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.

Borrowed Time

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Today, a time-out from writing The Project.  I will probably take tomorrow off entirely – I’ve earned it this week!

Chuck Wendig’s latest Flash Fiction challenge is here.  Took a day or so to marinate on the idea, then just let this flow.

Originally I meant to take a sci-fi action angle, but instead I ended up with this sort of cynical, sort of sad moment.  I beat the clock on this challenge, coming in at 945 words.  Haven’t edited it too much because it kind of shook me up.  Maybe I will tinker with it later.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy it – and as usual, I welcome any and all feedback if you’re out there reading it.

Borrowed Time

Andres was laid comfortably on his back, the lush chair feeling like a cloud bank buoying him up toward the soft fluorescent light.  The sting of the needle in his arm barely even registered.  It was replaced immediately by a dull, heavy feeling that crept across his body; first the fingers of his left hand went numb, then his shoulder, then his neck, and then he simply felt strangely dense and weightless all over.  The chair sunk away, the drones and beeps of the machines faded into nothingness, the outline of the lamp blurred slightly.

In a few minutes, his mind would empty of all thought, and a few minutes beyond that, he would feel no more.  The fear no longer held any power over him, he was merely curious.

The crowd gathered behind the one-way glass looked on in equal parts satisfaction, shock, and disbelief.  Just days ago, the Collective had all but announced that they had given up hope of ever locating Andres and the rest of the Timekeepers, but now they held him on their table, surrendered of his own free will, about to make his Donation to the powers he had fought against.

A surgical mask floated into his view, a lifetime of experience gazing at him through impossibly young eyes.  Dimly he was aware of questions being asked.  He blinked once for yes, twice for no at her directions.  Do what you will.  He let his eyes flutter shut, felt the fluorescent light glowing through his eyelids.

In moments, the chamber would seal around him, a steel and glass oubliette, and a mist of not-quite-gas would pour in: a horde of tiny nanobots which would permeate his skin, activate the growth enzymes in his cells, and then siphon off all the energy and divided cells, leaving him aged by the space of a lifetime in just a few short minutes.  The energy and the cells would be processed and purified through a bizarre alchemy and used to Reinvigorate a member of the society that Andres would never know.

******

The Borrowed Time Initiative was ostensibly one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.  In virtually no time at all it had gone from a fluke discovery into rapid, frenzied medical testing; within the course of just two years, there were BTI facilities in every major metropolis around the world.  The hook was simple.  Give a little time to make a better time.

At first, the initiative was fueled only by the elderly and the infirm, but the Collective quickly began putting convicts  into the stainless steel chambers, and from there, it was only a few short months before the Donation program was opened, and that was when Andres had started to fight.

The Donation program was innocent enough at first.  Give a year of your life and receive a year’s wages for your family.  The number of donators in the first month flooding the BTI facilities had been so overwhelming that the Collective immediately deregulated the system and allowed each center to set its own rates.  In the suburbs, a year would still get you about six months’ pay.  In the cities, Donators were lucky to get two weeks.

But where did the time go?  The BTI claimed that the stolen time (as it was colloquially known) was rationed out to those who needed it most, with extensively detailed logbooks showing where this inventor or that teacher or some other great leader had been Reinvigorated.  Sick children, cured by an infusion of Borrowed Time, were pasted on the sides of buildings and TV ads everywhere.  But the executives of the BTI stopped having their photographs taken, presumably because they were growing younger and younger, and then the stories began to break: Borrowed Time was being bought and sold like stock options, to the highest bidder.  Great stockpiles of it were found in palatial mansions, dingy apartments, buried in backyards.  There was some outcry, but the overwhelming part was that people kept lining up at BTI centers to make their Donations. It’s hard to get really upset when you can feed your family just by going into the chamber for a few minutes.  Sure, you die a little sooner, but what’s a few years of not wearing diapers and not forgetting your own name?

Andres was one of the first to join up when the symbol of the Timekeepers started appearing in alleyways and overpasses.  He fought the good fight, made a name for himself.  Then he came home one day to find a picture of his ex-mother-in-law tacked to his door.  Old, harsh, her face lined and sunken and her hair faded.  Dead.  What psychopath would send him a picture like this, he barely had time to wonder — until he saw the gold locket that he’d given his wife for their tenth anniversary around her neck.  She had been thirty-eight, and her corpse looked ninety.  Next to that picture was a picture of his daughter.

The next day, he’d given his thumbprint and his blood sample at the BTI center in Washington.  And from there, it was a short walk through hallways painted with clouds to the chair.

******

The steel-and-glass doors closed over his face, inches from his skin.  He could no longer feel it, but he thought of the picture in his pocket.  Not the photograph he’d found tacked to his door, but one his ex-wife had taken on his daughter’s fifth birthday.  In it, she smiled, her mouth a checkerboard of missing teeth, Andres’s face buried in her tangled hair.  A wet droplet rolled down his cheek as the hissing filled his ears.

5 in the bag

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Getting my writing done in a crazy busy day like yesterday is a pretty significant accomplishment. Only 1100 words, but still ahead of schedule. More importantly, the siren’s call of laziness, sounding loudly by virtue of having filled my quota for the week before Friday even started, failed to pull me off course. So for my first week of the project, I met all my goals : 5 days of writing at 900 words a day, stayed on topic, even posted to the blog a few times.  The sweet, sweet smell of accomplishment. Smells like donuts. Is it donuts?

So now I get two days off. But percolating for the weekend is a Flash Fiction from Chuck Wendig. I am not sure yet if having little side projects will help or hinder the central project, but as long as the ideas keep coming, why not give it a spin?

There is also the issue of momentum ; I am saddled with fear that if I stop pushing, stop driving forward, that the tires will bog down in the mud and I will be discovered years from now, a dessicated skeleton lazily raising a cheeto to its mouth (the cheeto, I believe, would still be intact, crunchy, and delightful).

The same could be said for my running, which is currently in the ditch belching black smoke. A part of me fears that if I go too long without a run that I will never get back into it, so I keep pushing myself to get out there and in all likelihood I keep making my injury worse. But KEEP PUSHING OR ELSE YOU’LL BE FAT FOREVER so off I go and then a few hours later ohgodithurts.

Sharknado,  I just came a little close to psychoanalyzing myself. ALL HANDS ABANDON SHIP RUN FOR YOUR LIVES THE ABYSS IS HERE.
Ahem. Next post should hopefully be a Flash Fiction about time thieves.

BTW, words that the tablet did not want to let me write in this post: belching, dessicated, cheeto, sharknado, virtue, psychoanalyzing, fat, abyss, bog. Predictive typing, my assignment (yep, it just made that “correction” too). It’s like it doesn’t know me at all.

Braindisk

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No post yesterday, a bit of a let-down: it was a private goal, not a public one, to try to post a little something here every day.  However, to be fair, I do have a decent excuse.

I started this little project on a really terrible week to be taking on an extracurricular activity like my novel.  Our play is in production this week and I’m spending more hours at the school than I could really ever advise any teacher to spend.  This is affectionately known to theater-folk as “hell week”, and to non-theater-folk as “where the hell is my husband week.”  Lots of hours and mental stress make it a terrible time to be taking on anything outside the norm as far as responsibilities go, so choosing to start my novel this week was, um, let’s not mince words, a bonehead move.  Oh, I have this mountain to climb, why don’t I strap this big Goldfinger rock to my back.  Rock-carrying is a thing I’ve always wanted to do.

Regardless, I’m clipping along just fine.  Though I didn’t post, I did get my requisite writing done: 1600 words yesterday, and 1560 today.  I was expressing to my dear wife yesterday how I really don’t want to get boasty or braggy about making my word counts because I know that I’m coasting merrily along in the honeymoon stage where undertaking this thing still seems like a pretty good idea.  That will fade, and I am hoping that when they do I remember to have my dukes up so I can fight through it.  That said, it’s hard not to feel heartened by the progress I’m making.   I’ve got almost 7,000 words in the bag already, which, if we track our maths, is almost 10% of what I want to arrive at when all is said and done.  Again, that’s inflated, and I do not expect to keep up that amount of flow throughout the process, but it’s not bad for 4 days’ work.

I even got a run in yesterday morning, which is always nice for making me feel productive.  It rained on me a little bit, but that doesn’t bother me; in fact, at sixty degrees, a bit of rain on a run now and then is welcome.  Non-runners hear that and think, running’s bad enough in the first place, why make it worse by doing it in the rain?  Of course, many of us are simply broken individuals.  The stuff that most folks would never consider is the stuff that keeps us going.  It reminds me of Calvin’s dad:

calvinandhobbes

I miss that comic so much.

I even, while I was running, had an idea for another project.  It’s stupid.  I once had the big bang explained to me thus: all the matter in the universe collected in a big round disk like a pancake, and at the moment of explosion the matter spun out sideways, bits of stars and planets and galaxies flying off and glomming together as the gravity of the central mass just wasn’t enough to contain them.  In this metaphor my brain is the disk, spinning up to speed and throwing off all these ideas that I will never be able to recover or develop.  Still, better too many ideas than too few.

Going Strong and Extra Long

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I am not sure to what I should attribute my incredibly productive first few days, but I have been incredibly productive and it’s kind of awesome.  The Project is alive and on fire; it’s sprouting extra arms and heads and other appendages that I don’t have words for.  I know better than to think that it will be like this all the way through August, but for the moment, the tide is high and I’m riding that wave.  1600 words yesterday, 1800 words today.  It’s a damn good feeling, balm for my languishing writer’s soul, a cold beer on a hot day.

In my musings on the play as I left it many years ago, there were a lot of criticisms that sprung to mind.  The rambling nature of the way the characters speak for one, the deus-ex-machina-esque nature of the ending, the distinct lack of pyrotechnics.  One critique that never occurred to me, however, was not “he needs a love interest.”  There was simply enough going on in the play that it felt (to me) complete without one.  In the meantime, it was suggested by my dear wife that a love interest would serve the story well.

“Why,” I asked.

“It just does,” she said.

“Why,” I insisted.

“Girls like love stories,” she said.

That makes sense enough, I suppose.  She is a lot smarter than me, after all.  So I thought about how to make the love interest work within the scope of the play as it existed.  And it just didn’t work.  It didn’t make sense to me.  Couldn’t make it jive.  It became part of the reason, I suppose, that I fell away from the project and didn’t come back to it until now; it was a problem I couldn’t fix.  (There I go again, blaming past me for my problems.  That guy really screwed my life up.  Except for the things he got right.  Ahh, I can’t be mad at that guy.)

Now, however, armed with new resolve, new confidence, and new pants (true story, none of the pants from back then fit; yes, that’s me tooting my own horn, because occasionally I need to remind myself of the little things I do that are awesome), I am attacking the problem head-on (apply directly to the forehead).  I am trying, in this grand experiment, to lean into the problems that seem unfixable.  They’re going to come up, and they don’t have to be fixed at the moment they come up.  Love story doesn’t work in the context of the story you wrote?  Create a new context.  Work around it.  Try something new and crazy and different.  So today, the story grew a new character.

I have to be careful to make sure that she’s not a tossed-off perfect creature, but on a first spin she seems like a pretty good fit.  There was a natural place to bring in somebody new anyway; why not make that character a central one?

Lots to think about, lots to write about. The temptation will be to consider the extra writing I’ve gotten done over the last couple days as a credit in the bank and let myself slack off from a day or two. Gotta stomp that down.

A Bright Light Shone (Shined?) on Ignominy (Or, How I Learned to Stop Noodling and Love the Bomb)

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Today is the first day of The Project, and like all first days, I came to it with excitement, resolve, and a really irritable bladder.  Seriously, I must have had to pee four or five times during the day at work today, which is just out of line, really.  Who has time for that?

One of the reasons I avoided choosing Accidentally Inspired as The Project is that, really, I’ve already written it once.  Wouldn’t that sort of deprive me of the creative aspect of the process, I asked myself?

Cue the derisive laughter.  In the broadest of senses, yes, I’ve written the story before, but honestly and without irony, the transformation from stage play to prose novel is so complete that I’m just laughing at the me who voiced that concern a week ago.  Silly past me, how much more clearly I see things than you!  The eyeglass of experience casts, like fiery lances, light upon your foolish claims.  Aaand I’ve been reading too much Macbeth.  (Silly literature teacher, letting literature created in a vacuum creep out to poison your daily life.  What’s that?  That’s the point of literature?  Balls, nobody ever told me.)

Things I didn’t have to write when I wrote AI as a play:

  1. Scenic descriptions
  2. Thoughts and internal monologues
  3. Exchanges that took place outside the apartment (Really, this should be worth about 3 or 4 points, as most of the action so far is outside the apartment, which kinda makes me laugh)
  4. Flowery metaphors (okay, the original might have had some of these but you really need a lot of them in a book.  Let me clarify.  I need a lot of them in a book, elsewise every description sounds boring and stilted)
  5. Really virtually anything that’s not dialogue
  6. Extended scenes including lots of dialogue

And the list will probably get longer.  In short, there is a ton of stuff that I have to – nay, that I can – include in the novel that there just isn’t time for in the play.  So thinking of the novel as not fully engaging my creativity is right out the window, even here on Day 1.  I even already talked about other ways I can expand upon the original, i.e. adding villains etc, in a previous post, so that limiting mindset is just doubly out.  Not only is it out, it never existed, and the previous mes who believe it existed also now no longer exist.  The timeline is repairing itself, and I am no longer my own grandfather.  So I feel a lot less like I copped out with this idea.

But, to get down to the meat of this post, here’s what I learned when I shoned my light on myself.

I first really considered giving this “writing” thing a stab oh, I dunno, two years ago.  At the time, I made some google docs, took some notes, jotted down some ideas, and got myself a couple of notebooks.  I told myself that when I felt the urge, I’d pull out one of those notebooks or one of those google docs and, by gum golly, I’d write a bit that day.

To be fair, that’s what I did.  When I felt the urge, I’d write.  Problem is, I’d feel the urge once every, I dunno, week?  Month?  Six months?  Also, to be fair, I booked several pages of hastily scribbled text in those notebooks.  Mad-cow chicken-scratch text, but text nonetheless.  Problem, again, is, that a “page” of chicken scratch is highly subjective, and sometimes when I sat down to write I’d write for five minutes and get half a page, sometimes I’d sit down for an hour and get three pages, or blah, blah, blah.  There was zero consistency and zero accountability, so there was virtually zero product.

BUT.  Because I had no accountability, I was happy with whatever I produced whenever I produced it.  “Hey, I wrote a little bit today; good job, me!  Let me take you out for a drink.”  “Oh, thanks, me, don’t mind if I do.”  “Not at all, good fellow.”  “Splendid.”  I don’t know why the me’s developed British accents in my head just now, but they did, and it just shows how foppish and dumb that system was, except that it was the complete antithesis of a system so I can’t even call it a system, all I can say is it was dumb.

In short (too late!)  I kept these notebooks going for about a year and a half, writing now and then, but never holding myself to any standard for production vis-a-vis quality or quantity.

Now that I’ve decided that I’m really going to for real give this “writing” thing a real shake for realsies, I’ve set some goals which I detailed before.  Those goals include finishing the first draft of a novel by the time school starts up next year (End of August).  Pursuant to that goal is a 5-days a week daily writing goal of ~1000 words per day (900 really, but why not round up) to give me a finished product of ~100,000 words which I can then edit down, like hacking the limbs off a baby octopus (who needs 8 arms, I mean REALLY).

So I sat down today during lunch to write (a portion of) my ~1000 words but decided that I really need to get what I had already in an electronic format so that I can actually work with it, in case I did want to work with it.  (Lest ye think this is just more procrastination, please rest assured, I type like a demon).  It took me about 15 minutes to transcribe (and clean up) everything I had written in my notebook on the project.  Because I’m a sucker for pain, I decided to find out how much work I’d actually done by the only hard-and-fast rubric a writer has: word count.  The total damage?  About 1800 words.

Now, 1800 words is no small thing.  But that’s all I can really say, and even then, I’m deliberately misleading myself through clever use of (lack of) context.  It’s not a small thing for A SINGLE DAY OF WORK.  It’s not even a small thing for a week’s worth of work.  Unfortunately, it’s also NOT A BIG THING by virtually any measuring stick.  To put it in perspective, the short story I wrote on Friday (300 Years a Thief) was 1860 before I trimmed it down, 1550 after.  This post, as I type it, will be passing the 1,000 word mark at roughly the end of this very paragraph.  When I got down to work today on Accidentally Inspired, I set down over 1600 (new) words, that done within the space of about an hour (less some work e-mails, less some students popping in to ask about grades, less a few bathroom breaks [I really wasn’t kidding, it was nonstop today]).  Frankly, I could have done more, but I needed to be professionally as well as personally productive, so I had to leave it off.

All that is to say, that within just over an hour working WITH a plan, I accomplished as much as I accomplished in almost 2 YEARS working WITHOUT a plan.

The lesson, kids, is simple.

Notebooks are the devil; burn them and feed the ashes to your computer as a ritual sacrifice.  Only that way can you absorb their power and open the gateway to…

No, wait, that’s not the lesson.  That was, uh, unrelated.

The lesson, kids, is: I need a DonDraper plan.  Luckily, I have one.  The trick will be sticking to it.  At least I can say this: Day 1 is a ringing success.