Author Archives: Jerry

The Last Breath of Summer

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A while back I wrote a story about the first warm day of the year. It is about beginnings, and about the endings that, like winter, must surely follow. The first warm day is a magical event; not only is the city transformed, not only do the people around you seem to have shed their dour moods along with their winter jackets, it is as if the rays of the sun shine straight into your soul, and the air that fills your lungs makes it feel like you haven’t inhaled in months. It is not a day for working.

The last warm day of the year has a similar magic. If the beginning of summer carries with it the knowledge that there will be an end, the last warm day is greeted with thanksgiving — one more day of summer. A reprieve. There have already been cold days, the clouds have settled in and look like they’re planning to stick around for a few months. (I was in the city center a couple weeks back, and I was surprised to see so many tourists. I had to remind myself that summer still lingered in much of the northern hemisphere.) Then out of nowhere comes one or two beautiful days. There is a chill to the air, there’s no forgetting what’s coming, but that just adds to the magic. This is a bonus day, a day life didn’t have to give you, but you caught it in a good mood. Life smiled indulgently and said, “Oh, I suppose one more can’t hurt.”

Sunday was such a day. When given such a gift, you owe it to life to make the most of it. You wouldn’t want to appear ungrateful, after all. So it was that Sunday afternoon found fuego and me sitting in the very beer garden where the above story takes place, chatting about this and that, watching the dogs play, and enjoying long silences while we looked out over the Old Town. The place was full, but they know how to keep things moving at the beer window.

We had arrived in the early afternoon; by the time we left the sun had set long since. We watched as the light put the city through a series of transformations, through the Golden Hour and into the night. I imagined people sitting on that same hillside one hundred years ago. I looked for buildings that wouldn’t have been there back then, and I thought about what the scene in the park might have looked like, thinking about the images of nicely-attired members of the Austro-Hungarian Empire out for a promenade, parasols twirling lazily.

The styles and mannerisms might change, but I’m sure the people back then talked about the same things fuego and I discussed: the beauty of the city spread out before us, and our great fortune to have one more warm day to enjoy it.

Thanks!

Odds and Ends

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I should mention that I have the cover story over at Piker Press this week. It’s set in the Tin-Caniverse, a neighborhood of the Science Fiction multiverse in which a few laws of physics have been suspended for being inconvenient. It’s the first in the series told in the third person, and the continuity issues between this and the previous installments I chalk up to conflicting memories. We won’t consider that one person is remembering something before the other person experiences it. In fact, in this case we can temporarily reinstate relativity to make traveling faster than light a form of time travel, explain away the problem, and then put that pesky law of nature back in the drawer.

I’m pretty happy with the story, but reading it now that it’s been published, I think I left a little on the table. No such worries about my story that will be published over there during zombie month. Zombie Month! Where have you been all my life? I’ll let you know when my modest submission is up; it’ll be a few weeks, yet.

I’ve settled on my NaNoWriMo story, but I really don’t know what I’m going to do with the idea. It’s a comedy based on the statement “When math is outlawed, only outlaws will do math.” In a world where governments willfully keep the populace ignorant, what would a revolutionary look like? It’s got lots of possibilities. I picture street gangs that hang out in ‘math houses’, leaving elegant mathematical clues how to find them scrawled on walls throughout the city. I think I’ll start with a scene where during a police raid the protagonists must convince the cops they were only doing drugs, and that the drugs were obtained through sanctioned sources.

This morning I put out a new release of Jer’s Novel Writer. The last version had a bug that only happened to users installing the software for the first time. Not good, and of course none of my usual testers were going to catch something like that. I’m not exactly sure how long the bad code was in there, but the problem manifested most obviously in the last release. I wonder how many odd problems people have been having over the past months were caused by the bug. Ai, ai, ai.

On Monday What’s-Her-Name sent me a message asking if I was free. I haven’t seen her since her brief tenure as a bartender at Little Café Near Home. My phone and I don’t really get along, though, and I didn’t see the message until about an hour ago – three days late. Somewhere, the capricious gods of telecommunications are laughing.

Finally, do any of you remember reading an episode about the Awkward Bowling League? I wrote it a couple of weeks ago, and now it’s… gone. There’s no sign of it. I was going to write a follow-up, and I wanted to read the original first and link to it. I’m just wondering if it vanished before or after you guys got a chance to read it.

[Late Addition!] Five cover letters tonight. I just have to assemble the parts, and I’m caught up. Got a smiley-face infested message from What’s-her-Name, so that’s cool. Getaway Cruiser is playing some good noise into my head right now. Things could be worse.

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Free Bird!

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Sometimes it’s difficult to find that perfect note to end a story on. Frequently I have a good setting, good characters, and no satisfying conclusion. It’s a sketch, rather than a story. Today, I have the opposite problem. I was writing along, and I hit a great note to end on. Boom. The only trouble is, there’s more that I want to tell, and the ‘more’ part won’t be able to flourish as a story on its own. Out there in the distance I already had a pretty sweet closing planned out anyway. So, onward. It’s not so bad to have a good sentence, take a breath, and move on. It’s just that it had a nice, final feel to it.

A few paragraphs later, boom. Another very nice ending. Alas, the story still wasn’t finished. On I went. I just wrote the third nice ending. Just like the song “Free Bird”, I’m into the third coda. This one is a really nice stopping point, even better than the others. I can’t have the door open now. I just can’t. I’ll just have to find another way to work the remaining parts into a different story. They’re good, dammit! They deserve to be written!

Just not here.

But… Aargh! I read over the story and I set up the intended ending so nicely. One more coda, Mr. Van Zant!

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Gambler’s alert…

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The Bolts are playing as I write this, but I have intentionally avoided checking the score until after I get this out.

First, some history. The San Diego Chargers Professional Football Club has, for many years, sucked. There was one giddy year, when they jouked and jinked their way to the Super Bowl ™ to be completely humiliated by San Francisco. That complete ass-whuppin’ was the best the Chargers managed (which, to be fair, means at least they got to the dance) while I lived in America’s Finest City ™. Most years, we were happy for mediocre.

Then I left town. I went so far away I couldn’t even watch the games on TV. The Chargers have been contenders ever since. (Also note that the San Diego Padres Baseball Club has won their division ever since.) Two years ago I started issuing alerts when I was in town, or when I would be following the game. Let’s call them red alerts and yellow alerts.

My first red alert was a couple of years ago when San Diego was heavily favored to crush Miami. The point spread was ridiculous, but Miami was really horrible, and the Chargers were looking pretty good. The catch: I was in San Diego. Miami won, and the Chargers never recovered. Season over.

That is the power I seem to wield.

Of course, one game, even when you call it ahead of time, does not a curse make. No, for that you will have to review the other gambler’s alerts on these pages. All of those are before the fact and therefore unassailable, but there are also the after-the-fact lamentations, as when I followed the last five minutes of the Chargers-Ravens game last season. When I started watching, the Chargers had the game in hand. When, nauseous, I turned off the game minutes later, they had lost.

The Chargers lost three games last year. After the first two losses, I spent a great deal of time convincing myself that it was simply coincidence that they choked in games I watched. I was not a curse, despite my statements here. I was nine time zones away, and no rational person would believe that I had any effect on the outcome of the game.

They lost.

I have not checked in with tonight’s game, but the message here is that I have discovered the world of Internet bootleg sports broadcasts. The barrier for me watching the Bolts is suddenly much lower.

It still might be OK. I’m not in San Diego. The delay in the bootleg broadcast might be enough. Still, I think it’s time to put a yellow alert on the entire season.

Gamblers, you have been warned.

Thanks!

Something’s Brewing…

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One of the nice things about the house where I live is that the back yard has several large fruit trees. A month ago my landlord was forcing upon me all the apricots I could possibly eat, then a few more. Recently it’s been plums.

On a couple of occasions in the last couple of weeks the smell of plums in the stairway has been pretty powerful. Obviously Otakar was not finding uses for the plums as fast as he was collecting them. Time waits for no plum.

But here, sometimes the obvious is not the same as it would be in other places. Anyone who live here would already have figured out that the plums downstairs were not going bad, they were going good. As I came down the stairs this afternoon there was a pot of plum juice, complete with peels and some of the pulp, sitting by Otakar’s door. The light bulb suspended over my head blinked on. He’s making Slivovice.

The Czech Republic has two national boozes. Becherovka is a brand name, made from a supposedly secret recipe; it hails from the Jagermeister school of boozemaking but is far less foul. Slivovice, or plum vodka, is just the opposite. It’s a people’s drink, the recipe owned by all collectively, and the best stuff is homemade. (I have had three chances to confirm this, and the homemade stuff really is better.) You have to love a country with a national tradition of making hooch. I wonder if old-timers lament that kids these days are content to drink liquor from factories rather than make their own.

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Driving Fast Cars

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There was a time in my life when I was married, had just bought a house, and money was tight. We had two cars, and one of them was a Miata. Not a practical car. We decided to sell it. Triska got the Jetta (a fine automobile in its own right) most of the time, which left me bus and bicycle as my primary transport. This worked most of the time.

Eventually, as the divorce gradually mobilized, it became clear that I was going to need my own car again. Triska was an enthusiastic and welcome shopping helper, and that extended to car shopping, but the best times were when I showed up at the dealership on my own.

Heck, you’re test-driving cars, why limit yourself? When you show up at a dealership, the salesmen are watching you. They are grading you. They are already deciding what car they’re going to sell you. If you show up on a bicycle, wearing clothes one might wear when bicycling around, they’ve got no baseline, except that in California, only health nuts bicycle around for transportation (those and poor people, but you can tell them by looking).

Thus it was one Sunday when I made the reasonably flat ride to the Jaguar dealership in Kearny Mesa. I arrived a bit winded but uncategorizeable, except that I was white and I was riding a bike. I just wanted to look at the XK-8’s. They were new back then. It might have been the weekend; there were other customers milling about. I was just trying not to get too much slobber on these beautiful machines.

(Yes, I am aware that these machines cost as much to build as it would take to feed a desperate village in Africa. That doesn’t make them not beautiful.)

Eventually, a salesman decided to give me a try. He drifted over and asked if he could help me with anything. “I’m just looking,” I said, or something like that. I didn’t want to waste his time. He didn’t go away, however. I asked him if one could get the Jag with cloth seats. “Only leather,” he said apologetically – knowingly. “You drive a convertible,” I said. He pointed to his ’60s mustang convertible across the street.

“Everyone wants leather,” he said, shaking his head. I understood. He understood that I understood.

“So, you want to drive it?”

I don’t recall the exact disclaimers I used, but he waved them off. “It’ll be fun,” he said. He didn’t have to twist my arm very hard. “All right.”

It was his job to drive the Jag off the lot, then he turned the helm over to me. “You want the top down?” he asked. I looked at him – Have you forgotten me already? – and he showed me how the top mechanism works. His take: the perfect mechanism. The windows work in synch with the top, everything is carefully choreographed and fully automated. My take: Damn! that’s got about fifty points of failure, and it weighs a lot.

On things like that, I diverge from the boys at Jaguar and just about every other ‘luxury’ mark. To me luxury is a top I can reach back and lift with one hand, flip a couple of latches, and be on my way, without waiting for the friggin’ machines to do their little dance. Time is my luxury. A car unencumbered by extra crap is my luxury. My current car, lovingly garaged eight time zones from here, is spartan by modern standards, but honestly has way too much busy crap.

So – the top raising/lowering mechanism on the Jag was preposterously complex. At this point the top is down and I’m behind the wheel. I’ve been driving four-bangers for a long time, and a smooth and throaty eight is affecting me below the belt. I pulled away from the curb, wheeled around, and headed onto the streets. The salesman pointed toward a freeway on-ramp, one of the loopy ones. “Push it,” he said.

There I am, sitting in a rock-solid, powerful beast of a car, and the salesman is telling me to push it. I pushed. I whooshed around that curve and hit the freeway in stride.

“That was pretty good,” the salesman said. “But let’s try it again. This time, push it.”

Thumbs up to both car and salesman. We came back around, hit another clover leaf loop, and I pushed it. The car was rock-solid, stable, the engine only just starting to have fun. We came out of that loop and I shot onto the freeway, slowing down to match traffic.

“Remember,” the salesman said, “you pay any tickets. But let’s try that again. This time, push it.” (The message: you haven’t driven a car that can do this before.)

I did. Holy crap. White-knuckle madness, the car performing with aplomb. “That’s good enough,” the salesman said.

We did some other performance tests as well, including brakes. Most salesmen try to talk me out of a serious brake test. Not this guy. I think he was having fun as copilot. “I know! Let’s do…!” He did a good job demonstrating to me that the car was a beast, but a civilized beast. (The jaguar folks may want to quote me on that one.)

If you need a really stylish way to burn a lot of gas flying around freeway ramps, this is your car. If you need a good way to kill an afternoon, ride your bike to you local Jaguar dealership. Shortly thereafter I experienced the two-stage turbo of the RX-7 (holy crap what a hoot to drive – two-stage my ass I was turning left at a traffic light and the turbo kicked in and I was in Arizona) and a few other cars as well.

And some people go to the movies for action.

Thanks!

Getting the Words Out

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Writing, for me, is pretty easy. I sit, I think of things, I write them. Some days it’s difficult to think of the things I’m supposed to be writing, but there’s always something, even if it’s throwaway prose that I will never use. Still, it happens that occasionally I finish things.

This is where the trouble begins. I’ve got a novel, sitting there, waiting for me to find someone to help me sell it to a publisher. Novels are patient, just being piles of words, and they are happy to just sit there forever. Likewise, the heap of stories in my “on deck” folder are in no hurry to go anywhere.

It is difficult for me to submit my work for a critical review. My pals over at Piker Press were a great way to get started submitting stuff — I already knew some of them through NaNoWriMo, and they’ve always been kind to me. The only problem: they don’t pay. I’m sure they’d love to be able to pay the writers (or themselves, for that matter), but I’m pretty sure that will never happen.

Submitting elsewhere is more intimidating. I’m up against a bunch of folks all scrambling for the same few dollars. It’s not fear of rejection that bothers me, it’s fear of being rejected and remembered. “Oh, man, not this guy again!” Nightmare. This compounds the feeling I get in my gut when I send off a submission that the story is not ready yet. It could be better. There’s always something to improve. In this way publication is an act of mercy; I can stop trying to fix it.

Then there’s the part where I’m lazy. It’s time-consuming researching markets, reading over submissions guidelines, and crafting a cover letter. Whenever I sit down to this sort of chore, I always find something else to do instead (like write).

Two days ago I made a plan. For every paying customer at Jer’s Software Hut, I’ll submit something, somewhere. No sooner did I decide on that plan than I made three sales. I got the submissions out this afternoon — two short stories to paying magazines and one agent query by email for Monster. It feels pretty good.

The next submission will also be from the Great Pile o’ Stories, one that I think is ready for the big time. If only I could be sure…

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Thanks!

And Now, Sports.

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Close on the heels of my last episode I find myself drinking a fine beer, eating a plate of goulash and potato dumplings, and watching hockey. I noticed something else about the sport that embodies toughness. Not only do players get up when then are knocked down, they also don’t whine about the call they got or didn’t get. They go to the box or they keep on skating. I saw a bad call and the alleged offender left the ice without comment. It was a weak call at a critical moment, but he sat without whining about it. Sure, while serving the penalty he might be cursing the ref, but he’s not going to hurt his team further by making an ass of himself. He’s there to play hockey.

There was a time in basketball when a player would raise his hand when a foul was called on him, to make things easier for the scorekeeper. That doesn’t happen anymore. If I was an NFL ref, I’d throw the flag on any receiver who made the “throw the flag” gesture. American football is the absolute worst for players bitching and moaning to the officials. Just. Play. The damn. Game.

Hockey. They just play.

Thanks!

Live From Osaka

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I’m at the Budvar Bar Near Home (for those who care, the actual name is U Kmotra, which means “at the godfather’s”), and some sort of international track and field event is on the tube. They just had a heat in the 200m women’s running-fast contest. I’m not sure who won; I only had eyes for the Ukrainian in lane 8. She came in near the back of the pack, but damn, she has great cheekbones.

Thanks!

Need a Favor

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I’ve been working on a Web site for a friend of mine, and while it currently has a pretty high degree of slickness when viewed with Firefox for Mac (it has the best debugging tools available to me), I’m curious how it will perform on various Windows browsers. Specifically:

  1. graphics – I blended the images with the background using alpha channels. I’m pretty sure this is going to look bad in Internet Explorer 6, but are there other broswers that also look bad? Can anyone confirm that they do look bad on IE6?
  2. menus – I wrote up some pretty complicated scripts to make animated menus, but I’m not sure how they’re working on other broswers. For instance, on the Leadership Coaching page, there are three drop-down menus. Do they work?
  3. sub-menus – On the lowest menu on the Leadership Coaching page (beneath the picture), does a submenu appear to the right when you roll over the top menu item? (The sub-menus are currently clipped off in Safari and Opera for Mac, which I will fix tomorrow.)

Now I remember why I don’t do Web…

I’ve only spent a little bit of effort trying to make the site aesthetically appealing – mainly I’ve been playing with the CSS to figure out HOW to make the text nice, without really worrying too much about the actual result. I’m really, really trying to make aesthetics Someone Else’s Problem. Still, there are some design elements that aren’t bad for an amateur. I’ll be working on a more consistent color scheme, but what are your thoughts?

Thanks in advance! The link is Eu-LIFE. If things look really weird to you, let me know and I’ll post screen shots to help you describe what’s different.

Thanks!

Soup Boy’s Birthday Party

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Walking home tonight I knew for a fact that the killer pup of autobazaar škoda is gone. I feel a wistful nostalgia when I walk past the place now, running my fingers along the links that in months past clearly defined the line between passer-by and victim. The business has changed, the angry dog is gone, and I feel cheated. I was wearing him down. We would have been friends eventually.

“I’d love to hear from you,” I said, for perhaps the thirty-fifth time, knowing as I did that I was probably killing any possibilty that I ever would. Even the most sincere sentiment wears out. But she was Scottish. You can’t blame me. The final time I said that tonight, we had just walked past the short edge of one of the world’s largest graveyards. I blathered on for a bit, older Scottish sister responded intelligently, it was all good. As we walked up the road, I realized that there were only smart people in our group of three. I also realized that I was doing a piss-poor job of proving I belonged.

“You’re not leaving. Here, have this beer.” I don’t even remember the dude’s name, but he was dead set on my presence in Bunkr. In this case he caught me pausing with a pair of Scottish sisters on my way out, so I wasn’t too upset about staying a little longer.

“A— –b– — –r–” she said. Between the loud music and my Rock-n-roll ears, more than once she said something I really wish I’d understood. It’s like riding the funicular up the side of the mountain, but when you’re close to the top the chain slips and you’re halfway down again. Still, halfway is better than nowhere. Time to make sure she understands that I’d like to hear from her again before she goes back to Scotland.

Even Jose gives up on dancing. The music is a wierd blend of techno and acid jazz. It’s interesting, but you’ve got to go emo to dance it. Every move has to have the suggestion of a fatalistic shrug.

“I’m shy,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand.” Wronger words were never spoken, but how to make her understand, after she had seen me and Jose putting on a dance lesson for the locals? That she was married made it possible for me to talk to her. Otherwise, forget about it.

[present tense… All Her Favorite Fruits by Camper van Beethoven is a heartbreakingly beautiful song. As I type it’s playing in my ears, and well, dang.]

There are a few reasons to dance. The best reason is for the music. If the sounds move you, move. You never know how much time you have before…

“We’re going to Bunkr,” Soup Boy said. “They have some Acid Jazz DJ’s from England there tonight.” Bunkr, it turns out, is well-named. It’s a long way down underground to get there. I understand the Nazis built it. Or someone else.

“This place is ours.” This is how the Boy throws a party. Big dinner at his favorite Greek place, then a short march to a five-star hotel where the entire spa section is exclusively ours. Swimming, sauna, and whatnot, all waiting for the Philistines. Pool girls took our bottles and served up the drinks, so we wouldn’t hurt outselves with the glass. Soup Boy should get older more often.

Now I must sleep…

Thanks!

The Stan-Man Plan

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The last couple of days the creative juices have been obnoxiously viscous. I got some good restructuring done on my front-burner project, but the little ideas that lead to little stories seem to be stuck. Rather than stare at my screen yesterday, after I was fried on my main story I decided to relax and just do a bit of reading. I pulled up for inspection my NaNoWriMo piece from the year before last. I remembered having fun writing it.

I also had fun reading it. It’s silly, and more than a little far-fetched, but it was good light entertainment. There is a tiny country somewhere in asia, probably wedged between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, that has been overlooked and forgotten for centuries. (If I were to work on the story some more, I would put a statue in the square of the capital. It would be Ghengis Kahn, gesturing to the side. “Let’s go around” the plaque would read.) Because they were bypassed by everyone, they are an insular and perplexing people.

Overlooked, that is, until a drunken general at a cocktail party declares that the US needs “a man in every stan!” The general promptly forgets, but his aide does not. Crumley doed not like his boss at all. He sends Robert McFadden, the only person in the US who speaks Ztrtkijistani. McFarland is, of course, completely unqualified to be a field agent. He begins to drink a lot, and under the influence he sends cryptic messages back to HQ.

Once the Americans are interested, of course the Russians become interested as well, and eventually the Chinese join the fray. Here are three short excerpts:


“They’re hiding something,” Crumley told the general.

The general nodded. “You bet your sweet ass they are.”

“Petersen says they’ve broken McFadden’s code. We have to assume that they know we know everything he knows.”

The general nodded. “All right then, we can’t let on that we know they know we know everything he knows.” He pounded his desk, sloshing his martini dangerously. “God DAMN I love my job some days.” He pulled out a Cuban cigar to celebrate, and to annoy Crumley. After spending several seconds lighting it with great care and blowing the smoke in Crumley’ direction he said, “We have to expand the code Petersen figured out in a way that he’ll understand, so they read one thing while he gets our true meaning. And they can’t know it’s happening.”

“Perhaps we should get a radio to him.”

“Yes, yes, but first we have to tell him it’s coming. What have we told him so far?”

“Er, nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

Crumley was defensive. “We have never sent him anything. By the time we knew what was happening, they had broken our code.”

The general set his cigar down carefully and leaned forward, his dark eyes glinting under his bushy eyebrows. “We will not leave our man out to dry.”

“Of course not, sir.”

“Draft some extraction plans, if it’s not too late. Military force is an option.”

* * *

“They’re hiding something,” Sergei told the general.

The general nodded. “You bet your sweet ass they are.”

“Petrov says he’s broken their code. We have to assume The Americans know the Ztrtkijis know everything the spy knows.”

The general nodded. “All right then, we can’t let on that we know the Americans know the Ztrtkijis know everything the spy knows.” He pounded his desk, sloshing his vodka dangerously. “God DAMN I love my job some days.” He pulled out a Cuban cigar to celebrate, and to annoy Sergei. After spending several seconds lighting it with great care and blowing the smoke in Sergei’s direction he said, “We need to get closer to the action, but we can’t let anyone know it’s us.”

“We need to get some specialists in there.”

“Yes, yes, but first we have to tell our ground people we’re coming. Who do we have in there?”

“Er, no one.”

“What do you mean, no one?”

Sergei was defensive. “We’ve never seen the need before. By the time we knew what was happening, it was too late.”

The general set his cigar down carefully and leaned forward, his dark eyes glinting under his bushy eyebrows. “We will not leave that country to the Americans.”

“Of course not, sir.”

“Draft some contingency plans, if it’s not too late. Military force is an option.”

* * *

“They’re hiding something,” Chan told the general.

The general nodded. “You bet your sweet ass they are.”

“Xing says he’s broken their code. We have to assume the Russians have as well, but we do not think the Russians know the Americans know the Russians know the Americans know that the Ztrtkijis know what the spy is reporting.”

The general nodded. “All right then, we can’t let on that we are interested in finding out just what it is they know.” He pounded his desk, sloshing his vodka dangerously. “God DAMN I love my job some days.” He pulled out a pack of Marlboros to celebrate, and to annoy Chan. After spending several seconds lighting one with great care and blowing the smoke in Chan’s direction he said, “We need to get closer to the action, but we can’t let anyone know it’s us.”

“The American fell silent the moment we became interested. We need to get some specialists in there.”

“Yes, yes, but first we have to tell our ground people we’re coming. Who do we have there?”

“Er, no one.”

“What do you mean, no one? We have the largest human intelligence organization in the world. You could hit the country with a stone from our borders.”

Sergei was defensive. “We’ve never seen the need before. By the time we got wind that the Russians were moving, it was too late.”

The general set his Marlboro down carefully and leaned forward, his dark eyes glinting under his bushy eyebrows. “This is an opportunity to outflank our rivals. We will not leave that country to the Americans or the Russians.”

“Of course not, sir.”

“Draft some contingency plans, if it’s not too late. Military force is an option.”

Obviously, this is the perfect sort of story when quantity matters over quality, as cut-and-paste becomes an attractive option. The story gets pretty convoluted, partly by design and partly because no idea is a bad idea in November. Just for giggles, if any of you are interested in reading the whole thing, I decided to toss it up on the Hut’s servers. (You probably want to right-click and download the file, rather than read it in your browser, but it works eaither way.) It’s a pdf, as that was the best way to preserve some of the formatting that Jer’s Novel Writer does that other word processors aren’t so good at.

If you do decide to give it a go, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind. Mainly, this is a very rough draft. There are parts that I quite like, and other parts that go nowhere. I dislike the Spy Party rather a lot. It must have been getting close to the end of the month. There are continuity issues (someone moves into his hotel room before he moves out, for instance), but if you just roll with those, none of them were deal breakers for me on this reading.

Anywhoo, it’s your call. There are lots of more worthwhile things you could read instead, but since when did life have to be worthwhile?

Thanks!

I am Become Google, Destroyer of Worlds

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Those who remember the old days might recall that sometimes I would compile a list of unusual search phrases that have brought people to these pages. What follows is a list I started quite some time ago, but either I’m getting more jaded or the number of wacky phrases people are finding me with is dropping. Fried Egg queries are still the most popular, but I’ve been letting the culinary pages gather dust, which lowers their attractiveness in Google’s eyes. That doesn’t really bother me. Still, when I take the trouble to look over the various ways people stumble across these pages, I have to chuckle. Here, then, is a list of some search phrases that have caught my eye, and (usually) a link to the place in the blog that fateful string brought them.

On another note, the phrase I bastardized for the title of this episode is more interesting than I ever suspected. Apparently, “I am become time…” is an equally valid translation. In context it makes sense. A God is trying to convince some schmoe to go for the glory, and pointing out that since in the long term he will be forgotten no matter what happens, he has nothing to lose. Bitchin’. Meanwhile, on with the show!

  • bily bear meat – Linked to an episode about czech hockey, of course.
  • wm byrne pub kilkenny – linked to an episode about our stay in that congenial place.
  • piker list of stupid – top hit, baby! When it comes to stupid, I’m very highly ranked.
  • fivepin bowling 5 pin approach video online – far more interesting than the idea of some guy knocking all the pins over, is a bunch of guys knocking all but the 5-pin down, while team bowling.
  • kicked in the balls+girl – no longer sure where it linked to on this site, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to meet that girl.
  • Cost of Trip to Giant’s Causeway – whatever it costs, it’s worth it!
  • carl sagan trampoline gravity – linked, of course, to a particularly extreme get-poor-quick scheme.
  • All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku bathroom – bathroom? It seems odd until you remember that the bathroom stall is an elevator to the evil meeting room.
  • humped his sweater – brought the unsuspecting googlist to the Stories category page, where a Werewolf’s bad manners are discussed.
  • Deanna Mac Guinness – apparently I’m the only one at homepage.mac.com/ that Yahoo found any mention of Guiness and Deanna.
  • easy steps to sketch a large cowboy hat – The Cowboy God pulls in another one looking for something else.
  • writing essays with modern language ass. – I’m not sure how modern my language ass is, but I have some thoughts on the subject.
  • car accidents 395 adelanto – they’re not pretty.
  • Neurotic writers – Not surprisingly, I have some thoughts on that as well.
  • bosom machine – Ahh… bosoms. Though a mechanical one doesn’t sound as appealing.
  • jer’s novel writer for windows – doesn’t exist. Trust me.
  • Budvar Bar – there are many, but this is my favorite.
  • reggie wanker – John and I were recently lamenting that that movie is still not available on DVD.
  • why does bud light kill you? – it can only hurt you if you drink it. Don’t.
  • what do u learn when u study graphic design – Muddled U starts attracting potential students!
  • ho does one save if earning 9000 – brought the searcher to, of all places, the Get Poor Quick category page.
  • glenwood cutoff – one of Google’s top matches brings people to the heart of suicidal squirrel territory.
  • post graduate degree course for someone who doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree – Muddled University again!
  • tom carruthers glendale ohio – someone was digging deeper into the insidious infiltration of the squirrels, and the humans who have betrayed us. We were here to help.
  • EDDIE ROCKETS – I’m glad that someone in the UK took the trouble to look past the first nineteen google results to land on my appraisal of the rather awful place.
  • how to fix a yoyo ball when it is broken in half – Muddled Ramblings was one of the top matches, despite the lack of yoyo’s
  • Nightmare Jer – surprisingly, was not my ex-wife searching. Whoever it was, ended up reading about a rather unpleasant flight I took recently.
  • one toe itches more so at night? – I hope they found a cure for that.
  • women in the great gatsby literary criticism – linked to my brief discussion of a pretty dang good book.
  • bagel rhymes – not just for breakfast anymore.
  • secret evil bunny labs – brought the searcher to the Rumblings category page.
  • cuttlefish for birds blister card – that almost makes sense until you get to the word ‘card’. Cuttlefish-man to the rescue!
  • cowboy holding coffee table – The Cowboy God pulls in another lost soul.
  • glad commercial, robbing bank – hey, I could have been in that, except I wasn’t very good.
  • Eddie Bauer fishing rod – all right! My open letter to Eddie Bauer is starting to attract attention.
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Thanks!

AiA: White Shadow – Episode 6

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Our story so far: Allison is an American high-school student who has transferred to a private prep school in Japan. From the very start things have been surreal. Kaneda has been assigned by a group of his classmates to be nice to Allison, to learn what her secret superpowers are. Who ever heard of a transfer student without secret superpowers?

Meanwhile, there is a computer virus running around, called White Shadow, that somehow infects the minds of computer users. Kaneda has been “infected” by the virus, and now White Shadow has contacted Allison directly. In order to save one of the only people who is nice to her, she must brave being infected herself…

If you would like to read from the beginning, the entire story is here.

— Hello, Allison. The voice was not really a voice at all, just a whisper coming from inside her own head.

Only, for it to be inside her head, there would have to be a head to be inside of. She was surrounded, isolated by the complete absence of sensation. She couldn’t feel herself clench her jaw, she couldn’t hear herself breathe. She had no throat to move, no tongue to speak, no ears to hear. She was a thought, and nothing more. It took her a moment to decide that she could speak back with a thought-whisper of her own.

— Where am I?

— No place. Every place.

— Who are you?

— I am White Shadow.

— Uncle?

The voice made a sound that wasn’t a laugh, but something abstract that represented a laugh.

— We have no use for him any longer. The hardware is assembled. Everything is ready for you.

— For me?

— I have been watching you for a long time.

— Watching me? How? Who are you?

— You haven’t told your new friends why you left America.

— That’s none of your business!

— Oh, but it is my business. You are here because I wanted you here.

— It was you!

— Yes. I was the one who got you in trouble, and I was the one who provided your escape. I even provided an “uncle”.

— Oh, jeeze! And now you want me to help you with something? You’re insane! I’m through with this conversation. It’s been sixty seconds.

— You think time has meaning here? It will be sixty seconds when I say it is.

Allison felt her anger rising at this smug bastard behind the voice. If he wanted to play computer mind games, well then, all right, that was how it was going to be. She was pretty good at those, too. She started pushing with her will, forcing back the heavy curtain between Allison and her senses.

— Then you’d better say it’s sixty seconds right now, or I’m going to break something when I leave.

The other presence hesitated for what might have been a microsecond or might have been a year.

— Very well. It would not do to have you damage yourself before we even get started.

— I’m taking Kaneda with me.

— As you wish. The institute will have to wait. You may find your friend … changed … however.

— What do you mean?

— What he has experienced is bound to affect him.

— If you hurt him, I’ll find you, wherever you are.

The laugh-analog lasted longer this time.

— You will understand soon enough. Farewell, Allison Crenshaw. I look forward to the next time we are together.

The diner was a hive of activity; students bounced from group to group, laughing and whispering secrets. Cheery waitresses called orders to each other across the room, and the entire place was imbued with a particular sparkliness that could be found nowhere else.

“Jeeze, Seiji, you’re such a downer,” Ruchia complained. “I’m sure they’re fine.”

Tasuki punched Seiji in the shoulder. “Seiiiiji is jeeeealous!”

“I am not!”

Kouta appeared next to the table. “What are you not, Seiji?”

“It’s so stupid it’s not even worth repeating.”

Tasuki’s demeanor changed abruptly. “Hello, Kouta. Do you want to sit with us?” Ruchia had to laugh behind her hand at her tomboy friend’s awkward attempts to be ladylike.

Kouta didn’t seem to notice. He sat next to a blushing Tasuki. “Say,” he said. “How come Mika never comes with you guys anymore?”

“She’s got other things to do,” Tasuki said, miffed. “She’s just a kid, after all.”

“I just miss her energy. Never a dull moment when Mika’s around.”

Ruchia nodded. “That’s for sure. But she won’t come back here anymore. Not since they started that no-mecha policy.”

Seiji spoke up. “You can hardly blame them. Remember when she came in driving that powered walker?”

“You mean the one that looked like a cat?” asked Ruchia.

“She’s got more of them? Jeeze. Yeah, I guess it was the cat one. She did a lot of damage that day.”

“Well, who knew a nice place like this would have mice?”

“It doesn’t anymore. Those were pretty powerful lasers.”

Kouota chimed in cheerfully. “I think it was the rockets that did the most damage.” He sighed. “Those were the days. So where’s Kaneda? It’s not like him to be so late.”

“Allison! Come back!”

Allison snapped out of her trance just in time to see a timer in the corner of the screen show sixty seconds and blink off. The screen went blank. Allison’s cheek was burning.

“Allison? Can you hear me? Are you OK?” The kid was staring at her intently; for some reason he was speaking Japanese.

She stared at the blank screen. She was sure she had been talking to someone, but that didn’t make any sense. Something on the computer? Certainly not chat or VOIP or anything like that. She was struck by a strong feeling of deja vu. Had she had an episode like this before? What had happened? She struggled to reconstruct her immediate past. She had been talking to —

“Kaneda!” she whirled to meet his concerned gaze.

“You had me worried there,” he said.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course I am. You’re the one who was spaced out. I thought maybe the White Shadow had trapped you. That would have been, uh, really bad.” His voice faltered as if he was distracted by a sudden memory.

“What do you mean, trapped?”

“Trapped? Did I say that?” He stepped back and waved his hands in denial so fast they were just a blur, and he began to sweat profusely. “I’m sure I don’t know. I mean, of course it’s bad when anyone has to go to the institute, that’s all I’m saying. I didn’t mean anything about you in particular.”

“Then why—”

“Well, then, I’m glad you’re OK! Ah hahaha! Oh! Hey! It’s getting kinda late. I promised I’d walk you home.”

Allison spoke without enthusiasm. “Yeah. Home.”

Kaneda noticed her reaction. “Unless…”

Any alternative to home was welcome. “Yes?”

“Well, some of us, I mean, some of the guys, I mean the people from class, we’re meeting at the diner for burgers. It’s no big deal, but if you wanted, you could—”

“I’d love to.”

“Great!”

Allison rubbed her still-tingling cheek and stopped short. “Hey! You hit me!”

Kaneda flung himself to the ground at her feet in supplication. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know what to do! Please forgive me!”

Allison was more embarrassed by his display than she was angered by the slap. For all she knew that is what had saved her. “All right,” she said, “but you’re buying my dinner.”

“Y—you’re not going to kill me?”

“Of course not.”

“You’re not even going to punch me?”

“No. Come on, get up. I’m hungry.”

“Oh! Yes! Yes!” He scrambled to his feet, his relief as embarrassing as his fear had been. “Thank you! Thank you! Come on!”

As they walked, Allison couldn’t help but feel that Kaneda was watching her closely, with a concerned expression on his face.

Thanks!

Last Night’s Dinner

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Last night’s dinner is still in there. I can feel it, a solid brick of chow resisting every enzyme and corrosive chemical my stomach can throw at it. It’s pitched its tent and has started laying the foundation for the cabin.

Let’s call the recipe “Empty Larder Surprise”. That’s a bit of a misnomer because there really wasn’t any surprise involved, but there’s a long tradition in our culture to associate ‘surprise’ with ‘danger’ when it comes to food. Seriously, when was the last time you read, heard, or even thought about a recipe with ‘surprise’ in the name that was good?

I don’t generally keep a lot of food in the house. One thing about living in a culture that is not based on the automobile is that the retail economy is built around people buying only as much as they can carry home. My life has a fairly simple pattern: buy a few things at the store, take them home, and stay there until the food runs out.

So it was yestereve I found myself hungry and not the slightest bit interested in going out to eat. No problem! I had food. I patted myself on the back for my tremendous planning skills and went to see what secrets my refrigerator would yield. Hmm… we seem to have a bit of dissonance. The food available to me fell into two categories. 1) things to go on bread and 2) rice.

After only a brief hesitation I set to cookin’. After all, bread and rice are both starchy foods. Stuff that goes on bread shouldn’t be too bad on rice. While the rice bubbled away (the little porous boiling bags rice come in here are a bachelor’s dream) I turned to the fridge and pulled out my other ingredients. Sitting lonely on the shelf was a small packet of swiss cheese and some stuff that goes by the name Dračí Tousty, which, with the help of the picture on the label, I translate to “Dragon Toasts”. Mmmm… dragon toasts.

Dračí Tousty is potted meat. I doubt it’s made with real dragons these days (not for 17 crowns a tub!), but in a country that has raised potted meat to an art form, Dragon Toasts stands out. (“Toast” in this part of the world refers to the toasted sandwiches many bars serve as emergency food. I assume the Dragon Toasts is meat intended for use making toasted sandwiches.) DT is spicy (on a Czech scale of spiciness) and, to my palette, mighty tasty.

And there you have the recipe for the next revolution in material science. Cook the rice, add the swiss cheese, and mix in dragon substitute to taste. Taste, you ask? In fact it wasn’t… too bad. Starch, salt, fat, a bit of spice — I’ve certainly had much worse cooked by people who weren’t constrained the way I was. No, the flavor wasn’t the problem. To borrow from geology, the conglomerate formed by the rice in the cheese matrix immediately started setting up into an aggressively solid mass. I’m not sure just what interaction the dragon meat had with the rest, but its addition seemed to act as a hardener. Dračí Tousty served the role of that unexpected wild card that has caused may a fictitious scientist untold grief.

When the mass is surgically removed from my stomach, I will donate it to science, hopefully for the betterment of all mankind. Perhaps the first building constructed of “Empty Larder Bricks” (Made from renewable resources!) will be here in the Czech Republic. They have the best access to dragon meat, after all.

Thanks!