Faking Disability - #fridayflash

“He's not disabled. He doesn't look in pain, I saw him smiling yesterday. Sometimes he jogs; he must, since I've seen him in sweat pants. Cripples can't exercise.”

“I've heard him laugh. His back can’t be that bad, that's just something he tells the government. He's lazy. He's a liar. Sure, sometimes he goes to his room for two hours, sometimes for a day, but he comes back acting normal. Bet he’s jacking off, and if he can jack off, he's not that sick.”

“When he staggers around like that it gets a lot of sympathy, but he’s not a hunchback. He could stand up straight if he wanted. I’ve seen him do it for photos. It’s an act.”

“No, he’s probably drunk when he’s staggering like that. I had an uncle who liked to get fucked up, but the government didn’t pay him for it. Being fake disabled is a sweet gig.”

“How much do they pay him?”

“Too much, that’s how much, to just pretend like that. It’s depressing to look at, with that stupid tremor. How's he make his leg go like that?”

“Depressing because it’s an act?”

“…Yeah. Yeah.”

John Adapts to Having a Cat

So, yesterday was not my day. While I don't want to go into everything that happened yesterday, it began by burying the family cat, Marshal. Spring had softened the ground enough to confer him to earth, and he'd been waiting long enough for it.

Marshal and I were not friends. He was my sister's cat, though she left him with us years ago to move closer to work, in an apartment that forbade pets. I am extremely allergic to animal dander, and above all danders, cat dander is the worst. Lock me in a room with a cat for long enough and I'm dead. That meant that Marshal spent his life in our basement, with a door leading to the outside where he could prowl and menace the squirrel population.

We had to adapt to each other, because often I'd be the only human contact Marshal could even have in a given day. And further, being the eldest male around, I quickly became Marshal's alpha. He would claw and bite the ladies of my family. I still chuckle remembering the one time he bit my foot as I was too slow to bring his food; I knocked two knuckles on the top of his head, soft but swift, and he looked so surprised that there could be comeuppance for his actions. He never bit me again, and starting that night became much more affectionate.

That was a problem for me since I'd get bleeding hives from a cat rubbing on me. I bought plastic gloves to pet him, and in warmer weather would occasionally wear an old blanket so he could sit on my lap for a while. Even that caused severe asthma attacks.

Marshal never understood why he couldn't rub against my leg or sit in my lap like he could on other humans. However, to illustrate the point of Dr. Pavlov, he learned that he wasn't allowed to. Last spring he finally adapted to following me to the deck and sitting underneath my chair, resting in the shade I created. By the end of summer, he was routinely beating me to the chair for his spot.

It was as close as we could be. Sometimes I'd bring fresh copy out to edit, and talk out plotting problems with him. He was a terrible editor, and if he managed to drool on a page I'd have to throw it out. There was something to having another pair of eyes, sapient or no, to look into as I chatted. There was even the benefit of having those eyes attached to a mind that couldn't understand and thus couldn't object to whatever I was saying, permitting me to have company without distraction. He was a good listener.

A person can adapt to a lot.
 

The Nigh-Infinite Serpent - #fridayflash

It’s hard to believe we ever wanted to kill the Nigh-Infinite Serpent. I mean, I don’t know how you do that, and neither did the Ancients, since every bomb they invented never even sloughed its old skins. But I’ve got fat books full of stories of great knights and cyclopes who braved the mountains of the world trying to kill the Nigh-Infinite Serpent. Their bravery made for great tragedies, even if these days they only get adapted as comedies.

You have to be very brave to fight something that can and frequently does encircle the continent. Every Winter the nights get longer, not because we’re tilting from the sun, but because it’s shifting in the sky trying to warm up. You might as well try to arm wrestle an earthquake. Also, fighting it caused a lot of earthquakes, which is why the Moderns outlawed fighting it.

There was this one whole crusade that climbed up to the Nigh-Infinite Serpent’s mouth, using a combination of apatosauruses and gryphons for travel, just to die bravely and go to Ten Heavens. This was in the second dynasty of the Moderns, who dispatched one thousand runners to chase them and hand of the writs of cease-and-desist. It was bound to be an epic, and an epic against the serpent would probably wreck the entire continent for us.

So the crusade had to turn around, because if they broke the law then their dead souls would never get into Ten Heavens. Except they were so high up that they had to march down the Nigh-Infinite Serpent’s spine – there was no easier way. And marching around up there, the crusaders found there really was no more convenient way to get anywhere on the continent than by walking on the serpent. It was lying about so much of the world that some of them even visited islands cartographers had deemed lost and mythical by hopping off its tail.

You can tell which regions were the first to bribe the Nigh-Infinite Serpent into playing highway because they’re still rich as cake today. Ornithologists were conscribed to trick flocks of rocs and gryphons into straying past the Nigh-Infinite Serpent’s mouth, giving it ample sustenance, and for every load it would contort its amazing body, a length becoming a new bridge or tunnel, sometimes running two or three highways on top of each other if the bribe was plentiful enough. When the Moderns factored in the reduction in wars with nature and no longer needing to construct or pave highways, they considered bribing the beast to be an exceptional savings.

Nowadays it actually gets angry if people aren’t traveling on its hide, which is why it attacks so many aircrafts. The best we can tell is it’s used to all the traffic as a sort of back massage. I work in automobile manufacturing, so I don’t mind the anti-aircraft strikes, but the delays on the highway are miserable whenever the beast sheds.

Waiting for Godot Review

I had the great pleasure of attending my first Broadway play last week. It was Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in Waiting for Godot, which commanded the sort of cast I’m told you don’t usually get even in New York City. Thanks so much to Ross Dillon and Max Cantor for having me along with them, I, some Philistine who wasn’t sure Broadway was even a real place. It turns out is a place, like a lot of New York City, that exchanged the sky for glowing billboards, making it a fine place to watch two great actors ask each other if life is really happening.

Vladimir and Estragon.

It was a wonderful production. Shuler Hensley played Pozzo as a hooting Texan, which I’d never imagined and immediately adored. Billy Crudup rounded out the cast and completely nailed the role of Lucky, from his weary swaying to that impossible monologue on everything and nothing. There came a point when, as an exhausted Pozzo prepares to leave, Lucky took on a knowing expression and caressed his chin in a way I can scarcely believe they got to work on stage, with Crudup blocking so much of our view and facing away, and yet sharing his expression with a crowd behind him. That’s the level of craft the foursome brought to the play.

Shame on me for my highlight coming out of the non-superstars, but McKellen and Stewart were as sterling as you’d expect. McKellen is the more versatile performer, and here played Estragon with so many senile and demented notes, all with the weight of immense age, that reminded me keenly of my grandfather’s final years. Even gestural suggestions of senility were perfect for Waiting for Godot, and particularly for Estragon, who has to forget so much of what’s allegedly happened in front of us. It detracts from my reading of the play as raw nonsense, deliberately eschewing its own continuity to make points about post-modernism, and yet it fits to humanize the material. I love when good actors read material differently than I do. Art isn’t worth it if we all agree. Then it becomes Heinz ketchup.

Also, I love Heinz ketchup.

Vladimir and Estragon.

McKellen got me thinking about other interpretations of the work, and inspired a vision that can never be: Waiting for Adventure Time. The cartoon is often absurd, but that’s a credential for this kind of mash-up, and is so often about exactly the kind of baffling logic that, here, Vladimir is infuriated with for not working. On the subway ride out, I pitched it to Ross and Max, with Finn as Vladimir and Jake as Estragon, and likely animated by the same crew. They won’t even have to switch backgrounds. Any number of Adventure Time voice actors would fit Pozzo, while if we’re going to get anyone to do Lucky’s monologue, it’s got to be Lady Rainicorn running it in Korean.

The play has that elemental nonsense about it, that honestly does remind me of Adventure Time. Adventure Time follows a contrived internal logic, something unreasonable and that children don’t know isn’t acceptable yet. Waiting for Godot is about a grown man’s inability to deal with that lack illogic. An easy highlight of the show was arguing with my friends over its potential meanings as we were stuck in the stairwell trying to exit the theatre.

Vladimir and Estragon.

And no comparison I make can render me guilty. No, sir and madame, every inane thing I think about Waiting for Godot was made to lofty after the lights in the theatre came up and a woman sitting two rows behind us asked, “Why were they waiting for him?”

That’s another highlight right there. You can get angry, or despair, or relish in gifts like those.

#NaNoReMo Wrap-Up

March is on its way out and maybe, just maybe, spring is coming. My boiler is busted and winds are rattling my walls, so it’s cold enough inside that it still feels like winter. Winter is a good physical state to read some angry Russian novels.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is probably going to be on my #bestreads list at the end of the year. It’s a unique novel and excellent in too many ways, the greatest being that it somehow balances all those ways without losing them. It’s political and religious satire, it’s sincere literary soul searching, it’s mad-cap adventures. Its tone changes on the scene to feel like it’s bridging worlds usually separated by genre.

Since I have this whole wrap-up post to write about the book, I’d like to target the dumbest criticism I’ve read of it. I’ve jumped around Google to collect context for Bulgakov’s life and the culture he was tickling, and there are many sites that have a nub about the novel’s aim on Soviet Russia’s secularism. The Wikipedia entry mentioned:

“However, the attempt is ad absurdum – the novel shows the reality of evil and demonic powers in this world. And the resulting question is, "If those powers exist, and the world is run by Woland and his entourage, why does this world still exist?"”

It’s one of many little atheistic editorializations that never seem to get flagged or cleaned up on Wikipedia. This is a particularly stupid one, as having read fifty pages of the novel you know Woland’s agents wouldn’t destroy the world because they don’t spend all their time here and they enjoy its excesses. Woland visits us so seldom that he’s baffled (and then elated) that the Soviets disbelieve in him. And near the end, the devil speaks with a possible superior (guess who) who seems able to get him to change his actions for the kinder.

It’s unbecoming when a line on Wikipedia bothers me for weeks like that, but at least I can get that out of my system, just like Woland got earth out of his.

If I have a regret about the novel, it’s that I read it while writing so much of my own. Composition takes up so much of my mind that often I couldn’t pay The Master and Margarita proper attention and would hold it off to a weekend or a travel day. I read half of the novel on trains headed towards Waiting for Godot, and it was a delightful experience, but it felt like it deserved better. It’s definitely one I’ll revisit in multiple translations.

Other National Novel Reading Month Wrap-Ups: 
Elephant's Child Vs. Salman Rushie
Cindy Vaskova Vs. Jekyll & Hyde 
Helen Howell Vs. Tom Brown's School Days

Talk to Villains - #fridayflash

I never expected to solve more crime as a reporter than as a bulletproof icon. Yet Simon Magus is responsible for more crime in this city and on the planet than any drug runner. He’s a CEO, the kind that builds skyscrapers named after himself, paid for by what his companies export into war zones. He hates me – one of me, for what I’ve been doing in those same parts of the world when I’m not pushing for a Pulitzer.

He invited me to a lunch on the top floor of one of his skyscrapers, witless that it'd been me who stopped a homicidal robot on its roof three days prior. Even with all the shattered glass, he had a breakfast table set up with Kopi Luwak and imported baguettes. Simon honestly wanted to talk to me about my criticisms of his company, at first to see if he could wow and bully me into retreating, but later about the veracity of my sources and how to keep shareholders happy while enacting reform.

All the while he peppered in attacks against my alter ego. He wanted to convince me what a danger he posed, taking responsibility away from normal people. As though he sells VX nerve gas to normal people. The surprising thing was that when I kept disagreeing, Simon grew more eager, like being stolid earned his respect.

I'll never forget. He said, "Cal, the world doesn't need him. It needs you."

That haunted me, and not just as I put on the tights and stopped his robots. Maybe that means he won.

The next day he bought my paper. We’d gone too deep into the red over the backfiring paywall, and without his money we’d have sunk. He said he’d bought it with the money he'd typically donate to PBS. He had me on the dais as he announced the takeover, and asked me to be the new editor in chief.

If this is a scheme, it’s Simon’s best. Not a single crate of weapons has ‘mysteriously gone missing’ off his cargo liners since our first breakfast together, which if you do the math, has saved more lives than I can at the speed of sound. I can’t help doing the math.

But if he expects me to run a puff piece Sunday, he’s got another thing coming.

Bathroom Monologue: Revenge

Step 1: make two small cups of tea since your OCD friend stole your big mug.

Step 2: sip randomly from both cups.

Step 3: watch your OCD friend pay.

Closing in on The Master and Margarita - #NaNoReMo

I cannot call this book by its real title. At least twenty times in this month I've called it "The Master and The Margarita". Perhaps this is because I spent three years expecting it to be about a beverage. Perhaps I have an unhealthy fixation with parallel structure (regardless, we know I have one of those).

I'm closing in on finishing The Master and T... and Margarita, and it's a fascinating piece of work. It's rare that I find any novel with such disparate elements, but it has zany comedy, romance/redemption or high religious pathos. At different points it's reminded me of those cheesy 80's satires that shed their criticism for personal stories of discovery *and* the most profound Historical Fiction. It maintains both its Soviet-era anti-secularism and its Christ-era critical thought, though they come closer to converging, and the ending gets surreal in provocative ways.

Most provocative to me is how the novel challenges what is absurd and what is surreal (damn it, more parallel structure). Both words describe parts of the book, but neither is wholly applicable. Because the scene with the giant talking cat trying to steal candy bars is absurd - it's goofy, impossible, something that doesn't pretend to fit into how the author thinks the world works. But the scene with The Master, an author who went mad trying write a book about Pontius Pilate, having a vision of Pilate struggling to find rest after the execution of Christ, is surreal. The latter scene feels so intense, not fitting with our world and yet unaware of it. Here the absurd and the surreal split: the absurd being what can never be and doesn't care, and the surreal being what can't be and feels like it thinks it could be. Bulgakov's surrealism is disturbing for how convinced it feels it could barge in and upturn us if it wanted to, and brings me back to Borges and the better Kafka.

Which is to say: it's really quite something. I'm too happy to have kept this copy around all these years, and a little guilty for not getting to it sooner, just like Middlemarch last year. Like Middlemarch, there's nothing else quite like this. Other than being unique, there's nothing in common with Middlemarch. Woland would set all that town's nuances on fire.

When I've asked around if any other Russian novelists screw around to the degree Bulgakov did, I've only gotten the answer of Nikolai Gogol. Any recommendations from that canon are welcome. It keeps rewarding me for diving.

A full review of the book should be up on Goodreads (and maybe here) soon. How is your #NaNoReMo coming?

The Perfect Song - #fridayflash

The author finds the perfect song. The search is laborious, infinite, and instantly forgotten in a melody inspirational and nonintrusive. Whatever muse sprang these rhythms into our world gave them merit without demanding attention, and thus the author can work to it.

The author puts the perfect song on loop and begins to type what will surely be the greatest opening paragraph in the history of the novel.

The author’s web browser blinks with an IM. GChat is never truly closed in publishing. Or perhaps it’s a tweet, or a new Like on a half-clever Facebook post from a few hours ago, the last dying gasp of approval for memes past. The author checks the trivial interruption, which ought to take only a few seconds, and the end of the key sentence is still in his mind. Somehow, by no fault of his own, he has soon opened Tumblr, Reddit, and least defensibly, Youtube, chasing links that ask for so little of his time. All with that perfect song on loop in the background, reminding him to work. Eventually he may pause the perfect song to better hear the funny cat video his second college roommate posted, though he’ll unpause it out of guilt shortly later.

The author screws around for so long that, once he realizes his errors, his mind now associates the perfect song with screwing around. Perhaps it was never perfect. Perhaps he was never perfect, but that matters not, for the song is no longer the anthem of victorious words. It causes him only to dwell in how he let lunch time get here without meeting his morning word count.

And so the author opens his music folder and searches for another perfect song.

Rough Draft Done Two Days Early, Let's Go Read Books

At 1:10 last night, I wrote the final chapter of We Don't Always Drown. It's 60 chapters long, about 97,000 words, and as in dire need of editing as I am of a bath.

Like always, I'll post a breakdown of the entire process. Right now I have to make a run to the library - finishing writing means it's time to read.

But I wanted to share a sheet of paper I've kept floating around my desk since the end of February. It assisted my temporal reasoning with the dates when people might visit, or when I'd be traveling, which is a handy way to not rationalize against productivity. At the end of every writing day, I'd mark down the roundest version of my word count.

The 22nd is marked "Godot" because I'm headed off to NYC to see Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot. A pair of wonderful friends got me a ticket to go with them, and I'm equally excited about spending Saturday night with them. I've got something to celebrate now.

7 Chapters in 5 Days

Those pixel-stained technopeasant wretches. Wait, what?

After Thursday, the plan was to write eleven chapters in seven days.

After Friday, the plan was to write nine chapters in six days.

After Saturday, the plan was to write seven chapters in five days.

Thursday was a very difficult day physically, but I managed to make pace that took me through the weekend, and at the urging of friends, took Sunday off as a breather. That’s reasonable because I’m at pace and over the tricky denouement. The remaining seven chapters are mostly shorter and all the composition has gotten me into the groove where I’m terrifically excited to write them. Some of the best bits of the book are about to spill out of my fingertips.

On Saturday night I went out to celebrate by watching The Wind Rises. It’s a wonderful film and a very interesting piece of art if it’s truly Hayao Miyazaki’s last. It’s about the life of a boy who dreams of building airplanes, living myopically towards his goal which lands him a job in pre-World War II Japan. I couldn’t help wondering if I was projecting things onto it, knowing it might be the end of his career, with its ominous treatment of earthquakes, the frequent shots of exhausted engineers smoking to relieve stress, and the finality of so many elements, even the love story that is stricken by tuberculosis we seldom pretend we can beat. It’s certainly the only anime I’ve seen that’s referenced Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.

Then, midway through the film, the engineer’s hero mentions that he’s retiring because an artist only ever has ten years in which he’s creative. That sort of line doesn’t make it into this sort of film by accident. Too funny after a career that touched five decades.

I was the only one in the cinema with a scrap of paper. As immersed as I was in The Wind Rises’s humanoid sound designs of planes and curious depiction of a country at war, I kept drifting back to my novel. Am I passed that ten year period already? I don’t know, but I kept having ideas for what I’d just written and what I’ll be writing next. I tainted my own mind by writing so close to seeing the movie, though it’s a testament to how much The Wind Rises gives that it still caught my attention every time I pocketed my scrap of paper.

Now it’s back to work for me. How’s everyone doing?

They All Fall - #fridayflash

Gravity was a good god, and that was his downfall. He always did his job, pulling things down or together, and did so with such reliability that humans could measure him. How Loki laughed at the idea of a god with such low self-esteem that he let himself be measured. But Gravity broke none of the rules: humans still couldn’t see him or talk to him directly, and he never tampered with someone else’s domain. Loki never had to fear Gravity playing tricks.

The problem came, then, that humans didn’t fear him like they did Loki or Zeus, and they certainly didn’t revere him as they had the sun or that Jesus kid. They made planes, helicopters and went to the moon without so much a prayer – except the typical calculations for landing and such. Even when he did something nasty it was always the suicidal prick that jumped off the bridge that got the credit, not Gravity for providing the very force that enabled the tragedy.

The rise of scientific thought only insulted him further as people believed less in his friends, but never even bothered to question his existence. He wasn’t even part of the cultural debate. One year Carl Sagan, of whom Gravity had always been very supportive, actually mocked theology by saying no one prayed to gravity. Then one morning Gravity picked up Scientific American (well, not “picked up” – he never picked anything up that he didn’t have to) and saw some theorist asking why gravity was so weak in this universe.

“So weak.”

Gravity snapped and finally took old Loki’s advice. They’d regret not appreciating him. They’d regret it when gravity ignored them, and they learned the terror of floating.

Mum At the Final Act

Apologies for recent and short-term blogging silence, friends and fellow readers. The biggest thing slowing The Bathroom Monologues has been on my novel-in-progress, We Don't Always Drown. I've just finished re-plotting the final act and think it's devious enough to go forward. Right now it weighs 76,000 words and feels ready for a big trick of a conclusion. I'm hoping to finish the rough draft before next weekend, when I hit NYC to see Waiting for Godot with friends.

This composition string has taken its toll on reading time; I'm even days behind on blogs, let alone my NaNoReMo pick.

I'm a third of the way through The Master and Margarita. At this stage in my career, I still feel awkward critically assessing the novels of others. So far the novel is delightfully cheesy in a way that none of the Russian heavy hitters I've ever read has gone for, including the deliberate, knowing setup conversation between those darned secular elites and the man we know will turn out to be Satan, as they deny his existence only to be blown away.

This is a good cheese, and an unusual cheese, especially for the contrast of flashback narratives to Pontius Pilate's encounters with a Yeshua of some renown. This Yeshua behaves skittishly, mortal to a fault, even denying his own teachings to get out of being convicted. Where the Satan-against-Soviets satire seemed gleefully pro-Christian, this depiction reads highly anti-Christian. Am I wrong? I almost hope not, because the collision of those two themes could make an incredible novel, and one third of the way in, The Master and Margarita hasn't uncloaked its true shape yet. It could wind up as a number of kinds of novels.

What this really calls for is research on cultural context, but I'm so deep into writing my own novel that reading time is slim. This has slowed down my consumption of Bulgakov's novel, but I'm no less enthused to read it.

Phallus for the Sky - #fridayflash

A gorgeous shot from Icy Sedgwick's photo prompts.

"Hey honey."

"Oh for God's sake, Earth."

"I know you see it. It sure sees you."

"Put that away. It's not even morning. I'm tired."

"I can see the sun behind those clouds! Come on, it's the weekend."

"Where'd the romance go? You're all architecture these days."

"I sent you that shuttle!"

"I know it's the last one, Earth. All your TV satellites are floating in me."

"Have I told you that you look spacious lately?"

"I'm going back to bed."

"I bet a full moon will be out!"

"You're the worst planet I've ever dated. Pluto never needed artistic viagra."

"And look what happened to him! No, baby. I got you figured. You go take a nap. Dream on all this. "

"The single worst planet I've ever..."

White Knighting

Discussed feminism with my girlfriend. She didn't understand why I kept walking in L-shapes around her. I explained that I was White Knighting her.

We broke up.

Bathroom Monologues Movie Awards 2013

It's March 2014, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2013. If all the griping on Twitter is any indication, I'm once again happy to have skipped the Academy Awards. Naturally I disagree with some of the winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a sizable democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go.

The Robbed Award
Going to the movie that got no play last year
and is still on my mind more than whatever won Best Picture

Beasts of the Southern Wild

The Too Little/Too Late Award
Going to the movie I missed by several years,
but have now seen and wish I'd been on the bandwagon for at the time

Lawrence of Arabia

#NaNoReMo Round-Up

It's March, and that means we're kicking of #NaNoReMo!

If you're just checking in, National Novel Reading Month is a support system to finally read the classics you've been putting off. It's not a book club and we don't all read the same book, though you're welcome to read along with me. Instead, every participant chooses their own classic based on their own definition, and blogs or tweets about their progress. It's been a great experiment every year, and everyone is welcome.

And if you've got a book picked out, sound off in the comments so I can add you to the master list!


The NaNoReMo Master List

John Wiswell: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Ross Dillon: Old Goirot by Honore de Balzac
Helen A. Howell: Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes
Cindy Vaskova: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Beverly Fox: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Sonia Lal: Murder on the Orient Express by Agathe Christie

Thanks to everyone who commented and e-mailed about which book I should pick. My friend Ross rightly chided me that I'd been talking about reading Bulgakov for too many years, and so I've chosen the Russian classic The Master and Margarita. It's got the wonderful elevator pitch of "Satan vacations in Soviet Russia," which is a wonderful sort of alien satire and immediately reminds me why I bought it. Even if it I bought it an embarrassing number of years ago.

I prefer satire from other time periods and countries because I have a tricky mind. I can't watch The Daily Show or Colbert Report regularly because, great as their hosts are, the social commentary is inevitably obvious and I can always find ways in which it's somehow inaccurate. No, that's not the problem. The problem is my mind always finds the ways they are inaccurate, even when they're arguing my position. But when I read the meaty social criticism of other countries, the requisite invention of context occupies my mind long enough that the criticism can sink in and has a fighting chance. As much as I respect Garrison Keillor, Avarind Adiga is just bound to give my mind more to work with.

Rest and Repel Those Aliens - #fridayflash

It’s so cold out that he has to build a robot. After he’s shoveled the snow, and cut the wood, and the stoked the fires, his bones are still heavy with persistent chill. He’s weary and climbs into bed, beneath layers of sheets and blankets, from which he constructs the robot.

Technically the robot is a military exoskeleton, but there is no time for technicalities because the planet is under siege. There’s a jersey knit sheet over him, full of microfiber transmitters. A heavier quilt lays over that, but he puts his arms over it, because they always get too hot under all the blankets, and because when he makes fists in the quilt, it feels like two flight controllers molded to his hands. There’s another blanket over that so his arms don’t get too cold, and to seal him into the cockpit. The only thing it doesn’t cover is his head, though he can pull the blanket over it if he gets a nightmare.

The beauty of his robot is that it convects his body heat, storing and building it up much better than a snow suit or a single blanket unit. Also, it has hard light lasers that can smash alien ships with armor that’s heat resistant, and that’s wicked. His weary eyelids slide closed and he enjoys a heads up display that targets all the enemy craft hidden in the sunspots.

His robot is so smartly built that he doesn’t feel it take off. It moves through the stratosphere without a whisper, powered by Generation Two Improbability Drive Tech. The invading aliens don’t even have Generation One.

The wind rattles his windows like a hundred tractors driving by. He imagines a hundred enemy space crafts, out-numbering him, but they are out-teched and out-gunned. Just one squeeze of his imaginary triggers fills up the sky with his hard light lasers.

Sometimes he shoots them down. Sometimes he goes up and talks it out, and becomes instrumental in the peace process. Sometimes he falls asleep right away. Saving the world is oddly relaxing.

What Recharges Writing?

Probably unrelated?

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about how to recharge writing. There are some people who never seem to stop – Stephen King infamously told the public he took three days off a year, only to reveal he’d lied and that he wrote on those days too. At Viable Paradise I was awed at how Elizabeth Bear could hit her laptop in-between lectures, critique manuscripts while jogging, and always seem to maintain writing progress even in crowded rooms of people who wanted her attention. She reported something like 200,000 paid words last year. From afar, King and Bear seem like model authors.

Update: Bear responded on Twitter that she takes breaks all the time.

I’m not like them. Based on an informal survey of professional authors I’ve been conducting, most aren’t like them. Most who would disclose their beliefs believe in significant periods of recharge, whether it’s a day or weekend off, or a few weeks or months after finishing a novel. More authors wouldn’t disclose or couldn’t come close to pinning down their processes.

Vacations don’t help me very much. In recent years I’ve kept data on myself around when I take breaks from composition and editing, and there’s very little correlation between a break and output at resumption or upon starting something new. While my recent novel-writing campaign started amazingly, it was one of seven projects I took significant breaks between in a three-month period, and was one of only two that seemed to jump out of the gate. The others ran on will power and routine until I could build up the steam.

Perhaps more importantly, I notice I don’t feel mentally refreshed upon returning to work. Most recently I was derailed from my novel by bronchitis, and then had to leave home for travel. As awful as bronchitis was, I was relieved to stop work because of anxiety about whether I was executing the novel correctly. After weeks off, I resumed yesterday and felt absolutely as incapable of getting it right as I did before. This morning I awoke feeling like I had nothing left inside of me, which is disturbing for a living being to believe.

It wasn’t until I helped a mother in a check-out line that the feeling changed. A joke fell out of me, and she laughed, and seemed a little relieved despite the child kicking her hip. It was as though giving someone that little relief temporarily validated me, and I felt like if I had a keyboard right then, the clouds would part.

This isn’t a whining session. It’s an invitation to you, friends, fellow readers and writers.

What do you do to recharge?

We know that it’s something taxing, partially on the body and partially on the mind. It’s something that everyone needs to pause from, and walk away from for the day. It may be that everyone has a different recharge cycle, or a different set of recharge cycles – surely some full-timers take the occasional afternoon off while also taking periodic vacations, while others are more idiosyncratic. That leads us to question what we do in those periods that restores us.

I’ve tried both avoiding reading anything and reading a great deal, and within the latter, reading narrowly and broadly. None of the above seems to change things. Do you read to recharge? If so, what? Is it research? Is your reading compartmentalized?

Many of my breaks have been around my home. If you know my health, then you can figure that I don’t travel often. Yet when I do travel, returning home doesn’t seem to have changed anything, whether I departed for family emergencies or to hang out with friends. Do breaks work on you? What is it about them?

There are authors who juggle 8- and 12-hour jobs and write in excavated free time. There are authors who are full time parents and still hit the keyboard every day of the week. Is there a shorter recharge cycle there? Do the Kings and Bears of the world recharge primarily in shorter runs, in breaks to jog or have dinner with family? If so, how do those refresh cycles operate?

A few questions for you. Perhaps too many. Feel free to drop any answers you have, even the partial ones. Most of the writers I’ve talked to about it seem to live on partial answers.

The Last Cat on Earth

Toby slipped on the thick leather jacket. He flipped up the collar to shield his neck and cheeks. Next came a second pair of jeans, buckling them over the tails of the jacket. Gloves and construction boots were necessary. He looked out the window as he donned the ski mask. He watched the undead shuffling on the street corners before flipping goggles to protect his eyes.

He couldn’t risk getting a speck on him. He was the last man who could do the job.

He followed the undead through the windows of his house. Two windows on the west wall, then the one next to the porch. Four of his former neighbors shambled along the driveways. Their eyes were blind, noses turned up to sniff. Maybe they could smell him. Or maybe they smelled Mr. Tibbs.

Scuffling rose behind him. Toby whirled and saw the basement door shake. He rushed over to it, but the button was depressed. It was locked. He heard his sister – his former sister – groaning down there.

He frowned at her through the door. She couldn’t do this job anymore.

“I’ll take care of it,” he told her. “Even though you know I never wanted it here. Do you know how dangerous it is?”

The deck door slid open quietly. There was a little whoosh of air, and then the saddest sound left on earth. A keening, churning whine. As much as he hated these things, it made even him feel a little sorry.

It padded around the plastic deck furniture. It arched its spine, so that when it walked between their legs it would rub its sides. Mr. Tibbs was a self-petter, but that wasn’t enough affection. Even self-rubbing, it looked so damned pathetic.

Toby drew a plastic sheet from the living room and closed the door. No sense in letting dander get inside. This was going to be an allergic nightmare as it was.

“I don’t like you any more than you like me,” he said down to it. It didn’t seem to dislike him, but cats lied with their faces. “This just doesn’t feel right. And you're not eating the food I throw out here. What's wrong?”

When Toby didn’t immediately pet the little bastard, it keened again. It sounded almost human. Kickably human. The kind of humanoid sorrow that’d haunted him up in his safely boarded study the last three days. His wonderful, hypoallergenic study with the view of the wonderfully silent, dander-free undead.

The plastic chair creaked as he squatted into it. He laid the plastic sheet over his chest and lap, hands flattening it into place over his jacket. When it was ready, he patted his thigh. Mr Tibbs quirked its wretched head, then began to climb into the last lap on earth. Even now, there was a little affection left in the world. But only a little. He’d kill the bastard if it got any hair on him.

Dedicated to Marshall, the cat that inspired this piece. Rest in peace, little guy.

March is #NaNoReMo – Help me pick my book!

This March is National Novel Reading Month, dedicated to getting more people to read classic literature. It’s moved back from last year to help a few people’s schedules, and sits neatly in-between the U.S.’s Black History Month and the April A-to-Z Challenge.

We all have those books we’ve put off reading for too long. Maybe we’ve owned them, or eyed them in the library, or have just heard about them our whole lives. Each reader is responsible for what he or she thinks is a classic. Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights are classics to most people, but if Ray Bradbury looms heavily over you, then you get to Something Wicked This Way Comes. 

Then across March we all blog about our journeys through our classics. Does the book measure up? Are there things about it you're surprised you've never heard of? Even if you hate it (and I did, one year with Jane Austen), it's worth sharing the experience of canons.

Like the last two years, I’m asking for opinions on which classic I should knock off my list. Because writing my own novel is taking up a great deal of my mind and time, I’ve cut the 1,000+ page novels from the list. I simply wouldn’t do The Infinite Jest or Les Miserables justice this March. This leaves me with five possible books:

1. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

2. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

3. John Irving's The World According to Garp

4. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities

5. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

I have only ever previously read Wolfe and Nabokov, but never these two particular great novels. Dickens is one of my great hollow spots, while The Master and Margarita is the most commonly recommended to me.

So, friends and fellow readers, which of these five do you most recommend?

Bathroom Monologue: Hollow Tree

We laughed at prophecies that we'd be devoured by hollow trees. We didn't know "hollow tree" is arbor-speak for "house." Not until the ceilings caved.

At 130

I'm on the road this week and so am sharing an updated story. I'll be reading this piece live at Boskone's Flash Fiction Slam on Sunday morning. If you're in Boston, feel free to say hi!

At 0: the first computer fills a large room with thousands of coiled wires, billowing steam and punch cards. It crunches numbers. It will help perfect the hydrogen bomb.

At 20: government workers rely on computers the size of desks for data entry and records.

At 25: 72% of respondents don't know what a computer is.

At 35: an assassination plot is stopped thanks to information shared between computers in different countries. They're connected by some kind of web.

At 40: diagnostic x-ray machines enable physicians to see inside their patients. Many patients fear side-effects.

At 50: fearing children who are not computer literate will be left behind, an affluent school district takes out loans to buy as many computers as it has pupils. The computers outweigh their incoming class.

At 55: multiple miniature cameras are deployed inside a surgery patient, minimizing size of incision and granting a radical vision of the living body.

Also at 55: a teacher receives a phone call in his pocket.

At 60: a student finds an answer on her cell phone faster than the teacher can pull it up on Encarta.

At 65: a physician releases nanomachines into her own bloodstream. They collect images and data about her cardiovascular system that she releases to the public domain.

At 75: a protein-based computer smaller than a pimple is revealed in the brainstem of a leading mathematician. It solves equations as fast as he can think them.

At 85: legislation to ban “internalcells” is overridden in the Supreme Court. 49% of respondents disapprove. 32% are undecided. Wall Street sees record highs.

At 90: fearing children who are not e-literate will be left behind, parents race to implant “cell chips” into the heads of newborns.

At 101: the first class of children whose motor skills are entirely pre-programmed by their “cells” attend their first day of school.

At 120: less than 3% of respondents under twenty do not have “at least some” of their emotions digitally regulated.

At 130: the prodigy who bought too much, including a large room full of wires and punch cards, executes a command. Everything turns off. He goes outside without shoes or socks and feels the grass between his toes. Without wifi, his natural hearing is so weak that he misses all the grinding and screaming around him. He wonders what this feeling is called. For the first time in his life, auto-fill does not answer his question. For the first time in his life, he has to wonder.

It's been a while since I've won a Liebster

My buddy Margit Sage bestowed a Liebster Award upon me last week. These awards are really little blog hops and tend to be fun. While I’ve won this one a few times, the Liebster has never looked so pretty. Look at that sweet new badge! 

These things always have a few rules. They can be simple, like these:

1. Link back to the person who nominated you.
2. Answer the 10 questions which are given to you by the nominator.
3. Nominate a few other bloggers who’d enjoy it.
4. Create 10 questions for your nominees to answer.

It’s an unspoken rule of mine to change the rules of all of these games. It’s a flaw in meme theory I like to exploit. Did I change these? You’d have to read Margit’s post to know. Speaking of Margit, let’s dig into her ten questions.

He Put the Ten Commandments in the State Capitol, and you won’t believe what happened next!

A little while ago a judge erected a statue of the Ten Commandments at the court house in his state capitol. You probably didn’t hear about it because there are many more important things in the world, but if you did, you might have heard that some people were upset about it.

The first great protest came from the Satanists – all eighteen of them who lived in the major metropolitan area, and several thousands of their friends who donated funds online. The Satanists delivered a hulking goat-headed statue of their lord and demanded that, if Judeo-Christian religions could be commemorated, then so must theirs.

The local Hindu Temple called the governor the next morning to inquire how many of their gods were allowed representation. Methodists, Roman Catholics and Unitarian Universalists called up asking if that one statue in the capitol was their only shot, because each caller had his or her own idea of what belonged, and really, shouldn’t every denomination have its representation?

Atheists lobbied for a statue as well, perhaps one commemorating the atom, the substance of which all humans are made. Their lobby was shot down by a majority who claimed the absence of a statue was the best statue to atheism, and given that most of the capitol had no statues, atheists were technically overrepresented.

Soon Christians were protesting that, as they made up over 70% of the local population, they should get seven tenths of the state capitol covered in their statues. One per denomination was offensively dismissive of their numbers and sincerity. Soon came great granite crosses, recreations of The Mount, and busts of the Lord in contemplation, and agony, and ecstasy, and in a diversity of ethnicities, as the Black Baptists and Roman Catholic groups seemed to differ as to how their Lord had looked. Even local Archaeological Society, a secular institution that worshipped historical accuracy, modeled the most plausible visage of Christ and had it 3D printed and donated it to the increasing crowd of idolatry.

Within one week people summoned to the court house could no longer navigate the number of religious icons in order to reach chambers. Several people who were one hearing away from sentencing for high felonies had to be dismissed – a miracle, in their eyes. The judge who had installed the original Ten Commandments was never found, and it’s suspected that he left town on one of the trucks carrying all the statues, so as to avoid the sheer of tonnage of press chasing him. There’s a statue of him hunched over reading at the court house now, though the stone commandments he would have read have since been removed.

Bronchitis and Guilt

Bronchitis is a lot like a baby turtle trying to eat a strawberry.
This may make more sense in Paragraph 3.

Bronchitis and guilt. Of the two, guilt will kill you quicker. Guilt will make use of your bronchitis, your student loans, the girlfriend you disappointed and the holiday you never make special enough. Any of those elements are dangerous, but guilt uses them all.

I'm a delusional sort. Scratch that - humans are a delusional sort, and it's the rationalists I distrust. One of my delusions is a guilt complex that I'm never doing enough. For the last week I've been relatively silent because I've been relatively bedridden with a splendid case of bronchitis. That's an infection of the bronchial tubes that cakes my lungs with solid snot, throws off my internal temperature, locks my joints, saps appetite for the nutrition necessary to fight it, and drives my neuromuscular syndrome nuts. By Thursday I'd pulled muscles in my back, both biceps, and pulled both hamstrings, simply from coughing or contorting in discomfort. It was such that I could no longer lie down without excruciating pain, and thus had to alternate between exhausting myself by sitting up for any relief, and lying down and making the muscles worse.

I am doing much better, and thank you for asking. But I also felt pangs of guilt over not continuing my novel, even when my head was so fogged I couldn't speak an entire sentence. I even felt the pangs when, in the sort of nonsense despair excessive pain causes, I worried my whole novel was garbage and had to be thrown out. Even when I was sure the work was worthless, I felt vile for not transcending and doing the work anyway. The Joker would laugh at me, and The Joker is never wrong when he thinks you're funny.

Writing is beautiful, and prose is one of my great passions in life. This morning I'm excited to be able to think straight and consider these characters again. Yet the anxiety I soaked in this weekend is the kind of mindset that you may wind up with if you become too attached to goals. I've argued it before and won't go on at length now, because I desperately need to sleep a full night soon or it's off to the hospital. But please, think about how stupid John Wiswell is because he's driven the next time some successful author tells you to lock it down and work harder.

For now I think what the last few months were like. Everything was held up in October for Viable Paradise. Then...

November: wrote my first screenplay.
December: wrote four short stories.
January: wrote 51,033 words of a new novel.

For these fruits, I think I'm not doing enough. The Joker would bust a gut.

I've got about a week left before I head to Massachusetts for Boskone, where it turns out I'll be reading in the Flash Slam competition. If you're in the Boston area, I'd love a little cheering section. I can't wait to practice, just as soon as my voice comes back.

I'm trying to figure out when I'll have enough wherewithal to write more of the novel. Maybe Monday? And whenever, how much I can get done before I ship out. I think the break is actually helping the plotting in a way I'll have a better handle on next week. Too funny if not writing for a while is the best aid to writing better fiction.

Finding Buddha in the Road - #fridayflash

This is a re-post from a few years ago. As I type this on Thursday night I am sick as a dog and not sure if I'll even get up tomorrow. Please excuse the redux, and if you can, giggle at it.

My teacher always said, “You’re not supposed to have teachers. The truth is already in you.”

But I kept visiting him, so he wound up saying other things. On that day, the thing that came to mind was, “If you find Buddha in the road, help dig him out.”

It came to mind because I saw a rotund man in an orange robe flailing his arms. He was buried up to his navel in gravel. I took him by the hands and jerked with all my might, but he would not budge. I thought him too hefty to pull free, but he explained.

“A nasty old philosopher stuck me in here. Said the only way out was the way that could not be known.”

“I didn’t think you were the sort to get into fights,” I said. “Or call people nasty.”

He folded his hands together. “Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.”

“Oh, I don’t!” This was the first impression I wanted to make. “I mean, I think you are what you are, not what I think you are.”

“Then you think I am what I think I am. I am still bound within what you think of me.”

“But I only think you are what you think you are.”

“Do you think you know what I think I am?”

“No. That can’t be known.”

“Then why do you think I am whatever I think I am?”

“You shouldn’t be bound by other people’s conceptions. It’s your internal existence.”

I don’t think the Buddhism I’d picked up from a master who wanted me out of his house impressed this man very much. He started playing with rocks.

“What if I think I am whatever a third person thinks I am? If I then invest my identity in another, am I any longer what you think I am?”

“I swear, I don’t think I know who you are. You’re just the Buddha.”

“Now I believe you don’t know who I am, regardless of what you think. My name’s Qi Wei, not Buddha.” He scratched next to his eye, perhaps idle motion, perhaps drawing attention to his distinctly Asian features. “You know, he was Indian.”

It makes you feel very guilty, when you want to punch a man who is buried to his navel in gravel. I curled a fist, then released it and turned to walk away. Qi Wei let me get five paces before imparting something.

“But if I am the Buddha internally, and not Qi Wei as I espouse externally, then I am what you admire without you thinking it, and you would have met Buddha in the road and done nothing more than walk away. Can you live with that?”

“You said you weren’t him!”

“I also said not to believe in anything simply because you have heard it.” He picked a stone out of his belly button. “I’ve said that one more than once, over the years.”

A year later I read some Chinese philosopher commanding that if you found Buddha in the road, “kill him.” He must have met this guy, too.

Why John Should Die On Your Next SciFi Expedition

Jeff VanderMeer will soon release the paperback and audiobooks of Annihilation, a novel set exploring the dangerous Area X. It sounds neat, and because it’s from the VanderMeers, it’ll probably be very neat. He’s running a little contest asking people why they should be part of the next expedition to Area X, where so many explorers have died, presumably from mysterious causes. Exhausted from a day of novel-writing myself, I couldn’t help proposing why I belong on any such voyage.

Area X sounds beautiful and highly dangerous to explorers, and thus I am the sort of person you need on your team. I have spent the last twenty years with a highly compromised immune system and am guaranteed to die in any sort of unknowably hostile environment. You will be able to dissect me and figure out what the greatest potential hazard of Area X is to the other explorers before any of them experiences so much as an allergic reaction. Atop this, I’m chipper and gregarious around strangers, and thus several people are likely to bond with me and mourn me acutely when I die out of nowhere so early into the expedition, giving you all a good bit of pathos before Pinch 2 sets in.

Bathroom Monologue: Twenty Years

They were the high school sweethearts who didn’t know they were in love. They ran the school blog, spending long nights figuring out HTML and never so much as touching each other’s hands. They were each other’s default guest at parties.

They were running jokes for all their friends, through college and into work places. No one spent that long on the phone with somebody they weren’t screwing – except they weren’t. They were starting up a company that was going to revolutionize non-invasive ads, a topic that was only exciting for the two of them, and an excitement that everyone else understood differently from the two of them.

Too broke to buy houses, they pitched in for rent on one apartment from which to launch their venture. They did each other’s laundry, drove each other home from surgery, and patiently faced down accusations from each other’s parents about the location of sin and their proximity to living in it.

It was almost twenty years before a college intern shoved one of them on New Years Eve and demanded they kiss. And they might have been drunk, and they might have been hiding things, but they did and it lasted an eternal seven seconds – they both knew because it made them so nervous they couldn’t focus on anything but their watches.

Then they were quiet.

Then one of them said, “We should do that more often.”

So they did. They spent another twenty years together starting the next morning, and another twenty after that.

Bad Good Habits

I’m bad with goals. On January 8^th I started writing my next novel with the goal of a minimum of a thousand words per day, but with my attention on writing scenes, chapters and arcs – of getting the text right. I write much more when I focus like that, which became the problem, because on the first day I wrote about 2,900 words. On the second day, I wrote about 2,900 more. On the third, I wrote 2,300, and felt exhilarated, having never started a novel so quickly, but also like I’d cheated and profoundly failed.

Do you recognize the problem? Do you have it, too?

Last week I managed to drag my chubby butt to 2.54 miles on the elliptical machine. It was the farthest I’d ever gone, and was so hard on my body that I was trembling for the next hour and felt exhausted the next morning. When I climbed on the next day and didn’t match that all-time record, my heart sunk. I was sweaty, and spent, and my neuromuscular syndrome flared up so badly I couldn’t bend my knees, and I felt like I hadn’t done enough.

I've habituated expanding my goals to a cancerous degree. We often talk about failure in terms of not reaching goals. Figuring out what you can achieve and what’s reasonable to push is vital. You have to learn to make a routine, and then to push. I fail in these ways all the time – it is, allegedly, mortal. But there are other ways to fail. Victory can defeat you.

It's a good line. ... Shut up.

Goals can’t remain static. It’s ridiculous to teach a baby to take her first steps and then never expect her to perform more than that. In writing, you want to push you productivity up if you can. If you can write 500 words in a weekend for months, then it’s healthy to try for 1,000. If you can bench fifty, try sixty. Sure.

But figuring out the limits above those goals is essential, and it’s something I’m terrible at. You can psychoanalyze me as the boy who learned to walk again, who didn’t readjust into school well enough and was brutalized for it, who wound up with nerds who all pulled better grades, and thusly craved to exceed his performance. I don’t think the mind is that simple, or that one reason is ever trustworthy for a whole personality. But I knew within seconds of seeing “2.56 miles” on the elliptical’s panel that I was going to guilt myself over not hitting that again tomorrow. And I knew I shouldn’t, and that it wasn’t healthy, and that I couldn’t stop it.

This is part of why I hate critics who backbite at authors for having a slow pace. It took Harper Lee a lifetime to make To Kill a Mockingbird, and then she was done. Truman Capote, of significantly faster work and greater output, supported and championed Lee. They weren’t competitors, and one wasn’t failing for not having the process of the other.

Goading people into rushing risks breaking them. Screw breaking their work – and yes, dashing towards word count like #NaNoWriMo ruins plenty of decent novels – it can damage their development.

No one browbeat me into writing 33,700 words in my first two weeks on this novel. That I am now significantly ahead of schedule and feel the dread of being behind is a doom of my own making.  It’s hardly fast composition – I have friends who are self-publishing books like they shed manuscripts. But today, after writing two emotionally demanding chapters in separate time lines, and having difficulty even sitting up in the chair afterward, I didn’t feel accomplished. I felt sicker and I felt like I’d failed.

Don’t do this. And if you’re like me, let’s talk it out.

Consequences.

There are authors I respect who advise to lock everything up, to be cold, and be as productive as possible. As someone who won’t fall asleep tonight because the mere strain of writing has jacked up his health problems such that he may not fall asleep tonight, please take my advice: ignore those authors. Mind yourself. Mind your goals and your limits.

And if somehow I become the Capote to your Lee, trust me that I will be overjoyed to share your one book with the world.