Milestones
About twenty years ago, I spent a month in Argentina, visiting a high-school friend, practicing my Spanish, and getting a socially inept gringo’s view of Buenos Aires. If I want to remember exactly which year I was there, I look up a biography of Rudolf Hess, the Nazi who had been second in line to succeed Hitler. Why? Because the month I spent in Argentina was the month in which Hess died in prison, and one of my memories from that trip was the photocopied, anonymous fliers posted all over the city, with his picture and the caption:
HESS
ha muerto
Ya es libre
Only one of these flyers had the added graffito “en el infierno”.
New beta story: “Husbandry”
The missionaries’ suntans contrasted with the rain falling outside Angela’s porch. They wore raincoats with the same lemon color as the house’s trim, and their facial expressions reminded her of puppies begging for attention. As the woman held up a plastic-bagged copy of The Watchtower, Angela rubbed sleep out of her eyes. Maybe she could invite them to use the bathroom and get a drink of water? Should she check with Mike first, or just assume that her husband had slept through the ringing doorbell? As she debated with herself, she noticed that the man’s face was changing: his cheekbones rose, his nose widened, and his skin bronzed to match Angela’s own complexion. “Derek?” she whispered.
The alien winked and put one finger to his lips.
“Come in come in.” Angela held the door wide for them. As they climbed the narrow, dimly lit staircase, she heard a door open on the second-floor landing. She called up, letting adrenaline power her voice: “It’s OK, sweetie. Old college friends.” Derek lowered the raincoat hood. His hair curled as it retracted into the scalp. The woman followed him, and Angela took up the rear. “You must be Kimberly?” Angela whispered.
Kimberly looked bashfully over her shoulder. Her lips had tinted themselves an un-Christian shade of red. “Sorry if we woke you. Your phones were off.”
“We were up late,” Angela admitted. “Just talking.”
Safely inside the apartment, Kimberly embraced Angela’s husband, a white man with a shaved head and a Vandyke beard. Angela kissed Derek on the lips, muttered something about how awful she looked, and took both raincoats to the bathroom. Between flushing the toilet and turning on the sink, she heard Mike’s question “So, honey, how’s that invasion of Earth coming along?”, and Kimberly’s laughter.
If you can provide feedback, I can provide the whole story, which runs to about 2,600 words.
Getting closer to nature
At some point while researching a story, I came across information on companion planting. One of the suggestions from that page was that plants in the Allium family, including onions, are good to plant with fruit trees, because they deter pests. So when we had a couple of onion bulbs destined for the compost bin, I offered to plant them next to the apple trees in our yard.
I don’t know if they are doing any good for the trees—given everything else in our yard, slugs and aphids are the least of their problems—but since I got to see what the flowering stem of an onion looks like, I can’t say the effort was wasted.
How I convinced my child to go the f—k to sleep
Since insomniac children is a hot topic these days, I ought to share a story of our own adventures in this department.
When our youngest son was two years old, recently transferred from crib to toddler bed, he discovered the joys of getting out of that bed, opening his own door, and visiting his parents. The standard parenting-manual advice for such situations is to deposit the straying child back in his own room, with as little drama as possible, but we feared that no matter how well we kept our poker faces, he was having such a good time with this game that he would not bore quickly.
Screaming at the kid was a tempting proposition, and would have been cathartic in the short term, but probably would not have solved the problem in the long run.
So we employed a technique from the behaviorist canon: “reinforcing the positive opposite”. Rather than discouraging him from getting up, we tried to encourage him to stay down. (Or at least, to stay in his room.) The first step was to reward him for staying in his room, with the door closed, for thirty seconds. For the first few days of the exercise, even this was an accomplishment worth praising.
I stayed in the hallway behind the closed door, mentally counting down. If the two-year-old emerged, I put him back in bed, poker-faced, and restarted the count. If he stayed in his room for the alotted time, I went in, praised him effusively for staying put, reminded him that more cuddling would be his if he would stay in bed, and began counting down again from a higher number. One minute… two minutes… three… five… eight… thirteen… no, I’m not obsessed with the Fibonacci sequence, why do you ask? If he seemed pretty solid about staying in bed for one minute on Monday night, then we might dare to begin Tuesday night with a two-minute timer.
It took a few months of this discipline to break him of the get-out-of-bed game entirely, and I did occasionally wonder if the positive reinforcement was really an improvement over the “just send him back whenever he gets out” technique. However, three years later, all three kids go to bed at the same time, and the youngest one reliably falls asleep before either of his big brothers. Indeed, he falls asleep so promptly that on Saturday and Sunday mornings, he wakes up before either of his brothers, and at seven o’clock, he drags me out of bed, demanding breakfast.
Be careful what you wish for.
Short, hopefully sweet, fiction
Seized with an idea for a short-short, I put aside the story I am working on in my Copious Free Time for long enough to write “Dying in the Zone”.
“My friends,” the crime lord says, “if we could all put our weapons down, I’m sure we could make some kind of arrangement.” You watch him strike a wooden match and draw on a cigar; his cheeks bob in and out under thick black sideburns until he is puffing blue smoke around it. The view out the window is a pixel-perfect Arizona sunset. The bodyguards who flank him do not lower their revolvers. Neither do you.
“The password, Mr. Franklin,” repeats Dmitri. His weapon is still fixed on the bodyguard across the room, a stout, sunburned man whose paisley vest is straining at its buttons.
Franklin says nothing.“Don’t think your simulated henchmen frighten us. If they kill us here in the Zone, we just wake up, relaunch our apps, and find you again. If—”
The smoke, overpowering the smell of sawdust, makes your eyes water. Franklin laughs. His eyes dart between you and Claire. “If they kill you in the Zone, you wake up? Did this charlatan—” he gestured with the cigar— “actually tell you that? My dear, dear friends, once you get beyond the practice levels, if your avatar dies in the Zone, your real body dies along with it.”
As usual, if you are willing to comment, I am willing to send you the whole thing. It’s less than 550 words, which is a change of pace for me.
Another tale presented for your perusal
“The Blessed Ones”, for which I sought beta-readers here, has been rejected by F&SF and Asimov’s, and I’m trying to work up the courage to submit it to Tor.com (one of the few other SF publications that will consider work above 10,000 words in length). I’ve gotten some good feedback on “Knives” (see here), so after I get some other stuff out of the way I will start revising it. And while waiting for feedback on “Knives”, I wrote something else that I call “House Arrest”, a little over 5,800 words, which begins thusly:
The girl lifted her hands straight up as far as they could go, exposing bony elbows. If she and the soldier had been standing toe-to-toe, her fingertips would have reached his nose. Her hair was blond, like the soldier’s, but plumbline-straight instead of curly; a headband shaped like a row of daisies held it back from her high forehead. The soldier aimed his pistol at her pale green Wharton School T-shirt, sighting on the r in Wharton.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she said. “There’s food here. Take whatever you want.”
“Where are your parents?” He kept his arm and his gaze steady, but was conscious of the loft above and behind the girl; he wondered if he would soon glimpse moving shadows in his peripheral vision.
The girl cocked her head. “My father’s dead. My mom’s in Long Island, in a nursing home.” She waited for him to respond, and then smiled at him, exposing her teeth. “My name is Tacey. Short for Anastasia—” she pronounced it Anna-tay-shuh— “of Washington County, daughter of Irene, daughter of Nina of Brooklyn. What’s your name?”
The front room measured about four meters across and three deep; Tacey had emerged from the bathroom door at the far side. The soldier cursed himself for not looking more carefully through the windows before breaking in; he had assumed that with tourist season long over and no vehicle parked outside, the cabin must be empty. He asked Tacey, “How old are you, miss?”
“Forty-eight.” She started to lower one hand and then raised it again. “This terminal just turned five.”
“You’re a housewife?”
“I am.” She puffed out her chest. “I got an MBA from Wharton Online and I have a husband and I have two daughters.”
“Go on,” he scoffed. Homo vestae housewives, unable to even cross the street in the flesh, depended on neighbors for the kind of social contact they couldn’t get over the Net. None of them would choose to plant herself in a cabin in the Maine forest, twenty miles from the nearest town. The soldier asked, “Where are your older terminals? Where’s the one who gave birth to your daughters?” Sweat had gathered in the small of his back, soaking through his shirt, pinned there by his knapsack. His beard itched. It was mid-September, but the hot, muggy air felt like August.
Tacey looked the soldier up and down and let out a slow sigh. “Every other terminal was culled,” she said. “It’s part of my sentence.”
“Your sentence?”
“I’m a convict. This is my prison. Well, technically, house arrest.”
As with the other two, if you can read it and give me your comments, I can email you a copy. I even have software that purports to translate HTML to various e-book formats (although the PDF converter doesn’t work), so if you want to read it on one of those newfangled devices, I can try to accommodate you. adTHANKSvance.
A fun fact that I learned today from my podiatrist
Fingernails and toenails are vestigial organs, like the appendix. You can live perfectly well without them.
(You probably don’t want to know how the rest of our conversation went.)
“...and I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.”
Dear Corporate Training Consultant Person:
The next time you give one of these seminars teaching employees of multinational companies how to work better in teams, where handling cross-cultural differences is one item on the curriculum, perhaps you could lay off the ethnic humor, eh? Crude remarks about the Scots, directed at the one Scottish employee in the room, may be considered inoffensive banter in the UK, but in my own culture, it makes a bad impression.
η I asked the Scot in question, and he said that a lone Englishman surrounded by Scots would get the same treatment in the opposite direction. So it is inoffensive banter in a UK context. But still, where nobody else is in on the joke, it looks bad.
Infosec: the early years
As part of my wife’s heroic renovation of our basement, she provided each one of our children with a little cabinet to keep their Lego creations and similar valuables. She screwed a hasp onto each cabinet and gave each child a padlock with a four-letter combination, so that each could secure his valuables against nosy brothers.
Over breakfast, The Six-Year-Old could not resist dropping so many hints about his combination that The Eight-Year-Old guessed it.
The Four-Year-Old told his brothers the combination outright, but this information is now moot, because while the lock was open, he accidentally held the shackle in the position for resetting the combination… and futzed with the dials, so that God only knows what the combination is now… and locked his cabinet.
In honor of National Novelette Writing Month
One reason I haven’t been blogging much recently is that I’ve been trying to spend more time working on my fiction writing. I got so many helpful comments on my last submission that not only am I prepared to revise it and look for a publisher, but I wrote something else, and I am ready to share a draft of that something else with whoever is willing to send back a critique within a month or so.
This time around I actually tracked how much time I was spending, usually working in sixty-minute blocks, so I can report that the process from outline to ready-for-beta draft took just under 31 hours. Yeah, I can write forty thousand words in a month… and delete thirty-two thousand of those words.
My newest dubious creation (total length: approx. 7,600 words) begins as follows:
I promised you in the hospital that I would write you every day, and I’m sorry I missed a day, but last night I couldn’t find my computer. I guess it would serve me right if boyscript becomes meaningless to you by the time this letter reaches you. Just in case, though, I will write down as much as I can now, starting with when I arrived for my first day of high school.
Getting into the building took longer than I expected, because each doorway had a teacher in front of it with a spool of rectangular lemon-yellow stickers. Each boy got waved through the door. Each girl had to present the teacher with her sheathed knife and get a sticker joining the handle to the scabbard. I walked through, trying to pretend I had walked through lines like this for years, trying not to look at anyone’s weaponry. The scar tingled on the back of my left hand.
I followed the numbers painted on yellow wall tile until I came to 105, my homeroom, and only then did I notice the banner across the hallway. Across the left side, blue paint on white paper, it said WELCOME. Then, in red, sketched with the same width of brush, were a human figure with arms raised, a hand with two fingers making a V shape, and a round eye with the pupil looking to my left. Person, hand, and eye were all drawn at the same height.
I remembered seeing the same kind of script on Mom’s notepad this morning. A row of gesticulating body parts had been stamped into her letterhead right next to Elizabeth Yamamoto, M.D., Psy.D., and under that, she had pencilled in a dozen more, in the same style, and pinned the sheet to the fridge with a magnet.
“What’s that?” I had asked.
“Just a note to Consuela,” she had said.
“A note for what? Asking her to wash the mammoth hide after she sweeps out the cave?”
Mom had given me a suspicious look and I had resolved to try really really hard to blend in.
Please let me know if you want to read and comment on the rest. Do not fear for my artistic ego; it has been trampled by experts.
