a quick cab ride later had me at the airport.

Where I proceeded to wait around for several hours. You can follow the whole sorry story on Twitter (albeit in reverse), about the ground delays and the confused announcements and the fellow passengers with whom I first sympathized and then grew to see as impatient jerks. It was a long day. I think I slept on the plane — I must have slept on the plane — but I still feel pretty tired. And, woe is me, there’s no episode of Kojak here to console me.

I did, however, learn just this morning that I was accepted for a self-directed writing residency at the Banff Centre in Alberta this fall. Heather‘s talked about it so much, I just couldn’t let her have all the fun there. But seriously, I’m looking forward to it. There’s still a lot of planning to do for it, come September, and the last thing I want to do right this minute is look at an another airline itinerary, but the Centre seems like a really great place to develop my writing, enjoy the “powerful mountain setting,” and be inspired. I’m excited and really pleased to have the opportunity. Plus, you know, getting to meet Heather before that apocalypse she keeps reading about for her graduate classes actually happens. That should be nice.

Right now, I foresee sleep in my near future. It’s Daylight Savings Time this weekend, which is an abomination upon the earth. (Except in fall when it’s a quite pleasant extra hour of sleep.) So all the more reason to turn in a little early, I suppose.

All in all, I think it was a successful conference. I won’t know until at least Monday, when I add up the tally, just how many books we sold — and some people will take our catalog or order online; we offer the discount for thirty days after a conference, too. But I think we sold more than a few, and I think my boss met with a few key authors for some good projects going forward. I didn’t get to see much of Boston, or even much of Cambridge — and both ways my flights were delayed — but I’m glad I went.

Sunday is as Sunday does

A rainy Sunday. I did the New York Times crossword, I watched a little Red Dwarf, I did a little editing for Kaleidotrope*, and I wrote this:

Waiting for a train that never comes is an occupational hazard for a temporal operative, time loops being anything but a freak occurrence on this kind of job. There are whole chapters dedicated to it in the standard operating procedures, endless shelves of academic books detailing their adverse (and, on rare occasion, surprisingly useful) effects, and no time agent is ever graduated without first experiencing at least one such linearity-fracturing event first-hand. But it was still starting to piss Veronica off. She needed to be back uptown in half an hour, and her agency handlers weren’t going to care if that half hour for her simply failed to occur. That was from her perspective, and her perspective alone, and the agency had a habit of simply not caring about any individual agent’s personal experience of cause and effect. If the time loop didn’t end, then she was damn well obligated to break free from it on her own.

Which wasn’t going to be easy. One of the reasons that time loops filled the pages of so many books was that were just so many different types of them, endless indices enumerating the various causes and remedies — and misjudging either one of those could just make matters worse. Some loops were the product of over-ripe neutrinos (whatever that meant); some were caused by more fundamental problems in the time-stream, fractures and tears at the subatomic and even quantum level. And Veronica was no physicist, just a covert operative caught in the wrong place at the wrong constantly-repeating-time. The only supplies she had were the handful of documents she’d packed for her meeting uptown, coded reports and tedious spreadsheets, and the pocket umbrella she’d brought along because they’d promised to send her back to last Thursday when the meeting was over. She seemed to remember that last Thursday it had been raining. Nothing she was carrying was going to set the time-stream back on its course; none of it was going to make her subway train appear.

Based on this writing prompt from my friend (and fellow writing group member) Maurice. I did not manage to work the word “confute” in there, however.

* Have I mentioned that starting in 2012 I’m almost definitely taking the zine all digital, dropping the print edition in favor of what will probably be a quarterly online version? I may have just hinted at this over Twitter. Anyway, that’s the likely plan, once I get through the next three (fully booked) issues. I’ll talk about it more soon, I’m sure.