Sinister

Also, this.

2010-08-25T00:19:00.000-07:00

Because this should not be relegated to obscurity.

The ADL Does Not Speak for Me

2010-07-30T17:30:00.000-07:00

I am outraged by the Anti-Defamation League's recent statement opposing the building of an Islamic center in New York City near where the Twin Towers once stood. The ADL's statement is an embarrassment to the organization and to Jews everywhere, and it should be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

The Anti-Defamation League is supposed to be the Jewish people's advocate for understanding, civil rights, and cross-cultural dialogue. It's supposed to be our defender against bigotry and intolerance. It's supposed to serve as an example to the world of Jewish ethical morality.

The ADL's statement says, in essence, that because bigots oppose something, we ought to respect their right to oppose it by also opposing it ourselves, while at the same time condemning the bigotry that leads us to oppose it.

Others have come out with strings of examples of where such twisted logic could lead. I have no interest in getting bogged down in metaphor.

Instead, I want to state unequivocally and stridently that the ADL's statement does not reflect my understanding of Jewish values, and should not be taken as an example of how the vast majority of Jewish people think.

Jewish ethics require us to "love our neighbors as ourselves." The ADL is not adhering to this standard.

Jewish ethics, not to mention American law, demands respect for the right of religious organizations to build structures and worship on whatever land that they control or possess. I do not have the right, nor do you, nor does the ADL, nor does the American government, to dictate where a Muslim organization may place its institutions. Or a Christian organization. Or a Jewish organization.

Beyond which, I believe that building an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero is a GOOD step, a POSITIVE step, something that may just lead to better cross-cultural dialogue, as we work to build peace and understanding in a world that is increasingly interconnected technologically but still so divided by political ideology and religious misunderstanding. As Jews, we should be helping the Muslim community, defending them against this kind of bigotry and fear.

Do I really need to explain why the Jewish people should be on the side of the Muslims in this particular fight? If I do, then we're all in trouble.

Jewish people who, like me, are horrified and offended by the Anti-Defamation League's statement, need to do something about it. Call your local ADL chapter and protest. Local chapter phone numbers can be found on the ADL website. Write letters to the editor. Blog about this. Talk to your Muslim neighbors and express your support. Contact the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and express your opposition to the ADL statement, and ask how you can help. Donate money to organizations that understand the urgent need for respectful cross-cultural dialogue.

As Jews, we have a special obligation to smother the very kind of bigotry and fear that the ADL is demonstrating with its statement. I am simply mystified and infuriated that the ADL completely failed to adhere to its own values in this case, and I condemn their position unequivocally.

So Hungry

2010-07-14T21:10:00.000-07:00

And now, a ghost story, lovingly ripped off of my favorite Asian horror movies.

So Hungry

I

Jeff Briggs and his guild had cleared the first boss, and Jeff had looted an epic sword that he’d been trying to get for ages.

The raid leader called for a restroom break, and Jeff took the opportunity to go into his kitchen and grab a beer. When he returned and sat down, he saw an odd shadow, something that was distorting the game picture. It was right on the edge of the screen, like a smudge. He reached out and touched his monitor, thinking that he might have some dead pixels, but the shadow remained steady. It looked like it was a part of the game world itself.

There was a clicking noise coming from the monitor. It sounded like someone tapping on an old television screen with a long fingernail, very slowly, and very quietly.

Jeff put his headphones back on. The raid group was gabbing away.

“Hey, any of you guys see a shadow on your game board, kind of near where Kayman is standing?”

Kayman piped up. His avatar moved around in a circle, indicating that he was looking around the game space. “No, man, I don’t see anything. What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I guess my monitor must be acting up. Never mind. Let’s do this.”

With that, the group busied themselves with the important task of hashing out the strategy for attacking the next boss. It was clear that this would be a fight in which warriors, of which Jeff’s character was one of the best, would play a key role. He needed to keep the beast’s attention, take as much damage as possible, so the magic users could drain the beast’s hit points.

While the guild discussed the minutiae of their strategy, the shadow, and the clicking noise, slowly faded from Jeff’s computer monitor.

II

The guild had gotten as far as the third boss before wiping three times in a row, and had decided to call it a night and spend some time thinking about strategy. After eight hours of straight gaming, Marco Rubenstein’s eyes burned and his head throbbed. He looked at the clock. 2:30 AM. Shit. He had to be at work in six hours.

He rubbed his eyes, stretched, said goodnight to his guildmates, and removed his headset. At that moment, Marco noticed a shadow right at the lower left edge of his computer screen, like someone had used a fingerprint pad and then smeared it there. He tried to wipe it away, but he realized it wasn’t on the outside of the monitor.

He heard a tapping sound. Tap…tap…tap. He leaned in closer to the screen, squinting at the smudge, trying to make out what it could possibly be. It had no real defined shape; it seemed like just a dark spot, a place where the game world got dimmer.

As he leaned in, the tapping became louder, more rhythmic. Under the tapping, he thought he could hear…whispering?

Very suddenly, something scratched his arm, and he screamed, and jumped.

He looked down, to see his very bewildered cat. She had merely wanted his attention, and had been swatting at him as he sat at his computer desk.

“Silly cat.” He scratched her behind the ears.

When he looked back at the screen, a face was staring back at him. It was the face of a young girl, with stringy blond hair covering half of her sallow face. The face was hollow, dead, and it flickered like a bad television signal. Its lips were pulled back. Shadow smudges filled the sockets where its eyes should be.

Its mouth opened to reveal a gaping maw of darkness that flooded outward, escaping the monitor, and came straight at Marco.

This time, Marco screamed louder.

III

Jeff yawned. These late night raids were tough, especially after an eight hour day doing mindless transcription for a medical office. Still, the game kept him from going mad with boredom. Sure, he could go outside and meet real people, but that would require, well, going outside and meeting real people. He just wasn’t up for that. He preferred the anonymity of the transcription office and the relative anonymity of the online game.

He grabbed a beer, sat down at his machine, and put on his headphones.

“Hey hey hey! Anthros the mighty signing on. Let’s go kick some dragon ass.”

“Hey, Anthros – you heard from Kayman? He hasn’t checked in.” It was the guild leader, Thunderhoof.

“No.” Jeff couldn’t imagine why their top mage would be missing on a raid night.

“Hmm. Well, we’ll wait a little longer for him and then I guess we’ll have to just figure something out.”

The shadow was back. It was a dark patch on the screen, hovering where one of the guild’s healers, a lithe nymph named Ravena, was standing. The tapping was also back.

Jeff decided it had to be a hardware problem that would either resolve itself or force him to replace the monitor altogether. He wasn’t enough of a hardware geek to really know for sure.

He stood up and shook off a feeling of vague uneasiness by sucking down the rest of his beer and then going into the kitchen for another one. In the kitchen, the tapping sound was barely audible. Jeff stood there for a while, drinking his beer, unsure of what to do next.

The beer having magnified his courage center, Jeff walked over and sat back down at his computer. The tapping and the shadow were gone. He put on his headset. The guild members were discussing strategy.

“Hey, Anthros, so since Kayman is AWOL, we need you to pull out Panadar for this one,” instructed Thunderhoof.

“Right, I figured that. Be right back.” He logged off of Anthros and logged back on as his backup character, a damage-dealing mage named Panadar. His monitor flashed for a second. Jeff was struck by a sudden terror as he could have sworn he saw a skeletal face in the screen. Just for a second, two deep skeletal holes stared at him from where his game screen should be. A chill whisper, like the screech of a bad AM radio signal, escaped the screen.

So hungry…

The sound came out of the computer and scorched Jeff’s brain with ice.

Then the apparition was gone, and Jeff was left staring at his character, Panadar, on the game screen.

IV

Nobody else in the guild had seen the apparition, heard the whispering, the tapping, or even seen the shadows. Jeff was alone with this particular nightmare. Thankfully, whatever it was didn’t come back, and Jeff was able to help his guild defeat the third boss in the raid successfully.

Ravena, in particular, outdid herself. She was right there with her healing spells when needed, and nobody was killed even once.

“Hey, nice job, Ravena,” Jeff said over his headset.

“Thanks. I really felt like everything was clicking.” Ravena’s reply was distorted. Her voice sounded digitized, like little bits of the transmission were breaking apart, the very waves of sound disassembling themselves. Jeff strained to hear her. He took off his headset, shook it, and put it back on. Must be a loose connection, he thought. But something nagged at him.

He remembered then that the shadow he’d seen earlier had been hovering over Ravena, and as he looked, it was back.

“Ravena, is everything ok?”

“What? I don’t know…everything’s fine. What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. There’s some kind of a shadow on my scree-“

A scream pierced Jeff’s headset, distorted, unraveled, and then cut off completely.

The shadow around Ravena disappeared from Jeff’s game screen.

And so did Ravena.

“Ravena?” Jeff ventured.

“Ok, what the fuck was that?” It was Thunderhoof. He’d also heard the scream.

“I have no clue. Ravena?”

The line was silent, but for a distant electric crackling sound.

V.

A headline the next day caught Jeff’s attention. The game was downloading a patch, so he had some time to kill before he could log on, and he was idly browsing the web.

“Man Found Starved to Death Sitting At His Computer.”

The headline linked to a video of a local news reporter.

“This is Chip Hedley in Tulsa. 21-year-old Marco Rubenstein was found dead yesterday in his apartment. Authorities are not releasing a lot of details here, but I’m being told that he died of starvation. His emaciated body was found slumped over his computer. Police suspect he may have been an online gaming addict…”

Jeff shut off the video. That was Kayman. Kayman was dead. But starvation? The guy logged off regularly. He had a job. Jeff knew this from the times they’d chatted during raids.

He went to Google News and typed “dead” and “computer” into the search box. A million things came up, most of them irrelevant. However, on the third page, an article caught his eye. It was from a couple of months ago. Jeff recognized the name. Sakaro Fujimura. She was a Japanese girl who had raided with them from time to time, and who had had an array of high-level characters, all with the best gear. She and Jeff had become fast friends during the raids, because she, like him, was a major introvert, and they had bonded over their shared social awkwardness.

She had disappeared about two months ago, and Jeff thought she’d moved on.

Jeff clicked on the article, headlined “Girl Found Starved to Death at Computer.” The story was horrible. The police had found her slumped over her computer, completely emaciated, her apartment a filthy mess, a dead cat in one corner. The autopsy revealed that she hadn’t eaten or consumed any liquid for over a week, and had died of starvation, dehydration, and exhaustion. The investigators discovered that her characters had been logged on to the game for more than 150 hours straight.

Jeff shuddered. He knew he gamed a lot, but he at least took breaks to eat, drink, and sleep.

The patch was finished downloading. Jeff clicked open his video chat program, put on his headphones, and logged on.

The shadow was back. This time it was over Thunderhoof. The tapping was louder, more insistent, and Jeff thought he could see the shadow pulse with each tap.

Fear gripped Jeff – Thunderhoof was a good guy and a great guild leader, but he was also one of only a few people Jeff could call a friend in the real world. Jeff looked up to Thunderhoof, who, though he was much older than Jeff, had always treated Jeff with respect. In fact, Thunderhoof was the only person who could drag Jeff out of the house once in a while to get a beer.

There was static in his earpiece. Behind the static, a high pitched keening. Behind that, a voice. A whisper. A bad radio connection. So hungry…

“Thunderhoof?” Jeff’s voice wavered.

“Yeah I’m here.” But his voice was distorted, crackling, broken, like Ravena’s had been.

VI

Edgar Hansen was proud of his role as guild leader, and took it very seriously. His office was decked out with maps and charts and strategy guides. He knew what each member of his raid group was capable of. He had spent some time in the military when he was younger, and now, in his retirement years, was enjoying the challenge of leading a group of soldiers again.

He was focused on his computer screen, arranging his gear for the night, when the entire screen became shrouded by what looked like a cloud hovering over the game world. The monitor flickered and made a sharp keening noise, like an old television warming up. Behind the keening, a rhythmic tapping.

The shadow on the screen began to take a shape. Edgar stood up and backed away from the screen. His headset, which was making the same kind of shrieking electronic noise, reached the end of its cord and pulled out of the machine, severing his connection to the rest of the guild. But the sound from his monitor continued, and grew, and began to hurt his ears.

Carefully, he pushed the button to turn off the monitor. The picture and the sound died.

He plugged his headset back into his computer tower. The screeching was still there, and he winced.

“Guys, I’m going to have to log off – think my computer’s about to clunk out…” He just hoped they could hear him. He didn’t know a lot about computers, but this kind of a problem couldn’t be good.

He decided that for safety’s sake, he’d better turn off his entire computer, and then maybe have Jeff come over and look at it. Jeff was a good kid, and knew a lot about this stuff.

He turned around and began to walk out of his office. As he left the room, he realized he could still hear a soft tapping coming from inside his computer monitor.

VII

Jeff ran downstairs and got in his car. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he knew – just knew – that something bad was about to happen to his good friend and guild leader. He had to get to Edgar’s house and try to figure out how to stop it.

Jeff peeled out of his parking space and sped over to Edgar’s house.

He realized then that he had forgotten his cell phone, so he couldn’t even call Edgar and warn him. But warn him of what? He hadn’t the faintest clue about what was happening – he just had a hunch, a dread, a horrible feeling that Edgar was going to die tonight.

He turned on the radio. This car had never had a good antenna, but tonight the reception was especially bad. FM began to sound like AM, with high pitched wavering distortions. He was in range of the NPR station he liked to listen to, but he couldn’t quite get it. He turned the tuning knob and tried to fix the signal.

At that moment, the signal cleared. A young female voice, a cold, empty, hollow, voice, a voice wrapped in shadows, was repeating, softly, insistently, words that drove an ice pick of fear into Jeff’s brain.

“So hungry…so hungry…”

VIII

The tapping was louder. A faint green glow pulsed in the corner of the screen, in rhythm with the tapping. The glow got bigger, fading in and out with the tapping. Soon the glow covered the entire screen. The overhead light in the office blew out, shrouding the room in green.

Edgar stood there, silent, unsure.

The AM radio sound started up again, the wavering static of a signal that isn’t quite in range.

The green glow faded, dimmed, the monitor emitted a harsh buzz, and suddenly turned itself on.

There was a face there. It was a face Edgar recognized.

Sakaro. The Japanese girl with whom Edgar had shared a brief online romance, who had run raids with Edgar’s guild, who had been beautiful, and smart, and funny, and had taken Edgar’s mind off of his wife, dead for one year. They’d exchanged photos, e-mails, had chatted via messenger, had even called each other on the phone, long distance, international, which hadn’t been cheap for either of them.

And then she’d disappeared.

Her face was gaunt, pale, drawn, her eyes were shadows, her lips were drawn up over her teeth, her beautiful blond hair tangled and knotted over one side of her face.

“Sakaro?” he whispered.

The face on the monitor opened its mouth, the shadows inside rushed forth, broke through the monitor, and reached for him with long, spindly, fingers.

IX

Jeff screeched to a halt in front of Edgar’s house, threw the car into park, jumped out, and ran to the front door, bruising his knuckles as he knocked.

An electronic squeal shot forth from inside the house. Jeff tried the doorknob, found the house open, and ran inside. He reached Edgar’s office.

The computer screen was smashed on the floor. Edgar was standing over it.

“It was Sakaro.” Edgar could barely get the words out. He slumped down in his office chair.

“Is she…gone?”

“No, she’s here.” Edgar’s voice had changed. It was cold, electric, but clear, like a perfect digital approximation of a voice. Edgar’s eyes darkened, shrouded, the whites flickering, then cleared again.

“I’m here.” Edgar stood up, his body jerking. Jeff backed away.

“So hungry…” Edgar lurched toward Jeff. Jeff tripped over something on the floor and nearly lost his balance, but recovered.

Edgar’s features were distorting, his whole body began to flicker and shimmer, as he shuffled forward, slowly, toward Jeff.

Edgar opened his mouth, a black hole, endless, impenetrable, drawing Jeff toward it, a keening digital wail emanating from it. The shadows exhaled from the blackness of that mouth and reached for Jeff. The shadows became perfect human fingers pale, withered, dead, with long fingernails. Jeff stumbled backwards, and this time he did fall. Hard. His head slammed against the hardwood floor, and he struggled to remain conscious. Dark splotches threatened to consume his vision, his head swam, but he willed himself not to black out. He sat up.

The shadow fingers were right on top of him. They yearned to consume him, to draw out all of his strength and leave his desiccated corpse lying there on the hallway floor.

He screamed, putting his hands over his face, trying to block out those dark, seeking, fingers.

The fingers touched him, and grew into a large, twisting, shadow that wrapped itself around him, and he felt himself being drained. His consciousness receded, slowly, dark walls closing, a wave of panic rushing in.

X

A rumor developed that if someone saw a shadow covering your character, then something bad would happen to you in real life.

Nobody was really quite certain what might happen, but there were stories of a psychotic hacker who put a virus into the game to terrorize people online and then went and killed his chosen targets in real life.

Police who were called to investigate the incidents invariably found someone who had clearly been a game addict, and who had starved to death rather than stop playing.

No glitch was found in the game to account for the shadows.

RIP Peter Orlovsky

2010-06-01T21:35:00.000-07:00

Poet and longtime companion to Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, died on Sunday. His unique poetic voice will be missed.

Here's a beautiful one by Peter. I particularly love the line: "I walk on the street looking for eyes that will caress my face."

FRIST POEM

A rainbow comes pouring into my window, I am electrified.
Songs burst from my breast, all my crying stops, mistory fills
the air.
I look for my shues under my bed.
A fat colored woman becomes my mother.
I have no false teeth yet. Suddenly ten children sit on my lap.
I grow a beard in one day.
I drink a hole bottle of wine with my eyes shut.
I draw on paper and I feel I am two again. I want everybody to
talk to me.
I empty the garbage on the tabol.
I invite thousands of bottles into my room, June bugs I call them.
I use the typewritter as my pillow.
A spoon becomes a fork before my eyes.
Bums give all their money to me.
All I need is a mirror for the rest of my life.
My frist five years I lived in chicken coups with not enough
bacon.
My mother showed her witch face in the night and told stories of
blue beards.
My dreams lifted me right out of my bed.
I dreamt I jumped into the nozzle of a gun to fight it out with a
bullet.
I met Kafka and he jumped over a building to get away from me.
My body turned into sugar, poured into tea I found the meaning
of life
All I needed was ink to be a black boy.
I walk on the street looking for eyes that will caress my face.
I sang in the elevators believing I was going to heaven.
I got off at the 86th floor, walked down the corridor looking for
fresh butts.
My comes turns into a silver dollar on the bed.
I look out the window and see nobody, I go down to the street,
look up at my window and see nobody.
So I talk to the fire hydrant, asking "Do you have bigger tears
then I do?"
Nobody around, I piss anywhere.
My Gabriel horns, my Gabriel horns: unfold the cheerfulies,
my gay jubilation.

The flotilla incident

2010-05-31T14:40:00.000-07:00

(Edit: There's a lot going on in the world, and while I have converted this blog to focus on fiction writing, I'm still a political animal, and sometimes I have to speak out.)

There are more questions than answers right now. The facts as we know them:

1) A "flotilla" of ships was headed toward Gaza.

2) This "flotilla" was asked by Israeli authorities to divert to Ashdod.

3) The "flotilla" refused to divert, was confronted by Israeli authorities, and people were killed.

As far as I can tell from what I'm reading, those are the only concrete facts that have been established.

Things that have not yet been established, but are being speculated on and used as rallying points for various angry parties:

1) What was the "flotilla" actually carrying? Food? Medicine? Weapons?

2) Who fired first?

I haven't seen a single objective report on this situation. People are posting videos all over the web that seem to support one side's view or the other side's view. I just watched a choppy video posted on BoingBoing with commentary in English, Arablic, and I think Turkish. The video was choppy and difficult to interpret, and as I don't speak Arabic or Turkish, I can't really tell what the commentators were saying.

I also saw a video from the Israeli military, with captions in English, telling a very different story.

My point is this. When we're dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian situation, we must take any "news" report with a grain of salt. The first question we must answer when looking at a video is: who shot the video, do they have an agenda, are they a neutral party? One cannot make any assumptions in this conflict. We cannot assume a) that this flotilla was actually carrying aid, b) that the Israeli military fired first, and c) that the people they were firing at were unarmed innocent victims. Likewise, we cannot assume that a) the flotilla was actually carrying weapons and other dangerous materials to arm Hamas, b) the Israeli military was defending itself from rioters carrying knives, broken bottles, and other weapons, and c) the deaths on the ship were only a result of such defense.

I don't know what happened. I wasn't there. I haven't seen a single objective news report. The objective fact that people were killed is a tragedy. But that is all that I know for a fact.

Eyes open, people. Be smart. Don't fall from propaganda - from either side.

When do we open our eyes?

2010-05-30T01:27:00.001-07:00

Let's recap the last few years. Briefly.

1) The economic system collapsed because the financial market wasn't sufficiently regulated by the government. As a result, millions lost their homes, their jobs, their livelihoods. The people who caused the problem gave themselves a nice bonus at our expense. The vast majority of Americans sat back in disbelief, completely unable to do anything about anything, because the decisions that caused so much chaos and destruction were being made in corporate boardrooms and stock trading floors that the average American had no access to or right to vote in.

2) 29 miners were killed in an explosion because the mining industry wasn't sufficiently regulated by the government, and the owner of that particular mine found it to his economic benefit to pay fines repeatedly rather than fix a myriad of safety violations. The miners who were killed weren't even given the benefit of a right to organize into a union, where they would at least have a voice to challenge the company's practices.

3) The Gulf of Mexico is currently being utterly destroyed because the government agency overseeing the drilling industry was rife with corruption, and let companies like BP do essentially whatever they wanted. As a result, a rig exploded, a dozen people were killed, and, again, the Gulf of Mexico is currently being utterly destroyed. The vast majority of Americans can do absolutely nothing to stop this disaster, because the decisions that led to it took place in corporate boardrooms in which none of us has a vote.

Libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, teabaggers, radical corporatists, are all convinced that government is the enemy, that freedom is the opposite of government. Yet that freedom they cherish is only freedom for a select few: those who sit in corporate boardrooms, those who own the factories, those who steer the wheels of our collective economic fates.

For the rest of us, this freedom is a lie.

You're pissed because BP is destroying the Gulf of Mexico? Alright then, go fly to London, go to BP headquarters and tell them to stop. See what happens. Sure, boycott them. That'll help. What are you going to not buy, exactly?

You're pissed because you're losing your house, because a mortgage lender lied to you? Go yell at your mortgage broker. See how far that gets you.

You're furious because your husband works in a non-unionized mine, and the mine owner isn't fixing safety violations? What, precisely, are you going to do about it? Your husband has the freedom not to work at that mine, you say? Sure he does. Is there another job available to him? Does that feel like freedom to you and your husband?

What freedom does the "free market" really offer the vast majority of people? The freedom to buy, or not to buy? How does that translate to BP? Or the mining industry? Or the financial system? Absent government intervention, what freedom do we have to hold BP accountable for destroying the Gulf of Mexico? What rights does the capitalist system grant us? What power to effect change?

Left to their own devices, capitalists will always choose the cheapest path that gets them the greatest profit, no matter what other factors may be involved. And if they have to kill people or destroy an ecosystem to get that profit, they'll do it. And there's not a damned thing we can do about it, as long as we believe the lie that this economic tyranny somehow equates to "freedom."

True freedom would be a democratic economy in which we could all participate. True freedom would be a collective understanding of our responsibility to each other and the planet. True freedom would mean that you and I could go tomorrow and vote to shut down BP and press for criminal charges for its top executives.

The anarcho-capitalist teabaggers are lying to you. If you make the government smaller, take away what little power it now has to regulate the market, then the capitalists will shortly destroy the planet in a fireball of incompetence, ignorance, and greed.

How many more massive capitalist failures that cause untold misery? How many more, before we open our eyes?

I'm not waving the red flag of revolution just yet. I just want people at least to recognize the lie. And the only solution, for now, is MORE government regulation, STRICTER government regulation, COMPETENT government regulation, and HIGHER taxes, especially on the wealthy. The capitalists need to be kept on a much tighter leash than they are now, and that costs money.

We can talk about revolution after the next massive failure of the "free" market.

Shouldn't take long. Probably already happened.

This isn't rocket science, people. It's simple economics - and in our current system, economics boils down to this:

Are you the one doing the screwing, or are you the one being screwed?

That's freedom?

Cylons vs. Klingons

2010-05-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

Cylons vs. Klingons

“Vodka is not meant to be drunk straight.”

“Russians do it.” Jesse looked at me, still holding the bottle.

“Well they're Russian.”

“I could be Russian.”

“You're not Russian.”

“God, it burned my lips!”

I squinted at him. I don't wear my glasses when I'm sitting at my laptop, so things far away tend to be blurry. “God, how much of that have you had?” He'd been making himself screwdrivers for a couple of hours.

“Not much.” He showed me the bottle, which to my unglassed eyes looked as if it had been pixellated. In other words, it was blurry as hell. But it was clearly still mostly full.

“I just wanted to know what it tasted like.”

I repeated, “Vodka is not meant to be drunk straight. It tastes like fire.”

Still, I shouldn't be one to criticize him for drinking. I'd gone through entire bottles of sherry in one night before. I'd gone through entire liters of whiskey in two or three nights. Recently, I'd started to cut down a bit, but tonight I had a shiny new bottle of Wild Turkey burning a hole in my cabinet, and it needed to be addressed. I got up from the laptop and poured myself another. Adele was singing about chasing pavements, her sweet British voice emanating from my laptop's tinny speakers, which really didn't do her justice.

Jesse came back into the room as I was settling back down at my laptop. He made some kind of odd noise, startling me, and then came over and attacked me with a smooch.

“You're being very annoying tonight.”

“You should get an Irish accent,” he suggested.

“How exactly would I accomplish that?”

He didn't seem to have an answer, and so he shuffled back into the other room to watch his television show on his own laptop. I had a novel to write, so I went back to staring at the blinking cursor. The damned thing just kept blinking, and the page kept being blank, so I typed some words onto it. I think I had the idea to write some kind of an epic science fiction adventure story, but it wasn't starting out well. I'd been watching a lot of downloaded episodes of old science fiction shows lately, which, now that I thought about it, had been the entire problem, the entire reason why I hadn't gotten any writing done. I'd just been zoning out in front of the desktop computer, watching episode after episode, killing my evenings one Cylon at a time. Now I was afraid that my writing would just be full of Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek, and I'd end up with Cylons fighting Klingons. Nobody would want to read that. Unless there was porn in it, and then there would certainly be a market for it on the Internet. Still, tonight I had put the television watching to bed, and I was determined as all hell to write something, anything, even if it was utter crap. I was sick of wasting my time.

I sighed. The Wild Turkey certainly wasn't helping matters; in fact, the more I had of it, the less I liked it. How could Jim Beam make a delicious rye whiskey, and this Wild Turkey stuff, which was more expensive, tasted like bathtub death?

Suddenly I hit on an idea, and started typing furiously, my fingers blurring over the keys like another metaphor I didn't have time to think of because I was too damned busy coming up with the next great science fiction epic classic adventure thingy. This was it, this was the thing that would be optioned for television, movies, and the inevitable Internet porn. There were no Cylons, no Klingons, nothing but a brand new science fiction universe that I had created myself, that was entirely mine, and that would make me millions. There would be at least twelve novels in this series, if not more, and that would just be the start.

“....hot dog stand burned to the ground,” explained Jesse, who was standing in front of the open freezer door eating ice cream out of the carton.

I blinked, realizing that I had hyperfocused again.

“What?”

“The hot dog stand – you know, the one we go to sometimes – apparently someone burned it down. It's on Oregon Live.”

“Shit, that sucks. Go away now – I'm creating a masterpiece of unbridled genius.”

He shrugged, put the ice cream back, and wandered back into the other room.

But by then, of course, all was lost. My work of unbridled genius stared at me, unfinished, the cursor blinking, waiting for me to figure out what comes next. I imagined my lead character sitting there in his fighter jet, twiddling his thumbs, staring at me expectantly. Ok, buddy, I thought. You tell me. What are you about to do? He shrugged. A lot of help you are.

I sighed, saved the document in progress, closed my laptop, and went over to the desktop computer. Another episode of Battlestar Galactica should help me focus my mind...

An ADHD moment

2010-04-17T15:28:00.000-07:00

I wanted to sit down and write a story. But of course, I have ADHD, which makes any task explode into a tangent of other tasks that are only marginally related to the original task of writing.

I started out just fine. I took my medication, which is a long-acting form of Ritalin. The problem with this medication is that because it is long-acting, it also takes a while to start working. So if I start trying to focus on something immediately, it doesn't always work.

I walked the dog, came back, got myself a glass of tea, and sat down with my laptop. When I opened OpenOffice, an information bubble popped up, telling me I needed to update something. I'm so fed up with information bubbles popping up on my computer. I clicked on the stupid thing and it crashed OpenOffice.

Well, at that point I decided I'd had enough of OpenOffice, and got on the web to find another kind of freeware word processing software. As I was scrolling through the list of programs available, I remembered that Matthew had a copy of Word 2007 on the main desktop. I don't want to use the main desktop for writing, because we don't have a good computer desk, and the chair is way too low, so it's uncomfortable.

Anyway, I got the idea that maybe I could turn on network sharing so that I could share the copy of Word that was on the desktop computer and use it on my laptop. I know now that such things are not possible, but at the time it seemed like a likely possibility. So I took my laptop over to the desktop and connected the homegroups using the password, making sure everything was shared properly. In the process, I noticed that while the laptop could see the desktop, the reverse was not true, so I spent some time trying to fix that problem. While I was doing that, I decided to set up all of the homegroup settings, making sure that I could use the network printer, and that my iTunes library on the desktop was shared with my laptop.

That accomplished, I went about trying to open the desktop copy of Word on my laptop. Unfortunately, my laptop showed that copy only as a shortcut, and since Word wasn't installed on my laptop, I realized that my genius idea just wasn't going to work, and I was going to have to either stick with using OpenOffice or find another program.

I took my laptop back over to my comfy writing nook and checked to make sure the network settings were all working, and then, since I was doing that anyway, opened iTunes on my laptop and synced it with my desktop library. Then I went back to the website and tried to find a freeware word processing software. I found one called AbiWord, and downloaded it. While it was installing, I checked to see how much Word actually costs, but for some reason, the website I was looking at didn't list the price.

AbiWord installed itself and I started trying to use it, only to discover that its dictionary didn't recognize contractions. Well that was no good at all. Finally, I gave up and opened OpenOffice, wrote a few sentences, and then got up to get myself a glass of tea. I got a glass out of the cabinet, got the tea out of the fridge, and then realized I had a glass of tea already, put the tea back in the fridge, leaving the glass on the counter, and went back and sat down at my laptop.

I wrote a few more sentences of what I was originally writing, and then realized how funny the whole previous sequence of events had to be if seen from the perspective of someone who doesn't have ADHD, so I switched to a new document and started writing this.

Mine Disasters

2010-04-06T23:21:00.000-07:00

Hello Sinister ...well, I've been away so long I doubt anyone's still reading this...so here comes a rare political post that hearkens back to the glory days of this once-mighty blog.

Yesterday's mine disaster in West Virginia is obviously tragic and upsetting for a great number of reasons. But I want to make a couple of points about it.

Rachel Maddow tonight pointed out that the company who runs the mine had literally thousands of safety violations over several years, and had been fined millions of dollars. The trouble is, the mine owners made a cold calculation: it was cheaper to pay the fines than it would be to fix the problems. Thus, they put profit over the safety and lives of the mine workers - and did so in a very conscious, calculating, capitalist manner.

The lesson I think needs to be drawn from this is quite simple: capitalists, left to their own devices, will kill people to keep their pocketbooks fat.

The "free market" offers absolutely no protection from this barbarity. And clearly, the regimen of fines set up by the government isn't working, because the fines cost less than would fixing the safety violations.

My first question to the government is this: Why doesn't the punishment for a violation require fixing the violation, instead of just a fine? Fine the company, and as part of that punishment, require that they pay the fine AND fix the violations - or face immediate shut down. Why is that not the case now?

Still, I fear that even such a solution as that would not be sufficient - capitalists tend to hire lawyers to help them weasel out of regulations so they can protect their bottom line. Or they just ignore them and buy Congressmen to keep the regulators out of their hair.

The "free market" clearly cannot be trusted with the lives of our coal miners. Too many have died because the capitalists literally decided that they'd rather pay a fine than create a safe work environment.

Of course, part of the problem is that we're running out of coal, and the coal that we're going after now is in much more dangerous places. But still - when you have such a blatant example of this kind of callous disregard for human life, this capitalist need to kill to protect profits - there's not much else that can be said.

I'd like to call on Congress and the President to consider a new spending program that would create safe mines, help us get control of our energy infrastructure, and probably create jobs in the process.

Nationalize the coal mining industry, and allow the United Mine Workers in to each site to unionize the workplaces. When mines are run by capitalists, union busting, just like safety violations, is rampant. When mines are unionized, mines are safe - as one commentator on Rachel Maddow's show put it, mining becomes a brotherhood, with all miners looking out for each other, and fire captains assigned to stand guard against accidents.

Nationalizing the coal industry will also serve another purpose, beyond creating safe, unionized, secure work places for miners. By nationalizing the coal industry, the government can take the profits gained from the industry to build new nuclear power plants, thus weaning us away from the need to use fossil fuels. Then, eventually, we can begin retraining programs, so that mine workers can enter safer, more healthy lines of work, and we can kill this dirty, unsafe industry once and for all.

RIP Howard Zinn

2010-01-27T23:09:00.000-08:00

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."

You will be missed.

writing writing

2010-01-21T22:47:00.000-08:00

My writing buddies and I have committed to writing 1000 words a day, and we're going to hold each other accountable. That's going to be good for me. Tonight I did not make the 1000 word goal, but I did sit down and pound out a good 750. That's more than I would have done otherwise.

Anyway. One or two of you may remember that a while ago I posted part 1 of a trifle of a short story I wrote called The Nondescript Man. Well, here's the rest of it. Let me know what you think.

The Nondescript Man, Part 2 of 2

IX

The nondescript man stood outside of Julie's apartment staring intently at her kitchen window. Since it was a Saturday at about noon, near Christmas, the sidewalk was jammed with people, but they all seemed to unconsciously walk around him, leaving him in kind of an eddy in the flow of the crowd. Julie, who was inside making some eggs, was oblivious. However, she did take notice when her radio station started playing her favorite song again. Then, her eyes widened as she noticed that her radio was sitting on top of a copy of the very CD that she had been looking for all these years, the one with that song on it. She grabbed it quickly, knocking the radio over on its front. Her hands trembling, she stared at the CD, daring it to explain its presence. It made no sense. She had never owned this CD. What was it doing here? She began to get paranoid, thinking maybe she had a stalker, maybe a radio DJ stalker, who was playing her song and sneaking into her apartment leaving her CDs. But that was crazy, she thought. Who stalks a forty-ish librarian with cankles, bad teeth, and a limp? There had to be some other explanation.
She decided to phone Mona, her childhood friend who also worked at the library. Mona picked up immediately.
“Mona, it's Julie.”
“Hey, what's going on, girlfriend?”
Julie thought about what to say, and decided on, “Weird things are afoot, Mona. And you know I don't use the word “afoot” unless it's serious.”
“Ooh, I like it when things are afoot. Or a foot long,” Mona added, giggling.
Julie grinned. “Oh, you're incorrigible.”
“Guilty as charged,” Mona chirped. “So what's afoot, exactly?”
Julie explained about the song and the CD, and her theory about the radio DJ stalker. Mona was silent for a minute, and then said, “Alright, so say you have a radio DJ stalker. Do you know anybody who fits that description?”
“No, that's the crazy thing. I don't know anybody in radio. I just have my one radio station that I love to listen to because it plays bossa nova music, and that's the station that's been playing this song that, until a few days ago, I hadn't heard in years. And now this CD shows up. I'm just a little baffled, that's all.”
“Julie, I'm coming over, and we'll figure this out. You know me - I love a good mystery.”
Julie smiled. “Ok, I'm making some eggs – I'll make some for you.”
“Great! I love eggs!” Mona hung up.
Outside the apartment, the eddy in the crowd surrounding the nondescript man closed, and he disappeared.

X

Mike woke up feeling strangely refreshed and awake, ready to take on the world. He sat up and realized he wasn't anywhere he recognized. He was on a small narrow bed in the middle of a room that was hard for him to describe. It was as though his gaze slid off of everything, and he couldn't really get a good grasp of perspective. He also had a strange feeling that he wouldn't remember anything about this place if and when he ever got out of it.

A man was standing at the foot of the bed. Like the room, he was difficult to focus on. Mike couldn't really pinpoint his height, facial features, hair color, or anything about his clothing. It was very odd.
The man began to speak. “Where are you? Who am I? What are you doing here? Those are the questions you're about to ask me, right?” Mike nodded slowly.
“Did you bring the harmonica and the marbles?” asked the man. He looked at Mike expectantly.
Mike was astonished to find that the harmonica and the marbles were in his left hand. “Uh, yeah, it looks like I did,” he said. “But -”
“Hand them to me, please.” The man held out a very long, very pale hand. Mike handed them over.
“What do you think these are, Mike?”
“You're asking me?”
“I'm asking you? I kidnap you, bring you to this weird room, and instead of giving you answers, all I do is ask you questions you have no idea how to answer? Who am I? That's what you're going to say, right? God, this is like a bad science fiction movie.”
“What?” Mike was growing increasingly confused and more than a little bit frightened.
“Beep boop, beep boop, take me to your leader.” The man began strutting around the room making “beep boop” noises. Mike looked for a way out, but he still couldn't focus on anything in the room, and it was beginning to make him a little bit nauseous.
“Um, so, can you just tell me what you want, and let me go? I have a bus to catch.”
“Oh, you have a bus to catch, do you? Well, I won't keep you then.” The man pressed a switch, and Mike suddenly felt like his stomach had wrapped around his brain. The world disappeared, and then reappeared, and he was back in his dorm room. Within fifteen minutes, he had forgotten the whole incident.

XI

The intercom buzzed.
“Captain, I think we need to talk about our man downstairs.”
“Why? What's he done now?”
“Well, he had the college student, got the items, but then he sort of...lost control.”
Captain Vorbo sighed. He had known that Marko was completely wrong for this assignment. The whole thing was way too complex for him. The precision required to engage the targets, connect them to each other, and perform the intercept really needed a precise strategic mind, and Marko just didn't have it. The whole situation was giving Vorbo a headache.
“Ok, bring Marko to me. I'll talk to him.”
“Aye, captain.”
A few minutes later, the nondescript man walked into the captain's office. He saluted.
“Sit down, Marko.” The captain sat behind his desk and peered at Marko intently. Sure, the appearance was perfect – nobody would remember a face like that – but the mind was flawed.
Marko sat. “What do you need, Captain? I'm very busy.”
“Marko, you know how important this mission is to the whole scheme of things, don't you?”
“I do, Captain, I do. But I can't help feeling that everything about it, including this conversation we're having here, comes right out of a terrible science fiction novel. I mean, you're going to berate me for my incompetence, demand that I do a better job of acquiring the targets, but do so in a way that doesn't actually reveal the plot, right?”
The captain blinked, which he didn't do very often. “Marko, you read too much...though yes, that's just about exactly what I was going to say to you.”
“Well, alright then, I promise I'll do better at,” Marko made some exaggerated quote gestures and winked very dramatically, “acquiring the targets, captain.”
“Are you not taking this mission seriously, soldier?”
“Really, captain? That line? I could write better dialogue in my sleep.”
Vorbo had had just about enough of this.
“You just thought to yourself that you've had just about enough of this, didn't you, captain?”
Irritated, the captain pressed a button, and Marko disappeared. This wasn't going well.

XII

A nondescript man walked into a bar, sat down, and ordered a series of vodka martinis. Or at least, he tried to, but the bartender kept forgetting about him as soon as he turned his back to make the drink. The man sighed, jumped behind the bar, took several bottles of the shelf, and walked out. The bartender was confused and disoriented for a second, and then blinked in amazement as he realized he'd been robbed. He looked around frantically, but he had no idea who could have nicked four bottles of vodka, three bottles of vermouth, and a jar of olives right out from under his nose.

Later, a nondescript man slept it off on a park bench, and wasn't bothered by the police.

XIII

Julie met Mona for coffee at the coffee shop, making sure to order tea as she always did. At a corner table, the nondescript man, looking a little the worse for wear, was nursing a large cup of very hot coffee that he had had to get for himself. He recognized Julie as one of his, he thought bitterly, “targets,” though he could never really understand what it was Vorbo wanted from the three of them. I mean really, he thought to himself, giving them strange things – childhood toys, a harmonica, an obscure CD – and then expecting, through a series of convoluted machinations and ridiculous leaps of logic, that somehow they'd realize their common plight and then...what? Vorbo hadn't really explained that last bit very well at all. It would be simpler if the objects led to some overarching mystery, that, when solved, prevented the imminent destruction of the planet, or something. Or if they really were aliens hovering over the planet conducting experiments on humanity. But this was just silly.
“So, any more sign of the radio DJ stalker?” Mona grinned.
“No, funnily enough, it's been a couple of weeks, and I haven't heard that song again. I still have the CD, but nothing else weird has happened.” Julie sipped her tea and looked around the room. Her gaze still slid off of the nondescript man, who was glaring daggers at her. He stuck his tongue out at her, made some incomprehensible but clearly obscene gestures, all in a futile attempt to get her attention. He was getting tired of being invisible. He hadn't signed up for this assignment, and he was getting sick of it all. Finally, he gave up, got up from the table, grabbed the table and threw it over, like in an old Western, threw his chair at the barista and missed. He stormed out, making sure to rip the door off its hinges as he left. The chair crashed into the espresso machine, breaking it. The barista blinked for a second and then looked at the broken chair and the broken espresso machine, and then over at the upside down table. She couldn't imagine how any of that could have happened. Then she looked at the door, hanging from one hinge. Julie and Mona were also looking around, wondering what the hell had happened.
At that moment, Eric walked in, surveyed the damage, and began to walk out again. Julie spotted him and said, “Wait!” Eric stopped and turned.
“Oh, from the park, hello,” he waved.
Julie hobbled over to him, her limp a little worse than usual.
“Hey, do you know what's going on here? I'm not a kind of conspiracy nut, but I've had some weird things happening to me lately.”
“Hey, there's nothing nutty about conspiracy theories if there actually is a conspiracy,” Eric said.
“Will you join us for a cup of coffee?” asked Julie. The barista seemed to be in a confused trance, as she cleaned up a mess she had no memory of happening.
Eric, who decided he could use a break from his writing anyway, agreed, and joined Julie and Mona at their table. Julie told Eric about the music, and the mysterious CD, and connected it to the grass at the park and the mysterious mess in the coffee shop. Eric told Julie about the firetruck. They discussed the possibilities intently for a while, mostly relying on old science fiction novels and movies, because those kinds of stories always had this kind of intricate threading that seemed completely unconnected until the hero solves everything in the last few pages or minutes.
Mike walked in then, again laden with his backpack. He was just starting the January term, and he had a lot of homework to get done. He sat down at a table, dropped the backpack onto the floor with an audible thud, opened it, and took out a rather imposing looking tome on quantum mechanics. He began to read. Then, he overheard Julie and Mona's conversation with Eric. He'd read many of Eric's novels, but he didn't know enough about the author to be able to recognize him in a coffee shop. Excited now, he reached into his backpack, where he happened to have one of Eric's Flabian Continuum novels, the one where the wily space pirate finally defeats the evil bureaucrats at the High Federation. He brought the book over and said, timidly,
“Excuse me, Mr. Vaughn? I'm a big fan. Can you sign this book?”
Eric grinned, took the book, and signed it.
Julie asked Mike, “Hey, so you know science fiction, maybe you can solve this mystery.” Mike listened to her story about the CD, and Eric's story about the firetruck, and a lightbulb clicked on in his brain.
“Wow. That's kind of a funny coincidence. I wonder if this is connected. A few weeks ago I got a harmonica and some marbles in the mail with no explanation, and there's also this period of about six hours that I can't for the life of me remember what I was doing, but I have a vague memory of being somewhere else.”
“Do the marbles and the harmonica mean anything to you?” asked Mona, who, as an outsider to this whole situation, felt that she had a unique perspective to offer.
“I don't know. For some reason, I don't seem to have them anymore.”
“Hmm,” said Julie. “You know, normally in these kinds of stories, something would happen here that would connect the three situations.”
“Well, I don't know, we're all kind of connected by Mr. Vaughn's stories, aren't we? I mean, right?” Mike hazarded.

At that moment, the four of them were startled to find a man standing at one end of the table. He was quite visible, quite memorable, and quite drunk. He began to speak, and to wobble.
“Look, you three were supposed to be the lynchpins to this whole big thing that we had planned for you. But – but you know what? It was a stupid, stupid plan. God it was stupid. Stupid, stupid stupid. Man, see? Now I'm quoting Ed Wood movies. What the hell?” The man sat down hard in the table's remaining empty chair. He put his head in his hands.
“God, captain Vorbo is going to be pissed at me. I'm a complete failure. He's going to have to start all over again.” The man was visibly sobbing now. Then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, he disappeared into thin air.

XIV

The intercom buzzed.
“We've taken care of Marko, captain.”
“Good.” Captain Vorbo sighed. This scheme had taken years of planning, and now it was ruined, all because the hierarchy had assigned an under-qualified agent.
“Send a note to the affected people, apologizing for the inconvenience, explaining the whole thing, and telling them not to worry about it. We'll just have to try something else, I guess.”
He closed the intercom connection and got up to pour himself a stiff drink.

Sleepy.

2010-01-15T08:45:00.000-08:00

Looking forward to a three day weekend.

On the theme of sleep, here's a poem for today.

A Dream Within a Dream
by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow:
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Finished the novel!

2010-01-02T18:39:00.001-08:00

The Shooter Vanished draft one is now complete. Now comes the hard part - revising it!

The ending of it was very different from the one I originally thought of when I started this novel - but I think it works.

Stay tuned for more info on revisions. I might publish more excerpts here if I'm feeling saucy.

Hey, it's 2010.

2010-01-01T11:20:00.000-08:00

Neat. Happy new year, everyone. May the teens be better for the world than were the aughts.

Interestingly, this is my first Portland overlap day. A year ago today, I arrived in Portland to interview for the job I have now. Three weeks later, after my partner had come up here, gotten himself a job, and found us the apartment, we drove a moving van & a station wagon with my partner, me, my dad, a dog, a cat, and a Betta fish, from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Portland, Oregon, and started a new life. I'll do a reflection post at some point, but not today.

Poem for today

2009-12-30T12:41:00.000-08:00

It's been one of those weeks that makes you wonder about the state of humanity. That sounds overdramatic.

Here's a poem for today by Allen Ginsberg.

An Eastern Ballad

I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak.

I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.

Novel progress

2009-12-26T15:58:00.000-08:00

I hit 200 pages today, which feels really good. I'm getting close to some kind of a climactic showdown in the story, which is going to be complicated. I'm hoping I can get the book to 250 pages, which I think is a respectable length for a first novel.

I'm heartened by a novel I'm reading - The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin. It's less than 200 pages long, and it's been wildly successful. I think the classic novel Heart of Darkness is also about that length. So I'm in good company, even if I end up with a short-ish first novel. Ultimately, it's not the length of the thing that matters, of course, but I'm always intimidated when I pick up a tome that's more than 500 pages long, and I wonder - how the hell did this author write that much? In some cases, obviously, like pulp fiction, a lot of it is written from a formula. But there are a lot of authors out there with enormous imaginations - Frank Herbert comes to mind - who can just churn out thousands of pages worth of brilliance (mixed with incomprehensible crap).

Anyway - I'm getting there. I can honestly say at this point that I have a novel, and that I'm going to finish it.

I might post another excerpt of it soon.

Well I'm 31 today

2009-12-22T07:50:00.000-08:00

so there's that. :-)

And now for no reason at all

2009-12-13T23:50:00.000-08:00

Here's Carol Channing.

I had a little dreidel

2009-12-11T12:35:00.000-08:00

Happy Chanukah to one and all.

Novel progress has been stalled this week by various abstract "busyness." I'm going to try to write a lot more of it this weekend, since we're evidently going to be enjoying some lovely sleet, freezing rain, snow, and other unpleasantness.

Here's a sweet poem for today by the late, great, e. e. cummings, who may have been a raving lunatic and an antisemite, but he was also a literary innovator the likes of which the world rarely sees.

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Excerpt from "The Shooter Vanished" (working title)

2009-12-07T22:05:00.001-08:00

Here's a small taste of my novel-in-progress, tentatively titled The Shooter Vanished. I've still got a lot of writing left to do - the novel currently stands at a very slim 178 pages, and I intend to get it to 250 at least. NANO really doesn't give you a novel at the end - it gives you a dime store paperback and a kick in the pants to put more meat on it.

I want to have the initial draft of the thing finished by January - that's my current goal. Initial draft by January, editing done by March or April, finalized by summer, published and making me millions by early 2011. Not ever having done this sort of thing before, of course, means that those dates are entirely arbitrary. Like Douglas Adams said,

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

So without more ado, here's something to whet your appetite.

Chapter 27

Michael was walking past Powell's bookstore. He was feeling a bit disoriented. He'd had another one of his mystery episodes – flashing lights, dizziness, a quick blackout. They'd been coming more frequently recently, and now they were accompanied by weird hallucinations. As he looked up at the marquee, he was absolutely astonished to see the name of the author who was up in the Pearl Room doing a signing at that very moment. Henry Garson?? After all these years of searching, of justice denied, of the pain of crushing loss destroying his spirit daily, could this be the moment when Michael finally got his revenge? Beyond which, what the hell was Garson doing out in public being featured and promoted by a major bookstore? The bastard had been in hiding for so long that Michael thought the world might have forgotten about him, especially after the controversy that had followed his acquittal in the murder trial.

Michael walked into Powell's. Some things didn't look quite right, and there were several book titles that made no sense to him, but Michael dismissed this as just being a symptom of the fact that he hadn't actually been into a bookstore in ages.

He ducked into the men's room and locked himself into a stall. He took out his pistol, which he had had to start carrying with him at all times just for his own peace of mind, and checked to make sure it was loaded. He wanted to see the look on that bastard Garson's face as he ended Garson's life, just as Garson must've looked straight into Jasmine's eyes before murdering her in cold blood.

Shit. He was having another episode. The world went swimmy, started to melt around the edges. Michael had been to quite a few doctors over the past few weeks, but none of them had been able to explain what the hell had been happening to him. Now, here it was, happening again. At a most inconvenient time, actually.

He sat down on the toilet, closed his eyes, and waited for the world to resolve itself again. There was the flash of light. He opened his eyes again. The world reasserted itself into his vision. He shook off the dizziness, stood up, and put his gun back in its holster nestled under his left arm and well-concealed under his finely tailored wool blazer. He brushed the wrinkles out of his slacks, opened the stall door, and walked over to the mirror. He looked at himself. His eyes were a little bit bloodshot, with black smears under them from the sleep he hadn't been getting enough of recently. He studied the ugly scar on his face, from a jagged beer bottle swung at him several years before. He opened his mouth, grinning at himself, checking for food between his teeth. Satisfied that his teeth were clean, he addressed his attire. If he was going to do this revenge thing, he wanted to do it while he was looking his classiest.

His gray wool slacks were immaculate, the careful crease in them undamaged by the walking he'd done to get here. His Italian loafers were shiny and polished. His maroon cashmere turtleneck draped across his slim form perfectly, and the color exactly complemented his black sport coat.

Michael took pride in his appearance, and used it to his advantage in his line of work.

Satisfied that he was appropriately dressed for his revenge, Michael walked out of the men's room, found the elevator, and started to take it up to the Pearl Room.

As the elevator doors opened, the world started to melt again. Mike cursed himself, determined to shake this one off so that he could complete his revenge. As he looked around through the haze, he noticed something odd. The Pearl Room seemed to be empty. No chairs were lined up in front of a podium where Garson should have spoken before beginning the book signing. There was no podium. Mike kept walking, through the haze, convinced that this hallucination was just part of whatever was happening to him.

There was the flash, and as the world resolved itself, more quickly than it ever had, Michael was staring at Henry Garson, at his smug face, that sickly sweet smile that he used to con the world into thinking he was such a good guy, that face that had convinced a jury that there just wasn't enough evidence to convict him of Jasmine's murder.

Without even thinking about it, he took out his gun and fired. There were screams, but they were lost in a fog that was enveloping Michael. Suddenly, Michael gasped. Through the fog, through the confusion, he could swear that he saw, running toward Henry and screaming...no, no, it was impossible...Jasmine??

Another flash. Michael blacked out.

Did it.

2009-11-29T17:57:00.000-08:00

Well, I did it - 50,000 words in 30 days. Who knew that such things were possible?

46,684

2009-11-28T18:42:00.001-08:00

Home stretch now. I should hit the 50,000 mark tomorrow. Very exciting. The novel won't be done, but I'll have completed the overall task. I will have shown myself that I can write a damned novel, and I can do it in a month, even while having a job and a life. This whole process has been pretty incredible, a real learning experience, a resounding "PROBABLY" to the question of whether I have what it takes to try to be a serious writer, to make it a career, to put myself out there and write material that I can send out to be published.

One thing I have learned is this. If, during this month, I had been able to devote my time solely to NANO, it is entirely possible that I would have finished this novel in two weeks. Not just the 50,000 words - finished the novel. With the pace I was writing, with the solid story that I had to work with, with the creative juices pouring out of my brain, this story would have written itself very, very, quickly, given no other distractions.

That says something.

38596

2009-11-23T22:30:00.000-08:00

Did a bunch of catch up tonight after totally blowing off my NANO this weekend. Now I'm back on track. Digging where the story is right now - clearly this thing is going to surpass the 50,000 word goal and become a real full length novel. There's just a lot that still has to happen, and it won't happen in 10,000 words.

Getting toward the end of this is a pretty incredible feeling. I've now written a story that is almost four times longer than anything I've ever written. And what's more, it doesn't suck! I mean it'll need a hell of a lot of revision, tightening, editing, proofreading, tweaking, whatever you want to call it, but I think I've really got something here. Many thanks to my Portland crew for opening my eyes to Nano. I've got something I never thought I'd have - a damned good start on a possibly publishable novel.

Anyway - onward and upward.

31,739

2009-11-20T08:40:00.000-08:00

I committed the cardinal NANO sin of revising last night, because I realized that my timeline made no sense. And since the second part of my book is a retelling of the first part, from a different perspective, it's sort of important that I get the timeline hammered down. This weekend, I might go through and write an actual timeline with notes as to when important events occur. Then again, I'm reminded that the goal of NANO isn't necessarily to write something perfect, it's to write something quickly and consistently, so I may not do so much of that kind of detail work.

NANO isn't easy. It's not the hardest thing I've ever done, but it's certainly not easy.

In other news, I do believe that it has rained every single day for the past couple of weeks at least. While at the start of this process, my mind was mossy, now I'm just growing moss.

In honor of moss, here's this:

The IT Crowd - Maurice Moss - fire
by Reghy

Quote and video for today

2009-11-17T08:43:00.000-08:00

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

--Carl Sagan

In honor of the space shuttle lifting off.

Passed 27,000 words last night. Still on track.