#fridayflash: conspiracy

I read the Guardian about every other day, usually, but somehow missed this article where Neil Gaiman gave a writing prompt and invited people to finish the story. Sarah Snell-Pym used it as a prompt over at Magenta Monster on 21 June, which is how I found out about it, and I decided to give it a go.

It wasn't just the murder, he decided. Everything else seemed to have conspired to ruin his day as well. Even the cat.

He hadn't had much sleep — the phone had been ringing, intermittently, all night. He couldn't turn it off because he was on-call IT support for work. None of them were work calls, though.

For the first several calls he listened for a few seconds, said "Hello?" one more time, then disconnected. Around two o'clock in the morning he gave up. When the phone rang and he saw it wasn't the work contact, he said "Fuck off. You pervert." at the handset as soon as he hit the talk button. He was too tired to snarl, and just said the words as if he were reporting on a crashed server's status.

Someone at the other end gasped. "Is that how you talk to your girlfriend's mother?"

"Wha?" he said. "I don't have a girlfriend."

"You listen to me, young man! Put Vera on the phone right now!"

"Who the hell is Vera?"

"WHAT?!?"

"Look lady, I have to be at work for eight-thirty tomorrow, and I've had no sleep because of some prank caller. I don't know any Veras. I'm sorry."

"You aren't Brad?"

Despite his tiredness he wanted to laugh. "No, I'm not."

"I'm so sorry, sir, I must have mis-dialed..."

"I have to keep this line open in case work calls. You understand. Good-bye."

"Good-bye. Terribly sorry."

He leaned back into the pillows, amazed how often people simply forgot about call waiting features.

Five minutes later the heavy breather called back. He thought it was Vera's mother dialling the wrong number again and missed his chance to use the "Fuck off. You pervert." line.

He woke up not to the sound of the alarm, but his cat retching up a hairball. He groaned, and noticed that the sunlight filtering through the curtains seemed a bit too intense for seven-thirty. He checked the time on his phone and swore.

His foot found the cat's hairball on the bathroom tiles as he came out of the shower. He stuck his foot back in the bath-tub and wiped it off, then hurried off to work.

His manager met him in the elevator, and cheerfully asked if he'd got carried away and had too much to drink after watching the big game the night before. He said he hadn't watched the game and had tried to explain about the calls, but his manager just said, "Too bad you missed it — we slaughtered them" and exited at the next floor.

He recalled as the elevator doors closed that his manager was a big sports fan.

During the day two servers went down, and the fail-over to the backup servers didn't work properly. He had to go in and change a lot of settings that should have been set already. In between fixing the servers he tried to figure out how the settings could have changed. His manager dropped by just long enough to tell him that he wanted an analysis done and delivered for tomorrow morning. "You know, for our office start time. Eight-thirty," his manager added as he walked away.

The servers were finally stable and he had all the log files he'd need collected about an hour after everyone else had gone home. He considered staying at work until the job was done, but he was so tired he could barely see straight. He knew he'd have to crash for a few hours and then work on the report overnight.

He bought a pizza slice to eat on the walk home and found a dead housefly under a slice of pepperoni. When he brought it back to the pizza stand and demanded his money back, the stout Italian woman running the counter told him he put the housefly on the slice himself to get her in trouble with the health inspectors.
"Health inspectors," he said, tossing the rest of the slice in the trash. "That's a good idea. I'll call them when I get home."

"You just threw out the evidence, asshole," said the pizza lady.

He tried to act like it didn't matter, but he knew from the look on her face she was right.

The lock on his apartment door felt funny when he turned the key in it. The resistance was off, as if it wasn't locked.

He swore under his breath, trying to remember if he'd locked up that morning.

He set his laptop bag on the floor and decided to use the toilet before trying to get a few hours' sleep in. That reminded him that he still had the hairball to clean up. He groaned and grabbed the cleaning supplies.

The hairball wasn't on the bathroom floor. He noticed that a drop of toothpaste he'd meant to clean up at the same time wasn't there either.

"Mitsou?" he called to the cat. "Did you finally decide to start pulling your own weight around here?"

He put the cleaning supplies away, chuckling about the chores he would like to delegate to the cat. He had just shut the cupboard door when he realised he hadn't seen her since he got home. Normally she came to the door to greet him.

"Mitsou?" he called.

The last thing he felt was his face smashing into the exposed brick wall above the cleaning cupboard.

"We'll be able to stay here tonight for sure. Maybe even a couple of days." Brad looked around. "It's a nice place. He must have been doing all right."

"We'll get caught," said Vera.

"No security cameras in the fire escape stairwells," said Brad. He nudged the man's corpse with his toe. "He doesn't look like he'd be too heavy. Let's get him to the bath tub so we can start chopping him up for the garburator."

It was true, he thought — you did float over your body after. He watched Brad and Vera pick up his body and drag it to the bathroom.

"It would be a lot easier if you took my shoes off first," he said, but of course they couldn't hear him. Mitsou crept out from behind the armchair in the living room. Somehow that made him feel better.

#fridayflash: beige

A group of British physicists have determined that beige is the colour of the universe. That is, if one takes all the sources and intensities of light in the known universe, then all the sources of non-light, and then if you balance the light over all of that vast nothingness in between, you get the average colour of the universe, and the universe is beige.

If all the sources of light really were averaged — which is to say, if all the sources of energy really were averaged — then the universe would be dead, and entropy would be said to be at one hundred per cent. There would be no hot to balance against the cold. There would be no bright to balance against the dark. Everything would just be sort of... beige.

Beige is the colour of the cubicle walls where I work, and the colour of the storage drawers and the work surfaces. They're too modular to be called "desks" anymore. They're just a collection of multi-fitting components, each connecting with all other types in the set. Some are shelving units to hang off the cubicle walls. Some are racks to hold the shelving units up. It's like working inside of a giant Meccano playset. Except Meccano came in different colours, and here everything is beige.

When we call or instant message each other at work, and we tell each other where our cubicles are, we don't use internal landmarks. They shift around too quickly, are too unreliable. Some people try to say, "You know, I sit right by where Katherine sits," but the reply is inevitably, "Where Katherine sits now, or where she sat before the last move? I'm not sure I've seen her on the sixth floor lately. Does she still sit there?"

So instead we look out the window, figure out where we are by the compass points, and use external landmarks. Someone might say, "I'm easy to find. I'm on the southwest side of the building, and I can see the lake from my desk." Or, "I'm on the northwest side. I'm directly across from the Wal-Mart parking lot, but closer to the McDonald’s side than the mall entrance side." Outside isn't beige. There is still bright and dark, hot and cold.

Everyone I work with, and myself, we've all moved desks at least three times in the last twelve months. The company is trying to reorganise us so we're all grouped with the people we actually work with. It's proving to be a lot more logistically difficult than anyone imagined. Instead of one big move where everyone packs up their workstations one Friday afternoon and walks over to their new locations, we move from cube to cube, slowly finding each other, increasing the average amount of cohesion. Everything is getting more and more beige.

We've all thrown out a lot of printouts so we don't have to pack them over and over again. I can now move my entire workstation and set it up in its new location in under forty-five minutes. People still decorate their cubicles. They put up pictures of pets and offspring. I have neither, so I put up some art postcards a friend of mine made of her photography. Still, you can only really see the personal artifacts when you walk right into a person's workspace.

From the outside, all the cubicles just look beige.

all of the above

A few months ago I took a science fiction writing workshop at the Bakka Phoenix bookshop here in Toronto. Before the session started, I wound up chatting with a woman whose first book had been bought by a publisher. She said some of the editing feedback from the publisher was making her uncomfortable. 

Not knowing the situation, I just said something neutral. Then she told me what the feedback was.

You see, she didn't have a romance subplot in her book, and the publisher said that readers expected romance to be present in books by women writers. She said it was expected at least as an element, if not the main plotline.

I have to admit, this is the last editing story I expected to hear at an SF workshop held in the 21st century, in the setting of a well-established SF bookshop no less.

Now that the SFWA flap and some other things have happened, I feel better about relating the story via blog post, because I've come to realise it's not an unusual story after all.

And that's made me wonder about a few things. 

Ten years ago, when I was re-establishing writing as something I did, a lot of people assumed I would be writing romance and/or erotica. That included people who knew what I read (science fiction, "literary" fiction, mysteries, paranormals). Because romance is what women write, isn't it?

Not this one, and not the writer I met at the workshop either.

So I'm left with two questions, which I tried Googling the answers to before I started this post, but couldn't find any references to:

1. Do male writers get the same pressure to include particular subplots in their work, regardless of genre, because it's believed readers will expect certain story elements when they notice the author is a man? It's tempting to say men are discouraged from writing outright romances, but... Nicholas Sparks. Or is that unfair of me?

2. Does this belief (that if it's a book by a woman writer a romance subplot is expected, if not a main plot) have reality backing it, or is it just another industry myth? I honestly thought this stuff would have died off around the time James Tiptree Jr. was revealed to be Alice P. Sheldon, but apparently that's not true.

What do you think?

#fridayflash: the welcome

One morning, when he had about eight years, the people he had always called Papa and Mama told him he had been found on their doorstep one morning, and now they could no longer afford to keep him. 

Even at the time he wasn't really surprised. He'd figured out long before that they were afraid of him.

He walked out into the dusty streets that day, eyes squinting against the glare of the white buildings, and picked his way past the merchants and beggars with purpose, but no particular hurry.

There were close calls and misadventures, brushes with police and perverts, but somehow he came out of it all more or less intact. By nineteen years (give or take) he had a more or less safe, regular routine.

He'd wake up just before dawn in whatever room he was renting that month. He'd steal some bread or fruit from the landlady for breakfast, slip out into the alleyway, and transform in the nearest shadow.

His animal form was a fox terrier, and the gods must have smiled when they granted it to him, because it was a perfect disguise. He was too small to be turned into food by a beggar, too non-threatening for the merchants to complain about him.

He would make his tour of the market, figuring out where the caliph's guards were patrolling that day. Then he would find another dark alleyway as far away from the guards as possible, return to human form, and choose an empty market-space in which to perform.

The performance itself was all sleight of hand — coin tricks, card tricks, making a walnut borrowed from a merchant vanish, or making the lentils from another merchant pour out of a child's ear. The merchants loved him because he drew a crowd, and the crowds loved him because they liked their entertainment to be clever.

Clever was what the performance was. He always restricted himself to sleight of hand, with no true magic used at all. The audience preferred to be impressed by his technique than astonished by the supernatural, and his early experiences had taught him it was not worth frightening people by showing them something they could not explain. His home city was on a high plateau, a place where "rain" was understood as a word, but never actually seen. Its citizens derived plenty of amazement from the mundane.

If the caliph's guards or the regular police spotted him, he would stop the show immediately and run to one of the many bolt-holes he had established around the city. As soon as he knew he was safe from any curious eyes, he would vanish that day's collection of coins and transform himself into his terrier form. Even if the police did find his hiding-place, they could find no proof of his earnings... or him.

Back in his rented rooms he would hone his secret talents, push himself to new mastery. There didn't seem to be much practical use for these skills beyond avoiding law enforcement, but he pursued them out of academic curiosity. Since, apparently, he was the only one in the world capable of these miracles, it seemed important that he know their extent and measure.

From time to time, for a fixed fee, he would perform at parties for the wealthier classes, never when the caliph was present, of course. His rich patrons would celebrate a matriarch's birthday or the arrival of the spice caravan, and he would make figs appear to pop out of gentlemen's coin-pouches. While he was delighting the guests, he would secretly revel in the lushness of the carefully irrigated gardens. Once he even performed next to a fountain, and clowned around a bit in the spray, much to the guests' enjoyment. It was the first time his entire body had been drenched in water.

The caliph enacted stricter laws against "mobs" and "sorcery". His performances at the market were interrupted more often; his private engagements at the homes of the wealthy more secretive. One time he was hired to perform at a wedding, only to have the police raid the house just before he was about to start. The hosts were devastated that their daughter's wedding had been ruined, and he wisely decided not to demand his fee.

After that the number of invitations to perform at private functions dropped sharply.

He was sitting at a café, nursing a mint tea in the sun-scorched morning, when a voice asked if he would mind company. He looked up to find the voice belonged to a woman whose long hair was a natural red untouched by henna — an impossible rarity in his part of the world. He decided she must be a foreigner, yet she spoke without the slightest trace of an accent.

She asked if he was the street conjurer she'd seen in the market, and although he thought that surely he would remember such a beautiful and unusual creature if she'd actually been present in any of the crowds, he said yes, and yes again when she asked if he performed at private events.

She smiled and said it was her birthday a week hence, and was he free to entertain her guests at the party?

He certainly was.

The afternoon of the appointed day, she met him in the main square, flanked by two men he took to be bodyguards. They led him down the narrow, dusty streets, through so many twists and turns even he lost track of where they were.

It worried him. The streets had been his home since he was a child, and he had the same unease a house-owner would have at finding a secret room.

At last they came to a heavy wooden door, which one of the bodyguards opened. The woman went in first, and smiled for him to follow her. He stepped into a small entrance-hall, followed by the guards.

There was a flash and a lurch, and he was shocked to discover himself standing in an orchard. It was colder than any day he could remember, and when he looked up he saw the sky was a softly marbled grey, and not the relentless blue he had always known.

And there was spray falling on him, just lightly, but he could see no fountain.

"You've led the caliph's men on a merry chase for years," said the woman. "It is strictly forbidden for a wizard to live in a non-magical city. Whatever made you decide to move there?"

"I was born there," he said. "At least I think I was."

The woman frowned. "You think... you don't know?"

"No," he said.

"Odd," said the woman. "Well, within our laws you're free to live here. I'm sure we'll find honest work you'll like."

He barely heard her. "Where is that coming from?" he said, trying to indicate the droplets with his hand.

"Where's what coming from?" said the woman. "I just see the rain."

He turned his face to the sky. "Magical."

both the future and the past are unwritten

Friday Flash is four years old this month! I only started participating 7 October 2011, and I've only written most weeks, not all of them. Still, I've managed to post 65 stories. That's a lot better than what my output was before.

In honour of Friday Flash's anniversary blog hop, here's a story that works out to be exactly 400 words long.

Mongolia, 2412

The woman scanned the codes on his device's screen.

"That's some undertaking."

He smiled. "It's worthwhile."

She stepped back. "You're cleared. Go ahead. Remember you'll be fetched next leap year, journey time. Be alone; it avoids fuss."

He stepped into the machine.

"Hey!" she said. "You can't bring a satchel! I thought you were going to put it in storage."

"I'm authorised." He held out his device, showing her the special gold barcode.

She scanned again and raised her eyebrows when the scanner beeped approval. "All right. Keep inside the ring."

Cuba, 1956

He knew what bars and cafés to frequent, even which restaurant for certain dates. But he had no introductions.

Afternoon, the right bar and the right time for once. A motorcycle roared by, muffler nonexistent. He jumped, spilling his drink. In his time petrol engines were only in museums, and never run.

"Not used to cities?" the Champion said to him. To him!

"Before I came here, I was in Mongolia." That much was true.

"I've spent time in China. That's a Boston accent, yes?"

"Well, Massachusetts."

The reserve melted away faster than the ice floating in his daiquiri.

Cuba, 1960

Four years later. They'd socialised at least twice a week. Usually more.

He presented himself as a writer, a journalist. Mostly true.

He gave the Champion pills from the future to heal his liver, restore his strength. It saddened him the Champion didn't ask their provenance, or worry they were poison instead.

28 February, they met for dinner. The plates cleared, the rest of the household elsewhere, he showed the Champion the device, told him the rest of the truth. He showed how the device held every word the Champion had written, even words only on paper in his study that night.

"You're CIA." Said through a scowl.

"No! I tell the truth. Come to my flat tomorrow afternoon. Watch me disappear. Please believe me. You have to live, to write."

"We'll see."

Mongolia, 2412

"Good journey? You've lost thirty seconds of present time."

"Wonderful journey." He checked his device. "Let's see..."

He grinned, held the device up. "Look. He didn't shoot himself. He lived to be 103 and wrote until the end. The Champion's eyes saw three centuries."

She checked his screen. "Well sure. He's our best." Pause. "Shoot himself?"

He clasped the device to his chest. "I have so much to read."

with all due respect to mr. ellison

Harlan Ellison is one of the few writers who can make me cringe and admire him at the same time. Admire, because he's a master prose writer and an incredibly articulate speaker. Cringe, because sometimes, as much as I appreciate whatever argument he's making, ultimately I just can't agree with it.

Today I found this example on Twitter (an irony in itself):



I can agree with Ellison about not wanting the video clip included on the DVD for free. There's a tangible product, a clear line from content to supply and distribution, and so on. I can also see that he shouldn't have to go out and buy a copy of the DVD his work has been included on. The "oh, but you'll get publicity" line is just that — a line.

The part where I can't agree with him is when he starts attacking "amateurs" for making "professional" writers' business more difficult.

What Ellison seems to think of as a "professional" writer is someone who does nothing but write and publish. That is, someone who doesn't have a day job doing something else. Never mind that celebrated authors like William Carlos Williams made their income from day jobs. Never mind that families and circumstances can put up barriers that are impossible to break through. You've got to do it his way, or not do it at all.

Well, we all make our choices, although Ellison seems oblivious to how harshly different the consequences of the same choices can be for different people. Perhaps he needs to read what another professional writer, Virginia Woolf, described in her essay "Shakespeare's Sister." It was written in 1929, but a lot of what it has to say is just as true today.

And that's where the internet Ellison despises so much comes in. For the first time since the commonplace book was, well, commonplace, people can compose, distribute, and engage in content that is created by amateurs on an everyday basis. No longer do you have to hang out at the right café with the right clique and sleep with the right people (yes, plural, and if you've ever dealt with an artist's clique you'll know it's true) just to get five minutes in on open mic night. You can garner an international audience from the comfort of your own living room.

Sturgeon's Law says the vast majority of that amateur content will be dreck, and no doubt it is. But that still leaves an awful lot of excellent amateur writers.

The other thing is that the line between amateur and professional is and always has been blurry, which may well also make Ellison uncomfortable. Are you still an amateur if you've only had one book published (like Harper Lee)? What if you're massively rich, and bankroll yourself, but everything you publish loses money? What if virtually nothing you write gets published, or even finished, like Kafka?

And, because I'd like to stop writing this before I go into full rant mode, here's Monty Python making a few points for me:

#fridayflash: sweet old things

The machine pinged, and a clipped voice asked if it should read the report.

"Commence," said Mrs. De Santo. She took a sip of coffee, set the cup beside the laptop, and picked up her cross-stitch to work on while she listened.

The machine chanted out the text of the report in its rote, expressionless voice.

Remote Listening Results since: ten PM yesterday

Data filtered for: voice recognition of all items in the standard search list

Sorted by: location

Location: Embroidery guild hall. No results.

Location: Office of cleaning services. No results.

Location: Pharmacy. No results.

Hmph, thought Mrs. De Santo. And after all the work it was to plant that bug.

Location: Peter's house, bedroom sublocation. Results from eleven-thirteen PM, yesterday. Play audio?

The machine pinged.

"Play audio," Mrs. De Santo said. "Start from five minutes before the search hit." She threaded her needle with some blood-coloured embroidery floss.

The first thing she heard was a lot of grunting and screeching that made her wonder when Peter and that idiot wife of his had acquired pet monkeys. Then she realised the sounds had a rhythm to them. She sighed, shook her head, and pulled the needle through the tapestry. Halfway through she stopped and glanced at the laptop with some alarm. Peter and his wife were doing this five minutes before a search hit for her name came up on the bug filter?

Mrs. De Santo harrumphed and pulled the rest of the length of floss through the fabric.

"Oh baby," said the wife's voice through the computer speakers. "I can't believe we did that."

Mrs. De Santo rolled her eyes.

"I can't believe you wanted to tonight," said Peter's voice. "You were pretty cheesed off after Aunt Thelma left."

Mrs. De Santo raised her eyebrows and turned her head towards the laptop again.

"Oh her. She doesn't really bug me. She's just such a relic. When you were getting the barbeque ready, I tried to show her my tablet, show her that game I got? She just wanted to do her sewing."

"Embroidery," Mrs. De Santo said through clenched teeth. Neither the game nor the tablet were news to her. Her research division had sold the designs for both over five years ago.

"Yeah, but we gotta be nice to her," Peter's voice said. He sounded muffled. "Just a sec, I gotta..." Mrs. De Santo closed her eyes and tried to not think of what he was probably doing.

"Ow! I know, I know, she's your only surviving relative..."

"But you get along with her," said Peter. "She seemed happy when you two were talking about the fish."

"Yeah, well my uncle Fred used to keep fish too. I can just see your aunt sewing a cozy for her aquarium."

"Shark tank," said Mrs. De Santo. "It's a shark tank, you moron! We spent over fifteen minutes discussing the best places to buy remoras!"

"...we gotta be nice to her," said Peter. "She's way more loaded than you might think. She's just not, whaddayacallit.... ostentatious. Yeah, that."

"I guess she saves money by coming over here for dinner every Sunday."

Mrs. De Santo decided it was high time her nephew was made a widower. If she used the shark tank, she wouldn't need to re-order chum for a few days.

"No. Seriously. Brandy. Listen to me."

Brandy, right. No wonder her brain always rejected it from memory.

"I'm her only living relative, and she's loaded. You get it? That old bitch keels over, we're the ones who'll be loaded. So we split a few rotisserie chickens three ways instead of two 'til then. Big whoop."

Mrs. De Santo rose from her oxblood leather armchair, fists clenched.

"You call me an old bitch? You fed me rotisserie chicken? After making a big deal of it and telling me five times it was a secret family recipe for that wife of yours? And you're talking about this right after you... oh.... augh!"

She threw herself back into the armchair and took a slug of coffee.

"Computer! Override!" The machine pinged. "Cease report. Take a memo: call lawyer tomorrow to rewrite will. Leave all the money to... to an academic prize fund for high school girls who want to pursue careers in STEM and... and who show a high degree of proficiency in the textile arts! But not sewing!"

The laptop chirped, issued a series of differently-pitched chimes, then pinged again.

"Send a message: to Night Leader, Covert Operations Team. Tell him I want the surveillance in my nephew's house ameliorated, stat. I want enhanced audio and video in every room in the house. Include the closets."

Mrs. De Santo reached for her coffee as the computer chirped and chimed. She decided that once it was ready for its next command, she'd bring up the chum delivery schedule.

#fridayflash: morning pages

It was easy to blame it on the recession, on people opting for crappy corporate-drone versions instead of getting a professional to do it, on ageism, but even with all of these taken into account she wasn't getting the freelance gigs she used to. She still made herself read the industry news, just so she could keep an idea of what was popular, what was selling, but it was rarer for her to go out and actually watch a film. It seemed to her that more and more projects were skipping the services of any script doctor, not just her, and it showed in the final output.

The truth was her savings were more than sufficient for her to retire on, but it didn't matter. She wanted to be working, damn it, which just made it worse when a friend suggested over lunch that she write an original screenplay instead of always fixing existing ones.

"Of course I can write from scratch," she said.

Her friend shrugged and swallowed a bite of kale. "So do it."

She spent a couple of weeks staring at her computer, or pacing around her office, or making another cup of coffee she didn't want and throwing it across the kitchen. The kitchen was recently redecorated in dark wood and black marble countertops, none of which even had the grace to show the stains. And still, nothing.

Her friend e-mailed her. No mention of writer's block, just advice on how to get around it (how? how could anyone have known? she always isolated herself when she was working).

"Morning pages," her friend wrote. "Grab a notebook and write in pencil for fifteen minutes without stopping. Do it as soon as you wake up; before coffee, before having a pee even. Never read them over. Just put the notebook away until the next morning. It's wonderfully liberating. I couldn't have done my last two novels without them."

She'd read the novels. It couldn't hurt to try.

The first day she woke up and realised there were no notebooks in the house. The second day, that she had no pencils. She wound up writing the day's pages with an old ballpoint she kept for writing cheques to repair people.

She went out and bought a pack of two dozen HB pencils, like the kind she used to use in math class back in high school. The day after that, a pencil sharpener.

After years of pounding out edits on tight deadlines, her handwriting was crap. She couldn't remember the last time she'd done more than a few words of a to-do list in longhand. It was just as well her friend's instructions included not reading over the morning pages, because she never would have been able to decipher what she had written.

An idea developed over breakfast one day, and by the afternoon she had a synopsis for a horror movie. A decidedly old-fashioned horror movie, to be sure, but given the recent backlash against "torture porn", she thought it could be shopped around reasonably enough.

The first act came to her easily, as did most of the second act. Then she got stuck again. In the middle of the day, just before she was going to break for lunch anyhow, the words just...stopped.

She went and made lunch. She told herself it was low blood sugar. But the afternoon wasn't any better.

The next day all she got done was her morning pages. She spent the rest of the day in her living room, staring out the sliding glass doors, a cold cup of coffee making a ring on her glass end-table.

Exhausted by doing nothing all day, she went to bed early.

She woke up in the middle of the night, startled to full wakefulness by an idea. The idea! She knew exactly how the rest of her script should go now. She turned on the lamp and grabbed the first thing she could write with that was at hand — the pencil and her morning pages notebook — and quickly jotted down the main points of what she was certain were the rest of the scenes she needed. She threw a robe on over her pajamas and went to her office to write.

By the time she felt comfortable taking a break, it was well past noon and she was dizzy from lack of food and caffeine. She went downstairs and hastily made herself brunch.

Back in her office, she flipped open her notebook to find the page where she had made her outline the night before. She smiled to see just how incredibly bad her first-thing-in-the-morning handwriting was. Most of it just looked like zigzags. Only one or two words were legible on any given page.

She noticed that two of the legible words made sense when they were strung together. It brought back memories of playing word games in university. Just for fun she flipped back to the last set of morning pages she'd written, from the day before, when she'd had the brief bout of writer's block.

YOU
                       NEED
    TO PAY
MORE

                                   ATTENTION

keep pushing and the momentum will come

This week gave me a lot of reason to pause and reflect on what crosses in and out of The Eyrea, both in the physical and the on-line world. Something that's always present got significantly stronger: the amount of ideas and content that is part of resistance culture, as opposed to sanctioned culture.

Now, I'm no French cultural studies professor, so for the purposes of this blog entry I'm going to define those two terms, in the Humpty-Dumpty-it-means-that-because-I-said-so way.

Sanctioned culture is composed of cultural interactions and artifacts which get produced and/or explicitly distributed by a large, powerful entity. Usually that's either a government or a big corporation.

Resistance culture is also composed of cultural interactions and artifacts, but gets little to no explicit support by large, powerful entities. Governments, big corporations, or the like may be tangentially involved — an artifact is created with a mass-produced camera, say, or distributed via an e-mail account Google or Microsoft host — but they don't sanction it. Beyond a cursory, automated check to ensure it doesn't break any of their usage rules, they may not be aware it exists at all.

This is an interesting era, because for a very long time (how long? I date it back to the advent of the photocopier, but other people choose their own milestones), resistance culture has been becoming easier and easier to produce and distribute. It's got to the point where sanctioned culture will use resistance culture's methods in an attempt to give itself back some street cred; at the same time, some resistance cultural artifacts are looking awfully polished — like something we're used to seeing from sanctioned culture. One example of the former are the various flash mobs for the sake of advertising. One example of the latter is Nina Paley's wonderful animated feature film, Sita Sings the Blues.

So what's special about this week? This week alone:

• Larry Kollar released Pickups and Pestilence, the sequel to his novel White Pickups
• Marc Nash posted an hour-long video for his Friday Flash — basically a poetry reading you could enjoy in the comfort of your own home, without having to head out to that café that doesn't have any signage.
• It was Mother's Day here in Canada and elsewhere, and my mum asked me to design and make her a necklace or bracelet instead of just buying something. At brunch today, we talked about stuff we were making and about the upcoming performance of my stepfather's first play.

All right, community theatre is as old as theatre itself, and Larry's not the first person to self-publish a novel, and Marc isn't the first person to upload a video to YouTube. I'm certainly not the first person to grab some pliers and head pins and stone beads and make a necklace.

All the same, think about it: for most if not all of the people on that list (including me), if marketers were to look at our demographic profile, they would come to the conclusion that we should be consumers, not makers. Certainly we shouldn't be publishing novels or plays. Our family just successfully celebrated that most Hallmark of holidays without directly buying a damn thing for it — even the card I gave my mum was an art card I picked up a couple of years ago... somewhere, and while it is mass produced it's not widely available either.

I don't have a very bohemian family — we tend to have jobs in IT or accounting. I grew up in the 'burbs, and most of my close relatives still live there. According to those who sanction sanctioned culture, there shouldn't be a single thing I own that can't be found in a shopping mall, bar maybe some tchotchkes picked up during an overseas holiday.

Resistance culture is supposed to require resistance. It's not supposed to be this easy to find and do. And certainly before the web took off, it wasn't.

The web's going to be twenty years old in 2015, so again, maybe this shouldn't be this big a deal still. But consider:

• Marc's in the UK, and I could watch his video. I cannot watch all  videos uploaded in the UK by sanctioned-culture entities like the BBC. If they deem it for international consumption, I can view it, but not if it's domestic-only. In practice this means I can watch a lot of news clips, but next to no drama or comedy. See that? A one-man production has less publicity, but greater reach than content that took dozens of cast and crew members to produce. We all know by now that when a resistance-culture video goes viral it gets more publicity than the sanctioned content.

So the next time someone complains to you that the world watches cat videos instead of supporting the latest Shakespeare adaptation, remind them the cat videos are easier to obtain. Also remind them there are hour-long poetry readings available.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of sanctioned culture I quite like. I just finished re-watching my DVD of The Avengers before starting to write this post. But it just seems, year over year, there's less and less to entice me back anymore, and even the stuff that was enticing is getting harder and harder to find. I'd love to see that film Hysteria that Maggie Gyllenhaal starred in, but it only played at two cinemas in my city (and Toronto loves movies — there's a reason they have a film festival here). That's a sanctioned-culture film that got great reviews, but good luck getting to experience it.

There's so many more examples to discuss, but this is an overly long post already. Long story short: resistance culture is blooming in landscapes those heavily involved in sanctioned culture never thought it could even sprout in. Traditionally that means an upset is coming. This time... I think this time is going to play out differently. But maybe more on that in a future post.

Postscript: if you are into any facet of resistance culture and have not yet read Lipstick Traces, you really, really should. The historical dot-connecting makes it a very provocative read.

#fridayflash: it ate what ate the south

The coast of Jekyll Island, Georgia was damp and foggy that October morning. The camping season was pretty much over, but Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Mukhurjee had decided to spend a long weekend at the park. They were the first to witness the disturbance off the north shore.

Mr. Mukhurjee had walked to the water's edge to drink his coffee and try to determine if the fog would burn off by lunchtime. He observed a dark shape about 200 yards from where he was standing. Initially he identified it as an overturned rowboat. 

He called out, asking if anyone required help. This brought Mrs. Mukhurjee running. Mrs. Mukhurjee was standing beside her husband when the shape began to rise out of the water. 

"At first we thought it was some sort of submarine," recalled Mr. Mukhurjee. "But then we realised that the two bright green circles weren't lights, but eyes."

The Mukhurjees were deluged with water as the creature stepped over them and headed inland. The couple ran back to their campsite and called 911, but were accused of prank calling when they tried to explain "a reptilian-looking creature about thirty feet in height" had risen out of the ocean, and that it was now walking through the camping grounds. Understandably shaken by the experience, and unsure how the authorities would respond if they continued to raise an alarm, they double-checked the creature was heading away from them and stayed where they were.

With a stride of over fifteen feet, the creature was able to travel inland quickly. Judging from tracks found later, it mostly travelled through farmer's fields and undeveloped land.

The next confirmed sighting was in the area that has now become the FF&F Containment Area. The creature discovered a large, uncontrolled patch of kudzu growing in the middle of an unused field, and was, as a local biologist put it, "chowing down on the vines almost as fast as the stuff grows."

Scientists and agricultural experts were able to quickly ascertain that the creature prefers an exclusive diet of kudzu, rather like how pandas strongly prefer bamboo. Through basic behaviour training, similar to how orcas learn to perform at marine parks, they have trained the creature to ride on a kudzu-baited flat-bed truck so it can be transported to an area with a bad infestation of the fast-growing vine. The creature will eat the kudzu, and only the kudzu, until it is sparse, at which time the handling crew entice it back to the truck and return it to the Foreign Fauna & Flora Containment Area. 

The team in charge of the kudzu management programme insist that the creature is not, as some have claimed, Godzilla. They assert that Godzilla is strictly a fictional creature.

There are, however, multiple conspiracy theories. Several copies of a video have appeared on YouTube, where a journalist interviews a Japanese marine biologist. The reporter asks if they have heard the news about the creature that appeared off the coast of the southern United States. The biologist turns pale and mutters something under his breath that is usually subtitled "Oh SHIT!" before denying any prior knowledge. Detractors are quick to point out the Japanese language has a different style of cursing from English, and that the exclamation may be taken as surprise or wonderment, rather than concern.

The Governor of the State of Georgia issued an official statement, declaring that while there was no proof the creature was imported from Japan, kudzu certainly was, and if the creature was helping to control it, that was good enough for him.

Dairy farmers expressed some concern over the creature's appetite for kudzu, since it is used as cattle feed. The creature's consumption rates have remained steady, however, and there is no indication that its appetite will create a shortfall.

In addition to training the creature for the purposes of kudzu control, scientists have been attempting to determine its sex and reproductive processes. The creature becomes very aggressive when touched, however, and does not react to standard tranquilizer darts.

There have been no other reported sightings of similar creatures.

Mr. and Mrs. Mukhurjee are currently in negotiations to have their experience dramatised as a movie on The Discovery Channel.

everybody knows

I went to a school where over eighty per cent of the kids were fifth-generation residents of the county. For the entire ten years we lived in this particular area, we were known as "the foreigners" not-quite-behind-our-backs. My schoolmates would regularly take it upon themselves to inspect my school lunches and declare "that's weird."

Some weird things I brought to school were:

• sandwiches made with cold cuts which were not bologna
• sandwiches made with rye bread or French boule, not Wonderbread
• sandwiches made with cheese which were not Kraft slices
• sandwiches made with Wonderbread and peanut butter, but with home-made peach jam, not store-bought grape jelly
• Swiss ladybug chocolates
• Hopjes coffee candies
• cookies that came from a deli, not the cookie aisle at the local A&P

The most memorable occasion was when my dad packed our lunches instead of my mum, and he decided to give us a hot meal of bratwurst slices and sauerkraut packed in a spare thermos so it would stay warm. It worked very well, but I had a crowd of about five kids eyeing my lunch and making comments. The next day a girl came up to me and solemnly told me that her dad said sauerkraut was only a topping for hot dogs, and that eating it in quantity as a side dish would make me ill.

"That's crap," I said. "We eat sauerkraut all winter at home."

That turned out not to be a very good defence.

Live and learn is the way the saying goes, and the thing I learned from the critiques of my lunches (besides that intolerance is truly irrational) is that while writing what you know is important, you have to give the reader a chance to understand.

Say your character has trouble with kudzu growing on their property and choking out the other plants, and say you want to make that a plot point. You can't just have the characters complaining about the kudzu, or making jokes about it, or mention it's killed the rose bushes. "Kudzu" is a totally opaque term if you've never encountered it before.

What to do? Well, mentioning it's a type of plant is a good start. I'm deliberately using kudzu as an example because the first time I encountered the word, someone had written a jokey piece about it with "the war on kudzu" being literally treated as a military action. At the end of the piece I could see it was supposed to be amusing, but I wasn't sure if kudzu was a dangerous animal or a quasi-military Japanese-American survivalist group. Maybe an isolationist cult that had militarised? I wasn't sure.

I definitely couldn't tell from the piece that it was supposed to be a plant.

Yes, there's search engines and dictionaries and encyclopedias which a reader can reference, but it's not likely they're going to bother the moment they get confused by your text. They'll either keep going, hoping for some context to let them puzzle it out, or else they'll give up and read something in which they can understand the references. Readers don't necessarily want the entire background on something they don't understand. They just want to be able to say, "Ah, okay, it's a type of plant" so they can get on to the next part of the story.

If you're not even giving them that, even something as humble and commonplace as sauerkraut will remain exotic and opaque.

#fridayflash: emulators

A brain is like a computer, and dreams are just data garbage collection. The brain will gather all the segments of disconnected data it hasn't processed yet and piece them together, seeing if anything fits. Most of the time it doesn't. The dreams that are remembered are the most closely-fitting.

Humans sleep and dream a third of the time. Some living things dream much more than this, some much less. Plants dream in chemicals rather than sensory impressions, but other animals dream like humans, give or take.

Whales are always waking and dreaming at the same time. While a human brain is like Windows, needing a distinct defrag period as opposed to its usage sessions, a whale's brain is more like UNIX or Linux. One-half of a whale's brain is sleeping and dreaming in the background while the other half is awake, processing new input data and providing output.

The bowhead whale can live over two centuries. Two centuries of dreaming paired with two centuries of continual wakefulness. Two complete centuries of letting in the world and dreaming it out, imagination and wonder fed nonstop with new cues from reality.

At best, human brains provide workstations. Whales get servers with one hundred per cent uptime.

Very recently, in about a quarter of a single bowhead whale's lifetime, humans have figured out how to expand brain wakefulness and capacity artificially. Machines have been built which never sleep and which complete their data garbage collection in the background. They are connected by wires and can communicate over thousands of kilometres, the same way that whale song can be heard from one end of the ocean to the other.

Is a yawn just a sped-up version of a humpback's call?

liebstered by bevimus

Beverly Fox at The Beveled Edge nominated me for a Liebster Award about four weeks ago (yes I am slow). Beverly has tons of cool ideas and brings an energy level in her writing that I envy very much.

I've already received the Liebster once, but since Beverly was kind enough to nominate me, the least I can do is answer her questions!

1) What is the last book you purchased? 
Wool by Hugh Howey. I'm about 90% of the way through it right now, and it is completely living up to the hype. It's a very well-spun yarn (sorry).

2) Recall your last dream. What happened?
I was driving to work and cars kept going by me dangerously close. At one point I had to swerve into an alleyway to avoid being hit. It was really frightening me, and then I realised that it was because I was on my bicycle and not in my car. It made me think about how inconsiderate drivers can be to cyclists, and about how much I miss commuting on my bike. (Note that when I worked downtown most of my commute was on dedicated bike paths!)

3) Name something that you do alone that you wouldn't do in front of others.
Um, besides the stuff that we all do by ourselves but not in front of others? [cough] I dance in my living room in the dark. I'm not a very good dancer.

4) Name the last album you purchased.
Your Mind is a Box (Let Us Fill It with Wonder) by Poltergeist. It makes me very, very happy to listen to it.

5) Any scars? If more than one, pick one and tell us how you got it. If none, tell us about your most bone-headed injury.
The scariest scar I have is probably the one on my left thumb. I got it taking the top off a pumpkin to carve a jack o'lantern, and the knife slipped. I'm really lucky I didn't do any nerve damage; the scar is quite deep and goes almost to the bone in some places.

6) Favourite quote?
I collect quotes — in high school I decorated my binders with quotes instead of the usual cartoon doodles and band names. My quote for today is from Donnie Darko:
"If the sky were to suddenly open up, there would be no law, there would be no rule. There would only be you, and your memories — the people you'd loved, and the lives you've touched."

7) Most exotic (your definition) location you've been to?
The farthest away from home I've ever been is Mumbai.

8) If you could meet any famous person from history, who would it be?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. No doubt he would not want to meet me, but I'm enough of a fangirl that meeting him would be enough.

9) What are your nicknames?
I don't really get nicknames. People try to come up with ones for me, and they never really stick. If people complain "Katherine" is too long to say, I tell them to call me "Kat". That's about the closest to a nickname that I ever get.

10) Favorite childhood T.V. show?
The original run of The Muppet Show. To a large extent it still is my favourite TV show. I have the first three seasons on DVD.

11) If you could have a super power, what would you have?
I usually say "teleportation", but today I'm going for "super healing".

the penthouse incident

I am six and my friend Valerie is six, and we are at her house because her mum runs her hairdressing salon in the basement, and my mum is getting a perm. We were told to play quietly, and so we are, but not in the spirit our mothers meant.

Valerie has two older brothers. One is in his twenties and has already moved out of the house, but the other is in his late teens and in college, and still lives at home. He keeps his bedroom door locked so that Valerie can't get in and "break anything." Valerie resents this on principle, because she is careful with things. Besides, she's six already.

 Thanks to trying to keep up with her brothers, Valerie is mature for her age. I am the eldest in my family and just act like a six-year-old, but I have acquired one skill she has not yet — I can read well enough to read stuff for grown-ups. At my house that means National Geographic, the Toronto Star, and Canadian Living. At Valerie's house it means that as well... except in her brother's room. And that is why we're being very, very quiet.

How well is "well enough to read stuff for grown-ups"? In Grade 1 (the same year as The Penthouse Incident), I was tested to be reading at a Grade 6 level. This is not unusual for children whose parents read habitually. Which, even when I was in teacher's college, made me question the whole "reading grade level" concept.

More importantly for this particular caper, I knew how to read silently, without having to say the words out loud. The plan was for me to read what Valerie wanted deciphered, and then I could repeat it when we were somewhere we were actually allowed to be.

Valerie takes the spare key to her brother's bedroom from its hiding place in the linen closet. She opens the door and we creep in. She locks the door behind us so that it looks like no-one's there.

First she shows me the model frame house her brother built for class. It's beautifully precise, and I think it would be a great start to a doll's house. Then we tiptoe back to the front of the room to complete the main part of our mission: her brother's porn magazines are there, and Valerie wants to know what they say because no-one will ever tell her. That's why she needs me.

We start by giggling (and shushing each other) over some of the pictures. We know what naked females look like. We are female. The magazine only shows naked grown-up women, of course, but we've both been in enough public swimming pool changerooms for that to be no big deal.

There is an extended photo essay of two women posing in a shallow pool of multicoloured poster paint (which they are completely covered in). Valerie points out one photo where one woman is trying to lick the other woman's bum. 

"Ewwwwww!" we say.

"What if she slipped?" I say. We both know what poster paint tastes like from art class. Getting a mouthful would be disgusting.

"That's going to take a long time to wash off," says Valerie.

So yeah, sorry to disappoint the morality brigade, but looking at photos of naked women when you're too young to understand what a turn-on is just doesn't seem to be a life-scarring event. Maybe if we'd seen more explicit stuff, but this was back when skin mags had to at least pretend to be artistic or risk getting censored.

Now, I'm not saying it's all right for little kids to look at porn. I'm just saying we shouldn't freak out if by chance they do see some — at least if it's just nude photos. The "not freaking out" part is important. Save that for when you find the grown-up who didn't take enough care... or didn't account for six-year-olds finding spare keys.

We hear footsteps downstairs, so Valerie quickly flips to an article for me to read. It's an entire page, two columns, with no pictures breaking up the text, and after a couple of paragraphs I'm bored and she's impatient with waiting. By now I'm holding the magazine, so I flip through it for something shorter and find a comic strip. Jackpot. I love comics.

So I read. And I read. And I flip back to the beginning because I'm sure I must have skipped a part, but I haven't. This lady who sort of looks like Wonder Woman gets into a cab, and the cabbie is driving along, and suddenly in the next frame she's taken all her clothes off and is attacking the cabbie, who looks terrified and then happy and then angry in turns.

"What does it say?" hisses Valerie.

I flip the pages back and forth. "It doesn't make any sense," I say.

It still doesn't.

#fridayflash: truth be told

I dreamt that one had died
in a strange place
they had nailed the boards
over your face

— His Name is Alive, "How Ghosts Affect Relationships"

"It's hard to explain," said Cassandra. "It just feels like something happened here."

"It's just an unfamiliar house to you," said Dagmar. Peter set a plate of bacon on the kitchen table and walked back to the stove. "You're in a strange bed, you had some dreams."

"But this was different," said Cassandra. "Really intense."

"How did it go again?" said Peter.

"It..." Tears started in her eyes, and she pushed them away angrily.

Cassandra took a determined sip of her coffee and started again. "I woke up and saw a glow-in-the-dark Mickey Mouse clock beside me on the nightstand, you know, the kind with Mickey's arms as the hands on the clock? It said it was half-past eleven."

"You can't read or tell the time in dreams," said Dagmar.

"This was a lucid dream! And I'm just telling you what I remember."

"Let her talk," said Peter, sitting down at the table and helping himself to breakfast.

"The first thing I thought was, I better fall asleep again, but then I remembered that there is no clock on that nightstand. And so I sort of started away from it, you know? And that changed the position of my head, and I caught sight of the little girl."

Dagmar raised her eyebrows. "What did she look like?"

"Blonde, long straight hair with a fringe over her eyes. Just her head and shoulders came over the footboard, so she was maybe, what? Five? Six? But the nightgown she was wearing, it was pale blue with that stupid scratchy white lace that was popular when we were little kids, you know..." Cassandra nodded at Dagmar for support.

"You saw all this in a dark bedroom?" said Dagmar.

"Oh for pity's sake, Dag, it was a dream. There is no little girl." Peter splashed milk into his coffee cup.

"The blind was up," said Cassandra slowly. "There was light from the street lamp. And the blind was up last night, the cord got tangled, remember?"

"That's true," said Peter, sipping his coffee. "The blind was up. So that part of reality got into your dream. What did the little girl do?"

"She said, 'That's my clock, but it isn't there anymore,'" said Cassandra. "She even told me I was dreaming. She said, 'I'm not really here, so don't be scared of me.'"

"Logical," said Dagmar.

Cassandra swallowed and took a sip of coffee.

"She said she was in the cool room, and she was tired of standing up, and could I go and get her."

"And then?" said Peter.

Cassandra shook her head and busied herself with her food. "That was it. I woke up for real and the room was back to normal. It just," she waved a forkful of scrambled egg around, "it doesn't feel right."

"Dagmar's family has owned this house since it was built," said Peter. "There was no little girl."

Dagmar was sipping her coffee, but waved her free hand around in a "stop, no" gesture. "That's not true," she said when her mouth was empty. "Another family lived here first. The house was only about a year old when we moved in. But," she said, "that cool room was always immaculate when I was a kid. You know how my parents are. There are open-heart surgery theatres in this country that are dirtier than my parents' garage."

"Yeah, well, hospital standards are slipping all the time," said Peter.

"My point being, if there had been something weird in the coolroom, my mum would have noticed it." She frowned. "But now that we're talking about it... it's funny, but I think the people who lived here before us did have a little girl. I remember when we came here to view the house before buying it. What's the guest bedroom now used to be my room, and when we came to see the house it was already decorated for a little girl."

"You must have told Cass at some point," said Peter.

"I don't remember you ever mentioning that," said Cassandra.

"But I must have," said Dagmar. "Because otherwise how would you get all these details right?"

"Do you remember the family's name?"

Dagmar shook her head. "I can e-mail my parents if you're desperate to know. They probably have it on some legal papers still." She shrugged. "Maybe the little girl died. Maybe that's why they sold the house." She glanced at the clock. "Pete, you and I should head out for work."

"Right," said Peter.

"I'll clean up," said Cassandra. "Thanks so much for letting me stay."

"It's good to see you again," said Dagmar. "Shall we check your word count when we get home?"

"All right," Cassandra laughed, "but no-one reads a first draft but me. And keep in mind I'm not starting until I clean up the breakfast dishes."

"Fair enough." Dagmar stood up. "Make yourself at home. Just don't go knocking down any walls looking for skeletons."

Half an hour later the kitchen was tidied. Cassandra set up in the window seat overlooking the ocean, computer propped up on her knees, getting nothing done.

"Screw it," she said, and ran down to the basement.

Dagmar always joked she was a slob compared to her parents, but the coolroom was dust-free and smelled faintly of bleach. Two rows of metal utility shelves had been dedicated to the storage of tinned beans and packages of toilet paper, but the shelves along the interior wall were still empty. Cassandra carefully carried each one out of the room.

The interior wall was thickly coated with white paint, and looked like it was cement instead of the drywall used everywhere else. But Dagmar's parents had done the rest of the finishing in the basement — Dagmar had told her that. That much she did remember clearly.

The wall was solid and smooth, no waves or bumps in it, finished right down to the cement floor.

"Ugh." Cassandra lowered her head and scrunched her eyes shut. Stupid writer's imagination. At least she only had to put the empty shelves back. No doubt Dagmar had the tins arranged by expiry date.

She opened her eyes without raising her head, and spotted a small black something at the base of the wall.

She crouched down to get a better look. In any other basement she would have dismissed it as a wad of dust or a dead insect, but not in Dagmar's house.

The little black something was a few millimetres above the floor, sticking out of the cement of the wall. Cassandra reached out and gently bent it towards her with her finger.

A tiny metal bar ending in a cartoon-drawn gloved hand.

Thanks to Deryn Collier for the prompt that led to this story.

Here's the song that linked together with the prompt (and some other things):

the iTunes effect

The truth as of April 2013: if you want to read a Kindle-published book, you can read it on any hardware that can run a reasonably up-to-date Web browser. The same is true for any Kobo publication. You don't need a special client, you don't need to buy an ebook reader.

But if you want to buy something from iTunes, you can't. That's because iTunes won't work unless you install their client, and their client is not supported on all platforms. Not surprisingly, I'm on one that isn't supported.

Now, this isn't a "complaining" blog post, because 98% of the time I don't especially notice. What I want to get into is why I don't notice, and what that means for anyone who wants to self-publish something they've created, whether that's stories or music or anything else.

Life without iTunes means that I'm exposed to music that is considered more obscure in my geographical area, though it may be popular elsewhere. Out of the last four albums-for-lack-of -a-better-term I've bought:

Two were from house concerts I attended (best small-venue acoustics ever, by the bye).

One was reviewed in a newspaper in a foreign country (there the release was major news; my local press barely covered it).

One I found out about because I follow the musicians on Twitter, and they used Pledge Music (similar to Kickstarter) to pre-sell.

There's a fifth release I want to get when it comes out in June. It was also a foreign-press find.

So what? Near as I can tell:

My tastes are trending more towards alternative just when my age, gender, occupation, and income bracket are all indicating I should be getting more conservative and having more mainstream tastes.

"Regionalism" is on shakier ground than a lot of big companies should be comfortable with. From where I'm sitting, it seems like the smaller independent artists are having a much better time embracing global marketing than the majors.

Straightforward, direct appeals can work very, very well. I got to preview all but one of my recent purchases in their entirety. There was no finding out I'd just blown twenty bucks on a single.

There's nothing wrong with using major distribution channels to make your work available, but if you only use the majors, some people will not be able to give you money at all.

It's easy to write off support of the alternatives as small, unimportant, not worth the effort. I'm sure most analyses used to show that about Apple.

But then look what happened.

I know, I know, anecdote is not the singular form of data. I just think it's interesting to consider.

What say you?

#fridayflash: cough

A bird flew into the west exit doors yesterday morning. Scared the crap out of me.

It's not normal to spot living things outside anymore. These doors are at the bottom of a concrete stairwell, so I'm not sure where the bird thought it was going.

Maybe it thought inside would be safer. Can't blame it for that.

I live in what used to be Bay subway station. The line of turnstiles dividing my open-concept living and dining room areas adds a certain retro-industrial je ne sais quoi to the décor, or at least I like to think so. All my chairs are Herman Miller office chairs. There was a shop that specialised in them close to the subway entrance. They're mismatched, but I like them all just as they are.

This used to be one of the poshest parts of the city. The Holt Renfrew department store marks the southern end of my little post-apocalpytic estate, and fifty-six stories in the air is the penthouse of what was one of the most desirable addresses in the city.

All irrelevant now. Addresses don't mean much in a city with a population of 16.

At night, when I don't have to worry about the drugs the doctors shot me up with burning me to a crisp in the sun, I go to the bookstore above the subway station. I found a book about local history. It said that the basement of the Holt Renfrew store, that too-posh-to-be-a-food-court lunch counter and the gallery of "casual wear" that cost more than my old wardrobe, that whole expanse of floor space used to be a mass grave, back in the 1830s. Supposedly there was a cholera epidemic, and back then Bloor and Yonge was the outskirts of town. When the city expanded north in the 1870s, they dug up all the cholera victims and put them somewhere else they thought was out of the way. Probably has a subdivision over it now.

They didn't get all of the bodies. They found the last one officially in 1929. Unofficially, there's been stories of more skeletons being found when the subway was built in the 1950s, and Bay station has been said to be haunted for as long as it's been open.

I never see or hear a damn thing. Maybe the chemicals killed them off too.

The book got me thinking. I should have realised after the first eight years, but all those books, that giant bookstore upstairs, two floors, café inside, even a grand piano so people could be serenaded while they shopped... and there's nothing about what happened in there. Maybe once I get around to the magazines I'll find a few articles. But all those books, and it's a just a museum piece of life before, not after. It's like as if a thousand years from now tourists come from the chemical-free zones of Earth and a guide tells them how this plot of land used to be Potter's Field, the mass graveyard for impoverished cholera victims, and never mentions Holt Renfrew.

So I went to the stationery section and grabbed a few Moleskines and some pens. Reading this back it's all scattered crap, but hey, I have loads of time to edit. I know I do, because now it's two days later and that damned bird is still flopping around outside the doors.

The problem is the doctors didn't know what the hell they were doing. They said the photosensitivity was just a side effect of the suspension medium, and once that was out of my system I'd be able, we'd all be able, to go in the sunlight again. Eight years later and I still can't. So they screwed that one up.

They told us, all of us volunteers who walked into the wrong clinic with sinus infections and walking pneumonia at the wrong time, they said the nanobots would eventually leave my lungs and just inhabit my circulatory system. The bots would use anything trying to eat my insides as an energy source. So all the corrosive chemicals, all the viruses... bot fuel. And because I was already coughing my damn head off, I'd spread bots to everyone else, and we'd all live happy cyborg lives. Hurray.

I haven't been sick for years, but I've still got the damn cough. So do the other subway-dwellers. The bots might be in my blood, but they're in my lungs too.

We tried all living together, Survivor Island Kumbaya, and it didn't work, to put it politely. There was this stupid huge debate about whether or not to try to have babies and repopulate the continent — would the babies be born with nanobots? would the nanobots kill the fetuses before they could become babies? — and the twelve women in the group pulled a Lysistrata before things got ugly. I still sleep with a knife, but no-one's come down this way in a couple of years.

My home station, Bay station, has upper and lower levels. The history book from the store tells me that they only used the lower level for six months after the subway opened in 1954. Then they decided it didn't help the trains run on time, so they barred it off, then they bricked it off. More people saw it used as a set for commercials and films than ever waited for a train in it.

I don't see anything that moves by itself down here. I don't hear anything. But sometimes I think I know one of the 16 is underneath me, using Lower Bay to go visit another survivor without me knowing. Without breaking the rules.

It's two or three days since I started this, and that damn bird is still flopping around outside the doors, at the bottom of the stairwell. All the hanging out here I do, all the coughing, there are probably a lot of bots around. They might have got into the bird. They might be keeping it alive, but the bird can't do anything, can't move, because even bots can't fix a broken neck. This keeps up, I'm going to have to give it a name.

The bots can just keep you alive. Forever, apparently.

I rearrange my mismatched Herman Miller chairs. I read. I raid the posh department store and try on Chanels and Pradas. I'm getting so thin, some of them even fit me.

And I cough. I cough out the machines of life, and it benefits no one.

Not even the ghosts.

#fridayflash: lazarus

“Lazarus was the first zombie.”

— D. Hutchings

And lo! With nothing before it was a perfect confusion of stench and pain: the stench so much that his lungs burned and loathed to take in air, as desperately as it was needed; and the pain through every fibre, bone, and sinew. Something covered his face, and he tore at it to free him and to ease his breathing. Although dry and lightweight, the covering was long, reaching past his toes and past the end of the stone plinth he lay upon. He flailed at the covering, thrashing with his hands and the whole of his arms, gasping at the rotten thick air only when he could no longer resist the urge to breathe.

A final wrench at the gauzy wrapping, and he freed himself and rolled off the plinth at the same time. He landed mostly on his right arm, and would have screamed, but his throat felt as though full of rotten mush, and he breathed in new reek sharply. He pushed himself off the floor, all of his fingertips in agony and feeling as if the finger bones were poking through the too-soft flesh, then with one more helpless gasp threw himself past the foot of the plinth, towards what some part of him knew was the exit.

He was blind, in a stinking airless world with no light at all, but his ruined hands found a stone wall just as he noticed the sensation of his foot-bones sinking through the pulpy meat of his feet to the thickly callused soles. He pushed to the left, applying the weight to his palms, and felt the rock move a little under his left hand. With another gasp, each breath feeling like a poisoned spear in his side, he replaced his right hand above the left and pushed again. This time the rock moved half a hand span, and now he could feel fresh air and hear screams coming from without. He was still blind.

He pushed again, and now it seemed as if other hands were pushing from the other side, and the rock rolled enough to form an opening perhaps four hand spans wide. Navigating by placing a hand on either side of the opening, he pushed himself through to outside.

Past the stone, he swayed a little, and the screams he heard changed pitch and intensity. He tried to step forward, but his ankle was still caught in the shroud and he tripped and fell. His arms swung out uselessly to break his fall, and as his hands splattered against the ground. In the moment before the pain hit again, it occurred to him that although the stench had lessened it was still present.

The screams changed to wailing, and then he felt a presence come near and a hand touch his shoulder.

“My friend,” murmured a voice very low, but close enough he could hear it over the cries, “I’m so sorry.” And suddenly he was puking with no control or thought, puking where he lay, and something pushed from behind each of his eyeballs, and something fell from each of his lids. He blinked away thick muck from his eyes, and lo! He could see again. The first things he saw were two rotten eyes lying in a pile of entrails and awful filth, and that made him puke even more.

After what seemed an eternity, there was nothing left to vomit, and the hand that had stayed on his shoulder pressed while the voice said, “Come, stand up with me.” And as he stood the stench left, and as he leaned against the hand and arm for support the offal vanished from the ground where it lay.

And the wailing turned to whimpering, and he looked over, amazed, for it was his mother and sister prostrate on the ground nearby who were so inconsolable. And the voice said, “Go home and leave us. He will stay with me a few days, while you prepare for his return.” And his mother and sister leapt from the ground and ran away, veils covering their lowered heads.

And he looked in wonder to see whose hand it was that had stayed on his shoulder the whole time, and he saw it was a friend of his family.

He opened his mouth to speak, but the man said again, “I’m so sorry,” then looked away, as if ashamed. His friend drew a long breath, then looked him in the face again. “They begged me, and I wanted to know... if it’s any consolation, I will have to do it by myself not long from now.”

He finally found his tongue. “No-one should have to go through that,” he said, his throat thick as though still decayed.

“I’m sorry,” was all the man said, and led him away to meet his companions.

---

Re: D. Hutchings — Darren Hutchings does a lot of different things, but one of them is make zombie movies as a partner in Post-Life Productions. His first film, The Post-Lifers, has been released and screened in Canada, the USA, and Germany. His second film is almost done. Read more here.

Skywriting

Tom Gillespie recently wrote about a file management issue he'd had writing a novel. Besides outlining a good way to keep files safe (er, with a strong contrasting example), it brings up the issue of trusting your data storage solutions. Removable or non-removable? Local or cloud? Most people have a good idea of the importance of backups, but few are diligent about it unless they've been burned.

I've been burned a couple of times now, the most ironic of which was when I came home to a laptop grinding its hard drive to death. I'd been at a friend's house, recovering data on their computer and helping them plan a backup strategy they could stick to. The hard drive's death rattle was so loud I could hear it from outside my apartment door.

For the novel I'm working on now, I'm trying something new, something psychological. As I mentioned last week, I don't trust the cloud. As part of my day job, I've seen large server farms go down and permanently lose years of data. Not all of the data, only a fraction, but that's cold comfort if your documents were part of that fraction.

So I'm using that distrust as a force for good:

Writing and outlining are being done on Google Drive.

The Drive files are copied off to my laptop's local hard drive every time I have a writing session on that machine (about once every other session).

The local files get automatically backed up to my Ubuntu One cloud every Wednesday.

It sounds backwards, and it feels backwards, because we're always told the cloud is safer than local storage. But because of it I have a writing space I can get to from multiple machines, and backup to two different locations.

Postscript: I couldn't post this entry at my usual time because I couldn't get to a working Internet connection, and now I've had to rewrite this last paragraph because of synching problems. More reasons to distrust the cloud.

#fridayflash: elementals

The Earth struck first, with tremblers strong enough to make the pictures on the walls rattle. Something got pulled, something popped, something shorted and the electricity went out. It stayed off for less than half an hour, but when it returned the clock on the stove no longer showed numbers. Instead, its seven-bar digital readouts formed alien glyphs.

The stove's timer alarm chirped and chattered to itself. The squat metal box seemed to have had the electronic version of a stroke, reawoken to a delusion it was a baby sparrow.

The Earth rotated twice, with the same speed and axis it always used, and the non-conscious machine that was the oven suddenly realised it wasn't a baby sparrow after all, but a kitchen appliance, and the horror made it scream. And scream. And scream, the long insistence of its alarm beeeeeeeeeeeeeep only fading as the speaker vibrated itself to death, only stopped when the homeowner in despair flipped the breaker switch and pulled the plug.

Fire and Water, mischievous fraternal twins, chose to trade places. A burned-out solenoid rendered the dishwasher unusable, while a tiny drop of water sneaked into an electric toothbrush's inner workings. Damp little ghost in the machine, it made the toothbrush turn on and off by itself, and not turn on or off in response to human fingers pressing the controls.

The final prank was left to Air, element of communication. The radio waved data passing through it were rearranged and randomised. E-mails floated into games of solitaire; photos from porn spam illustrated articles in the Wall Street Journal. Characters and sometimes even whole words would appear in tweets and blog posts from nowhere. All gibberish, the phone's and computer's extensions of those glyphs on the oven clock.

But there is one more element, more ethereal and less frivolous than the rest. She sums and supplants the other four, and what she lacks in tangibility she makes up for in intelligence.

Spirit quietly asked for her turn, and when Air was satisfied he bowed out and gave it to her.

Spirit knows language, and she knows grammar. Spirit knows how cultural conventions work.

She can write blog posts so real they can be easily mistaken for human.