Author: Pavowski

I am a teacher, runner, father, and husband. I am an author-in-progress. I'm bad at jiu-jitsu. I know just enough about a lot of things to get me into a lot of trouble.

The First Wave

Pavowski10 Comments

I approached this week’s Flash Fiction Challenge from Chuck with a healthy dose of self-doubt.  I tend to be a bit long-winded when I write, and the limitation of 1000 words spread out into 10 chapters felt tailor-made to put the screws to my brain.  I pondered on it, meditated on it, kicked around about four or five different story ideas before finally arriving at one I liked and then mutating it into something horrifying.

Honestly, I don’t know if my short stories are trending dark because I’m writing comedy or if I wanted to write comedy because I’ve got these dark stories bubbling up.  One way or another, this one’s probably the darkest yet, and I don’t really know what to make of it except to let you know that this is all artifice and is probably the product of too many crime procedurals and alien movies.

I wasn’t sure about the first person viewpoint, but I didn’t know how else to write it.

In fact I’m not sure about the story as a whole.  I just don’t know if it works.  But this blog is not about what works, it’s about THE WORK.  So here’s the latest.  Like all my short stories thus far, it’s edited only a little bit (mostly to get down to the word limit).  If you’re out there, let me know what you think.

Coming in at 1000 words on the nose:

The First Wave

1.

Things aren’t supposed to happen like this.

I’m a scout, not a soldier, but the link has been silent so long that they must think I’m dead or lost.

It’s been almost eleven months since I was last contacted.  The feeling is unmistakable.  A tingling at the back of the neck, a rush of blood to the head, and then a ringing in the ears that means a transmission is coming.  The body becomes a lightning rod for sensation, and underneath the sensory rush that follows, the messages can be heard.

So when my skin tingles while I’m waiting in line at the Starbucks to sample my two hundred thirty – third flavor/texture combination, I know in an instant that I’m not forgotten, that today may be the day it begins.

But something’s wrong.  The waitress notices me. Looks at me for half a second too long, the way you look at a misspelled sign. You know what it’s supposed to say, what it should look like, but it’s wrong, and you pause to process it.  She smiles to cover it – very cagey – but I know what she saw.

Maybe she doesn’t know, though, so I ask for her phone number and she gives it to me, scribbling it artlessly on my coffee sleeve.  I return her empty smile and beat it out of there, cursing myself.  She distracted me, and I missed the transmission.  I can only hope they’ll send it again.

2.

Back home I scan all the frequencies and search my residence for signs of contact, but come up empty. The receptors are as blank as they’ve been for months, their green glowing grids blipping ceaselessly.  Maybe the shiver was a false alarm.

But if that’s so, what did she see?

3.

A tap at the window wakes me up.   I fly to the sill and throw it open, and the freezing air smashes me in the face. No signs of life on the ledge or on the street below. I don’t look up; never up.  If I look up and they’re there, then it’s over. If I look and there’s nothing, it only reminds me I’m alone.

I’m so tired from loneliness.  Tomorrow I’ll call that waitress, even though I’ll probably have to kill her.

4.

Somebody was here last night.  Whoever it was took something or…  moved something or…  I don’t know what it is, but there’s a wrongness here, pressing outward against the walls, an over-inflated balloon ready to burst. I tear the apartment to pieces looking for what’s lost but it’s gone, stolen, maybe destroyed.

I remember that I have to call that waitress. She can’t see my place like this – it looks like a lunatic lives here. I methodically put everything back exactly the way it was before I lost it.  I even put the dirty dishes back on the table.  It only takes me three hours.

5.

We met for sandwiches. I asked why she didn’t want to meet for coffee like normal humans do and she looked at me like I was stupid. I’m not stupid; just because you serve coffee doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a coffee. I think she thought I was joking because she laughed, her pretty cheeks stretching back the corners of her mouth.

She knows.

6.

When she left me, the transmission came through clear as day. The time is not right. She cannot interfere. I tried to question them, but as ever, my words spiraled out into the ether, and no further directions were forthcoming.  I was, as always, on my own.

7.

It’s unsettling how little people look out for their own safety.  Lock the front doors, lock the windows, and call it a night.  But my waitress doesn’t lock her balcony door, and she only lives on the 7th floor.  A quick shin up the fire escape, a shimmy along the ledge to her window, and I’m with her.  Granted, most people wouldn’t risk their necks on this three-inch concrete outcrop, but thoughts of my own mortality were taken from me long ago.

It smells of her, and it smells of coffee, and I’m overcome by sadness and doubt.  In a few moments, she’ll be gone; all that she is and was and ever might be will be erased.  For a long moment I pause at her bedroom door, my hand slick on the handle, the blade humming in my pocket.

The act sickens me.  I’m on her before she’s even awake, the silver sings across her throat, and my hands clamp down on her windpipe as the life sprays out.  In seconds, she’s gone, but I stay there, holding her, hyperventilating.

The parasites ooze out of my ears and flow down my arms in a grey-green river, mingling with the blood and rushing in through the smile in her neck.  The horrible sucking sound of their ingress turns my stomach until I hear it, the transmission again, whispering under the tumult  in my brain.

And I understand.  I’m not scouting for the first wave.  I am the first wave.  It begins with me.

8.

Giddy with hope and purpose, I convey her body delicately out onto the balcony, where she will find the moonlight that she needs.  I stay with her until the sun is almost up, then I leave.  She’ll need some time.

9.

The next day, she is back at work.  I order number two hundred thirty-four, and she smiles at me knowingly.  They are hard at work in her.  I smile back and drink my coffee thoughtfully.  The sweetness is almost too much to bear.

10.

I step outside and feel the sun on my shoulders.  I look up, for the first time in a lifetime.  They’re not up there.  But I’m not alone anymore.

A woman, engrossed in her phone conversation, bumps me, dropping her armload of papers.  I help her pick them up, but when I hand them back to her, she looks at me for a little too long.  I feel my neck start to tingle.

Thump Thump

Pavowski2 Comments

Amidst all my musings on gouda last time, I forgot to mention the project.  It’s happily chugging along; a thousand-ish words yesterday, thirteen hundred-ish the day before, a solid fifteen hundred and change today.  The momentum is still boiling and I’m thanking goodness for that.  Strangely, it’s been a little bit tougher to get the writing done this week.  Not nearly so many demands on my time, but I seem to be hitting more roadblocks with the story.  But as I’ve detailed before, I’m getting better at throat-punching my roadblocks, which is exactly what I’ve done, which all contributes to the rather monumental discovery that I made today.  Having typed that, let me clarify that the discovery is only monumental on a personal sliding scale.  I’m not curing cancer over here or anything.  That said, hyperbole is exciting!  Fireworks!  Streamers!  Puppies!  Accomplishment!

So anyway, I was happily squeezing out my daily word count over a sandwich at lunch today when I saw my page numbers have rolled over into the thirties.  I use a nice small font and don’t waste a lot of space on the page, so it takes me a good chunk of words to fill a page, though I’ve not yet counted how many words I get on a page on average.  Actually, I guess I have, but I haven’t done the math yet, because fargo math.  I didn’t take creative writing in college because I’m the kind of person who does math for fun, DonDraper it.

That’s a lie.  Numbers are fascinating and complex and, if you think about them long enough, the sheer overwhelming enormity of their significance, could, I’ve heard, devour your soul without a whit of conscience.  (I checked my comma usage in the previous sentence and, rest easy, it is correct.)  (Also, I fully realize that my comma [ab]use is probably the least of your concerns.)  However, being one of those creative types, I prefer to admire their poetry quietly from afar, musing on their possibilities in the way that I imagine an ant knows and appreciates the sun is there without having the slightest understanding that its (the ant’s) entire existence is fueled, nay, POSSIBLE because of it (the sun); in other words, don’t bother me with the goldfinger details.  I will leave it to others to dive screaming into the swirling throbbing depths of the infinitude of numbers, armed with their brains of +4 maths.  People like my brother-in-law, who builds missiles.  That’s right, mother truckers, a real-life honest-to-god ROCKET SCIENTIST reads my drivel and gets his jollies (not all, but at least one or two) from my little pile of content.

Sidenote: rather than a table of contents, I want to write a book that has a “pile of contents”.  Then again, when you think about it, that’s all a book is, innit?

Er, that was a sidenote to a sidenote.  The point is, numbers.

Glorious numbers!  Fantastical numbers!  So-big-you’ll-slap-your-mama numbers!  The overall goal for August is ninety thousand words.  That’s a whole lot of words.  A dauntingly huge amount.  So huge, it’s best not thought of.  So I haven’t thought of it.  But here, at the end of two weeks’ work on the project, thirty pages (and change) deep, I thought that the time for thinking about it might be this time, so I thought about it.  I ran a word count on the entirety of my draft as it stands thus far, just to see where I stood.  The grand total as it stands right now is almost seventeen thousand.

Seventeen thousand words is a haberdashery of a lot of words.  Now, it’s a far, far cry short of the ninety thousand I need to have this thing taken seriously.  But it’s also a far cry from where I started.  It’s tangible, significant progress; progress that is heartening and a little overwhelming; progress that is chest-thumpingly awesome.

There is not only quantitative progress but creative progress as well; the story is organically sprouting tentacles that I don’t even remember coding into its DNA, and it’s now attracting lightning strikes and spawning new lifeforms.  New characters, new plots, new subplots, new complications, are occurring to me all the time, faster than I can write them into this thing.  This is the heady thrill of creative adrenaline, and it is surging.

So this is me, thumping my chest a little bit.  I have almost seventeen thousand words in the bag and a rocket scientist reading my blog.  Sharknado yeah.

Chuck’s writing challenge for the week is a 10-chapter story in just 1000 words.  I’m going to try for it this weekend as I take a break from the Project, but it feels tailor-made to hurt me.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, BUT I TEND TO RAMBLE.  Short choppy chapters are not my bag.  BUT I WILL TRY.

A Word About the Words

Pavowski2 Comments

Time-out.

If you read this blog in the past two weeks, you might have noticed that I am a fan of colorful language.  And by colorful I mean rude.  And by rude I mean naughty.  And by naughty I mean werty dirds.  (Fargo, there’s no good way to spell that phonetically.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, my dear wife has pointed out to me that due to the visibility of this little dumping ground of mine (and I mean that as an entendre), i.e. that anybody could see it, not least of which my students (fear for the future), I should perhaps be a bit more conscientious of what I post here.

In my head, I argued that conscientiously, I choose virtually every word I recreate here with love and care, and every word which I write here is exactly the word which I meant to write, unless I happen to be posting from the tablet, in which case all bets and all syntax are out the Goldfinger window.

I also feel that a good epithet is the spice of not just language but maybe also life itself, and by that rationale, saying, for example, that a particular sandwich was “a great sandwich” just doesn’t mean the same thing as “a great Fargoing sandwich,” no matter how much we want it to.  Maybe you like some smoked gouda on your burger, and maybe I don’t – but that doesn’t mean that the gouda has to come off the menu.  Gouda, after all, has only the power we give to it and no more.

However, I also know that my dear wife is smarter than I am, so the rational side of me got my foamy-mouthed writer half in a headlock and eased him gently into sleep for a little while.  And by eased him gently into sleep, I mean clubbed him with a DonDraper two by four to lay him out, and hit him once more for good measure once he was down.  Seriously, that guy hasn’t had his shots.  Keep your distance.

So while the unchecked-stream-of-consciousness-happy id-writer Me was napping, world-conscious, livelihood-conscious Me (Goldfingerit, there are so many DonDraper mes crashing around this joint) did a bit of reprogramming and spruced up the place.  To be specific, I stole a page from John Green and crew at CrashCourse and made some substitutions.  John cleverly uses the names of well known authors to stand in for his favorite unsavories; I like movies.  And characters.  And nonsense.  So I’ll use my own code.

So when you’re browsing through these halls of egotism, and you come across a word that sticks out, that just isn’t like the others, fear not, it’s simply the word fairy hard at work keeping this place semi-presentable.  She’s got a lot of Fargoing work to do, though, because I keep a pretty high level of Sharknado flying around this place at all times.  But we can keep it between ourselves, dear reader, you and I.  YOU know what I’m talking about.

Goldfinger it, THE WORD FAIRY, that’s brilliant.  I need to write that down.  Nobody touch that, I’m totally going to use it later.

Anyway, the words may have changed around here, but the feeling won’t.  I write at my best when I let it all hang out, even if it is thinly coded.  I have to say, though, that there is a certain liberation to cutting loose and letting all the gouda bounce off the walls.   Without actually calling it gouda, I mean.  Sharknado, I think my metaphor’s gotten convoluted.

Aaand now I’m hungry.

Writing at home kinda sucks

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A really rough day of writing today.  Lots of things demanding my attention at work (silly work, intruding on my happy writey time) and more roadblocks falling in my path.

But, as we learned in the previous post, when we hit roadblocks – WE DRIVE THE FARGO AROUND THEM.  (We, here, would presumably be me and my slavering pure-id writing alter ego.  Do NOT feed him caffeine.)

From the current vantage point, from the lofty peaks of oh, a week and a half in, seems to be this: the action of writing a play within a play, while I think it works brilliantly onstage, does not translate particularly well in a book.  Or, if it does, let me amend by saying: I do not know yet how to do it right.  I wrote the first sort of split scene today, and oi, was it an exercise in frustration.  I kept finding myself leaning back in the chair, saying to myself, “god, I really don’t like that,” or, “there’s got to be a better way to do it,” or, “WHY IS MY DOORBELL RINGING AT 7:30 AT NIGHT, WHAT ARE WE, SAVAGES?  No, I don’t want to change my cable provider, you can have a nice tall glass of go to haberdashery, now where was I, oh yes, this passage I just wrote is godawful, maybe I would like to talk to you about my options for upgrading my high speed internet for just a little while, please come back?”

Sidenote: writing at home is HARD.  First of all, there’s the sprout, whose demand for attention is akin to a black hole’s demand for swallowing all matter in the universe.  Basically inescapable.  (And yes, I know that black holes no longer exist, or maybe they do, SCIENCE CAN’T BE TRUSTED.)  Then there’s my dear pregnant wife, who needs as much of my attention as I can give her, and bless her, she deserves it, which is why this post will be extra short so that I can get some quality Walking Dead time on with her.  Then there are door-to-door salesmen at 7:00 at night, apparently.  It’s so much easier to take some time on my lunch at work or get to work a bit early, to close the door and bang out some piping hot words and then go about my day safe in the knowledge that I have achieved a personal goal today.  Twenty minutes writing in isolation is worth an hour of writing in the den, and I will take it whenever I can get it.

Of course, as you may have gathered, that did not happen today.  I got about 600 words in during the day – a good showing, but short of the mark – so I came home to hammer out a few more.  And I got them. Oh, boy, how I got them.  Subvert the roadblocks, leave them for Future Me to deal with, move on to something a lot more fun to write and hi-ho Silver, I ended up with 1200 words today.

So I’m still on track.  The Project.  Day 7.  It’s gonna be a thing.

Here’s my favorite passage from today’s session.  Might just have to make this a regular feature.

  • Bernardo was a local man who was very well paid to keep Harold’s drink topped off, to have Harold’s breakfast ready when he came down in the morning, to screen Harold’s phone calls for him, and to otherwise stay the Fargo out of Harold’s way and pretend not to speak English, thank you very much.  For these modest services, he was ridiculously well compensated, and was happy to suffer a week’s worth of abuse once or twice a year.

See you tomorrow, bandidos.  Pew-pew!  (That’s a laser gun six-shooter.)

 

Comment Commentary

Pavowski2 Comments

My favorite passage from today’s work:

  • He lowered the paper to examine the details of the place, but found that the restaurant had vanished and been replaced with his crummy apartment again.  Even the heavenly garlic bread smell had been replaced with the unmistakable aroma of “please take out the garbage.”  Frowning, he wound the paper back into the typewriter, and the smell hit him again.  His aunt Martina used to make garlic bread that smelled like that, and it always made him think of summer nights in the rolling hills of Salerno, except for the fact that he’d never left the United States and his aunt Martina was as Italian as Honey Boo-Boo.

So, it will bear editing, of course, but it makes me smile.  Also, I formatted that on the fly, and the look of it pains me, but I’m in a serious-ANTZ can’t-be-bothered mood as far as my writing goes today.  I’m getting some sweet Word Count in; ain’t nobody got time for all that flowery make-it-easier-on-the-reader Sharknado.

Except for you, reader.  You’re awesome.

The weekend is never long enough, but this weekend was a good one.  Lots of family, lots of cleaning, the culmination (and pretty fantastic reception) of a big work project, and I even got some extracurricular writing done.  Really happy with this week’s Flash Fiction, and really pleased with today’s writing.

I got 1639 words done today, which is pretty impressive, considering how badly I was struggling to get my wheels turning.  Luckily, for today at least, once I was able to break the wheels out of the ice, it was smooth sailing.  But I’m learning some tricks to keep from getting stuck.

The trick of the day is Comments.  I am growing to love using Comments when I write.  Past Me would, when having difficulty with a passage or a phrase or any other sort of roadblock, sit and stew in front of the screen until he could come up with something at least passable to use to surmount the problem.  It was frustrating, slow, and perhaps more than anything, made me feel inept and uncreative and ill-suited to even be writing.  In other words, I’d get hung up on some insignificant detail and after a few minutes, my inability to come up with a good peripheral character name or clever made-up song title would balloon into WHY ARE YOU EVEN BOTHERING YOU’RE AN IDIOT YOU CAN’T DO THIS JUST EAT A CUPCAKE AND FORGET THE WHOLE THING.  Eating cupcakes is easy and that voice in my head was loud, so there you have it.  (I wonder why that voice of inner doubt is always shouting.  Probably mommy issues.)

Present Me, on the other hand, hits a roadblock then powers up his PNEUMATIC JUMPING CAR (note to the future, invent pneumatic jumping cars), jumps the obstacle/plot hole/misplaced character/encroaching cupcake (okay, let’s be honest, I still eat the cupcake) and sticks a flag in the ground when he lands, warning Future Me HEY LOOK OUT THERE’S A PROBLEM BACK THERE, HAVE FUN DEALING WITH THAT SUCKER, I’LL BE UP HERE STILL WRITING LOL WOO TYPETYPETYPE.  (Turns out my voice of inner writing badANTZery shouts a lot too.  Who knew.)

So my first draft is a Haberdasheryscape of stuck-in comments like “omg this part, help” to “MORE BACKSTORY, WRITE IT LATER” to “jesus, so BORING”.  They say that writers are their own worst critics, and that certainly seems to be holding true at the moment.

In short, Present Me is a Darwin to Future Me, but at least Present Me gets to stay productive and keep moving so that Future Me will have the opportunity to do the same.