My back pages

This morning, I decided to try morning pages, a free-writing exercise I’ve heard talked up a few times. (I own a copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, though I’ve never read it.) I’ve been hesitant to try it before not so much because I doubt its usefulness or effectiveness but simply because it’s meant to be done first thing in the morning. And while three pages of stream of consciousness isn’t the most time-consuming thing in the world, I do cherish all those minutes of sleep in the morning.

But a time comes when you have to ask yourself, am I serious about getting better at this? How will am I to commit the time and effort to this?

That time, of course, is 11 am on a Sunday, but still. The real question will come on Tuesday, or even Wednesday, when I go back to my regular schedule, when I have to find a half an hour or more that I’d rather spend sleeping. Today, though, it went reasonably well. I don’t feel super-empowered to finish this short story I’ve been working on or anything, but I feel a little closer to it than I did before. Or at least not further away? I don’t know. It’s an exercise; it’s not supposed to be life-changing immediately. It’s not even necessarily meant to be life-changing. But it’s the sort of thing that, if you keep at it, is supposed to help the actual work of writing work better.

Like I said, I haven’t read the book, but I’m a big believer in anything that makes writers write more.

That in mind, I also wrote this, in my weekly writing group:

“Can we PLEASE stop pretending like there is any wisdom to be gained from psychopaths?” said Kendall. “Or like anything good will ever come from listening to that mad man?”

She was angry, Daniel knew, but more than that, she was tired, not thinking straight. He was tempted to skip ahead a few minutes, fast-forward through this argument, but there was no point; he was going to win it anyway. He could just wait her out, stare her down — he’d been perfecting a patented stare — and she’d break just from exhaustion. He didn’t feel good about it, and he knew it was going to come up later in their marriage counseling — he HAD skipped ahead, briefly, to that — but he also knew it was important that they listen to what Dr. Nefarious had to say.

“That’s not even his real name,” Kendall would say, had said, and often. “He stole that from some comic book in the ’70s. I can’t believe you’re going to trust him on this.”

“Just hear him out,” Daniel did say. “If he says he knows how to save the world, we have an obligation to let him talk.”

“He’s the one who DESTROYED the world, Daniel,” said Kendall. “Or have you forgotten? This is literally all just a game to him.”

Daniel waited. He stared. He knew she would break; she’d throw up her arms, maybe storm out of the room, and heaven knew he’d been sleeping on the couch tonight. But she’d let him interrogate Nefarious, find out what the mad doctor knew. Daniel was sure of it. Just a little bit of patience, and —

He skipped ahead. Just five minutes, but he was going to have a monster of a headache in the morning. The game environment wasn’t meant to be operated like this, wasn’t built for this kind of brute-force mental hacking. Kendall didn’t like it because she said it gave him an excuse to never listen, just zip past the parts he didn’t like and then —

“Did you even hear me?” Kendall said.

“What?” said Daniel, blinking back the bright stars of the headache already.

“You did it again, didn’t you?” Kendall said. She said. “Damn it, Daniel, I thought we talked about this. As long as we’re trapped in here, at the mercy of the game we need to — “

Two more minutes. The headache was worse, but in for a penny…

“Fine!” Kendall said. “Let the mad man talk. But when it all goes south, and he does whatever it is to make things worse, don’t come crying to me.”

She sighed again, but she didn’t storm out of the room, and in the end, it was Kendall who pulled the gag from Dr. Nefarious’ mouth while Daniel rubbed the pain from his eyes. “Okay, pal,” she said. “Spill it.”

Nefarious needed no encouragement — but then, that had been the man’s story from day one, hadn’t it? Back when they’d first been building the simulation, when Daniel and Kendall had just been a couple of engineers on the project, and back when that project had just been a fun, interactive game — MAYBE some military application but not the super-villainy Nefarious had apparently had in mind all along. Even back then, in monthly meetings or his daily address to the employees, Nefarious just wouldn’t shut up. He loved to hear the sound of his own voice.

In retrospect, it wasn’t so hard to believe he’d blown up the earth and trapped everyone’s consciousness inside the game. It was only hard to believe he hadn’t done it sooner.

“The system AI has become self-aware,” said Nefarious now. He was still tied to the chair, but Kendall had pulled the tape from his mouth. “But more than that, it is aging. And believe me, its emerging adulthood is the very worst thing that could happen to all of us now.”

“Tell us something we don’t know,” said Kendall.

“It also offers us an opportunity,” said Nefarious. “in its growth, it will be distracted, and the locks on the doors –”

Twenty minutes. No, thirty. Forty. An hour, then two. Something was wrong. Daniel could now see days, weeks, months zipping past. He was losing Kendall, Nefarious, the present moment. And, maybe more important, this time, Daniel wasn’t responsible for skipping himself ahead. Someone or something else was in control.

You can probably tell I’ve been replaying Portal a lot lately.

And then this evening, I watched We Bought a Zoo. Which is more likable than good, and which does feel like two movies at war with one another: serious family drama and family-friendly comedy in which monkeys slap their faces in exasperation. Which is a thing that actually happens in it. Is it wrong that I think I liked the movie more before it went to the zoo?

Anyway, not a bad day. The Sunday crossword kind of kicked my ass, but other than that it was pretty decent.