Month: December 2014

The Neverending Edit

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A couple of good (read: productive) days of editing the novel have got me feeling, well, productive about my time off from work thus far, but they also have me mired in doubt. I feel kind of like the horse… was it Artex? … from The Neverending Story, who wandered into the swamp of sadness or whatever and finally got so depressed and full of doubt that he was unable to move and just sank into the depths with hardly a whimper. (By the way, what the hell? Who puts something like that in a movie ostensibly for children? Let’s just have this horse — beloved by one of the main characters of the film — just fargoing give up on life. That won’t scar the children in the audience forever. Come to think of it, that movie as a whole is actually pretty bleak. The entire story world gets sucked up into The Nothing? This vast, invisible, intractable force? Okay, let me un-digress…)

Yeah. Mired. I feel like the leg of the edit I’m working on is a solid one, one that does good things for the story, but I’m afraid that I’m doing it all wrong, and as a result, I’m afraid to take much further action. Fearful of breaking the thing further. Fearful that I’ve sunk in dozens of hours working in the wrong direction. Which is probably why I’ve been hiding from the novel behind all those excuses for the past couple weeks.

But we all know that the only thing hiding accomplishes is wasted time, and running from the inevitable means you only die tired. No, the thing to do is to lean into the skid, embrace the suck, power through the rest of this edit, and brace myself for the feedback to come. Because I’m pretty sure that, after I can get all the sprockets and gizmos stuffed back into the chest cavity and do one more polishing pass, I’m going to send it out to some readers and solicit some feedback from a mind that isn’t mine.

And, boy, oh, boy. That was an idea I had pretty much already decided upon in my head, but actually giving voice to it and putting it in writing fills me with an entirely new sense of dread. For all that I think I’m telling a good story, that I think it works and will resonate with audiences, I simply can’t know.

A metaphor that gets tossed around in my life as a teacher is that “we jump out of the plane and build our parachute on the way down,” which always gets a few laughs but is really a horrible way to approach education. The metaphor is apt, though, for the writing world, I think. I just have to trust that this parachute I’m building won’t be shredded like my confidence when I finally unfurl the thing.

Trying for a short story by the end of the week, but outside of that, I may give myself a few days off from the blarg. All the cool kids are doing it, and there is a lot of action for our family (families) at Christmas. So, you know. This might be my last entry for a few days. Unless it isn’t.

Late-night indecision is fun!

Also, look at the lame-o who calls 10:30 late-night! What a sap!

Toddler Life, Chapter 76: Infants Are At War With Our Sleep Schedules

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I believe I’ve written before about the sixth sense the babies have about the plans adults have made in the house. In short, if you are a parent of a kid under… mine are only 2, so I’m going to extrapolate a little bit here… 7, that kid will inevitably find a way to unearth your plan, smear it with his slobbery little fingers, then shatter it into tiny little pieces, then eat the pieces and poop them out all over the oriental rug in the living room. The priceless one you inherited from your grandmother. The one valued at over ten thousand dollars, because somehow a rug can be worth more than a car.

They know. They have brains the size of baseballs, but they can smell a plan forming, and the smell is abhorrent to them. They don’t have sophisticated language skills yet, or the ability to set a booby trap or actively create a mess for you to clean up at the expense of whatever thing you were thinking of doing, but what they do have is the knack for becoming unignorably needy and unbearably obnoxious.

Case in point:

Morning runs have been getting dodgy of late. My wife is exhausted from the wee hours wake-ups with sprout #2 (justifiably so) and has asked me to help out with some mid-night changings and feedings. (Mid-night is hyphenated, because oh, if only they happened at midnight. No, were they at midnight, they would fall in between REM cycles and allow for a nice long stretch of sleep unbroken before sprout #1 wakes at half-past waaaaay too early. These happen at 10:45 — roughly an hour after we head to bed — and 3 AM — just a few hours before we’re going to wake up.)

There’s a corollary here which neatly encapsulates the Catch-22 that takes place in my house every night (and here, were current events different, I’d quote Bill Cosby’s Himself routine about how “the same thing happens every night”, but the world is an ugly place and I can not currently quote Bill Cosby without feeling a little bit skeevy). Sprout #2 begins crying at oh, whatever time she damn well feels like it. My wife sleeps much more lightly than I do, so she wakes up immediately (I can sleep merrily for at least ten minutes of infant fussing). So she’s awake anyway, but I’ve promised to help out, so wife starts poking me in the ribs to wake me up. I get up. Go downstairs to warm up a bottle. Bring it back upstairs and begin to change baby’s diaper. By the time I get the bottle in her mouth, about twenty minutes have passed since she started crying. It’s a funny trick of the universe that twenty minutes is about the amount of time it would take for my wife to hear the crying, get up, change the diaper, stick a boob in the kid’s mouth, and be back in bed. But I dutifully feed the kid. Sometimes she accepts the bottle, sometimes she doesn’t. Either way, it’s about 40 minutes from the time she originally started crying before I can have the little bundle of joy laid back in her bed; 40 minutes which my wife cannot sleep through because of first the crying and then the slurping and then the singing and fussing and finally the walking around as I soothe baby back (hopefully) to sleep.

If that was too much to follow: it takes my wife 15-20 minutes to settle the crying baby back down with roughly a 95% success rate, and it takes me about 45 minutes to settle the baby with more or less a 30% success rate, because even though the girl can take a bottle, what she really wants is a boob, and to a lesser extent, her mother. But I am trying to help, so I soldier on anyway.

Right, back to the point. Baby wakes up at 4 AM this morning. I have the brilliant idea that I’ll put the baby down, and, since I’ll be awake anyway, I’ll suit up and go for a run, then come back and go to sleep if time allows, and if not, well, the run will have woken me up.

But the baby knows, and she won’t take the bottle from me. I’m determined to pull my weight and let my wife get her last two hours of beauty sleep before she goes to work (she’s making bank while I’m home for the break), so I keep at it. Baby fights me for twenty minutes, drinking about two swallows of milk and drooling half the bottle down her onesie, which then needs changing. Changing the onesie makes her cold, which wakes her up even more. Then she poops, so I have to change her diaper, which makes her even colder.

Now it’s 4:30 AM, and the baby is wide awake. Sometimes she can fake me out and appear to be awake but actually be very very tired, so I lay her in the crib and decide to give her a few minutes to see if she falls asleep while I suit up for my run.

She doesn’t. She begins squalling louder than before. I trudge back in and try the bottle again, but she demonstrates surprising forearm strength and nearly swats it out of my hand. There’s nothing for it: she’s awake, but I’m going to insulate my wife from having to get out of bed, so I take her downstairs and watch her flerp around on the floor for a while. (“Flerping” is that uncoordinated rolling, scooting, flopping and stumbling that only a baby who’s surprisingly mobile but not yet able to crawl can accomplish.) This she does for fully an hour without showing any sign of getting tired.

So I can’t run, because the baby is awake and will cry like I’ve stolen every cookie from her entire life if I lay her in the crib. And I can’t go back to sleep, because if I close my eyes for an instant while the baby is flerping in the floor, she’s likely to pull the Christmas tree over, or gag herself on the tail of a cat, or somehow set fire to the drapes. This infant — brain the size of a baseball, remember — has not only pooped on my plan for a productive early morning, but destroyed my fallback plan of going back to sleep, and has made me feel like an idiot besides for now being stuck on the couch watching her flerp at 5 AM.

5:45 AM comes, and I hear my wife stirring upstairs. I take the baby up and relate the events of the morning, and share my opinion that the baby is probably still hungry since she hasn’t actually eaten in nine hours. My wife takes the baby into the nursery and within two shakes of a cricket’s whisker, the baby is asleep, drunk on breastmilk straight from the tap.

I go for my run anyway at this point, because I’m stubborn like that, and spend the rest of the day in a mind-fog that can only come from … well, from a sleep-deprived night with an infant who is, apparently, smarter than all of us. Or at least smarter than me.

The only rational course is to plan to wake up in the night to feed her. That way, when she foils my “plan”, she will play right into my trap of letting my wife and I sleep through the night.

This will work.

Please, let this work.

Toddler Life, Chapter 34: Plague Vectors

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In the real world, when another human being contaminates your stuff, one of three things happens:

  1. You burn the thing.
  2. You burn the other human.

Okay, it’s only two things, because in the real world, if somebody else spits, sneezes, coughs, barfs, pees, poops, or otherwise gets their fluids on your stuff then that stuff is as good as quarantined and that somebody else deserves to have their throat slit and their precious blood evacuated as they hang upside down in the walk-in freezer in your murder basement. …You don’t have a murder basement? …Yeah, me neither.

When you have a toddler, or even an infant, that rule goes out the window. And not just because if you bleed out your infant, the infant’s mother gets mad. But because something inside you, some fundamental self-preservational instinct, gets rewired. And when I say rewired, I mean ripped out of the wall and left dangling there, waiting to burn the house down.

Here are a couple of real scenarios which have actually happened within the four walls of my house in the past few months:

  • The toddler has explosive diarrhea. Like, launder-the-bedsheets and scrub-the-carpets time. I clean up the mess, shower down the boy, and then possibly forget to wash my hands before having food some time later.
  • The infant, suffering from a snuffly nose which is probably a watered-down version of what the wife and I had a week prior, gets hold of my fingers and sucks on them for a while. I pluck my fingers from the infant’s mouth and immediately use them to shovel a handful of popcorn or something into my own mouth.
  • The toddler likes to drink out of big-people cups and bottles. I have a swanky water bottle that he loves to get hold of and sip out of. Did I mention that he’s got the same snuffly nose that the infant had in the previous instance? He drinks from my bottle, visibly backwashes because that’s what toddlers do, and I forget and drink from the bottle five minutes later.
  • I’m multitasking, trying to shovel in a few bites of dinner while carrying and soothing the infant. (Your time does not belong to you when you have an infant, doubly so when you also have a toddler. You therefore do the things crucial to your existence only when you are also doing things of middling importance to the kids’ … I can’t even say happiness … I’ll say, baseline for not throwing a screaming hissy fit.) I’ve got a steaming forkful of home-cooked, perfectly seasoned spaghetti six inches from my mouth. She coughs directly onto my fork. I feel droplets of goo splatter on the backs of my fingers grasping the fork. I look at my wife, who is trying unsuccessfully to stifle spasms of body-rocking laughter. I eat the spaghetti anyway.
  • I’m carrying the toddler around, because even though he’s perfectly capable of walking and in fact running as if the devil himself were at his heels, he still likes to be carried, especially when I’m tired from a long day at work and would really rather just sit down now. So I’m carrying him and talking to my wife about my day, and without warning, he reels back and sneezes. A deep, phlegm-thick, lung-clearing sneeze. A sneeze that deserves to be captured on high-speed slow-motion camera. Right into my mouth. The plague-mist dampens the back of my throat. I clear my throat and finish telling my wife about the student who’s obstinately determined to fail my class.

The disturbing thing about the previous vignettes (and rest assured, they are not examples in isolation, but merely the most recent iterations of a horrorshow of infection and disgust in memory) is not the fact that they happened. No, the moment you become a parent, you realize that there are so many bodily fluids that are now a part of your day-to-day existence that it’s silly getting upset about their presence. The disturbing thing is that, in each of the above examples, I encountered the vehicles of infection, I allowed them into my body, and did so without blinking an eye, or in fact even considering blinking an eye.

I don’t have an explanation for this. To reiterate, if any of the above were to happen in the real world, the response would start at fisticuffs and top out at nuclear annihilation. But when it’s your kid’s snot, spit, and other varied germ transmission vectors, somehow that instinct to protect yourself just shuts down. Looks the other way. Retreats into itself and sobs quietly in the corner like a 40-year-old regressing into memories of an abusive uncle.

Which is probably a good thing, because otherwise no poor soul on this planet would survive their first month.

When you become a parent, you will be poisoned by your child at every opportunity. This is the way of things. So let it be done.

 

Excuses, excuses

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Sometimes I blarg about what’s going on in my life, sometimes I find a topic somewhere that I like, and oftentimes on Saturdays I take the topic from Linda G Hill’s site for a stream-of-consciousness post that I type without second-guessing myself.

Today’s topic honestly feels as if guest author Leigh Michaels slithered in through my earhole, squeezed the spongy matter of my brain, and slurped up the juicy bits of raw fear that came dripping out. Her prompt is the word “excuse,” and boy oh boy have I been making excuses lately.

The novel has slid right away from me over the past two weeks. I finally navigated the minefield of rewriting a particularly troublesome scene, and, flush with success, allowed myself to miss a couple of editing sessions owing to… well… a slew of excuses. I was really busy at work (I was). I was mentally tapped after fixing that one scene (it’s true). Kids were wearing me out (always true). And I allowed those excuses to be “good enough” to allow myself not to work on the novel without chipping away at my self-esteem.

However, that permissive slide is in direct violation of the mantra of my blarg, which is “momentum matters”. Actually, no, the mantra of my blarg is that “things don’t always have to mean things, except that things ALWAYS mean things.” And the permissive slide is actually not so much a direct violation of the “momentum matters” thing as it is a perfect example of it.

You say you’re going to get up at 5 AM and run three days a week, and you do it for two weeks, but in week 3 that snooze button is just too tempting, and then it’s all too easy to hit that snooze button every morning, and before you know it, those early morning runs are a thing of the past. You say you’re going to diet, and you do well for a while, but then you go out to dinner and, well, a couple bites of chips and queso won’t hurt, and next thing you’re at the drive-thru ordering a double cheeseburger because the diet is already screwed for the week, why stop the slide now?

So: I allowed myself out of a few days’ worth of novel work, and those few days turned into almost two weeks.

I had good excuses. Valid excuses. Excuses which are totally reasonable for getting me off the hook. But they’re establishing the sort of momentum that I don’t want gumming up the gears around here. Now, work has been busy, and the holidays do have me a bit more stressed than usual… but next week it’ll be something else, some new stressor, some new obstacle to getting the work done. And yes, it’d be perfectly reasonable to acknowledge those excuses and continue not to work on the novel. Believe me, I feel the gravity of that black hole.

But it’s not the time to embrace excuses. The edit is at about 70%. I may not finish it by the new year, as was my goal, but I will damn sure finish it, excuses or no.

So thanks for the prompt, Leigh… you’ve shone a bright light on my dark enabling of my own lame half-assery.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

The Screaming Comet

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Chuck’s challenge this week is another Random Title challenge, which is always so much fun.

My title was “Screaming Comet,” for which I had a couple of ideas right away but none of them seemed to fit. I pondered on it for a few days before finally arriving at this one, which was at least influenced in its inception by Stephen King’s short story, The Jaunt.

I don’t know what it is with me and kids, but they’re having a run of bad luck in my stories of late. Nonetheless, I actually quite enjoy the idea behind this one and the society I started to build for it, even if … well. I guess I’ll just let you read it.

Here’s “The Screaming Comet,” at 1499 words.

 

The Screaming Comet

“…reaches over two thousand miles per hour before it leaves the tracks and turns skyward…”

A pencil jabs Brian in between the shoulder blades, and he spins around from his doodle to see his friend Jessica looking at him with big deer eyes. “My Gran is going on the Comet tomorrow,” she says, “isn’t your grandpa going, too?”

Brian nods proudly. “He doesn’t have to go for another three years, but my Grandma went last year, and he says he’s ready.” He puffs his chest out as much as is possible in the confine of his Edu-enforcer. “He’s showing me the train.”

“…achieving a top speed of over twenty-five thousand miles per hour as it delivers our Elders on their final voyage…”

Jessica stifles a snort. “Big deal. I saw the train last year.”

“And perhaps Mister Roberts can tell us,” Miss Remnand asks pointedly, as every head in the class snaps around to stare at Brian, “why the train is called The Screaming Comet?”

Brian whirls in his seat and his face darkens. He knows it’s something to do with the speed…

Eddie Verner shouts out, “Miss Remnand, I heard it was because everybody inside starts screaming as they go into orbit.”

“Nonsense, Eddie. Nobody would be able to hear anybody inside the train doing anything. No, the sound is a combination of the train breaking the sound barrier and the friction on the tracks…”

Breathing a sigh of relief, Brian silently thanks Eddie for saving him, even if Eddie is an idiot. The Comet carries people to the Great Beyond; nobody would scream because of that.

**********

Final departure will commence in t-minus twenty minutes.

As his grandfather points out the features of the train, Brian runs a few steps ahead, running his hand over the shiny vinyl seats, pressing his face to the big panoramic windows, staring at the sparkling array of digital displays and the wide-mouthed air vents that dot the aisles.

“Here we are,” Grandpa says, pointing to the aisle seat just a few rows from the back.

Brian plops into the seat, buckles the belt and starts kicking his legs. “Aw, why couldn’t they give you a window?”

The old man laughs, mirthless and empty. “Some of us just aren’t so lucky.”

Packs of people mill about, mostly silver-haired men and women moving quietly to their seats, a few adults giving hugs or listening as the elders whisper in their ears, a handful of kids like him moving about the car in wonderment. “Grandpa,” Brian says, his voice hushed, “Eddie Verner says they call it The Screaming Comet because the Elders scream when it leaves the station.”

Grandpa’s face creases with concern, and he sits next to the boy, squeezing his shoulder and mussing his hair. “Don’t listen to your friend. The Comet is the best gift our old world has ever given to people like me.”

“It looks really cool. I want to ride it someday.”

“Not for a long time, son.”

Brian nods to himself. “And Eddie’s not my friend. He’s stupid.”

**********

On the loading dock, a commotion has broken out — pushing and shoving and shouting — at the center of which is a gaunt, bald and wild-eyed Elder. His family can’t be found, and he’s waving an old knife around at anybody who gets  close. It’s only moments, though, before a tiny dart sprouts from the side of his neck and he collapses, drooling and babbling. A contingent of white-clad attendants shoulders through the crowd and ushers him onto the train.

*********

…no cause for alarm. All non-passengers, please exit the train at this time.

It’s orderly, but it’s chaos as the aisles jam with people evacuating the train at the announcement and the appearance of the drooling, nonsensical man being hauled into a seat. The attendants buckle him in as a sudden crowd of people surges past, seeking the exits.

Grandpa kneels next to Brian, his faraway, mist-veiled eyes piercing through the boy. “I love you, grandson. You take care.” And Brian feels himself yanked into a bone-crushing embrace. He thinks he hears the old man sobbing at his shoulder, but the moment Grandpa releases him, his wrinkled hands spin Brian around and point him toward the front of the train. In a heartbeat, Brian is lost in the close press of people emptying off the train. Grandpa dabs at his eyes and straps in.

*********

The initial stir has ceased, but now a general unease has settled over the loading dock, a foul miasma that the onlookers are breathing in. Nervous chatter breaks out here and there, then voices raised in argument, and the attendants as one cock their heads at the directive streaming in through their earpieces. They share a nod and then, as the last people debark the train, seal the doors. It’s seven minutes ahead of schedule, but they’re sending The Comet off early.

**********

The face of Grandpa’s dearly departed wife floats to the surface of his memory as a leaf across a pond. He steals a glance across the woman next to him — smiling in her sleep, hands clutching a weathered picture — and spies the onlookers. Some look angry, others anguished at being held back from the train by the outstretched arms, and in some cases, batons, of the attendants. Not supposed to be this way. Old fool on the dock ruined this nice moment for all of them. The thrusters begin to fire, one after another, at first sounding far away up by the engine, then growing closer and louder, until all is a dull roar muffled by the tin walls of the Comet, like a kidnapping victim screaming in a trunk.

It’s at that moment that Brian peeks his head out from underneath the seat in front of him. Sure he’s seeing things, Grandpa blinks his eyes again and again, until the boy speaks and dispels all hope that he was an illusion: “I’m stowing away, Grandpa!”

The elders are slow to react, and it’s hard to hear over the roar of the engines, but first Grandpa’s seatmate wakes up, then the pair across the aisle, and in moments the traincar is alive with shouting and protesting: “A kid… just a boy… where’d he come from… open the doors…” it all bleeds together in a growing torrent of disbelief and panic.

**********

The crowd on the docks is unruly now, some of them with tears streaming down their faces, some pointing furiously at the train. One attendant takes his eyes off the crowd for a moment and steals a glance at the Comet — sure enough, the Elders in there are pressed against the glass, banging on the windows and shouting soundlessly. Rare for it to go this way, and a shame, too. Better when they go with dignity, but it looks like it’ll be a Screaming Comet this year.

Then the locks disengage, the train lifts up on its hover-rails, and in the space of a breath the Comet winks away into the distance, a sound like shearing metal and a thousand voices in pain dissipating on the dock as it disappears.

*********

Brian watches, his eyes the size of bowling balls at the window as the houses fade to dots, the cities turn into a formless blur. The entire landscape resolves itself into one huge patch of green and blue as the Comet streaks into the upper atmosphere. The Elders, all their sound and fury spent and useless, sink back into their seats, some of them grasping Grandpa’s shoulder with heavy hands before they do. Some are crying. None of them will look at Brian.

Brian pulls himself away from the luminescent panorama and stares at the Elders. “Why are they crying?”

The words seem to tangle in Grandpa’s throat. “Because you’re not supposed to be here.”

“But I wanted to go to the Great Beyond with you.”

Grandpa wants to explain to the boy. But the sun is shrinking over the radiant blue curve of the earth. It won’t be long now. He chokes back tears and flashes the biggest smile he can manage at Brian. “Then let’s go together. Have you ever seen anything like that?” And he smiles and laughs with his grandson as the sun disappears from view, the last sunset they’ll ever see. And it’s such a marvelous sight, this final gift to the Elders, with the inky black of space behind and the infinity of sprawling starscapes ahead, that the Elders forget their rage and fury that Brian has to take this journey with them and they smile silently. The cabin fills with the boy’s innocent laughter as the vents release the numbing gas, and the passengers of the Screaming Comet drift off to sleep.

In the seconds that follow, the hatches on the Comet open and its contents are ejected into the void to begin their final journey into the Great Beyond, while the Comet begins its balletic descent back to the Earth.