Monthly Archives: March 2022

Anori Edit: Killing the Precious Ones

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It took me ten weeks to process Tennessee’s notes, but at long last I have begun my eighth (ninth?) draft of Anori. Tennessee (my editor) made excellent suggestions related to killing characters – a terse goodbye to Valerie and Robi – as well as complete restructuring, which means sideways, headache-inducing thinking and no more scenes in Newfoundland like this precious little one:

Flagstones, newly dug, and boards bent into the red earth, led down a narrow path, following the base of a rocky ledge to a meadow. Fitz walked ahead, his windbreaker too small, pants heavy and large. The archeological site was deserted, a wheel barrow with shovels and picks lined up at its side, standing by a row of tents, the one at the far end with its front entrance unzipped and flapping in the wind.

“A bit of sloppiness that.” Fitz bent down to the tent, head-first into a man, middle-aged, as he backed out. “Watch your—Unh!”

“That’s the irony,” Eileen whispered behind Dee.

“You all right there?” The man zipped the tent shut before standing up.

“Looking about for Tommy Baines.”

The man adjusted his glasses. “He must have gone with the others, an hour or so ago.”

“Off to the pub, that it?”

“Don’t know about that.”

“We’ll just show the girl around before he makes his way back.”

“You’ll need Tommy to take you through for that.”

“We’ve been around the heath, seen the pit, the chunks of slag,” Fitz replied. “We know where not to put our feet.”

“That a leopard you got there?”

“He’s a serval. His name’s Apollo.” Dee smiled at him. “He won’t bite.”

“Aim to keep my hands intact, thanks.” He gave them a wide berth as he headed up the path. “Evening to you.”

“That’s his spot.” Eileen pointed out the yellow and blue flagging tape in the distance. “They’re saying it was an iron ore camp, set up to make their nails for the ships.”

“A lot of theories about the Vikings could be gutted with a place like this,” Fitz added. “They’ll be looking up and down the coast and across to Nova Scotia next. See what they can find.”

Dee watched the wind churn the distant water into a wash of whitecaps, each chasing after the thick grey clouds low in the early evening sky.

The Sentience of Po

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The final book of The Cx Trilogy is centered on Po, a being-non-being borne of a catastrophic deceleration from close-to-light speed to gain orbit. Po has human sensibilities of the temporal – desperation, uncertainty – yet remains indifferent, aware of the immensity of the whole.

Po’s story – and of the humans on the planet Mina with it – is diametrically opposed to the space operas centered on the ceremony of civilization. It is instead of irrelevance, accepting and dissolving into that, an antithesis to humanity and its childish aspirations

Tiny Door. Little Door.

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It’s a longish short story of a relationship that starts with a connection, direct and funny. And then an angry step daughter arrives, sexually taunting. “How did you get here? What did you do to be standing here? I knew how fucked up everybody was when I was a kid. And that never made sense to me. The world was huge. It was beyond anything I could imagine. And then I went out and realized that it wasn’t all that. Don’t fuck with my mother.”

After that, the story of the relationship isn’t as wise or wonderful as survival. “Life might be done with me, but that’s because I called it out on all of its bullshit.”

Liking People Less and Less

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I realize that I am getting older and less patient and all of that, but I am certain that people are getting weirder and more fucked up on some exponential scale. Masks are my proof. Why can’t people just wear a fucking mask? Isn’t this like wearing a shirt or pants? We figured that out when we were kids. Most of us anyway.

The point of wearing the mask to slow the spread. This is not about the people that ate paint chips on their Count Chocula. I am talking about people with brains, that accept medicine and science and humanity and all of that, and they still can’t seem to wear a mask. It’s either on their chin, especially when they’re trying to focus on their social media feed – be it dunks or pumps – or just below their nose.

How can they not understand that the issue of breathing is related to both the nose AND the mouth? Isn’t that, like, grade two bio? Anyway, I’m getting sick of these nitwits and it helps that the mask mandate is coming to end where the stupidity of the seemingly educated is so baldly on display.