Month: April 2015

The Immutable Mr. Jenkers

Pavowski18 Comments

Chuck’s challenge for the week: The Opening Line challenge. I took a few weeks off from the flash fiction game, but it’s time to saddle up again. The task at hand: choose an opening line from another author and build it into a 2000-words-or-less story.

I took a line from a guy calling himself Nicholas. The first line is his. The rest is all me.

The Immutable Mr. Jenkers

The 3rd time I killed Mr. Jenkers I knew i had a problem.

Not because he came back to life. That happens all the time. Once is rarely enough when you start talking about quantum murder. Sorta like fixing a wobbly chair. You shave a few millimeters off one leg, then it’s wobbling the other way. Go back and try again. Or like swatting cockroaches. Sure, you get that one, but there’s a thousand just like him in the walls just waiting to pop out. That’s why there aren’t too many guys working solo like me anymore. Murder’s one thing, but that’s one universe, one reality. You want somebody well and truly wiped out, it takes legwork. Timelines have to be rewritten, sometimes memories have to be wiped, hell, I once had to take a two-hundred-year detour to make sure this one woman didn’t date any men from India, so that her descendant’s bloodline could be clean enough for her to marry into a rich family. People ask for the craziest things. And I’ve been back and forth across time so often, sometimes it feels like I’m older than the dirt itself.

Certainly felt like that after Jenkers. Who hires a hitman for a cat, I should have asked. Why not just, you know, stop feeding him, or drop him off across town. But it’s a hard thing to say no to a hundred thousand credits. And besides, how hard could it be?

I should’ve asked around before I took the job. I did, after the fifth try. Turns out, this cat’s been around for over three millenia, and maybe longer — they just don’t have good records going back past ancient Egypt. And no, I’m not making that up. Best I can make out, there have been over 800 documented attempts on the life of this particular feline; most of them successful. But like a bubble under a static sticker, you squish it down, it just pops up somewhere else.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The owner’s this sweet old lady. ‘Bout 60 or so. All white hair, glasses on a chain, looks like a librarian except for the dark circles under her eyes and the smell like she hasn’t bathed in a few months. And she wants Mr. Jenkers whacked. “Do it humanely,” she asks. On account of she still loves him, despite the fact that she’s pretty sure he’s eroding her sanity. Those were her words. “He never sleeps,” she says. “He just watches me all the time. Like he’s accusing me of something. Like I had tried to kill him and he knew all about it.”

I know, right? She didn’t get the irony, and I guess that’s fair. I didn’t get it right away either, but of course she was trying to kill him, and he absolutely knew about it.

I’m getting ahead of myself again. It’s a hazard of the job.

Protocol says you always go the straightforward route on the first try, because you never know when once will do the trick. So — that afternoon, picked up a cat carrier, came by Harriet’s place (her name is — was — Harriet). Jenkers in the carrier along with a couple of bricks, and into the river he goes.

Next morning, he’s back. I fire up the ReClocker and arrive at her house a day earlier. No frills, just a hammer to the back of his head. Get back to Now, the cat’s still there. I try this a few different ways, go back a few years on the cat, come to find out she adopted him fully-grown from a shelter. So I go back further. Try to kill him every time, naturally, but sure as the sun, there he is every time I go back to Now. Trace him back to another family. Two kids, picket fence, and this psycho-eyed cat. Thing is, though, I’ve gone back five years now, and the cat looks exactly the same. Killed it over a hundred times, now, and every time, he’s back. Mr. Jenkers. Orange stripes, big chunk missing from his ear, eyes sparkling like black diamonds. And now, Harriet’s words are in my head, and I feel like when he looks at me — in the past, you know, not in the Now — he knows what I’m doing.

I go back ten years, and there’s Jenkers. Same as ever. I go twenty years back. Same old Jenkers, same old scar on his ear, same evil eyes. He’s living with some World War 2 vet, and I can’t bring myself to kill him in that timeline, so I go back even further. Thirty years. Then fifty.

When you first suit up in this line of work they tell you not to go getting crazy notions in your head about drastically altering the flow of history. Can’t go back and wipe out Hitler, for example — something’s broken on that guy’s reality and he always comes back. Can’t scrub out Mussolini, or Pol Pot, or Rasputin, or any of those guys that the history geeks would really like a crack at, right? Thing is, those guys — and I’ve gone back and messed with them, who wouldn’t? — they at least exist in a normal timeline. They’re born, they turn into big world-altering jerks, they die. And you can’t erase them from the Stream, but at least they’re just little contained pockets of horror and atrocity.

But not Jenkers.

This thing is beyond anything I’ve ever seen, beyond anything the Bureau’s ever seen, and maybe beyond anything the universe has ever seen. You go back to the Renaissance, Jenkers is there scratching at the edges of a Botticelli painting. Go back to the Middle Ages and Jenkers is chasing plagued rats down alleys. Ancient Egypt, like I said, was a good time for the old boy — they worshipped cats back then, you know, and with his eyes like eternity, well. You think cats get spoiled now when they end up with somebody like Miss Harriet, it’s nothing on Egypt in the pyramid days. He had his own entourage.

Suffice it to say, as far back as we can go — and we can go pretty damn far — I can’t find an origination point for this cat. For all I know, he’s existed since life first crawled up out of the swamps. He can’t be killed. Can’t be erased. Can’t be unmade. He’s like a scar in the fabric of the universe.

So what else could I do?

I adopted him from Miss Harriet. Took him back to my house. Bought a bunch of toys, you know, feathers on strings, little jingly balls. Found this guy on the internet who sells catnip by the pallet — god knows Jenkers will go through all of it.

It was unnerving at first, coming home every night to those empty black eyes staring at me like death itself. But he grows on you after a while. I always laughed when people said their cats had personality, but Jenkers… he’s got a sense of humor. Like, he’ll run under my feet when I’m coming downstairs in the morning. As if he were trying to kill me, to get back for the thousands of times I killed him. But it’s all in good fun. Late at night, he sleeps on my feet. When I’m reading, he’ll nose under the book and demand to be petted, with that one floppy, chewed-up ear.

I still kill him at least once a week. Just to see what happens.

But he always comes back. Dependable as the Sunday paper. Watching me with those eyes like midnight at the bottom of the ocean.

You’re a Genius All The Time

Pavowski3 Comments

Much as I love to ramble on when it’s time for Stream of Consciousness Saturday, I think I’m going to let brevity get the better of my wit today. (As if that were a fair fight!)

I’ve spent the week dunking my toe back into the ocean of drafting delights this week, and whoo, it’s overwhelming. Drafting is awesome, but drafting is also awful. As such, I’ve been peeking around the internet to find things and stuff to keep me motivated and rolling forward, because, as I think I may have mentioned before around here once or twice, momentum matters. As is always the case when you go trawling the internet, you find a few gems and a lot of space trash, but in particular I found one site that’s chock-full of fantastic little tidbits for writers especially, but for everybody, when you get down to it. Lists like this one from Neil Gaiman, or this one from Kurt Vonnegut are delightful and straightforward.

But there’s something raw and enchanting about the magic brain bullets Jack Kerouac squeezed off in a list of 30 points entitled “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”, in all its disjointed shorthand and ungrammatical gutpunchery.

The whole list is excellent, but in particular, I really like this piece of self-motivational pie:

#29: You’re a Genius all the time.

I’m going to paraphrase Bill Murray’s character from Ghostbusters 2 and say that that is the kind of thing I need to hear every day, that kind of uplifting, you’re-right-even-when-the-world-thinks-you’re-wrong certainty. Maybe I wouldn’t be such an idiot. So I’m going to print that off and affix it to my laptop, or maybe I’ll stick it in the sole of my shoe, or maybe I’ll tattoo it backwards across my forehead, just so that I can remind myself in the morning when I’m feeling not so much particularly like a genius.

Did I say genius? I meant Genius. Capital G. Real deal. No games. Just Genius. All the time.

Anyway, there’s your wisdom for the day. You’re a Genius all the time. So if nothing else, you’ve got that going for you.

Which is nice.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Why I Love/Hate My First Chapter

Pavowski5 Comments

Beginnings are the worst.

Just ask the guys muscling for position at the starting line of a race; all elbows and hip checks and ankles getting stomped on. Ask the folks dragging themselves out of bed for a pre-dawn workout, fighting against the gravitational pull of the singularity created by a warm bed. Ask the authors, staring at the terrible white expanse of the blank first page.

The beginning of any endeavor is the worst, because each step is a battle. Every inch of ground is an inch that must be won not only from the enemy (your competitors, the weights you’ll lift, the miles you’ll run, the white space you’ll reclaim in ink) but also from your own momentum — momentum that wants to let you slide to the back of the pack, stay in bed, watch TV… do ANYTHING but fight that fight.

So it goes with writing.

I’ve just started a second novel, and MAN is it tempting not to do it. As much as I’m excited about the prospect of a new project, I know that for the few months of fun in drafting I’ll have the long slog of a better part of a year or more in edits ahead. Then, there’s the story itself. I don’t know for entirely sure where it’s going yet. I’ve got some moments and ideas mapped, but it’s still a lump of clay. It needs shaping. The result is that each foray into this new world feels a bit like a fish flopping around on a riverbank: There’s water just over there, just at the edge of vision, and if I can just get there, if I can just find the flow, everything will be okay. Problem is, a fish is designed for swimming, slicing through the water, carving liquid paths in currents and bubbles… the movement comes out as herky-jerky twitching on land, and I can’t even tell if it’s moving me closer to my goal or not.

I’m also pretty sure I’m terrible at writing beginnings anyway. Every word that goes on the page feels like needless exposition; clunky, unnecessary, and obtrusive, like riding an elephant to work. Any attempt at action takes a hard left with an explanation of who this person is, what the place looks like, why it’s even going on… end result? The 3000 words or so I’ve written so far feel positively glacial. My sneaking suspicion is that it’s crap, and I should probably pack this thing in, cut my losses, and do something more productive with my time.

But.

Much as the drafting is frustrating, it is freeing: the first draft is not constrained by the need to be perfect or even good. It doesn’t even have to hang together; it can have unformed limbs, elbows that bend the wrong way, or a vestigial tail. All that crap — the characters that randomly appear and disappear throughout the narrative, the note that you forgot to plant earlier in the story, the the gobs and gobs of exposition that feels like so many monster trucks spinning their wheels, spraying mud all over the walls — can be fixed when the narrative surgery begins, in the edit.

The draft is raw, bleeding genesis, messy and gory, staining the earth red in its wake. (Give me Genesis!)

The draft is rainbows spewing from the netherparts of unicorns, coloring the sky with a riot of sound and fury. It’s a newborn eagle spreading its wings for the first time after its mother boots it out of the nest: nervous at first, stumbling over its own tangle of talons and beak, but then — then! — the wind catches its wings and it soars. The story creates its own momentum and, once tilted over the edge, it rolls and tumbles and picks up crumbs and absorbs stray cats and it barrels down the hill, absorbing everything in its path.

At least, that’s how I think it will be. I’ve only done this once before, after all. But having done it once, the inertia is that much easier to break; the fear of failure is that much easier to overcome.

The first draft is awesome.

The first draft is awful.

The starting is the hardest part, but the good news is, as long as you keep your momentum up, you only have to start once.

Word Wars: A New Hope

Pavowski1 Comment

I’ve been in a writing funk for, gosh, let’s just go ahead and call it three months.

I’d been beating my head against the wall of the edit of my novel and… it’s just so exhausting. Reading the pages over and over again. Checking for continuity. Evaluating the language. Fixing this. Tweaking that. Blasting holes in the drywall and going back in with a blowtorch to re-weld the pipes. The most tedious and thankless of work.

Yeah, WORK. Who ever thought this writing thing would be WORK? It turned into such an ungainly mass of WORK that just like real work, I was hiding from it, finding excuses not to do it, stretching it out, and basically procrastinating myself into a corner, and teaching myself to hate it at the same time. Seriously, if I didn’t love it so dearly, I could almost say I hated the project right now.

But it’s out of my hands now. I’ve passed it on to a few beta readers and I have feelers out for a few more, so now it’s time to cut the cord and let that one fly away (birds have cords, right?). I started thinking about the other novel ideas I had kicking around in my head from a few months back. I stopped stressing about the details of the “finished” work. I began thinking about what sort of deadline I could impose upon myself for a new project; how many words a day I could write, how many months it might take. I started dreaming up characters and themes and plots and motifs and a hundred other little things I want to include in the next story. I cobbled together some notes and a ghost of an outline in Evernote (god I love Evernote, it’s like a personal assistant I don’t have to pay or buy lunch for).

And then last night, the craziest thing happened. I cracked the seal on a brand new word document, breathed in the heady aroma of that blank page, and started writing. Originally I only planned to get a couple hundred words down — just the introduction of a character and a place — but before I knew it I was back in top drafting form, slinging words with abandon, hastily leaving notes to myself, swearing at myself in the margins, in short having a ball of a time. Within just forty five minutes, I’d penned a thousand words, and it had felt as effortless as falling off a toaster. This, I reminded myself, is what it’s supposed to feel like. This is why writing is awesome. Creating people, giving life to worlds, unearthing plot devices from the raw soil of my cerebellum… ahh yeah, that’s the stuff.

The months of ennui fell away like a cobra’s skin. Underneath was the churning engine of creation that so wrapped me up and carried me away at about this time, one year ago. Still purring like a kitten, still snarling like a junkyard dog to chew up some words and spit out some copy. I felt glorious; I felt renewed. I guess this is the start of the next chapter.

When I started my blog last year hand in hand with my novel project, I had a simple system for organizing posts. Everything I posted about the novel here on the blarg last year, I tagged “the project” and/or “commitment 2014”. I had promised myself that I’d get the first draft written before 2014 was out, and I fargoing did it despite my own expectations that I wouldn’t. I’m on Twitter now, so I guess it’s only right that I start the tradition anew.

#TheProject lives.

#Commitment2015 is here.

Fasten your seat belts and hide your children.

How to Crush your Saturday Morning (a guide for schlubs)

Pavowski11 Comments

At its heart, this blog is a journal. A daily (more or less) recounting of what’s front-of-mind. I dispense a fair bit of advice on this blog, much of it about writing and parenting, but occasionally, I like to step out of my comfort zone and write about things that I probably shouldn’t, and today feels like one of those days. The flavor du jour?

Saturday morning.

As a guy not so long out of his twenties, more or less recently become a father, and still very much making it up as I go along, it occurred to me not long ago that I was really screwing up my Saturday mornings. I used to think Saturday morning was the initiation of the weekend, and that meant sleeping as late as you possibly could, then slothing around the house until you could no longer put it off. But the older I get, the more I feel that Saturday is just another day in which lots of things have to be done. Maybe it’s the grocery store. Maybe it’s your kids’ soccer games. Maybe it’s a crapton of yard work. (Ha ha, I don’t care about my yard, score one for me.) And as the health organizations have been telling us, what’s the cornerstone of a good day? Breakfast.

Problem is, if you’re like me, you learned how to do Saturday morning lazy, and you don’t know how to bridge the gap. You end up eating cold cereal or leftover pizza instead of eating proper breakfast fare. Maybe you don’t know how to cook. Maybe you’re crap at time management. Let’s work on that.

I’m no master chef, but I do believe that anybody can learn to cook one or two basic things and then parley that knowledge into fleecing people into believing that you know how to cook. And the easiest place to start? Breakfast. Why breakfast? First of all, it’s simple. Breakfast doesn’t have a lot of options as far as cooking goes. Eggs, bacon, pancakes, toast… You branch out from there, but those are the basics. Secondly, eggs are super cheap, so while you learn to cook ’em, you won’t be breaking the bank (because, let’s be honest, you WILL screw up a few times). Third, who doesn’t love a hearty eggs ‘n bacon breakfast? Nobody, that’s who. You’ll be a hit if you can serve up some tasty eggs and bacon in the morning.

So, for those guys (and gals!) like me, who are totally lost when it comes to cooking and starting your weekend off right, I want to share with you my method for CRUSHING your Saturday morning in just about thirty minutes. This is especially designed for guys (or gals!) who have a significant other and/or kids they need to feed first thing in the morning, but you know, you can scale it to your needs.

So, get your eggs and bacon ready.

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 400 or so.

Purists will say bacon should be cooked in the pan. Nonsense, I say. I learned about cooking bacon in the oven about two years ago and I’ve never looked back. Bacon in the pan requires constant attention, lots of turning, and I always ended up with raw bits and blackened bits on the same piece. In the oven it’s picture-perfect every time, and the slow cook of the oven frees you up to do other things.

Step 2: Dishes (first time).

Oh, you’re one of those who unloads the dishwasher as soon as it’s done washing? YOU DON’T NEED THIS GUIDE. Look, doing the dishes is a chore, and it’s best done when you have nothing better to do, which is almost never. But now, you’re waiting for the oven to preheat, so take those five minutes or so to clear that thing out. It’s full of the dishes you ran last time, and you’re going to need the space in a minute… stop putting it off and unload those dishes.

Step 3: Bacon in.

Line a cookie sheet with tinfoil (you’ll thank me later) and lay the bacon in. Cooking time will depend on how thick your bacon is, but the sweet spot for me has been about 19-20 minutes at 400, depending on how crispy you like it. If in doubt, start checking it as early as 15 minutes. Set your timer and forget about it.

Step 4: Dishes (second time).

Oh, you’re one of those who washes dirty dishes the moment they’ve been used and leaves your sink empty at night? YOU DON’T NEED THIS GUIDE. Seriously, who feels like doing dishes right before you go to bed? You left them in the sink just like I did; don’t pretend you’re fooling anybody. That bacon needs 20 minutes to cook and you’ve got ten minutes before the next step starts; might as well dive in. You just emptied the dishwasher, and a dishwasher isn’t happy unless it’s full of dishes. MAKE YOUR DISHWASHER HAPPY.

Step 5: Prep the eggs.

Get your skillet on medium heat, and, if you prefer, get the butter out. I prefer bacon grease, but use whatever brings you the most joy. Now, if you don’t mind the idea of flavoring your food with the grease of delicious pigs, follow closely. Pull the bacon pan from the oven (there are probably about five or six minutes left, you might want to check and see how it’s doing anyway), and tilt the pan slightly. A bunch of grease will run down the pan; use a spoon and scoop a bit of it into your skillet. I like a teaspoon for 2-3 eggs, both to grease the pan and to make the eggs taste like literal heaven on a fork. Adjust as necessary; 2 eggs per person is usually pretty reasonable. Me, I like eggs, so I go for a little more. If I’m feeding myself, my son, and my wife (the infant is still on baby food), six eggs does the job pretty perfectly.

Step 6: Eggs in.

Yolks or not depends on taste and cholesterol needs in your household, but you cook them the same either way. You have to experiment with your stove to get the cook time right, but for me, eggs in any form take no more than 3-4 minutes in the pan. (If you’re keeping track of the time, you see what’s developing here: the eggs should finish up within a minute or two of the bacon.) Start with scrambled eggs, and you can get fancier with your prep as time goes on. If in doubt, scrambled eggs are done when they’re firmish and still glistening. When they lose their glisten, they’re getting dry. I’ve heard that you shouldn’t season the eggs until late in the cooking process because the salt can screw up the flavor if it goes in while the egg is raw, but I’ve never been so sensitive to the taste to notice the difference. Also, if you know that much about seasoning, again, YOU DON’T NEED THIS GUIDE. Anyway, I like to season once the eggs start to firm up just a little bit, but you know, figure out what works for you.

Step 7: Toast (optional).

Yeah, carbs are the devil. I’ve stopped taking toast with my breakfast, but toast is easy enough. Pop it in about the time you get the eggs in the pan and you’ll be fine.

Step 8: Plates.

If you timed it right, the timer’s going off on the bacon within about a minute of the time you’re pulling your eggs off. It’s ideal if the bacon’s done first so that you can get it on a plate to cool and pat some of the grease off first, but that’s not a deal breaker. Anyway, spatula the bacon onto a plate lined with paper towels to draw some excess grease off. While it’s draining, spoon the eggs onto plates (along with the toast, if you made it). Serve, and enjoy.

My plates look nothing like this. Who cares? If it’s delicious (and it will be), nobody cares. And if you put that green thing on your plate for breakfast at home, I’ll kill you.

Step 9: Dishes (last time).

Remember how nice it was having a clean sink about halfway through this process? It was glamorous, right? Well, now you’ve got all these dishes from your cooking adventure mucking up that canvas. Don’t go into Saturday with dirty dishes hanging over your head. Take the five minutes and finish up; that egg skillet will never be easier to clean than right after you cook with it — leave your dishes and that egg residue turns into lacquer. Know what lacquer is? They used it to protect paintings back in the day because it doesn’t wash off. Clean it now, before it sets.

Step 10: Enjoy the rest of your freaking day.

See that? Do you see what just happened? You fed your family, cleaned up after yourself, ate a hearty breakfast, and demonstrated your role as provider and master of the house, and now you get to carry that feeling of accomplishment with you for the rest of the day. You feel like a boss, right? And it only took you thirty minutes. For bonus points, next weekend, do the same thing all over again, but this time, get up before everybody else so that the aroma of your boss-cooked bacon hypnotizes them to walk dreamlike down the stairs for the breakfast you have waiting for them.

Now your schedule is all cleared for that SVU marathon you’re totally going to end up watching instead of fixing the toilet like you were supposed to do.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.