writing

Sunday

I took another long weekend starting this Thursday. I didn’t do a whole lot with it, didn’t go anywhere more exciting than the dry cleaners, but it was nice to have a few days of just hanging out. I watched several episodes of Comedy Bang Bang, which is funny and weird and which my only sporadic listening to the podcast version hadn’t really prepared me for. I also watched a few episodes of Columbo, which, maybe surprisingly, still really holds up.

I also watched Julia, starring Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jason Robards. All three of them were nominated for Oscars for the movie, and it seems a little strange that Fonda is the only one of them who lost. Robards and Redgrave are both good, but they’re each only in the film for a small handful of scenes, and for my money Fonda’s a lot better. (Meryl Streep also pops up; it’s her first film role.) That said, I can’t really claim to have enjoyed it, and it’s a strange duck of a movie, not least of all because it’s quite possibly all untrue.

On Saturday afternoon I drove out to the airport to pick up my parents. They’d been away for a couple of weeks on vacation in France — ah, the joys of retirement — and came back bearing gifts of Belgian chocolates and T-shirts.

Last night, I watched The Last Picture Show, which I’ve had out from Netflix for way too long. Wikipedia informs me, coincidentally enough, that “Julia was the first film to win both supporting actor categories since The Last Picture Show six years earlier in 1971.” (I hadn’t planned my movie-watching that way.) The winners for Last Picture Show were Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman, and they’re both really good. Not a lot to say, but I really liked the movie.

No movies today — I passed up a chance to go see the new Transformers movie, which seemed like the smart play. Instead, I finished putting together the newest issue of Kaleidotrope. I’m really pleased with it, not least of all because of the (triumphant?) return of the horoscopes and fake advice column. There’s also some really great short stories and poems and a cartoon. I hope you’ll check it out.

And with my weekly writing group, I wrote this:

We were supposed to meet Franklin at the mouth of the cave, sometime around noon, but by the time we finally got there at half past, he was already gone. We could see that he’d been there, from the fresh ashes in a nearby circle of stones and the tin coffee cup tossed atop them, but of Franklin himself there was no other sign or note. Still, we weren’t worried — or at least I wasn’t.

“He probably just got impatient and decided go on ahead of us,” I told Sarah. “You know how your brother is.”

“That’s actually the only reason I’m here at all,” she said. “Because I know how my brother is.”

When Franklin had called us a week ago, it had been a surprise, the first time in maybe half a year that we’d heard from him. There’d been semi-regular reports from his doctors, whether or not his progress was any good, and presumably his and Sarah’s mother was still visiting him, if she could ever pull herself from the bottom of a bottle. But we hadn’t spoken to the kid since January, and hadn’t actually been in the same room with him since before Christmas, when he’d started having what had seemed like the worst of the attacks. When he asked us to meet him back at the cave — “you remember, don’t you, Mark?” he asked me — it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that we were hesitant.

“You’re out, Frank?” Sarah asked him. “How can you be out?”

I was on the other phone in the den, and I remember thinking we had a bad connection, because they both sounded so distant, like voices in another room, and I could hardly hear her brother talk. I could hardly hear him at all when he said, “We have to go back to the cave.”

“You’re not calling from the hospital?” Sarah asked. “Does Mom know you’re out?”

“I’m going to be there tomorrow,” Franklin said, like that answered anything. “At noon? I need you guys to be there too.”

And with that, he was gone. I let the click echo for a minute, wondering if Sarah was still there, and then I said, “Honey, I’m coming upstairs.”

Now we were here, back where it had started. This was where I’d met them both, six years earlier, and it had been shortly after that that we’d started seeing signs of Franklin’s illness. How long had he been trapped down there in the dark of the cave? It couldn’t have been more than an hour, but the doctors had called it a “precipitating factor,” or something like that. I knew for a fact they wouldn’t have allowed him to come back here.

Not entirely sure what to make of it, and it doesn’t really connect with the prompt I supplied (except maybe in my head), but it’s something at least.

Back to work tomorrow, and back to the office. Though I usually work from home on Mondays, we’re closed on Friday for the holiday, and we don’t get to take the Mondays when that happens.

Sunday

I did some cleaning yesterday, which is about as exciting as it got.

Today, I had my weekly free-writing group. And, well, the prompt was a little weird, but I had fun with it nevertheless:

“Children and the elderly go first,” the robot man said. There were gears inexpertly grafted to its face, a clockwork mechanism that let the human jaw beneath poorly mimic human speech.

You chose this? Manny thought, eyeing the metal thing and its patchwork of sheet metal and flesh, a rusting constellation of rivets scarred across its receding hairline. A hundred years ago you stepped through this very same time gate and let whoever’s on the other side do that to you. They said, let us strip off your humanity and and replace it with leaking motor oil, burnt spark plugs, soldered-on transistors, and you said sure. If the stories are true, you signed up for this, you and all the other temporal borgs watching over the gate.

At least the four of us didn’t have a choice in the matter. We’re going through the gate if we want to or not.

“There aren’t any elderly or children here,” said the Professor. He’d introduced himself, Conrad something, but Manny still thought he looked like a professor decked out in tweed. He was just missing the chalk dust stains and the elbow patches. “Perhaps we should just go through one at a time?”

“Doesn’t it make more sense for me to go first?” Ms. Earth asked, twirling a lock of her blonde hair and unnecessarily moistening her lips with her tongue. Watching her preen for cameras that were no longer there, Manny almost laughed. Only a girlish giggle would have been more transparent.

“What’re you doing, honey?” Abigail, the fourth in their little group of prisoners, asked with a heavy sigh. “The beauty pageant’s long done with. It’s not like Gearface over there’s gonna fall for your act.”

“I’m just saying,” the one-time beauty queen said, glaring at the older woman, “if we want to put our best foot forward with the Architects, maybe we should lean on the one of us who has some experience with public speaking.”

“Yeah,” Abigail said, “and who knows, maybe there’ll be a swimsuit competition.”

“C’mon now,” said Ms. World — whose real name, Manny now remembered, was Melody — “I just meant that — “

“Children and the elderly go first,” the temporal borg repeated, stepping in front of the time portal.

“Do you think if we don’t follow the rules it won’t let us go through at all?” the Professor asked.

“Now that’d be a real shame,” Abigail said.

“They’re not going to let us go back to what we were doing before,” Manny said, surprising even himself. “The Architects don’t let anybody go once they’ve chosen.”

“The kid isn’t wrong,” the Professor said. “Everybody goes into the future eventually.” He looked at Manny as if sizing him up. “He’s also as close to ’children’ as we get,” he said. “He and you should probably go through first.”

“And me?” Abigail asked. “Just who do you think you’re calling elderly?”

“It’s just relative,” the Professor said.

Sunday’s come round again

Last week was a quiet one at work. I didn’t even realize until Friday afternoon that it marked the beginning of summer hours, largely because I’m not taking part in them this year. I came back from lunch and there were maybe only a dozen people left in the office. It was a little unnerving, but at the same time I kind of like the quiet.

Yesterday was my father’s birthday, so we went out to eat, then had cake and presents. I spent the rest of the day, or at least a part of it, copyediting stories for next month’s new issue of Kaleidotrope. Then that evening, after the cake, I watched The Purge, which I cannot recommend. It felt a little like two very bad movies ganging up on one potentially okay movie. What it lacked in an understanding of basic human nature…it also lacked in basic movie-making technique. I think I knew going in that I wasn’t going to like it, and that I was going to be confused about all the reasons why by the end. And, in that respect, I guess I wasn’t disappointed.

This afternoon, I saw Edge of Tomorrow, which was much better. It’s not brilliant — it’s the military sci-fi video game crossed with Groundhog Day you didn’t know you wanted — but I read the book it’s roughly based on (All You Need Is Kill) last week, and it’s at least as good as that.

I also wrote this with my weekly writing group:

“There you have it, gentlemen. The upside potential is tremendous, but the downside risk is jail.”

“Rich people don’t go to jail,” Manheim said. He laughed, but it was clear he wasn’t joking. “We have plausible deniability if the results of the tests become public.”

“It’s not the results I’m worried about,” said Burke. “It’s the tests themselves. We’ve already run afoul of a dozen regulations just by meeting here, discussing this. You can’t pretend they don’t send people to jail for conspiring like this.”

“Oh please,” said Manheim, “there’s no reason to start throwing around ten-dollar words like conspiracy. The inner planets wouldn’t be able to prove anything — “

“And we’ve already established that the outer worlds don’t care,” said Wilkins, breaking his long silence. “We wouldn’t be presented with this opportunity if they did.”

“Exactly,” said Manheim, even though all three of them knew he’d have agreed with Wilkins on anything.

“We have a rare opportunity to test the good doctor’s theories on Circe,” Wilkins added, “unfettered by any planetary regulation. The population is still small, and so projected losses are only — what was it again, Roderick?”

“Three million,” said Manheim. “Give or take a point-five.”

“Perfectly acceptable losses,” said Wilkins.

“And that’s only if things go belly-up,” said Manheim. “The genetic modifiers in Dr. Breton’s formula have been considerably refined since that fiasco on Ganymede. And you’ll recall,” he added, seeing that Burke was still unconvinced, “no one went to jail there except a few lab techs.”

“It’s still a risk,” said Burke.

“Of course it’s a risk,” said Wilkins. “What new business venture isn’t a risk?”

“Just think what happens if the formula works,” Manheim told Burke. “And if we control that. Even if all we get is a planet of Breton’s super-soldiers? Think what we stand to gain.”

If you’ve read any of James S.A. Corey’s Expanse novel, you can maybe see where I’m ripping them off paying homage to them. Not every free-writing exercise is going to mine gold.

Sunday

Last just kind of was. Some weeks just kind of are.

On Memorial Day, I watched the original Mad Max — you know, like one does — which I’d never actually seen before, despite having seen its two sequels. It’s not a great film, exactly, nor even as good as its first follow-up, The Road Warrior, which I revisited on Friday. But there’s definitely something to it, and if nothing else it looks terrific in Blu-ray.

Last night, I watched The Haunting, the 1963 adaption of Shirley Jackson’s great novel The Haunting of Hill House. I wasn’t entirely sure if I wanted to watch the movie going in, since I’d read the book not that long ago and felt like I knew all of its beats. But it came highly recommended, and now I can see with good cause. The movie’s genuinely terrific — or as Keith Phipps puts it (in his review of the reportedly 1999 remake), “a superb exercise in how atmosphere, suggestion, and acting can produce more terror than any amount of special effects or cheap thrills.” There’s maybe one effects shot in the entire movie, and yet I’d easily put it among the best horror movies I’ve ever seen.

No movies today, though I’m debating watching one this evening.

This morning, I read “Heather‘s short story “Cuts Both Ways” in the highly anticipated Woman Destroy Science Fiction issue of Lightspeed Magazine, which I really enjoyed and would encourage everyone else to go read. And to support the issue. Personally, I’ve never thought it was in doubt that women can write science fiction, or even that some of the best the genre has to offer has been written by them. But this is apparently an opinion that some people think is valid, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. I don’t know if WDSF is going to convince such people, there’s prodigious talent involved, and an e-copy is only $3.99.

I also finished the Sunday crossword, but that’s just a tiny personal victory.

And then I went to my writing group, where we were offered this weighty prompt:

Start writing a story that makes use of the following elements:

a. A generation ship that has gone missing

b. The execution of an alien who is accused of a crime he did not commit

c. A sorceress who is twelve years old

I think the operative word there has to be start. That’s not a forty-minute writing exercise; that’s the basis for a series of novels. Still, I had some fun with it:

Tell me a story, the little girl said. Tell me what happened to the place you used to call home.

Nobody remembers, he told her. It was a beautiful planet, though: lush jungles, harsh deserts, a world of unsurpassed and varied wonder. I grew up in one of the monasteries on the eastern continent and lived there for ten years of my life.

You don’t have the bearing of a monk, she said.

I was younger than you when I left, m’lady. I set out on a ship bound for the Reach although I don’t think that’s what you call it.

Starless Galley, she said. The Celestial Hollow. It has many names among the Twelve, as you might expect. That span of darkness between the stars, between this galaxy and its sisters.

That’s right, he said. We were further from that Hollow than you are, and our technology was not even half as advanced. But we built a ship, the greatest nations on our planet did, and when I was still just a boy, I stowed away on board.

This is your ’generation ship,’ she said.

Yes, m’lady, although as it turns out that’s a bit of a misnomer. There were provisions on the ship for at least five generations. But it was less than ten years into our journey that we encountered a scout ship for your Twelve.

They are not my Twelve, she said.

I’m sorry, m’lady, I mean no offense. I mean only that you live among them. You speak their common tongue, you do their work. You’re here to interrogate me for them, aren’t you?

I am here to listen to your story, she said. That is all. Would you rather that they just killed you now?

I would rather they didn’t kill me at all, m’lady. But considering how my trial went, I don’t think there’s too much chance of that.

So tell me your story. Tell me what happened to your home.

My planet was destroyed, he said. When we were first captured by the Twelve, when they came aboard and then commandeered our ship, there was nothing for it but to take citizenship. I believe your people call it the Shroud?

My people, she said. We are excluded from the benefits of citizenship. We are…a protectorate of the Twelve, covered by neither the Shadow nor the Shroud.

Well, nor were we, for what that’s worth. We were even more alien than you, and I know for a fact they didn’t trust us. But they said come, join us, and they clearly were the only game going in town.

And your planet?

They called it the Dark Winters’ War. Can you believe that? Almost a kind of poetry to it. In the ten years we were out there in the Reach, our planet was at war with the Twelve. When we set out on our ship, we didn’t even know there were aliens out here. But like I said, your technology’s much more advanced, and the Twelve found where we lived long before we bumped into them.

It’s more world-building than anything else, but it’s world-building that piqued my interest. I wouldn’t claim to have a series of novels brewing in my brain from this — I struggle even to finish short stories — but there’s something there.

Monster Movie Mayhem (or, Suddenly It’s Sunday)

Yesterday morning, I decided to get a haircut and then catch the very early matinee of the new Godzilla movie. Thanks to time being fleeting and not infinite — seriously, who do I need to talk to about that? — I wound up only doing the second of those two things. Which why right now I’m still in real need of a haircut but I did get to see a giant lizard smash through giant buildings.

And you know, Godzilla is kind of an odd movie. I’d watched the original only a week ago, for the first time, and while I hadn’t loved that movie, it also hadn’t dimmed my interest in seeing the remake. (Interest that was sparked, really, by what I still think is a well done trailer.) But ask me about the movie now I think I can only tell you this: Godzilla’s very good in it. He’s probably the best actor. And that’s not even really a joke.

The giant lizard is definitely the most compelling presence in the film — a very shouty Bryan Cranston and not-even-a-little-shouty Ken Watanabe notwithstanding. But it’s altogether possible that that’s by choice. David Ehrlich of the Dissolve argues that the movie is ”
the first post-human blockbuster,” and I have to say, he makes a fairly convincing argument:

The film’s evocative closing shot serves as a resonant reminder that just because we’re the planet’s predominant storytellers doesn’t mean that the story is necessarily about us.

Then again, even if you don’t buy the argument, or you don’t think it’s enough to account for (or overcome) the blandness of some of the characters, I’m not joking when I saw Godzilla is very good in the movie. If nothing else, it’s some pretty terrific CGI.

I can definitely not say the same for the next couple of movies I watched yesterday.

Heather has already written up yesterday’s “Bad Movie Night,” wherein a bunch of us willingly subjected ourselves to Storage 24 and the improbably named Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark and joked about them both over Twitter. I’m tempted to just direct you to her write-up, as she’s accumulated a lot of the best tweets from last night’s double-header. I’ll say this: neither movie was especially good, but both were wonderful fun to watch and laugh at. And, seriously, this happened. No movie in which that happens can be all bad, however hard it may try.

And besides, it’s less about the movies themselves — which by design are terrible — and more the great fun of watching them with friends.

Today, with my writing group friend Maurice, I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past, which was decent enough summer fare, enjoyable, but not remarkable. I do like the way the AV Club’s review describes it:

It’s a loose adaptation of one of the all-time great Marvel storylines, with Professor X and Magneto using Shadowcat’s powers to send Wolverine’s consciousness back in time to 1973 so that he can help their past selves set aside their differences and avert a dystopian, Sentinel-run future by preventing Mystique from assassinating Bolivar Trask. Readers who are confused by any or all parts of the preceding sentence should take it as a warning.

Honestly, though, there’s not a whole lot more to say about the movie. It does a pretty decent job of marrying the earlier X-Men movies, prequel and all, and is probably the only comic book movie we’re likely to see for awhile set largely in the early 1970s. But it’s not often very distinctive or inventive, even if it is decent enough fun.

In between all this movie watching, I finished reading and responding to all of my Kaleidotrope submissions. Which is a lovely feeling. I still have two issues to edit before the end of this year, but for the next seven months I won’t have to read another story I don’t want to accept. I didn’t run the actual stats for this past reading period, but I’d say out of roughly 250-300 submissions, I accepted maybe ten. Which, actually, seems maybe a little high.

I also wrote this:

They’d made planetfall in winter, the team leader said, which explained the hardiness of the local population but also the scarcity of diverse genetic stock. Only ten dozen of the original settlers had survived that first season, and through the next fifty years, intermarriage had left them fit for the harsh conditions on the planet’s surface but prone to illness, especially when traveling outside the valleys in Icarus’ (relatively) more temperate zones.

“Why Icarus?” one of the geo-engineers, Burke, asked. “In the myth, didn’t Icarus fly too close to the sun?”

“As near as we can tell, that’s local irony,” the team leader said. She glanced again at the planet’s specs and her notes, which were not extensive. “The settler’s original ship was thrown off course after miscalculating the gravitation of the smaller of the system’s binary stars. A joke,” she added, “though obviously not a great one.”

“Isn’t this like the third Icarus we’ve been called in on in as many months?” asked the pilot. Grace Wong didn’t always attend these preliminary meetings, but team leader was glad to see her nevertheless. “Don’t these people have any imagination?”

“In all fairness to this planet, they crashed before either Icarus Prime or Icarus II were colonized.”

“And we’re pulling them out anyway,” said Burke, “right?”

“Right,” the team leader said. “The Ic — the planet has become untenable. The system’s primary sun isn’t dying, exactly, but they’ll be outside a shrinking habitable zone in less than another generation.”

“Wait,” said Wong. “What does ’isn’t dying, exactly,’ mean? Is it going nova or not?”

“Not exactly,” the team leader said. She’d been worried about this, but better to get it out in the open now before they ported to system. “Command has reason to believe that whatever’s happening with the sun is artificial, neither a natural nor man-made process.”

“Command?” said Burke. “Since when did we start taking orders from — wait are you saying Alterians?”

“We have reason to suspect their involvement, yes.”

“And you’re just telling us this now?” said Wong. “You want me to fly us into beastie-controlled territory and you didn’t even tell us til now?”

“It’s a little more complicated that,” the team leader said. “And there’s another reason why we have to evacuate Icarus.”

I can’t say I much like it, but sometimes you just go where the prompt takes you. (Even if, in this case, I didn’t get the prompt itself in at all.)

I plan tomorrow mostly reading, maybe writing some. It’s a three-day weekend, which is nice, and hopefully today’s nice weather will last a little while longer.