JerNoWriMo

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Well, the only way I’m going to get that dang Day of Atonement out of my head is to write the dang thing. However, I can’t just go dropping everything else every time I become infatuated with a new idea. The only way I can justify writing this is to get it finished quickly.The good news is it will be more novella-sized — about 70K words I’m guessing — which is possible in a month without too much trouble.

So I’m declaring June to be JerNoWriMo in the grand tradition of National Novel Writing Month.

What does this mean to you, the blog-reading public? Will my media empire languish for the rest of the month? Probably not. I spend several hours a day writing anyway, so what I’m writing probably wont affect you much. In fact, I’ve got a couple episodes saved up for a rainy day. I have added a JerNoWriMo counter to the main page, however, so those who care can follow my progress.

Wish me luck!

Thanks!

I’m starting to get it.

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15

It’s wasn’t War and Peace or even My Dinner With Andre, but I just had a real honest-to-god conversation in Czech. I cheated, but that doesn’t matter.

Here is the full text, translated to English for your convenience:

W: Here’s your beer
J: Thanks
W: No Prob. So, you writing a novel over here or something?
J: Yes
W: Really? You’re writing a novel?
J: Yes
W: A novel?
J: Yes
W: You’re a writer?
J: Yes
W: No shit?
J: Yes

Skeptics among you may note that I only used two different words in this conversation. But he used several, and each repetition was different, and I picked up enough of the words to know what he was asking me, and say “Ano” with confidence. Some of the repetition on his part is easily explained as a natural assumption that I didn’t know what he was saying. Finally, “No shit?” was actually “Fact?”, but I took the liberty of some cultural adjustment.

3

Thanks!

Is this working?

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Day of Atonement

Chapter 1

The rain fell gently, whispering on the roof, welcome after the heat of the previous day. I was standing at the window, enjoying the cool air and the fresh smell, not seeing even though my eyes were open. The moment strecthed, dilating until time itself was merely an abstraction. My mind was far from the rain, far from my motel room. It was in another place, hot and dry and shimmery, long ago when I was a different person, not the stranger I had become but a youthful and vigorous man. I had had a future back then.

A lonesome car hissed past on the wet pavement outside. My eyes followed the progress of the nondescript Dodge, probably blue once, until it vanished around the bend. Lush foliage crowded the 2-lane blacktop, threatening to swallow it back up into the forest. Eventually the forest would win, but by then no one would even notice. Only the locals had any use for the old highway, and they, too, were a dying breed.

Besides my car there was only one other vehicle in the parking lot, an old Chevy pickup that was more rust than metal. It was parked by the office, where the manager had a room. I had been there two days and had not seen any other guests.

Now that the back of the heat wave had been broken, it would be a good day to travel. I looked at my truck and wondered where to go. Anywhere but there. Anywhere but the windswept grave tucked between rock outcrops, far from the curious eyes of humanity, with the headstone, crudely carved, that said only “Helen 1952 – 1987”. I had known her birthday, but not her last name.

I was stalling, of course. I knew exactly where I was going to go. No need to check the wallet to know that I was going to head down to the gulf to find George and accept his offer. I had been resisting for a long time now, but he was patient. All those years ago we had both known the day would come I had no choice.

I looked around the room in a habit deeply ingrained, even though there was little I had left that I could leave behind. I hefted my pack up off the sagging bed and fished out my keys. The door to my room had swollen with the moisture and was wedged tightly shut. I gave it a yank and hoped the doorknob didn’t break off. With one last grunt of protest the door swung open and I was free.

The red lettering on the side of my run-down Scout had faded in the sun, but with some effort I could make out “Schmidt Geological”. Beneath that the black lettering was doing much better: “Exploration and Assay”, followed by a phone number that hadn’t meant anything in years. Not for the first time I wondered idly what would happen if I dialed it.

I tossed my pack in and climbed in beside it. I flipped the switch on the dash I had wired in when the ignition switch had worn out. When I pushed the doorbell button next to it the engine came to life. I coaxed the truck into gear and began my journey south.

Chapter 2

“I’m Helen,” she said, standing on tiptoe to offer her hand through the open window of my truck.

I shook it. “Robert,” I said. “Robert Schmidt. Most people call me Bob.”

She smiled, a little lopsided. “You look more like a Robert. Thanks for coming out.” Her face was brown beneath the white brim of her floppy sun hat. She wore a red flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and cut-off denim shorts. Her boots were sturdy and broken in. Where her sun-bleached hair had got loose from the scarf holding her hat down it blew randomly in the wind. Unthinking she would push it away from her face, but it would just blow right back a few seconds later. She had a line of sunscreen along her jaw; I resisted the impulse to reach over and rub it in for her.

I levered open the door and stepped out into the desert. Even that early in the morning the sun began immediately to bake the top of my head. I reached back into the truck and pulled out a straw cowboy hat, once white but now stained with sweat and grime. “What can I do for you?” I asked.

“I think I found something,” she said. She looked around as if it would be possible for someone to be eavesdropping out there. “I didn’t want to talk about it on the phone.”
I nodded. Much of my business was telling people they had not found gold. “What did you find?” I asked.

“I think maybe you should see for yourself.”

Chapter 3

I had been drifting in the general direction of the Gulf for several weeks now, knowing in the back of my heart that the day was nearly upon me when I would have to make the decision to track down George. It had been at least five years since I had heard from him, but I knew he would be down there somewhere, waiting for me, and he would make sure that I could find him when the time came. I pointed the Scout south down the narrow highway.

The truck ran well, enjoying the rain, but the old beast was always thirsty. After about fifty miles I pulled off the road for gas and breakfast. Fifteen gallons of regular would see me through till lunch time.

The parking lot of the little cafe was full, and I could see through the plate-glass windows that it was crowded inside. Must be the whole town in there. I parked on the road and didn’t bother locking the truck’s door.

It was loud in the cafe, and full, but there was still room to sit at the counter. I made my way between tables filled with well-dressed locals. Must be Sunday, I thought. “Be right with you, hon,” said a frazzled woman, her hair piled high atop her head, reading glasses dangling from a chain around her neck. She was the classic.

“No problem,” I said, but she had already moved on.

I looked around the room. The men were wearing their polyester suits, all navy blue, all from the same rack in the same department store. These weren’t the sort of folks who had to wonder which suit they were going to wear. For all uniformity of the men, their wives were another story. It was spring, and I was in a garden of floral prints. The women were dazzling and proud in their finery, and joyful in thier communion. There was no one in that place less than fifty years old, with the possible exception of the waitress. She may just have been tired.

On the wall was a poster with a kitten hanging from a pole by its front paws, eyes wide. “Hang in there, baby!” the caption read.

Chapter 4

“Hang in there, baby,” I said as Helen clung to my hand. I pushed the hair back where it stuck to her sweating face. “Hang in there.”

Chapter 5

“Coffee?” The patch on the waitress’s shirt identified her as Evelyn.

“Sure.”

Evelyn poured me a cup in a practiced gesture, just a quick splash that filled the cup without spilling a drop. “Not usually so crowded,” she said, “But, you know, Easter.”

I nodded and sipped my coffee.

“You know what you want?” she asked, although she had not given me a menu. There’s no need in a place like that.

“Bacon, eggs over easy, hash browns,” I said.

“You want some biscuits and gravy? Good on a rainy day.”

May as well live it up, now. “Sure.”

Evelyn was gone again. There were only so many places I could look while I waited for breakfast, so I pulled out the battered piece of paper and unfolded it for the throusandth, and possibly last, time. In faded pencil George’s awkward scrawl spelled out the name of a roadhouse somewhere near Pensacola. Lucky’s, YYY Fla.

Chapter 6

“You’d like this place,” George said, writing with furious concentration. The pencil looked tiny in his giant hand, and he was having difficulty controlling it. The black man was sweating profusely in the summer heat, turning his t-shirt dark.

Finished at last, he handed me the slip of paper. “They call me Big George down there. You just ask and they’ll know who you’re talking about.”

I folded it twice, neatly, and slipped it into my wallet, intending to throw it away later.

“It’s going to be fun working with you,” he said.

“I’m not going to do it, George.”

“Oh, yes you will. Sooner or later you’ll come knockin’. Your ghosts won’t give you no choice.”

“I’ll have to take your word for that,” I said. “You’re the one who can see them.”

He laughed. “Oh, I don’t see them; I just know they’re there.”

Chapter 7

Helen reached over and rubbed my earlobe. “Sunscreen,” she said.

“Thanks. You have some here.” I gestured to my own face, along the jaw.

“Which side?” She rubbed both. “This stuff works great, but it’s hard to rub in. How ’bout now?”

“That’s got it.”

“Thanks.” She flashed me another of her lopsided smiles.

After a pause I said, “So where is this thing?” She had told me we would have to hike in, and we would probably camp at least one night.

“About twelve miles. Is that OK?”

I opened the rear door of the truck and pulled my pack out. “Nothing left worth seeing that doesn’t require some walking.”

“Do you know this area?”

“I’ve been here and there.” There wasn’t much out here of interest to my clients, but I got out this way occasionally.

She nodded and turned to her battered, dusty Subaru. She had hiker’s legs, lean and strong. She fit the landscape perfectly.

Both our packs were heavy for their size; we were carryning lots of water. I added another canteen at my waist and watched while she did the same. The army surplus belt was adjusted as small as it would go, but it still rode low on her hips, making the canteen bob as she walked. Finally she pulled a bottle out of her car and took a long drink. She offered it to me when she was done. “Carry your water inside you, the Bedouin would say.” I had my own supply, but it seemed impolite to refuse her offer. Somehow she had managed to keep the bottle cool, and the water felt refreshing going down.

“Good water,” I said, inspecting the bottle.

“Finish it off,” she said. “I have more.” I did as I was told.

When I could drink no more I shouldered my pack. “Better get going,” I said.

She was looking distractedly behind me, back the way I had come. “You’re sure no one followed you?”

“I would have seen their dust cloud for miles.”

She nodded, not completely satisfied, and hoisted her own pack, settling it onto her back and cinching down the waist strap. I stepped to follow her up the canyon when she paused and looked at me over her shoulder, her face pensive. She opened her mouth, hesitated, closed it, and continued on her way.

Chapter 8

“You want anything else, hon? Some pie for the road?”

By the time I was mopping up the last of my gravy the cafe had quieted, only a few of the Easter celebrants remained, lingering over coffee and cigarettes. Evelyn and the others fell into an easy rhythm as the pace of the morning slowed.

“No thanks. I’ve got to get going.”

She started adding up my tab. “Where y’all headin’?”

“South. Florida panhandle.”

“They got some nice beaches down there. Howard and I go down there every summer.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Way better than Miami.”

“I’ll have to check them out while I’m there.” As I counted out my money she returned with a small container.

“For the road,” she said. “It’s on the house. Happy Easter.”

“Thanks,” I said, mildly nonplussed. “Happy Easter.” It sounded odd when I said it.

1

Thanks!

Where am I?

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Let’s say for a moment that you’re going to the bank. In czech you would say Jdu do banky. – “I’m going to the bank.” No problem. Of course, if you’re gong to the post office you would say Jdu na poštu.

D’oh! How you say “to” depends upon where you’re going. Banks and post offices strike me as being pretty similar, but in the czech tongue they are very different. Not only does the preposition change, banky and poštu are themselves different cases of the nouns. The first is the accusative form of banka while the second is the genetive form of pošta.

How you say “post office” and “bank” changes again once you get there. Jsem v bance translates to “I am at the bank”, while you would tell me you’re at the post office by saying Jsem na poštÄ›. In the case of the post office, na now translates to “at”. At least once you get there you can use the locative form for the name of the place no matter where you are. Remember, the rules apply to names as well: Jsem v Pizza Hutu.

And what if you’re going nowhere? Well, in czech, you’re not going nowhere: Nejdu nikam. Once you start negating you don’t stop until you run out of words. The idea that a double negative implies a positive strikes czechs as rather odd. All that negating leads to sentences like Nikdy nic nikde nikomu neříkej a nijak se nezabývej žadným problémem – which would translate literally to “Don’t never not say nothing to no one and in no way don’t bother with no problem.” (I got that sentence from a book. Don’t ask me why it uses nijak instead of žádný. I know you were going to.)

Then again, if you’re already nowhere it’s Nejsem nikde. There are different kinds of nowhere here, depending on whether it’s a destination or a location.

1

Thanks!

A Sweet Friday Afternoon

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Got a call from Amz this morning at 4:20; it was already getting light outside. At first I thought it must be later than that and I tried to work up some semblance of coherence, to no avail. I just couldn’t hold up my end of the conversation, no matter how much energy was coming over the wire. She quickly realized she was talking to a zombie and let me go back to sleep, after lamenting that we were not in the same city. I feel the same way.

If my fuzzy impressons were correct, Amz had just had a fight with her boyfriend. She had just moved the last of her stuff into his place, but apparently it was still not their place. A thought tip-toed across my less-than-nimble brain as I drifted back off to the land of nod. I am the only one who has crashed at her place for more than a day or two that she hasn’t wound up being angry with. Amz would be, I think, a very challenging roommate. She’ll patch things up with Cute Boy, and that’s good. Should things fall apart, though, my advice to her for her next relationship is this: “Sure, sure, marriage and all that, just don’t live together. Ever. Make sure there’s a short taxi ride between your house and your husband’s.”

One night, enjoying the lights reflecting off the still waters of Mission Bay as we walked along the deserted shore, we forged a pact that if we were both single January 1, 2012, we would get married.

Note to self: start saving up cab fare.

I woke up for real a few hours later, the morning sun blasting through my windows, my head clear and sharp, knowing I had a lot of cramming to do if I was not going to waste my czech lesson today. I got some studying in yesterday, but there’s a lot of shit in this language. I have another episode about that coming up soon, as soon as I get my head around do and na well enough to even ask the question.

It was a good lesson; my studies paid off, and I’m finally getting the concepts she’s been pounding into my head week after week. We were done ahead of schedule, and she took the opportunity to throw a new pile of vocabulary at me. Parts of the body. That was good; just the day before my landlord had been complaining of his knee, and for some reason I had wanted to know how to say “foot” this morning.

Otakar Ptáček talking about knees and Iveta discussing body parts are very different. My teacher is a very pretty czech girl who is dating a friend of my brother’s and now a friend of mine. But pretty she is, by gum, and a guy can’t help but think things. I can’t help it anyway, especially when she throws in the word for “kiss” after teaching me “lips”. They’re similar. It was all for linguistic interest. Not sure I can justify learning two ways to say “breasts” the same way, but over here breasts just aren’t the same deal. I was taken back to the line in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World when the english guy says “All you Americans are so fixated on bosoms.” (Actually, I doubt he used the word “fixated.” It was the 60’s, but ridiculous psychological theories were still not part of pop culture.)

Rose once said, (and this quote I do have right) “Boobs are man’s kryptonite.”

See that? And incident that lasted perhaps fifteen seconds, thirty at the outside, has now taken up a big chunk of a narrative that was supposed to just be about what nice day I’ve been having. So she taught me breasts. (All her indications of body parts were accompanied with unambiguous gestures.) And she also taught me boobs. And butt. Inspired by that, I had her teach me the phrase “I’ve been sitting on my ass all day.” After “stomach” we discussed Czech food. I told her that when all czechs drive they will be even fatter than Americans. Then I told her that Americans will drive around in circles until a parking space opens up so they don’t have to walk very far. She looked at me, incredulous.

“That’s horrible,” she said.

Czechs, speaking English, use that word a lot. Horrible. And they say it with feeling. One language or the other has a more nuanced way of expressing badness, and things don’t map across the void between the two quite right. I think it is English that has more shades of gray, which surprises me. The Czechs are to unpleasant like Eskimos are to snow. (That’s not really fair, but I like it too much to delete.) I think perhaps it is not in the czech nature to differentiate. There is that which is pleasant, and that which is to be survived. Last week Iveta misspoke in English, not her native tongue. “I’m horrible!” she exclaimed. “I’m so stupid!” She said this after she had listened to me massacre some ordinary phrase she had known before she had known what knowing was. I look forward in the future to comparing the different gradations, of “bad” and “stupid”. Perhaps if you were to graph them in czech and english you would discover that the axes are completely different. Now wouldn’t that be interesting? It’s stuff like that that keeps me going. Language as a window to the soul. The words people use, the phrases, the parts of life that language simplifies, show where that culture’s heads are.

It was a good lesson, and afterward I hustled over here, to the soulless free Internet bar in the mall. I won’t be here much longer; the day outside is completely perfect, I’ve got a great Hawaiian shirt on, and the people-watching is optimum. I’d be out in the day already, but they’re playing some old Rolling Stones and I’m feeling good. I’m feeling velmi dobře, and I don’t care who knows it.

Thanks!

Screen Gogs

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Prague, in the summer, is a beer-drinkers paradise. Beer gardens dot the city, the people watching is unparalleled, and the long, warm days make it wonderful to sit inthe shade of an old tree and sip a fine Czech pivo while writing.

Unfortunately, that same pleasant sun makes it nearly impossible to see the screen of a typical laptop. Even in the shade it’s just too bright out there. I had been designing in my head a special “writing outdoors” laptop with an ultra-bright screen. They have them, but they are power hogs, so the rest of the computer would be taken up completely by batteries. There would be no optical drive and maybe even no hard drive, just enough flash RAM to hold the OS and Jer’s Novel Writer, and a USB port to use for file transfer.

But then I noticed something. I can hardly see my phone screen at all when I’m wearing my shades, but if I turn it 90 degrees, there it is. The light is polarized. And there lies the key to outdoor laptop use. Construct the screen so that the light is polarized in a particular direction. Create glasses that are extremely dark except for light polarized in that one tiny notch. As Voltaire would say, “Voila!” The relative brightness of the screen would be increased without burning through batteries.

I don’t know what it would take to make lenses that were that specific to a particular polarization angle and very dark in all others, but I bet it could be done.

Best of all, Geeks would finally be able to get some fresh air and sunshine.

Thanks!

Thoughts about Jer’s Novel Writer

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That will change eventually, of course, but I just heard from someone who upgraded their software solely so they could use Jer’s Nove Writer. Pretty cool, but it reminds me to take time out from putting in features that help me write and edit to put in features so that people can pay me for the software.

Tootin’ my own horn here a bit today. I’m just too excited about the vision for this software that’s growing in my head.

One of the key things that differentiates Jer’s Novel Writer from other writing programs is the margin notes. I recently upgraded the margin note system with features that I thought were pretty cool at the time. Tonight I was putting together a sample screenplay project for one of my faithful beta testers and it really started to come home to me just how unbelievably powerful these notes can become, without interfering in the writing process at all. Those cool new features were just a stepping stone. Tonight I saw the future.

I have long said that every word processor will have margin notes eventually. The idea is just too good, too useful, to ignore. Some guy programming in his jammies part-time can never keep ahead of the big dogs. Or maybe he can. Here’s why my program is different than everyone else’s: I spend more time writing with it than I do working on it.

Thanks!

Books ‘n’ Stuff

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How many books do you own?
Maybe 40 or so, only about fifteen here in the Czech Republic. I gave away hundreds of books before heading out. Very few of them will I miss.

What was the last book you bought?
I bought five books at once: Communicative Czech, Winter Warriors by David Gemmell, Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, Women In Love by D. H. Lawrence, and No Saints or Angels by Ivan Klima

The first in the list is a textbook, the second is a fantasy novel with some pretty good characters. It says its number eight in a series but this writer does what I wish more fantasy writers would do: put an entire story between the covers of the book. This is something I’m going to have to deal with soon – I hope.

The next two I got because I had heard that these guys knew how to use language and I haven’t read much that was written in that era. So they’re kind of like school to me. Tess was a pretty good read – talk about your “Life’s a bitch and then you die” story. The language is flowery but not too overdone, and I did become a better writer for having read it. I also learned far more than I wanted to about farming techniques in rural England.

I have been meaning to read something by Lawrence for a long time, and Women in Love was one of his more controversial works, so I chose that one. I haven’t finished it, but I still pick it up from time to time. The language is rambling and repetitious when not contradictory, but what gets me most is that people say and do things that just make no sense to me at all. That the characters are also confused isn’t much consolation to me.

The last one is by a popular Czech writer, and it was fun reading as people visited places that I know know, like the crematorium near where I live, and the big graveyard nearby. I also learned more about recent Czech history, throwing off the communists and dealing with the aftermath. Yes, it’s very Czech. It’s a good read, though.

What was the last book you read?
72 Essays on the Czech language or something like that. I have it in the bathroom.

Name five books that mean a lot to you, and that you’ve read more than three times.

  1. The Monster Within by Jerry Seeger. I’ve read this book many, many many times. I’m reading it again right now. No book means more to me than this one, and I still love to read it. Now if I can get it published…
  2. The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel by Edward Abbey. To be honest, I have not read this three times. There’s one part, I know it’s coming, and it hit me so hard the first time I read it, I haven’t been able to get past it again. It’s a damn good book.
  3. The Princess Bride is so much more than the movie there’s just no comparison. Ironically, it starts a little slow, just like the book he is supposedly transcribing. I have read this one out loud more than three times.
  4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams – need I say more?

I know, I can count. My powers of recall don’t work that way; I’ve got a couple more on the tip of my brain. I’ll add one in a little while when I think of it.

Challenge five people to fill this out on their blog:
Aser, Cheryl, Jerk McSwede, Delia, and um — the people that read this aren’t really a bloggy bunch. Not the ones who leave comments, anyway. Someone else out there, step up! Jerk McSwede, you can just leave a comment with your answer.

Note that if you use the above links to buy any of the books (or anything else, for that matter) I get a kickback. They sell cars over there, you know.

Thanks!

Gold Class, Baby!

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fuego and I went and caught the new Star Wars movie the other night. I’d heard it didn’t suck as bad as the previous two, so I was up for it. It was the day for my czech lesson, and that just happened to be in a part of town with a theater fuego had been telling me about.

Gold Class.

Here’s how it works: You pay too much for your movie ticket, then before the movie you hang out in the lounge paying too much for beer. While you’re out there, you tell them when during the show you would like them to bring you more beer. You give the staff your seat number and pay too much for the beers they will bring you. Not American prices, mind you, just more than you’re used to paying here.

When the time comes they open up the doors and everyone goes in. By “everyone” I mean all forty people, if the show is sold out. it doesn’t take long for everyone to make their ways to their La-Z-Boys, settle in, and get comfy. Feet up, reclining, appreciating the sound system, I was ready to do some serious movie-watching. Well, almost ready – the previews were just finishing up when the first beer arrived. Bravo!

I suppose I should say something about the movie as long as I’m here. I’m happy to report it did suck less than episode 1. I never saw Episode 2 (not in English, anyway). fuego and I exchanged some snide comments during the movie; at one point the Obi-Wan has nasty little robots crawling around on the outside of his spaceship. Skywalker pulls off some flying miracles to clean them off. You know, because Jedi knights can’t manipulate matter from a distance. Oh, wait. they can. They just seem to forget that at the most inconvenient times. Yoda, at least, seemed to keep some grip on his own abilities when faced with crisis. It was the same in the Matrix sequel: If the power you have imbued your hero with is inconvenient, pretend it never happened. Didn’t someone ask the writer, “Hey, wouldn’t he have used the Force here?” And probably someone did, but the writers were too lazy or not creative enough to invent situations that would truly be a challenge to a jedi, instead hoping that we wouldn’t notice.

There were times the writing was terribly hackneyed, and times good writing was massacred by bad acting. Samuel L. Jackson put in his worst performance ever in any movie, somehow caught at the center of the vortex of stupid lines delivered badly. It hurt to watch sometimes.

On the other hand, Sith-boy (I must confess I don’t know the actor’s name), the new Emperor who will take three more movies to overcome, did a really good job. So many movie productions forget that not only do you need a star as the hero, you need a good actor for the villain. The power of Star Wars has always been the bad guy: Darth Vader, Darth Maul (I was sorry to see so little of him), and Sith-Boy. This guy has been all that’s buoyed up the last few episodes, though Frank Oz has helped as well.

I was interested in seeing this movie because it presented a great storytelling challenge: spin a good yarn that holds up even though everyone in the audience knows the bad guy is going to win. Send people home satisfied. But it’s a great opportunity as well, to write a story where the good guy wins but the seeds of his destruction three movies later are planted. “Into exile go I must.” “He still has good in him, I know it.” “Don’t you remember? you killed her.”

One more bitch: R2-D2, in this episode, could fly, combat dozens of war-droids, and generally kick ass. I missed one part where he got away from a bunch of bad guys or reduced them to scrap or something because my next beer had just arrived, but you get the idea. Compare this to the little trash can that gets captured by the glowing-eye guys in episode IV. Did all those systems break in the intervening years? Sure, sure, I know it’s hard to keep a story consistent over that great a scope, but don’t you think as they were writing R2 into the prequels they would have asked, “hey, why didn’t Obi-Wan recognize R2 in episode IV?”

Call me a nitpicker if you want, but stuff like that bothers me. I know what it’s like to try to get all the little pieces of a big story to work together, but they had friggin’ years to get it all together. The last night before they called their script final, they should have sat down and watched the original Star Wars. Their best work. They should have asked themselves two questions: “Do they fit?” and “Does this cheapen the original?”

Of course, episode IV, the original, had nothing to live up to. Partly because of that, because there was nothing to compare it to, it became the definition of the best, and Lucas has been behind the eight-ball ever since, getting castigated for making movies that are merely good, and hearing people like me say “Back when I was a kid your movies weren’t nearly as childish.”

In the end, I think the difference comes down to acting. The original had a bunch of unknowns (not for long) and one recognized great, who played in an action movie with grace and aplomb. It is unimaginable to me that lame, flat, dead, stilted acting like I just saw would have been tolerated on the original production. If you’re blowing a million bucks a millisecond on VFX, perhaps you could say, “Let’s do that scene one more time. This time, pretend you’re acting.”

It may not sound like it, but I really didn’t think the movie sucked. It was better than most other pre-constructed blockbusters. I’ll tell you this, though: I could have done a lot better. A lot better. I could kick that movie’s ass at a fraction of the cost. With a mere seventy million dollar budget I will make a movie that outgrosses all the Star Wars movies combined. I guarantee it. So come on, Hollywood, put your money where my mouth is.

Meanwhile, if the movie’s huge, spectacular, and overhyped, there’s only one way to go. Gold Class, baby.

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The Sound of Power

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I was walking down the street today, the main shopping drag here in my ‘hood, looking in the windows of the little shops, thinking about lunch, when I heard the roar. The source of the sound was obscured by a parked truck, but I didn’t need to see it to know what it was. After the initial burst it settled into a throaty, uneven growl, the sound that only an American V-8 that’s been tuned for maximum power can make. It could hardly idle at all; the thrumming was choppy, rolling down the busy street.

Perhaps it had difficulty idling, but when the driver touched its throttle the glittering silver coke-bottle Corvette purred like a sabre-tooth dreaming of meat. It eased from its illegal parking place and stalked away.

2

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Episode 15: Year of the Rat – Conclusion

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Note: To read the entire story from the beginning click here.

Jimmy Slick sat forward, eager. “You’re sure you want to hear this?” I asked.

“As a personal favor to you, I’ll deliver your message,” he said. He knew he was taking a chance, but the urge to know was driving him now. Hidden treasure didn’t matter to him, knowing about hidden treasure did.

“Then tell them, my so-called friends, whoever they are, that I don’t know where the map is, but I know someone who does. I’ll give them the name for a small slice of the pie.” Who’s the rat, now? I asked myself.

“A map, huh? Who has it?” asked Jimmy. I glared at him over the rim of my drink. He shrugged. “I had to try, didn’t I?”

“Just tell them that. By the time you get word to them I may already have the map. The price goes up then.”

“You’re playing with fire, Charley. Better to just come clean and duck out. They’ll still think well of you. Well enough to not kill you, anyway.”

“Now, Jimmy, I wouldn’t want to put you in a tough spot like that. A lot of people want that map, but there are others who don’t want it found at all. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of any of them. Just deliver the message.”

“How should they contact you?”

“Be back here tomorrow – alone – with the answer. If they’re interested in playing nice, my friends, my enemies, I don’t care who as long I get paid and I get my ass out of this mess, if they’re interested you bring your answer back here tomorrow.”

“All right.”

“Alone, Jimmy.”

He hesitated, but in the end he knew I already knew he couldn’t promise that. “That may not be my choice.”

“If you are not alone, I will know it, and I will take the map elsewhere.”

“You’ll bring the map tomorrow?”

“No. Tomorrow we talk about the price of the map. I will also be talking to some people who want it destroyed. I have no problem with lighting it on fire and leaving the treasure forever lost. I’m not getting any of it anyway.”

“So there really is treasure.”

I shrugged. “I haven’t seen it.”

“But there is a map.”

“I haven’t seen it.” It would go very badly for me if there was no map.

“But you smell it.”

“Yes.” Rats have a keen sense of smell, and I was the biggest rat of all. But Lola Fanutti hadn’t been particularly forthright either. She was going to hear about this conversation soon enough, and that wouldn’t go well for me. Shooting me would be as easy as blinking for her. She might not have counted on Alice, however. Mrs. Fanutti figured she could manipulate me, but her charms weren’t going to work on Alice. As long as my secretary could prevent her from contacting her people I would have room to work.

Jimmy Slick was watching me. “You do smell it.” He shook his head, trying to figure whether to admire me or pity me.

We sat in silence, sipping our booze, contemplating what the future held for us, if anything. Conversation in the bar ebbed and flowed, the same tired stories that are told in every bar everywhere. “And then I socked him,” one of the interchangeable patrons said. “That’s what I think of your clock!” I never seemed to have stories like that. All my stories are complicated and uncertain. I’d tried spinning a yarn at Jake’s a time or two, but I never got very far. A man getting blotto on gin doesn’t want to hear about your mistakes.

I was enjoying the quiet when Jimmy said, “I think there’s something you should know.” He took another sip, still not sure he was going to tell me. He decided. “A bunch of Europeans showed up recently. They have lots of guns. Cello’s not happy about it.”

“I imagine he wouldn’t be.”

“There’s something else I’ve heard,” he said. He lowered his voice. “I’m not sure if this is true or not. There’s always rumors like this going around, and usually they’re bullshit.”

I nodded. His business was spreading the fertilizer, mine was picking through it.

“Friend of mine said he saw Vittorio Fanutti. Last week. Fanutti was mixed up in this, so watch out for him. And whatever you do stay the hell away from his wife.”

I think I held my poker face. “The Contessa?”

“That’s the one. I don’t know much about her, but everything I have heard is ugly. She was Fanutti’s favorite assassin. If he’s gone then someone else will be pulling her strings. It doesn’t matter; if you see her, run the other way as fast as you can.”

“How would I know it was her?”

Jimmy nodded grimly. “When she slides a knife between your ribs.”

“That’s not very useful.”

He shrugged. “There’s nobody that scares me more. She has no soul at all.”

“She might be offended to hear you say that.”

“Nah. She likes that kind of story to get around. It’s good for business. You can’t buy a reputation like that. You have to earn it. Let’s have another round. On me.”

I held out my hand, palm forward. “I’m buying. You’ve earned it.”

He rocked back in his chair. “Damn, Charlie, you’re not dead yet.”

Tune in next time for: Never on a Sunday!

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Advertising reaches a new low

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They have the Monaco Grand Prix playing here in the bar, and I’m mostly able to ignore it, but something just caught my eye I had to mention. One of the cars had a flat tire, so they switched to a camera on the car facing directly backwards so we could watch the smoke trailing behind as the car sped around the track toward the pits.

“Star Wars” the rear wing of the car proclaimed. (You may not have heard – there’s a new Star Wars movie out.) I thought to myself “those guys lucked out. They’re getting bonus exposure for their advertisement and their car’s still in the race.” The car pulled into the pits where the crew was waiting. They put on a new tire, topped off the gas, and the car was back out on the road. A textbook pit stop.

The crew members were all dressed as Imperial Storm Troopers.

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Ungraceful

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Ungraceful

Today I watched an insect die
An ant, with wings
Must be that time of year.

It was tired, expired, done
but still it tried to fly
It had nothing else to do.

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Czech is not for Muddled Ramblings

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Here’s something that is taking some getting used to for me: In Czech, often a word late in the sentence affects all the words that come before. That may not be a bad thing at all. I remarked on this today to Iveta, my teacher, and concluded, “Maybe that makes people shut up more.” She thought that was funny, but also probably true. Perhaps some of the famous Czech reserve is simply because they have to know what they are going to say before they open their mouths.

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An interesting little pronoun

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Consider these three sentences:

I have my pen.
I have his pen.
He has his pen.

In Czech they become:

Mám své pero.
Mám jeho pero.
Má své pero.

Did you catch it? In the first sentence “my” translates to “své”. In the third sentence “své” means “his”. But “his” is “jeho” in the second sentence. To complete the cycle, “He has my pen.” becomes Má mé pero.

There is a special pronoun, svúj, that takes over when the possessive pronoun refers to the subject of the sentence, no matter who or what the subject of the sentence is. So in “I have my pen” svúj takes over for the usual múj (and then is converted to the proper form, following the same pattern as múj). Same thing in “He has his pen,” since the “his” refers to the same thing as the “he”.

I’m not sure it improves communication at all, whether it reduces ambiguity in the language. I think it does. When you say “Mary has her pen.” you know right away whether the “her” refers to Mary or to some other woman. I’m liking the svúj.

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