Monthly Archives: February 2008

Heisenberg’s Daughter

Posted on by
3

Actually, it was not my intention to go into Heisenberg and the Human Condition, but one of the things about an exercise like this is that I let ideas come. There was quite a bit more particle physics in the result, but it was ruining the original mood I was shooting for, so I pared it down. Mood, after all, is what a quick little blurb like this is all about. (Although on that scale this piece still isn’t that consistent.) Anyway, here it’s:

Heisesnberg’s Daughter

She may still be out there somewhere. I hear rumors now and then. Moscow, or Cape Town, or Jackson Hole. She’s the kind of person who could be in any of those places. She could be anywhere. Her potential is everywhere; I feel it every time I walk into a room. Maybe this will be the time I see her again. Until I scan the room, listen for her laugh, there is a very real part of her there with me. But she is never there; where I am is the only place in the world she’s not. Then I will hear someone mention they saw her at a bar in the Frankfurt airport, a flash of light and laughter, a drink and a smoke and a story, and for one brief moment she will have a location, before leaving to catch a flight to no specific place, just out there somewhere. It must be lonely to be a wave when the rest of us all act like particles.

Or, she may be dead. Perhaps it is Schroedinger I should be invoking. That’s my girl; both dead and alive, and everywhere all at once. Everywhere, of course, except here. I expect I’ll never see her again. I’ve told that to the police, but they’re not yet convinced.

“How can she just leave you after all that?” one detective asked me. I didn’t bother to answer. If he ever meets her he’ll undestand. She left the same way she arrived; without warning she appeared out of nowhere, then just as abruptly she was gone, leaving my little apartment quieter than it ever had been before — if you don’t count the explosion and the nearly-incessant visits by various sorts of law enforcement officers, and other, less savory inquisitors. The explosion was minor; it’s the police that are the most annoying. I tell them all the same thing. She’s gone. All she left behind was a faint scent of exotic perfume, a t-shirt that says “Bite Me – please”, and a single red Chuck Taylor low-top. I never saw her wearing the shoes, I suspect she had already left the other somewhere in her wake. The cops carefully bagged the shirt and the shoe, and took my trash with them for good measure. My favorite carving knife is missing, but I don’t think the police took it. Perhaps the shoe was meant as an exchange.

I didn’t tell them about the sunglasses. Cheap Ray-Ban ripoffs with tooth marks on the earpieces. She used them while driving, but she spent more time with them hanging out of her mouth than wearing them normally. There’s nothing special about the shades, no reason to withhold them except that they were mine before they were hers. The lenses are a bit scratched up, but I still wear them sometimes. When I do, I feel like a gangster.

Thanks!

The Blahs

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been going on for a while now. We all have our ups and downs. As emotional cycles go, mine tend to linger more in “up” territory, and the amplitude of my mood wave is fairly small. I’m a pretty steady guy. When I am feeling a little low, I’ll even nurse it, gravitating toward melancholy reading and letting it show in my writing. This last low spot has been, for whatever reason, different. The words, they have not come.

Saturday was a productive day, however, and I thought I was back on the upswing. Maybe I was. I could contemplate all the stuff I need to get done and decided that Sunday I’d hit the ground running and and least shift part of the mountain. I even wrote a bit of doggerel about it.

Nope. Sunday, the very giganticness of everything I needed to do lay on top of me like a ton of paper (heavier than a ton of lead), making it impossible to even sit up. (When I get the jers software hut email working again, it will be hours of work going through it all. And that’s just one fairly minor chore.) Complete paralysis. Knowing that I was failing in my resolve, that Jer’s Software Hut could be going down the toilet and I wouldn’t even know it, that I was missing deadlines, and so forth just added to the weight.

This is not like me. I blame global warming.

Today’s a little better, perhaps because I had to leave the house to eat. (Sunday’s fare: two slices of cheese and a can of pineapple slices. I should probably unplug the refrigerator.) I got a bit of writing done, the intro to a story I think I’ll post here so I don’t have to finish the story. I really do have a lot of better things to spend my writing time on.

Thanks!

Tomorrow

Posted on by
Reply

Tomorrow

I’ll get up early
tomorrow
hit the ground running
as they say

work, of course
the everyday stuff
but tomorrow, for once
the chores
the cleaning
feeding myself
a thank-you note
a love letter
the countless minutiae
of life

tomorrow

2

Thanks!

Here it comes…

Posted on by
6

I woke up this morning wondering just how many days has passed under the banner of February. Quite a few, I was certain. But fourteen? I hoped not.

The prospect of Valentines Day looms. That Girl assures me that for her That Day is not a perilous journey into the valley of despair in which man in certain of only one thing: It was not enough. It’s a holiday in which a guy could hire the Rolling Stones to play just for her in the corner of the four-star restaurant, and she would say, “I wanted the original drummer.” I don’t have any figures to back this up, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts that more couples break up on valentines day than any other day.

Once Jesse told me about a buddy of his that routinely broke up with his girlfriend before the day of horror, and reconnect after. I laughed at the time, but later I realized that the trauma of the disconnect-reconnect was miniscule compared to the failure on the big day.

Womenfolk out there, I can hear you now: “That’s not me.” Based on a fairly large sample, I regret to inform you that YES IT IS YOU. Ask yourself honestly, what would you say if your boyfriend/husband/other said, “Let’s not do valentines this year.” Wait, let me rephrase that. You would say “oh, that’s fine. I don’t like the whole obligatory show of affection anyway.” Then the day comes around and you discover to your horror that he meant it. “Not even a card? No flowers?” Valentines Day is a big, fat, hairy deal, and I hate it.

From a guy point of view, it’s a cynical chance to go nuts and hope to overcome all the little failures from the previous year. It’s like going to church only at Easter. Keeping the faith is an every-day thing. Observing the annual rites doesn’t make you a true believer.

Dudes, you want to be a good valentine? Give her love 368 days a year. That means love her every day, and go double (no big deal) on her birthday, valentines day, and one other day when she least suspects it. In fact, don’t hesitate to spontanify a few more of those special, unscheduled days. Those are the ones that will live forever in her heart. And screw those guys with their mass-market holidays. After a couple of years she’ll forgive your inferior valentines performance, and appreciate the other 364 days of the year.

Of course, this gives you the chance, around your 17th Valentines, to really blow her socks off. Oh, yeah, baby. Been setting it up all along.

Thanks!

Dead Girls

Posted on by
4

… if stories about technologically-altered humans can be considered old-fashioned. And if it was actually good.

This review kind of got away from me. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, you should at least check out the excerpts. I highlighted them to make them easier to find.

I wanted to like this book. I really did. I pulled it off of the shelf at John’s house (and, um, accidentally stole it), and the blurb on the back hooked me. It seems that at some point in the future, the art of doll-making has become a science, and the science of nanotechnology has become an art, and it’s pretty tough to tell dolls from people, sometimes.

The story opens with a guy on the run, a desperate dash for freedom, to be caught is to die. Ahead is the Mekong river, on the other side possible salvation. His pursuit, identical-twin killer hottie robots, are closing in. You can feel the tension, feel the fear. He’s almost home free, and then… he’s caught, agrees to go back, they don’t kill him, and the whole episode is filed under “always start your story with action.”

In this world, the greatest doll-maker of all time reaches so deeply into the esoteric world of quantum uncertainty that the result is more than human — and dangerous. Into this doll is built her creator’s deepest neuroses about the fairer sex. His creation has a few unexpected habits, like the desire to drink blood. In the process the doll passes nanomachines into the bitten one, and the victim’s female offspring will be rebuilt by the nanomachines until she herself is a doll, and no trace of humanity is left. They become Dead Girls. The vampire element is nicely soft-pedaled; the story focuses more on the tragedy of women created as objects, vessels to carry all of man’s fear and hatred. Men don’t come out looking too good in this story.

The dolls are a venereal disease. Parasites. When mankind is extinguished, the dolls will also die out. This turns the tale from a “man replaces himself” story to a “man finds an especially poetic way to exterminate himself” story. That’s a plus. The fleeting rise and fall of this other species, the dolls, adds to the poignancy. Intellectually the dolls know they should leave a few people uninfected. Unfortunately, even though their brains are machines, The dolls are a pretty emotional bunch.

With all that going for it, I wanted to like Dead Girls. It gets mired, at times, belaboring the fact that the dolls and their progeny are not truly alive, they are automata of incredible sophistication but in the end just machines. Most of them seem to accept this, and aren’t terribly bothered by dying. There are, however, exceptions, and one of those is Primavera. A question knocked about beneath the surface of the story is just what “alive” means, thought it is not addressed directly. But if the sincere wish not to die is a measure of sentient life, then Primavera (who has little regard for anyone else’s life) is most certainly alive herself.

Still, the book has its share of problems. For the first time ever while reading, I thought “Wow, I’ve got to remember this page for the review.” That’s not a good sign. Near the start I just had no idea what the hell was going on, and after a while the author cut me some slack and provided a badly contrived vehicle for filling in backstory. Dialog at the start is trying very hard to straddle the divide between speech by people who know full well what’s going on, but will be read by people with no idea. It’s not easy to do, and in Dead Girls, the writer doesn’t do a very good job of it.

The story is told in the first person by Primavera’s sidekick, himself not a terribly well-adjusted lad, the only (living) man infected by Primavera. Perhaps, in fact, it is he that makes Primavera unique; he has loved her since before her transformation, before the nanobots restructured her molecules. It is agreed by all that she is not able to love him back, but maybe… The narrative style can be over the top, but generally that’s OK if the story is written with an atmosphere of recollection, words carefully considered over time.

Then, suddenly, the story abruptly shifts to another point of view, also told in the first person. Umm… wha? This is all the more confusing because the voice doesn’t change. This isn’t narrator A faithfully recording what narrator B told him; there’s no sense of oral storytelling at all. It’s more like narrator B borrowed narrator A’s diary and wrote in the chapter. They have the same voice, like the two narrators are machines created in the same factory. Bugged the hell out of me.

The shift happened on page 111, a page that included this gem: “Each morning that summer the sun effervesced into my room like a champagne of lemonades.” No, context doesn’t make it better. He (not the usual ‘he’ but the suddenly-substituted ‘he’ of narrator B) was having a good summer. I’ll admit that if you ignore all meaning and just look at the sentence as a pile of pleasant words, that a certain glow is conveyed. But still…

It remains to be seen whether page 111 has taken me over a threshold, and changed the way I read. Will I now habitually note pages with especially outlandish language? Is that a bad thing?

Next on my memorized list of page numbers is 145, a page I fell asleep to twice (more due to circumstance, but still not a good sign), when our protagonists (including Primavera) are trapped inside Primavera’s mind. (Suddenly the doll’s cognitive ability can include multiple human minds as a subset. So much for assertions that the robot mind is inferior or fundamentally incompatible.) The dialog for the whole sequence is a series of quips and bon mots, but then there’s this:

This was dollspace. Machine consciousness. Impure, like all thought, but more massive than the consciousness of mankind, its constituents were psychons of iron, glass and steel, a neon-bright vortex of complex simplicity from which rose the aleatory music that so bewitched the world. Music that was solid, dimensional; music that was sinew, muscle, physique.

Actually, I’d like the last sentence in that excerpt, if it was referring to, say, Beethoven. It’s not, of course, and after the neon-bright vortex it was too late to rescue this paragraph. This was not the only mention of “complex simplicity”, an interesting idea lost in this simple complexity.

Finally, there was page 167, when Kito, herself a low-budget knockoff doll who seems uniquely imbued with a sense of self-preservation, has got the drop on people who are currently trying to zap her with energy weapons. Quips Kito in her pidgin English, “I wake up first. Take Duracell from gun.”…”Bad day for you when Smith and Wesson merge with Mattel…” That line right there almost redeemed the whole damn book. Almost. Someday I’m going to write a Dirty Harry across the 21st century movie and make Clint Eastwood say that line.

The book takes place in Southeast Asia, and it’s obvious the author knows the area well. (Well enough to convince me, anyway.) At the end there is death, and life, and a personal decision that may doom humanity. Good stuff. Then, right there at the bottom of this first-person narrative, the story closes with a tagline: “Nongkhai, 1991.” 1991? I thought the story was in the future… Oooohhh, that’s the real author breaking character, stepping out of voice just to tell us, “I was there, you know.” It’s a silly thing to do, but especially distracting in a first-person narrative when I imagine I’m reading someone’s diary or a personal account, which the narrator felt compelled to authenticate with a date. When the last two words of the story broke voice it was one last jab at my already-annoyed story-loving self.

I did not read the teaser for the sequel, Dead Boys.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Thanks!

I’m Still Here

Posted on by
26

So, while nobody’s actually come out and said “Hey! Blog, dammit!” I’ve had a few gentle prods lately reminding me that the blogosphere has been under-rambled lately. Sorry about that. The Media Empire is crumbling, and I am playing kazoo while MySpace clamors at the gates. (‘Clamors’ carefully chosen; I like to tell myself that the signal-to-noise ratio here, while dismal, is better than elsewhere. I am fighting a trend that finds signal to be a quaint ideal. Long live noise.)

Here’s the thing: I haven’t been saying much because I don’t have that much to say. While I was hanging with That Girl plenty of things happened, but they fell under the unbrella of None of Your Damn Business. [Type retained. Unbrella is a word that deserves to live.] Now I’m back in Prague, doing the same shit I’ve been doing for years now, and really if you want to know what I’m up to, the archives are there for you.

There have been a couple of developments worth noting, however.

My most rejected story has added to its legacy. Truly the Lou Gherig of rejection, this story is not finished yet.

That Girl sent me an email today that helped me up when I was down. I intend to reply to it before she reads this. Just so I can tell her personally first.

It’s still February, and I’ve already picked up the Most Awesome Birthday Present Ever. I intend to send a thank-you before the generous giver reads about it here. He gave me a vote, in a place that really matters, and made it clear that he thought I deserved that vote. Dang, that feels good.

Meanwhile, I’ve still been wrestling with the screenplay format. The biggest problem: No Rambling! I’ve been trying to pack my story into the required package and it’s been driving me crazy. Every time I want to tear my hair out and shout “It’s Impossible!” I think of The Usual Suspects. That’s a lot of story in the confined realm of the screenplay. How do they do it? A magnificent cast to turn a few words into an epic doesn’t hurt. Extensive voiceover by one of the best actors of our age doesn’t hurt. Then I realized… voiceover, quick-sliced action… the whole damn movie is a montage! (Any time you want a lot to happen in a little time, use a montage!)

Last year fuego and I got word through Charles 1th that there was a guy out in LA who had cash and wanted to make a movie. He was looking for a low-budget Usual Suspects. There are, as I write this, a thousand people trying to write the next Usual Suspects. Minimum. Suspects had some locations (burning freighters and stuff) but spent its main capital on director and cast. Still, it was the writing that brought all those people together. The stars bought into the script. kevin Spacey is brilliant, but the words come from somewhere else. It started with a script, and the entire industry is looking for the second coming.

So I look at that flick, and I wonder why I can’t achieve the same story density. It looks so easy there on the screen. What fuego and I did write was completely different, but actually rather good, and made to fly on a low budget. What if the mysterious powers that toss you around like a plaything are acting in your best interest? Makes you wish you’d payed more attention to the crazy lady next door, before she died on your sofa.

In the end, all my work with Dark War (with the help of fuego’s story-tellin’ flair) makes it more cinematic, more divorced from paper, and more trusting of skilled actors. But it’s still too damn long.

So, there’s that. Writing to constraints. It’s uncomfortable sometimes. Although that’s the biggest part of this post, it’s not the biggest contributor to my current state of mind. It’s just the one I’m most able to discuss. The rest of it — I’m not really sure.

Thanks!