Writer's Journal

(This is what happened last week.  I’m going to go figure out some actual fiction for Wednesday.)

I sat in the hotel restaurant–a room smaller than my living room, but well-decorated–and read the menu. My mother sat across from me, fiddling with her phone.

“You get anything you want. Don’t worry about the cost,” she said to me.

“We have a lentil soup, tonight,” the waiter said to an overweight young woman, behind me and to the right, “…I don’t really like lentils, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad.”

I looked down at the menu, my eyes swiveling across the type.

“Do you know how to turn on my phone?” my mother asked.

I took it from her, and turned on the wi-fi with some difficulty, before handing it back to her.

“There you go,” I said.

“It’s really very good,” the waiter said.

“I’m feeling kind of sick,” my mother said.

“Try some club soda,” I said, “it’ll help.”

“Get anything you want. Don’t worry about the cost.”

I looked back down at the menu.

“What exactly are capers?” I asked, frowning at the menu.

“They’re like a berry. Want to look it up?”

I took the phone from her, and showed her how to access wikipedia.

“A berry pickled in salt,” I read.

“Lentils are very healthy,” the waiter said again.

The waitress came by our table.

“Get you anything to drink.

“A club soda,” my mother said.

“Water, please,” I said.

She frowned at me.

“You sure you don’t want a beer? He wants a beer.”

“Water, please,” I said.

“Do you want bread or chips and salsa?”

“Bread,” my mother said.

The waitress nodded,and walked away. After a moment, she returned with our drinks.

“I’m sorry, but we’re out of bread. Would you like chips and salsa?”

“No, thank you,” my mother said, sipping the club soda.

“Do you know what you’d like?” the waitress asked.

“I’ll have the chicken piccata,” I said.

“You sure you don’t want the steak?” my mother asked, referring to the night’s special.

“I’m sure. Just the chicken,” I said.

“I know this is going to sound weird,” my mother began, “but I’ve been feeling sick, could I get some lentil soup and a baked potato?”

“Of course,” the waitress said.

“I threw up today,” my mother added.

“I’m sorry,” the waitress said, sympathetic. She walked away.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the waiter walk away from the two young women at the table.

“I don’t know what made me sick,” my mother declared.

“Think it was something you ate?” I asked, not really wanting to say it, considering that we’d eaten breakfast in the hotel restaurant.

“No…probably just the plane-ride.”

I nodded.

“Neither of us are very good with flying,” I said, not sure what else to add.

“No,” she responded.

She went back to experimenting with her phone, and I returned to people-watching. I didn’t want to be caught staring, so I looked down at the table, and relied on peripheral vision.

A shadow here, a laugh there.

“She’s too young for him,” my mother said, looking out the window.

“Could be his daughter,” I said, not seeing who or what she was looking at.

“Could be,” she mumbled, “are you sure you didn’t want a beer?”

“Yeah,” I said.

She returned to her phone, and we sat in tableau until the food was brought out.

“The broth feels good,” my mother said, sipping her soup, “I’m afraid that if I eat anything more…”

“Ah,” I responded, and began to eat my dinner.

After a moment, I spoke, again:

“You should try to eat some lentils. They’re healthy.”

She nodded, but turned to the potato, cutting it open and picking at it with her fork.

Fourth Chapter, a set of vingettes.  The story’s focusing more on the setting than the character, sadly, but it’s working out.

Chapter Four

Proud to say that the website autopilot has handled things just fine while I was in New Mexico.  Post about that forthcoming.

This video was created by Mr. Steve Gardels, and I provided the voice over.    This is primarily just academic posturing, as you can obviously tell.

If you like this, just go to the youtube account the video’s from.  There’s tons of stuff there.

Based loosely on the setting of Ellis’ Doktor Sleepless, this is a cyberpunk murder mystery.  This is a story I wrote  last year, and sent into Futurismic for publication:  They didn’t pick it up, saying that the “point of attack” came too late, they were correct.

However, I still like it.

A Fool’s Prerogative

(More of an outline for a story than anything else.)

Halfway through the 21^st century, the joy-button was patented. For the low fee of two-hundred dollars, anyone could have an electrode planted in the pleasure center of the brain, powered by a small fuel cell that links into the circulatory system.

The joy-button made every other entertainment option meaningless: it simply caused the brain to briefly white-out with pleasure, for as long as the button was pressed. The movies failed, books failed, everything. People stopped going on vacations or going out to eat, and many stopped going to work.

This was fixed in the next update, allowing employers to switch of the joy-button for the duration of the work-day. This allowed the economy to stay in one piece, but birth-rates were still declining.

At government insistence, cloning labs were set up to provide workers for industry and for fresh taxpayers.

Stability seemed to have been reached.

Select one random citizen, give him a name, Martin Hunt. Martin works in an office, waiting until he can hit the joy-button again at the end of the work day.

This lasts until, one day, the button does nothing: the fuel cell has died. All of a sudden, there’s no pleasure from hitting the joy-button. Martin sits and repeatedly pushes the button for almost an hour, before he goes outside and tries to find someone to fix it.

Obviously, no one cares.

He attempts to get a new one installed, a job handled by an automatic process now, but it fails: he already has one installed. He wanders the streets, looking for someone who knows how to crack open his skull and replace the broken machinery.

Martin finds no such person, and ends up falling in with a small group of homeless people who haven’t had Joy-buttons installed.

I’d watch this movie, wouldn’t you?

chapter three

In which things are explained.  Somewhat.

Hey, folks.  Normally, on thursdays, I post an amusing video.  Not this week; I’ve been doing a lot of essay writing and news-watching (mostly to do with the stuff going on over in Iran.)  It might seem odd to put a news story in a writers’ journal–even an open one like this–but a great many stories are inspired by the news, and the weird things that happen in our strange, strange world.

So, today, instead of moving pictures, I present you with a handful of static ones:

Twitter to Flickr

This is a collection of photographs taken in Iran that have been collected into a flickr account and put out there for use by News Organizations.  I thought you folks might like to see these photos and take a look at them yourselves, without the interpretation that always comes with them being used in the media.

This sort of thing is what Twitter, Flickr, etc. were meant to be for (not really, but it’s the best use for it.)  Citizen journalism at the speed of the wire:  right now, there’s a cyberwar going on in Iran, as the government tries to restrict the free flow of information.

I was going to post a link to the paranoid linux project (based on Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother) but it seems the project’s died on the vine.  Too bad, really.  There’s a wealth of relevant information on this sort of thing out there already:

• Instructables by W1n5t0n
• News story about Pirate Party & Anonymous assisting Iranian Protestors
  

But why do I find this interesting, you wonder?  There are a variety of reasons, and I’m not going into them all.  However, as a writer, I find this interesting because of the interplay of fiction and reality.  Go and look at the Little Brother link up higher on the page, realize that we’re coming into a cyberpunk future:  even if the government isn’t getting involved, people all over the world are.

Fascinating, no?

(Might turn this into a longer story, at some point.  It does feel a little incomplete.)

“Well, you know, it’s bullshit,” Jake said, putting his glass down on the bar.

“I know, I know.”

“Who the hell is that shitbird professor to…”

I swiveled my eyes away from him, and looked down at the glass in front of me. The transparent brown liquid sloshed, as Jake slammed his fist down on the bar.

“To be fair, you did miss the deadline,” I said, slurring my words slightly and squeezing one eye shut in concentration.

“I talked it over with him,” Jake protested, “I told him that I had a wedding to go to, and that I would be remiss if I didn’t attend.”

I looked over at him, my eyebrows forming a straight, low line above my eyes.

“You just assumed that if you went to Las Vegas that someone would get drunk and get married? Do you base your life plans on sitcom plots?”

He looked away and slumped.

“Now you got it in, and he said you did a good job. You just broke with procedure and it caused problems. You know how it goes.”

He drank down the rest of his beer.

“Finish your drink, and let’s go,” he said.

#

We wove our way away from the bar, cutting through the campus lit with magnesium-bright white lights, toward home. The semester’s end parties could be heard from where we stood. Jake didn’t feel like celebrating, just erasing.

Like always, I was dragged along.

We hopped a fence and crossed the soccer field; Jake produced a flask, and I lit a cigarette. I handed him the pack, and he handed me the flask. When I’d taken a swig and he’d lit up, we traded back.

At the other end of the field, the side toward the science building, the fence was higher, but had been worked loose. I lifted up the bottom edge, and Jake slipped under before I followed.

On the other side of campus, it was back to the residential streets. We walked a block before it happened.

There are certain moments that change the course of your life. Muggings. Weddings. Car Crashes. Graduations. Spontaneous human combustion.

For these moments, you should generally be sober.

One of these moments was waking for me and Jake at the end of the block: In an empty lot, there was a freestanding door that had never been there.

It had no frame–it was simply a door sitting upright, askew as if open. A sliver of light came from its edge, as if it were a portal into an invisible building.

“What the hell?” Jake asked, standing on the sidewalk, looking at it.

“Is that a door?” I asked.

“Give me a smoke,” Jake said.

“Give me a drink,” I responded, handing him the pack of smokes.

“Give me an explanation,” he replied, handing me the flask.

“Don’t have one,” I took a swig and lit up a smoke of my own.

He took a drag off the cigarette, then a deep drink.

I looked at the door, not saying anything. My lips were dry, and I forgot to blink.

“What’s on the other side?” Jake croaked.

“uh…”

“Come on,” he said, “Let’s check it out.”

He walked up to it, and reached out to put his hand on it, before turning to me.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked.

“Something that makes sense,” I responded.

“C’mon, Niels, have they dropped yet? You’re scared of a door?”

I shrugged.

“Not one that’s got a building to go with it,” I protested.

He looked back at the door, and pushed it open.

“See? Doesn’t bite.”

“There’s a hallway beyond it. How do you explain that?” I responded, pointing.

He snorted, and then stepped in, walking on in deeper.

I waited a moment, as he receded down into the hallway beyond.

“Aw, Christ,” I said, following him in.

#

The hallway was made from gray light, but there was a doorway at the other end, and I could see Jake’s silhouette.

Pushing past him, dust rose from my footsteps.

It was an overcast day on the other end, but the scenery was familiar. The street signs, the road, the buildings.

We were exactly where we had been, but everything was wrong.

Nothing was growing here–the grass of the lot, always overgrown, was calcified and dry, the trees were barren black shadows stretching upward.

No bird flocked in the sky, but there were shapes up there: some with two wings, some with four, some solid, some liquid. The silhouettes were indistinct, but troubling.

“What…uh…what’s going on here?” I asked.

“Give me a smoke.”

“Give me a drink.”

Alright, this is just some stuff swept up off the workshop floor and assembled together into a decipherable form.

To make sure we’re on the same page, are you familiar with the concept of a “smart mob”?  For those who aren’t, the nutshell definition:  A smart mob is a distributed group that organizes through technological means–peer-to-peer sharing, irc, skype, twitter, text message, and good old phone calls.  They’re a great deal like the critical mass phenomenon, in that they’re largely self-organizing (though there may be “Dispatchers” who moderate and mediate communication.)  For an example in fiction, look to Global Frequency by Warren Ellis.

Earlier today, while I was at work (slow day) I had an idea:  why not use a smart mob system to generate art?  Set up a distributed, city-wide group made up of writers, grafitti artists, editors, actors, etc. and use it to create art in a guerilla capacity, little more than an hour or a day from conception to completion.   Each endeavor could be spearheaded by the individual that came up with it, and could span a variety of media.

The idea could be especially useful for culture jamming, as well as for the generation of novel ways of approaching various media (for example, using grafitti to create sets for guerilla theatre or films.)  Of course, you’re free to take it or leave it.