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writing
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.
Geist Summer 2010
Can I just say I’m quite enjoying the summer issue of Geist? Sure, I didn’t even make the shortlist for their postcard story contest, and their crossword puzzle hurts my brain every time, but there’s a lot of intriguing stuff inside the issue, even for a non-Canadian like myself.
Like, for instance, this article about Banff, which I know only from Heather‘s descriptive recountings. In it, Stephen Osborne writes:
Presenters adopted a parÂticÂuÂlar style when disÂcussing matÂters of theÂory and techÂnique: voices dropped from conÂverÂsaÂtional regÂisÂters into flatÂtened monotÂoÂnes, the rate of delivÂery accelÂerÂated and the lanÂguage tended to thicken under the weight of too much jarÂgon. During one such preÂsenÂtaÂtion, a volÂunÂteer from the book table said to me, you know, none of us underÂstand a thing of what these peoÂple are sayÂing. I assured her that underÂstandÂing was not required in the avant-garde.
The author of Eunoia described a plan to embed or implant a poem enÂcoded in the lanÂguage of recomÂbiÂnant DNA into the bacÂterium Deinococcus radioÂduÂrans, a name that he proÂnounced fiercely, freÂquently and at dauntÂing speed. He had taught himÂself genetÂics, he said, and later he said that he was a self-taught genetiÂcist. The bacÂterium in quesÂtion, which he referred to in the diminutive as radioÂdurans, is expected to outÂlast the solar sysÂtem, the galaxy and whatÂever else there is to outÂlast, with the result that the poem encoded within its DNA — which, I recall him sayÂing, would at some point durÂing its five-billion-year duraÂtion genÂerÂate a new poem, also in the lanÂguage of DNA — would be the oldÂest poem in the universe.
Gardyloo!
The word for today on my Forgotten English desk calendar is “gardyloo,” which apparently was “a common cry in former days of the dwellers in the high flats of Edinburgh, who were in the habit of throwing urine, slops, &c. out of the window; from the French gare l’eau, beware of the water.”
So I guess, if nothing else, we should be thankful we don’t live in the former days of Edinburgh.
I spent today mostly working on the Sunday crossword (which I haven’t completed) and watching a few episodes of Eureka and Breaking Bad. I also joined my writing group for our regular Sunday free-writing exercise in Huntington. The group is usually more of an idea factory for me than anything, but this week I managed to pull together something approaching a narrative. We had multiple prompts to get us started, but it mostly came down to a shared sentence, the first one in the paragraphs below:
When the clown lost his head, Sandra knew that the party was over. The piñata lay smashed against the ground, foil-wrapped candies spilling everywhere, to be trampled underfoot, the afternoon’s lunch of spaghetti and marinara still caked to the wall opposite, in a pattern all too reminiscent of the guts and brains that had so thoroughly failed to explode out from the faulty robot’s bursting head. Sandra wasn’t even sure where all of the children had run off to, although she was sure it was just to one of the other playrooms, to create additional destruction, to revisit one of the other full-service party droids that had somehow managed to escape their original warpath.
The party was an unmitigated disaster. She’d be lucky if MechaPlay, Incorporated, didn’t sue for damages; she could absolutely kiss her initial deposit goodbye. She only hoped her son had enjoyed himself. Kyle’s tenth birthday had probably just cost them his entire college fund.
She stared down at what was left of the clown, marveled again at the detailed realism of its features. If she didn’t know better, if she couldn’t now see the mess of wires erupting from its neck, she’d have sworn that it was an actual zombie. Certainly, when it had shambled into the room, with its blood-spattered pasty white skin and angry grunts, Sandra had been taken aback, suffered a moment of genuine fear. She knew that it was based on one of the video games Kyle and his friends liked to play — Bozo Ghoul or Deadly Chuckles or something like that — but it was still quite a shock to see it in the flesh, so to speak. She’d rehearsed the line that would cause the droid’s head to explode, had been assured by helpful techs that it would seem real, if perfectly harmless.
But, like so much else that afternoon, it had not gone according to plan.
It’s a goofy idea, and I don’t know if it’s a story that has any legs to it, but I had fun writing it. And it was sort of nice to have something to read, however, short, at the end of our forty minutes than just an overview of the story idea I’d come up with.
You just can’t go wrong with malfunctioning zombie robot clowns.
“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.
