#fridayflash: opposable thumbs

"But they don't have the capacity," said Caitlin.

Peter shrugged and slid the device across the table to her. "Nevertheless, some of them have figured out how to do it. Read for yourself."

Caitlin picked up the device and read the first couple of paragraphs of text on the screen. She gave a short laugh and handed back the device to Peter. "It's an April Fool's joke," she said. "There's no way."

"I saw Spot do it," said Peter. "I left the device on my desk when I went to get another coffee, and when I came back she was entering the text you see here. She jumped off the desk when I returned to the room, but, and this is the key part, when I laughed and said I was all right with her using the device, she jumped up again and finished the paragraph. I extracted the video from the home security file. You can watch that if you don't believe me."

"Even if I do watch it, I still won't believe you," said Caitlin. "You're telling me your pet cat wrote that?"

"She did, and Farrah's cat Biggle has, and an orange tabby named Larry has written a beautiful essay on the merits of wet versus dry food. He comes out in favour of dry, even though he says wet tastes and feels better. I think most humans would have expected cats to all be in favour of wet food."

"You're yanking my chain."

"Farrah says that she's observed Biggle trying to teach her other cat, Triggle, how to use the device for writing. Biggle tapped the icon to open the text editor, then closed it and pushed the device at Triggle. Triggle opened a video instead, and Biggle batted at her and closed it, then demonstrated again. Farrah said it all looked very deliberate." Peter's device chimed, and he swiped a few commands into it. "Farrah has the lesson on video too, plus an extract from the device's log showing what commands were completed during that time period. She's going to synch it with the video."

"Is that the text you just got?" said Caitlin.

Peter shook his head and smiled. "No, that was a report of another cat who seems to have learned how. The owner calls the cat Squirrel because it has a grey bushy tail, but she says the cat only answers to 'Kitten', and sure enough that's how the cat identifies itself in the report it wrote."

Caitlin blinked. "What did it write a report on?"

"It's a description of inkjet printer behaviour if a cat places a paw on the moving paper at different stages in printing. Um, let's see, 'If the paper is at the top, the machine stops and blinks. If the paper is partly through the machine, the machine gets louder and the person will make the machine work over again. Kitten will be told to leave the room. If the paper is almost all the way at the bottom, no effect." Peter raised his eyebrows. "I think this one has a bright future in engineering."

Caitlin rolled her eyes, then frowned. "Wait... have any of them written anything that could be considered fiction. Or at least something fanciful?"

"Not so far. It's all essays on the merits of different food brands and how to sabotage printers. They're very focused on evaluating their environment." Peter's device chimed again. "I'm more interested in why it's starting to happen now," he said, swiping at his device. "Right now I'm exploring the idea that it's finally easy enough to write without opposable thumbs."

"They're doing it because they can."

"Basically. Hrm." Peter frowned at the device.

"Another one?" said Caitlin.

"Here's some of that fiction you were wondering about," said Peter. "Written by a cat named Allroy. These names. I'm starting to feel bad about what I called Spot."

"What's fictional about the new one?"

"Allroy was born in a bachelor apartment, the only surviving kitten of a small litter. She's always lived in apartments, only goes outside in a carrier during trips to the vet. But she's written this story about hunting birds and climbing trees. Two things she's never done in real life." Peter swiped at his device. "The beginning's pretty good, actually. I'm looking forward to reading the whole thing."

Caitlin laughed. "All this cat stuff. Okay, assuming you're not making this all up, which I'm still not convinced of, I guess it's safe to say we won't be seeing the cat version of War and Peace any time soon."

"You realise that's what people used to say about 'women's fiction' and fiction by people not of European descent."

"Yeah, but, these are cats."

Peter grinned. "Twenty years from now, humans will be bitching about cat quotas in the Hugo nominations. Wait for it."

are you victor frankenstein or professor utonium?

Victor Frankenstein's story is a tale well known. He collected corpses which suited his purposes. Then he dissected them, picked out all the good bits, and reassembled them into his modern Prometheus.

The resulting monster became more famous than its creator, both within the fictional story and in the enduring layers of meta­narrative, going so far as to steal his name.

Professor Utonium is perhaps not as widely known, but to be fair Frankenstein had a two-century head start on him. He's the father figure from The Powerpuff Girls, who decided he was going to create the perfect little girls from laboratory chemistry. (Apparently he skipped health class on the important days back in high school). He mixed sugar, spice, everything nice... but he accidentally added CHEMICAL X.

And it seems to me that both of these are good metaphors for the process of writing. They don't near cover all the major process types, but from where I'm standing they're two distinct processes which get confused a lot.

They're both analytical processes, in that you figure out what the guts are first and then work from there. But there's a difference.

The Victor Frankenstein writer is the sort of creator who's very comfortable talking about "beats" and plot points. They probably would be very comfortable writing for television. Just like Frankenstein was comfortable with grave-robbing at night to get his raw materials, they're perfectly fine with pulling from older known works and fashioning them into something new. Good examples of this kind of writing are... just about any kind of classic TV sitcom for starters, but also anyone who writes "classics" of any genre fiction (and when I say "genre", that includes "literary fiction*". There, I said it.).

The Professor Utonium writer does things a bit differently. They gather up all their basic elements and then see what happens when they drop in some Chemical X (or, as Erin Morgenstern put it, add ninjas).

I know I'm more of a Professor Utonium. I usually start with characters and a basic reason for them all to be together, and then figure out what's going on (the reason for the lab explosion) later.

Like most writing things, there's no "good" or "bad" way to be, so long as you get things done successfully. Frankenstein, Utonium, or someone else altogether, while it's useful to have some self-awareness about one's process, in the end it's whatever works.

*"Literary fiction" encompasses so much science fiction, historical fiction, and romance fiction that really it should be renamed something like "critically acclaimed fiction". Honestly, I've got a four-year bachelor's degree in this and I still don't see what's so special about it. We never talked about "literary fiction" when I was in university. Most of what we studied would count as "slice of life" or "psychological" fiction, with some historical (like Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year) or romance thrown in. And don't tell me "popular fiction" or "pulp" doesn't get counted, because Dickens and Cervantes among others are both canonical, and they were both pop fiction in their time. We used to joke serious fiction was pop fiction that had been around for a long, long time.

#fridayflash: roy g. biv

Red was the lumberjack shirt Roy was wearing over his favourite Supertramp t-shirt that night. Red was the STP logo on his baseball cap. Not that anyone saw him as he drove over the gravel side roads home, rolling up each hill and down into each valley as fast as he could go without spattering pebbles into his windshield.

Orange was the colour of Roy's pickup truck. Burnt orange, he insisted. His friends didn't care. They teased him about whether or not the paint glowed in the dark, or whether they could just shoot deer out of his truck during the season instead of having to don an orange coat. Roy liked his pickup. It wasn't the biggest, or the most powerful, or — all right, so it wasn't the best colour — but it let him get his work done, and it didn't need much maintenance.

Yellow was the light thrown off by the pickup's headlights. The light bleached out the warm brown of the dirt and the pale grey of the limestone gravel, making the road look almost white. The dead grass and bullrushes growing in the ditches looked white too. If he hadn't known there were healthy fields of corn just beyond the bordering trees, Roy would have been creeped out. He crested the next hill, which was little on the way up, but long and steep on the other side. A glance at his dashboard clock told him it was just after one in the morning. Roy knew the road well, and let the truck go a little faster than was safe so he could coast down the long slope. That's why the truck skidded so badly when he slammed on the brakes to avoid the man standing at the bottom of the hill.

Green was the man's skin, at least the parts not covered by his silver jumpsuit. His bald head was encased in a glass bubble, just like in the old films CHCH Channel 11 showed on Saturday afternoons. He didn't move as Roy screeched the truck to a halt, and didn't seem bothered by the glare of the headlights. The pickup came to a stop about three metres from where he stood. Roy insisted later the glare from the headlights hitting the glass head-bubble should have blinded him, but he also reported that the man didn't seem affected by any glare. He just peered over the hood of the truck, nodded as he stared straight at Roy, then raised his left arm and shook it. A signal.

Blue was the flash of light Roy spotted coming from his left side. Later he said that whoever or whatever caused the light to flash must have been in the ditch, directly parallel with the driver's-side door of the pickup truck.

Indigo was the colour of the next thing Roy remembered seeing — his jeans, wadded up and being used as a pillow for his head. He discovered he was lying on the road in front of his truck. He still had his underwear on, but, as he put it later, it "wasn't arranged right." His socks and shoes were arranged neatly on the pickup's hood. The truck still had its lights on, but the engine was shut off. There was no sign of the green man.

Violet was the colour of the eastern sky as Roy picked himself up and checked for any signs of the green man and his blue-light-flashing assistant. After Roy got fully dressed and got back into his truck — which still had enough battery power left to start, barely — the clock said it was five-thirty. Roy's wristwatch only said it was about five past one, though. He drove home, thought about calling the police to report what happened, then thought the better of it.

One other thing he did notice, though. After he crested the next hill, he reached the highest patch of land between home and where he had stopped for the green man. And out in the distance, near the escarpment, there was a clearly visible, fully-formed double rainbow. But, Roy pointed out, the area was dry. No rain for a week.

clarity vs. dumbing down

Last week I took a course for work on requirements gathering. We took all about how to elicit, verify, validate, and record requirements. One of the things emphasised (not surprisingly) was language usage. We were told to be clear, concise, consistent, concrete, and a whole lot of other adjectives that mostly started with the letter "c".

And for writing requirements documents, that makes perfect sense. But my brain working the way it does, I remembered something on a completely different topic while we were doing the pre-exam review on the last day.

You see, there's this documentary I like a lot, called In the Shadow of the Moon. They interview many (not all) of the Apollo astronauts, and show their responses intercut with footage from the various moon shots. I've never been able to catch it since, but the very first time I saw it, Michael Collins used a word which surprised me. It's not an unusual or rare word, but it is a polysyllabic one, and it's one that someone used to giving interviews would generally avoid. It's one of those words that falls into this weird hinterland of being only for "educated" people, even though pretty much anyone who finishes elementary school knows it.

That first time I saw the film and heard him say it, I wondered if he'd slipped up and forgotten the interview was for general public consumption. But then I realised something else was going on: he expected the audience to rise to the occasion. I'm convinced every phrase and sentence was being used to get the audience to turn their brains on, not just drift along. It was the opposite of the "dumbing down" we've become so used to in the last thirty years.

Just before the pre-exam shifted topics, I thought about the Lee Child novel I was reading. It was Killing Floor, the first in the Jack Reacher series, and it's remarkable for how Child uses vocabulary and sentence length. Here's the first paragraph as an example:

I was arrested in Eno's diner. At twelve o'clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee. A late breakfast, not lunch. I was wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain. All the way from the highway to the edge of town.

The whole book is like that, a sort of See Spot Run with more plot and violence but no pictures. The writing makes Samuel Beckett's prose look purple.

I enjoyed the novel — after spending all day discussing the uses of UML diagrams in requirement verification, it was nice to treat myself to a little brain candy in the evening. But of course it got me to thinking some more about language.

Anyone with an opinion at all about writing will always tell you to choose simple, clear, and direct over complex, obscure, and tangential. I've always been a big supporter of this in writing: Hemingway over Foster Wallace. Beckett over Joyce. Camus over de Maupassant.

Simplicity can only go so far, though, and no farther. If it devolves too much, the writer has to make up for the lack of vocabulary with more words than necessary. I deliberately wrote "make up for" instead of "compensate" in that last sentence to illustrate.

I'm with the astronauts on this one: entice the reader to put their smartest selves forward, but do it in an accessible way. Who knows? It might give us all a chance to smarten up instead of dumbing down.

#fridayflash: family heritage

"Mum, you sit down. Jimmy and I can do the dishes."

"I'm fine. You go sit down. Talk to your father."

Roger knew that as soon as the water started running in the kitchen, their father would tell them they should help their mother, that real men didn't expect their mother to pick up after them. Roger would protest, and Jimmy would point out that when the parents came to visit one of the sons, their mother insisted on doing the dishes then too. The argument itself was a tradition, like watching the Stanley Cup game together when the truth was none of them really followed hockey.

Anne checked the water temperature with her hand, then very gently lowered the first stack of dishes into the sink. She pulled the knitted dishcloth off the faucet and lifted the first plate from the water.

A white plate with pink roses, it was the only survivor of the set Great-Grandmother Bridget had brought with her to Canada in 1920. Anne rinsed it off and set it gently in the dish rack.

Bridget had always hated that dish set, a wedding gift bought by relatives without asking her preferences. It came to symbolise all the choices taken away from her. Her in-laws had that ugly, tiny house waiting when she arrived. Her dreams of going to university were destroyed when she discovered she was pregnant with Anne's grandmother. She took great pleasure in pitching as many of those dishes at her husband's head as she could find excuses to throw them.

Green Roman key pattern around the edge of a salad bowl Anne's grandmother, Vera, had received as a twentieth anniversary gift. Anne set it on its own tea towel after washing it, since its shape didn't allow it to sit well in the dish rack.

Vera had loved flowers and blue-and-white china patterns. The salad bowl was a gift from a thoughtless friend she had a falling-out with a year later. Her husband remained friends with the woman's husband, so she could never throw out the gift, never stop inviting her over for bridge on Saturday evenings. She gave the bowl to Anne as a starting-a-home present.

Handpainted sunflower motif on a serving plate Anne's mother Marilyn had made sometime in the 1960s. The centre of the sunflower was textured to imitate the heavy rounds of seeds in a real plant, and Anne gave that part a good scrub to make sure all the pâté bits were removed from the dimples. She set it in the rack in front of Bridget's roses plate.

Marilyn only took the one ceramics class, a lark to do with her friends that didn't work out when she discovered they all enjoyed it much more than she did. She stuck with it to the end for the social aspects, but the serving plate was the only useful thing she ever made.

The rest of the dishes were in a pink-and-red rose pattern Anne had picked for her own bridal registry. She'd tried to match Bridget's surviving plate as much as possible, over the objections of her husband, who had wanted something with blue or gold in it. It hadn't been a fight exactly, because he'd dropped the issue immediately.

He'd said that if she did the cooking, he should do the washing up. It was only fair, he said. But she didn't trust him after they disagreed on the china pattern. Grandma Vera always said her father was the reason only one of Bridget's plates survived, and Anne had never understood what that meant until John said he wanted to do the washing up. Of course John was careful, but still. But still.

"Mum, we've been sitting around the TV for half an hour. Are you sure you don't want a hand?"

"Just finishing up, Jimmy." She set the last side plate in the rack and rinsed out the sink. "I know they're just things, but so much history gets wrapped up in things. It's heritage, know what I mean?"

How can I when you won't let Rodge or I do anything but eat off them, thought Jim, but he nodded and smiled and handed his mother a fresh tea towel. 

#fridayflash: seeing out the angel

"Land!"

It was good to hear it, but Matthew was too busy feeling ill to look. He and Master Thomas occupied the stern of the little boat, or at least the space between the cooking-stove at the very back and the pile of academic instruments in the exact centre. Mistress Angelica and Foster sat at the bow. No-one could get 'round the gigantic globe mapping the world, so no-one had been able to change places. Even passing plates of food at meal-time involved Thomas leaning out over one side while Matthew leaned out over the other, stretching to reach Foster's waiting hands.

Matthew hadn't partaken of many meals, because everything he swallowed came back up again. Still, his and Foster's lessons had continued. Mistress Angelica told him that while the symptoms were in his stomach, his seasickness was located inside his ears. Matthew suspected, not for the first time, that she and Thomas occasionally made things up to keep him and Foster sceptical apprentices.

He heard Master Thomas say they could see the buildings now, and he eased himself up, using the cold cooking stove as a brace. Thomas and Angelica had both declaimed loud and long about the beauty of the university and the nearby library tower, and Matthew was looking forward to seeing some architecture that was intact.

It was clear that the buildings Thomas was so pleased about belonged to the dead era. Matthew could see they once were very tall, maybe even a hundred storeys, but now they were crumbling and shattered, like everywhere.

"Where's the university?" he said, the words themselves triggering a fresh gush of nausea.

"About a day inland," said Thomas.

Angelica clapped her hands. "Tomorrow morning we'll be sailing over the land."

They've gone insane. We're done for, thought Matthew. He angled himself so he could see around the globe, the better to check Foster's demeanour without tipping the boat. But Foster was facing away from him, leaning forward on the prow as if he'd assigned himself the job of figurehead.

Matthew settled himself deeper into his robes and sulked.

They landed just before nightfall, and spent the night in a gigantic inn Master Thomas informed them had been built as a "shopping mall", whatever that was.

The next morning they navigated their way back to the docks under pale grey light. Angelica and Foster ducked into a grocery stall and emerged laden with dried sausage, hard bread, apples, and cheese. "No cooking with the stove anymore," said Thomas. "Too dangerous."

A block away from the dock, Matthew's nausea returned. There was a strong smell both of dead fish and recently-tanned hide. "What is that?" he said despite himself. Apprentices weren't supposed to ask questions until a teacher introduced a topic.

"It's how we'll complete our journey," said Angelica. "It's a whaleskin turned into a bladder." She giggled.

Thomas chuckled. "We'll use a lodestone and wind maps to travel the rest of the way. Something to remember when you're old professors yourselves, boys."

Matthew heard Foster asking what the whaleskin would be inflated with, but didn't pay attention to the answer. They reached the dock.

Workers had tied ropes to the gunwales and placed the contents of the boat on the dock. The mostly-inflated whaleskin rested on a huge raft the dockworkers had drawn alongside the boat, and Matthew watched them attach one stout cannister of gas after another to a valve located where the whale's mouth must have been.

Some gentle pushing from the workers, and the inflated whaleskin bumped into the air above the boat. The workers added some more ropes to keep the boat attached to the dock itself, and Angelica stepped forward to guide them in the task of replacing all of their gear.

The last item to return to its place was the cooking stove, into which they stowed the food they had just bought.

"All right," said Thomas. "Students in the bow this time. Angelica and I will need to consult together to get us where we're going."

Matthew and Foster clambered into the boat after their tutors. Thomas called out to the workers, who pulled off the ropes attaching them to the dock. The boat rose into the air as if it were too distracted to obey the laws of gravity.

They hung motionless for a moment, just long enough for Matthew to realise they were higher up than he had thought possible. Then the faintest gust of wind propelled them forward.

"The alternative is to change to a donkey wagon," called Thomas from the stern. "It's three days to ride, with highwaymen to worry about and rotten roads to smash the instruments."

The boat meandered through the air, copying the movements of the huge grey clouds that travelled above them. Every time Matthew became certain they would be drenched in rain, sunbeams of faded gold would break through and prove him wrong.

At midday Thomas passed Matthew and Foster some lunch, which they both ate slowly, distracted by the view.

"It's very like when you took us up that mountain, except you can see all around," Matthew shouted.

"Just don't fall out," said Angelica.

They spotted the university and library in the afternoon, and came upon them in the early evening. Matthew was surprised at how far apart the two buildings were, but Angelica explained they were both ancient structures built four hundred years before the dead era, and once an entire city had lain between them. From the vantage point of the boat, Matthew could only see the occasional broken rock.

Matthew's nausea had disappeared once the boat took to the air, but Foster complained he was cold and sat hunched into his robes. As the library tower neared, the clouds over them grew black. Matthew was sure they would get rained upon at last, but the sun slipped below and lit the library up in brass and flame.

Matthew startled to make out a figure standing on the library roof, a woman with long pale hair the evening sunlight made look like real gold.

"That's Elizabeth," said Thomas, "the head librarian. We'll present ourselves to her as soon as we land." He reached over and rang the bell suspended from the belly of the whaleskin, then gave the bell-pull a practised jerk.

The whaleskin gave a loud shushing sound, and the boat drifted down the hill between the library and the university.

Update!

I tried the image drag 'n' drop Google feature Larry Kollar described in the comments, and was able to trace the image back to its original creator, Bartłomiej Jurkowski. You can find the original image and lots of other gorgeous work at his web site.

The image shown here will appear in larger size if you click it. It's from this Flickr stream, which has an "all rights reserved" setting even though it's a collection of images from around the net. Which just goes to show this on-line image management concept has a ways to go.

Also, yes, the title of this comes from the Simple Minds song of the same name. I haven't been able to get it out of my head for days, and weirdly enough it goes with the image.

true believers: inclusion, geek cred, and stan lee

I started reading comic books in earnest when I was about eight. My dad would take me along to the local smoke shop when he went to buy cigarettes, or else my mum would drop by to get a lottery ticket, and if I was good and it wasn't too soon since the last time, I would be allowed to scan the rotating metal rack of comic books and buy one that cost a dollar or less. My mum tried to get me to read what she called "girl's comics" — Richie Rich or Archie & Veronica — but almost always I headed straight for the superhero comics.

Because I never knew when I would be allowed to buy one, I tended to avoid any multi-issue stories. Instead I just went by whichever cover seemed the most interesting. I wound up with random copies of Batman, The Amazing Spider-Man, X-Men, The Phantom, Strange Tales, and loads of others which only lasted a few issues and which I've forgotten the names of.

The teenage boys who hung out at the smoke shop thought it was very amusing that eight-year-old me in my dresses and white knee socks always went for the superhero and supernatural comics, and sometimes they asked me if I liked Marvel or DC better. I always told them Marvel. Truth be told, I was very loyal to some of the DC characters like Batman (Wonder Woman not so much, but that's because I got to see Lynda Carter play her on TV every week, plus see her animated every Saturday morning in Superfriends), but Marvel had one thing that DC didn't, and that was Stan Lee's Soapbox.

The Soapbox was basically a newsletter, telling comic readers what issues to expect next and which members of the Marvel "bullpen" were working on them. Each column had several topics, all of which were prefaced with "ITEM!". The concluding paragraph was always "Excelsior!". Comic readers were "true believers".

What set it apart from other promotional columns (DC sometimes ran one, among others) is that it was completely and utterly hilarious. I usually read it over five or six times before I could make it through without laughing out loud. I found out during the writing of this post that the columns have been collected in a book (might have to look into getting that). If you want a taste of what the style was like, there's some examples on-line at the Marvel web site.

What was amazing about reading the column is that it seemed just as applicable to me, sitting on my bed with my dolls shoved to one side so I'd have room to read, as to the teenage boys back at the smoke shop. You didn't have to have all the appearances of Wolverine memorised to read the column. You didn't have to remember the year issue #1 of X-Men came out. If you spent a lot of time wondering what the Sea Monkeys advertised at the back of the book really looked like or not, you could still read the Soapbox. You just had to be a "true believer", and even at age eight I knew Stan was using that term with a just a bit of hyperbole. The price of admission to the club was a buck for the comic — and if you didn't have that, having the wherewithal to borrow it from your friend who did manage to snag a copy was a good enough substitute.

But now: now agents and publishers complain if an author hasn't "read widely in the genre they are writing in", which seems to translate to "read all the same books the agents and publishers have". Now men at conventions think it's totally okay to judge whether or not a woman is a real geek or a "fake geek girl", completely forgetting that they too could fall down on trivia if asked the right questions. Now "noobs" are derided, as if some people sprung from their mother's womb already knowing the circuitry diagram for the R2D2 costume. Now there are rules about what you can and can't wear to show your geek cred, how fat or thin you can be during cosplay, how much you need to spend on cultural artifacts. You will be judged on whether you saw the first episode of Doctor Who with the new Doctor as it was broadcast, PVRed, or much, much later when you borrow the DVDs off a friend.

And to anyone who thinks anything in that last paragraph actually matters if enough caveats and howevers are layered onto it:

Fuck off.

That's from me now, and from eight-year-old me with the Hollie Hobby doll sitting next to her copy of X-Men. I don't need your approval.

I'm a true believer.

super sweet -- if super slow

Back in June (!), Helen Howell nominated Larry Kollar and myself for the Super Sweet Blogging Award. Like Helen, nominating a baker's dozen of bloggers would be difficult for me, just because frankly most of the people I would nominate have already received (very deservedly) multiple awards.

Here are the questions for the awards, along with my answers:

Cookies or cake? Cake, so long as it's not too goopy. Strawberry shortcake, malt loaf, carrot cake, or angel food cake with fresh fruit are all good.

Vanilla or chocolate? Vanilla, so long as it's the real deal. I don't like chocolate cake at all.

Favourite sweet treat? Depends on the season. For summer, a bowl of ripe cherries is perfect.

When do you crave sweet things the most? Right after a meal, especially if it was strongly flavoured. It doesn't have to be a big dessert though. Usually I just have a piece of fruit.

Sweet nickname? Can't think of any.

Nominations:
I'm going to nominate Jake at Junk Boat Travels and Tara and Artemis and Friends. Not only are they in-real-life friends, but they blog about totally different things than I do, which helps me get out of my head.

#fridayflash: post-op

This is a sequel to the story from two weeks ago.

The way the hospital was designed, it was difficult and confusing for patients to find the waiting room again after a procedure. No-one in staff uniforms seemed inclined to help him, so Dan followed the signs as best he could. After what felt like at least three too many left turns he found the room where Nora said she would wait for him.

He found Nora slumped on a hard plastic chair, holding a paper cup of what was probably waiting-room coffee. She was so locked away in her thoughts that he had to call her name four times before she looked up. She brightened, but it was the brightness of sunlight hitting a glass wind chime.

"I'm declared healthy," he said. "They did find something, but they did a procedure right away and I'm all right now."

"Procedure? What procedure?"

He held out his hand. "Want to get breakfast?"

She shrugged and stood up. "If you think you're up to it."

"I'm starving. Let's go."

They walked out of the hospital. Nora led him down the street where they had spotted a promising-looking diner earlier.

"I parked the truck in front of it. They had a few spots behind the hospital, but it was so abandoned-feeling, and the chargers didn't work anymore. It didn't feel safe." She paused. "They have a sign saying the chargers are part of the 'authentic nostalgia'. But they still work."

"Of course," said Dan. "They wouldn't be authentic otherwise."

Nora laughed with a sincerity that pleased him.

The diner did evoke a kind of authentic nostalgia as they walked in and found an empty booth. The seats were upholstered in something much like the vinyl Dan remembered from his childhood. The menus displayed on the table's surface took the gloss of the touch screen into account, the better to emulate the plastic-laminated paper of old.

Dan immediately tapped an order for the special, adding a bottle of water as an afterthought. Nora flipped through the whole menu and then wound up ordering the special anyhow.

"Do you think these are real vinyl?" said Nora, rubbing the seat cushion.

"My guess is vat-grown leather. They can get it awfully close to plastic these days." Dan stared out window at their truck, as if he expected it to drive away on its own.

"So you had a procedure," Nora prompted.

Dan's gaze shifted towards where the hospital stood. "Dr. Zavic was right. But," he added, wagging a finger at Nora's stricken face, "the procedure got rid of it."

"Rid of it," Nora said.

"Yeah. I had cancer this morning, and now I don't."

"Just like that? What about follow-up visits?"

"They said I had to drink lots of water for a week and follow this healthy living plan they were going to e-mail me..." Dan fished his device out of his coat pocket and glanced at it. "I got something... yeah, that's it. If you don't mind driving back, I can read it in the truck maybe."

"I don't mind." Dan glanced up as he tucked his device away again. Nora still looked troubled. "What did they do? You were away for less than an hour."

The server — an authentic human being, not the robots like most diners had — arrived with their coffees and Dan's water. "They teleport you. First she scanned me as if she was going to teleport me, but didn't. That let them look for the cancer. Then they teleport you for real, but they just put you back in the same place, minus the cancer part."

"Right, my brother had his appendix out that way two years ago," the server said, setting the drinks on the table. "That's still a pretty new use of the technology."

"But you must have an incision or, or something?" said Nora.

"No. I can kind of feel something's different, but that's it."

"It's really cool," said the server. "My brother's appendix burst on the way to the operating room, and they were still able to fix him up without cutting him open. By the way, is that your truck outside?"

Nora confirmed it was.

"Thought I saw you parking it earlier," the server said to Nora. "You two didn't want to teleport to the hospital?"

Dan shrugged. "Nearest 'port is almost all the way here. By the time we reached it, it made more sense to just keep driving."

"You're farmers?"

"Sixth generation. We were independent, then we worked for Agrisanto. Now they're tanked we own the land and we're independent again."

"I guess that's why you need a truck." A chime sounded from the kitchen area. "That'll be your meals. I'll be right back."

"You'd think these townies had never seen a truck before," said Dan.

"I haven't seen any except for ours," said Nora. "Some bicycles, but no trucks or cars. I guess they're weird now."

Dan grimaced and added milk to his coffee. He stirred the milk in slowly, concentrating on the task.

"You're not telling me something," said Nora. "Did they find something else in the scan?"

"What?" said Dan. "Oh, no, nothing like that." He set the spoon down with exaggerated care on the saucer. "I was just thinking... they can convert a human being to data and then convert them back again, minus whatever they don't want. What can they do with other stuff?"

"Like what?"

"Anything. Remember those spaceships in those old films my grandfather liked? Space Trek or something?"

"Star Trek, wasn't it?"

"Maybe. But their food just came out of those little oven things..."

"Here you go. Two specials." The server set their plates in front of them. "Condiments on the side there. Enjoy. Let me know if you need anything else." The server gave a professional smile and returned to the kitchen.

"Looks good." Nora picked up her fork and glanced at Dan's plate. Then she frowned and set the fork down again.

"What's wrong?"

"Look..." Nora turned her plate so the food was oriented the same way as Dan's.

The food on the two plates was identical in every way.

teleportation

Von Braun had his rockets, Asimov the three laws of robotics... I've got into teleportation. Partly this is because I live in a city that's rated as one of the worst in the world for commuting in. Partly it's because I'm a big fan of public transportation.

Partly it's because I wish humans would think things through better before they go off and build. Teleportation technology is in its infancy now; now is the time to think the ethics through.

The biggest technological constraint you'll see in these stories is that I decided to go with an engineering solution closer to what was depicted in The Fly than in Star Trek. The teleportation system has dedicated arrival and departure pads — you can't just teleport off to anywhere you have the "co-ordinates" for, and you can't arrive and depart from the same pads (although in terms of practical construction, they tend to be built right next to each other in the stories).

You can use this list to read through the stories, or filter on the teleportation label.

• Freedom
• The Timeline
• Newsmagazine Story
• Newsmagazine Story v2
• The First
• Data-driven
• Morning
• Malfunction  
• A Long Trip
• Edited 

look! ew. depiction versus promotion

This post has been simmering for a while, but it's inspired by things like this*:

• People dismissing Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy as a "rape fantasy".
• The inside cover of a paperback edition of The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. Instead of the usual blurbs from glowing reviews of the hardcover edition, the publishers had chosen to use blurbs denouncing the novel as perverse, calling for its banning and for Banks' incarceration.
• I don't know if his publisher ever thought to use them as blurbs, but what happened to Banks had already happened to JG Ballard.
• An article giving an overview of Stephen King's writing career, noting that there was a period earlier on where he was accused of... ghoulishness, for lack of a better word.

What connects the dots? All of these authors write strong, graphic, disturbing stories. Sometimes, as with The Wasp Factory, most of the disturbing scenes feature the protagonist as the instigator of the horrors. In other stories like the Millennium trilogy, the protagonist doesn't start the conflict, but she finishes it — in kind.

Sir Philip Sidney argued that the purpose of fiction/poetry is to "teach and delight". I once had a story of mine criticised at a writer's group for failing to include a moment of moral redemption at the end. The critic insisted that a story wasn't complete until the reader got to see the protagonist learn from the error of their ways.

There's another way of doing it, of course. Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is a great example: the writer doesn't break tone to overtly moralise within the work. Instead, they arrange things so the reader is the one made aware of the wrong. It's a somewhat trickier path to walk down, because one has to have faith that the reader will be thoughtful and reflective enough to come to the hoped-for realisation, but when successful it is often more effective than overt lecturing.

Larsson is on the record for using the "show-don't-lecture" approach in the Millennium trilogy (okay, yes, some characters get used as mouthpieces, especially in the last book. This is a blog post, not a thesis). He definitely didn't set out to promote the brutal rape of wards of the state by their appointed guardians.

As for the rest of my list: authors can and have defended themselves in three basic ways. They can say that they wished to evoke repulsion in their readers for the purposes of teaching — a negative example rather than a positive one. They can claim that their emphasis was on "delighting", rather than "teaching" their readers. Or they can claim that they believe the Sir Philip approach to be wrong, and that there is more to literature than the imparting of morals.

Their detractors — the people who call for the books to be banned, and for the authors to be incarcerated and/or committed to the insane asylum — argue that not only have the authors failed to not provide positive examples, but they are promoting the negative, immoral behaviour by writing about it in the first place. And because these promotions of immoral behaviour are also immensely popular, they are an influence. And not only must that influence be stopped, but its creators must be punished.

Not surprisingly, since I'm writing this post, I come down on the side of the authors. I've never seen any evidence that describing the world solely in terms of sunshine and lollipops ever made it a better place. On the other hand, "A Modest Proposal" is remembered today for its effectiveness as an argument as much for its audacity.

I'm also very uncomfortable with the idea that anyone who writes something ugly or disturbing "enjoys" it and wants to promote it. Sometimes ugly gets written about because if it isn't, it will be hidden. To write only of sunshine and lollipops while at the same time decrying anyone who chooses to write about anything else to is steep oneself in an awful lot of denial. If you want to write about sunshine and lollipops, go for it, but don't think that gives you the right to piss in the cornflakes of someone who chooses to go about depicting their truth differently.

* Funny thing about the list at the top of this post — I wanted to include some women authors to even things up... but I couldn't think of any. I even called the ever-resourceful J-A, since she reads a lot of horror (horror writers tend to get targeted for this kind of hate), and she couldn't think of any either. We ran search queries on every major woman horror, science fiction, fantasy, and "controversial topic" writer we could think of for the better part of an hour and came up absolutely empty.

That's not to say there wasn't any hate out there for women authors. There was loads of hate. The difference was that no-one seemed to be calling for these women to be put in jail or the insane asylum for writing strong, disturbing content. That included a couple of major women authors we thought of who have been accused of promoting Satanism.

If you have any ideas on what the difference is  — why men authors seem to get the "lock 'em up" response more  — please leave a comment about it!

#fridayflash: goldfincher

The windows of the B&B Enterprises office tower ran the full height of every floor, and, like all office tower windows these days, they were mirrored on the outside so as to be tinted on the inside. On a bright day with not too many clouds in the sky, the windows could be counted on to confuse at least two or three birds.

Gordon only flinched a little, then, when a bird flew into his cubicle window and bounced off with a very solid thunk sound. He finished formatting the columns in the profit-and-loss summary he was working on before he glanced out the window to check on the bird's status. If it was lying dead or injured on the ledge, he'd have to call Real Estate Services to get someone in a window-washer's bucket to sweep it off. Company policy was that any animals found dead or injured on or in the building were to be reported immediately so they could be cleaned up. This policy had come into effect after the incident in the fifth-floor men's room between Director Fraser and the sewer rat.

Gordon startled when he saw that the bird was neither dead nor injured. The bird seemed to be in rude good health for a small creature that had just collided with the side of an office building. The feathers on its yellow body and black-barred wings were all in place, and it looked through the window with a thoughtful expression in its obsidian eyes. Gordon felt like it was inspecting him as its little yellow head twitched from side to side, observing him from all angles.

"Can it see us?" he said to no-one in particular.

"Can what see us?" said Angela, his nearest cubicle-neighbour. She popped her head up over the divider to see what Gordon was doing and spotted the bird. "Awwww!"

"Don't move around too much. I don't want to scare it," said Gordon.

"Get your cell phone! Take a picture! Or wait, I'll get mine." Angela dropped back into the depths of her cubicle. Gordon slowly took his phone off his work table and got it into position, but the bird left before he could key the lock combination and turn on the camera.

The bird came around the same time the next day, and the day after that. Co-workers  made a point of dropping by Gordon's desk around when the bird was meant to show up, cell phones at the ready. The bird got caught on camera a few times, but the shots were all dim and blurry.

Director Fraser teased Gordon about his new "assistant". Fred from Accounts Payable declared the bird was an escaped canary, and that it would surely die once winter came. Stan from IT said it was a goldfinch, and not a domestic bird at all.

"How would you know?" said Fred.

"I go birdwatching on the weekends," said Stan. "My parents got me into it when I was a little kid. It's their favourite hobby."

"I guess that's why you have an opinion about it," said Fred. "But I think it's a canary. But, you know," he added when Stan opened his mouth to protest, "we're all entitled to our own opinions. It's just a bird. It doesn't matter."

Stan left, muttering something under his breath about goldfinches.

The bird appeared on the window ledge outside of Gordon's cubicle every day for two weeks. On that last Friday, it alighted just as Gordon was e-mailing his profit-and-loss report. He hit "send" and turned to say hello to the bird. The bird looked him side-to-side one last time, then flew away.

"That was a short visit," Angela said from the other side of the cubicle divider.

"I still can't decide if he can see inside or not," said Gordon. "Maybe the cloud patterns are a little different today. Might be throwing off his game."

"It's still a beautiful day," said Angela.

"It is," said Gordon. "Do you want to hit a patio after work? Quick dinner and a beer?"

Angela thought that was a great idea.

The bird flew over the vacant lot next door to the office tower, over the ravine with the underpass to the shopping mall, over the professional services development centre. It shifted course to fly over a set of identical white-sided townhouses, and flew into an open second-storey window in one of them. Once inside, it alighted on a computer workstation desk and walked across it to a small metal plate. The bird froze the moment both feet were on the plate. Somewhere downstairs a bell chimed.

There was the sound of a heavy tread on the stairs, and then a man entered the workroom. "Welcome home," he said to the bird, giving the top of its head a light pat. He pushed on the bird's black-feathered forehead, which made the lower jaw drop open. Where the bird's tongue should have been was a micro USB port.

The man plugged the loose end of a USB cable into the port in the bird's mouth, then turned his attention to the computer monitor. Images of Gordon's cubicle appeared. Most of the images were too grey to register much, but his computer screen was bright and sharp.

The man zoomed in on one image. "Interesting," he said.

A few images later he began to laugh.

worlds beyond these: some final thoughts

Please note this is non-fiction. Don't worry; I have no intention of bleeding all over the keyboard.

This post is the fourth and final in a series. If you haven't read any of the other posts, at least have a quick read of Part 1. You may want to also read Part 2 and Part 3.

To sum up the previous three posts:

• The five stages of grief are, in no particular order, Denial, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance, and Anger.
• Not all grieving people go through all five stages.
• Some non-grieving people will go through one or more of the five stages when they discover someone else is a survivor.

Now, here's the fun part. Once I actually started this blog series and mentioned what I was writing about, I found out from someone I know who does grief counselling that the five stages.... are bogus. They're not the five stages of grief at all. There is no such thing as the five stages of grief.

What happened was someone defined them as the five stages of a patient dealing with a traumatic health event: a major stroke, say, or an amputation. Someone else stole the idea and applied it to grief. Except, while there is some overlap, they're not really about grief.

So when the grieving family gets back from the funeral home and the casserole the neighbour brought over is warming up in the oven, please do me and all the other survivors in this world a favour and don't make noises about the five stages. They are a fairy tale, and my own subjective experience tells me they do more harm than good. They make people who are already going through grief feel like they have to respond in certain ways that aren't even necessarily applicable.

The stages of grief that Western society has internalised since at least the 1980s are fiction. They have nothing to do with actual grief.

What if you are trying to write actual fiction? How does death and survival and grief fit in?

What bothers me the most about survivors in fiction is that grief tends to be a Chekhov's gun sort of thing. That is, it's only mentioned when it's going to become a plot point or the cause for a character trait. There are precious few major examples in fiction where someone has a dead relative just by-the-bye. At best, they're orphans to deny them a safety net of support.

When death and grieving do get mentioned, they tend to be what's called "complicated grief", which is another thing I learnt about while writing this series. Complicated grief is when someone is so overwhelmed by their grief that they can't function. People with complicated grief wind up taking time off work for months at a time. Grieving is an unusually long and difficult process for them.

Real-life people going through real-life complicated grief deserve support and empathy, but unfortunately for the majority of us who have "regular" grief (whatever that really is), complicated grief tends to show up in fiction more prominently. Think  of Hamlet's behaviour after his father's death, or Lear screaming on stage with Cordelia in his arms. Everyone I know who has gone through, um, "uncomplicated" grief has stories about being told they're "heartless" or "didn't really love" their deceased relative because they haven't been seen in public wailing and tearing their hair out.

And you know what? It's not fair, and it makes a difficult situation worse for those dealing with death and loss. It's a great example of a situation where fictional conventions overwhelm psychological reality.

One of the few examples of regular grief done well I can think of is in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, where Laura decides to reconcile with Rob in part because she just wants a break from feeling awful. Grieving is often like that. You can go out, watch a funny film, enjoy it, then go home and spot the dead person's favourite coffee mug on the draining board and just fall apart. A lot of people are perfectly fine getting through their day-to-day lives at school or work, and then they go home and cry. They're not "hiding how they feel", or "putting on a brave face for the world". They're just doing what comes naturally.

On the other hand, there's also this weird pressure to "get over it". Grief counsellors I'm in contact with have told me stories about clients getting told to "snap out of it" one week after the unexpected death of a close relative. This too gets depicted in fiction a lot. A character will grieve just long enough to make the reader feel sorry for them, and then they shift gears and move onto whatever the next emotional prompt is. Maybe there will be some mentions of the death sprinkled later on in the book for continuity.

The consensus is that there is no "getting over it" per se. Most people say they have adjusted to a new version of reality. There is no going back.

Running in a weird parallel with the "get over it" attitude is the threat that if you don't "get over it", you'll somehow be forever messed up and wind up with "issues".

Personally I'm uncomfortable with the idea of "changed" being equated to "messed up" once death enters the mix. Yes, there's some things I'm not into because my dad died when I was thirteen. I will never, ever watch Mamma Mia or anything else with a  "search for my real dad so I can be walked down the aisle by him at my wedding" plot. My father died exactly one week before Father's Day, so I tend to arrange my errands so I don't have to go out a lot when the Father's Day sales are in full swing.

But there's crippling personality traits based on past trauma, and then there's quirks. The fictional Indiana Jones certainly seemed to be a well-functioning character despite a strong phobia for snakes.

So I'm going to wrap this series up by challenging writers to step up their efforts to depict grief more accurately. If you want a resource, I strongly recommend reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. It's a doorstop — the copy I read was over 1,000 pages — but it's worth it, it's a great read, and you can always skim the parts that don't touch you. There are more than enough wonderful passages in it to make up for the skimmed parts.

#fridayflash: edited

"You can just leave your clothes in this bin, Dan. Once you have the examination gown on, you want to go through the door with the green light over it." The nurse pointed with one hand while holding out the hospital gown with the other.

"What's this thing made of?" Dan said, taking the examination gown and rubbing his thumb callouses over the material.

"Cotton-rich paper. It's disposable."

Dan grunted. "I suppose they get ground up and composted."

"Something like that." The nurse went through a door with a red light over it.

"Asshole," said Dan under his breath while he unbuttoned his shirt.

Dan finished undressing and pulled the hospital gown over his head. He was relieved to discover it was closed at the back, just shaped like a giant t-shirt. He folded his clothes, put them in the bin like the nurse had said, and went through the green-lit door.

The room beyond was larger than he expected, and mostly empty. In the centre was a black rectangle of some rubbery stuff with plexiglass walls around it on three sides. Beyond that was a table supporting an array of display monitors and other electronics. A young woman sat on the far side of the machines. She barely glanced up at the sound of the door swinging shut behind Dan.

"Mr. Hodge?" she said.

"Yes ma'am. And you are...?"

"I'm the diagnostician. You can call me Sherry." She waved her arm towards the rubber flooring.

"What do you need me to do?" said Dan.

"Step into the 'porter so I can complete the scan," said Sherry.

"Por... is that thing a teleporter?"

Sherry looked at Dan directly for the first time. "Of course it is. But a medical one."

"Where are you sending me?"

"You're not leaving this room until the examination is completed. Now please, step on. I have a lot of appointments to complete today."

Dan set his feet shoulders-width apart and folded his arms. It was a stance, he thought ruefully, that was a lot more effective when he was in his work gear and telling off seasonal workers than when he was wearing a paper gown trying to deal with a medical... android. Whatever she was. He made sure he was scowling.

"Lady," he said, "I'm not stepping anywhere until you explain to me what the hell you're going to do with this carcass of mine."

Sherry blinked rapidly several times. "I am going to scan you, but not dematerialise you. Medical 'porters aren't hooked up to any network. Once your data is scanned, the system will analyse it and report any anomalies."

"And then?"

"I'll verify the system's diagnosis and discuss any necessary treatment with you."

"Well, that last part sounds like it will be lots of fun." Dan stepped into the teleporter. "Will any of this hurt?"

"No, it's just a scan. It will feel like you're being teleported, but you won't go anywhere."

"Never been teleported."

"What?" Sherry gawped at him. "How did you get here?"

"Same way I get anywhere — my '63 Ford F-150 Solar. My wife's trying to find a place to park it right now."

"I think there's still some parking in the back..."

"We figured. We're farmers. We're used to having to find somewhere to park."

"Try to hold still. I'm going to scan you now."

Dan saw a flash of white light. Sherry gave quick little taps to the different keyboards arrayed in front of her.

"How long before the scanning starts?"

"Already happened. Just stay where you are, Mr. Hodge... " She pushed a button on one of the control panels. "Have you been urinating blood at all, Mr. Hodge?"

"That's exactly what I've been doing. That's why I went and saw my doctor."

"You have bladder cancer. It hasn't metastasised yet — if it had, there'd be more alarm indicators on the scan."

"Cancer?" Dan felt his knees go weak.

"Why don't you sit on the gurney over there, Mr. Hodge." Sherry pointed to the wall adjacent to the change room.

Dan stumbled to the gurney and sat down. "Cancer," he repeated.

"Yes. The markers are quite definite." Sherry tapped a few more commands into one of the keyboards. "With your permission, I'll edit it out before you leave today."

"Wha?"

Sherry took a deep breath. "You lie down on the gurney, and I wheel you back onto the 'porter. This time we do dematerialise you, but when we rematerialise you half a second later, we don't include any of the cancerous or precancerous cells. It'll feel just like the scan, but you might experience some déjà vu. Are you comfortable with that?"

Dan shook his head. "But how do we treat the cancer?"

"I just told you, Mr. Hodge. The editing procedure removes it."

"What if you take out something you're not supposed to?"

"The system only edits out cells with the DNA markers for cancer. Also, we do another scan immediately after the procedure to verify the data and confirm there are no other health issues. Lie down on the gurney please."

Dan hesitated, then stretched out on the gurney. Sherry strode over, took the brake off the gurney wheels, and pushed the gurney into the teleporter. She checked the gurney's positioning and applied the brake. "Just lie still," she said.

Dan heard her walk back to the control table. He wanted to ask her about the other risks in treatment, but before he could he saw one flash, then another.

"Verifying," said Sherry. Dan concentrated on his bladder. Something felt odd, but nothing hurt.

"Successful. No perforations. Get up when you're ready, Mr. Hodge, and try to drink lots of water for the next week or so. As much water as you can stand."

Dan eased himself into a sitting position slowly. "How do I make sure this doesn't come back again? The cancer."

"The hospital will e-mail you a healthy living guide. You can return through the door you came in, Mr. Hodge. If you don't mind, I'm running late and need to attend to my next patient."

worlds beyond these: part 3 (penultimate posting)

Please note this is non-fiction. Don't worry; I have no intention of bleeding all over the keyboard.

If you haven't read Part 1 of this series, you might want to go back and at least read the introduction before continuing here. There's also a Part 2.

Parts 1 and 2 got the crazy, ugly, incredulous reactions out of the way. This post covers reactions which are a lot more understandable, and which are a lot easier to generate empathy for.

Depression

It happens. A survivor could be having a perfectly nice conversation with someone, and they'll say something like, "How long have your parents been married now?"

And so you explain, as briefly and with as little drama as possible, and the person you're having the conversation with falls apart.

I have made people cry by merely saying, "My dad died when I was thirteen." I was just giving information; it was not my intention to make them cry, and they weren't looking for an excuse to.

All that's happening is that the person is so able to imagine the same thing happening to them they have a grief reaction. All you can do is reassure them and, if necessary, change the subject.

Anger

I mentioned in Part 1 my dad died of a heart attack. While the exact cause was never determined, he smoked. He had a lot of work stress. Even though he was strongly against any and all junk food (including a lot of food which isn't even thought of as "junk food" in North America), he had trouble keeping his weight at healthy levels.

Starting about ten years after he passed away (so around 1993), I began to encounter people who would quiz me for health details. Once the ones I enumerated in the previous paragraph came to light, they would declare he was a bad father who should have taken better care of himself. They would say he was no better than a father who willfully abandons his children.

I will not provide my entire counter-argument here, but I will say it is not for them to decide how fit a parent he was.

I always wonder what has happened to these people that they feel so strongly about passing judgement on someone they never met.

Bargaining

Sometimes when people learn what happened, they don't become sad or angry. They become fascinated with hypotheticals.

"What do you think your life would be like it that hadn't happened?"

"Do you think it was harder on you or on your brothers?"

"How much do you think that affects you today?"

The answer to all of the above is that I don't know, and that I'm not sure they're even answerable.

Onwards

Those who have been keeping track of the phases will know I left out "acceptance". I can't think of anything to discuss there — people just say something along the lines of "I'm sorry" and then things move on.

The series wraps up next week with some reflections — including some things I learned as I wrote these posts.

I'm also going to tie this back to fiction writing, both to plotting and to characterisation. But more on that next week.

#fridayflash: float on

What everyone forgot was that the city was built on water in the first place. The entire downtown used to be a river delta criss-crossed by creeks and rivers. After the epidemics of the mid-nineteenth century, the waterways were forced underground and integrated with the brand-new municipal sewer system.

Some of the rivers were already underground. They just discovered a new one about ten years ago, a leftover glacier channel created during the last Ice Age. The water is very cold, very clean, and very old. It flows about ten metres underground, through a layer of gravel deposited ten thousand years ago. The rate of flow is about a metre per year.

Two days ago there was what they're calling a "fifty-year flood." More water fell in six hours than the city normally gets in four weeks this time of year, and there was severe enough flooding to close every major highway and thoroughfare, for the very straightforward reason that they were all underwater. Basements were drowned; King Street was navigated by kayak.

Fifty-year flood is a nice, romantic way of putting it, but everyone forgets. Ten years ago there was a rainstorm so sudden and intense the water fell in ropes, and a three-metre sinkhole opened right in the middle of Eglinton Avenue. That's eight kilometres from the lake on supposedly high ground, in a relatively new part of town. In fact, the older neighbourhoods and buildings tended to do a little better, because they were built in eras when developers weren't so cocksure they could out-engineer nature.

In the west end, at the line where the city proper ends and the inner suburbs begin, a man went to parallel park his car on the street yesterday. He owns an underground parking spot in a nearby condominium highrise, but of course he couldn't use it because the parking garage was flooded. He was the first one to report the curb and sidewalk had shifted about twenty centimetres to the south.

At first it looked like there had been small earthquake as well as a flood, but as city inspectors traced the fault line, they realised what was happening. The water underground isn't just rising. It's lifting. It's rotating.

The entire city sits on a bed of water, and has become a floating island.

The engineers tell us that the displacement must be immense, and that the shifting will be minimal. Eventually, they say, the water will drain into the lake and the city will settle again. Buildings near the island's edge may experience some structural damage in the foundations, but overall it won't be anything major.

But everyone forgets. That's what they always say.

worlds beyond these: part 2 & some reflections

Please note this is non-fiction. Don't worry; I have no intention of bleeding all over the keyboard.

If you haven't read Part 1 of this series, you might want to go back and at least read the introduction before continuing here.

Li and John both commented that it would be a good idea to mark these as non-fiction. I've added it as a label, and put a note up top here and in Part 1 as well.

Part 2 is the second and last example dealing with denial. It's a little harder to explain, because unlike Part 1's example, I'm pretty sure I never got to witness the worst of it. It's sort of like reading a novel where the protagonist keeps on noticing people playing cards, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything until two weeks later when you're trying to describe the book to a friend. I didn't put everything together until years after all these little snapshots of interactions occurred.

Part 2: More Denial

Snapshot A: church
I'm thirteen, my one brother is ten, and my youngest brother is four. So after my dad passes away, when it's communion-time at church, my mum goes up first, and then when she returns to the pew I go up with my ten-year-old brother. That way there's always someone old enough to be responsible with the four-year-old. Nothing more to it than that.

Except...

The whole time my mum is standing in line at the front of the church, the people behind us are whispering things like: "That's not allowed. A divorced woman taking communion... that's not allowed. Why doesn't the priest do something about it? Why doesn't he talk to her? Who does she think she is? I suppose it's the modern way... but it's not allowed. Well, if the priest wants to help her pretend..."

It was an open casket visitation. The obit was in the local paper. There was a church funeral. There was a condolences notice in the church newsletter. There were In Memoriam masses which were also announced in the church newsletter.
Even if they missed all that — Catholic congregations are big around here and you don't get to know everyone — there's no excuse.

I could have had a dad who was disabled and found it too difficult to physically make it to church.

I could have had a dad who wasn't Catholic but who agreed that the kids would be raised Catholic.

But no. They had to go there.

Snapshot B: music class interrogations
There's a girl, let's call her Vera, in music class. I only met her when I started high school. But she knows about me and my family a little bit, because her family is friends with my mum's hairdresser.

A couple of times a week, when we're getting our musical instruments out of their cubbyholes or putting them back, she asks me questions.

"Does your mum wear makeup?" she says.

"Lipstick."

"So, would you say your mum wears a lot of makeup?"

"Just lipstick."

"Do you think your mum is pretty?"

"She was a model in high school."

"You're lying."

"She wasn't a famous model. She modelled clothes from home sewing patterns."

"Did your dad know how to cook?"

"Yeah. He was good at it."

She laughs at me. "Oh yeah, sure. Hamburgers and hot dogs."

"His first job in Canada was working as a cook."

And on. Sometimes I'll interrupt her and ask what the point of all these questions is. She shrugs and acts like they're no big deal. They aren't presented like I've written them here — just one or two a day, a few times a week — but if the same question was asked more than once and I varied in my answer at all, I'd get grilled on it.

She says her hairdresser contact gave a different answer than mine. I ask her what the hell business it is of any of them and tell her I'm tired of being mined for gossip.

She says she just wants to know and that she doesn't mean anything by it.

The thing is, the incidents I described in Part 1 only started after the questions started. And Natasha and Vera knew each other.

I understand that there was a time (in some places that time is now) where a family that's been abandoned by one or the other parent will pretend the absent parent is dead. I get that. But I doubt very much that these pretending families will go through such an elaborate charade that they'll find a body to display at a funeral home for a couple of days, hold a church funeral for it, and convince the priests in two parishes to go along with the story.

Reading this post over again, it sounds like these things happened in a much smaller community than they did. We lived just outside of a small town until I was ten, but before my father passed away we moved to a suburb of 300,000 people. There were 1,800 people attending my high school the year I graduated, and the students who went there lived in two different municipal counties. The church where my dad's funeral was held had over 2,000 people in the parish.

There is a line where assumptions turn to malice. And I think these examples show two points that line intersects.

#fridayflash: the gardener

No warning, just as bloody usual. That simpering boy the Baron calls his valet is so used to waking me in the middle of the night, he even knows when and where to jump back when my stiletto hand thrashes out.

"Same as before," he says, skipping the more flowery message the Baron gave him to repeat. He stopped that after I threw him to the ground and threatened to shove the stiletto up his nose for wasting my time.

I pull my tool bag out from under the cot. "Clean or dirty?"

"The Baron said clean if you can manage it. He said there will be a state funeral."

My room's as dark as the inside of a dead cow, but lighting a lamp would waste time and draw attention. I retrieve two vials of poison from the sack by feel, and tuck the stiletto into a sleeve.

"Tell me," I say, reaching for my boots.

"Two," says the boy. "A nobleman and his mistress, already asleep. I'll lead you there."

"You always do," I say. "Let's get it over with. The beans need staking up tomorrow."

We leave my room at the back of the garden-shed and walk with light feet on the flagstone path. It's too overcast for the moon or the stars to show the way. Something squishes under the toe of my boot, so now I know I have slugs to deal with on top of everything else.

The boy leads me to one of the guest houses that lay hidden in the forest beside the castle grounds. They're supposed to be secluded, but the dozens of servants who work for the Baron all know where they are.

The door from the great stone patio to the dining-hall has been left unlocked; we slip in, and almost wake the entire household when the boy trips on the rug. I yank him back by his collar to keep him upright, and we creep up the stairs.

The second-floor corridor has a torch lit in a wall-sconce, so at least we can see our way. The master bedroom is at the end of the hall.

The open doorway lets me see a man — my main target — asleep on his side, facing the door. His body blocks the view of the mistress, but all is quiet, so I figure I'll risk it. I nod at the boy to watch the door and tiptoe in.

The first part of the job is simple enough. Since the nobleman is on his side, I unstopper the appropriate vial and carefully pour the contents down his ear. Then I hold his nose and mouth closed in case he wakes up and tries to complain about the concoction eating out his head. He spasms a little but dies before he wakes up fully. I can smell he pissed himself on the way out, but that doesn't count against a "clean" job. The Baron just wants something that will be pretty for the state funeral. A body that needs washing fits the bill.

The mistress stirs beside the corpse, so I hurry to the other side of the bed. She's lying on her back, and I get the feeling she'll wake up at any moment, so I press her forehead down firmly with one hand and shove the stiletto up one of her nostrils with the other. She gasps awake as the steel touches her upper lip, but it's piercing her brain before she can cry out.

There. Done right quick and both clean. I wipe the stiletto off on the bedsheets and return to the doorway. The boy glances a question to me and I nod back an answer.

I know he hates this part. He has to confirm they're both dead. I've never messed  up that part of a job, but supposedly it was a problem with the last unlucky wretch who held the post.

The boy returns, and even in the torchlight he looks a bit green. He just never learns to have a stomach for the checking. I shrug, he looks like he's going to say something, but in the end he just starts down the hall, which means I'm free to follow him.

Just before we get back to my room the clouds part, and the moon comes out. We hurry into the shadows and my room.

"He said to give you this," says the boy, pulling a small leather bag from his satchel. It will have the usual number of coins in it. "This too," he adds, and hands me a small wineskin. I open it. It doesn't have wine, just flat ale.

"Good," I say, "I'll feed this to the slugs. They love beer so much they're willing to drown in it. At least they die happy and leave my raspberry bushes alone."

"How did you wind up killing people at night if you're the gardener?" the boy says. The way it pours out of him, it sounds like he's been waiting a long time to ask.

I shrug and sniff at the aroma of ale coming out of the wineskin before replacing the stopper. "The Baron saw me wring the neck on a chicken one day and asked if I could do the same to a man. You know the Baron. He doesn't like it when he asks a question and the answer is 'no'."

"But you're a gardener. You make life."

I snort. "When I was your age, I let a cucumber rot where it grew. And you know what happened? All these little cucumber seedlings came up, too many for them all to live. They crowded each other to death. But if I'd picked that cucumber like I should have, someone would have eaten it. No new cucumber plants from eating. I make life, but I make death too. That's what gardening is."

I pull my boots off and lie back on my cot. "Be off now. I told you I have to stake up those beans tomorrow morning, and the Baron will be wanting to be dressed sooner than you might be ready for."

The boy looks like he wants to say something else, but he leaves anyhow.

I think about drinking the ale to put me to sleep, but something smelled off about it. I tuck my stiletto in its usual sleeve, and fall asleep dreaming of a slug-free broccoli patch.

worlds beyond these: introduction & part 1

Please note this is non-fiction. Don't worry; I have no intention of bleeding all over the keyboard.

I've been wanting to write this for ten years. Just be forewarned that it's not about what you're going to think it's about from the next couple of paragraphs.

What it's not about is: death, grieving, my dad. Really.

Note, though, that the five stages of grief as outlined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler are, in no particular order, Denial, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance, and Anger.

Note also these bare personal facts: my father passed away thirty years ago this past 12 June. He had two heart attacks in one day, it was sudden, and there was no prior medical history to lead us to expect this might happen.

He had just turned forty-eight on 27 May.

I was thirteen years old, and my brothers were ten and four.

But that is not what this series of articles is about.

At the funeral home, at the funeral itself, in the months that followed, we got to hear a lot about those five stages of grief, got to have our every mood and emotional reaction pegged as one of the five.

No-one mentioned one very remarkable thing, though: that those five stages are not just about what you and the other loved ones of the deceased go through. Other people who have never met the person who passed away react the same way. And that's when things can get very, very weird.

This series isn't about me. It's about everyone else.

Because it's about everyone else, I've changed names for the usual reasons. The point isn't to embarrass anyone, although in the case I'm covering in Part 2, I'd like to. The point is to consider other viewpoints.

Some of these examples are understandable. The trick for the survivor is just to ensure they're ready for it when it happens.

Some of these examples are as inexcusable as they are unbelievable. Those are the ones I'm putting first.

Part 1: Denial

It is two years after the funeral. I'm in the second year of high school, as is a classmate I've known since before. One day we're in the corridor at lunchtime, talking to a mutual friend whose parents are divorced. The mutual friend mentions she's going to see her dad on the weekend. He lives in another city now, so she only sees him a few times a year.

Natasha, my classmate, turns to me and says, "How often do you see your dad?"

"Pardon?" I say. The question doesn't make any sense.

"Doesn't he have visitation rights?" she presses.

"Visitation rights?"

She rolls her eyes. "Well, I don't think that's right. He's still your dad, and you should be able to see him when you want to."

I finally catch up. "Natasha," I say, "He's dead."

"Whatever," she says, and flounces off with the mutual friend.

There's more to it than that. Not only was Natasha at the recreation centre where my dad had his initial heart attack, not only did she see him borne on a stretcher into an ambulance, but she represented my class at the funeral. She was front-and-centre for the entire event, but here we are two years later, and she's asking about visitation rights. When I confront her later and remind her about the funeral, she just keeps repeating "I don't remember that", as if it makes it true.

Two years later again we're both in senior year and she tells me that once I turn eighteen, any visitation restrictions are null and void. I remind her again of the truth, again she claims not to have lived through her part, and we're back in our starting positions.

Part 2 and a reflection on Parts 1 & 2 will be posted next week.

gang-a-gley

This was the plan: Shelve the Tilly with the Others serial once it got to #50 (and its conclusion, natch), work on something else, and then start turning Tilly into a novel starting 1 June.

It was a good plan, but of course I wouldn't be starting a blog post that way if things had actually gone according to plan.

The "something else" I've been working on is coming along slowly, but it is coming along, and I'm loathe to interrupt it because I'm learning a lot of stuff. It's the first long-form piece I've ever done where I'm making myself figure out the entire plot before I start writing scenes in earnest.

One of the things I learnt is that I have a hard time with antagonists. Because, you know, they're the bad guys, and who wants to hang out with them? Readers, that's who. Not much of a story without conflict, after all.

So I'm sticking with my spreadsheets and notes for now. I still want to have the next draft of Tilly done by the end of this calendar year, but I'm not worried about delaying it. Tilly as a character has existed since the autumn of 2007, when she was created for a collaborative novel project I tried to get off the ground with five other people. (Despite our luck in having some brilliant writers on-board, it crashed and burned. I still think the method could work if people were willing to commit to it, but that's another blog post.) She's had the same biography and the same character arc the entire time; the difference with Tilly with the Others is that the action starts just before she moves to the Annex, whereas in the collaborative effort she was already there. The only thing I've changed is her last name, because "Zondernaam" is a better name for her and, as a name, has a very cool place in history.*

Writing-wise a lot of things have got better in the last year or so. I'm starting to learn how to write when I'm sick. I'm in less pain overall, but I've figured out a few ways to write while I'm in pain too. The one thing I haven't figured out yet is how to get more writing time in, but I keep trying.

*What is Zondernaam's place in history, you may ask? You could always Google it (although I just tried and couldn't find any references on the first results page, perhaps because I'm querying in English). Maybe I can cover that in another blog post too.