Saturday's Child is Undead

There's nothing like the haunting narratives in World War Z to get my blood pumping... when I'm loading the dishwasher or running the vacuum. I'm sure I've listened to it on my iPod three times within the last year with the same fervor of tonight's race through the first two volumes of The Walking Dead, shunning the aforementioned chores in favor of the undead. I don't know what it is about zombies, but I know it's not healthy. Possibly contagious. I'm already afraid of the dark, and indulging in literature like this just fills it for me, the gurgle and drag of my imagination promising nightmares. Still, I can't resist, not when these are stories that get at the heart truths of what it means to be a living person, to live, to be a person. I'm not interested in drivel, but ink that coagulates on the page like old blood, terror that resonates even when it's a belly laugh; maybe because of it. Like the Borg or the Flood, the Cybermen and even to some degree the Shadows, what is scary and best about zombies is their singular desire, their collective agency, that they want and rot and are willed all the same. I've found I haven't enjoyed as much those short stories that explore zombies who retain some sense of who they are, and zombie romance confuses the hell out of me, mostly in attempts to gross me out. Zombies who want more out of their (un)lives than brains might as well be vampires or aliens or soccer moms. I like my monsters just the way Romero intended them... and I like even better the monstrous things they inspire in soccer moms.

Bottom line, I don't want to save them. I just want to shoot them in the head.

Pest Control

There's a big difference between trapping a wasp or beetle or spider or bee under a cup and a copy of Martha Stewart Living before banishing it outside my back door and risking life and limb on an expressway shoulder to free a cicada from my windshield wiper. See, I couldn't stop anthropomorphising the poor bastard. Even when I slowed to thirty-five miles per hour, his bent wings became broken arms, his coal-squat body pinned between rubber and glass like a harness, like the times I've been coerced to ride roller coasters that ought to require helmets and rum. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Maybe the cicada couldn't think it but I was thinking it for him, chewing my lip with worry and trying not to watch. When I couldn't stand it any longer and pulled over, hazard lights heralding what felt like imminent injury, I tried to coax him onto my sunglasses and freedom. His distress rivaled the rumble of motors, buzzing translation. I whipped him, finally, into the weeds and wildflowers growing just off the shoulder, both wings in working order.

If this were the sort of story I liked to read as a child, those morbid, moral feasts, the cicada would have transformed into a fairy and given me money, or charm, or a man; best yet the ambiguous gift of good fortune that promises all three. I don't believe in stories anymore, but that doesn't stop me thinking and acting just in case. I'm not crazy. I've just got a big imagination.

Mischief Managed

I made a promise and while I'm not always good at keeping them unless blood or marriage or money are involved, this one I'd like to. I said that when I'd finished editing I'd write about something else, and that something else is the life I'd like to have now. Or the life I'd like to have until I begin working in earnest on the second novel, which won't happen until I've read everything ever on the business of publishing. Meanwhile, back in the real world, I'll be making pesto from the basil in my garden. I'll croon to green bean buds curved and pale as festuses beneath womb-veined leaves. I'll slather Mod Podge on bottle caps and balsa wood and anything that dares to reveal a blank and boring surface in want of a bird. Friends I haven't seen I'll see again, games I haven't played I'll play again, favorite books will be thumbed and loved and read over for all the very same reasons and new ones, besides.

And in good time I hope to see fruits of a literary kind. I might still be thrilling from having finished, really finished, with a novel that no longer feels like a draft to me, but I hope my hope isn't only that. But now I'm talking about writing again when what I really ought to be doing is planning and dreaming and growing. Though not, I hope, my hips. With time enough now to be a warrior of another kind, I'd like to lose the eight pounds I've been wanting to all year. Priorities, right?

Heigh-Ho

I'm thinking of the last few weeks as The Big Push, but I'm not doing anything so brave or useful as child birth. We're in the business of making books, not babies. I'm in my last edit, and because this isn't the first time I've said that, I have to really mean it this time. Here's hoping it won't have a cover (or contents) only a mother could love. I can feel myself getting sloppy. I'm close enough to fog up the glass in this manuscript, and it's time either to draw a heart with some poor bastard's name in it or a curse word. Maybe both.

I find chapters too long or too short and they're like bowls of porridge I think I'd rather throw at the wall than eat, strings of adjectives and orphaned commas like the seven fucking dwarves. Happy, Dopey, Sleazy, Garfunkel. Less telling and more showing, but not too much. Keep it in your pants.

At least until book two.

Genrecide

The last time I had cause to go to the laundromat I ended up writing my wedding vows, the words sticky-slipped from ink pen to page, sucked reluctant as my thighs from the seat of the plastic chair when I rose to move laundry from over-sized washer to dryer. I remember thinking it was almost as romantic as having written them on a napkin, which says a lot about what I think of romance. Today a trial of another kind, without my husband's heart to consider but my own - which must be put aside utterly, it seems, for edits. I didn't need a score of industrial dryers or a wall of glass windows at my back to heed the excessive heat warning. My fingers slogged across the keys, each keystroke a sacrifice to the gods of copy and paste, murdering more than my darlings. I've reached a point in the editing where there's no stepping back, no perspective but the biggest, and the word "continuity" is like to give me nightmares. I don't know up from down. Right from left. Context from crap.

I'm raising the stakes, alright. This one's going straight through my right ventricle.

Super-ego

It would be an inaccurate picture to offer only an excerpt of the following list, written somewhere in the range of fourteen or fifteen years old and found by me in a vain attempt to purge the many relics of my adolescence that fill moving boxes in our basement. This one's a keeper. Misspellings and a lifetime of friendship intact.

K and I are alike because:

We both love Ramen Noodles We both love Dr. Pepper We both hate tomatoes We both hate mayonaisse We both hate potato salad We both hate egg salad We both hate chicken salad We both hate deviled eggs We both hate peas We both love Long John Silver's We both love Captain D's We both love cheese sticks We both love doodling We both love Hanson (duh) Our telepathic moments saying something at the same time The word snifty (nifty) sensitive hyper moments shy sacastic sarcastic We like purple love to tye-dye love sparkles We are both pretty We both think we're ugly We both love music We both love art We both love shoes snifty hairwraps snifty power bracelets snifty rings We both have long toes bad concentration no boyfriends love nature & peace We love to smile enjoy chocolate We love monkeys & bananas (but not to eat) We both love drama We both love singing Winter of Fire (our favorite book) We both are abnormal We both love camaras We both love each other's pets We both love our own pets We both love Beavis & Butthead We both love Daria We both love Grease We both obsess over Hanson (duh) We waste money on magazines with Hanson We both love mail We both love paper games We are incurable klutzes We spill things daily We both call people evil (if they are)

U.S.S. Enterprising

Years ago when M and I painted the living room of the house that wasn't yet half mine, we pushed all of the furniture into the middle of the room and crab-walked the perimeter, brushes and rollers stiff as sore limbs and caked with pumpkin-colored paint. We queued episode after episode of Star Trek: Voyager and Tuvok's stoic acceptance of the vagaries of children's tempers helped me to control mine. House projects are something I have accepted with reluctance, and perhaps only because of my love for a man who is convinced that if he doesn't know how to do something, he'd rather learn than pay someone else. So it was that when we agreed to begin tearing up the kitchen floor, I indulged in a little TNG and sliced up some watermelon. Stealing bites between peeling tiles, unable to hear over the roar of the heat gun but having seen enough to know just what Wesley Crusher was prattling on about, I found comfort in being part of a crew of two. We're always doing or dreaming big, and for all it might seem that our projects are for the someday that hasn't happened yet, I know these are the memories the rest of our lives are going to be built on. I think our kids might be as inclined to groan as I have been, but I'll share with them my secrets: suck on cold fruit, escape into utopian fiction, trace the patterns of paint and stain and grit on the same pair of old work pants, remembering where you've been and what you've done. Work together. Be a family.

Or maybe because he's their Daddy they won't be so buggered.

Down the Rabbit Hole

As a child, the start of every month would mean I'd wake, gummy-eyed, and mutter softly to myself before saying good morning to anyone, Rabbit, Rabbit. Before the age of Google and despite having been rather a voracious young reader, I heard this on Nickelodeon, and latched on to it as I always had and would always be terribly superstitious. I had no notion of why I was doing it, only that if I didn't, I was cheating myself out of a very real opportunity to plot the course of the next thirty-odd days with a little more luck than I would have otherwise. And I felt - jinxing, horoscope-reading, avoiding stepping on cracks even when I was very, very angry with my mother child that I was - that I needed all of the luck that I could get. To earn better than a B on my math tests. To get picked to play the xylophone. To hold hands with a boy. To turn invisible when it was my turn to do a somersault in gym class (or dribble a basketball, or get picked for kickball, or climb the rope).

Now a new month just means I get paid and can, after paying my credit card bill, break my financial fast from iced coffee and frozen yogurt. I am especially guilty in the summer of finding very little to look forward to but autumn, each month one nearer to November - which is when it comes to Ohio, these days. There is nothing so wondrous or flexible as the faith I had as a child that something small I did could change the whole course of things, unless it's averting an argument with my husband by loading the dishwasher. How grim and dull adulthood is.

I think that's why I write.

Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living

I've always loved that particular folk rhyme, or perhaps it was the book I read as a child where the children - named after the days of their birth - are all turned into the foods they like best and nearly eaten by a witch. I was born on a Saturday. For me at least this doesn't mean I'm living by the skin off my hands or the sweat on my brow, but by the drive I have to do and be, to feel guilty for every moment of rest away from the work of my life: writing. It isn't that I consider time spent away from my work necessary, because I totally do, but the murderous, ruler-rapping impulses courtesy of my Type-Triple-A personality - kind of like the T-888, only soft and prone to tears - make everything that isn't something feel like I ought to flog myself. I could and did skip any number of classes in college without warranting this kind of response, but if I elect to read before bed instead of tap-tap-tapping out a few words I might even end up deleting tomorrow, it's on.

Maybe I ought to have been Wednesday's child?

But I do give myself a break, even when I don't feel like I deserve one. With that in mind and my desire for something here to cater to my exhaustive hunger for geek culture - and what my obsessive fervor often transmutes to geek culture, like honing my gardening and sewing skills for the zombie apocalypse - I bring you Saturday's Child, where I am admitting the opposite of what I ought to be doing. What I'm reading, watching, playing; the things that just took my heart and squeezed it like a naughty cat.

1. I've got a crush on the Naz'jar Battlemaiden. World of Warcraft has some really tremendous storytelling, and as I tend only to game when there's a rich world and story involved, this is dangerous business, indeed.
2. I'm not a genius, which explains why I'm late to the Eureka party. The success of this show, I think, lies in what a friend smartly called the fact that it's "light on the science, big on the fiction." I love a space opera or fantasy epic as much as the next geek, but a romp that doesn't take itself so seriously is refreshing.
3. Jason Sanford's Never Never Stories, especially the scope and sheer weirdness of the science fiction stories, are just captivating. Every question I felt I needed answered on the first page was forgotten in the wandering and wondering pleasure of just reading.

Guilty pleasures? Spill 'em.

Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?

I sit down to write at my new (old) writing desk and I am distracted by the imperfections in the wood. Before handing the man one of only four twenty dollar bills I have between today and the end of the month for gasoline, groceries and, apparently, the purchasing of antiques, he told me that he believed it was poplar or maple. But what I see is glitter, pink and silver, pixie-slick thumbprints where the smallest hands could reach. Red paint and black and glue residue. A faintly edged circle is crossed by a constellation of pencil compass points, and I wonder at the purposeful destruction, what sort of child would stop there and not pepper the desk top over with holes. The name 'Jaron' is scratched twice into the wood. I think I'll use it.

I put the desk in front of a window. It's dark now but I wonder tomorrow what I'll see, what this new space will warrant the page.