kaleidotrope

Monday

It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so I was off from work. I still had to wake up a little early to go with my father to get his car inspected, but I was able to go back to sleep when we came back home.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I watched a bunch of episodes from the last season of 30 Rock, then the first episode in the new third season of Sherlock. (I think I’d maybe have a half-letter-grade kinder to the episode that this review, but it’s pretty much spot on.)

Then this evening I read the first volume of Walter Simonson’s run on The Mighty Thor from the early ’80s. It’s a lot of fun, with many weird and unexpected ideas and a great dash of humor. It’s little surprise that a lot of the recent Thor movies are drawn so heavily from Simonson’s work on the title. (Though I wonder if we’ll ever see Beta Ray Bill on the big screen.)

And that, somehow, was a full day. I also put some bird seed and suet in the feeder, went to a local burger joint for lunch, and read some submissions for Kaleidotrope. And I haven’t once looked at my work e-mail since Friday. It wasn’t an exciting weekend, but sometimes that’s for the best.

Saturday and Sunday

It’s been a pretty quiet weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winter vacation, day 15

It dawned on me this morning just how close I am to the end of my vacation — only two days left — when I realized I had to buy my monthly train ticket. It also occurred to me how long I’ve been on vacation — more than two weeks now — when I finally opened up my work laptop and realized I’d completely forgotten my log-in password.

(It’s okay, it was on a small post-it note in my wallet. Though maybe we don’t tell my IT department that that’s where I was keeping it?)

I’d changed my password a day or two before leaving the office, since it was about to expire, and I really did think I’d have some call to use the new one while I was out. But except for a couple of e-mails answered way back at the start of my vacation — a couple that hopefully kept a book from slipping in the production schedule to February — I haven’t really done any work. I’ve been checking in occasionally, as I’d already updated the e-mail password on my iPhone, but nothing that really justified my going back to the office after the holiday party to pick up my computer.

In my defense, I was a little drunk then.

Of course, in retrospect, there’s not a lot of work I could have been doing, which I confirmed when I actually logged in and compared chapter reviews that were due against chapter reviews that have actually come in. I knew this was going to be a difficult time of year for instructors to take deadlines seriously, but in the past two weeks I received very few of the responses I need to get anything done. I could start collating what little feedback I have, before I go back to the office, but that’s not going to save me a lot of time in the long run. And saving myself time in the long run — preparing for a January that’s going to be front-loaded with so much to do — was the only reason I took the laptop home with me.

I can think of better ways of spending the next couple of days, like maybe reading a book.

I spent a good part of today mostly working on Kaleidotrope, whose new issue will be ready for launch tomorrow or Wednesday, if all goes according to plan. I want to do more with Kaleidotrope in the coming year, really make it work the considerable out-of-pocket investment of time and money.

I’m okay with the time, even if I’m a little scared about re-opening to submissions in two days. But it’s the money part that’s a tougher sell sometimes. I pay a cent a word, way below what’s considered a professional rate but still pretty steep for a project that takes in no money — beyond a couple of very generous and welcome donations — and it’s a cost I want to justify by making the zine more than just a collection of other people’s work. I did that a little last year, and I want to look for new ways to do it this.

Because right now, I’ve already filled the next two and half years’ worth of issues with last year’s submissions. It would be too easy for the fun of producing the zine to disappear on me.

This evening, after writing fake horoscopes — that’s something I do for the zine, something I started when I was editing the weekly newsletter for the Penn State Monty Python Society (and something I almost certainly stole from The Onion — I watched You’re Next. It’s an okay movie, mostly because it mixes up a couple of horror genres and isn’t just your standard home invasion scary movie. It gets off to a slow start — which is probably necessary, in retrospect, even if it could have used some better acting there — and ends poorly, but it takes a couple of interesting turns along the way. (Not surprising turns, necessarily, but ones that keep it, at least, from being something more than similar movies I’ve seen.)

And that was Monday. It was Monday, right?

Sunday, that’s my fun day

During the middle of the night, the rain rolled in and melted almost all of yesterday’s snow. And while it wasn’t necessarily warm out today, it was a stark contrast to yesterday’s winter weather.

I’m feeling much better today, although all the more convinced that I should take it easier with the drinking, even if it is only once a year, and even it was only four watered-down drinks.

I spent the day like I would most any Sunday, though I threw caution to the wind and decided not to trim my beard, like I usually do each week. I think that’s how I know I’m actually on vacation, by allowing myself to get grizzled. I don’t think two weeks is enough time to go full mountain-man, but there’s definitely a certain pleasure in not shaving. It may be the sole reason I have a beard in the first place.

With all the snow gone, driving wasn’t any problem, so I had my weekly writing group again. I’m not entirely thrilled with what I came up with, spurred by a random prompt picked from online, but mostly because I have no idea where it’s going:

The shop had been closed for a week, maybe more, locked tight against vandals, though there weren’t likely to be any. The rest of the stores on Main Street had seen bricks tossed through boarded-up windows, ominous warnings graffiti’ed on the walls outside, but the antiques shop was curiously untouched, almost pristine, as if the gangs that had done the rest of this damage were somehow frightened of it, had decided to steer clear of the shop and the narrow alley that adjoined it and the Chinese take-out place next door. The books and lamps and jewelry that normally filled the front window display had been removed, a thin metal grate pulled down in their place, but the glass behind that was all in one piece, one of the few windows on the street that had survived this past week, and the only storefront that looked like it might just be closed for the night. Already the Chinese restaurant’s door had been pried open, the interior ransacked and the spray-paint leading a trail of angry words down the street, and the rest of the town felt also abandoned and already crumbling from neglect and decay.

But not the antiques shop. Sam watched it from the shadows of the small park across the street. Its proprietor had left with everyone else, a panicked flight that had left little time to do more than lock doors and slap boards across windows, and in that flight there had been nothing to distinguish the antiques shop or Mr. Barlow from the rest. Just a kindly old man forced out of town with everyone else by forces that none of them could understand. If he hadn’t been stranded here — hadn’t been left here with them — Sam might have believed it, too. But Sam had been here when the gangs arrived; even if he didn’t yet fully understand where they had come from, even if he had spent most of this week running and hiding from the gangs, there was one thing that he knew for sure: it had been Mr. Barlow who’d come out to greet them.

The gangs weren’t quite human, though they seemed to speak English well enough, and the markings they had left around town were crude but legible enough to Sam. From a distance, the gangs — who were never in a group smaller than four — appeared almost like men. But closer up, and especially in the light of day they seemed to most often shun, it was clear that they were not. It had been their arrival that had forced everyone else in town to run, but everyone else were the lucky ones as far as Sam was concerned. He could make it to the border, or the police station, or any of a dozen other places, but there were few spots not under the watchful eye of the brutal gangs.

Sam hadn’t been the only one trapped here in the town, but he was determined not to end up like the others.

The first thing he needed to do, he thought, was to get inside that antiques shop.

I’m making much better progress on a piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It got a little sidetracked this week by editing I needed to do for Kaleidotrope, but I’m hoping to get back into with the next two weeks wide open.

Tonight, though, I think I’m going to watch a movie. I was very sad to hear that Peter O’Toole had passed this weekend. He was a phenomenal talent, and Lawrence of Arabia is quite possibly my favorite movie of all time. (Its one fault, which may be a fault by design, is that there is not a single female character in it.) I’m thinking of watching Becket, which I’ve never seen, but which promises to be quite good.

And that was/will be Sunday.

Tuesday

So it’s turning out to be an interesting week.

It’s snowish, for one thing, or at least it was in the city, where it turned mostly into rain or too wet to stick. But here on Long Island, there was actually some accumulation. Not as much as in that photo up top — that’s from this past February, when it snowed a lot — but enough that I think this qualifies as our first proper snowfall of the season. We’ve had little bits and light dustings so far, but nothing really that would have lasted through the night.

We got a new coffee machine at the office. And while it’s very weird and perhaps needlessly complicated — little packs instead of little cups, no choice of serving size, and our mugs just barely fit — but it seems to make a better cup of coffee.

Two of the textbooks I’ve worked on published this week: one I was expecting and another I wasn’t, at least not for a couple of weeks.

I’m making some good progress on a short story, rather unexpectedly. Except tonight, when I was distracted by copyediting some stories for Kaleiodtrope‘s next issue, which it occurred to me this weekend is next month. (And I need to give authors time to respond.) I also spent some time re-creating a lost spreadsheet which had all of the stories and poems I’ve already accepted for 2014 and 2015. I essentially have the next six issues mapped out, or at least filled up, but reminding myself of which stories will fill those issues was good, as I’ll admit I’ve been feeling my enthusiasm for the zine lag a bit lately. It can feel like an expensive hobby that garners some very good but limited attention. I’m trying more ways of imprinting my own personal stamp on it. (Hence things like the fake advice column.)

Oh, and I haven’t mentioned that I will almost certainly be going back to the Banff Centre near the start of next fall. I still need to confirm the dates at work — still waiting til we can request 2014 time off — but my application for a self-directed residency was accepted. So that’s cool.

But, really, it’s all about that new coffee machine.