kaleidotrope

Sunday writing

So this kind of got away from me, or maybe I never really had a handle on it in the first place. It’s free-writing, based on a newspaper headline and a drawing from the New York Times book review pages. So it’s almost guaranteed to not be completely coherent. But it’s what I wrote today, beyond the morning pages, which I’ve been doing consistently since the end of January.

If they had killed her, she didn’t remember it. She couldn’t let herself think about that now, anyway, not with the portal behind her closing — no, wait, she’d blinked, and now it was closed — and the next portal not scheduled to appear until she didn’t know when, or how, or where. She didn’t even know what this city was called, much less where the portal had dumped her inside of it. Where were the street signs, the people? It looked so different than it had just a minute ago — not that a minute ago it had looked any less strange. The thing on her belt, what she thought Leo had called the actopulse when he’d first hooked it there and shoved her through, that was blinking; and when she looked at its readout, the red flashing numbers painted across its dented and silvery face, it seemed to suggest she’d traveled forty years into the future. Which, okay, sure, fine, she could believe that. She’d seen a lot weirder happen since she’d bumped into Leo that morning, and time travel at least seemed plausible enough as far as explanations went. But then, was this still the same place, that crazy city that Leo had stranded her in when he pushed her through that first portal? Because then where were the people? And not just the two who had been chasing her, had opened fire just as she’d —

Damn, why couldn’t she remember? It was these portals, or maybe just this last one, that had Swiss-cheesed her brain. She’d liked to give that jerk Leo a piece of her brain when — no, wait, of her mind. He’d probably wanta piece of her brain after this, stuffed in a formaldehyde jar on a shelf in his lab, studying what had happened to her, what happened to a person exposed to the portals, the actopulse — if that even was what he’d called it. And why couldn’t she remember? Had they killed her? She couldn’t be here, forty years later, if they’d done that, could she?

Okay, she thought, brain’s still a little foggy after that last jump. I know I opened the portal to get away from those two guys, the two in black with the weird guns. And they’re not here, so at least that much is good. She just needed to figure out where she was, and —

Maybe there was another Leo here, too? He’s the one who’d sent those goons after her, right? She was starting to remember, at least a little. This was some kind of parallel dimension, and she wasn’t supposed to be here, like physically not supposed to be here, on a quantum level. And the actopulse didn’t really work worth a damn. It kept her from getting ripped apart, atom by atom, whenever she stepped — or got shoved — through a portal, but it didn’t stop wear and tear on those atoms, didn’t keep her memory safe from that wear and tear, and didn’t help her one bit when parallel versions of Leo tried to have her killed for invading his private kingdom.

Would he still be king of this world forty years later? She couldn’t imagine any world dumb enough to let that happen. She needed to find out, get off the street, and then figure out a way to get home. Or at least get to the next portal, which probably wouldn’t be good for her memory or atoms but which might at least lead somewhere better, somewhere else. She’d keep going till the actopulse, or her brain, conked out.

Tonight, I think I’m going to spend reading Kaleidotrope submissions. Because there ain’t no party like a slush-reading party.

Friday

A busy day at work, but luckily it’s the start of a three-day weekend. The office is closed on Monday, and I’m working from home on Tuesday, and honestly I’m looking forward to it mainly for an extra hour or two of sleep in the morning. I am indeed that dull.

I do plan to do some more writing over the weekend, as I’m fast approaching the deadline this short story was meant for. It’s not the end of the world if I miss that deadline, and I can easily rework the story. I just worry that, with that deadline gone, I’ll have an excuse to avoid the work. And I don’t want that. I want to finish this story.

Meanwhile, the stories in the most recent issue of Kaleidotrope — that quarterly online zine I edit and publish — were reviewed at Locus Magazine’s website. Reviewer Lois Tilton, who’s had mixed things to say about the zine in the past, calls these stories “almost all dark, to a greater or lesser degree. Several quite depressing.” But I think she means that in a good way.

And I finished reading John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, which may have made me tear up just a little. But I am a big softy like that. It’s not a perfect book, occasionally a little too clever for its own good, but it’s very touching, and it does that thing that all good books should do: make you miss the characters when they’re gone. I recently discovered Green through his YouTube channel, which I think I discovered mostly because I wanted to subscribe to a YouTube channel that didn’t then immediately vanish.

Anyway, it’s a good book, sweet without being maudlin, and I quite enjoyed it. That, as they say, is all.

Oh, and I (re-)finished playing Portal. On to Portal 2. (You think I’m kidding. I am not.)

Seconded

I have been off from work for eighteen days, and for at least a week of that I have been unable to check my e-mail. I go back to the office tomorrow morning, and that should be…interesting. I can’t say I’m looking forward to the early mornings and sensible bedtimes, but I am looking forward to reading more, since I don’t seem to do much of that while I’m home, sadly. I do sort of rely on my daily commute for that. And, if nothing else, at least it’s only a three-day week, to ease with the transition.

Last night, I went out to dinner with my parents. We had a nice time, and a good meal, even if the restaurant itself was a little pricey, the menu unexpectedly limited, and the service not all that great. (It took forever for us to get the bill, and credit card, back, for instance, and even then it was completely wrong.) After that, I came home and watched The Great Escape, which was pretty good — and certainly better than The World Is Not Enough, which is what I watched today. (Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones? Sadly not the most ridiculous thing about it.)

I also got the latest issue of Kaleidotrope up and running last night, with a few necessary tweaks this morning. (I’ve been having some issues, both here and there, with the latest update to WordPress.) If you like stories about trolls, magic, body swaps, other planets, witches, monsters, time travel, stories themselves, and true love, then I can’t recommend it enough. Or even if you just like free fiction and poetry! I’m always interested to hear what readers think.

Today, there wasn’t much besides the movie. I poked around a short story a little, though I’m not sure I can call what I did writing.

I think I’m just still reeling from the idea that I have to go back to work tomorrow after almost three weeks. Where did all that time go?

Twenty-twelve

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what. Now try How and Why. – Margaret Atwood, “Happy Endings”

So, 2012…that was a year, huh?

At the start of it, I declared — half in jest — that it would be the Year of the Meeting. Had I only known how true that prediction was going to turn out to be…

At the start of January, a number of changes were already underway at work, with my boss’ boss having taken retirement at the end of 2011 and some of the organization in the company changing in the wake of that. Things

wouldn’t really change for my group until early March, however…and that, of course, is when the cold that I’d been fighting for the past few weeks was diagnosed as being a little pneumonia.

I spent a week at home, I suppose you could say convalescing, at my doctor’s recommendation, and at what turned out to be a very strange time for doing that. While I was out, two other people on the team were let go, which I got to hear about via e-mail, and then in a very odd teleconference call discussing the changes and the reasons for them. Shortly after I returned to the office, I learned that I still had a job…but that it would soon be as part of different group, with a different boss, on the opposite side of the building.

The new job, which I’ve had officially since the start of April, is probably a better fit. I’m still a development editor, working on textbooks, but I’m much more involved in the process, and slowly but surely working on projects beyond the narrow borders of psychology. (Which is where I’d been working exclusively before.) I like the people I work with, and for, even if that too has changed slightly since mid-year. And while it has meant a lot more work — many more irons in the fire, as it were — I’m in a good position for going forward. I miss the people I used to work with — I don’t even see them very often, and there have been a lot of other changes there, too — but I’m getting more of a chance to do the sort of development work I was hired to do.

Sometime in March, I also found time to go to my cousin’s wedding. It was a really busy month for me this year. It’s little wonder that I didn’t have much time or inclination to reflect on my also turning thirty-five.

The rest of the year has seemed almost dull by comparison.

I published four issues of Kaleidotrope this year. I’m still figuring it out as I go, but I think the zine has benefited from being published more often in a year, and from moving from print to online. I miss some of the physicality of print layout — let’s put this photo here, let’s put a little Easter egg in the margins there, etc. — but I don’t miss the costly and time-consuming photocopies, or the hours spent addressing envelopes and standing in line at the post office. The whole thing is probably just as much a money-losing operation for me as it ever was, probably even more so, since I traded those costs for upping my pay to authors. (To the still-far-below-professional rate of a cent a word for fiction.) In 2013, for instance, I will spend an estimated $2,000 putting out another four issues of the zine, which is, admittedly, a little expensive as far as hobbies go. It’s why I’ve re-added a donation link to the site. I’m going to try to lower my costs a little going forward, although that’s mainly going to be by accepting less. I’ve already decided that next year I’ll only be open to submissions from January to March, and even then I’m going to have to be even more choosy than usual. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’m edging up to a $1,000 already for 2014.

This is at least part of the reason I don’t go on vacation very often. My parents went on vacation to Italy, my sister and her husband to Turkey. I went on a work trip to the University of Maryland, Towson, and, a month ago, to Hofstra, maybe ten minutes away by car. Oh, exciting times!

We did take my father fishing for Father’s Day, and that was fun.

And then, of course, there was Hurricane Sandy, many months later. There was the week of work that I lost to that, the power outages, the awfulness of the commute in the weeks that followed.

Yeah… 2012 sure was a year.

I’m looking forward to 2013, just a change — although hopefully not as much of a change as this year, this past March in particular, turned out to be. I would like to move out, to an apartment of my own, maybe sometime in the spring, but that remains to be seen. Beyond that, I’m not really making any resolutions. I want to — I have to — write more. (I have a membership in the Online Writing Workshop that would be wasted if I didn’t.) But beyond that, I’m just going to take it as it comes.

Saturday or a close approximation

I have completely lost track of what day it is.

Presumably it’s Saturday, but I’ve been off from work for more than two weeks now, and one day has kind of blended into the other.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day working on getting the Winter 2013 issue of Kaleidotrope up and running, and contacting my hosting company to get this site back up. (Migration to a new server had a temporary number on my WordPress installation.)

I also watched a couple of movies. On Thursday night, I watched Midnight Run, an enjoyable if lightweight ’80s action comedy starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. Then on Friday, I re-watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, though I swear I only meant to watch maybe twenty minutes of it while eating lunch. I got the Blu-ray boxed set of the four movies for Christmas and…well, come on, Raiders is just a really great movie. It also looks really great in Blu-ray. Later that night, I watched The Descendants, which is both very good and very odd. I’m still kind of mulling over what I think about it, but George Clooney’s never uninteresting in it, if nothing else.

Today, there was more Kaleidotrope, which will go live with the new issue on January 1. It’s a really good issue, I think, and I hope you’ll check out the stories and poems in, particularly if you usually don’t. It’s science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and I know a sizable number of my (not sizable number of) readers like that.

I also re-watched GoldenEye, the first Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie. You know, in for a penny, in for a pound. It’s actually not too bad, and more or less exactly as I remembered it. Brosnan is actually quite good, Judi Dench is terrific (albeit criminally underused), and Famke Janssen is painfully ridiculous. I think this is less her fault than her character’s. (Her name, Xenia Onatopp, is perhaps the least ridiculous thing about her.) Parts of the movie are great, parts are actually, rather dull, and a few parts are just too silly for words. Which is more or less what you want out of most Bond movies. (Though I’m personally leaning more towards the grittier Daniel Craig version following Skyfall.)

And that was Friday and Saturday, I guess. Meanwhile, the heat has gone off in the house, thanks to a busted motor on the furnace. A work crew came out, but they won’t be able to repair it until Monday. Despite some snow on the ground outside, it’s actually not too cold in the house. And downstairs, where it is warmer, we have the dining room open — it’s heated separately, electrically, and it seems to be helping a little. I don’t think we’re in any real danger of freezing.