books

Monday and Tuesday

I’m getting pretty tired of winter. This winter, to be specific, when it seems like we’re constantly under a new major storm advisory. There’s snow predicted for the next three days, with the same number of storms colliding in our area, polar-vortexing us into submission again. Which I suppose means we won’t see a thaw until sometime in 2018. I’m just tired of the snow that doesn’t melt, or melts only a little and then re-freezes later in the day. It’s not the cold or the longer nights. I can handle those. I just wish winter would knock it off for a while.

Meanwhile, the stray cat seems to have left the garage when I scared it out of hiding. The garage is pretty tightly packed with stuff, but I did a pretty thorough search — tripping and twisting my ankle badly in the process, I might add. (The ankle gave me some grief last night, but ice and acetaminophen seem to have done the trick.) If the cat is still out there, hidden in some inaccessible nook or corner, I don’t really want to think about what its lack of movement might suggest. I’d much rather it ran out the other night and discovered a warmer place to hang out.

We should all be so lucky.

Today I was on campus, talking with professors, which is that thing I have to do several times a year. It went well, I think. And I managed to finish reading the last ten pages of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary while I hid out from the cold in the campus library. (I really liked the book, so more on that later.)

Tomorrow, though…well, there might be more snow. We’ll just have to see.

A fine enough Friday

Given that I spent the very beginning of this week lying sick in bed, I’m quite happy that the rest of it passed by so uneventfully.

Tonight, I finished reading the second volume of Walter Simonson’s run on Thor. It’s maybe less heady and flashy than some of the bigger comics of the day, less groundbreaking than, say, your Alan Moores. But it’s really well plotted, full of lots of great and weird ideas, and good fun.

Meanwhile, I’m also slowly reading William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, which I’m also quite enjoying, although Faulkner definitely requires an investment of concentration. There’s a wonderful moment in this interview with him in which he’s asked, “Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?” Faulkner’s response? “Read it four times.”

I’m still only about a third of the way through the book, therefore — meaning I’ve so far only read 9 of 1 books for the year — but I quite liked this short exchange:

“….I be dog if he ain’t skeered of his own shadow.”

“I’d be scared of it too,” Benbow said. “If his shadow was mine.”

Tuesday

Today marked the first time since Thursday that I went outside, wore anything but pajamas, or did anything more strenuous than watch several episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show*. After four long days of illness and convalescence, of stomach bug and fever, I finally went back to work.

Sunday was pretty miserable, though, and it’s what convinced me I needed the extra day off. I’d planned to go to the doctor yesterday, but by that morning the fever was gone — and moreover, it seemed to stay gone without any outside assistance. I was still pretty beat, and so I lay about all day, but I was feeling a lot better long before the end of it. A lot better than the day before, definitely, when I’d had to take a long break between eating the two halves of a fairly small banana.

So I went back to work today. It was pretty uneventful, except for the yearly emergency preparedness training the building makes all of the floor’s fire safety team go to. And even that’s just sitting around learning about what to do in case of a biological attack, or gas leak, or zombie outbreak. I’ve still got lots of imminent deadlines and projects that I wish were more finished than they are, but it was nice to not come back to more of them.

And it was nice to get a chance to read again, something I couldn’t really do while I was sick. On Friday I couldn’t even concentrate on television. (Though later, putting Galaxy Quest and then Goonies on in the background while I tried to sleep was actually quite a comfort. Good movies, those.) Tonight, I finished reading Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred. It’s a simple but powerful book, a reminder of Butler’s talents, and though it’s a novel written about the antebellum South and slavery from the viewpoint of 1976, it doesn’t feel the slightest bit dated. I liked it a lot.

February promises to not be entirely normal, just looking at my schedule coming up, but it was nice to get back to a little bit of normal, today, anyway.

* Seriously, why have I never really watched this show before? It’s a little dated in places, but it holds up remarkably well. It’s endearing and funny.

Saturday and Sunday

It’s been a pretty quiet weekend.

Last night I watched Riddick, which turned out to be surprisingly entertaining, given how remarkably terrible its predecessor turned out to be. It’s not a brilliant movie, and hardly original, but I quite enjoyed it.

Today, I went to my weekly writing group, where we each spent our forty minutes working on a prompt from Writer’s Digest, from their monthly contest. Using their first sentence as a jumping-off point, this is what I wrote:

“If you can guess what I have in my pocket, you can have it.”

She says this like I’m supposed to be impressed, when we both know the pocket and whatever she’s tossed in it are stolen. She wants me to think she’s learned to fold space, that’s fine, but she knows as well as I do that this particular pocket of it isn’t her handiwork. It’s too polished a job for that, the seams too neat. It hardly shows up on her ship’s sensors, probably wouldn’t show up at all on mine, and there’s nobody outside the core planets who could have done this kind of work so well. What it’s doing all the way out here, or why the core might have abandoned it, I don’t know, but she’s not fooling anybody if she thinks I believe she did this herself. This little pocket, and whatever she’s got hidden inside it, are like everything else in my sister’s life: an unhappy accident she wants to make somebody else’s problem.

“What makes you think I want it?” I ask. “Even if I guess right, I’ve got cargo of my own left to unload.”

“You’re running light and you know it,” she says. She adjusts the screen with a few random taps and the pocket is outlined in a dark angry green. It’s nothing you could see with the naked eye, if you tried staring out into the blackness of space, but Claire knows I trust the ship’s readings. After all, this salvage tug used to be my own. “And you’re gonna wanna guess. It could earn you millions.”

“If it’s so tasty a haul why don’t you sell it?” I ask. “What’s with the hide-and-seek, the guessing games? That’s not why I agreed to come out here.”

“No,” she says, “you’re just checking up on me for the core, reporting back on my movements. Just like Dad would’ve wanted, right?” She’s angry when she says this, even though she knows it isn’t even half as simple. “But, don’t you see, Nick,” she adds, “that’s exactly why I can’t be the one to unload this. The core’s already got it in for me. They’d take me before I even got planetside.”

“If you’d just talk to them,” I tell her, “I’m sure they’d drop the charges.”

“If I just let Dad talk to them, you mean. Let him pull a few strings, rehabilitate his smuggler daughter. That’s what the core wants, Nick. I set one foot back in the system and that’s what they’ll get.”

“So what, you want to off-load this on me, whatever smuggled goods you’ve got to hide in pocket of space all the way out here in the ass end of nowhere? I’ve got cargo, Claire. I’ve got a reputable business.”

“You could also have millions,” she says. “And all you have to do is guess.”

I don’t think I have any intention of trying to submit that to the contest, not least of all because it isn’t yet a story, and yet at 480 words it’s well past half of the magazine’s 750-word limit. But I had fun writing it, even if it took me a long while to get into anything like a groove.

I noted on Twitter yesterday that I occasionally get stories that were very clearly written based on writing prompts, most notably for the Machine of Death anthologies. Those books had such a distinctive premise, no matter how very different the stories that were written for them, that I always feel weird when I encounter it again in my own submissions. I understand the impulse to try and take a story you’re proud of, one that for whatever reason didn’t make it into either of the two anthologies, and try to sell it elsewhere. But even if I loved the story, I don’t know that I would feel entirely comfortable accepting it. For one thing, you’re admitting the story has already been rejected elsewhere, although, really, that’s hardly a factor. I have to assume that Kaleidotrope isn’t the first stop for a lot of the writers who submit. But, more importantly, it’s such a distinctive premise that your story can’t help but be seen as a cast-off, a reject, by the reader. That’s maybe unfair, but I think that’s the reality. I less frequently see stories clearly based off the prompts from The First Line, which I’ve noted in the past, but I think that’s much different, easier to work around, maybe even less central to the story. I don’t reject stories out of hand just because they clearly were first intended for someone else. But I’m probably more likely to pass on stories where a machine that predicts the cause of everyone’s death is a central concern.

Finally, this evening, I read What now? by Ann Patchett. I liked it, although it’s maybe a bit of a cheat as an actual book. It’s the text of a commencement speech that Patchett gave at her alma mater Sarah Lawrence a number of years ago, and while it’s a good speech, the book is really quite short. It’s full of large print and white spaces, as well as many full-page stock photographs of mazes, footprints, puzzle pieces, and other things that would probably put Patchett well above the “cliché quota” she mentions at the top of the speech. It’s the sort of book you give as a gift, mostly to graduating seniors, and while fifteen bucks seems a little pricey for that gift, it’s a gift of kindly good advice. It’s a very short book, hardly a book at all, but it ends well:

The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way. What now is not just a panic-stricken question tossed out into a dark unknown. What now can also be our joy. It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance. It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow. There’s a time in our lives when we all crave the answers. It seems terrifying not to know what’s coming next. But there is another time, a better time, when we see our lives as a series of choices, and What now represents our excitement and our future, the very vitality of life.

Wednesday

It was incredibly foggy this morning, which surprised me a bit, and a little icy on the ground, which actually surprised me a bit more. I guess it warmed up just enough for yesterday’s rain, then cooled down just enough to slick the sidewalks in invisible ice.

It seemed to be gone this evening, though the fog had rolled back in. Not quite ghost pirate weather, but somewhere in the neighborhood. Frankly, a part of me just wishes winter would let itself be winter again. (This obviously is not the part of me that just a week ago though the earth was trying to kill him with cold.)

Meanwhile, January, or at least this week of it, has marked the return of Year of the Meeting at work. Busy times that aren’t likely to let up until the spring, or at least until I get a few of these books handed over to production.

But I finished the report I’ve been working on, the one that ate up several hours of my weekend, so that’s good.

I also finished reading Jonathan Carroll’s The Bones of the Moon, which was odd in all the sorts of ways you expect a Jonathan Carroll novel to be. I don’t know that I loved it, necessarily, but I found a lot in that I really liked, these (spoiler-free) passages included:

Sometimes dreams bite like fleas and leave little itchy bumps all over your skin.

We want to be loved for what we are, but also for what we want others to think we are.

Our actions and responsibilities are our own: what later returns to either haunt or applaud us is neither possible to predict nor always completely understandable.

How far was a dream allowed to trespass into real life, before it was caught and sent back to its proper place? Could it go haywire and take over everything you knew? Was it permitted to live wherever it wanted? Or had I reached a point where laws and distinctions, rules of the game, had disappeared? A point where everything in my mind, in my life, was up for grabs?

It’s hard convincing yourself that where you are at the moment is your home, an it’s not always where your heart is.

And that’s that.