Month: March 2014

In which I make a formal introduction to The Blog and The Project (Or, why the F am I doing all this)

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A lot of people that know me know that at one time in my life I wrote a play or two (or three or four, or… damn, I actually wrote a hot little handful of plays in my younger and more piss & vinegar filled days), then I stopped. For a while there, I thought it would be neat to turn some of those plays into books. It just didn’t happen. Well, for one reason or another, a fire has cropped up underneath my rear parts and an elf in my brain decided that the time to get around to doing those things is now, like immediately, starting right the hell now today, with no further delay.

In a fit of delusional grandeur or whatever you would like to call it, I decided that I want to write a first draft of a novel by the time school starts up back in the fall. To that end, I’m hoping to write at least a little bit every day between now and then.

To that end, I started my little journal/blog here at wordpress. I doubt it will change your life, but on those days that I just can’t write on The Project, I’m going to make it a point to post at least a little something here to keep exercising my brain meats, and I’ll also be updating it with my progress on The Project, among other things. I’ve already posted a short story there that I wrote today as a bit of a stretching exercise, and will doubtless be posting more stories, maybe as often as weekly. I’m hoping that The Project will lead to other Projects down the road, but for now, I want to follow through on something I’ve always wanted to do.  In the meantime, I’m a teacher, a runner, a father, a husband, and between those things, I end up with a fair few stories and ponderances to write about.

At any rate, I’m glad you’re here checking it out, whether you’re just a little bit literarily inclined, or even if you’re not. Not just because you’re padding my views by landing here (we writers do like to have our egos stroked) but because knowing that there are people besides me taking an interest in what I’m up to will keep me honest and keep me on track, as there are any number of distractions out there to keep me off my goal. I’d also welcome any feedback from anybody on the fiction that I write, because above all I want to improve and I want to write things that people are interested in reading.

So now that you’re here, I hope you’ll give it a look, and if you do, I hope you enjoy it.  Thanks for clicking on me.

300 Years a Thief

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Here’s a little ditty for Chuck’s flash fiction challenge this week.  My first official one.  I went a bit over the limit but I’m cutting myself a break since it’s my first go.

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2014/03/07/flash-fiction-challenge-must-contain/

I rolled a 7 (a time machine) and a 7 (a hard drive filled with secrets).  A happier combination for me may not exist. The title sucks, but I’m stuck on it for now. May change later. I am trying to improve, so if you’re out there, let me hear it.

**

300 YEARS A THIEF

It was unlike any electronic device she’d ever seen; a tiny silver box, no bigger than a toddler’s alphabet block; gleaming, square, perfect.  And her design for it was now perfect.  Ugly and functional, but perfect.

**

She didn’t believe that it had been anything at first, it was so insubstantial.  But when she followed Karn’s directions and got it close to the ports in her laptop, it had crazily sprouted wires that reached out for the connection, witches’ arms, grasping.  A flash of light and the smell of burned electrics, and when the smoke cleared, she saw that her old beloved laptop from freshman year was melted and charred, buzzing pitifully as the mechanics tried to spin back into function.  Some heavier gauge wires, lots of insulation and a newer machine had allowed her to successfully connect the cube to her desktop: it powered up happily, flashing strange symbols across the monitor and displaying a progress bar in green along the bottom.  Then the cube had started to hum – its alien mechanisms spinning up to speed – louder and faster until, with a sudden clang and a zapping sound, it launched itself across the room, tearing all the wires and punching a hole in the drywall.

It might have been useful for Karn to warn her about the innocuous little box, but his guidance had carried her this far.  The time for questioning him was long past, not that it was even possible.

**

Lisa pushed her goggles up, the last solder finished.  She slid the cube into place and clamped it down.  Silvery tendrils snaked out to make the connection with her snarled cluster of industrial wires.  Almost a sigh as the humming started.  The parade of arcane symbols marched across her screen.  She wiped her grease-smeared fingertips on her cruddy jeans and cast an anxious glance at the doorway.  The green bar on her monitor began to fill.

**

Seven months ago, she had heard that Karn’s estate was slated for demolition.  Some business had been invented about it spanning multiple district lines, containing materials that were a threat to public health or safety or well-being.  When she went digging, the city referred her to the county, who referred her to the next county over, who referred them back to the city, until she got tired of asking for permission and just broke in.

The inside of his big, dark house had been a rat’s nest of science textbooks, wires, defunct mechanical equipment, hastily scribbled notes and vagrant trash.  It was such a mess that she’d all but given up finding anything of value until she sat at his desk and toppled a pile of notes and garbage to the floor.  But it wasn’t the notes that caught her eye.  It was the network of symbols etched into the desktop, with an IP address scrawled faintly beneath it.  She’d made a rubbing and left disappointed, and the house simply wasn’t there the next day, as if some careless creator had reached down and wiped it out with a giant eraser.

**

The green progress bar filled and disappeared.  The cube hummed happily to itself, vibrating in place on the benchtop.  Her screen blanked out and was replaced by simple, ancient dot-matrix text which blipped into the bottom corner of the screen and asked, directly and bewilderingly, “Displacement vector (hours)?”

**

The IP address had led to nowhere, an empty site.  It was an easy task to set her system to monitor the site, but over the following days it saw no traffic and never got updated.

The funny little chart she’d copied from his desk turned out to be a cryptograph, a bizarre recursive system where a symbol could stand for a number or a letter or another symbol, filled with redundancy and apparent nonsense for good measure.  But there were no messages to decipher.

Until one day, a few weeks later, she noticed a stream of characters had been broadcast on the mystery IP address.  A stream of characters that looked remarkably like the ones in her chart.

Deciphering the first message had been like trying to follow a rabbit through a tangle of kudzu, but follow it she had, and once she got the knack for deciphering the messages, she started noticing them everywhere.  They arrived at unpredictable intervals, sometimes popping up on her computer screen, rarely making sense at the first reading.  She’d had to dedicate a wall of her workshop to his communiques before she started to understand what he was hinting at.  Bits of yarn connected one scrap of paper to another in a gigantic and cascading web of cryptic messages that should have been indecipherable.  Messages meant for somebody else.  Messages that told her how to build the device, how to stabilize it, and finally, where to find the power source: the little silver cube, the hard drive which housed the mind-bending circuits, calculations, and parameters to open a portal in time.

**

When Lisa started translating the messages, she had noticed that each one had a string of characters on the end.  Numbers.  A date.  A timestamp.  Three hundred years in the future.

“Displacement vector (hours)?”

She took a deep breath and keyed in 269274.

Enter.

The cube’s humming climbed in frequency, became a whistling in her ears and then a soundless pressure in her head.  It glowed a bright, luminous blue, an impossible blue, spreading and intensifying, the entire room looking as if it were made of neon lights.  She felt her skin beginning to hum, her insides vibrating in time with the cube, the floor resonating with the impossible frequency bouncing in her brain.  Then a blinding flash, a deafening roar.  She thought, crazily, of the time she’d been skydiving; the sudden, world-shattering wind in her ears.

The cube’s hum died away.  The resonance dissipated.  The computer shut down.  Rain pattered softly at the window.

Had it been raining a moment ago?

She lost consciousness.

**

She’d tried to learn who Karn really was, but there were not very many records to go on.  A recluse, certainly; a genius, probably; and there was also the matter of his being undeniably, bewilderingly, mind-numbingly insane.  One day he’d been an inventor of some repute, living off the patents and income of some gadget he’d thought up around the time Lisa had graduated high school, and then one day he’d quite simply stepped off into the abyss.  He talked about seeing the future and meeting with himself from a hundred years hence, and how he could bring back the technology to save humanity, and what’s wrong with you all, you can’t lock me up like this, you’re all going to die, and … that’s when they took him away.  There had also been the small matter, of course, of him blacking out the power grid for half the city and blowing a crater a mile across in the desert outside of town, whereupon it had rained ash for three days.  The authorities tested the ash and found it to be perfectly harmless, but it had scared the hell out of everybody, and after that, Karn had disappeared.

**

It was, therefore, a great shock to Lisa when she woke up and found Karn himself standing over her, wild-eyed, soot- and grease-stained, raggedly-bearded, holding a device – no, it was definitely a gun, it’s impossible to mistake being held at gunpoint, even if the gun looks like something from a bad Star Trek ripoff – about an inch from her nose.

“Wh… y…” he mumbled, licking at his lips and working his jaw impotently, as if he had not spoken in years.

“Who in the blue FUCKING blazes are you?” He finally spat.

She swallowed hard, tried to focus on him and not on the barrel of the device that had to be some sort of gun.

“I’ve been getting your messages.”

“My messages?” he said, blinking.  He shook his head fiercely, his beard flapping madly.  He pressed his gun into her forehead, pinning her to the floor.  “Those were for me.  For ME.  You should be ME.  I should be… WHO ARE YOU?”

The gun-thing and his raving drove coherent thought out the window.  “I… I…” she stammered, shaking her head feebly.

He slammed her head to the floor, placed a finger to his lips, and darted to the window.  He crept over to it and ducked just below its sill, surprisingly spry for as old as he was.  How old was he?  He stole a glance out then dashed over to her, helping her up off the floor and shoving her toward the back door.

“What -”

“No time.  Run.  Hide.”  Once outside, he blustered past her and broke into a dead run, his unkempt hair streaming behind him.  “They’re COMING.”

She called feebly after him, still shaken from fear, “They who?”  But he was already shrinking toward the line of dead trees in the distance.  A thought nagged at her – those trees weren’t dead before she activated the cube – but she pushed it away.  She looked back past the little house.

Robots.  Hundreds of them.  Coming.

She ran.

Ruthless (wait for it)

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The fact that after only a couple of days and a couple of posts I have picked up a follower or two is instructive. (Thanks very much, by the way, to my first two followers!) If I can trick passersby into getting interested in my daily-ish rambles, then I guess I need to seriously consider the purposes for which I’m running this little monkey show.   After all, CLEARLY NOTHING WILL STOP THIS FROM BECOMING THE BIGGEST BLOG EVER.
I had really wanted to use this as a sort of dumping ground for everything from my writing project ideas to revelations garnered through running to stupid things I picked up from teaching to whatever other sort of nonsense might occur to me. But it occurs to me at this juncture that I might actually want to keep my writing ideas especially a bit closer to the vest. Don’t get me wrong (who am I talking to? Myself, let’s get real) me, there is still plenty of writing that I can do about writing. But I suppose it only makes sense to keep the details of my specific projects a bit locked down. Fear not, (me) there will still be plenty to say with printwords about my other hodgepodge of topics. Oh, and the profanity; Fargo, I almost forgot the profanity.
Posting from the tablet is for the birds, in other news. It’s taken as long for me to type out this sniplet as it did for my thousand words this afternoon. An exercise in frustration, like using a butter knife to saw off your trapped-under-a-boulder arm, only the knife is already dull from having first hacked off your other arm, also trapped by a boulder, this one covered in badgers. Which incidentally means you have to hold the knife in your teeth, and don’t forget you’re bleeding out. And the badgers are descending. And the typos and auto”corrects”, ye gods! Words the tablet didn’t want to recognize: ye, gods, badger, dull, trapped, arm, and more, and that in only the last 50 words. So much doubling back and retyping. First world problem, I’m well aware, but ugh. In the future, only when necessary.
A teaching anecdote to close things out. I get a special warm feeling when I crack a dumb joke and one student picks up on it (most of the mutants don’t listen to me at all and even when they do, most of my humor goes over their heads).
Students are taking an open book quiz.
Student A: what’s ruthless mean?
Me : ruthless, yes, that’s a state of being in which you don’t have any Ruths.
Student A stares blankly, student J at the back of the room snorts, “Mr. P, seriously?”
Me: am I wrong? I guess you’ll have to look it up then.
Being a teacher is awesome sometimes.

Just banging out some words

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(Title Edited so that I can save the totally awesome title “Wordhammer” for a more awesome use later)

Spiraling around the issue of actually putting metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper, I want to take a bit of time today as practice banging out some words.

I’m very close to settling on Accidentally Inspired as the focus for my novel.  When I say very close, I frankly can’t think of what would shake me from it, but I did after all give myself until Monday to officially make that call, so my procrastinating half will happily allow me to put it off until that time or very nearly so.  After all, me from Monday certainly dropped a DonDraper anvil on future me’s head, or at least, will have done by the time he gets around to it.  I get around to it?  Future uses are Fargoers, especially when we refer to them (ourselves) in infuriating 3rd person.  Who would do that?  Your author is as puzzled as anybody.

At any rate, I want to kick around some ideas for AI in a span of about 20 minutes or so.  That will leave me time to prep for my next class coming in.

So, I realize that what the storyline lacks is a real villain.  Sure, the characters that Andy invents at the typermachine (yeah… that happened and I stuck with it) end up working against him, but they are not villains.  They’re not working against him so much as they’re simply working for themselves.  Of course, in noticing that I recall upon myself the notion that there is no good or bad but thinking makes it so; ergo, NO villain should be working against him in the strict sense of acting as an ANTI-Andy, that wouldn’t make sense.  However, the created characters are not operating at goals which stand at cross purposes to Andy.  They want their story to go one way, he wants his story to go another way, they may not agree or be particularly happy about the compromise, but they both WANT A STORY.  It works as a conflict, but the central conflict is an internal one.  His writer’s block.

Not to say that an internal conflict can’t carry the day; certainly it can.  But why not an extra external conflict to muddy the waters?  To spice up the soup?  Chuck would say, probably, if I knew him and were he reading this, why not 4 or 5 more conflicts?  Why not indeed?

So, a villain.  If there’s a villain in the story as it exists already, it’s Andy’s barely-mentioned nemesis Harold Green (or whatever his DonDraper name is; I can’t even remember, which is a testament to how long it’s been since I’ve written and also a testament to how forgettable he was, which is kind of the point – if he’s forgettable then why is he the Fargo there?) who exists outside the action of the play, writing the stories that Andy can’t write, scoring the bonuses Andy can’t score, presumably bedding all the models that Andy can’t bed.  He’s the measuring stick against which Andy measures his … prowess, we’ll say prowess.

So why not make him visible?  Why not bring him into the tangle and allow him to Fargo with Andy up close and personal-like?  Why not allow him to get in there and grab a hot handful of Andy’s scrotum and tack it to the floor?  Why, indeed, not?  (I’ve definitely been reading Chuck’s blog.)  There are moments for it.  It could even be built up to.  First, a taunting phone call as part of a good-natured pissing match between the two of them (good-natured, that is, in Harold’s eyes – Andy wouldn’t be able to stand it, I like that dichotomy).  Then a furious follow-up when he learns that Andy has an opportunity to snake the job from under him.  Then some honest to goodness Fargoery as he attempts to sabotage Andy in the writing of the project.  Making all kinds of crazy noise in the street outside?  Why not.  Planting radios in the air vents to play Hanson at all hours of the day?  Demented.  I love it.

Point is, I think I realized that he’s a perfect opportunity for the story to have a villain that can be reviled and hated and who I can also use as an avatar to give Andy some additional holy Haberdashery to deal with – and let’s face it, if I’m going to expand this thing into a novel, there needs to be more Haberdashery in Andy’s world to make it worth the price of admission.

There, that’s twenty minutes.  Or was it ten?  I think it was ten.  Nonetheless, a villain is a pretty good product for 800 words or so of musing and drivel.  Also a pretty good indicator that I can take hold of the ol’ wordhammer and bang out some stuff if I decide to do it.

Mark me, this is not self-serving wheel-spinning and procrastination.  Well, yes, it is, it’s exactly that.  But I think this idea needs just a bit of ground-laying to really take shape and I’m hoping to accomplish that to give myself a good chance at 1) actually writing and finishing the thing and 2) okay I really don’t have a list of objectives, I just wanted to perhaps lessen the magnitude of that first and only important point by giving it some cohorts on my to-do list.  If there’s just one thing it seems insurmountable.  If there are several things, it’s like a checklist.  Did that.  Working on that.  Gonna do that.  No problem.  Let me try again.

Give myself a good chance of

1) actually writing and finishing the thing

2) having a hot sandwich for lunch

3) pondering penguins in a parade

There.

Percolating

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Mar 5

Non-run frustration is building.  I can feel myself growing tubbier and more sluggish and grumpier.  Just when I thought I could finally say, yeah, I think the heel is really healing, I think things are going to be fine this weekend when I take it out for a test drive, I put pressure on it from the side (by sitting down of all things) and an exquisite sensation of wrongness bloomed in my heel and radiated out through my foot.  Not pain, per se; it certainly hurt, but in less of a “holy god okay let’s not do that particular motion anymore” way and more of a “whoa that was surprising, I wonder if I do the same thing again if it’ll ping like that, hey it does, maybe I’ll not do that again” kind of way.  Maybe just a tweak, but I’d be lying viciously if I said it didn’t have me rattled.  I’m still planning to take a little jog this weekend – probably Saturday – to test myself out again, but I really fear that there’s something serious at stake.  If I’m honest-to-god laid up and unable to run for a span of a couple of months, I don’t know what I’m going to do.  Probably go a bit batty and start flinging poop, but given my recent commitment to writing the first novel over the summer, that may just be a foregone conclusion.

Speaking of that novel, on day one of The Commitment, I was feeling pretty strongly about option C: coming up with a new premise to base the novel around, and saving Accidentally Inspired and Superhero Thingy until I’ve sharpened my teeth a bit on an idea I felt less enamored with.  But yesterday had me leaning back in the direction of Accidentally Inspired, because if I’m trying to sally up to an idea that I haven’t even truly formed yet, then am I not doing myself a disservice?  I love the story of Accidentally Inspired, and I think it’ll make a fine book.  Who cares if it’s not my best work – it’ll still be good (despite being crap by virtue of being my first novel) and more importantly, it’ll keep me driven.  So that’s my leaning.

Nonetheless, ideas for option C are percolating.  MDW suggested a horror story (go figure) about a crazed killer (go figure) in a small town.  Could be interesting.  I asked for clarification: an honest-to-god one-man-band deranged murderer or some kind of monster in the mist?  Naturally she gravitated toward the deranged and monstrous human, rather than the monster.  I suppose there’s more gravitas and relatability in the human, but damned if I’m not feeling the pull of the monster.  Something about a secluded little town, with a horrific and evil Something out there in the dark… echoes of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village perhaps, which I saw once and don’t think I’d see again in preparation for my own story.  There’s something there.  I feel its pull.

A good morning, starting with writing, even if I couldn’t start it with a run.  I won’t call it a perfect substitute but it does fill the void left by a nice pre-dawn run that makes me feel productive and leaves me feeling like, whatever else happens in the day, I have accomplished something before most of the world was even awake.  I wrote today, and that means I by god accomplished something.