travel

Friday!

No horrible commuting stories today, thank heavens. Even the connecting train in Jamaica this morning that I thought would be canceled — mainly because the LIRR website told it had been canceled — arrived pretty much on time. Today wasn’t much better or worse than any other Friday.

I hope to spend the weekend working on Kaleidotrope. With just a couple of exceptions, where I’m waiting on authors, everything is edited, and layout just needs to be finalized. I’m looking forward to getting this done…so I can pretty much immediately move into getting January’s issue ready. I suspect 2012, when I go wholly digital — and free, for those of you either with no cash to spend on a subscription or even just a bit of schadenfreude for my soon-to-be-emptying pockets — will be something of a learning process.

I won’t miss collating and mailing, though, that’s for sure.

I might also watch a movie over the weekend. It’s been a while since I did that.

It’s thunder and it’s lightning

Leave it to the Long Island Railroad and Mother Nature — or, rather, the LIRR’s complete inability to cope with any little thing Mother Nature throws at it — to take what was an ordinary, even boring day and turn it into something special.

It rained this afternoon. Weather in New York has been weird lately, making me all the more nostalgic for the fall weather I experienced in Alberta. The very early fall weather, warm by local standards, but it’s just about October and we’re still walking around in short sleeves here in New York. We had a week when I wasn’t uncomfortable wearing a long-sleeve shirt, maybe even a light jacket early in the morning or late at night. But that changed, and it’s been almost as humid as it was a month ago. We’ve had heavy fog, and today, I’m still running the air conditioner.

So it rained, a lot, but not for long, and not so much that you would expect it to cause any issues with the evening commute. It had stopped altogether by the time I actually left the office at 5 PM.

Oh, but you say, you’re not taking into account lightning. You don’t need a lot of rain for lightning. Well I just need the LIRR to take lightning into account…but apparently that’s asking too much. Because you’re right, it was lightning that screwed tonight’s commute.

I got to Penn Station, same as usual, to find it particularly crowded — especially considering that the trains had been less crowded this morning, thanks possibly to a number of people staying home for Rosh Hashanah. It quickly became apparent that no trains were leaving, except maybe to Port Washington, thanks to signal trouble between Manhattan and Jamaica Station in Queens. (The Port Washington line doesn’t go through Jamaica and so wasn’t affected.) But I wasn’t taking an over-crowded train to Port Washington, which, without traffic, is easily a half hour’s drive from home.

I eventually squeezed my way through to the 8th Avenue subway, after the transit cops started shutting the gates and blocking other entrances/exits. And I took a very long subway to Jamaica, where I managed to get onto a very crowded train headed to my station — and only just managed to squeeze myself off when we reached that station.

All told, it only took about an extra hour for me to reach my destination, but it was a long evening that involved way too much pushing through crowds and way too much of the Long Island Railroad being its usual self. (This isn’t exactly the first time this has happened. Or even the first time it’s happened recently.) Word is, they’ve since fixed the situation, manually resetting all the affected signals and re-opening Penn Station, so hopefully tomorrow morning’s commute will be nothing special.

But I dunno, with the weather we’ve been having… We could go right from summer into winter’s heavy snow. And the LIRR has proven they’re none too good at dealing with snow.

So, Canada

The past week really just flew past, and it’s with no small amount of shock that I realize I left for Canada some ten whole days ago. It was a really good trip, productive in odd ways for my writing and a whole lot of fun. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel a little weird to feel like I’m suddenly back.

As noted here, I arrived a week ago Thursday, after a busy (and early) morning of traveling. I wound up seeing very little of downtown Calgary, just a short walk around the hotel and then back to my room, but I have it on reasonably good authority that the city’s a whole lot nicer and more interesting before dark. (After is presumably when the bloodthirsty, fanged deer come out, at least those who have migrated from the mountains, but perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself there.)

On Friday morning, I met Heather for breakfast downstairs at the Palliser, where we were joined by Jocelyn, had a very nice meal, and I suppose they sussed out this odd man who had traveled some 2,400 miles (or 3,800 km — roughly; miles seem a whole lot easier to guestimate in, but when in Rome…) to meet them and travel on to Banff.

It’s not quite a two-hour drive from Calgary to Banff, but the time passed quickly. The bus was comfortable, and Heather was a very good tour guide and company along the way. We arrived and checked in at the Banff Centre, then split up, me to explore and get my ID card made and Heather to pick up supplies for her swanky studio. We met up for dinner, where we both met a poet and a filmmaker, who were staying and working at the Centre during the same time. I’m not terrific at meeting new people under normal circumstances, but the Centre really does allow you to bump into new people — artists and mathematicians both — doing interesting work, and I’m glad to have met the few I did.

Friday evening, after hearing about it at dinner, I decided to go to a short film retrospective, and after that, it was straight back to my room to work on the 3-Day Novel starting at midnight.

Well, I actually went to sleep and started around 6 o’clock the next morning. I mean, I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy.

The next few days are kind of a blur, as I spent a lot of the time sequestered in my room madly typing away at my novel. Sometime Saturday evening, Heather took pity on me and accompanied me downtown, where I’d not yet been. It wasn’t the full Banff tour — and walking downtown in Banff always comes with the caveat that you’ll have to walk back up — but it was nice to get out of my room and my own head for a little while at least. And, really, Banff is a ridiculously pretty town whose weather was ridiculously nice while I was there.

And we only saw one bloodthirsty fanged deer along the path, so there’s that.

I finished the three-day novel sometime on Monday evening, Labor Day, around eight o’clock. I eventually called it The Last Man from Mars. It’s a bit more time-travely than I originally expected, and it’s by no means a masterpiece — maybe salvageable, almost certainly not publishable — but I definitely had a sense of accomplishment when I was done. The final draft, which I have yet to read over — and who knows if I ever will? — clocked in just under 17,000 words. That’s on the short side for a novel, but it’s 17,000 words I didn’t have on Friday…and not all of them are bad.

There are worse things than writing a failed novel. Like not writing one at all.

The rest of my days there were a mix of writing and seeing the sights. On Tuesday, we went up to Sulphur Mountain in the Banff Gondola. It’s a touristy thing to do, apparently, but hey, look at me: tourist. The view from the top was simply spectacular, even if I did get a little sunburned along the way.

A number of people hiked it — including, apparently, some of the aforementioned mathematicians — but even with the pretty reasonable switchback trails, I think the gondola’s the nicer way to see the mountain and below.

I spent a lot of the rest of my time plugging away at a short story. I didn’t quite take the words-and-more-words-at-any-cost approach of the three-day novel, and the going was a lot slower, with the story still nowhere near finished. But I think I made significant progress on a story that’s been stuck for awhile. The Centre definitely creates an atmosphere conducive to creativity.

After the gondola, Heather and I went to reserve a spot on a horseback trail ride for later in the week. I’ll admit I was more than a little nervous about the whole thing, having never been on a horse before — I seem to recall a brief photo op atop a pony when I was a young boy, but I don’t remember it ending well. But Heather made it sound like it might actually be fun, and how often do you get the opportunity to ride a horse along a trail in the Rockies?

I probably needn’t have worried. It really was a lot of fun. I was very sore the next day — I don’t think hiking back downtown for last-minute souvenir shopping afterward really helped — but it’s definitely something I’d welcome the opportunity to do again. Aside from a slight nervousness at mounting and dismounting, and some trepidation as Francis, my horse, picked his way down hills, the ride was absolutely worth it, and it definitely did not feel like two whole hours. I’m only sorry I didn’t take more pictures along the way.

Then on Friday I checked out. I hung around the Centre a little while longer, sitting out on the deck at Heather’s studio, reading her most recent short story (it’s quite good). Then around three o’clock, I got a bus back to Calgary, then found my way to the Hilton Garden Inn near the airport. (A really nice place, and everyone there was very friendly, but man, after a week of the Banff Centre’s terrific and ample food, their room service almost couldn’t help but be a let-down.) I turned in early, not doing much more than watching some Canadian television. (Wow, they have Red Green up there, too!)

I had an early-morning flight the next day, although thankfully not quite as early as the week before. I seem to have bumped into a lot of tour groups on my travels, first the large group in line ahead of me at JFK, then twice on the way back, Japanese tourists leaving Calgary and a tour group of Minnesotans headed for twelve days in Rome. I arrived around five o’clock in the evening, New York time, my father picking me up at the airport.

I had a really great time on my trip to Canada. I wrote a short and crazy novel, saw some beautiful scenery, plugged away at a short story, met some really interesting people, ate some really good food, went up a mountain, rode a horse for the first time (and enjoyed it, no less), and got the chance to meet Heather. Not at all a shabby vacation. I never quite got used to the money — some of it’s blue! some is magnetic! lots of things are slightly more expensive — or the use of metric for everything but weight in pounds. (Seriously, what’s up with that?) I never quite mastered the mental conversion of Fahrenheit to Celsius, and I never stopped being amused by everything being written in both English and French. But it was absolutely worth going.

And while I’m not so sure yet about next year’s three-day novel contest, I’d definitely go back to Banff some day.

Can’t trust that day

Sales meetings at work today, mostly for acquiring editors and the marketing team, but at least I got a free lunch out of it.

Of course, they’ll tell you there’s no such thing as a free lunch. And maybe I paid for it with my evening commute, which was pretty dreadful, thanks to the Long Island Railroad’s complete inability to deal with the weather. I’m still not entirely sure what happened — I’ve heard hail storm, I’ve heard lightening strike — and I’m still amazed that none of the bad weather made it to Manhattan.

Of course, I very nearly didn’t get out of Manhattan. I rushed to make a 4:54 train, only to discover it had been canceled, along with many other trains. I finally squeezed aboard the today-only 5:22 and made decent enough home, home a little over an hour later. Except that’s an hour of standing in very tight corner on a train that only proceeded to pick up new passengers as we went along. There was one woman, who seemed perfectly nice, but whose hair kept brushing into me. And there was the gentleman who suddenly decided to share with us his love of Creedence Clearwater Revival (or crappy headphones). Basically, we were packed like sardines for an hour…if sardines were packed standing up and fully conscious.

I was very happy to get off the train.

Oh, and I should note: I did not finish writing my short story over the weekend. It was due today, but I hit a brick wall around 10 o’clock last night, after which my brain just stopped working properly. I wasn’t entirely pleased with everything I’d written leading right up to that, and it felt like the story was going to need at least another full scene, one that was going to take me more than a couple of hours (even with a working brain) to write. I like the story enough that I want to put the effort into it, not rush it just to meet the deadline.

But, you say, isn’t that exactly what you’re going to be doing with the 3-Day Novel Competition? Well, yes, in a way. But there, that’s part of the experience, the mad rush to finish, to just keep writing. I’m almost certainly going to have plenty of terrible writing in whatever I manage to come up with over the course of those three days, lots of work that will need lots of editing, but I’ll have time for editing after. (Well, unless it’s so good that it wins the competition.) With this story, I only had that crazy rush to finish because I didn’t know about the deadline earlier.

This was good practice for that, and the 3-day competition is a good (if crazy) writing exercise, but not every story benefits by being written that way.

Thursday

I kept my bag, which I liberally sprayed yesterday with disinfectant, securely in my lap today, on both my morning and evening commute. There was no sign, in either direction, of another toilet-overflow disaster, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

Other than that, it was a pretty average — albeit ridiculously hot — day.