Year: 2014

My Wife, the Overachiever

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There is something wrong with my wife.

She’s incredibly intelligent, incredibly patient with our kids, and incredibly talented at putting up with my particular brand of daily nonsense and idiocy.  I frankly don’t know how she does it.  In addition to being a stay-at-home mom and an occasional on-call news writer, she’s in her third year of a Master’s program.  I’ve seen her daily planner and it gives me the spins.

I should point out that this is not me sucking up.  She gave me explicit permission to write about this, though perhaps not to write about it in the way I’m going to write about it.

It’s a not insignificant feather in her cap that throughout this Master’s program she’s maintained straight A’s.  It’s doubly not insignificant in that her program is a program really designed for teachers and sort of assumes she has ready access to the resources of a school, which she does not.  It’s triply not insignificant in that she’s doing the overwhelming majority of the work from home, which means she spends hours daily reading textbooks thick and dense enough to lay a foundation with and then posting responses and building portfolios and collaborating online with her slacker classmates and just generally making me feel like a schlub for putting in my workday at school and coming home too exhausted to do much more than make dinner and sack out.  Add to that the fact that the sprout only wants her to put him to bed anymore and that every other hour she’s either got an infant or a breast pump attached to her chest and, well, I am starting to wonder if she hasn’t in fact been bitten by a kryptonite spider (that’s a thing, right?).

I think we’re both gifted with more than our share of innate intelligence, my wife and I.  The key difference between my wife and I is that she takes her natural ability and slides into the driver’s seat, finding ways to make the best of herself and challenge herself in even the smallest of projects, while I, um, well, I like video games and writing blarg posts about the inconsequential minutiae of my life.   Oh, and I locked OUR ENTIRE FAMILY out of the house not two weeks ago.  She gets straight A’s in her graduate program, and I routinely load the dishwasher and forget to run it, then get mad at the dishes for being dirty in the morning.

Anyway, she’s home with the sprouts today, studying up on educational practices for exceptional education while breastfeeding the infant and keeping the toddler from killing himself in any of the dozen ways that the house presents him with, and she has to take a quiz for her online course.  Well, the instructor called it a quiz, but it was an eighty question marathon that ended up taking her two hours to complete.  I’m going to leave aside the issue of the instructor giving a non-retake-able “quiz” at eighty questions (seriously, who has that kind of time?).  She gets about halfway through the thing and the sprouts start to wake up from their naps and she has to finish the quiz while they’re screaming and slurping at her and throwing things around the living room and making her life unbearable.

She got an eighty-five.

Now, here’s the difference between my wife and me.  If it’s me taking this quiz, and I got an eighty-five in a vacuum, I’m pleased as my dog when we leave the room and our dinner plates are still on the table.  If I got an eighty-five with the sprouts bouncing off the walls and pulling and tugging at me and screaming and I’m in pain from my body producing ungodly amounts of infant food, I expect nothing short of a ticker-tape parade complete with elephants playing trumpets and midget monkeys building a walking humanoid Eiffel Tower.  My wife gets the eighty-five, and she is furious.  I’m talking about there has been no happiness in her life since it happened.  She’s mad as hell that the quiz was misrepresented and she was unable to properly budget her time for it, and she’s concerned because her post-graduate GPA of 4.0 could conceivably be in jeopardy thanks to this one quiz.

She might as well be French-Canadian for all the sense this makes to me.  Don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate a perfect record as much as the next guy, but I will also be the first to point out that the piece of paper you get at the end of a graduate program like this is the same if you squeak by as if you pass with flying colors.  Which is not to say I advocate mediocrity or not living up to your potential; rather, I maintain that you should do your best under the circumstances you exist in and not burn yourself out like the human candle trying to achieve perfection in every aspect of your life.  (In writing that, I feel suddenly as if I’ve outed myself as one of those slackers for whom, as a teacher, I would probably have a few choice words.)

How does she do it?  How can a person chase perfection in so many aspects of her life, and perhaps more puzzlingly, how does such a person end up with a slackerjack like me?  And finally and perhaps most importantly, will she murder me where I sit for giving her a hard time about it in front of my tiny internet audience?

Commitment Time Again (Help?)

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Back when I started this shindig in April of this year, one of the first things I did was to set up a deadline.  It was important to me that I get my first draft finished in a reasonable amount of time.  I know me.  Without a deadline looming, without some sort of external force pushing me forward, I’m likely to flag and fail and fall off the horse like I’ve done so many other times.  Well, I set a deadline of being finished before the end of August, and I blew it out of the water; my first draft was finished about a month ahead of schedule.

Editing the thing frankly scares the bejeezus out of me.  I’m nervous that I will think the good bits are crap, that I will think the crap bits are good, that the entire narrative is boring and I won’t be able to fix it, that the characters’ motivations won’t make sense, that the characters will be too shallow, too deep, too cookie-cutter.  I’m nervous that there is no fixing it, that I’m actually a terrible writer and the whole exercise has been a laughable foray into an impenetrable forest full of poisonous plants, golfball-sized mosquitoes and voracious predators, and all I’ve got is the hawaiian shirt I packed for what I thought was a nature hike.

But then I remember that when I first decided to write the novel, I was a fledgling swimmer standing on the high-dive over the deep end of the pool: no water wings, no life jacket, and I had left my swimsuit at home.  (Wait, that was another dream.)  I jumped anyway, and yeah, I thrashed around in the waters, and I thought I was going to drown, and there were times when I just wanted to splutter to the edge and dry myself off and go home, but having the deadline — having made that commitment — to get the work done made me stick it out and learn to swim.

So, it’s that time again.  Time to step onto the diving board and jump; time to set off into the jungle, mosquitoes and plants and predators be damned.  I’ve no idea how long it should take me to edit this thing; between reading and re-writing, cutting and rearranging, destroying and rebuilding, I feel like I might as well be inventing calculus.  Therefore I’m going to be (what I feel is) very conservative and give myself until the new year to finish a first pass.  I figure I should be able to move at least as quickly as I moved in drafting to go through a first edit.

So.  A week to get my affairs in order, determine a plan of attack, and set up a routine, and then bury myself in the novel again, and then begin the daunting task of finding some readers to give me some harsh feedback on it.

Write Club starts again on Monday.  No excuses.

 

Yeah, I’m terrified.  Anybody have advice for a wannabe writer tackling his first edit?  What do I need?  How do I approach it?

The Dressmaker’s Last Call

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Chuck’s challenge this week:  The classic Random Title Challenge.  I did this one properly, rolling the dice before I even looked at the possible titles, coming up with the bizarre title “The Dressmaker’s Last Call.”  I balked at it, not knowing how I’d possibly approach it.  But no, the challenge is in working outside of your comfort zone, so I set it on to percolate.

I went through a lot of different concepts and plots before ultimately arriving at this one.  My Five Stories, One Title exercise has taught me that I get my best work done after I flush out the pipes a little bit first.  I pushed away my initial ideas of thieving and murder in favor of something entirely different.  I actually ended up liking this little story quite a lot.

Clocking in at 989 words, here it is.

 

The Dressmaker’s Last Call

******

As she stepped into the light and spun delicately on her toes, tears sprung into Tanner’s eyes.  He had woven nightsilk garments before, but never one so fine as this, and he would never weave another.  Myra was a miracle cloaked in the night; as she spun the candles seemed to gutter and fail, lending their light to hers.  The dress pulled the luminescence in and suffused her with it; setting her aglow in the sudden dimness, radiance spilling out from her skin.

“It’s incredible,” said Myra, laying her fingers lightly on her arms as if she were afraid to touch it.  In truth, she was, a little.

“Let me,” Tanner said.

He began the work of making tiny adjustments to the garment.  The shimmering material flowed through his hands like water; it cascaded over his fingertips and pooled in gathering incorporeal heaps and whispered as his needle pierced it again and again.  Darkly it billowed in swirling waves of deepest purple, midnight blue, and the black of the void; the fabric so light its touch on the skin was almost imperceptible, if it could be called fabric at all.  Far too fine and fragile for any machine to ever touch, the nightsilk, once stitched, seemed to mold and shape itself to itself and to Myra; a seeking thing almost merging with her porcelain skin, a congealed shadow, a living darkness.

Tanner stepped back and regarded his work with a frown.  It was immaculate, but his exacting eye picked out the flaws nobody else would ever see.  There was nothing for it; the shadowed silk was a mystery even to him, each garment unique, each swatch of silk with a personality all its own.  Even before his eyes, the dress bent and twisted with tiny imperceptible ripples, the thrashings of light and vibration that would ultimately tear the dress to pieces.

The room was alive with the flames of a hundred candles, guttering dimly, but the dress and their faces were barely visible. He clasped her by the hand.  “The dress will hide you from the eyes of the living wherever you walk.  You will appear as but a shadow, if they can bring themselves to look upon you at all.  Even now, it turns my eyes.”  It was true.  The longer she stood in the tiny room, the more she seemed to fade at the edges, the more she seemed just an extension of the shadows stretching across the floor.  His eyes hurt with the effort of keeping her in focus.

“But I’ll be able to see her?”  Myra stared back into the old man’s eyes, brushing his cheek with her hand.  The gesture seemed to calm him.  “And she, me?”

His lips pressed into a thin line, and he inclined his head ever so slightly.  “The dead walk in shadow.  To become a shadow yourself is to become like them.”  He squeezed her hand with a grimace and walked across the room.  Picking up a lantern, he turned to her and scratched his head in hesitation — he could no longer see her.  Myra reached out to take his hand, and he relaxed.  “Keep this near you, lest the darkness take you forever.”  She took the lantern and hung it in the crook of her arm.  Kissing him on the cheek like a whisper of autumn air, she left without another word.  He knew she was gone when the candles blazed back to life.  He gave the last scrap of the nightsilk to the flames and watched as it convulsed, shriveled, and died on the floor in an ashless wisp of smoke.

***

The sun had set and the stars did not show their faces — their tiny pinpoints of light drunk up by the nightsilk.  Myra made her way to the graveyard and hesitated; before her, in the dark, were the shuffling, aimless shapes of neighbors and friends long dead.  They floated in the darkness, gossamer and grey, barely visible, gazing back at her with wonder and contempt.  They spoke in words she could not hear and prodded at her with fingers she could not feel.  Seeing that she was not like them, they lost interest, allowing her to pass unmolested through their ranks.  There were more gravestones than living people in the town, and the yard was thick with their shadows, but they parted wordlessly before her as she pressed on toward the small, unmarked stone in a lonely corner, where a small wispy shade of a girl sat singing to herself, tunelessly, the way Myra’s husband used to do.

Myra’s voice caught in her throat.  She reached for the girl but pulled her hand back, tears in a river down her cheeks. Finally, she choked, “Clara?”

The girl spun and regarded her strangely, expressionlessly, then stood and faced her.  Myra felt sobs wracking her body, but made no sound.  The girl’s mouth seemed to move, but Myra could not hear the words.

“I can’t hear you, darling,” Myra protested.  She longed to grasp her, to squeeze her as if she could somehow share her own light with the girl, but Myra’s hand passed through her as through a fog.  Myra drew her hand back in horror as the girl recoiled from her, shielding her eyes.

In an instant, Myra forgot the Weaver’s warning.  The light hurt her little girl’s eyes; she must put it out.  The lantern shattered, the oil taking flame in a tiny gout that sputtered and faded in the night.  As the lantern’s light died, Myra felt her daughter’s tiny arms closing around her shoulders, felt the dress shifting and changing into the gossamer grey that the other dead wore.  The voices of the dead became a sudden clamor in her ears; Myra fought the rising panic until she heard her daughter’s voice, tiny and sweet and real again, after so long.

“Mommy, it’s safe.  You’re with me now.”

The New Batch of TV Shows Is So Depressing

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I’m going to embarrass myself (again) and say that we watch a lot of TV in my house.  Too much, really, for a couple of otherwise intelligent adults.  Now, we read a lot too, but most of our “together time” is spent watching one thing or another on the good ol’ boob tube.  Needless to say, we are enthusiastically anticipating the return of some of our favorite shows and curious about the wave of new entrants to the fling-advertisements-at-our-face race.  We’ve seen some of the new pilots, and the general consensus so far?

Network TV is trying too hard.

I’m going to talk mostly about The Red Band Society, because it was the guiltiest of the parties, but all the shows I’ve seen yet are coming up a mess in one way or another; usually by dint of insulting their audiences.

First and foremost, RBS is trying to capitalize on the The Fault in our Stars dollar by shoving cancer kids in our faces and counting on that fact alone to tug at our heartstrings and keep us tuned in.  A sympathy play as empty as the heart of a god that would allow kids to get cancer.  There’s nothing wrong with trying to ride the coattails of a successful product, but, I mean, at least embellish upon the idea.  TFIOS resonated with readers (and subsequently, viewers) because of its compelling, flawed, sassy but ultimately likable and admirable protagonist and her relationship/obsession (resessionship?) with Cancer Jesus.  RBS takes that trope (compelling, flawed, sassy) and paints a caricature of it.  Bitchy girl is so bitchy she’s unredeemable (but I’ll bet my no-longer-attached-left-nut she will find redemption, oh, somewhere toward the end of season 1, but slip back into her bitchy bitchiness just in time for season 2, should the show survive that long).  Sassy guy has every answer for every situation ever, knows everybody and knows how to get what he wants from everybody, but he’s too smart for his own good.  Horny black teen is horny and black and a teenager in the most transparent of ways (“awkwardly” propositioning his new nurse since he doesn’t want to die a virgin in a scene so painful and forced that … well, the point of all this is that it insults its viewers, so you know, THAT).  Uptight girl is uptight, but she OH SO DESPERATELY SECRETLY WANTS TO BREAK THE RULES.  And the protagonist (how is he a protagonist without being involved in any of the action?) watches (???) all this unfold from the depths of a coma in which he can hear everything around him, and boy has he learned a lot about life!

These are cardboard cutouts of tired characters who have appeared in every teen story we know since FOREVER, and they all have cancer and they all fight ferociously to prove who they are at every stage and they all spout pseudo-philosophical drivel in an attempt to sound deep that ultimately just left us scratching our heads.  Example:

Put-upon Doctor:  I guess the word “no” isn’t in your vocabulary?

Cancer Kid:  If it was, would I be asking you to say “yes?”

That’s not clever, it’s an idiotic non-sequitur.  And EVERY KID HAS A LINE LIKE THAT.  That’s not character development, that’s a sledgehammer with the word “character” scratched in the side by a rusty penknife.  And don’t tell me, “well, of course the characters are simple, it’s aimed at a teen audience!”  It’s going into the Prime-time lineup.  Glee is a show ostensibly for teens, but it has tremendous viewership outside of that demographic (or HAD, until the sharknado writing became super-sharknadoey writing after the second season).  No, teens might be a focus of the show, but they are not the only audience intended for the show.  But even if they were, that doesn’t change the fact that even teenagers are tired of these cookie-cutter characters.  Glee was a bag of chocolate covered potato chips — an interesting treat, but not something you want to eat a whole bag of.  RBS is trying to be a bag of chocolate covered potato chips with a dead frog in the bag for good measure.  They’re counting on the fact that the kids have cancer to bring weight in and of itself to a show as hollow as anything on TV, and it’s not going to make me want to eat a dead frog.

Also?  And this is not just RBS, but all the pilots we’ve watched yet — Narration.  God, gag me with a hammer over some narration.  Coma kid narrates all the comings and goings of the hospital from his coma.  (How does he know what’s going on in the basement, by the way?  Did everybody tell him everything after he woke up?  Isn’t that sort of spoiling the entire show for us?)  Some female voice narrates every facet of the female protagonist’s life on A to Z.  It’s not the female lead’s voice, which is odd, because the female lead is grown and theoretically should not need an “old person” to provide her voice in flashback, so who is she?  If she’s a character who will appear later in the story, why not introduce her in the pilot?  If not, why have a separate voice narrating a character’s life?  This show, also, suffers from trying-too-hard-to-be-significant disease in its dialogue: “Their relationship will last for three hundred, twenty-two days, seven hours, and fifty-six minutes.  This is their story, from A to Z.”  It’s cutesy the first time you hear it in the opening, but then you hear it again as the show closes out and you realize it’s going to keep happening and I just want to reach for a hammer.

Screenwriters:  If the action is strong enough, YOU DON’T NEED A NARRATOR.  If the action is not strong enough, WRITE BETTER ACTION.  The only time you need a narrator is if there’s some seriously deep behind-the-scenes stuff developing, and even then the narrator should be hamstrung and chained to a post with a five-foot leash.  Narration KILLS stories.  And while I’m on the A to Z show, are you just going to make 26 episodes?

The only show that’s shown any promise yet, to my mind, is Selfie, and even that promise is dubious.  I found myself wondering how I was supposed to identify with and root for a scummy shell of a human being, but at least the show had the good sense to poke fun at the shell and make the show about redeeming that person.  It’s a good message for our technologically-advanced-socially-retarded society, but I wonder whether there’s any longevity in the concept.  I fear that, more likely, it will splash around in the waters of social commentary for a little while and then get sand in its britches when it realizes that depth is hard and move to the kiddie pool with the other sit-com-rom-com dropouts (looking at you, A to Z).  It does, however, have that girl from Doctor Who, so that’s a plus, though hearing her speak with an Americanized accent seems wrong somehow.

To be fair, I’ve not looked at any of the new dramas this year, but do I need to?  More crime procedurals, more gritty tales of outside-the-box, not-by-the-book antiheroes with hearts of gold?  Is there anything coming out with a legitimately original concept and a legitimate chance at longevity?

It’s all so depressing.  Why can’t we have a show like Sherlock being produced in this country?  Where is the next Breaking Bad, the next Dexter (prior to season 3)?  Where, in short, is the next show I can get lost in?

(Redacted)

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It happened.

I wrote a post that was maybe too personal, perhaps a bit too embarrassing, and for the moment at least, entirely too gross to post here.

It’s a shame, because it really was one of the most bizarre situations I’ve found myself in over the last several years, but… well, we get married so that our significant others can tell us when we’re doing something wrong, and that was the case with this one.  I’ve saved it, and in the case that I’m ever not dependent on my job at a school system, maybe I can dust it off and share it.  I hate to spend the time and work to fire off a solid post and then not share it, but there it is.  Maybe one day.

If you’re curious, it involved a vial of, uh, genetic legacy, my lunchbox, and a day at work.  THAT’S ALL YOU GET.  And if you caught it in the fifteen minutes it was posted, well, you get to be special.

And I’m just kidding.  We get married for LOVE.  Telling us when we’re wrong is just one of the many services a spouse can provide.