kaleidotrope

Saturday and Sunday

Yesterday was warm enough to sit out in the yard for a little while, reading Kaleidotrope submissions. So that’s what I did. I sometimes worry than I’m being a little too choosy, after I’ve rejected a dozen or so stories in a row, and then one comes along that I don’t want to reject and I think, “Nope. Just choosy enough.”

After dinner, I watched American Hustle, which I wish I could say I enjoyed more than I did. At this year’s Golden Globe Awards, Tina Fey joked that the movie’s original name was “Explosion at the Wig Factory,” which really isn’t far from the truth. There’s some good acting in the movie, but a lot more over-acting, and a lot of over-the-top hair and costume design, all in service of a fun but kind of thin story — a very loosely adapted version of the Abscam investigation. It’s not hard to see why the film was nominated for ten Oscars last year. But it’s also not hard to see why it didn’t win a single one.

After that, I watched Area 407, which I can’t even pretend was any good. It’s exceptionally terrible, even by the low standards of found-footage monster movies, apparently ad libbed over the course of five days, and man does that show! It so very, very bad…and for that reason, it was absolutely wonderful.

I watched it with friends over Twitter, which is something we do semi-regularly — Heather has a rundown of some of the comments we made — and it was kind of magical. Heaven knows I’ve seen my fair share of terrible movies, but every now and then one comes along that’s terrible in all the right ways. This was definitely one of those, and I had a blast live-tweeting it with everyone else.

This afternoon, I went to see Captain America: Winter Soldier with some in-person friends. I enjoyed the movie, which is fun and has some nice little moments from its leads interspersed with all the acting — I don’t Steve’s ever going to get to ask out Kristen from Statistics — but there’s not a whole lot to say about it, really. I mean it’s no Area 407.

Anyway, before the movie we had our weekly writing group, and this is what I did:

“You gotta write it down,” Trevor Kettleson said. “His speech recognition software isn’t working at the moment.”

“This is the robot?” Dean asked. “Your investigator?”

“He doesn’t like that word,” Kettleson said. “Either one. It would be more accurate to call him a…’cyborg consultant.’”

“From outer space?”

Kettleson sighed, sat forward in his chair. “While technically accurate, detective, pre-judgmental language like that will only make it more difficult for Roger — “

“The robot. Roger the robot.”

“ — our consulting cyborg to adequately assist you on this case. It’s true that Roger’s cybernetic components were outfitted on a space station orbiting an abandoned planetoid, but the fact that this all happens three hundred years in the future — “

“I’m not here to prosecute your cyborg, Mr. Kettleson,” Dean said, all smiles, “just trying to get a lay of the land. Everyone who came through the time vortex was granted immunity, that’s the law. How I feel about it doesn’t matter.”

“It might matter to Roger,” Kettleson said.

“I’ll try not to step on anyone’s toes,” Dean said. “Especially if they’re made out of titanium.”

“Our firm has the utmost respect for Roger’s investigative skills. I urge you to turn to him as an asset.”

“He just doesn’t talk.”

“Oh, he talks. He just can’t process speech presently. We’re doing everything in our power to remedy that, but…well, we are talking about technology three centuries more advanced than our own.”

“And was Paige Caldwell working on this remedy?”

“Was — ?”

“Dr. Caldwell. The victim. Was she spending a lot of time working directly with Roger?”

“Well…I — it was one of her projects, yes. It’s been a team effort. Certainly you don’t think that’s what got her killed, or that Roger — ?”

“You said yourself she didn’t have any enemies.”

“That I knew of, yes. But, detective, that’s a very wide leap to naming Roger as a suspect.”

“I’m just thinking out loud, Mr. Kettleson” Dean said. He stood up and moved towards the door. “If I start making allegations, believe me, I’ll put them in writing. I wouldn’t want Roger to miss them.”

Three hours later, with the cyborg’s pneumatic-powered hands at his throat, Dean Hendricks thought he might have made a mistake.

“Make it look good,” he croaked. “We need her to think you’re really trying to kill me.”

Silently he cursed himself, remembering Roger’s speech recognition problem. He just hoped the cyborg remembered the plan. Those steel-tipped fingers were pretty tight around his windpipe. But they weren’t going to flush Caldwell out of hiding if they didn’t put on a good show.

And that, pretty much, was my weekend.

Monday

It snowed this morning, which came as something of a surprise. It’s not that it never snows here at the end of March, or even into April, but I don’t remember seeing anything but rain in the forecast. Almost all of the snow had melted by late afternoon, which makes the whole thing feel like some early, strangely elaborate April Fool’s Day prank.

Still, I’m glad I didn’t have to trudge through it to get to the office this morning.

Meanwhile, there’s a new issue of Kaleidotrope up and waiting, if you’re looking for some short stories and poems to read.

Sunday

A quiet, rainy weekend.

I spent a lot of it pulling together the next issue of Kaleidotrope, which should be more or less ready to launch later tomorrow. I’m really happy with the stories and poems in this issue, although I do hope in the Summer issue I can make a return to the fake horoscopes and advice columns that let me put a little more of my own personal spin on the zine. I mean, why else am I continuing to do it otherwise?

Oh, and I haven’t mentioned this here, but one of the poems from last Summer’s issue — “Leaving Papa” by Darrell Lindsey — was recently nominated for a Rhysling Award. That made me happy.

I spent the rest of the weekend out at dinner, it seems. Last night, I attended a surprise party for my aunt’s seventieth-something birthday, and tonight I went out for dinner with my parents to celebrate my own birthday earlier in the week.

Somewhere in there, I managed to watch several episodes of The Good Wife, and the latest Hannibal, and write this:

They come out when the sun goes down.

They don’t talk, or not often, even among themselves, for to talk would be to reveal that they don’t belong there, their accents thick like oil splashed across the water of their words. They are not worried that their meaning will be lost, but that who they are and where they’re from will be found out. The others, these so-called natives, are a superstitious lot and quick to violence, and they have seen, from weeks now of quiet study, what happens to those who are not as careful when threatened with such violence. Mannerisms and mistakes can give a man away — they have seen at least one man hanged for no more than a single gesture — and their mission is too important to jeopardize in such a careless way. They dress according to the local style, the finery and golden beads strung around their necks a sort of camouflage that would be unthinkable back home, perhaps even a kind of sacrilege. They are often glad that no priests were selected to join them on this mission; the test to their own shared faith has been difficult enough. But they also know that they must not reveal themselves, must look no different than the natives themselves. These beads are the custom, and they really are no more than baubles — hardly the sort of thing to truly anger the gods — and so they wear them in this place.

When they first arrived, they were shocked by the sight of the moon in the evening sky, a harvest moon larger than any they had ever seen before. Back home each of them had seen slivers of the moon in the sky, and they are not as ignorant of basic astronomy as some might think, but they have only seen it against a backdrop of blue sky and cloud. To be outside after dark, for hours after the moon has stolen that sky from the brighter sun, that too would have unthinkable. And yet it is a sin that each of them knows is required. If they are damned for it, then they are damned. The natives — or rather those who have taken this valley and now call themselves natives — these people do not come out except after dark. It is their way, the peculiar nature of what these people are, have allowed themselves to become in turning away from the old gods. And they, the dayrunners, have learned that they must mimic this to stay alive.

Saturday

I got word yesterday of some fraud on my debit card — no, I wasn’t at a Charleston service station, thank you very much — so I had to go into my bank this morning to pick up a replacement.

The rest of the day was even less exciting than that. I re-watched Clue for some reason — it’s on Netflix, so, y’know, there — and the latest episode of Hannibal. I read some Kaleidotrope submissions, and I finished reading What Is the What by Dave Eggers, a novel based on the life of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng.

I liked the book, particularly Deng’s voice that comes through as a character, and the way the story is structured, but I’m not sure it’s brilliant or illuminating of the human condition. If it weren’t a true story, for instance, I don’t think I’d have liked it half as much. But still, it wasn’t bad.

I am glad to be finished, though: I’ve actually been reading the book since late February, and it will be nice to move on to something else. According to my Goodreads challenge, I’ve only read 12 of 1 book for the year.

This evening, I watched Akira, which was…strange. On the one hand, it’s a very straightforward post-apocalyptic psychic powers kind of story. But it’s also…strange. I’m tempted to look into the original manga, which apparently goes into a lot more detail.

Anyway, that was pretty much my Saturday. I didn’t do any writing today, though I have been writing every other day this week. It’s not been great — I’ve filled several pages in my notebook but wouldn’t necessarily want a lot of it in the final story — but it’s keeping the story alive for me and moving me in the direction I need to go with it. So there’s that.

The weekend

Yesterday, I got a haircut and finished reading the last of January’s submissions for Kaleidotrope. That maybe doesn’t sound like a full day — and heaven knows submissions have kept coming in all through February and into March — but if you think my Saturday was in any way wasted, I have just two very simple words for you:

Arctic Blast.

I watched this cinematic — or is tele-visual? Wikipedia suggests the movie premiered on screen, but I think it aired primarily on the Syfy Channel — classic over Twitter with friends. On any objective level, it’s a terrible movie, with bad effects and some questionable acting. Michael Shanks gives it his all, or at least whatever percentage of his all he decided the movie was worth, but it’s ridiculous disaster movie. Heather’s already posted a good rundown of the night’s film, including several of the funnier comments. (Keep in mind, of course, that this is a woman who calls Sharknado “a metaphor for modern life, in which chainsaws solve all our problems.”)

I’ve been watching my fair share of bad movies lately, but watching them with friends — even when those friends are separated by several time zones — is a whole lot better.

Today, I wrote a little with my weekly group:

“Do not call me Master,” the doppleganger said. “Call me…Phil.”

He didn’t look like a Phil, but Alison knew it wouldn’t do her any good to tell him that, not with that weird crooked staff, still crackling with energy, held over his head. It had taken only a single blast of that energy to get rid of Nate — which was no big loss, as far as Alison was concerned, but she also wasn’t in any hurry to join him in an atomized spray of used-to-be-people particles. She’d called this weirdo Master out of some instinct — it was what the long crimson robe and dangerous magic seemed to demand — but if Phil was what he wanted, then Phil was what he’d get. She wasn’t going to risk making him angry like Nate had, at least not until she managed to wrestle that magic stick away from him.

It was funny, though, Alison thought. He didn’t look a Phil so much as he looked like…well, Nate. She hadn’t really noticed that before, but the resemblance was a little uncanny. Was that why her now very ex-boyfriend had called the man the doppleganger before they’d awoken him? Then he’d just looked like some old dude propped up on a big rock inside a cave — “entombed upon the altar of Circe’s midnight slumber,” Nate had said, which she was sure was something he was remembering wrong from out of some book. The man had looked kind of peaceful, actually, serene, and she hadn’t seen Nate look like that even once in all the time they had been dating.

True, they’d been hunting magic and legends since their second date — or was the Bigfoot trap officially their third? It had seemed fun at the time. Nate had seemed fun at the time. But that was long before they’d stumbled across this Merlin-wannabe who’d zapped Nate into a cloud of nothingness and then taken his face. Alison had been planning to break the relationship off after this excursion, just waiting for the right moment between the caves and the flight back home to the States. Should she tell him before they cleared customs, or after? Now Nate was gone and she’d escaped having to go through all that, thank god, but she hadn’t escaped this deadly wizard who could zap her too if he wanted, and even worse who looked like her ex.

You know, sometimes I just go wherever the prompt leads me.