work

Can’t trust that day

Sales meetings at work today, mostly for acquiring editors and the marketing team, but at least I got a free lunch out of it.

Of course, they’ll tell you there’s no such thing as a free lunch. And maybe I paid for it with my evening commute, which was pretty dreadful, thanks to the Long Island Railroad’s complete inability to deal with the weather. I’m still not entirely sure what happened — I’ve heard hail storm, I’ve heard lightening strike — and I’m still amazed that none of the bad weather made it to Manhattan.

Of course, I very nearly didn’t get out of Manhattan. I rushed to make a 4:54 train, only to discover it had been canceled, along with many other trains. I finally squeezed aboard the today-only 5:22 and made decent enough home, home a little over an hour later. Except that’s an hour of standing in very tight corner on a train that only proceeded to pick up new passengers as we went along. There was one woman, who seemed perfectly nice, but whose hair kept brushing into me. And there was the gentleman who suddenly decided to share with us his love of Creedence Clearwater Revival (or crappy headphones). Basically, we were packed like sardines for an hour…if sardines were packed standing up and fully conscious.

I was very happy to get off the train.

Oh, and I should note: I did not finish writing my short story over the weekend. It was due today, but I hit a brick wall around 10 o’clock last night, after which my brain just stopped working properly. I wasn’t entirely pleased with everything I’d written leading right up to that, and it felt like the story was going to need at least another full scene, one that was going to take me more than a couple of hours (even with a working brain) to write. I like the story enough that I want to put the effort into it, not rush it just to meet the deadline.

But, you say, isn’t that exactly what you’re going to be doing with the 3-Day Novel Competition? Well, yes, in a way. But there, that’s part of the experience, the mad rush to finish, to just keep writing. I’m almost certainly going to have plenty of terrible writing in whatever I manage to come up with over the course of those three days, lots of work that will need lots of editing, but I’ll have time for editing after. (Well, unless it’s so good that it wins the competition.) With this story, I only had that crazy rush to finish because I didn’t know about the deadline earlier.

This was good practice for that, and the 3-day competition is a good (if crazy) writing exercise, but not every story benefits by being written that way.

Gotta get down on Friday

It was a quiet day, if you forget the annoyingly loud construction/demolition going on all around the building. But, thanks to summer hours, the office largely clears out around one o’clock, and I think even the work crews outside took the rest of the afternoon off.

Not a whole lot planned for the weekend, beyond mailing out copies of Kaleidotrope’s new issue and trying to do some writing.

So much for Wednesday

I stayed home today, thanks largely to a bad neck crick that became real pain in the middle of night and kept me from getting back to sleep. It started on Monday, and I’m sure I just slept badly on it, but last night around four or five in the morning I must have really twisted my neck. It hurt a lot, and was still well past uncomfortable when I woke up (late). I took a shower and got dressed, thinking I’d swallow a Motrin and hope for the best, but it was already well past eight when I got anywhere near the door. I was going to both miss my train — meaning I’d have to walk or take the train from Penn Station, getting in even later — and I’d still barely be able to move my head from side to side.

So I stayed home. It’s not something I like doing, but lying in bed and applying heat to the back of my neck seemed like the better course of action. I checked my work e-mail periodically throughout the day, and I seem to have gotten back to the simply uncomfortableness I had Tuesday night before bed. I’m going to get a good night’s sleep and get to work tomorrow.

In the meantime, though, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the latest issue of Kaleidotrope is now available. It’s a little different than usual, though no shorter in length. This issue, which I’m calling the “Summer 2011” issue, features a fantasy novella, a long-form poem, and what I hope is a really nice cover. Check it out, won’t you?

Wednesday

They grouped in the road at the top of the rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.
– Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Happy birthday, Mr. McCarthy, sir.

My own day was largely uneventful, at least until my evening commute when the train car I was in flooded. I didn’t notice it for the longest time — long enough that my bag, which I make a habit of placing under my seat, got wet, and then so did my pants leg when I lifted the bag off the floor. I hoped at first that somebody had just spilled a large drink, but when I stood up before my station I saw that it was down the entire length of the car, a long puddle of water. At a guess, the toilet in the bathroom (which, as it happens, was in that car) overflowed.

There’s nothing quite like overflow from a communal toilet underfoot to liven up your evening commute.

Have I mentioned lately how much I don’t like the LIRR?

Beyond that, it was just a typical day, although I did manage to get a fair amount of work done, which was nice. And I finished reading John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I decided to read it after seeing the trailer for the upcoming new movie version. (It was already made into a miniseries starring the late Alec Guinness.) I liked it a lot…but also didn’t. It can be kind of boring and obtuse at times, although I think somewhat deliberately, since it suggests that’s an awful lot of what spycraft is, sifting through old files, making connections, ferreting out the truth. There’s a lot to really like about the novel, which is full of inventive jargon, often suspensful, and often quite dryly funny. But my opinion’s split.

I do think I’ll watch the miniseries and movie, though.

And that was Wednesday: mass transit toilet water and Cold War espionage.