#fridayflash: data-driven

"Because it doesn't work that way!" Fenmore would have banged his head on his desk if it hadn't been a video call.

On the main screen, Detective Gordon was staring at the camera like a bulldog trying to decide where to bite first.

"Teleport Inc.'s machines gather all the data there is to know about a person when they step onto a departure pad and tap that keycard," he said. "Your network knows their height, weight, hair colour, what's been left stuck between their teeth from lunch. You know what's in their purse, their wallet, what the shape and size of the skidmarks in their underwear are."

"More or less, but — "

"So you have all this data about a person when they use your network to teleport. And you Teleport Inc. folks, you're careful. You've never lost anyone yet, never forgotten to give them their fingernails back on the arrival pad. You have to have data archives."

"Not the way you're thinking of."

"What I'm thinking, Dr. Fenmore, is that under the Criminal Information Act, I don't need a warrant to demand the data I'm asking for. I don't need you to give me the logs of the past week. Just the one. Gina Saunders. I have her DNA sample right here. You find me the record, we know where she last teleported to, and we'll continue our investigation from there."

"But it doesn't work that way," said Fenmore. "We're exempt from the CI Act, because we're considered transportation, not communications. And our data is encrypted. And you can't just 'access' it, because we deliberately stored it in such a way that it can't be queried like a regular database. It's sent redundantly, but not all redundant streams have the same data, so even if one stream gets hacked a hostile force can't go and kidnap someone by re-routing their data..."

"We don't want access to the live data, doctor," said Gordon. "Just the archives. Saunders was last seen at the corner of Bloor and Bathurst on 17 August. We want you to check the archives for then..."

A laugh cracked out of Fenmore's throat. "The seventeenth? That was six whole days ago. Are you kidding me? We only keep stuff for thirty-six hours. Detective, that data is long gone, even if it was legal for me to help you. Do Canadian police still keep notes on paper too?"

Detective Gordon glowered at him. "You better be telling the truth, Fenmore."

Dr. Fenmore tapped his desk in a few different places. "Just sent the documentation proving it. Nice talking to you, Detective Gordon."

---

Dr. Fenmore made a point of using all the locks on his front door, even though the detectors would let him know if anyone was within five kilometres of his house.

He checked that the arrival pad was completely powered down, then prised off the cover panel and reconnected the wire he'd loosened a week ago. He replaced the cover panel and powered up the pad. The machine ran through boot-up and self-diagnostic processes for a minute or two, and then there was a white flash over the pad itself.

A young woman stood on the pad, her fedora and trenchcoat dripping water onto the rubberised sensor surface at her feet.

"Amazing," said Dr. Fenmore. "Toronto hasn't had any rain since the day you left. How do you feel, Gina?"

Gina Saunders shrugged and stepped off the pad, doffing her hat and coat at the same time. "Fine," she said. "Felt just like a regular port." She noticed the coat rack by the door and hung her hat and coat up. "How long was I gone?"

"Seven days in total," said Fenmore.

"And no-one figured out where I was?"

"The broken circuit meant you registered as arrived on the network, but you stayed in the local cache until I re-connected the wire just now."

Gina raised her eyebrows. "And you think no-one's going to question that the pad was off-line for a week?"

Fenmore shrugged. "Technically it's a lab machine. They're not supposed to be up all the time."

Fenmore watched her check out his living and working space. She ran her hands over his worktable as if she expected the sensors to recognise her hands. As if he'd leave all that data open for access by just anyone. Suddenly she froze and held her hands up close to her face.

"What is it?" said Fenmore.

"I was wearing light blue nail polish when I left Toronto. Look." She flipped the backs of her hands to face him. All the fingernails were bare.

"Oh, that," said Fenmore. "Well, you know, being a man, and not one who wears that sort of thing, I don't have any nail polish remover handy, so I just edited it out of the data record. You understand."

"What, they don't have pharmacies in Australia?"

"If I'd bought cosmetics, it would have shown up on my transaction records. Some marketer or another would have flagged the data, and then it could have gone anywhere. The whole point is to hide the fact that a woman is living here."

Gina frowned. "I figured I'd just find my own way. That last job means I've got loads of credits saved up, even after I give you your share. I just can't spend them in North America without getting flagged."

Dr. Fenmore smiled. "We're in the outback, Gina."

Gina glanced out the living room window. "Looks like it."

"The teleporter pads are the only means of transportation in or out of here. I got rid of my car as a sign of good faith when I joined Teleport Inc. Anyhow, petrol hasn't been for sale within a thousand kilometres of here for two years at least."

"Okay, so I'll teleport out. It's a risk, but if I have to, I have to —"

"You don't understand," said Dr. Fenmore, a little too loudly. "The company hired me to work on secure network nodes, so private areas with teleportation pads couldn't have just anyone using them. The departure pad only responds if it's going to teleport my DNA. It won't take anyone else's. If I so much as have some of your dead skin cells on my sleeve, the departure pad will edit them out."

He watched the information sink in. She was far more pretty than intelligent, this one, but eventually she understood.

"How far is it to —"

"Five hundred kilometres."

More pretty than intelligent, for certain. Prettier still with a pale face.

#fridayflash: the bride

The first time was when Holly was sixteen. The family doctor had discovered the heart defect when she was five, but the operation had to wait until she was old enough and big enough to receive a pig valve transplant. Her first conscious impression as the anaesthesia wore off was of a huge shadow lurking by the doorway. Somehow it nagged at her. She kept waking up in the night, expecting to see him — the shadow was very definitely a him — there again, but there was only ever the night nurse, the equipment, and the long tubes which ended somewhere beneath her skin.

She recovered well within the expected time limits. When she mentioned him to the nurse who was helping with the discharge, the nurse just shrugged and smiled. People had all sorts of hallucinations when they were in between anaesthesia and full wakefulness, the nurse told her.

Her mother was there to take her home, and teased that it was probably a secret admirer. Holly nodded and smiled and decided to drop the subject.

Two years later the family home burned to the ground when a repairman accidentally caused a spark over a leaking gas pipe in the basement. He ran out the stairs, ignited air rushing behind him as if to catch up and escape too. Holly was upstairs and almost didn't make it out. Both of her feet were burned badly enough that the doctors chose to use grafts of artificial skin.

This time, the anaesthetic wore off quickly, and Holly was sure she was awake when the shadow appeared at her door. It was after visiting hours, the lights were out in all the wards, but she quite clearly saw the silhouette of a large man wearing a boxy, old-fashioned suit. He startled when she turned her head to get a better look at him, and disappeared into the corridor. She could hear his long but surprisingly quiet stride fading away from her.

This time she had glimpsed his hand on the doorframe as he turned and made his escape. While the hand was well-formed it was an odd shade, pale and rather greyish.

Holly's parents both said that initial heart defect had doomed her to a sickly life. She was perfectly healthy most of the time, but every couple of years would need to get an operation for something or other. A tonsillectomy when she was nineteen. An appendectomy when she was twenty-two. A freak accident led to a broken wrist when she was twenty-five, and the doctors had used bone tissue from a cadaver to reinforce her own, too fragile and shattered to heal well by itself.

The shadow-man appeared the evening of every post-op period except once. The anaesthesia hadn't worn off well that time, and a nurse stayed in the room with her the entire night. Holly always wondered if the nurse's presence had scared him off.

Holly had only got a fleeting glimpse of his face, once, the night after the tonsillectomy. She couldn't sleep because her throat felt like she had swallowed a box of needles, so she just lay in bed, clutching at the sheets, trying not to gasp and trying especially not to swallow. He inched into the doorway, checking both her room and the corridor behind him. Two steps into the room he froze, and Holly realised he was staring at her wakened, pained face. She pointed to her throat and mimed a scalpel cutting into it.

She thought he might say something, but he just took another half-step towards her, slowly extending one long grey hand. The light from the corridor caught one side of his face, and Holly saw a wide cheekbone crested by a large, pointed nose, and a big grey eye that looked cloudy. The rest of his face was hidden by shadow and lank, black hair.

The footsteps of someone wearing hard-soled shoes clacked in the corridor. Once more he was gone.

Her manager hassled her about her frequent short-term disability leaves. She went to HR with a sheaf of medical records and a letter from her lawyer. She was transferred to another department.

Holly's thirty-second birthday fell on a holiday weekend. She spent the Friday afternoon getting a bone graft on her lower left jaw, to repair damage from a less-than-perfect tooth extraction that had been performed when she was a child.

"I hope it doesn't bother you we're using cadaver bone tissue today," the dentist said just before he administered the anaesthetic.

"Already have some in me," said Holly, holding up the forearm to show off her incision scar.

She stopped by a pharmacy afterwards to obtain the painkillers her dentist prescribed, and to get some nutritional shakes to live on until she could eat solid food again. She washed a pill down with a shake as soon as she got home, then went to bed to sleep off the initial discomfort, her cheek resting on an ice pack.

He was there when she woke up. He'd carried one of her dining room chairs to the bedroom, and was sitting in it, watching her as she slept.

She'd never seen him in daylight before. His shoulders were broader than she'd thought. A part of her was shrieking that a strange man in one's apartment was supposed to be a cause for panic, but she'd seen him so many times by this point that it seemed absurd. It felt far more like the arrival of an old and comfortable friend. Someone of her kind had come to take care of her.

He let her stare at him for a few seconds. A smile spread over his face like the slow rendering of a new dawn, and he reached out to stroke her hair away from her face.

"Hate life. Love death," he whispered, and bent down to kiss her.

GIGO

This blog post is going to seem like it's all about math, but really it's about writing and editing. More to the point, it's about some of the stupid mind tricks we can pull on ourselves when we're planning things like writing and editing, and trying to get a schedule together.

Last Friday I wrote a story about a near-future corporation who replaces their office workers with robots. They then discover that they didn't do a very good job of projecting some of the consequences. True to Friday Flash, the comments were the best part, including a chilling real-life example which Sonya Clark provided.

The effects of outsourcing and automation were certainly a big part of the story, but today I wanted to delve more into the math behind a line I gave to one of the executives:

"We bought these robots expecting 24/7 productivity out of them, or one robot for every 3 FTEs, but we're only seeing about 23 hours of work for every 24-hour cycle. That's a 4-hour lag 3 weeks into the launch."

The executive is claiming that a human worker puts in 8 hours a day, that each robot does the work of 3 humans, and, therefore, unless a robot is working 24/7 like she assumed it would (because she forgot to calculate in maintenance time), the company will be less productive and losing money.

Here's a quick spreadsheet I made to show how that assumption works out versus the actuals:

Even leaving out human-worker variables like overtime, vacation, and sick days, the executive's math is off. She assumes humans work 7 days a week, for one thing. Okay, a lot of us do, but it's not assumed to be the norm when figuring out FTEs. Nor did she include vacations, which should have been a no-brainer. Probably if she'd worked out the numbers on a per annum basis instead of per week she would have noticed something was off.

Instead of getting 3 FTEs from a robot, the company is actually getting 4.29 FTEs. They are ahead in terms of productivity, not behind, even with that one hour of maintenance mode per day. Even if you factor in vacation time for 3 FTEs, you still don't lose a whole FTE's worth of hours over the year. There are still too many robots to replace the humans, too much productivity for which there is as yet no measurable demand. Yet perception is reality, and the executives believe productivity goals won't be reached because of the maintenance hour.

But that's the thing about spreadsheets, or any other "what if?" math. Humans tend to simplify the variables as much as they can to eliminate the fuzzy, unmeasured parts of a problem, and in turn come up with off-base predictions.

While I was writing this blog, I Googled the term "how efficient are office workers?". I was trying to find some quick and dirty numbers on how much time the typical office worker gets to, you know, do work, instead of handling interruptions or creating their own. (Yeah, I know, "quick and dirty" numbers. I've been trying to write this post for four days and instead been spending it on overtime. Please understand.)

Check out the results. Loads of tips on how to become "more" efficient, sure. How to measure how efficient you are right now, or how much more efficient you've become after following those fabulous tips? Not so much.

So: writing. Next time you tell yourself you're going to get more done by getting up half an hour earlier, or staying up later, or writing with a fountain pen on paper, or whatever the heck scheme you come up with.... get some numbers. Find out how much different practices improve your game. Okay, don't get to the point where you're spending all your time measuring yourself and no time writing, but get something together.

You may well be surprised what you find out.

#fridayflash: uptime

Beth held back a sigh. Her tablet screen had just gone red, and a blinking  message saying, "URGENT -- report to the Progress Room immediately" had appeared. She undocked her tablet and did a slow jog to the elevators, checking the executive office cluster as she passed by it. All of the executives were away from their desks.

Doesn't mean they're all in the same meeting, she told herself as the elevator call button scanned her thumbprint. But she knew they probably were, since it was time for the weekly status meeting.

The elevator arrived, and Beth told it to take her to the Progress Room, which, it turned out, was only three floors away from her cubicle. She paused in the elevator bays, searching her tablet for all references to robot status and the Office Worker Automation project. If it was urgent and they were asking her to attend a status meeting, then it had to be about the new robotic office team.

Beth adjusted her features into her best poker face, palm-scanned the door open, and followed the arrows her augmented-reality spectacles displayed to make her way to the meeting room.

Sure enough, the entire executive team of GovCorp was there already. John nodded her in, while Ratna indicated an empty chair for her to occupy.

It was Gloria who spoke first. "We were just reviewing the latest weekly status reports, and saw some odd numbers," she said. "The OWA project seems to be losing efficiency every week." She hand-signaled the room's presentation screen. It displayed a line graph in response, showing a shaky but steady downward trend. "We just wanted to know if there were any... technical reasons this should be. We bought these robots expecting 24/7 productivity out of them, or one robot for every 3 FTEs, but we're only seeing about 23 hours of work for every 24-hour cycle. That's a 4-hour lag 3 weeks into the launch."

"That's correct," said Beth. "Per the specifications and instruction manual, the robots need an hour downtime every day for maintenance, recharging, and data backup."

"All of them need an hour, every day?"

"Yes," said Beth. "May I?" She pointed her tablet at the presentation screen and made a few taps and gestures. Messages from her to various members of the executive appeared, pointing out the maintenance duration.

Gloria looked pained. "But we need these to work 24/7! All of our contracts assumed... can't we squeeze the extra hour out of them? Delay the maintenance?"

Beth shook her head and displayed more messages. "The one-hour window is the minimum. Either you run the robots at 100% for 23 hours and then let them run maintenance at 100% for one hour, or you run them at 100% for 14 hours and then let them run at 90% for 10 hours. Those are the choices."

"There must be some alternative." That was John.

"The manufacturer says there isn't. If we want more work, we need to buy more robots. I put that in my pre-launch report," Beth said, displaying the cover page of the report.

"We can't afford more robots," said Ratna. "We need to find a way to make these run 24/7."

"You could hire a human team to do one of the projects," said Beth.

Gloria smiled. "These robots... they're highly... configurable, aren't they?"

Beth shrugged. "Sure. That was a big part of the pre-launch work, getting them set up to take over from the human project teams."

"So... couldn't they just be, configured to work 24/7? Like an override?"

John nodded vigorously. "An override! Change the settings to what we need!"

Beth counted to ten before answering. "There is no override for maintenance mode," she said, displaying the relevant documentation page. "And configuration only switches between 1 hour at 100 or 10 hours at 90. No other choices."

The block in the centre of the table turned blue and chimed. The presentation screen went blank.
"That's the sales report arriving," said Gloria. "Thank you for all of your... information, Beth. We'll let you know what our decision is."

"Wait," said Ratna. "Let her stay. We were going to release the numbers in the next newsletter anyhow, and I want to talk more about this maintenance window problem."

John palmed the cube, which turned pink in response to his positive ID. The display screen showed a line graph, which had a far sharper downward trend than the robot productivity graph Beth had seen when she came into the meeting.

"We won't be needing those maintenance hours at this rate," said Ratna. "What's the analysis?"

Gloria made a gesture with her hand. The diagram transformed into an analysis bar graph. The "lack of customer disposable income" bar stood out amongst the other reasons like a skyscraper amongst bungalows.

"Wha?" said John. "We're not in a recession."

"We will be." Beth said the last, which made the team glare at her, since she wasn't answering a technical question. "Companies all over the country have been replacing staff with robots. The only people left are tech support types like me and managers like you. Everyone else is out of a job. I heard it on the news this morning on the way to work."

"But if we hadn't automated, we wouldn't have been able to cut prices," said John. "Robots work 24/7, okay 23/7, and they're more efficient than humans."

"Why don't you go, Beth," said Gloria. "We'll call you back down when we're ready to discuss the maintenance issue further."

Beth picked up her tablet and headed for the elevator bay. Along the way she spotted a group of robots linking together with their data probes — the robot equivalent of a closed-door meeting. She envied them.

#fridayflash: recreational endeavour #30

We live and work in a beige environment. Beige is best for interiors because it reflects the ambient light, is a warm tone, and is easy to keep clean. We have beige walls and carpets, beige furniture and countertops, beige work equipment and dishware.

We wear beige clothing. Beige is flattering to every skin tone, yet practical and suitable for any season and weather.

We don't wear uniforms. We have choices in cut and fabric composition, with the proviso that the clothing must be suitable to whatever task of work or leisure is at hand.

We have choices in meals as well. There are three choices for breakfast: toast, hot cereal, or cold cereal. There are many choices for midday and evening meals. We can choose rice or potatos. We can choose chicken, seafood, or red meat. We can have red or pale sauce, mild or spicy.

We work six days a week, ten hours per day. Most of us work during the day. The evenings are for socialising, education, and hobbies.

The Governing Corporation encourages us to pursue hobbies which will ameliorate our work skills. We practise music to improve our mathematics, we read to increase vocabulary, we knit to make us more dextrous. We are expected to maintain our physical selves with regular exercise. After all, we wouldn't want to steal from the company by being ill and unproductive.

We also participate in artistic endeavours, so long as they do not infringe on our work time with the Governing Corporation. We may paint on Sunday afternoons, or sculpt.

We may also post a maximum of one piece of fiction per week — so long  it does not exceed 1,000 words.

We are fortunate in our freedom, and enjoy a healthy work-life balance.

We couldn't imagine it any other way.

#fridayflash: went bump

“Aren't you afraid?” The bartender gathered the empty pint glass and the tip in one smooth motion.

He shrugged and shifted off the bar stool. “Nah, I walk along there all the time.”

Once he had left the lights and bustle around the bar, though, he started to wonder if he should have called a cab.

It was true, he did walk along the street at all hours all the time. It was always quiet, but there were always signs of life, places he could run to if anything set off alarm bells. There was a 24-hour laundry about halfway between the bar and home. There was the doughnut shop that always seemed to be open, always with the same grumpy old Portuguese guy manning the counter. Hell, there was a police station just a block away from his house.

Tonight things felt weird. He found himself looking for buildings with lights on and people inside. He sized up the people he came across on the pavement, and it felt like they were sizing up him, too.

Screams jumped out of an alleyway about fifty metres ahead, and he crossed the street to get out of range, wondering if he should duck to a side street for a few blocks. As he hurried by, he saw three men in denim jackets beating the crap out of someone who was already on the ground. There wasn't enough light to tell if it was a man or a woman.

The doughnut shop had a brawl going on in it too. Through the shop's plate glass window he could hear the old Portuguese guy shouting at a bunch of teenagers to stop it, threatening to call the police. The kids weren't punching each other, they were.... was that kung fu?

As he watched from the sidewalk, the kids took the fight outside. When one of them whistled the fighting abruptly stopped, and they all started laughing. The whole thing seemed to be a prank on the doughnut shop guy.

He shook his head and brushed through the teens as they giggled on the sidewalk.

Just about even with the 24-hour laundry he caught up to a woman who had been walking the same route as him for about three blocks. She stopped, stood on the sidewalk with her legs apart, and peed. He pretended not to notice and crossed the road again.

Something flashed in the sky and he craned his head to see what it was. A shooting star, maybe... yes, there was another one. One ended with a little explosion, almost like fireworks. Its light made a pale white flash brighter than the streetlights.

He hurried the rest of the way home, caught with the idea of watching for more shooting stars from his back yard. It was darker there than on the street – neither he nor his neighbours had porch lights out back.

He made it to the walkway in front of the house, reaching for his keys in his coat pocket, when he saw someone out of the corner of his eye, over by the gate to his back yard. He startled and dropped his keys. He stooped to pick them up, then took a better look at the gate. There was no-one there.

Strange. He hadn't seen clearly, but the overall impression was of a twelve-year-old kid wearing dark sunglasses.

He let himself in, walked out the back door, and looked at the sky. He watched for about fifteen minutes, but there were no more shooting stars.

He went back into the house, and made it three steps up to the second floor before he changed his mind. He grabbed the flashlight out of the laundry room and headed out the front door towards the gate.

There was definitely no-one there. But in the soft ground just in front of the gate, he found a footprint about the same shoe size as his own. Except this footprint was made by someone with three large, webbed toes.

#fridayflash: it's not the heat

The truth of Toronto summers is that the entire populace waits for them, pines for them, longs for the day when they don't have to spend ten minutes bundling up before they head outside; yet once they arrive, that same populace shuffles around in the fetid polluted air like microbes beneath the clingfilm covering a mayonnaise-dressed salad, left too long out in the sun.

Karen drew out a long breath in exasperation, then stopped short because the air hurt to breathe that strongly. A row of smokers stood next to the curb, mixing the scent of their cigarettes with the fumes from the cars. Karen noticed they were all sullenly blowing smoke back towards the doorways they weren't allowed to be less than five metres away from, and wondered why they didn't just quit if it bothered them so much. Especially in this heat. Who wanted to hold a smoldering tube of paper and dried leaves up to their mouth voluntarily when everyone's clothes and hair were already damp at eight o'clock in the morning?

She walked by the entire line of them, then turned right at the corner. Off the main street was a residential area with narrow houses and old trees. The air was better here, but Karen could feel the droplets of water sticking to the backs of her hands as she walked. She bit her lip, resisting the urge to check the time on her cell phone. She tasted like base metal and car exhaust.

At the next intersection she finally let herself check the time. She was early. She let herself stop for a moment and try to cool down. The soles of her nylon stockings felt funny, and she realised they were melting slightly.

"Keep going," she muttered to herself, and crossed the road.

She heard a low rumble from behind and above her. The sun was still shining where she was, but as she glanced over her shoulder she saw that a black stormcloud  was overtaking her.

No. Perspiration she could comment over, but getting soaked in a rainstorm... no.

She walked faster. A run in her nylons trickled up her left leg.

Karen turned down the next side street and started checking house numbers. Once this had still been part of the same residential area she had just walked down, but now all the old houses had been converted into professional offices.

She felt a heavier wet spot splotch onto her shoulder, and a glance at the sidewalk confirmed it was a raindrop, not just her imagination or a random congealance. The number she wanted was on the other side of the street. She checked no cars or bikes were coming and crossed.

The numbers by the front door said "77A", so she navigated the frost-tilted stepping stones to the back to find 77B. A peal of thunder sounded so close and so loudly it made her jump. The sun was gone and all the foliage had turned the vivid green that meant the plants knew a storm was coming.

Karen figured out how to open the gate and let herself into the yard. She slammed the gate hard behind her, but it wouldn't latch automatically. The random drops of water were accelerating to rain in earnest, so she just pushed the gate shut and squelched across the lawn to the back door. She knocked, hoping they would answer before the storm dumped on her. Now that she was away from the street, she could smell the copper in the air that signalled a lot of rain was coming soon.

A hand pushed part of the lace curtain covering the door's window aside, then let the curtain drop back into place. Karen heard bolts and locks being worked.

The door opened, revealing a tall, willowy woman with a long braid of thick grey hair thrown over one shoulder. "Come in!" she exclaimed. "Looks like you made it just in time."

"I'm Ally," the woman said, closing and re-locking the door. She gave Karen a look-over. "Oh honey," she said, "did you think you were coming for a job interview? Do you actually need those tights?"

Karen checked her stockings. Both legs had sizable runs in them, and she could feel large holes in the soles. It was cool in Ally's apartment, but not the artificial chill of over-used air conditioning. Better than that, though, it was dry. Karen felt damp and covered with pollutants.

Ally picked up a pair of blue flip-flops from the shoe rack. "I got these for a buck and have never worn them," she said. "You take them if you want. Part of the reading fee. There's the washroom if you want to get that plastic mesh off your legs, and I'll find a bag to put your shoes in."

Karen was surprised by how much gratitude rushed into her voice when she took the flip-flops and thanked her.

When she emerged from the washroom, Ally had disappeared. Karen followed the sounds of someone moving around and found her in the kitchen. Ally gestured her towards the nearest chair at the kitchen table.

Karen sat down, and Ally took a seat opposite her. Karen held up her hands. "How do I — "

"Are you right-handed?"

"Yes."

Ally gestured for Karen to extend her right hand. Karen did, and Ally started kneading it with her fingers.

"Strong mounts, strong lines," she said. "Lots of possible paths here. Hard to say what to read first." She glanced up at Karen's face. "You're a fire girl. Summers must be very hard for you here."

writing: outlining in tomboy notes

There are tons of outlining tools out there. Graphical ones, bulleted-list ones, physical ones the writer draws on large sheets of wallpaper, ones set up in word processor templates. Personally I tend towards onscreen sticky notes, maybe because of all the document review meetings I've sat through at the day job which included a "parking lot" full of yellow stickies. I've been using

Tomboy Notes

(available for Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X) since at least 2008, which is the last time I

blogged

about it.

Tomboy is better integrated with Ubuntu now than it was then, which is a bit ironic since they no longer officially support it. No biggie so far — it works fine in v11.04. I set up my system to automatically start it when I log in, so it's always in the top toolbar waiting for me (see screen shot above). Clicking the icon displays all of the major menu choices plus all of the recent notes you've made.

Each note allows very basic word processor functionality, can be as long or as short as you like, and can be categorised into a notebook. Notebooks are just collections of notes given a label the user creates. It's a pretty unfussy way to store information, and if you forget what a note is called, the search function will let you do a text search, either on a specific notebook, all uncategorised notes, or all your notes.

I love Tomboy for outlining larger works of text. My Tuesday Serial has finally got far enough along that it's hard to remember all the character names and plot points, so I made a cluster of notes to keep track and illustrate this blog post at the same time:

I started with the note in the top left. Once that was written, I highlighted the text "the Zondernaam family" and clicked the

Link

button. Tomboy created a new note for me with the title "the Zondernaam family". Any time I use that phrase in any other note from now on, it will automatically create a link back to the note with that name. It's important to choose meaningful text as note titles, which is a good thing because it keeps you from making a note called "this" or something else non-descriptive.

If you look at the screen shot at full size (click to view), you'll see that all the major characters are have notes with their first names except for Beth Zondernaam. I was worried because I've had other characters named Beth in the past, so I changed the title of the note about her. Tomboy asked me if I wanted to update the links, and I said yes, so it did an automatic global search and replace for me. If a note gets deleted, all links to it get deleted as well (not the text itself, just the linking formatting and behaviour).

Notes may be exported to HTML. The links will stay intact, so if I were to export the top-level "Tilly with the Others" note, for instance, Tomboy would include all of the child notes attached to it. The result would be a single HTML page with internal links to the different notes (now sections in the overall HTML document). This has come in handy when I need to move content from one machine to another.

It is possible to synch notes (you can see that option in the menu screen shot), but I've never had much call to use it. Some of the features highlighted here can be altered or turned off as well.

Tomboy isn't as strict or as hierarchical as other outlining tools out there, but that's partly why I like it. I'll often arrange a set notes on a screen pane when I'm trying to organise something (there's that whiteboard parking lot training again). It doesn't go as far as some of the "mind cloud" organisers out there (which personally I see as a good thing), but the physical/spatial aspect can be a definite plus.

#fridayflash: action

This one makes more sense if you read its prequel first.

The subway train screeched into another station. Someone disembarked a few cars up from the one Ben and Lisa sat in. Ben was knitting a sock on two circular needles. Lisa was adding a neckband to a sweater.

The chimes sounded, the doors closed, and the train lurched off again.

Ben knitted all the stitches off one circular so that the sock was suspended from only one of the needles, with the excess joining cord pulled out between two stitches at the halfway mark.

Another station, another few passengers left the train. Ben asked Lisa if she had the yarn clippers. Lisa said she thought Ben had them.

Behind them and across the subway car aisle, Wei Li and Chandra were giggling over something on a smart phone. As the doors closed, Chandra made a swiping motion over the screen. Both teenagers stopped giggling.

The train jerked back into motion and Olof slowly opened his eyes. The rest of his body hadn't moved and still looked like he was dozing — arms crossed, legs splayed in front of him.

Opposite him, Jennifer stared out the window, even though there was nothing to see but blackened concrete walls and utility wiring. She started as if something had caught her eye and leaned towards the window.

Ben rose from his seat as if getting ready to disembark at the next station. He wrapped one arm around the chrome support pole that ran between the top of his seat and the ceilling, hiding the circular needle in his free hand.

"So you found it?" said Lisa. Ben turned to her and nodded once.

Lisa rose and slammed her hand against the emergency stop strip above the windows. The train screamed to a halt, throwing Jennifer and Olof into the door partitions in front of them.

Lisa reached into her knitting bag and grabbed a smooth black ball. She threw it overhand onto the floor in the gap where the exit doors were. The ball broke apart on impact and released purple clouds of smoke. Olof, the two teenage girls, and Jennifer were all reduced to spasmadic coughing. Ben advanced towards Jennifer, his half-finished sock held over his nose and mouth by the excess joining cord of the needle left inside it. He looked like he was wearing a DIY version of the emergency oxygen masks used on airplanes.

Jennifer pushed herself back onto her seat and tried to stand, but a fit of coughing forced her to double over.

"Witch ninjas," she gasped. "I should have known from the kniting."

"Pretty slow for an eldritch demon, aren't you?" Ben took a gulp of sock-filtered air as he ducked around Jennifer, then took one end of the free circular needle in each hand and pulled it around Jennifer's throat, forcing her upright. He looked up at Lisa, who had pulled her knitting over her head so that her nose and mouth were covered.

"Now!" Ben shouted. Lisa leapt in front of Jennifer. She held a rune-carved dagger up to the coughing eldritch demon's eye, made sure she had the proper placement, then shoved the point of the dagger home.

Jennifer opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out but the start of another cough. Her head started to collapse around the point of the blade, green mist escaping from her ears and nostrils. When there was nothing left but a smoking, blackened lump on top of her neck, Ben released his circular needle garrotte and let the demon's body fall to the floor.

"Impressive," said a voice beside them. Ben and Lisa whirled to face Olof, who had pulled his muffler over his nose and mouth and had risen to stand beside them. Wei Li and Chandra were still doubled over, coughing.

Ben pulled his own dagger out of his pocket and held it up to Olof's face. "You're not supposed to be in this dimension either, paladin."

"Yes," said Olof. "And those daggers pretty much useless against anything but demons. They're not even sharp. What else have you got?"

"You got anything, Lisa?" Ben glanced down and noticed the purple smoke was starting to dissipate.

Lisa shrugged, reached into her cargo pants pocket, and pulled out a steel knitting needle.

"Old school," said Ben.

"What are you going to do, scratch my back?" said Olof.

"No, this." Lisa kicked Olof in the groin. As he doubled over, she shoved his forehead back and pushed the knitting needle up one of his nostrils as far as it would go.

It was a classic stilletto kill. A thin trickle of blood ran out the nostril and down the length of the needle. Lisa shoved twice more to ensure the brain was pierced more than once.

"That's disgusting," said Chandra. She coughed, and a little bit of purple spittle appeared at the corner of her mouth. "But it doesn't matter."

"Why not?" said Ben.

"Because we put bombs under the subway car," said Wei Li. She held up the cell phone, which now displayed a countdown.

"Uh huh," said Lisa. "And how were you planning on leaving before the bombs went off?"

"Oh," said Chandra. "Right. Shit."


Ben glanced at the countdown display. Forty-three seconds to go, assuming these two paladin ninnies had made the countdown in seconds. He jimmied the door open with a needle gauge and slid under the train.

Chandra took half a step towards the opened door. Lisa held up the bloodied steel needle. "I could stiletto paladins all day."

"In seventeen seconds, we're all going to be dead anyhow," said Wei Li, flashing the cell phone display. "Thirteen. Nine seconds... five..."

The screen counted down to zero and flashed red. Nothing happened. The two teenagers stared at each other, then at Lisa.

"Amateurs," said Lisa, and flung crochet hook shivs at each girl. They stuck neatly into the centre of the forehead. Chandra's and Wei Li's bodies slumped to the ground.

"All done up here," said Lisa as Ben climbed back into the subway. "Were there even bombs underneath?"

Ben shrugged and pulled off his sock mask. "Yeah, but they forgot to attach the ignition wires to the explosives."

"Great," said Lisa. She pulled the unfinished sweater off her face and shoulders. "I should get this thing back on the needles. I want to wear it for real tomorrow."

the last word on genre

Last Saturday I went to see the Picasso exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I'm not even going to try to critique it (I like visual art, but I don't have the background to do a proper critique). I did want to share something from the explanatory plaque beside one of Picasso's early multimedia pieces. The piece in question is Guitare et bouteille de Bass, and its date was given as "fall 1913".

It was said by the art critic André Salmon in response to some of the initial confusion arising from the piece (people didn't know if it was to be hung on a wall, or treated like a sculpture, or what).

The English translation is:

"Now we are delivered from the imbecile tyranny of genres. It's neither one thing nor another. It's nothing. It's the guitar! Art will at last be fused with life, now that we have at last ceased to try to fuse life with art."

The French (and probably the original text) was given as:

"Nous sommes désormais delivrés de la tyrannie imbecile des genres. Ce n'est ni une chose ni l'autre. L'art sera enfin fusionné avec la vie, maintenant que nous avons finalement cesser de tenter du fusionner la vie avec l'art."

If you know both French and English (or if you can parse well), you'll see there are two short extra sentences in the English which are not present in the French, nor is their sense. Oh well, they don't change things.

But I want to emphasise: someone was already saying this about genre, in fine art.

In 1913.

When is our culture going to catch up with itself? Why do we have to keep repeating the same useless, circular debates over and over again? Salmon summed it up quite nicely almost exactly a century ago.  Genre may be all right for designating regions in the creative landscape, but simply cannot be applied to every single specific piece of art.

There.

#fridayflash: just before all hell broke loose

Since I wrote a writing structure post this week about head hopping, I decided to do some in this week's Friday Flash. Further to what I said in the blog post: this story may well suck, but it won't suck just because the head-hopping is in it. That's the same logic as saying purple prose is evidence writers should never use adjectives.

just before all hell broke loose 

Jennifer found a seat to herself on the subway and sat down. She gave the rest of the people in the car a glance-over because she always did, and as usual it was a depressing sight. There was a man in falling-apart late middle age dozing next to the door. There were two teenage girls giggling over something a few seats away. There was a younger man knitting what looked like a sock, and a woman beside him and about the same age knitting something bigger. A sweater, maybe.

Jennifer looked at the window and watched the blackened cement walls whiz by. Humanity sucked. She could hardly wait for the coming of the Eldritch Old Ones, when she would be freed from her stupid human body and take her rightful place amongst the ancient gods again. All of these idiotic...

....teenagers could just shut up, thought Olof. He kept his eyes closed and let his head sway with the motion of the train. It never worked, but he always hoped people would shut up if they thought they were near someone who was asleep. There were plans to make, wheels within wheels. At least that Eldritch pawn sitting across the aisle from him hadn't seen through his disguise. He hadn't even had to open his eyes all the way to notice her fingernails and ears weren't quite human-standard. He didn't need to open his eyes at all to feel the gaze of Wei Li and Chandra. They giggled...

...looked away again, and pretended to be checking out downloaded photos of Justin Bieber on a cell phone. Really they were reviewing the ignition sequence for the bombs one more time. Chandra tapped out a caption for a photo. From more than half a metre away it looked like Bieber sitting on a motorbike, but from the right distance and angle it resolved to a wiring schematic.

Do you think we can tip off that paladin before it happens? she wrote.

"No way!" gasped Wei Li.

Too bad, he looks like he has a lot of experience, tapped Chandra. I hate collateral damage. Did you see him spot that Eldritch when she got on?

Wei Li giggled and nodded.

Chandra swiped the screen and changed to a photo of the bomb placement pattern under the subway car. From far away it looked like Bieber standing beside a split rail fence. Wei Li gave a pop-eyed gasp and Chandra said, "I know!" to cover up. Wei Li took the tablet from her and tapped, What about those two humans playing with the pointed sticks?

Chandra grinned. "What can I say? I think..."

"...I'm going to have to switch from double-pointed needles to circulars," said Ben. He and Lisa had set up their code to use knitting jargon. No-one paid any mind to knitters talking shop on a subway train. We're going to need more firepower than we originally planned.

"What, use the Magic Loop method?" said Lisa. Are there paladins here?

"I know, I know, following the crowd, but for this pattern I think it will help me get these done faster. I'm starting to get second sock syndrome." They are all engaged to attack the Eldritch. There are two sets of them. "How about you?"

"Almost done the neckband. Wish I'd darned in the ends as I'd gone along." The Eldritch is top pritority. Let's just keep it clean.

"At least it's stash reduction. Gotta support local yarn shops, but gotta reduce stash too." Getting rid of the Eldritch is good, but getting rid of the paladins and the Eldritch is even better.

"True," said Lisa. "I hope I brought a darning needle along." She reached into her knitting bag and pressed her thumb into a rune carved on a smooth black ball. The ball glowed red, then white. The light pulsed softly.

"I have a spare," said Ben. "Here." He reached into his own knitting bag and deftly palmed a short dagger whose handle was carved with more runes. Only the very tip of the blade showed past the end of his fingers as he dropped it into Lisa's knitting bag.

"Thank you," said Lisa. She pretended to inspect the sweater she was working on. "Three more rounds."

head hopping

"Head hopping" is moving from a focused third-person narration with one character's point of view to a focused third-person narration with a different character's point of view. It's supposed to be one of those Bad Things that automatically make a text Bad Writing. It's usually cited in the same breath as "always use 'said'", right after "show, don't tell". And, like a lot of other writing rules, it gets broken in popular, canonical books all the time.

Virginia Woolf head-hopped in both To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway. Philip K. Dick used it to brilliant effect in several books, including (my favourite example of all time) Radio Free Albemuth, where not only does he hop between different heads, but he breaks point of view mid-sentence and then picks up the same sentence from the point of view of a different character. Stephen King even head-hops for a few sentences at a time in Hearts in Atlantis before switching back to the main narrator's point of view.

So what's with the Universal Writing Rule of "No Head Hopping"? I think it's similar to the what John Wiswell found when he did an analysis of prologues in popular books. Many agents and publishing industry types insist that including a prologue means an instant rejection because "everyone hates reading them," yet on the list of thirty-six books in John's blog post there are several nominees for major awards.

If head-hopping is done well, it's considered structural experimentation by a brilliant writer. If it's not done well, it's considered a stupid newbie mistake, which somehow elects it to be graven in stone somewhere in a list of Things Writers Shouldn't Do.

I would respectfully suggest there should be another stone engraved with Things Critics Shouldn't Do, and that one of the items listed near the very top should be "Don't Confuse the Device with the Execution." Just because it's difficult doesn't mean it should be banned.

writing: the virtual environment

I run a proudly Microsoft-free and Mac-free household. No Windows, no iThings. I admire some of the design of the various iThings, but their "intuitive" interface drives me crazy. Whenever someone hands me a Mac product to use, they always have this gleam in their eye, because if they know me well enough to lend it to me they know that I work in software development and they know I'm a freak about user interfaces. They're always disappointed when I can't figure out how to work the damn thing half the time.

So instead my (Dell) laptop runs Ubuntu, which is a flavour of Linux. My phone also runs Linux, but that's not so unusual in phones — both Android and iOS are Linux flavours. More on how I use the phone to write in another post.

Linux has got a bad rap over the years for just being a nerd toy. Sure, it started out like that.... but then again, Steve Wozniak's first PC was an Altair, and look where he took things. I'd argue that Linux is actually more user-friendly now than the Big Two operating systems.

Plus it's free (at least the home & small office versions), so there's far fewer licence agreements, security keys, and other DRM crap to deal with. Ubuntu in particular installs all the common applications most users will need at the same time it installs itself, so you can spend half an hour installing it and then settle down to your word processor and spreadsheet immediately afterwards. And because Linux software developers know they're developing for a world where most computers don't run Linux, they tend to include features (like file converters) that let Linux users interact with the rest of the world, even if the rest of the world doesn't know it's interacting with Linux users.

So, this is what my virtual writing environment looks like:

Not a whole lot of clutter. To the left is a (hidden) toolbar which launches all the applications I use regularly. At the top are Tomboy notes, the mail/chat/Twitter menu, Bluetooth, wireless, sounds volume, calendar, and screen lock/logout. If I wanted to, I could save files to the desktop, but I try not to want to.

One thing Linux tends to have standard that other operating systems tend not to have is an extended desktop. I have mine set up to the Ubuntu standard four panes. This means I can set up application windows in logical groups on each of the four panes and flip between them as necessary. If you use more than one monitor, the pane will include the extra real estate on the monitor.

For writing, this is wonderful because you can open all your virtual Post-It notes in Tomboy on one pane and your word processor on another pane, and flip between them. If you want to change the arrangement, you can switch to the all-panes view and drag and drop the windows to where you want them, or use the window menu to change which pane a window shows up on.

The screen shot below also shows the left-hand toolbar that I usually keep on auto-hide (although you don't need to).

There's been a lot of talk lately about getting off the Net while you're trying to write. Ubuntu has an application (yes, a free one) called FocusWriter that blocks out your entire screen, including its own toolbar. All you see is what you're writing and whatever theme you've chosen for the background. If you mouse over the toolbar or status bar, you can check your word count or alter your formatting. I use it for Friday Flash and Tuesday Serial pieces a lot because it converts well to Blogger, but for longer works I just go straight to the Libre Office word processor.

It's comfy, it's simple, it's free, and it's easy to install. It also comes with all the basic tools a writer would want to use right away: a word processor, a note-maker, Twitter and e-mail connectivity. (Yeah, we're not supposed to want Twitter and e-mail connectivity, but let's face it, we do, especially for the communities I mentioned above.)

Somehow this wound up being a long post again. Next post about environments, I'll show how I use Tomboy Notes to keep longer works straight.

#fridayflash: the first

She was just about what he'd expect in a lady scientist. Mousy hair, weak blue eyes, too pale and angular to be pretty. She spoke passable German, though, which was nice. It meant they didn't have to use one of those translation apps on her tablet. He hated those. They always butchered the nouns.

"Mr. Schwartz," she said, smiling and extending her hand. She asked him to sit down, so he did, giving the room a quick once-over at the same time. It just looked like a regular office space. So they didn't intend to use him as a lab rat quite yet.

"May I call you Ernst?" she said, glancing down at her tablet.

"Do I get to call you Gertrude instead of Dr. Abramovic, then?" he said.

Her smile widened. "It's Gerry for short."

"I'd prefer Mr. Schwartz, Dr. Abramovic."

She didn't react the way he expected. The smile dimmed, but a trace of it remained as she tapped a few things into her tablet.

"Mr. Schwartz, I represent the company that runs the teleportation network you, ah, used professionally until recently."

"You mean the shipping business that I got sacked from."

"If you like."

"I'm not going to try to commit suicide with it again if that's what you're worried about."

Dr. Abramovic shook her head. "No no, I'm not a psychiatrist. I specialise in anaesthesiology, actually."

"The only thing I was anaesthetised with was about two litres of vodka. A little out of your area of expertise, I'll wager."

Dr. Abramovic set her tablet down on the table and very deliberately pushed it to one side. She leaned forward on her elbows and looked him straight in the face. "Mr. Schwartz, my employer hired me to find out exactly what happened when you teleported with that shipping crate. You are the first living creature ever to be teleported, and we need to know exactly what happened to you, how it affected you, and what your perceived experience of it was."

He snorted. "My 'experience' was that one moment I was drunk and trying to off myself by running onto a pad just before Frank threw the switch, and then the next moment I'm just as drunk, but now I have this customs officer screaming at me in Afrikaans."

She leaned back in her chair. "Let's start with the basics. Have you always lived in Hamburg?"

"Born and raised."

"And you started as a dock worker in April 2043, correct?"

"Sounds right."

"Why did you choose the profession?"

He shrugged. "My uncle got me in. It's a living, or at least it was."

"Mr. Schwartz, we are paying you twice your old salary to participate in our research."

"So like I said, my uncle got me in."

"When teleportation replaced ships, you worked on loading and unloading containers from the teleportation pads."

"Sure."

"2043 to 2053... that's a ten-year career, and you've never been late or disorderly on the job before, until two weeks ago."

He stared at the table and clenched the fist he held on his lap, so she couldn't see. "My wife left me."

"I'm sorry to hear. But Mr. Schwartz, why come in to work at all? Why not just call in sick?"

He gave a short laugh. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

Dr. Abramovic nodded. "All right. That's not entirely relevant to the teleportation part, but I was curious. Thank you for explaining."

He couldn't think of a single polite thing to say to that.

Dr. Abramovic slid the tablet in front of her. "The security camera's files show that you were completely on the pad before the switch was thrown. That may have saved you from losing a limb or two."

"Pity."

"I compared the logs of the departure and arrival pads. You were in transit for about two hundredths of a second. I know that's a very short interval, but do you remember anything that may be from when you were in transit?"

Schwartz shook his head. "I had just run onto the pad. I was facing the shipping container. Maybe if I'd been looking out to the loading area, or watching Frank... maybe I would have noticed something then."

"And your own account plus the one in Johannesburg indicate that you were indeed still intoxicated when you arrived... Did you feel more drunk, or maybe less drunk, than before you teleported?"

"I damn near threw up when I realised what had happend, but I was probably about as gone as I was beforehand. Nah, no difference."

"The exam Dr. Gutman gave you shows you're in about the same shape as you were last September, when you had your annual physical..." Dr. Abramovic frowned into her tablet and tapped a few keys. "Mr. Schwartz, I'd like to have you take some tests over the next few days, maybe include some brain imaging. Are you comfortable with that?"

"Sure. You are paying me to be a lab rat, after all." Schwartz pulled out his own tablet. It wasn't as big or as new as Abramovic's, but he kept it in a hand-embossed leather case.

They recorded a series of appointments, and Schwartz left.

After he stumbled onto the tram that would take him home, he found a window seat and pressed his forehead against the cool glass.

The teleport had just felt like he had blinked quickly, and in the interval all his surroundings had changed. Quick and simple as that, it was true. But... he remembered the shock of the change in temperature and humidity, the assault of all the new smells, the abrupt shift in room tone.

He'd thought he'd succeeded at first, that he'd died. A half-remembered myth came back to him, about how the dead simply passed to a different world just like the one they'd come from, how the newly-born of our world were the dead souls of another world beyond. There really had been a very brief moment of joy before that idiot bureaucrat had started screaming at him.

But there had been something. Before the joy, after Frank had thrown the switch. That sensation of blinking. And within the blink... Schwartz squeezed his eyes shut.

He knew it now. That fraction of a moment, born of his anger and shame and self-pity, that selfishness and loneliness he had felt. It would affect the lives of practically every person on the planet. In two hundredths of a second, he had changed the course of history.

writing: the physical environment

Over the years I've read a lot of articles about where writers physically write. Alice P. Sheldon had three different desks: one for her non-fiction, one for her SF fiction written under the name James Tiptree Jr., and one for everything else. Ernest Hemingway had a standing desk. Stephen King has a large room with a skylight. And so on.

I went deskless in 2008. At the time it was to save space in my apartment, but now I have another reason: due to an injury caused by a hit-and-run drunk-driver accident three years ago, my upper back can only take so many hours a day of holding my head up. I can make it through the day job all right, but I'm better off in a semi-sitting position once I get home. I'm writing this with my head and back propped up on some giant pillows I sewed, and the laptop on my lap (or what would be my lap if I were sitting upright). Here's a photo of my usual spot at home, with the computer added in to show the entire physical environment.

Sometimes I go to a café or the local library for a change of scene, but typically that's only on long weekends or vacation time.

One thing I don't do, and stopped doing as soon as I got my first laptop, is write longhand. I have report cards going back to Grade 3 proving my handwriting has always been terrible, and I'm tired of apologising for it — especially since I've been proficient at touch typing since I was thirteen. It's just as well now that I have the spine issues, because typing is one thing I can do quite comfortably in this position.

The one thing desks are wonderful for is spreading out lots of pieces of paper and marking them up. This activity certainly has its merits, but from what I've been reading in the blogspace, it seems like more and more people are doing their editing onscreen these days than previously. Tony Noland's posts about using yWriter are illuminating on the subject (although it sounds like he edits from printouts too). So was E.D. Johnson's recent Friday Flash .org post about writing on a mobile device.

Everyone needs to find their own writing space, of course. I'm just offering mine up as an example because I've read too many advice articles saying that writers need a special room (when I live alone?) or a special desk setup (in this apartment? not going to happen).

Stay comfortable.

#fridayflash: swimming, not drowning

Normally I'm against using non-fiction for Friday Flash, since "flash" is short for "flash fiction", after all. But Larry Kollar forced my hand a little bit, in the comment he wrote on this week's instalment of my Tuesday Serial. This flash happened when I was three, and is told exactly how I remember it. Perhaps it's not what happened; but what I remember.

Once upon a time when I was three years old, my parents bundled my little brother and I into my father's dark green Ford pickup truck and we drove all the way to Wasaga Beach. My brother was one and a half, so even though he could walk and play with a pail and sand shovel he was still a baby. I was a big girl.

Usually it was just the four of us when we went to Wasaga Beach, but this time we met one of my father's friends. My father's friend wanted to go out on the lake, but he didn't own a boat, and neither did we. So he rented a rowboat and he and my father planned to row out into the lake, and I got to go with them! My brother stayed on the shore with my mother, wandering around with his pail and sand shovel, wet sand sticking to his diapers.

I was wearing my red and blue two-piece swim suit with the white pleated skirt attached to the bottoms. I was glad I didn't have to wear diapers at the beach.

My father got into the rowboat first and sat in the bow. Then my father's friend picked me up from the dock and handed me to my father. I didn't like that part because I wanted to climb in by myself. The boat wobbled every time someone moved. My father told me to sit still in the centre of the boat.

My father's friend got into the stern of the boat and cast us off from the dock. My father started to row.

My father's friend — I have no idea what his name was, so let's say Peter — tried talking to me in Croatian, but I didn't know what he was saying because my parents had only taught me English. Peter was surprised I couldn't understand him, and asked my father about it. My father answered him back in Croatian, and their conversation went back and forth over my head as I watched the shoreline get farther and farther away. I'd been taught it was rude to interrupt grown-ups, especially when they were speaking other languages, so I just watched the waves and the shore and the people in their swimsuits getting smaller and smaller.

Every once in a while Peter would cup his hands and scoop water out of the boat. My father leaned forward and told me to help him. I tried, but my little hands couldn't scoop much water. Peter and my father kept discussing something in Croatian.

Eventually, Peter looked at me, then at my father and said, "She swim?" in English.

"No," my father said.

There was more discussion in Croatian. Peter turned backwards in the boat to look at the shore a lot. I didn't like that because it made the boat wobble. The water in the bottom of the boat was up to my ankles.

Then the boat wobbled a lot, because my father went over the side into the water. He swam up to where I was sitting, and explained the boat had a bad leak. He was going to swim back to shore with me, and Peter was going to swim back with the boat and get his money refunded from the man who rented the rowboats.

My father explained that I would need to hold on to his back so he could swim with me, but I couldn't hold tight around his neck, because if I did that he couldn't swim. I should hold onto his shoulders instead.

Peter said, "Ready?" to my father, and my father nodded. Then Peter said "Ready?" to me and I held my arms up so he could pick me up and hand me to my father. My father held me above water while I climbed around to his back.

I held on around his neck like he told me not to, so he told me to remember what he'd said. He wasn't yelling, but he was sharp, so I changed what I was doing right away. Then he started swimming.

Peter shifted around and started trying to row the leaky boat back to shore. The boat was slow, and before long we were far away from him.

My father swam with his head out of the water, and that kept my head out of the water too. It was nice to be in the lake because the sun was very hot. Every once in a while he would stop and tell me to not hold him around the neck, and then he would start swimming again.

As we got closer to shore I noticed there was a bunch of people watching us swim in. One woman was yelling and waving an arm, while she held a baby with the other arm. When we got close enough I recognised the woman and the baby were my mother and brother. My brother was crying, but that was no big deal because he did that all the time.

I didn't know why my mother was yelling. I didn't understand a lot of it, and anyhow she was yelling at my father. My father swam until we got to shallow enough water that he could stand up, then he had me slip around so he was carrying me and walking through the water. When the water was below his knees he asked me if I wanted down, and I said yes because I could walk through the lake by myself. It was shallow enough and I was a big girl.

My mother was shouting and crying I could have drowned. My father shrugged and said they hadn't deliberately rented a leaky rowboat, and since everyone kept calm and both the adults knew how to swim, everything had gone all right.

"So where's Peter?" said my mother, not as upset but still unconvinced.

My father turned around and pointed out the half-sunken rowboat, still about a hundred metres from shore. He frowned. "I should go out and help him tow it in."

"Don't you dare!" said my mother, and by the time they were done arguing about it, Peter was back at the dock.

I learned how to swim when I was five, and probably by the time I was ten or twelve I appreciated how much trouble we'd actually been in that day. It hasn't changed the memory, though — the day I almost drowned is still one of my most peaceful early recollections.

#fridayflash: gold

In the morning he said that next time it would be with a knife. She just acted as if he had mentioned the weather — there was no confronting him if he was in one of those moods — and walked to the washroom. There weren't any bruises, but her nose felt crunchy if she pressed it on the damaged side.

In this space it was damp and grey and too cold for regular indoor clothes, which meant the furnace was acting up again. Inside her head, every time she closed her eyes, she could see gold, see it and hear it as this amazing piece of French horn music that Philip Glass had never written. She wished she knew how to write it down, or sing it. She concocted a scene in her head where she sang what she was hearing into an MP3 file and sent it to Philip Glass, and while of course the piece he did compose sounded nothing like the fantastic French horn in her mind's ear right now, it would prove that she had been on the right track. She was right that the music in her head was beautiful, even if she didn't know how to write it down or sing or play anything.

She went to the living room and started tidying up. There were no further sounds from the bedroom, no further evidence of the abundance of tin and lead in the grey air. She cautiously sang a few notes, realised they didn't match what she was hearing in her head, and tried the same phrase again. It was closer. She would have to be louder to match the tones exactly, and that wasn't a good idea.

She listened. Maybe there was more than one French horn playing at once. There wasn't any harmony, but she wasn't sure what successions of notes were physically possible. She wasn't even sure it was a French horn, but from what she could remember from music class in elementary school, that seemed like the best fit. Inside her head it was playing at a loud but pleasant volume.

The cleaning supplies were under the sink in the kitchen. She went down the hall to get them.

Sounds that resolved to "Make me a coffee, would you?" floated out of the bedroom. She froze in mid-step. The French horns vanished.

"Regular or espresso?" she said. Her nose had started hurting again.

"Espresso would be nice. Since it's the weekend."

The espresso maker was one of those tiny Italian coffee-pots that were too little to fit in the centre of the burner. She filled it with coffee and water, almost putting the coffee in the water reservoir, but catching herself just in time. She screwed the reservoir onto the bottom of the pot and set it on the stove, double-checking that she set the right burner on.

Still no movement from the bedroom. The doorway was dull and dripping.

She'd been going to the kitchen for something else before she made the espresso... something to do with the sink. The sink was full of dirty dishes, but she couldn't run any hot water until he decided whether or not he wanted to take a shower first thing, and he wasn't out of bed yet.

She realised she was staring at the cupboards under the sink, so she gingerly opened one of the doors, making as little noise as possible. There was nothing under there but the garbage can and cleaning supplies. Dusting was a quiet thing to do, so she took the dusting spray and a rag out and checked the espresso maker once before padding to the living room.

The coffee table's knick-knacks were all sitting on the couch, and she realised that she must have been planning to dust earlier. It was a lucky break she'd made the same decision over again. She shook the dusting spray cannister and gave the coffee table a light coating of cleaning chemicals. He didn't like it when the smell was too strong, but he liked it to be there.

The dusting spray smelled like orange oil, and as she wiped down the table she thought of Spanish oranges in her Christmas stocking, and of very bright sunlight on a very cold winter's day. French horns. She'd heard French horns in her head when she woke up this morning. They were astonishing, calm and pure and golden like sunlight itself. She could imagine one still playing, far away, directly under the sun, like a coda. She started putting the knick-knacks back on the table.

From the kitchen came the smell of cooking coffee. It precipitated to the taste of old blood on her tongue, and her abdominal muscles cramped, once. Right, her period would come in a day or two on top of everything else. She put the rag and the can of dusting spray on the bookshelf and went back to the kitchen to check on the coffee.

The coffee-pot sounded like the water reservoir was almost boiled dry. She took the pot off the stove and poured the coffee into a cup, making sure that she had turned the burner off. He hadn't got up yet, so she grabbed a cloth napkin and brought the coffee into the bedrooom. She set it on the nightstand without looking at him, using the napkin as a coaster.

"Stay away from me today," he said.

"I'm going to go grocery shopping." She got some clean clothes out of her side of the closet and pulled them on.

"The coffee's good," he said. "Did you clean out the espresso pot?"

"It's still too hot," she said. She headed to the front door and slipped her shoes on.

"Could you do it when you get back?" he said, but she was dragging the bundle buggy down the stairs and checking she had her money and keys on her at the same time, so she didn't hear.

Outside it was a sunny day, and much warmer than she expected. By the time she had walked one block she had her jacket open. By the time she got to the market she had taken her jacket off and put it in the bottom of the bundle buggy.

She ran into a friend of theirs and the two of them chatted about the weather. "It's wonderful out today," she said. "The air is positively golden."

writing thoughts: sleep

I try to keep a civil tongue about most writing advice I disagree with. That is, I try not to say anything about it at all. There's one piece of advice I've decided to speak up about, though, and that's because it is possibly hazardous to your health.

That's the one about getting up one or two hours earlier than you usually do to write.

Now, if you usually clock eight or nine hours of sleep a day, enjoy regular relaxing evenings filled with family time and light chores (do the dishes, take out the garbage), then getting up an hour, or even a couple of hours early on weekdays is probably fine. I say "probably" because I'm only speaking from experience, not as a medical expert.

However, if you are not someone who usually gets that much sleep and/or has low-stress evenings, you might want to do a web search on the effects of chronic sleep deprivation first.

Sleep deprivation became a special interest of mine after I spent most of my twenties living on between three and five hours of sleep a night. Maybe I'd get six or seven on a random weekend night, but usually not. If you want to compare symptoms with that list of articles I linked to, I got to the point where:

•  My craving for carbohydrates was insatiable — I'd eat a (large) lunch and if someone else was having a sandwich or a cake or something, I'd sit there and stare at them eating it, even if I was so full my stomach hurt.
• I had to write down everything, because my memory was completely shot. Not only could I not remember what I needed to get at the grocery store, I'd get halfway down the street and not be able to remember which shop I was supposed to be going to. I had a calendar-style pocket diary in which I wrote down everything. Otherwise, I simply couldn't cope.
• I was cold all the time.
• My immune system worked at a sort of "bare minimum" level  — I always had minor infections that would get better or worse, but never go away entirely.
• I had a tendency to repeat myself a lot, mostly because I couldn't keep good track of what I was saying.
• Towards the end of the eight-year period I was going through this, I had a lot of visual and auditory hallucinations. At one point I was afraid to vacuum the lower-level stairwell in my apartment because of the "ghosts".

There's more, but you get the idea. At the time, even though I was always complaining about lack of sleep, people put it down to job stress, having too much of an imagination (!), and "aging". The symptoms started interfering with my life when I was about twenty-four, and someone overhearing me telling a friend about it interrupted and said, "Guess you're getting older, eh?". I was twenty-four.

And writing? It didn't happen. I still got ideas in my head, still imagined scenes, but they very rarely made it to paper. When they did, they never made any sense, and unfortunately not in the "oooh, that's so imagistic and surreal" way. Truth be told, I couldn't read very well at the time either — I had to read an entire chapter of a book at once, or else I couldn't remember where I was in the story at all.

I finally got control over my sleeping and living habits when I was a few months shy of turning thirty. That was twelve years ago, and there is still long-term health damage. I joke that my circadian rhythm runs like an experimental jazz piece. Mostly I put myself to bed and wake myself up by the clock. Mostly it works.

It doesn't take eight years for things to get bad. After just a few weeks of too little sleep (days if no sleep at all), you won't be able to write, because you won't be able to think.

Getting up early is one way to find some writing time, but there are other ways. If getting up early works for you, great, but please think twice before trumpeting to the world how wonderful it is. I've read precisely one article that admitted the "get up early" advice assumed you were already getting enough sleep.

The point is to write more and live better, not write less and live worse.

Take care of yourselves.

#fridayflash: story-maker's faire

I had the honour of hearing Ray Bradbury speak at a writer's conference I attended some years ago. This story isn't based on what happened. But then again, it is, because he gave us magic and a much-needed reality check, all in one well-chosen speech.

---

Pens, quills, styluses for sale at the Story-Maker's Faire. Typewriters, telexes, telegram-forms, and these are just the midway stalls. Paper, parchment, pretty little pixels glittering in the sunset.

Inspiration? Buck a throw, mac, a buck a throw, try your luck, send the pretty lady on your arm home with something she can show off to Mother.

The noises and colours and lights and the smell, that reek of sugar and used toner cartridges. The hawkers shill like hawkers always do, claiming publishing is just a case of money on the table and a straightforward game of skill and chance. The hipster rubes pretend they don't care, then blow the whole night's entertainment budget on one crap shoot, just when they think none of their friends are looking.

There's more to the Faire than the bric-a-brac, though. Past the midway, under the big top, there's a trio of stages with speakers pronouncing on Writing of the Future.

The first stage is made of unpainted steel, welding seams blackened like torture scars at the corners. The stage is lit with a tangle of fluorescent tubes hanging above it, all wrapped up with various colours of rubber-insulated wires. It's impossible to make out which wires are for support and which supply the electricity.

The stage is set with two objects. The larger one is an apparatus made of the same steel as the stage. It might be a giant mobile. It might be a time machine. It might be a feat of engineering impossible to categorise within the bounds of known history. It might be, come to think of it, from outer space. In the blue-white glow of the fluorescent tubes, there are gears and levers, buttons and handles, the screw of Archimedes and the engine of Babbage, all fabulated together into a skeletal thing.

The smaller object is human in form and male in gender. He has curly hair that bounces from his head in flaxen coiled springs. He has round, wire-rimmed glasses, and a grey bow-tie pinned to his white shirt. He stands next to the apparatus where the largest set of levers are clustered.

A crowd forms. The man begins to speak. He explains that the apparatus is a Story Machine, and that it will tell a story however the reader wants it to be told. The machine can make the story happy or sad. It can let the reader read it from the male protagonist's point of view or the female protagonist's point of view. The reader can decide how quickly the action goes, and how the characters will react to each plot point.

Some teenage boys at the back of the hall call for a demonstration, and the man on the stage gets flustered. As it turns out, the machine is not finished. Not all of the parts are installed yet. Without the parts, no content can be uploaded.

"I'm really sorry," he stammers. "There's been a lot of bugs."

Robbed of their grand finale, the crowd dissolves. Some people wander back to the midway. Others make for the second stage.

The second stage is made of wood that looks like it spent a very long time in the sea. Grey and softened, weathered and warped, it's held together with rusty nails and old baling wire. The performance area is lit with hundreds of thick white candles held in dozens of tall iron candelabras.

In the centre of it all is a large red velvet armchair. A woman in black pajamas with very short-cropped hair sits upon the chair, legs wrapped in the lotus position.

Once the crowd has settled, she begins to tell them of a Future of Writing where the reader will choose to engage directly with the text and guide it. The reader's choices will shape the text, and the reader will choose what the outcome of the characters' predicaments will be.

"Doesn't that just mean the reader is the writer?" calls out someone.

"How's this all going to work?" calls out someone else.

The woman rolls her eyes skyward and shrugs. "That's not down to me," she demurs. "I'm a creative. The technologists will determine the process."

"Surely the writing process for something like that —" a third someone starts, but the woman rises from the chair and starts wandering the stage, blowing out all the candles.

Yet more crowd members head back to the midway. Those that remain shuffle towards the third stage, unsure if they'll be bigger rubes for staying inside.

The third stage is dark, but the afterglow from the young man's fluorescent tube display reveals the silhouette of a man standing alone upon it. He is tall, not just tall but large, and the observant notice a glint from his eyeglasses just before he flicks the switch and... turns on a backdrop of flashing incandescent lights! The stage turns out to be wooden but sturdy, and the lights that blink in sequence in the background make the running effect known to anyone who has seen a marquee.

The man tells a story involving no more technology than a bicycle, a film projector, and a ball-point pen. The crowd roars at the punch-line that ends it. He tells the one about the circus, the one about the typewriter, the one about the wallpaper, and the one about the apples. The entire audience laughs, cries, wonders together. They have known these stories all their lives. They have never heard them told before.

Finally and too soon, it is time for the man to wind up. "This stuff," he says, gesturing at the other two stages, "this is fascinating stuff, really thought-provoking. But remember: no matter how the story gets told, in the end what matters is that it is a good story." Before the crowd has a chance to burst into applause, he flicks off his incandescent marquee lights and quickly slips down the stage's back stairs, gone before anyone had a chance to even ask for his autograph.

Five minutes later, out in the parking lot, all that can be heard are ballpoints scratching in notepads and fingers tapping laptop keys.

A good story. It's all there ever was to be had.

#fridayflash: place

Gerald got into it for historical reasons. Back before the Baby Bust, back when the suburbs were swarming with climate-altering automobiles, there used to be this thing called "urban exploring". People would find buildings, infrastructure tunnels, all sorts of locations that were abandoned. They would sneak in, photograph them, and research their history.

Gerald did that now, except with the abandoned suburbs. He joked that the advantage of his variation on the hobby was that if anyone scary were around, you could spot them and bike away long before they had a chance to get close to you. Once you cleared the gate in the Etobicoke or East York walls, you could see for kilometres and kilometres.

To the southwest he found a cairn, telling the story of a town that had once stood where now there were only hectares of rotting asphalt. The town had been split in two when the highway had been built, and had died like any other large organism would when it was bisected. Now the highway and the giant carpool parking lot had been abandoned too.

Gerald turned in a slow circle, straining to pick up any signs of currently-used civilisation. Nothing. He saw something move by a clump of bushes on the other side of the old highway, but figured it was just a bird or a raccoon.

Once winter came he stuck within the city walls; the coyote and wolf populations had somehow bounced back more quickly than the deer, and it wasn't safe to venture out that far with so little sunlight in a given day. Besides, even the winter treads on his bike tires would skid badly if he hit a patch of black ice.

There was plenty to explore even within the city limits, though. Like the dead carpool lot and highway that were paved over the dead town, Toronto had layers of abandonment within it. There were the high-rise condo towers with the top ten or fifteen stories closed off. If you could figure a way in, you could see how people lived in the early decades of the century. Some of the units still had their major appliances in them, and many of the floors still had electricity running. It was proof of how big the Bust had been that Gerald had discovered so little evidence of squatting.

There was a spit of land out on the lake. In pre-Bust times it had been created by dumping all the soil dug out of skyscraper foundations. Far from being the industrial wasteland it should have been, the city had declared it a bird sanctuary and paved cycling paths through it. At the very end of the spit was a small, still-operating automated lighthouse.

Gerald liked riding his bike out there. On a still day the only sounds would be the hum of his tires on the pavement and the calls of the birds as they settled into the trees. Often building debris would get mixed in with the dirt and the gravel. He had found everything from late twentieth-century beer advertisements to bricks with dates from the late eighteenth century imprinted on them. The city was older than that, he knew, but before most things had been made out of wood, so the evidence was scarce and hard to recognise.

It was a very cold, dry, bright day when he found the stairs. They were just sitting there, in a wide flat part of the spit that hadn't grown in with grass and trees yet. He liked how they looked in the harsh midday light, and got off his bike to take a photo.

When he got closer he discovered that there were footprints on the three stairtreads, fresh and sharp in the cement dust. He took photos until he was satisfied he had the shot he wanted, then cycled home.

It was only when he got home and saw the photo on his larger video screen that he noticed that there was only one set of footprints, going up, with no pair at the top of the stairs to indicate the person had stood there. Whoever had made them had ascended, and then, by all evidence, simply climbed into the air.