writing

And so it was Sunday

Today was day two of my two-week vacation, though as it’s still the weekend, I’m not sure how much it should count. Mostly all I did today was join my weekly writing group, where, with a little prompt, I came up with this:

The vampire loved going to the mall during the Christmas holidays. Not for the reasons you might expect, since he had given up on human blood almost a century earlier, when there was just an open field where the mall now stood, and he found no joy in the thought of so many warm morsels pushed together, jostling for the holiday sales and reeking of the iron tang his taste buds knew so well. In his youth, when he was more enamored with the hunt, or in that dark, dry period in Madrid several hundred years later, when he would have died for even a small sip of pulsing red — then this mass of people, such easy pickings, like low-hanging fruit, might have warmed his unbeating heart. But none of that was what drew him here now. He loved this time of year, and at the crowded mall especially, simply because it reminded him of Magnus, the vampire who had sired him, and it allowed him a few small moments when he might almost convince himself that the other man was still alive.

He had no real confirmation that Magnus was dead, it was true, and indeed Magnus himself would have disputed the claim even if someone had been able to produce a body. “When you’ve seen death cheated as many times as I have,” he might have said, “you start to doubt it at every turn.”

But the vampire knew what he had seen, and he had not seen Magnus alive since that day.

Christmas Eve, 1857, Sarajevo. Not an especially auspicious year, but nor as dire as some that he and the rest of his kind had endured over the centuries. Only that summer he, Magnus, and a woman whose name he could no longer remember — Isabelle? — had been hunted across half of Europe. He had only narrowly avoided the stake himself one foggy night in Budapest. But now they had escaped, achieved a brief moment of calm and respite on this snowy evening, and Magnus was enthralling them beside the fireplace with details of his newly hatched Grand Scheme.

“I at last understand the secret of true happiness,” he told them both — and, in his clearly drunken state, to anyone else in the tavern who wandered into his orbit. “But the only path that leads to it also rounds past death. So it would take a madman to make such an attempt.”

Magnus was, it would soon be clear, such a madman.

I’m not entirely sure where it’s headed, but I had fun writing this much.

The tweeting dead

I didn’t do a whole lot today, on my first day off, beyond run a few errands and do a very little bit of writing. I watched most of Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking one-woman show, mostly just because I stumbled across it on HBO. It’s kind of a weird experience, but she’s thoroughly engaging.

Then this evening, I watched 28 Days Later with friends over Twitter. I liked the movie a lot when it first came out, but it was a lot of fun and truly interesting to re-examine it. I remember not being as enamored with the sequel, but I definitely need to revisit it as well now.

Sunday pancakes

An uneventful and rainy day here in New York, punctuated only by a trip out to Huntington for my semi-regular writing group. My prompt this week, such as it was, was a recipe for a high-rising pancake in GQ. This wasn’t exactly my choice, but we draw inspiration where we can. Not so sure about this piece — I had fun writing it, and I think these exercises are good crafting skills regardless, but it’s not something I see much hope for developing. It’s a silly little disposable semi-story, and as such I have no problem posting it here:

“The High-Rise Pancake”

So this was it. They were kicking Jerry out of the architectural program, and he would be lucky if he didn’t lose his scholarship and get booted from State altogether.

Designing an apartment complex that resembled a pancake, complete with a light, fluffy interior to a butter- and syrup-coated exterior, probably hadn’t been his smartest move ever. But was it really his fault that the griddle had malfunctioned, then exploded, in class? It was just a short circuit and a splash or two of buttermilk batter; no permanent damage had been done. Imagine if he had followed his original model’s design specs and included blueberries!

But according to his professor, Jerry didn’t take his studies seriously, and this was just the final straw in a long line of…well, many other straws. Enough straw, perhaps, to build that cabana shaped like a giant straw hat that Jerry had designed for the first midterm. His professor had called that impractical, too, however, and she certainly hadn’t appreciated the coconut rum and orchid leis he had unsuccessfully tried to distribute in class.

“It’s all about setting a mood!” he had insisted.

“You can’t drink in class and your building has no doors,” his professor countered.

And so that was that. No one in the degree program had any appreciation of art, of whimsy, of the avant-garde. You couldn’t make a building look like a pancake, or a hat, or even a eighteen-foot-tall Scarlett Johansson — both for anatomical and legal reasons, apparently. The only thing the dean and his subordinates cared about was practicality, efficiency — dull, dry buildings no better or different than the dull, dry buildings already all over campus.

“Maybe you should move into the art department or something,” his advisor suggested.

“My scholarship won’t pay for that,” Jerry said.

“Son, you convinced the scholarship board you had some talent for architecture. Either they like you a lot or they’re clinically insane. Convincing them their money and your time are better applied somewhere else should be easy by comparison.”

“So you’re saying you wouldn’t want to live in a giant pancake?”

The “ending” is more than a little rushed — enough that it deserves those air-quotes — but again, I had fun. Oh, and yeah, Scarlett Johansson was on the GQ cover. Again, we just go where the muse decides to lead us.

Do you think there are Marvel vs. DC arguments in the Johansson/Reynolds household, with the former playing Black Widow in Iron Man 2 and the latter soon to be Green Lantern on screen? I’m sure there must be, right?

Thursday various

  • “What’s a Canooter to Do?” Heather reviews Jenny McCarthy’s latest book, so the rest of us don’t have to:

    Is this what the book is about? No, not really. But even my canooter agreed that there was a glimmer of something just underneath the surface — a subtext of what happens when you turn to a life of reality TV and high profile media. And when you finish reading the book — when you finish with McCarthy’s tale of how she has turned to Buddhism to try to find peace and acceptance in her life — you’re left with a vague, nauseous feeling. A feeling that if you want to be like Jenny McCarthy, you’re buying into a view of the world that is tough, jaded, and incredibly cynical. It’s a fleeting feeling, though. Give a moment, and then you’ll be back to laughing about the silly things you can do with your canooter. Hahahahahah. Seriously. I’m not making this up. Hahahahaha.

  • On why dancing is like being a Time Lord:

    When dancing is going well, time does funny things. Sometimes it feels like the most perfect special effect. The suspended water drops. The muffled pause inside an explosion, with every piece of debris hanging still in midair. The only other time I’ve felt the same endless expansion was one evening when I drove down the freeway and a car in front of me lost control, spectacularly and ridiculously. It spun the way cars do in movies, actual elliptical twirls that carried it across the entire spread of lanes, first one way and then the other. It struck the central divider and pinwheeled off again, and everything looked so gentle and so inevitable that when it swung towards me, it seemed to drift along an obvious curve and I had all the time in the world to twitch my own car the smallest degree to the side and watch it slide past. Time suddenly opened up, every edge of it unfolding, like some sort of weird, reversed version of origami. [via]

  • A short but interesting interview with Chevy Chase:

    Let’s not call physical comedy falling down and pratfalls. All humor is physical, no matter how you dish it out. It’s timing, like a dancer or an athlete would have. The raising of an eyebrow, how you do it; when you look, how you look. All those little things are physical. [via]

  • Genevieve Valentine on bad movies:

    If you are on a desert island and Legion is the only movie available in the island-proof DVD player, use the reflective surface of the DVD to angle sunlight onto some dry grass and start a fire; do not use it for any other purpose. I am serious.

  • And finally, Theodora Goss on why she goes to the museum:

    It’s part of a writer’s training, in a sense, to experience as much as possible and to store what is experienced away, not as though doing research, but storing it in the mind so that what is most important is retained. The sheen on a particular piece of glass, for example. Because we create a sense of reality by describing our fantasies as though they were real, and in order to do that we need to draw from what is real, from our experiences. That’s why monsters are hybrids: we always draw from and recombine reality, and so our fantastical creatures are recombinations.

Some kind of Sunday

Pretty much just your average Sunday around here. I finished the Sunday crossword, and I went to my Sunday writing group, where I wrote this:

Good manners are everything, said Mathilde, even when — perhaps especially when — confronted with the slavering minions of the darkest underworld.

Roderick had to agree, begrudgingly, if only because he had seen the proof of Mathilde’s theories at work on previous occasions. He had accompanied her as diplomatic envoy to hell now several times, and although in her eyes he knew he was still little more than hired muscle, her father’s man through and through, there was little doubt in Roderick’s mind that heeding her now was their wisest course of action.

That didn’t mean he had to like it, though.

“Good manners is one fing, miss,” said the boy, Kairo, “but ain’t the sort of fing what’ll stop them beasties from eatin’ youse alive.” He eyed the door they’d barred behind them nervously. A pounding continued to echo from the other side. “Youse really fink we open up, they’s gonna just gonna parley, nice an’ peaceful-like?”

“If we establish terms,” replied Mathilde. “And if we pay the proper respects…then yes, I believe Lord Marbas and his attendants will see reason.”

“We’d best listen to her, boy,” said Roderick. “Either way, that door isn’t going to hold them off much longer.”

“We will need to address Marbas directly,” said Mathilde. “Appeal to his sense of honor, decorum; spilled blood is to no one’s benefit.”

“I still fink you’re starkers,” said Kairo.

“Well, certainly, we won’t open the door until a few strategic wards are in place,” said Mathilde. “Mr. Barnes, the rock salt and the good book, if you please.”

Yes, Roderick thought, he didn’t have to like it, but it was their only shot.

It’s altogether possible I’ve been watching too much Supernatural lately.

Of course, I did also receive a story rejection this morning, which is okay, and maybe wasn’t entirely unexpected given the flash piece in question, but is still disappointing. But the only thing to do is dust myself off and keep writing, try to find another home for this thing.

I do note, with some small level of satisfaction, that “writing” has moved into the “most used” post categories here on the blog. I’m going to have to do my best to keep it that way.