Sunday

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I was planning on giving blood this morning, before my afternoon writing group. I was just a little worried I might oversleep a little.

The dog made sure I didn’t do that.

At least I managed to give blood. There was a sizable crowd, too, at the blood drive, which is nice to see when it happens.

This afternoon, after the writing, we went to see Guardians of the Galaxy, which I thought was a lot of fun. And I got to tell myself the popcorn I bought was just to help replenish me after my earlier blood donation. That and the cookie earlier. I do what I can.

Anyway, it wasn’t all barking dogs, big needles, and talking raccoons. I also wrote this as part of our free-writing:

“Don’t tell the demon,” the blonde-haired super-heroine said. Her short red cape flapped menacingly in the wind.

“I’ll tell the demon anything I want, my dear,” said Professor von Evel. He leveled his home-built death ray at her aggravatingly perky head. “You’re hardly in a position to be making demands.”

“I’m just trying to save us both some grief.” Even floating a hundred stories above the city streets, Kalindra, the last daughter of Mars, was nothing if not cheerful. “He’s going to double-cross you, you know. If you’d been a little less focused on trying to rule the world, you’d have seen that what the demon wants is to destroy it.”

“That’s a lot of talk for a girl without a death ray,” von Evel sneered.

“Fine.” Kalindra sighed, swooping down to land on the rooftop. She seemed unfazed by the mad professor’s gun. “Give him a call. Tell him the museum heist went great, you’ve found the last component, and the machine’s almost ready.” She sat down on the edge of the roof, tucking the end of the cape beneath her, and looked down at the street with a stifled yawn. “You’ve still got him on speed-dial, haven’t you?”

Von Evel stared. “The demon’s powers are nothing to be trifled with, my dear,” he said. “The Beast will honor our bargain.”

“Sure, sure,” Kalindra said, examining her nails. “Real stand-up guy…the Beast of the Unspeakable Depths. You go right ahead and tell him anything you want. I mean, it’s just one of the ancient demon guild’s gemstones, right?”

“It’s — “ von Evel said. He could feel the weight of the unholy sapphire where he’d stashed it in his pocket. “Well yes, but — “

“Remind me, what’s that thing called again? You know, in the ancient texts?”

Von Evel lowered his death ray. “Betrayal’s Reward,” he said.

“Right,” Kalindra said. She stood up, taking the death ray and crushing it to dust it her fist. She clapped a comforting hand on the would-be super-villain’s shoulder. “Hey, don’t beat yourself up, guy. You’re not the first evil genius the demon’s taken advantage of.

“Wanna get some coffee?”

And that — plus, admittedly, a short nap after lunch — has been my Sunday.

Saturday

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Today did not go exactly as I planned.

Admittedly, it wasn’t much of a plan, and the one thing I had actually scheduled to do — taking my car in for its yearly inspection — that much I did. But I thought I’d spend the rest of the day writing, or at least guilt-tripping myself into trying to write, while instead I spent almost all of the afternoon trying to get the house wireless router to work.

Trying and failing, I should say. Ultimately, my father and I went and bought a new one. (Well, he bought it. I offered, as I’m really the one who makes use of it and because…well, without an internet connection, do I even exist?) The new one seems to be working, which is already a step up over the old failed router.

And I actually did manage to do a little writing. I dusted off a story that had been a rejected a couple of months ago, made a few revisions, and sent it out, maybe to be rejected again, fingers crossed.

Then I watched Mama, which has a lot going for it. And weirdly, the fact that it’s not always scary isn’t exactly a bad thing. I don’t know that all the good things about it add up to a good movie, necessarily, but it definitely has its moments.

This day has, too, despite the rain and the aggravation of so many hours lost to broken technology. There’s rain in the forecast again for tomorrow, but hopefully that’s it.

Sunday came and trashed me out again

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It was a quiet weekend, spent mostly writing or failing to write. (Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.) The word count is slow to increase, but I did make some progress on a short story I’ve been writing. Maybe not enough to meet the deadline I’m trying to write it against, but I’m hoping the deadline itself will light a fire under me. I’ve entertained more ridiculous hopes.

Writing at my weekly group didn’t go terrifically well, thanks at least in part to a half-assed prompt I was responsible for providing. In fairness, I delegated — “you give a subject, you give a verb, I’ll give an object” — but that probably explains the Frankenstein’s monster of the prompt we eventually wound up with, and the unsatisfying nature of my “story.” I share it partly for filler, and partly because it’s useful for me to remember the free-writing isn’t about creating finely tuned prose, or even necessarily about generating great ideas. It’s about just writing. And like I said up above, sometimes writing is indistinguishable from failing to write:

The airplane transformed the final note. They hadn’t heard it live, but in playback, with the rest of the background noise scrubbed from the track, it was obvious that the jetliner had done something strange to the sound. This wasn’t just interference, Max thought. The more he listened, the more he realized that weird background hum started early, messed with the overlay of vocals, pretty much ruined the whole song. If they couldn’t clean the recording, isolate and excise, they’d have to dump the whole thing and start over. And the talent wasn’t going to like that.

“That’s the airplane that crashed?” Ben asked. He’d flipped the volume down on the boards, but the hum was still there, ringing in Max’s ears.

“Disappeared,” he said. “They don’t know yet that if it crashed. Or at least they’re not saying.” He reached over Ben’s shoulder and shut the sound off. “But yeah, it happened later that night. But it doesn’t make sense. When we were rolling, the thing was just parked there, sitting on the tarmac.”

“And who’s idea was it to record way out there?” asked Ben.

“Who do you think?” said Max. He glanced up at the poster tacked to the studio wall. The rest of the band was visible in the background, just barely, but it was obvious who he meant. “Gustav insisted. You wouldn’t believe the hoops we had to jump through with the FAA just to get half an hour at that place.” He sighed. “But the man loves airplanes. We’d have done the video there if they’d let us truck in the lights.”

“Well,” Ben said, “I don’t know what to tell you. The sound was never going to be clean, but this… Whoever you had with you, they did an okay job rigging the mikes, but… You’re sure there weren’t a lot of planes flying overhead?”

“Just the one. It’s not a busy airport, mostly joyriders out on a sunny weekend afternoon. That’s the only reason we got the permit. I mean, we saw the guy who was heading out on the plane, but he didn’t even come out of the airport until we left.”

“Well it’s definitely mechanical,” Ben said, starting the sound back up. You can hear it most at the end, but it’s all over the track. Still, if the plane was shut down and there wasn’t any other equipment running…”

“Just the recording gear,” said Max. “The guy, I mean, he had some equipment with him, a couple of crates he was waiting to cart out to the plane. Stuff looked mechanical, maybe. He didn’t want anybody near them. I dunno, maybe there was something loaded already that was making that sound.”

“You say you didn’t hear it day-of, though.” Ben pointed at the boards. “Something big enough to pump out this, I gotta say you’d probably hear it on the ground.” He listened for a moment, as if lost in a trance. “It sound kind of rhythmic to you?”

“What?” Max asked. “No, it’s just — “ But the more he, too, listened, the more he had to admit there did seem to be some kind of rhythm to the hum, some kind of pattern, repeating, beyond the background noise. He couldn’t quite place it — hell, he hadn’t heard it at all before — but yeah, it might just be there.

“Can you pull out the rest?” he asked. “I know you said we couldn’t wipe the noise, but could we dampen everything else?”

“We could try,” Ben said. He reached for the levers, adjusting here and there, with the kind of engineering alchemy that Max had hired him for. “It won’t be pretty,” he finally said, “but here it is.”

It wasn’t pretty. It was still too high-pitched, too difficult to really decipher, too much like a hum that rattled angrily in his head. But yes, Max thought, it was something all right, something more than just noise.

It was a voice.

Some of that — too much, probably, in fact — owes itself (in a roundabout way) to my having watched the second episode of The Strain earlier that morning (while I tried and failed to do the Sunday crossword). It remains, two episodes in, not a very good show, although there also remain elements that work quite well, just obscured by all the stuff that doesn’t work at all. The stuff that doesn’t work, like the creepy vampire designs and the conspiratorial machinations of that storyline, make me want to keep giving it a chance. But man, there are a lot of characters I really don’t care about at all in the show, and most of them are supposed to be our heroes.

Last night, I watched 1947’s Black Narcissus, which maybe looks a little better than it actually is. It was a pioneering film in the use of Technicolor, and it (probably deservedly) won an Oscar for Best Cinematography, but I’m not convinced the story was as impressive as the visuals. It also takes a slightly weird turn near the end, becoming almost a horror movie, and while Deborah Kerr and David Farrar are both good, Kathleen Byron may lay on the Sister Crazy Eyes act a little too thick.

Then this afternoon, after the writing group, we went to see Lucy. Did you know, as humans, we make use of only 10% of our ridiculous plot-driven magical powers? It’s true! The movie was a little dumb, but interesting, probably neither as smart as it thought it was nor as silly and entertaining as it might have been. (Like the AV Club’s insightful review says: “Calling the whole thing dumb would be a disservice, but not because there’s anything especially smart going on under the movie’s surface.”) It wasn’t brilliant, but I enjoyed it. Scarlett Johansson is in a surprisingly interesting phase of her career, and if you’re going to get somebody to lend a certain gravitas to dopey pseudoscience, you could do a lot worse than Morgan Freeman.

Anyway, that was about it as far as my weekend goes.

Tuesday

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I stayed up a little late on Sunday night watching Snowpiercer. While it isn’t perfect, it’s audacious and fun and definitely one of the more unique action movies I’ve seen in a while.

I went to bed early last night, however, and then slept later than planned this morning. But I still woke up feeling tired. So I call shenanigans. What gives, sleep patterns?

The day itself was pretty uneventful, and I’m not even sure it demanded being at anything close to peak efficiency. I had a phone call with an editor, about a new textbook I’m going to start working on, then in the afternoon I talked with my boss about that and the other projects I’ve got on my plate. In between, I prepped some of the instructor resources that will go online as part of another book’s companion website. The exciting, thrill-a-minute world of academic publishing.

It wasn’t a bad day, though, not at all. But I’m still calling shenanigans on those sleep patterns.

“There’s nothing like a love song to give you a good laugh.”

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It’s been an unexciting handful of days. But, honestly, if that’s the worst you can say about a weekend, that’s probably not too bad.

I watched a pair of movies last night, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. Both were terrific — the former because they don’t make them like that anymore, and the latter because I don’t think they’ve ever made them like that. Under the Skin is definitely the more unsettling of the two films, with a surprisingly great performance by Scarlett Johansson. (Less surprising because it’s Johansson, who’s actually been having a good run since at least The Avengers, than because the role is largely silent.) The movie’s very loosely based on a novel of the same name I read late last year, but I think in not trying to tell all of that novel’s story — or even explicitly tell you what story it’s telling — the movie is much more effective at looking at the alien-ness of its lead character.

I spent most of today writing…or, what’s that thing where you stare blankly into space and then periodically slam your head against the wall to see if you can knock some words loose? I did that. I made absolutely no headway with the story I’ve been working on lately, then finally turned my attentions to another, sillier idea and managed to squeeze a few hundred decent-enough words out of that. It wasn’t much, but there’s only so much abuse that wall can take.

My regular writing group couldn’t meet today…so we met yesterday. I don’t think there was any appreciable difference, but you tell me. Here’s what I wrote:

We couldn’t see where we were going, but all things being equal, that was probably for the best. Half an hour earlier, the last of the on-board systems had shorted, a spray of white sparks and a weird hum that stuck in the ears long after the life support itself had shut down. Now there was just silence: no propulsion, not even drift. All of the ship’s computers were dark. We had maybe three hours of breathable air left, a little more if we could pry open the bay to hydroponics and the O2 that was locked up in there. But it wouldn’t be enough; we’d be dead before we reached wherever we were landing, and I think Maisie knew it just as well as I did.

Hijacking the ship had seemed like a good idea at the time. Bad ideas usually do.

It was a deep-space hauler, its cargo nothing to write home about. Just three cramped bays filled with knock-off goods — handbags, jewelry, sneakers — bound for the poor saps living out on the rim. But as salvage, ripped to its foundations and sold for parts, it’d sell for good money. Enough for what Maisie and I needed, anyway. We wouldn’t even need a big team to pull it off, just a couple other guys I’d worked with once before, a few credits tossed their way. We’d get ourselves on board — even private haulers stopped for distress calls, way out here — and we’d subdue the crew, just like that. Hell, it seemed like the best damn idea I’d had all year.

Except there’d been no crew. Just a few leftover systems shutting down. The ship was dying.

I tell all of this to you now — and you know what happened; god, who doesn’t know what happened? — and it almost sounds funny. Maybe I’ll get real lucky and the judge will think it’s funny too and let me go with a laugh. I might even be able to find out what happened to Maisie. If I’m lucky — if we’re all lucky — maybe she really is dead.

Because I sure as hell don’t want to go back where that dying ship finally crash-landed. Even if that is where everyone seems so damn set on sending me.

Anywho, that was my weekend.