#fridayflash: links

If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, and Part 9.

"So where are we going?" said Geoffrey.

"They won't have got to the roof yet," said Pepper. "There's a way off from there."

"One that doesn't lead to a horrible death?" said Cinnamon.

"Not usually," said Pepper. "Follow me." She led them down the corridor to the women's washroom. The small foyer between the corridor and the washroom proper had a utility door in it, which served as the entrance to an electrical closet. Another utility door was at the opposite end of the closet. Behind it was a narrow stairway.

"This goes to the roof," said Pepper. "Bet you a mouse-free beer they haven't thought to cover these stairs. They only start on the twentieth floor."

"Great White implies a master hunter," said Geoffrey, but he entered the stairwell behind Pepper and Cinnamon.

"It's not a shark," said Pepper. "It's a TV show. Remember?" She reached the first landing and let out a long, ululating falsetto call.

"Oh, like those Canadian wilderness mini-documentaries they used to show on the CBC between cartoon shows?" said Cinnamon. "I love the parodies of those... Geoffrey? Oh man, you're not having a heart attack, are you?"

Geoffrey looked up at the two women. Even in the dim blue fluorescent lighting of the stairwell his face looked red, but he was grinning. "I remember," he said. "Hosers and 'take off, eh?' and all that. I loved that show when I was a kid."

Cinnamon glanced up and down the stairs, one of her colleagues to the other. "This is one of those things that would never survive on cable, but you're going to tell me back when you were kids and we only had two stations it was really great, right?"

"Once we get out of this mess, I'll show you on Youtube," said Pepper. "But that show reference alone means the guys with the guns are Canadian, and one of the episodes included instructions on how to raise a mouse in a beer bottle. Then you claimed you just found it there, so you could guilt-trip the brewery into giving you free beer."

Geoffrey ran a few steps to catch up. "Did you ever see the film?"

"Only when it first came out," said Pepper, already another flight ahead of him.

"I think I still have it on VHS somewhere," said Geoffrey. "And the first LP."

"Things you learn about co-workers," Cinnamon muttered under her breath.

"Doesn't really help us any further in figuring what this is about," said Geoffrey.

"Once we get a chance to hit the web, it might," said Pepper. "Let's get back to street level first."

"This plan doesn't have anything to do with parachutes or hang-gliders or anything else like that, does it?" said Cinnamon.

Pepper grinned back down at them and jumped to the next landing. "We are in the middle of the Bay Street wind tunnel."

"No way. Let's double back and shoot our way out instead."

"She's kidding," said Geoffrey, pushing Cinnamon ahead of him. "You are kidding, right?"

"Yeah," said Pepper. "But I gotta say, I'm kind of jealous of that outfit. Pulling your code names from cult TV shows is way cooler than what we do. Belonging to an entire division with names based on the co-ordinator's obsession with British girl bands sucks."

"Huh?" said Geoffrey.

"Pepper, Cinnamon, Ginger, Saffron... what, you've never noticed that?"

"Not everyone," said Geoffrey. "Susan goes by Meg."

"That's short for Nutmeg," said Cinnamon. "Wow. I thought everyone knew that."

They finished the rest of the stair-climb in silence. Before opening the door to the roof, Pepper warned them that Bay Street or no, they were forty-five stories up and the wind would be bad. They wouldn't really be able to talk on the roof, and they shouldn't really talk on the way down in case they were near patrolling goons.

Then they stepped out into a rooftop gale.

Geoffrey's tie flapped into his face and acted like it wanted to cling to his nose. He loosened it and tossed it away. The lights lining the top of the building illuminated the tie's flight over the edge.

Pepper led them to the west side of the roof, where a window-washer's rig was tied down. Through gestures she instructed Geoffrey to help her move the rig into position and hang it against the side of the building. It dropped an awkward metre past the edge of the roof and held steady.

"This is the worst part," Pepper yelled into Cinnamon's ear. "Sorry, but you're the lightest. Get in and hook yourself onto a safety strap while Geoffrey and I hold the ropes."

Cinnamon climbed over, clutching at the roof when the rig jerked under her weight. She found a safety strap, clipped it to her belt, and gave an "okay" signal.

Geoffrey and Pepper had a brief, gestured argument about which of them should climb in next. Eventually Pepper climbed in the opposite side of the rig from where Cinnamon stood. Geoffrey eased himself into the space between them.

"There's only two safety straps," Cinnamon yelled.

Geoffrey shrugged and crouched against the rig's frame.

Pepper waved to get Cinnamon's attention and mimed how to work the rope controls. They let themselves down gradually, pausing a few times when they spotted movement through an office window further below.

The ropes ended half a storey above the ground. They all helped each other half-jump, half-clamber out.

"Glad that's over," said Cinnamon.

Pepper ignored her. "Geoffrey, I was thinking on the way down — do you remember the names of those two characters on Great White North?"

"Oh," said Geoffrey. "Um. The Mackenzie brothers. One of them was Bob, and the other one was, um..."

"Doug," said Pepper.

"Doug?" said Cinnamon.

"Hello," said a voice behind them.

Cinnamon tried to grab for her ankle holster as she wheeled around, but Doug shot at the ground just in front of her. She jumped back.

"Don't bother," he said. "You're surrounded. I'm glad that I'm not the only one in the office who has a sense of humour, though. So Ellie, how about that data you were supposed to hand over this evening?"

To be continued...

Bonus links! If you want to chuckle like Pepper and Geoffrey (or be perplexed like Cinnamon), check out the infamous "beer mouse" clip from Great White North below. Wikipedia has an article on the Bob and Doug Mackenzie phenomenon.

help your writing with video games part 2: minecraft in creative mode

If you don't already know the basics of how Minecraft works, you might want to at least scan Part 1 of this series.

I really think Minecraft could be of use for a writer who is trying to figure out a complex physical space like a maze, a town, or the layout of a large dwelling like a mansion or a castle. This post walks through an example maze I built: a copy of the hedge maze at Hever Castle.

Hever Castle's maze is very uniform, with the paths between the hedges being about the same width as the hedges themselves. Judging from the photo, the maze is about 34x34 hedge-widths big. I translated that to 34x34 blocks, and built a 37x37 platform of sandstone to put my maze on, along with some wooden block markers to help with measuring things out:

The easiest thing to do seemed to be to start at the centre and work my way out. I grabbed one of the leaf block tools and started doing just that:

Once the maze was laid out, I went over it again and made all the hedgerows 3 blocks (3m) high. The Minecraft player avatar is 2m tall, so a 3m maze is high enough that you can't see over the tops of the maze when you're navigating through it:

The final result wasn't as beautiful as the real maze, but the maze path is the same. The next thing I did get back on the ground level and try it out:

The Hever maze isn't difficult, but it makes very efficient use of the area it covers. You basically wind up walking the entire space before making it to the centre:

The centre seemed a bit boring. For a story, I'd expect something interesting to be in the centre of a maze (more on that further down), but since this is just a demonstration I added a water fountain, some tables and chairs, and cake:

Well, so what? How does this help with writing anything?

I've now got an actual 3D model of a working, walkable maze. That means I can talk about blind alleys, wrong turns, and false exits from a working reference. Otherwise I'm stuck doing a lot of hand-waving and skipping transitional areas without knowing myself what's there. The reader will probably get lost in the narrative, but not in a good way.

I just made a rough copy of the Hever maze, but one could use it as a starting-point for a much richer world with more plot possibilities. Consider these options:

• The maze is made of stone and has a roof over it like the labyrinth in the Minotaur myth. Or the maze is made of unbreakable glass, so you can always see outside and the centre, but you can barely make out where the walls themselves are.
• The maze follows the same path as shown, but the centre is much larger and contains an entire castle. The castle's floor plan matches that of the surrounding maze.
• At the centre of the maze is nothing but a trap door, and the door leads to... something cool, like a hidden city. Or another, different maze.
• The maze's passages are streets, not paths. Replace the hedgerows with buildings. At the centre is the magistrate's building, or the market square, or...

Now, you may argue that any one of these things may be written about without creating a model or map first, and you'd be right. My counter-argument is simply that you'll do a better job of being consistent if you have a reference.

Furthermore, you might discover possibilities for conflict, plot points, and world-building that would have been harder to discover without the visual model.

To be fair, I'd guess that most writers would prefer a rough-and-ready version of their models, rather than some of the elaborately detailed (and beautiful) creations diehard Minecraft builders make. It's the difference between a film set and a real location. But even this very rough Hever maze copy only took about an hour and a half to create. If you're going to write a longer work with a complex landscape in it — a building with secret passages important to the story, say — isn't it worth it to figure out a physical structure that actually works?

Bonus: you can include a map or rendering of your model with the story so that readers can look at it. If the story has physical navigation as an important factor, readers enjoy that. Consider what The Lord of the Rings would be like without the map of Middle Earth in the end-papers.

Next week: notes on how Minecraft's survival mode can be used for ideas.

#fridayflash: upwards

If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, and Part 8.

Pepper hit both the up and down buttons for the elevators. Two of the six sets of doors opened with accompanying chimes.

"Here," Pepper whispered as she ran into the elevator with the Up indicator lit. Geoffrey and Cinnamon followed her. Pepper pressed the door close button. Below them, in the lower mezzanine, they could hear men shouting and running.

"There's a security camera in the back right corner of the cab, but no sound," said Pepper, barely above a whisper. She pressed a floor button. The cab jerked but didn't ascend. "Geoffrey, you're the one in the suit and trench coat. Pat your pockets for a key card. Sheila, look disgusted that he forgot." She unlocked her phone and made a series of quick gestures on the screen.

"That door's going to re-open in a few seconds," said Geoffrey quietly, checking his pockets. Cinnamon leaned against the back wall of the cab and folded her arms.

"Got it," said Pepper, giving the phone one last tap. "Okay, now make it look like you're palming me a key card from the camera's point of view." Outside there were squawks from walkie talkies and the knocking sounds of heavy boots on granite floor tiles.

Geoffery pretended to surprise himself and find a key card. Cinnamon lifted her head and lazily watched Geoffrey hand the nonexistent key card to Pepper. She made a show of sliding something to the back of her phone and holding it up to the security sensor.

The sensor beeped and its LED turned green. Pepper jabbed the button for one of the upper floors and the elevator cab started to ascend.

"The nice thing about the elevator system here," said Pepper, "is that it'll only say it's going up, not which floor. My contact says it's incredibly irritating if you're trying to make it back for a meeting right after lunch."

"But they'll have a good guess from how long the indicator light is on," said Cinnamon.

"Not that good," said Pepper. "It's harder to tell with these high-speed systems, because you don't know when it started to decelerate."

"Where are we going, anyhow?" said Geoffrey.

"To my contact's office," said Pepper. "She's very good at cooking up a story on the spot if anyone tries to question her, and the RFID on my phone will unlock her door."

"That was a neat trick," said Geoffrey. "I didn't know they were issuing toys like that with our budget."

Pepper snorted. "They're not. I requisitioned one ages ago and they laughed me out of the quartermaster's office."

The elevator doors opened. "Then how come you have it?" said Geoffrey.

"A little Acme Surplus, a little Fry's," said Pepper. "I needed it."

"Yeah," said Geoffrey softly, "I can really appreciate that."

"Here," said Pepper, tapping the back of her phone against another card scanner. The door clicked and she pushed it open.

Pepper checked the office as Cinnamon and Geoffrey followed her inside. "Clear," she called. "The alarm won't go off unless we try to take something substantial out of the office. My contact is very big on RFID. Well, and computer security."

"So, we've got what, about twenty minutes before we have to move again?" said Cinnamon.

"Sounds right," said Geoffrey.

"Okay," said Pepper, leading them into a boardroom and sitting down. "What do we know about the goons downstairs?"

"They're most likely but not definitely associated with DeBussy," said Cinnamon.

"Who left the USB key out as a decoy," said Geoffrey. "And who, at last report, is freaking out because Pepper found what he was really hiding. Now she's the one hiding it."

Pepper hesitated, then tapped at her phone a few times. "See for yourself." She held her phone in front of Geoffrey.

Geoffrey squinted and leaned back to read the screen. His eyes widened and he stared at Pepper. "How the hell did he get hold of that?"

"Had to be someone on the inside," said Pepper.

"Now I understand why you were so quick to point your gun at me earlier," said Geoffrey. He pressed his lips together. "And then our briefs for the op were different..."

"Any way to narrow down who it might be?" said Cinnamon. "Research is an awfully big division, and those briefs get assembled from a lot of different sources. It's hard to say at which point those security details were suppressed."

Pepper shook her head.

"There is one thing," Geoffrey said slowly. "I found out about the cordon around Sheila's apartment building when I scanned for radio. There were two people communicating. Base was filtered; could have been anyone. The field was unfiltered. Probably the guy on the grate who spotted us."

"Any referentials?" said Pepper.

"Code names," said Geoffrey. "The base was Great White, which I guess is a shark reference. The field was just a nonsense phrase. Beer Mouth or... no, wait. It was Mouse. Beer Mouse."

"Great White and Beer Mouse. Sounds like they just threw darts at a dictionary," said Cinnamon. She glanced at the wall clock. "Shouldn't we start moving?"

"Beer Mouse..." Pepper giggled. The giggling grew more acute, until it cracked open into a full-on laugh.

"This is a bad time to lose it, Ellie," said Geoffrey.

After an effort, Pepper stopped laughing. She sighed, still grinning, and stood up. "I know a way out that they won't have covered yet. Well, most likely." She giggled again. "And I think I know where those code names came from."

To be continued...

help your writing with video games

My brother Steve showed me Minecraft a while ago (back when it was still in alpha). He said I'd like it, but I try not to have too many time sucks around, so I didn't get my own copy. Then Peter Newman mentioned he was getting into the game, and I wanted a good game to play on my phone... That was the middle of January, and I've played it pretty much every day since.

The phone (Pocket Edition, or PE) version is a smaller world with fewer features, but the essentials are the same as the full version: you play in a "sandbox" (limited world) made of different types of blocks, scaled to be 1m cubed.

There are two basic modes of play:

• Creative: there are no monsters, and no way for your avatar to die. You have as many blocks as you want, of whatever type you select. Your avatar has the ability to fly, which can come in useful for some of the construction work. The experience gets compared to virtual reality Lego a lot, which I think is fair. The landscape is created for you randomly by the app, and it is always a beautiful, sunny day.
  
• Survival: there are monsters, mostly at night, and they are all trying to kill you. You start the game with nothing but your avatar's bare hands to work with, and have to build a shelter to hide from the monsters, and tools to work with and defend yourself with. The only blocks you have to work with are the ones you collect or fashion yourself. If your world is missing a type of block — my current survival game doesn't seem to have any lapis lazuli, for example — then you simply can't build with it. If you want to work with metals like iron or gold, you have to find some ore, smelt it, and then craft with it. It doesn't rain the way it does in the full version of Minecraft, but days and nights are ten minutes long each. You learn to run somewhere safe at sunset.

I hadn't been playing long when I realised that Minecraft could be a great tool for writers (really!). It gets you thinking about:

• how geography and one's environment can shape culture and values
• the history of civilisation
• the place of monsters both real and imagined in history and mythology
• "who's the monster?": whether the real monster is you, the human player, and what that means
• aesthetics and architecture
• how to plan out things in enough detail so that they work as you imagined

I'm not a writer who's very big on note-taking or diagram-making. I could see using Minecraft as a kind of cheap AutoCAD, though, for planning out things like:

• house floor plans
• labyrinth designs
• town layouts
• secret passages and rooms
• re-scaling (lots of the creative designs in Minecraft are at a giant scale; the avatars are mouse-sized in comparison)

In the next couple of Tuesday posts I'll be taking a look at these and evaluating how useful they could be in practical terms. In the meantime, here's a link to Mashable's list of 25 amazing creations in Minecraft. It was fun to notice a lot of them are inspired by books!

#fridayflash: alignment

I'm trying to make these episodes stand alone, but if you want to read them as a series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.

Geoffrey sat down on the floor cross-legged and placed his hands on his knees, palms up. "I can't say I blame you," he said, glancing up at Pepper's face before focusing on her gun again. "Just so you know, at some point in the story you're going to want to look at evidence on my phone."

"Sheila, watch the entrance and listen for activity on the lower court," said Pepper. She waited until she heard Cinnamon walk a few steps and then stop. "Geoffrey, tell us about that brief."

"My task was to fake being a buyer, in order to confirm DeBussy had the data on him," said Geoffrey. "So I made up some business cards, opened some fake contact accounts to match — just phone and e-mail, a web site, nothing too much — and took appropriate security precautions for the meet. I noticed Sheila didn't have a gun on her when she came on shift. That surprised me, since my brief definitely said DeBussy would have a security force and his own weapon."

"I was issued a cocktail-length dress," whispered Cinnamon from the edge of the elevator lobby.

"But a thigh holster —"

"Bar stool," Pepper and Cinnamon hissed together.

Geoffrey frowned, confused.

"You can't hide a thigh holster when you're sitting on a bar stool, and the brief said for her to sit at the bar," said Pepper.

Geoffrey shrugged. "All right. So I texted you the green light from the cab," nodding at Pepper, "and I went home. I was taking a break before I wrote up my report and went to bed... and that's when Doug called from the communications post."

"Because I never showed up," said Pepper.

"Because Doug is an idiot," said Geoffrey. "He found out we were all working from the hotel and decided to meet you there."

Cinnamon's gasp of disbelief was audible all the way over from the upper court safety rail.

"And look," Geoffrey continued, "he already admitted he hadn't met you before, hadn't communicated the, uh, change of plans. So if you diverted because you had a tail, Ellie, that was Doug."

"I wondered why he was so easy to lose," said Pepper.

"I would have too. Anyways, after that fun phone call I knew you weren't coming in that night. I tried to trace your phone, but I guess you remembered to turn it off when you were somewhere in Mississauga? One moment you were on the map, the next you weren't."

Pepper gave a crooked smile.

"So I did some other checks, wrote up my report, sent a memo that Doug had, well, you know, and when I checked again you still weren't back on the map, so I checked Sheila and she was pretty clearly heading back to her place. That's when I decided to go out and meet you."

"And on your phone?" said Pepper.

Geoffrey held one hand up, and used the other to slowly reach into the breast pocket of suit jacket. "The brief," he said. "Let me unlock the phone and you can read it yourself." 

Pepper waited while he did the necessaries, then took the phone from him and read the document he'd loaded. When she was done thumbing through it, she holstered her gun and did some extra actions on the phone which required two hands. She nodded and handed Geoffrey back the phone. "You understand why I did this."

"Completely," said Geoffrey, taking back the phone and easing himself off the floor. "I would have done the same. It certainly doesn't make research and communications look very good, being inconsistent like that."

"Looks worse than you think," said Pepper.

Cinnamon slid away from the railing and pressed up to them. "Looks worse than both of you think," she whispered. "People are coming, and they've already covered all the exits."

To be continued...

history's fools

I haven't had a good rant on the blog in a while. This one is going to be a little weirder than usual, because it's centred on a book I've only ever read the first five pages of.

As you may recall, when James Frey's A Million Little Pieces was released, there was a bit of a shitstorm over it. Oprah's Bookclub first endorsed it, then reversed and demanded an apology (although it seems there is still an OBC version around). What happened was that it eventually came out that it was not, as originally publicised, a non-fiction memoir, but a novel told as a memoir.

There was a brief period where some people were saying it was fiction, while others were still maintaining it was non-fiction (and Frey was trying to keep mum as to the real answer). A friend of mine bought the book, started reading it, and by the end of Chapter 1 was passionately telling anyone within earshot that the story had to be true. She mentioned she'd heard people criticising Frey for his weird use of grammar and word capitalisation, but she said that if you actually read the book, it was clear he was using his own, authentic voice, and anyone who thought otherwise was just hung up on conventions.

That's when I decided to take a look. I read the first five or so pages of my friend's copy, closed the book, and said, "It's definitely fiction."

"You're just prejudiced from the controversy and from what Oprah said..." my friend started to say.

"Nyuh uh," I said. "I know it's fiction because he's ripping off Daniel Defoe."

And it's always been pretty clear to me that's exactly what was going on. That "authentic voice" my friend fell in love with followed eighteenth-century conventions — that's why so many of the common nouns were capitalised. Defoe, of course, was a master of making an immediate first-person narrative read like a personal account, when really it was fiction shored up with a bit of research. After all, Defoe was a journalist as well as a novelist.

And the marketing? Defoe did the same thing, using pseudonyms and subterfuges to make his books appear to be non-fiction when they weren't, and then letting word-of-mouth do the rest. A Journal of the Plague Year was hailed as an authentic eyewitness account. Same thing with Moll Flanders. And yes, Defoe too had to endure uproars when it was revealed he'd gulled the reading classes yet again, but they kept reading him anyhow. Perhaps people in the eighteenth century were more cynical than we are, and didn't mind having the wool pulled over their eyes if they got some fun out of it.

Now, understand I'm no expert in eighteenth-century literature. I have a BA Hon in English Literature, no MA, certainly no PhD. I just happened to wind up taking both a full-credit course and a one-semester seminar in works from the eighteenth century, because I had to fulfil degree requirements and had run out of available options. To be totally honest, I wasn't expecting to enjoy either course, but I lucked out with excellent professors who presented great reading lists.

And that's why this bothers me so much. Yeah, I have a post-secondary education, but it's not a remarkable one. If I could figure out Frey's work was riffing on Defoe in five pages, at least one of Oprah's book evaluation people should have been able to. Maybe they did and just thought enough other people would as well (people with a strong voice about books, like book reviewers, journalists, and book club moderators). It really boggles me that so few supposedly well-read people were able to spot the reference. Go and Google, and you'll find a few mentions of the Defoe connection (I'm hardly the only person in the world to spot it), but it's swamped by the outrage. And the outrage has more authority than the style analysis.

I don't know if there's a direct connection, but it seems to me that after A Million Little Pieces is when publishers started tagging "a novel" on the cover of every fictional book. I hate that. It assumes the reader is gullible and stupid, yet somehow has the reading level to handle the language in the book. It assumes the reader is too proud to take a risk on a text.

There's a similar controversy brewing right now. I read on The Passive Voice blog that the creator of the @GSElevator Twitter account landed a book deal. The book is based on their supposed observations at Goldman Sachs, but now it's said that he's never actually worked there. Interestingly, even though this revelation is coming out in advance of the book's release this time, the publisher says they are going to go through with publishing the book. I'd like to think it's a sign we're ready to re-embrace what was taken for granted in the eighteenth century, but I suspect that the reasoning is closer to "any publicity is good publicity".

There were similar reactions when JK Rowling's The Cuckoo's Calling was revealed to be by her and not the Robert Galbraith pen name (with accompanying fictional biography) she'd used. In that case, I even read several calls to charge Rowling with fraud. To me that's patently absurd. Even if you bought the Galbraith back story, the book was presented as a novel — not to be believed word-for-word.

Maybe it's time to remind people that the saying, "Don't believe what you read" was coined for a reason. Anything written, anything recorded in any fashion, is always filtered and distorted by the act of recording. This is not in itself a bad thing, but I believe a lack of awareness of the process — especially in the face of all this history — could be in itself dangerous.

#fridayflash: discrepancies

I'm trying to make these episodes stand alone, but if you want to read them as a series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.

Geoffrey grabbed the handrail for the next flight of steps down and leapt the last three steps and the landing for the flight he was on, because Pepper and Cinnamon were almost a full flight ahead of him.

"I'm taking it both of you are armed?" he said, hoping they wouldn't notice he was slightly short of breath.

"Of course," said Pepper.

"Not yet," said Cinnamon. "I've got a cache behind the electrical box two floors up from the emergency doors. Almost there."

"You don't keep any in your apartment?" said Geoffrey, too shocked to care about whether the others noticed he was more out of shape than they were.

"Well, yeah," said Cinnamon, "but we were in a hurry to leave. I've got to keep them locked up and everything to meet regulations."

Sure enough, they encountered a large electrical panel a few flights of stairs further down. Cinnamon reached underneath, typed a code into an unseen number pad, and a lid flopped down. She placed one flat palm against the underside, and reached around the edges for catches Geoffrey couldn't see from his vantage point half a flight up. A metal box dropped out of the larger one. Cinnamon opened it to reveal two different types of handguns and two boxes of bullets. She shoved the boxes of bullets into the side pockets of her cargo pants after giving the guns to Pepper to hold. Geoffrey watched her lift out an inner tray and remove an ankle and a shoulder holster.

"Where are we going, anyhow?" said Pepper as Cinnamon loaded and holstered the guns.

Geoffrey closed his eyes to concentrate. "The PATH," he said. "It's open all hours and there's lots of security cameras. They'll be less likely to want to make a fuss with an audience."

"Unless they just plan on killing us first and frisking us later," said Pepper.

"Too messy," said Geoffrey.

"That assumes they care about messy."

"Ready," said Cinnamon, with pointed brightness. "There's a door that leads to the service tunnels just past here. From there it's not too hard to get on the PATH, if you don't mind getting a little dirty."

Geoffrey started following Pepper as she moved behind Cinnamon, but he frowned. "It might be better to switch to official channels once we get past the cordon," he said. "Get on those security cameras."

"We're armed," said Pepper.

"With concealed weapons," said Geoffrey.

"I'm leading the way by rank," Cinnamon sang out. "So Geoffrey wins by a nose. Now everybody shut up, because we have to be quiet for this next part."

Cinnamon led them through a short series of tunnels, all lit by electric utility lamps anchored to the tops of the walls and exposed to the outside via grates laid over the tops. As they passed through the last one, they heard a man's voice bark "Shit!", quickly followed by an "Ow!"

Cinnamon paused to look up, but Pepper and Geoffrey pushed her into the next tunnel before she could get a good view.

The tunnels led to a stairwell in a different highrise tower. Cinnamon unlocked the door with her skeleton key and guided them to the underground parking. Just as Geoffrey was pulling the door to the PATH behind them, a bullet ricocheted off the cement doorframe.

"Damn," said Geoffrey. "We better move faster." He noted that Pepper and Cinnamon had already started running, and he rushed to keep up with them.

Once they were in the PATH proper Pepper took the lead, taking them through the underground shopping mall as it passed through the basements of different downtown office towers. At this time of night, nothing was open but the subterranean pathways themselves, and they crossed through corridors linking to food courts linking to storefronts, over and over again.

At last Pepper pulled them down a short side corridor, which led to a set of escalators and street level. Instead of going outside, she led them up a second set of escalators to the main bank of elevators to the office levels.

"This area doesn't echo much," she said, "and it's dark. And I happen to know this building's security sucks."

"Are we still being tailed?" Cinnamon breathed.

"No. We lost them when we took that turn back at First Canadian Place," said Pepper. "But there's losing a tail and then there's losing a tail and gaining some ground."

"They know we got past the cordon," Geoffrey panted. "That guy on the grate..."

"Yeah, but they don't know where we went after that," said Pepper. "If we were just crossing the street underground, we should be well east of there by now. Instead we're several blocks south and west."

Geoffrey shrugged.

"What an incredibly shitty night," said Cinnamon. "I hate getting shot at when I haven't done any shooting first."

"Technically, that could have been anyone," said Geoffrey.

"No way," said Cinnamon. "This is Canada. Not enough people are allowed guns. If they're shooting at us, chances are way high it's the ones who are after us."

"True, but —"

"Sheila's right," said Pepper. "The part about tonight being a disaster, anyhow. I mean yeah, technically mission accomplished, but the fallout is way out of proportion for a simple substitution job, and the research for the hotel was completely off."

"How do you mean?" said Geoffrey.

"Just for starters, it would have been nice to know about the target's security detail. The brief said he hadn't hired anyone."

"Yes it did," said Geoffrey.

"No it didn't," said Cinnamon.

"Yes it did," Geoffrey insisted. "It said he has his own private security force he always brings with him. I was surprised he didn't bring anyone to the hotel restaurant with him. But never mind that. What did you find in the hotel room besides the USB key? It must have been something important, or else the target wouldn't have sent out all this heat."

"The brief didn't say anything about extra security," said Pepper. "Do me a favour, Geoffrey?"

Geoffrey turned to look at Pepper, and found himself staring down the barrel of her gun.

"Take out your weapon," said Pepper, "nice and slow and all those other cliches, and give it to Cinnamon. Then once you're done that, sit down on the floor. You've got some explaining to do."

To be continued...

double-liebstered!

Recently

Margit Sage

nominated me for a Liebster Award. I am always amazed anyone wants to nominate me for any awards, so getting one from someone whose blog I enjoy so much really means something! Then

Cindy Vaskova

nominated me for one today!

Both these people write excellent fiction and are far more connected in the blogosphere than I am, so getting a nod from them is very cool. In honour of the double occasion, I took the current Liebster badge and made a double image version:

Those who are Liebstered (is that a term? it is now!) thank their nominator, answer the questions posed to them, nominate more people, and pose their own questions. Because I've got two sets of questions to answer, I'll do my nominations and post my own questions first.

And the nominees are:

1. Helen Howell: Helen recently published a new novella (Mind Noise). She also has a new blog site!

2. Larry Kollar: Larry has published nine books (most of them in the last twelve months if I'm not mistaken). He also blogs about e-book publishing and the nuts and bolts of writing.

3. Tony Noland: Tony published his debut novel, Verbosity's Vengeance, last year. He also blogs regularly about writer's craft.

4. Icy Sedgwick: Icy has a new novella coming out soon. When she isn't posting flash fiction on her site, she sometimes blogs about crafting.

Questions:

1. Do you have one place you write in, several regular places, or are you a "writing nomad" (write where you can)?

2. What are your favourite writing tools (either physical or software)?

3. What is your biggest writing "win" from the last twelve months?

4. Author and genre comparisons can be tricky, but what are some signs that a reader will like your books (ie: if they liked X book or like work by Y author, they should check out your books)?

5. The universe grants you power over all of writer-dom for one day. What's the one thing you make all writers stop (or start) doing?

6. Recognising that everyone on my nomination list writes in the science fiction/fantasy/horror end of the spectrum — how much time to you spend on planning and envisioning your setting relative to character development?

7. Does your setting come first, your characters, or a combination of both?

8. How much research do you do when working on a story?

9. What are your favourite sources for setting inspiration?

10. If you could spend time in one of your settings, which one would you pick and how long would you stay there?

I'm going to answer the questions in the order they came in:

Margit's questions

1. What is the soundtrack to a great writing day for you?

   I don't listen to music much when I'm writing, but some background noise helps. The sound of the dishwasher or my robot vacuum cleaner are good sounds, because they mean I'm getting help, and therefore am "allowed" to write! If I do listen to music, it's got to have no words, which these days usually means Glide/Poltergeist.

2. Is there a song that embodies your favorite character (or poem) that you’ve written? If so, what is it?

   My main characters tend to get favourite songs, even if they never get mentioned in the stories. Tilly's favourite song is "America" by Simon & Garfunkel; the verse that goes "Laughing on the bus/Playing games with the faces/She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy/I said be careful his bow tie is really a camera" inspired the entire series.

   The two main characters in the novel I currently have in first draft have Foo Fighers' "Learn to Fly" as their theme song, although only one of them knows it.

3. Do you know exactly what each of your characters looks like? Or do you just have some vague notion (or none at all)? Does your visual conception of characters change over time?

   Yes. If I could draw I would be able to draw their portraits. The visual conception doesn't really change unless there's a big time jump (like with Tilly).

4. Why do you write?

   Because the characters keep showing up in my head, and I keep seeing the scenes, and I keep knowing what happens. Writing it down is the most sane thing to do. I effectively stopped writing for ten years, and it was a very bad thing, because the ideas kept coming anyhow. I always have a hard time believing people when they say they don't have this happen to them.

5. How does your writing begin? With a visual, a concept, or something else entirely?

   Oooh, this one is uncomfortable to talk about, because it always sounds a bit mad. Either I'm listening in on the characters and sitting near them in their scene, or else the characters show up and start telling me what happened. The latter tends to make the stories that get the most compliments, but it's a little weird as an experience because it really does feel like talking to ghosts.

6. When you write, where are you? What are you surrounded with/by?

   Usually I'm in the living room, on my couch, surrounded by cluttermy knitting stuff and the stereo. Sometimes I go to one of the local cafés.

7. What author do you wish every writer you talk to had previously read?

   Philip K. Dick.

8. What are your writing goals this year?

   1. Finish my current WIP first draft. 2. Edit Tilly to beta-reader status 3. outline the story that will be next WIP first draft.

9. What advice would you like to share with your blog readers right now?

   If you haven't yet read this blog post by Hugh Howey, you should. Whether you're a writer or not. Because he's right, and there's more to this world than the producer/consumer dichotomy.

10. What is the reaction you’re most hoping for from your readers? What reaction would put a giant grin on your face?

    For this blog post, or in general? In general I love it when someone finds something in my writing that is far, far more cool than anything I thought of when I was writing it. Because I'm lucky to have some very smart people reading my stories, this happens frequently.

Now for Cindy's questions!

1. Who’s your hero?

   I don't know if I have one! Usually I admire people for very specific things. Let's say Albert Camus for today, then, because I admire him both for his writing and his work with the French Resistance.

2. What gave the beginning of your writing experience?

   These are tough questions, Cindy! Okay, what I usually say to questions like this is when I learned how to write I started writing them down.

3. How do you engage on a story? Do you outline or are you a more of a discovery writer?

   Shorter works I usually have entirely in my head before I write them down (not sure whether that's outlining or discovery). For longer works, I used to make it up as I went along, but I'm transitioning to doing some outlining (not super-detailed, but a framework).

4. In what genre/s do you write and why?

   Mostly science fiction, but just strange tales in general. Partly because that's what I like to read, but partly because strange things happen all the time, but people don't like to take notice of them. It's like we've all agreed it's not polite.

5. What’s that one line you’re really proud of?

   I thought that one line would be near the end of my first published short story, but it doesn't stand on its own at all. For the record, it's "I sat on the little strip of grass between Avery’s grave and the grave of the next person who had died, and I cried for all of us, the dead and the guilty." So instead I'm going to go with the near-end of "Cough", which is "And I cough. I cough out the machines of life, and it benefits no one." Both of those are kind of heavy. Hm.

6. You get to bring to life one character for 24 hours. Which one is that and why?

   Oh, Mags. Because Mags and I, we need to talk.

7. Do you regret reading a book? Which and why?

   I always regret reading "cod liver oil" books (ie: book I don't enjoy, but read because someone insists I need to). I'm not comfortable mentioning specific books, but a lot of literary fiction and romantic fiction has fallen into this category. Why? I don't do hand-wringing over domestic trivia well; I find it boring. Domestic trivia always needs some cryptozoology or ghosts to brighten it up.

8. Pick a childhood favourite book. Which is it?

   My edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, which were only lightly translated from the German and not Disneyfied at all, plus there were wonderfully scary engravings for each story. My mum threw out all my childhood books when I went to university (long story). I now own three different versions of Grimm's and none are that version. I mourn that book, and many of the others which were lost. I still look for them in used bookstores.

9. How many books do you plan to read in 2014?

   As many as I can! I don't like to do numbers on books a lot — I didn't in school and I don't now.

10. You have been given a one way ticket offering to any fictional destination. Which one would you choose?

    Diagon Alley, to open a yarn shop and write in after hours. Now where did I put that business plan...

#fridayflash: in plain sight

I'm trying to make these episodes stand alone, but if you want to read them as a series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

Cinnamon made a big show of stashing the jug of windshield wiper fluid in the back seat area of her car. "Don't think I don't remember you said we weren't going to rendez-vous after this job, Ellie."

"You'll thank me later," said Pepper, tucking her feet under the blanket Cinnamon had spread over the back seat. "There's a twenty-four hour Tim Horton's drive-through a couple of blocks from here. Go through it and get a coffee or something."

"There's twenty-four hour drive-throughs in Toronto, too," grumbled Cinnamon as she got behind the wheel and started the car. "If there is a satellite scanning us, they're going to know I went out to the sticks for something, especially this time of night."

"Yeah, but any security camera cross-references are going to show you're the only person in the car, and fingers crossed the overhang means we weren't caught on satellite."

"Fingers crossed." Cinnamon pulled onto the road and headed south to the highway.

"Sheila."

"Mm?"

"Put the radio on."

Cinnamon tapped the control on the dashboard and turned the volume down. "I don't think this even works anymore with the filters they have now."

"It doesn't. I just felt like hearing some music."

Cinnamon drove into the night, focusing on the red sets of brake lights, all grouped around her and her car like giant pairs of eyes.

*          *          *

"Great White, target has returned. Ow! Shit."

"Beer Mouse, you're supposed to be pretending to be asleep. So shut up."

"But she's back. I just saw her car drive into the parking garage."

"How did you confirm?"

"Licence plate number."

"Transmit."

"I already am. Ow!"

"What the hell is wrong with you, Beer Mouse?"

"The grate's digging into me. I don't know how real homeless people sleep on these things."

"I don't think they have much of a choice. Who came back with her?"

"No-one on the camera... and the trunk's not riding any lower than on the way out."

"Okay. Stay put. We'll give her some time to get settled and then move in."

"Can't I just sneak into the van?"

"What if she notices the 'homeless person' up and left their nice warm grate in the middle of the night?"

"Shit."

*          *          * 

"I still can't believe it. That data is on an isolated network. How would you even walk it out?" Cinnamon turned off the engine and got out of the car.

Pepper groaned and sat up in the back seat. "Same way I found it — physical media. Which means..."

"It's probably someone on the inside," Cinnamon finished for her. "Are you okay?" She slammed the driver's door shut and opened up one of the rear doors for Pepper.

"Yeah." Pepper rubbed her temples and eased out of the car. "Riding like that always gives me a headache."

They kept to procedure and chatted lightly about nothing in the elevator and the corridor. Pepper noted that Cinnamon avoided getting clearly photographed by the building's security cameras.

Cinnamon opened her  apartment door and entered. Pepper followed her and walked into her back, because she'd stopped dead two steps into the foyer.

Cinnamon took Pepper's hand in the dark and used it to gesture towards the front of the apartment.

"Sorry I dropped in unannounced, Sheila," came a male voice from the living room. "Is Ellie with you?"

Pepper shut the door behind her. "Evening, Geoffrey," she said. "What's wrong this time?"

The darkness of the doorway between the foyer and the living room became more darkened as Geoffrey's body blocked the light from the street. "For starters, either we leave now via a side entrance and hopefully sneak past the cordon that's been waiting for Sheila to come home, or else my presence helps even up the numbers. I strongly suggest option number one."

"This night is really starting to suck," Cinnamon groaned as she followed Pepper out the door.

To be continued...

#fridayflash: protocols

I'm trying to make these episodes stand alone, but if you want to read them as a series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Geoffrey carried the water glass to the living room, set it on the waiting coaster, and eased himself into his favourite armchair, biting back a groan. He was glad his days of foot chases and overnight surveillance were behind him — the cold and damp tended to make his joints ache.

He put his feet up on the ottoman and checked the clock on the mantlepiece. Ellie should be at the safe house by now. He allowed himself a thin smile. Knowing her, she'd have already sussed out the USB key by now — not out of paranoia, mind, just so she could check the data team did their job right — and she'd be working on an intelligence analysis that she'd keep to herself until it was time for the debrief. Then she'd make Munroe look like an idiot.

Geoffrey's smile turned into a frown. It was past time for him to put in a good word for her again. Unlike a lot of agents, Ellie wanted to be kicked upstairs.

The phone rang, and Geoffrey startled despite his best efforts. He grumbled to himself and let it go to voicemail. When the answer light turned on, he listened, and heard a customer satisfaction survey from Sunshine Cleaners.

Aches and pains forgotten, he rapidly punched a number into the phone.

"Sunshine Cleaners," said a man's voice.

"Hi there," said Geoffrey. "I just wanted to confirm my shirts would be ready to pick up tomorrow morning."

"Sure," said the voice. "Could I get your ticket number?"

"643214."

"Oh hi Geoff."

"Hi Doug. Has the drop-off been completed?"

"I tried, but..."

"Tried what? Is Ellie okay?"

"I dunno. She got on a subway."

Geoffrey pulled the handset from the side of his head and glared at it for a full second before pressing it against his ear again. "Doug, there aren't any subway stations near the drop-off. Want to walk me through this?"

"Vera from research, we had coffee together, right? And she mentioned the hotel — the location for the pick-up. And I just thought instead of waiting all night, I could just meet Ellie there, right?"

"At the pick-up."

"Right."

Geoffrey pinched the bridge of his nose. "I remember the brief saying the target has his own private surveillance force. Wasn't that in your copy too?"

"Well, yeah, but —"

"Okay, so you were there. Then what happened?"

"I saw Ellie leave. Well, not really."

Geoffrey sat up. "What the hell does that mean?"

"She was about half a block away before I realised it must be her. So I tried to catch up."

"Do the drop-off in the middle of the street, you mean."

"Well not like that, but..."

"And Ellie's met you before. She knows what you look like."

"I was going to show her my office pass."

Geoffrey held the phone away from his mouth and took a deep breath. "So she got on the subway, and then what?"

"I couldn't catch up enough to get on the same train as her. So I went to the safe house. She still hasn't shown up yet," Doug said, indignation creeping in. "And it's like a freaking war room in the comm post, because the target went back to his hotel room and started phoning and e-mailing every contact he's got. Turns out we were wrong all along."

"What thing exactly are we wrong about?" Geoffrey clenched his teeth.

"The USB key. He doesn't give a shit about that. Every electronic trace we have on him, he's telling his entire network something else is missing. Something he cares about."

Geoffrey grinned and held back a laugh. "Ellie figured it out."

"Figured what out?"

"Never mind. See you at the office tomorrow." Geoffrey hung up. He was going to have to order an investigation into how the likes of Doug ever passed the entrance exams, but at least he now knew that USB key had just been a decoy. Munroe had insisted it wasn't. But Ellie had found something else worth taking — something she hadn't had a decoy for.

His grin fell into a frown. He opened the lid on the ottoman and rapidly punched in the combination to open the fireproof box it contained. From the box he pulled out a laptop.

He had to find Ellie before someone from the target's side did.

To be continued...

excerpt exceptions

It happened again at lunch today. I was reading an article about a new poet and they included one of her shorter poems at the end of the article.

The article itself was a gush. It stated quite baldly that any Canadian who reads should be reading this poet.

I am inclined to check out the poet's work, if only because I haven't read any poetry lately. But the short poem that was included in the article didn't really help to build the case.

It's not that the poem was bad; I thought it read fine. The problem is it didn't do what it set out to do, which is give the reader an idea of what was inspiring the hyperbole in the article.

Excerpts are tricky things. It's one of the reasons why if you go to hear a stand up comedian, and then try to tell one of their jokes around the water cooler the next day, probably it will fall flat. It's why, even though people often complain about this, most readings are excerpts from the beginnings of novels.

So what to do? What to do is reintroduce the context. I once went to a reading where the author had contacted several major corporations in the process of writing his novel, asking them for money for product placement in the story. He figured if major authors got paid for doing so, he could too. Since he was an unknown at the time they all rejected him.

For his reading, he read out each rejection letter and then the relevant part of the novel where the product placement occurred. It gave him a chance to show off the characters and the plot arc without divulging any spoilers.

And of course it made the reading very funny. But I'm not going to recount in the examples of that.

You had to be there.

Moral of the story: it's not enough to choose an excerpt of the right length and which semantically stands on its own. Run it by a disinterested third party to ensure they agree that it really does sound as amazing as you feel it does in context.

#fridayflash: dead zone

I'm trying to make these episodes stand alone, but if you want to read them as a series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Secret agents have to be as rational as chess masters, but all the same it's surprising how many of them have little superstitions and self-belief in minor superpowers. Pepper's favourite delusion was that the public transit systems of the world were controlled by a benign, unseen intelligence, and it liked her. It liked her so much that hopping on a train or tram ahead of a pursuer was her favourite way to get out of a tight spot. She couldn't be stupid about it, of course — the dodging into crowds and doubling-back still had to be done — but she seemed to always have something to board whenever she needed to vacate an area quickly.

Like now. The subway train pulled into the station just as she reached the platform, and she ducked into the second-last car as soon as the doors opened. She surrounded herself with other passengers, but at this time of night it wasn't busy, and she was definitely the only person who entered the car. The Bloor-Danforth east-west line still had the old-style trains, the kind that passengers couldn't move between cars while on the train.

She hadn't been able to see if anyone else had followed her onto the platform and boarded another car. If they had, she'd be exposed when it was time to disembark.

The problem suggested its own solution when Pepper checked the name of the next station and realised the train was heading west. She leaned back into the seat and spent the rest of the trip people-watching, trying to observe and deduce as much about each passenger as possible. It being a Saturday night, and the train headed out to the suburbs, most of the passengers were returning from a big night out downtown.

When the train reached its terminus, Pepper took her time disembarking. If she still had a tail, they'd want to get onto the platform first and start looking for her. She'd have her choice of open train doors to duck out of, and be able to hide behind train cars and pillars as she made her way to the bus platform.

She was almost disappointed that the station was practically deserted. There was no-one left to leave the train but her, and the three people waiting for buses had very obviously been there a lot longer than she had.

It had been a long time since she'd been to the west end. It took her a while to find the right bus stop, and a much larger while for a bus to actually show up. "Last trip of the night," the driver announced as she pulled away from the station. Pepper was one of only two passengers, the other one being a man the driver seemed to recognise.

Even though the bus was part of Mississauga Transit, it was a good twenty-five minutes before the bus reached that particular suburb. The driver slowed down before every major stop, but no-one seemed to want to get on. Both Pepper and the other passenger left at the end of the route — the gigantic shopping mall called Square One, even though it hadn't been square-shaped in decades. Pepper hailed one of the cabs that was always loitering around the bus terminal and told the cabbie to take her to Cawthra and Burnhamthorpe, an intersection about three kilometres east of the mall. She gave instructions for the cabbie to pull into the parking lot of a strip plaza, paid, and got out.

The plaza had a twenty-four hour pharmacy, a pizza parlour, and a dentist's office in it. Pepper went to the pizza parlour and ordered one slice each of the three remaining pizzas in the display case, plus a can of pop to wash down the food and get some caffeine in her system. She sat down at a table away from the windows and took a couple of bites out of one slice to make it look like she was eating.

Pepper pulled her phone from her coat pocket and checked the signal. She grinned. She didn't know why this particular intersection was so bad for radio and cellular signals — it was on flat ground, at the same elevation as the surrounding area, and didn't have any tall buildings nearby to cause interference — but it was. Half a kilometre in any direction and the signal was perfectly strong, but here she may as well be in the middle of the Badlands. Maybe, she smiled to herself, the UFO rumoured to be buried at Church and Gerrard downtown was really under here.

She powered down her phone, prised off the back of the case, and removed the microSD card from its slot. Then she powered up the phone without replacing the back cover. Once it was fully booted, she put it in flight mode.

She paused to take a few more bites of pizza and a drink of cola, then slipped the microSD card she'd stolen from Anton DeBussy's hotel room into the phone. To her slight surprise, the phone appeared to have no problem reading the card. She opened up a terminal window and used the "ls" command to list the files.

Now she was truly surprised, so much so that she almost dropped the phone onto a slice of pizza. She hadn't been expecting to recognise the file names. Pepper gingerly ran a virus check on the card, and when it came back clean she used the vi editor to open one of the files.

She gasped in spite of herself.

A few contemplative sips of cola later, she hooked the gold chain she wore around her neck from under her shirt, and opened the cameo locket strung on it. She put her personal microSD card in it and replaced the back on her phone.

"Hey," she said, walking up the counter and waving her cell phone in front of her, "I can't get a signal here. Could I used your phone to call a friend to pick me up? Local call, no long distance."

The pizza clerk rolled his eyes, used to such requests. "The boss says I gotta ask for a quarter," he said.

"Here's a loonie," said Pepper, setting a gold-coloured dollar coin on the counter. "Just one call, promise."

To be continued...

book review: mind noise by helen howell

"Different" has had a mixed history when applied to people. "Different" can mean "wrong", but it can also mean "special". Sometimes it means both at the same time.

Helen Howell's Mind Noise portrays an adolescent boy whose difference is both a tremendous gift and a curse. Mikey can hear the thoughts of others -- whether he wants to or not. Just like it can be difficult for a "normal" person to pretend they didn't overhear something when they really did, Mikey struggles with keeping straight what he doesn't know and what he does.

The story follows Mikey's progress as he is tutored in how to control his gift... and groomed for other purposes.

What I liked best about Mind Noise were its ambiguities. The story itself is told clearly and in a straightforward manner, but the motives, actions, and plans of the characters are never black-and-white. The ambiguous ending especially was pleasing, and I could see it launching all sorts of discussions.

The language, story length and the age of the main characters make this book suitable for adolescents, but adults will enjoy it too.

#fridayflash: details

I'm trying to make these episodes stand alone, but if you want to read them as a series, here are the links to Part 1 and Part 2.

In the moments before executing a job, someone in Pepper's line of work was supposed to mentally review the end-goal, procedures, fallbacks. Instead, she was standing in a frustratingly slow service elevator, remembering what her handler had told her just before she went out on her first solo mission:

The career path for women is different than for men. You're going to get honey pot after honey pot until you hit forty. Then you're going to get cleanup after cleanup until you either get blown or retire. Before forty, all men — the kind of men you're going to target
— are going to notice are your legs and your tits. After forty, you'll be an asset because you'll be an experienced operative... who's also invisible.

Pepper thought of Cinnamon, somewhere below in the hotel's restaurant, distracting the target... well, with the techniques Pepper had trained her on, but basically with her legs and her tits. Pepper made a crooked smile as the elevator doors opened. Her parts of the jobs weren't as glamourous anymore, but at least the clothes and shoes were more comfortable. She pushed the cleaning cart into the corridor, making herself take her time. Hotel cleaning ladies never, ever walked with purpose, not even the ones Pepper knew for a fact were ex-military.

She scanned the corridor as she walked. The target, Anton DeBussy, wasn't supposed to have any security staff, but there was a man standing in front of one of the doors about halfway down. Pepper used the key card she'd scammed along with the outfit and props to let herself into the nearest room. Turning down the bed and leaving a chocolate on the pillow gave her a chance to figure out how to get past the goon (and to seethe at the research department for not picking up on his presence in their report), but she only had half an hour, tops, before Cinnamon was due to sashay out of the hotel, and DeBussy might decide to head back once his distraction left.

The default method was to just act like she was doing a turndown like a real hotel staff member, and hope the goon wasn't too good at keeping track of the time.

"Hey," said the goon when she returned to the corridor. "Got a spare candy you can give me?"

Pepper frowned. "They count," she said. "My manager, he keeps inventory."

The goon rolled his eyes. "Tell him one was broken. Tell him the wrapper was ripped and you were worried you'd stain the pillowcase if it melted."

Pepper made a big show of hesitating, then timidly gave the goon a chocolate. He produced his own key card and opened the door he was guarding. "This is where my boss is sleeping," he said. "Make sure you get the fold even all the way along the width of the bed. Crooked bedsheets give him hives. No really," he said, catching the puzzled look Pepper decided to display, "he's a very precise man."

"I'll try," said Pepper.

"Don't just try, do it. No wonder you have a crappy job."

Pepper shuffled into the room, pulling the cleaning cart after her so it blocked the door. At first she was worried she'd have to make up a story about needing to close the door, but the goon was content to let it close on her.

All right. She'd taken her time with the previous room's turndown, so the goon would give her as much time as possible. At best she had five minutes; realistically, half that.

There was a green USB key sitting on the night-stand in plain sight. Pepper shook her head. Even DeBussy wouldn't make it that easy, surely? She pulled the substitute one out of her pocket and compared them. They were identical. According to the research department, she was nearly done for the night.

She heard the goon walk past the door and recalled that the research department had already let her down once tonight.

Pepper dropped the USB key into her pocket and left the decoy on the night-stand in the same position she'd found the original in. She turned down the sheets and left a chocolate on the pillow, checking the rest of the room as she did so. Something didn't smell right.

"Hey, how's it going?" the goon called through the door.

"I folded the sheets crooked," Pepper said. "I'm going to try again, okay?"

"Just hurry up."

Too easy. Even with the goon this was way too easy. Something had to be odd, something had to be out of place. If she just paid attention, the room would tell her where the data really was. Her eyes lit on the suitcase resting on its stand, and her heart sank. There was no way she'd have time to search it properly, never mind make it look like it hadn't been searched.

"You turning down the sheets or washing them?"

"One more try, and then I'll give up."

Pepper stuck her head in the washroom. There were used towels everywhere. For a detail-oriented man, DeBussy didn't seem very inclined to clean up after himself.

Then she saw it. DeBussy's shaving kit was sitting on the vanity, completely zipped up and pushed under the soap dish installed in the wall. She grinned and pulled the kit to the edge of the sink.

The kit had an inside pocket, and Pepper fished a microSD card from it. She dropped it in her pocket and quickly replaced the kit where she'd found it.

Pepper finished the rest of the rooms on the floor, the goon checking her every time she appeared in the corridor. She took the service elevator down to the storage room and left the hotel from one of the staff entrances. She wished she could check on Cinnamon, but there was no safe way to do that. She pulled her coat around her and started to walk to the safe house.

After two blocks it was obvious she was being followed. Pepper clenched her jaw and headed for the subway, vowing to rip the research department a new one once she got out of the mess they'd put her in.

To be continued...

#fridayflash: choices

I'm trying to make these entries free-standing, but for those who have not yet read it, Part One is here.

Anton blotted his mouth with his serviette and dropped it on his plate just before the server cleared it away. "Choices," he said. "I'm talking about choices. You make your decision and follow your bliss."

"You have to understand," said Geoffery. "It's just such an odd way of being approached with an offer like this. I'm much more used to a business-to-business approach —"

"I'm a businessman," Anton interrupted smoothly.

"Of course," said Geoffery. The server distracted him as she set two glasses of brandy on the table.

Anton kept his eyes on Geoffrey and didn't say anything — he just picked up his brandy glass and swirled the liquid inside it. Geoffery did the same after a moment's hesitation, then raised his eyebrows at Anton.

Anton held his glass up in a silent toast and took a sip. Geoffery followed him, taking a smaller sip. "It's nice," he said.

"They have a good bartender here," said Anton. "He remembered to warm it up a little. They don't always around here. Drives me crazy."

Geoffery set his glass on the table with exaggerated care. "For the figure you're asking, I'll have to call head office for authorisation," he said. "They'll want to know when we can receive the data."

Anton spread out his hands. "Immediately, once the payment is confirmed," he said. "I already have the data."

Geoffery nodded several times, bit his lip, and nodded again. He picked up his brandy glass abruptly and downed the rest of his drink in one gulp, then stood up. He extended his hand. "I'll call them first thing tomorrow. We have an exclusive offer?"

Anton rose and shook Geoffery's hand. "Until five PM tomorrow."

"Thank you." Geoffery smiled. "What will you choose to do with the rest of your evening? Watch the playoffs?"

Anton glanced at the large TV set hung behind the bar. "I never got into ice hockey. However, I think some physical activity will be in order." He nodded at the tall redhead sitting by herself at the bar.

Geoffery's eyebrows raised again. "I didn't realise you had arranged another appointment. I'm keeping you."

"Oh, no appointment," said Anton. "I'm just choosing to make the most of the opportunity, my friend."

"What if she says no?"

Anton grinned. "Then something novel would have happened," he said. "Have a good night. I look forward to closing the deal tomorrow morning."

"I'll try not to call too early." Geoffery smirked and left.

Anton finished his brandy and paid for the meal, then sauntered over to the bar. The redhead was studying the hockey game on the TV with the focus of a scientist observing a rat in a maze.

This country is insane, thought Anton. Even the beautiful women are sucked into this stupid game.

The redhead's focus on the hockey let him take his time studying her. Flawless skin, and definitely natural breasts. The red of her hair was a little too bright to be natural, but her pale complexion and wide grey eyes indicated her real hair colour was close to it. Anton liked the classic simplicity of her outfit — little black dress, pearl necklace, pearl-and-jet bracelet. No earrings, he noticed. Nothing ostentatious.

And she was watching a goddamn hockey game.

"Who's ahead?" he said, signalling to the bartender at the same time.

"The Leafs," she said, as if by reflex. "But it won't last."

"Maybe this is their year," said Anton.

The woman gave a short, soft chuckle. "They haven't won the Stanley Cup since 1967."

The bartender came over. "Buy you a drink?" said Anton.

The woman finally stopped staring at the TV set. "Oh," she said, as if suddenly awake. "Thank you. Rye and ginger, please."

"Make it two," said Anton. The bartender nodded and left.

The redhead's eyes drifted up to the TV set again, but it was showing commercials. She gave Anton a gentle smile. "You don't follow hockey, do you?"

Anton shook his head. "I never had time for pro sports. I'd rather play a game myself than just watch someone else do it."

"You don't like to appreciate other people's talents?" said the redhead.

Anton shrugged. "The way I see it, life is made up of a set of choices," he said. "Opportunities arise, and you either choose to make the most of them, or you let them drift past. My general preference is to not let them get away."

The redhead was watching the game again. Anton watched her breasts rise and fall as the away team moved the puck towards the net. She groaned as they scored a goal.

"You see?" she said, gesturing towards Anton with one hand while she pointed at the replay with the other. "I wish the Leafs would choose to defend the goal a little better."

"Yeah, but that guy who just scored, the, uh, running back..."

"Captain."

"You gotta admit, he made the most of that opportunity."

The redhead glanced at him over her shoulder and batted her eyelashes. "So it's the actions that are admirable, not the cause?"

"Well, uh..." Anton wasn't sure if she'd changed the subject or not. "They go together, don't they?"

The redhead checked the clock counting down the period on the TV screen. "Let's see." She patted Anton on the arm. "Twenty-six minutes left."

The Leafs lost by three goals. In the twenty-six minutes it took them to lose, Anton and the redhead had flirted steadily, and, at least Anton thought, with increasing chances that he would get laid that night. Anton offered the redhead a condolences drink once the game was finally over, but she checked the time on the clock behind the bar and announced she had to leave.

"What, you come in here all dolled up like that, watch a bad hockey team lose, and now you have to go?" demanded Anton.

The redhead showed her teeth as she smiled. "Choices are made in context and have consequences. It's almost ten — I was supposed to go at nine-thirty, but you know, overtime... Thanks again for the drink." She had her coat picked up and was heading out the doors before Anton could think of a comeback.

"What the hell?" he finally said to the almost-empty restaurant.

"It's the playoffs," said the bartender, taking up the empty glass and pushing the redhead's untouched rye and ginger towards Anton. "All sorts of weird shit happens. You have no idea."

To be continued...

#fridayflash: getting ready for work

Cinnamon ducked into the back lane without glancing behind her or changing speed. Pepper always told her that you attracted more attention if you acted like you didn't want to be seen. She also always said that the safe house they were rendezvousing at hadn't been discovered yet. Cinnamon clenched her jaw as she pushed through the apartment building's service entrance door and hoped that particular piece of intelligence was correct. She had had to shoot her way out of a tenement block in Chicago two months ago. It wasn't an experience she wanted to repeat any time soon.

She fished her skeleton key out of her coat pocket as she approached the stairwell door. There was a security camera trained on the door, and Cinnamon had tucked her hair up under a black baseball cap to avoid getting any identifiable part of her on a recording. She shifted the key from her palm to her fingers in one motion, using her hand to shield the key from the camera. It only took a little bit of wiggling to get the door open — no more than someone with a real key would if the door and the lock were slightly misaligned. She closed and locked the door behind her, checked the stairwell for any new cameras, and jogged up the stairs. Pepper called that a mini-workout.

Cinnamon hated the stairwell, hated the pale green paint and the way it always smelled of dog's piss, but she had to admit getting to the fifteenth floor didn't feel nearly as awful as it had when they had first started using this location. She listened for a moment before opening the stairwell door and slipping through to the corridor, pretending to make sure the door latched as an excuse to keep her head down. There were more security cameras, one at each end of the corridor.

Cinnamon studied her nails as she walked down the corridor. She found the right door and rapped on it, calling out the all clear signal. "Ellie, it's me."

"Hang on, I'm coming," she heard Pepper reply, the response indicating it was safe to enter. If something had been wrong, she would have said, "just a second."

Cinnamon walked into the apartment when Pepper opened the door for her. She took three big steps into the living room and froze, waiting for Pepper to close the door behind her. "So how are things?" she said, as a way to fill the space if anyone had bugged the corridor.

"Same old, same old," said Pepper, scanning Cinnamon for unauthorised tech or weapons. "Want to see what I'm working on in the sewing room?"

"Sure." Cinnamon followed Pepper down the corridor to the spare bedroom.

The spare bedroom, like all the rooms in the apartment except for the living room, was soundproofed and had anti-scanning devices running. Pepper tossed a sealed plastic bag at Cinnamon. "Here's your kit for tonight."

Cinnamon tore open the bag. "Nice." The bag contained a classic little black dress, black pumps that were more practical to walk or run in than they looked, and an evening bag.

"Jewelry and makeup are in the bag," said Pepper. "The emergency signal is on the bottom of the lipstick."

"What's the brief?"

"I'll get there at 2030 hours. You'll show up at 2100. You want to chat up the guy in the brief I'm pulling up now  —" Pepper pulled open a drawer in what looked like it actually was a sewing table and retrieved a laptop " — until at least 2130 hours. That should give me enough time to get into his hotel room and get the USB key."

"USB key? You're kidding me."

"Hey, he has information. No-one said anything about him being smart."

"Sounds straightforward." Cinnamon pulled off the baseball cap, revealing the tumble of shoulder-length red hair that had given her her code name. "My ID's in the purse too?"

"Just enough to make you seem legitimate." Pepper picked up the evening bag and checked its contents. "Don't use that perfume spritzer — it's sulphuric acid. You shouldn't need it, but you know — just in case."

"Lovely." Cinnamon continued to get changed while Pepper fiddled with the laptop. As usual, she hadn't been issued any earrings; they were against policy ever since an agent had had her earlobes torn during a scuffle. The choker-length pearl necklace broke apart easily if someone yanked on it, and the beaded jet bracelet had a magnetic clasp.

"We won't be seeing each other again tonight," said Pepper. "No interaction this time. You finish, and then you go home. Got it?"

Cinnamon laughed.

"What?"

"I'll never get over how boring this job is compared to what people think it's like."

Pepper rolled her eyes. "Read the brief. I need to get changed."

To be continued...

#fridayflash: gaming

"Again."

Ralph put his hands on the edge of the kitchen table, and eased himself up from his chair. "Dec, I've got to get up early for work tomorrow. It's past midnight. I'm going to bed." He rose slowly, trying to make his motion as invisible as possible, resenting that he'd had to state the screaming obvious. Just like all the other times.

Dec froze, the chess piece in his hand hovering over the square it belonged to. "You selfish asshole."

"What? Because I want to not be a zombie at work tomorrow? Fuck off, Dec." Ralph was straightening his knees now, slowly. A few more seconds and he'd be ready to walk to his bedroom.

"You know I need to win the tournament on Saturday. I need to practise."

"So practise. Study those strategy books, or something. Just let me get some sleep."

"Oh right, rubbing it in. Ralph MacPherson has a job, and that makes him king of the goddamned world. Let's see how smug you feel at the end of the month if I can't make my half of the rent. I need to win this tournament."

Ralph bit his lip. He sat back down. "One more game. Promise?"

Dec shot him a look and replaced the white queen. "Of course. I'm not being unreasonable."

Ralph reset the chess clock.

Dec had given Ralph white, so he opened the game using classic moves he'd memorised as a child, playing with his father. That was the worst part — he remembered liking chess. It was one of the things that had brought he and Dec together.

It was one of the things that had made him decide it would be all right having Dec as a room-mate.

He moved a knight and hit the button on his side of the chess clock. They were mid-game now. He was going to have to actually pay attention soon. He needed to think.

If he'd just buggered off and gone to bed, Dec would have berated him for hours, even through the closed bedroom door. They had a "no going in your room-mate's room" rule, and Dec obeyed it, except for with his voice. The last time Ralph had skipped a game, Dec had lectured and harangued him right through to when his alarm clock had gone off.

Ralph had nearly lost fingers at work twice that day, trying to operate machinery on no sleep in over twenty-four hours.

He could have made up an excuse and crashed on the couch at Dave's, but midnight was too late at night to try shit like that. Dave's wife already resented him for the amount of time he spent over there.

He could have gone to his sister's. She'd let him in any time of day or night, no questions, no judgements — Fran was great that way — but the last time he'd gone there, Dec had smashed up Ralph's hi-fi. Said he'd been trying to vacuum behind it and it had toppled over. Because Ralph hadn't set it up right, he said.

Fran only had a bedsit. She was breaking the rules to even let him stay one night, although her landlady was willing to let it slide every once in a while since they were brother and sister. He had to sleep on the floor in her spare blankets.

The sudden, sharp sound of chrome and particleboard being struck by a grown man brought him out of his head. Dec was glaring at him across the chess board, the left edge of his mouth curling up in contempt.

"I'm not competing against fucking sleepwalkers," he said. He snapped his fingers in front of Ralph's face, three times in rapid succession. "Wake up. Honest to God, I'd be better off practising against a trained monkey."

Ralph glanced at the board, recognised the pattern as one his uncle had taught him when he was twelve, and chose a response favoured by some of the Russian masters. He tapped the chess clock.

Dec snorted. "If you don't play in earnest, we'll have to keep going until we get a game where you do."

"They allow smack talk at chess tournies now, do they?" said Ralph. Tired as he was, he was pretty sure Dec didn't know the master he was copying his moves from.

Dec snorted again, but continued to study the board.

Ralph didn't dare look at the clock on the stove, but he guessed it was still before one AM. So if he got up at five as normal, worked from six-thirty to four (he crossed his fingers under the table against any overtime tomorrow)... he might be able to make it to the rental agent's before closing time. He just needed to get his name on the lists. He'd even take a bedsit like Fran's if it got him out of living with this nut.

Dec made a move — the one predicted as most likely in the series Ralph's uncle had taught him. Ralph made the prescribed response and tapped the chess clock.

Shit. The agent always called you at home when they had a lead on new digs. Dec spent nearly all his hours at home. They weren't supposed to get personal calls at work, but Brenda the receptionist seemed like a good sort. He wondered if he could ask her for a favour.

"Fuck you," Dec breathed. He threw up his hands. "You've fucking won."

"That was from a book, by the way," said Ralph. "Now seriously, I'm going to bed."

"You can't even be bothered to be pleased about winning," said Dec. He had his arms folded, and was glowering at Ralph. He startled and slammed the kitchen table again, making the chess pieces jump. "Which book?"

"One my uncle had."

Dec pushed away from the table and marched to his desk in the living room. "Don't you dare fucking move," he said.

"Dec, for fuck's sakes, you said one more game..."

Dec thrust a pad of graph paper and a pencil at him. "Write down the sequence."

"Dec, I'll do it tomorrow, I swear, just let me get to bed..."

"Write down the goddamn sequence, and this time I'll play it and you goddamned play against it."

Ralph pushed the pencil and paper away. "What the hell will that prove? I won't be strategising against it like I don't know it. You won't learn anything."

"Write it down."

Ralph sighed and scratched down the first line of the sequence.

"And when you're done," said Dec, sitting down and resetting the pieces, "we'll go. Again."

best reads of 2013

Want to read more reviews? John Wiswell has the full blog hop listing.

2013 has been a weird year for reading. On the one hand, it hardly feels like I've read anything at all (and, going by my Goodreads list, this is totally true between the end of July and the end of December, where I finished two books in three days). On the other hand, I've read more than I thought I did, and I've been reading more shortform stories than I did in the past.

Another thing that was weird is that it seems I've been reading mostly men authors this year. I honestly don't pay attention much when I'm picking up a book, but it's uncomfortable that this happened the same year Alice Munro was the first Canadian Nobel Prize for Literature, the same year that David Gilmour publicly showed an inability to differentiate between "great literature" and "literature by men", the same year that the "fake geek girl" meme exploded. In previous years my list has had a majority of women authors. Maybe I need to actively re-balance next year.

A third item to consider before getting to the list: I read a lot of murder mysteries this year. Science fiction is and likely always will be my favourite, but mysteries were my first love. That's simply because I was one of those kids who jumped to reading full novels as soon as possible. The grown-ups gave me Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie to read because they figured there was relatively little sex in them, and no worse violence than I saw watching Superfriends or Emergency!.

I call mysteries my "candy" reading; not because I think they're superficial (more on that in the reviews), but because they're a similar pleasure to sitting down with a box of really nice fancy chocolates. They're great for stress relief. This year had more stress in it than other years.

One final point: I've always maintained a policy that I never include books I've beta-read or read ARCs for in these lists, just because it means I've had a certain amount of contact with the author and that means I'm less objective etc. etc. I think next year I'm going to toss that out and just disclose. This year I included a book by Vicki Delany, who personally sold me the first Constable Molly Smith book I ever read. It's the only time I've ever had a conversation with her, so I'm not counting it.

Here's the list.

Montaro Caine, Sidney Poitier

Yes, it's that Sidney Poitier, the Hollywood actor (and former ambassador to Japan). I haven't read any of his other books, but this one caught my eye because it's science fiction. While set mostly in the present day, the science fiction tradition the book belongs to was more prevalent in the sixties and seventies — it's not afraid of leaving things unexplained, it's not afraid of getting mystical, and it definitely posits that our interior lives and the "big picture" of what's going on in the universe are all part of the same experience. I could tell you about the plot and the characters: there are mysterious coins found clutched in just-born babies' hands, mathematical geniuses on the autistic spectrum speaking prophecy, and a metallurgist CEO discovering his real fate, but really this is a book of ideas.

What I found fascinating about it is that so much of it is concerned with consumerism and capitalism. I'm trying to avoid spoilers here, but a series of incredible events occur right at the beginning — the sort of thing that would have launched new religions at one time in history. But all the characters are so mired in the exchange of capital for goods and services that the few who recognise the significance of what has happened get physically threatened for breaking with the status quo. I spent most of the middle of the book wanting to give certain characters a good shake and tell them they should stop and think about what the hell they're buying and selling. But of course, that's the point.

Poitier's prose is crisp and unadorned; the book sometimes reads like a documentary transcript. There are occasional brief bursts of poetry, though, half a sentence here or there, and they're lovely. Given the "out-there" content, the flat delivery worked for me.

At the end of the story, I felt like I'd just read a fable I'd only partly grasped the moral of, but was quite happy to ponder further. Just before I started writing this review, I typed "Montaro Caine" into an anagram generator. It had occurred to me that while he is an important character in the book, he's not always the central character — it wasn't an obvious choice to title the book for him.

In the top five generated anagrams was "Arcane Motion", which is a phrase that has a lot to do with the events described in the book. It made me wonder.

Wool Omnibus, Hugh Howey

I read Wool just to find out what all the fuss was about, and because so much of the hype was about how an indie author had made it to the best-seller list.

This is definitely a case where the book lives up to the hype.

The basic premise: an entire society of survivors have been living in an underground silo for generations. Their culture is a mishmash of American-style military labour divisions, 1950s utilitarianism run amok, and European medieval guild organisations. They have one, and only one, form of enacting capital punishment. The condemned are put into hazmat suits and sent outside to die of exposure to the poisoned elements.

Except then we find out there's more to it than that.

Wool is working in another classic science fiction tradition, one that's grittier and grimmer than Montaro Caine. In Wool, the world has shrunk down so far that the "big picture" is the silo. This is a society where most people only ever see the same two or three floors they live or work on. For holidays they visit the upper levels and get to see the environmental horror that is "outside".

Wool raises some excellent questions about information distribution, societal structures, and what "freedom" means. It explores some answers, but doesn't give a pat affirmation to any of them. It was a great book to read in this year of the Edward Snowden NSA revelations.

Negative Image, Vicki Delany

Negative Image is one of a series of mysteries centred on the character Constable Molly Smith, who works in the fictional Trafalgar, British Columbia. I started reading this series last year. The copy editing misses (there's always a few in every book) drive me crazy, but I love the characters (especially Molly), the plots, and the setting. My paternal grandparents used to live in Kelowna when I was a kid, and we'd visit them every summer, so I really appreciate having some fiction set in the interior of BC. It's a setting that should be used in books and films more often, in my humble opinion.

One of the things I find interesting about this series is that Delany sticks to more realistic events in her plots, including the violence. I suspect Trafalgar has more fictional murders than any real town of the same size in BC, but each one is investigated with proper attention paid to actual Canadian police procedures.

With the attention to detail on the violence comes a greater attention to detail on other, related matters. The books make it clear that Molly Smith gets more flak, from the criminals, from the local citizens, and from some of her own colleagues, because she's a woman. This might not sit well with some readers, but I've yet to read anything in any of the books which suggests Delany is pushing it too far. All of it rings true, and the types of incidents Delany depicts are congruent with the culture of a small, relatively isolated city. I lived in a city like that for twelve years.

I'd recommend any of the Molly Smith books if you like the Wallendar books, but feel like something a little less heavy and world-weary.

Jar City, Arnaldur Indriðason

Arnaldur Indriðason's series of Erlendur mysteries is another set of books I've been working my way through since the end of last year. Erlendur is like the opposite of Molly Smith: he's a senior, experienced detective, rumpled, perennially grumpy. A friend of mine called him an Icelandic Columbo, and that's not a bad description.

All of the Erlendur mysteries draw major plot points from history. Often, as is partially the case in Jar City, Erlendur is working on a cold case. Sometimes, and this is particularly relevant to Jar City, the crime has just happened, but it is motivated or influenced by past events. It's like the famous William Faulkner quote: "The past isn't dead. It's not even past." There are no fresh starts, for the victims, for those who commit the crimes (here, as in other Erlendur stories, to a large extent victims themselves), or even for the police force trying to keep order and enact justice.

I'd recommend Jar City in particular just because it raises serious ethical and philosophical issues which tie directly into the main murder plot.

The Bloom County Library, Vol. 4, Berke Breathed

My brother Steve has been gradually giving me each volume of The Bloom County Library as they get released; Vol. 5 is already out, so I'm one behind right now.

I can't believe how relevant these comic strips from the 1980s still are today. I also can't believe how few people seem to know about them. The strips were published in major newspapers during their initial run, and had a devoted (and always underestimated) following throughout. They're still as surreal and wonderful and funny-as-hell as they were the first read through. Some of the references have gotten stale (I checked a few on Google when my knowledge of 1980s American politics failed me), but overall they hold up well. A little too well, given that a lot of the humour is about how colossally (if hilariously) messed up things are.

Now, check this out. Miley Cyrus, 2013:

Bill the Cat, 1986:

See? Anyone alive stuck in Western culture today needs to (re)read these comics. You'll learn that Miley and Bill have way more in common than favourite musical grimaces for publicity photos. You'll learn a lot. One of the things you may learn is how long you can laugh before you absolutely need to use the washroom.

Things might not make any more sense, but they'll be funnier. I'll be checking my kitchen drawers for my Ronco Turnip Twaddler while you catch up.

V for Vendetta, Alan Moore, David Lloyd et al 

I bought this ages ago, after I saw the film (yeah, I saw the film first. Bite me.). I just never got around to reading it because I knew it was going to be depressing, and it is, but it's wonderful, too. It takes place in a late 1990s that almost-was and partly-is. When the book was published, the was an entirely plausible near-future. Now it's a recent that wasn't quite... but we came awfully close, and could still get there.

It's an exploration of the dance Western democracies do with fascism, of the difference between anarchy and chaos, of free will and the greater good. There's a lot of uncomfortable material here, including (especially?) from a feminist perspective, but the story manages to walk the tightrope between depicting something nasty and endorsing it.

The artwork made me feel nostalgic. I don't read as many graphic novels as I'd like to these days, and a lot of it has to do with how much I miss the art style of the 70s and early 80s. By the early 90s both the men and the women in the comics look like they've been drawn from balloon models — the proportions are ridiculous and distracting. The men's shoulders are too broad, the women's bustlines too pneumatic. Here, with the effects of the old American Comics Code still felt if not enforced, the proportions are relatively realistic. In this particular case the story is served better by it, adding to the plausibility and verisimilitude.

The Casual Vacancy, JK Rowling

I have the paperback copy of this book, and it's almost exactly 500 pages long. That's 300 fewer pages than my copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I got through the latter book in a weekend of non-stop reading, and I loved it.

The Casual Vacancy took me five months of off-and-on reading to finish. But I loved it just as well. The book depicts the weeks following the surprise death of a progressive member of the local parish council, and the fallout caused by death.

Rowling's talent for creating well-rounded, flawed characters is very evident here. Although the reader could draw up lists of "good guys" and "bad guys", it would be problematic because all the "good guys" have major flaws, and all the "bad guys" have significant redeeming qualities.

The Casual Vacancy reminded me a lot of Middlemarch by George Eliot, and I'm not the first person to make that comparison. I loved Middlemarch, so it makes sense I'd love The Casual Vacancy as well. Both of them have a big sense of time, a big sense of how personal interactions work. I really enjoyed seeing how an innocent, inconsequential action by one character could have major repercussions later on.

If you read writing advice articles, there's a lot of talk about how "good" books are "unputdownable" (a horrible neologism, but there it is). The Casual Vacancy is "putdownable" — there was about a three-month gap between when I read the first half and when I read the second half — but I don't see that as a bad thing. It's the difference between visiting a smallish town only during the election week to fill a casual vacancy, and living there for a few months. The perspective will be different, but the latter one will be richer and allow you a greater understanding of how the place and the people in it tick.

Rowling doesn't spare any of the characters in this book. All of them get a 1,000 watt klieg light shone on them, and there's nowhere for them to hide in her omniscient third-person narrative. It can be uncomfortable for a reader, because even if no one character is like you, you'll spot your sense of humour in this one, your temper in that one, your choice of dress or diet in someone else again. Even though you're not in the novel's fictional setting of Pagford, you may as well be.

Margaret Thatcher claimed that there was no such thing as society. It seems to me that The Casual Vacancy argues, quite forcefully, that if — if — there isn't, then there needs to be. In its own way, this is as much a call for the end of elitist "1%" control as V for Vendetta is.

#fridayflash: environmental variables

Planet Zorg had a lot of things, but one thing it didn't have a lot of was sodium chloride. Its ecosystem had evolved without it, and its species — sentient and non-sentient alike — couldn't tolerate a lot of it. They were far more comfortable with the beautiful yellow sulphur clouds that swirled through the atmosphere, and ammonia-rich but otherwise "fresh" water of the planet's lakes and oceans.

Therefore, when a planet came up on their scanners that featured not just one, but five large fresh-water lakes in a single watershed, the Zorgians were ecstatic. Here was a planet which they could not just invade, but perhaps even settle. The resource harvesting teams might get to take their helmets off now and then. Low morale in other off-world invasion forces had been a chronic problem. This planet was two-thirds water with high levels of sodium chloride, to be sure, but if the fresh-water inland lakes were used as a home base for the first attack wave, the lowered risk had an excellent chance of returning a more lucrative reward.

A Zorgian mother ship was dispatched, and it sent down scouts the night after the lake area's winter solstice, the better to utilise the cover of darkness.

Scouts are partly bioengineered, and emit their own natural light. To avoid attention, they were directed to head for the indigenous civilisation's major habitations, since those areas already had so much natural light pollution a few more lumens wouldn't be noticed.

The first reports back from the scouts to the mother ship were enthusiastic. The atmosphere and solid surface of the planet were cold, but well within the Zorgian tolerance range. Likewise, the atmosphere was mostly nitrogen, not sulphur, but nitrogen was an easily-tolerated element, and not a concern.

Most amazing of all, there was frozen fresh water carpeting the carbon-based ground, with more falling from the sky! The atmospheric water fell in very-cold droplets, landed on various land features, and froze solid.

The scouts sent back data on their findings: chemical analyses, photographs, further observational reports. When their vibration sensors detected something large moving nearby, they hid under some plant life, beautifully coated in the alien planet's low-ammonia atmospheric fresh water.

One scout was able to successfully send back moving photographs before it was destroyed like all the others. The data showed a large moving object — possibly sentient if alive, or controlled by a sentient if a machine — working its way slowly down a clear area coated with a thick layer of frozen water.

And that's when the Zorgians realised that the sentient life on this alien planet was more than ready for them, and was already mounting a counter-attack. What the large moving object was spewing out from its sides were large crystals of near-pure sodium chloride.

Only one crystal needed to make contact with a scout to destroy it. Most scouts encountered several. The sodium chloride reacted with the ammonia and sulphur in their systems and ruptured their outer carapaces, exposing their innards to the alien atmosphere and killing them.

The Zorgian mother ship commander quickly calculated the loss of scouts against the viability of the Plan B site — a single large lake located in a much less hospitable area — and aborted the mission. It immediately ordered the crew to initiate a hyperjump back to the home planet, and settled in to write an indignant report shaming the military researchers and their poor viability analysis.

"Spread pattern okay?" said Frank.

"Looks like it," said Bill. He glanced in the passenger-side mirror. "What the hell is that?"

Frank shrugged. "Temperature must have climbed up to just over freezing. Sounds like the ice popping off." He navigated the salt truck past several large fallen tree branches. "I don't envy the Hydro people. They'll be working around the clock past Christmas on this mess."

"Yeah, but that green glowing thing we went by..."

"I didn't see it, but I'm guessing it's a lawn light. This neighbourhood seems to still have electricity overall."

"You're right," said Bill. "It just looks weird under the snow like that."

Frank grunted and navigated the next corner.

#fridayflash: long night, still night

"What does it say?"

"Dunno. Turn the headlights on." Darryl heard Gina clomp through the snow to the car. So dark, so quiet — they hadn't seen another car for the last half-hour of driving before they stopped outside the Christmas Tree farm. The few houses, like the one Darryl figured must be at the end of the driveway they were parked beside now, were so far back you couldn't see them from the road.

Gina opened the car door, fumbled the keys into the ignition, and sat in the driver's seat to turn on the headlights. She yelped and jumped out again.

"What's wrong?"

"The car shifted when I sat down, shit... Darryl, it's gonna be stuck now."

"What about the front wheel on the passenger side?"

"Um..." Gina edged around the front of the car. "It's in the snowdrift too."

"Shit." Darryl stepped through the knee-deep powder, reached through the still-open door, and got the headlights on.

He stepped back into the frozen ditch and sighed. "This was your idea," he said.

"It was not. I wanted to go downtown to that pop-up shop..." said Gina. The car was pointing the wrong way to illuminate the signs on the fence directly with the headlights, but there was enough ambient light to read them. "Darryl, this isn't gonna work."

"Huh?" He turned and read the sign.

ELECTRIFIED FENCE. DO NOT TOUCH. CONTACT WILL CAUSE INJURY OR DEATH.

Darryl laughed.

"See? Tomorrow. Downtown."

"Screw the pop-up shop," he said, reaching into in his coat pocket. "Watch this." He put an old lighter into the top of an empty pack of cigarettes, and wrapped it up with the foil liner from the pack.  "This should toss okay." He lobbed it at the fence.

The wad of garbage connected with two wires on the fence links. Orange sparks splattered into the night, and the paper backing the foil ignited briefly as the package fell into the snow.

"I'm glad you tested it first." She said it sincerely.

"Let's get the damn car out of the ditch and go home." Darryl turned to get into the car and spotted something moving towards them. Finally, another pair of headlights on the road.

The lights were attached to a well-used pickup truck, which turned in to the driveway to the Christmas Tree farm and stopped a couple of metres from the gate.

A man got out of the truck, black watch cap pulled almost all the way down to his bushy grey eyebrows. "Engine trouble?"

"Huh?" said Darryl. "Ah, no, no, but we might be stuck."

"Funny place to pull over," said the man, shielding his eyes from the glare of the car's headlights and walking to the passenger side. "I'd say you're stuck. Did you not check our web site for the business hours first?"

Gina stepped into the light. "The thing is, we didn't want a full tree. Just some boughs. There was an article in Seasonal Decor and, you know, I wanted to try it." She gave the smile that had melted the hearts of nightclub bouncers and TSA agents.

The man grunted. "Right, we've heard a lot about Seasonal Decor this year. We didn't sell any boughs off the farm, though. Shipped a bunch wholesale to one of those pop-up shops or whatever you call them, in the city. Right downtown."

"Oh, but we came out all this way," said Gina, not ready to give up yet. "Couldn't we just buy some deadfall, something that wouldn't be too much trouble..."

The man held up a leather-gloved hand. "You two have already been too much trouble," he said. "No offence. I'll pull your car out, and then you should get going. There's a freezing rain storm due in a couple of hours. You want to be home by then."

Darryl started to protest, but one glance from the man reminded him that if this farmer didn't help them with their car, they might not get home at all that night.

"I'm Gord Arden, by the way," said the man as he walked back to his truck. "Why don't you introduce yourselves while I get the chains hooked up?"

Thirty minutes later the car was back on the road and the chains were put away. Gina apologised so profusely that Gord gently told her to stop.

"Come back next year, when we're open for the season," he said. "Today was our last day." He wagged a finger. "Check the web site first. And get home before you have to worry about that freezing rain."

"We were lucky," Gina said as they drove away. "He could have been a real asshole about that."

"You really want to go back there next year?" said Darryl.

"Sure, why not?"

Gord knocked the snow off his boots and let himself in.

"You're late," Marilyn called from the living room. "Anything wrong?"

"Just two lost surburbanites in a snowbank."

"Want a coffee to warm up?"

"Nah, we got to get to sleep. Big day tomorrow. You didn't have to wait up."

"I just kept reading my book." She appeared at the doorway between the living room and the entrance hall, hugging her soft grey cardigan around her. "You're right, though. Big day. Let's get to bed."

"The kids all still plan on coming?"

"By lunchtime, yeah."

It was still dark when Marilyn nudged Gord awake. He groaned and stretched, then got dressed and met her in the kitchen. They each had a cup of coffee before bundling up and setting off into the heart of the spruce grove.

Past the well-ordered stands of commercial trees, past the edge of what looked like the "farm" to outsiders, there was an empty, snow-covered circle where trees never grew. Gord and Marilyn stood at the western edge, holding mittened hands, watching the eastern sky. There was nothing to be heard but their own breath and the crunch of the snow beneath their boots when they shifted their weight.

At first light they began to sing. When the sun crested the horizon, they blew it a kiss and went back to the house to make breakfast.

Thanks to Eric J. Krause for the prompt, and to Larry Kollar for tweeting it!