Author: admin

By the time I made it back to my apartment all the adrenaline i’d kicked up from the action was leaving my system like the last passengers to make it off the Titanic. I was jittery and had to keep my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t see them shake. I wouldn’t be firing a gun again tonight. Killing a person like that takes a toll. It’s different than in the heat of battle when they draw down on you and you don’t have a choice. This action was all choice. Didn’t matter that I wanted to believe it was the right one.

The car full of goons were packing up and piling into their car laughing and high fiving each other like they’d just won a game. The loss would hit them soon enough. Maybe it turned to anger and they came back. Maybe not. I watched them go and rode the elevator up to the 14th floor where it spat me out in a long corridor filled with identical metal doors. Mine was the one bashed in. A few neighbors were already sticking their heads out their doors and tsk tsking me for being the guy to bring this kind of bad to their doorstep. Mrs. Mitler, a dwarf woman who looked closer to 100 than the 50 she was, told me she’d called the cops and they’d be along soon. The cops wouldn’t be along too soon. This was Greenpoint after all.I ignored them best I could as I walked into the mess of my apartment.

Good News: The locks held. Bad News: The frame didn’t. That one costs more. I was already eating into the profits of my next job. Why couldn’t I have an office like every real detective and that way the baddies show up there and cause damage I just write it off as a business loss.

Bad News: They killed my cat. Good News: I don’t have a cat. They must’ve brought the carcass along as some weird message. What did it say? We will kill pets you don’t have? We hurt things that everyone loves? I’ll admit that did get me. I do love cats. There’s a matrix rule about not hurting cats, so I suppose they were making a statement after all. Or, they never got that memo.

They wrecked a few pieces of furniture, drank the last of my beer, and my bed was suspiciously wet. Somehow all of these things felt like less than the penance I should be paying for my own actions. Somehow all of these things felt like the should be avenged; especially the cat. However there would be a time and place for that. It wasn’t now. Now I needed a hotel to crash at. I dug through my closet, found the right clothes and gear for the upcoming job, and left long before the police considered arriving.

Before everything in my life went balls up, I trained to be a cop. I did the whole Knight Errant program before they tapped me for Firewatch and life grew a little fuzzy. The first thing I learned about being a cop in a dangerous situation was you point your gun at the target and keep your finger off of the trigger, because you don’t want to shoot first. Want to know what they told me day 1 at Firewatch?

When I cam through the door I saw two of Tung’s goons posted up against the bar, laughing at something Tung said and holding drinks. I shot the closest one in the knee cap. I shot the second one in the head. I’m not a killer. Not really, but like I said, I trained a lot of different places and learned a lot of different things. What stuck was this: Make sure they know you are serious.

I pointed the gun at Tung and said, “You know damn well I won that bet.”

He was speechless. His hands flew up defensively and his eyes jittered between me and the mess of his two bodyguards. I followed his gaze to the one that was still breathing. He was a tough guy. He wasn’t howling in pain so much as grimacing like a cheshire cat, grunting unintelligibly and grasping at his blown out knee. I said, “You get to live. I get to live.” Then I turned back to Tung and said, “You don’t.”

After the third gunshot the police were sure to be on their way. Knowing how the place worked I knew to slip back out the backdoor and trotted down the road a ways before easing up into a steady walk. My heart was pounding in my chest. I’d just killed two men. They weren’t the first on my resume and certainly wouldn’t be the last, but they were preemptive in a way that hadn’t happened to me before. I felt the weight of it coming on like a late evening storm. I wasn’t ready to deal with that. My focus had to remain on next steps. I needed to head back to my house and see how badly the remaining goons had tossed the place. I had to think about what those goons would do next. My thought was that it was over. I killed their boss, so why bother coming after me? That’s why I let the one guard live. He needed to remember that I did. he needed to decide what to do with that.

I needed to decide how to live with it.

Some Thoughts:

1. Rough day today. Adding to the existing tension, loss, crippling depression, and shame in my life, my first born just quit football on the eve of his senior year. No explanation, no conversation, no emotional moment. Nothing that reflects the value and effort of the work put in leading up to this point. I know that we don’t live vicariously through our kids, but that doesn’t mean we don’t invest in our kids and invest in what they claim to hold dear. When they let go so suddenly we are expected to pivot just as fast, and I for one, am a slow mover. I’m going to need a minute.

Tried to get back into the bloganovella today but I don’t have it in me. Baby steps, y’know? I feel like I made some really strong progress on the contracted work today and that is enough… for today. Tomorrow I expect to be back at the bloganovella. I’m interested in seeing where it goes with the character and the person he’s out there to protect. I don’t know the main character that well yet. I meet him again every time I write him and we are starting to become friends little by little. All characters come from somewhere. Whether you believe they are shades of yourself or shades of other people you’ve met along the path, or that writing is a way of seeing into worlds or creating new realities, or whatever you believe, it takes time to know a person. I don’t know the main character well enough yet. Heck, it took me a minute to remember that his name is Tojiro, and I still don’t see his face when I write him.

Some Thoughts:

1. Well, that was fast. Still 5 on the clock and I frankly have nothing left to say.
2. It still amazes me how variable my writing speed can be based on how close to the surface the material is. I can knock out words as fast as I can type them if it is all right there on the surface. The deeper I dig, the slower I get. I can put down 500 words or 50 depending on the night. Tonight we are in the 170-200 range at a guess.

Some days you’re the hammer. Some days the nail. Other days you’re just that mote of dust that happens to land between the two and get smushed without actually having any real value to the equation. I’m dust. I’m going straight to…

Some Thoughts:

1. Rough two days in the writing way. Let’s just say I took the weekend off from story. Back to the grind tomorrow for certain. More stories to be written!
2. Day 1 of the 12:12 fasting method. I am really working on getting myself in a healthier place. I need to get the BMI down and lose 30+ lbs as a result. intermittent fasting is just the latest way I am trying to do that. I start eating after 8 Am and stop at 8PM giving the body time to process and use all the calories. I’ll keep updates on how it goes. So far? I don’t know, it’s day 1. I do know that I discovered an appreciation for black coffee. I’m looking forward to it in the morning.
3. I popped into Minecraft for the first time in a while. It was cool to listen to this book I’m engaging with (not really reading is it?) and play. Much joy. Too brief.
4. I am also drinking a ton of water as part of this process. I don’t know how to drink the required level of water. I haven’t drank that much since I was an active athlete. Now it just feels wack trying to suck down a gallon plus of water over the course of a day. Quite literally it is all I drink after the morning coffee.
5. Did I mention how good that coffee was?

I find that stories come to me in pieces. Sadly, the pieces rarely belong to the same puzzle. For example, I’ve been gearing up to finish this short story which is entirely sci fi and scenes from a fantasy novel are flowing through my head. Not just one novel or even one world. To go one step further, I’m fairly certain that one of the scenes does not take place in the first book and another involves a character from a different set of stories in my head. All of this is good news. It is a reminder that the tank is not empty. It just needs to be cleaned out so it can fill properly.

I used to do this thing called The Idea Archive. In it I would create and post a ton of random ideas for the shadowrun role playing game that I hoped people would use and bring into their own games. I made a lot of NPCs on the archive. I often wonder if I dumped out all of my ideas in that space to the point where it took me a long time to fill back up.

No, this is not that. No, I think it is an important thing for individual writers to do, and I should start it up again for myself. I could use a notebook’s worth of ideas. Heck I have a good 30 of them right now and I still have not cracked a single one open. So, yeah, that needs to happen too. Brainstorms matter. when you sift through the wreckage of the thing you may find some really good ideas in there.

Some Thoughts:

1. Audio books are killing reading for me. I just don’t want to do it anymore.

The problem with shadowrunning is that everything happens at once.  It isn’t like a desk job where you can queue your workflow. Life on the streets is faster; more volatile. That’s why I needed to make my way back to

I followed not-Larry from a distance. He met up with another slitch in an old Chevy Legend. They talked through the window for a bit and then the guy in the Legend let him in and they both drove off. My guess was they were going to tell the boss how it was. That worked for me. Tung was a thug, plain and simple. The fact that he was planning rousting me over a lucky break on the score meant he was trying to change the narrative. He was trying to make it seem like he was still strong; still in charge, despite whatever he might have lost over this situation. That meant he’d be sending extra muscle to clean up.

I walked the distance to Tony’s at a double time pace. By the time I arrived I was out of breath and the big Legend was loading up with passengers. They peeled out like they had somewhere to be in a hurry. That meant that Tung was at the bar with limited muscle. That was exactly how I wanted it.

I came in through the back door. It’s usually locked, especially at night, but I’d been hard up for drinks for a lot of years—enough to know how to pick that particular lock like as easy as opening my bathroom door. A few seconds later I was in. I stayed low, using my right hand to keep my longcoat secure around me where it couldn’t make any noise. I held out my Ruger in my left. The Super Warhawk was the kind of pistol you saw in movies. It made big noise and bigger holes. After you fired it your arm flew up and back, so the second shot wouldn’t even be close to the target. That didn’t happen in the movies, but in real life the hope was you wouldn’t need the second shot.

I’m usually not one for escalation, but like I said, I had a job coming up and the pay day was big enough that it needed all my focus. It’s hard to keep your eyes forward when you’re looking behind your back.

Two workers were hanging back here, cleaning up and running inventory scripts through their PANs. They saw me and backed away. I whispered to them to leave out the back. They complied instantly.

The swinging door between the front bar and the back area has a small dirty window, so you can see who is coming and avoid crashing into them. I peeked through the window quickly, getting a sense of who was still out there and where they were located. The time for planning faded into the time for action.

 I took a deep breath, pushed the door open, and stepped through.

I’m a deep diver. At times in my life this has been seen as an excuse to tune out the world around me, preferring to focus my attention on what I am writing and sinking into that headspace. However, I don’t see that as an excuse. I see it as a productive state of being. As I write this I am exhausted from a too brief night of sleep. I’m unsettled and trying to settle myself in at the page. However, I have a real bit of concern about doing so, because when I write the time just evaporates. Suddenly it is two hours later and I’m wondering why it feels like it has only been 30 minutes.

This works for a single person or for a person who is in a situation where they don’t need to be thinking about anything else but the words for large stretches of time. My life is less and less like that. So, I am working on coming up with solutions to appease everyone–including myself. This is all about experimentation. Haruki Murakami said, ” I think life is a kind of laboratory where you can try anything.” In that same interview he went on to point out that he starts writing at 4 AM, finishing up around 10 or 11 Am. I’ve been using 8-1 as a firm block of time, but unfortunately, that is the heart of the day when my loved ones are up and about. So, I wind up being torn. More specifically, I wind up feeling guilty and feeling bad about myself because I go off and write and forget about anything else. I sink into my routine and my words and I am happy. But when I emerge there is only unhappiness and dissapointment to greet me.

This is no way to live. This is no way to be healthy.

So, here is my newest strategy. I am going to start writing earlier. I think this way I can be up and moving and functional in the space where people I love are still sleeping or just starting to come around. It is but an experiment. It is worth trying.

Some Thoughts:

1. Part of being me is being an apologist for myself. I hate that I have to feel bad about who I am as a person, but here we are. I’d like it to be one way, but its the other way.

I’m skipping the bloganovella tonight because I just don’t have it in me. Ever have one of those days when you just feel generally dissatisfied with life? It is how most Knicks fans feel when our team makes the playoffs. Its like, “well, thats it.” or like, “Wow, I’ve waited a long time to reach this level of disappointment.” That is what today feels like.

Football Stuff
The acquisition of Julio Jones makes the Titans a legitimate Super Bowl threat… on paper. I think it is a real thing though. I think it plays havoc with the fantasy numbers, but I really need to do my research there to be sure. We may see games where the Titans don’t run the ball hardly at all to keep defenses on their toes. Mad play action.

In the youth game, well, I really don’t care nearly as much anymore…. so there’s that.

Basketball News
Don’t care much about that lately either… I’m sensing a theme here.

Some Thoughts:

1. It is crazy how a day can slide towards misery so quickly. I’m a master of compartmentalization. I can salvage a day if I can make one thing go right. Today was not that day. It just slides on towards the abyss.
2. Case and point: I went and got pie and ice cream and the pie was undercooked and disgusting. I thought, Wow, I’ve waited a long time to reach this level of disappointment.

The knocks at my door grew louder, whomever it was losing any sense of patience. I was down to a pair of shorts and a tee shirt. I didn’t have my gun handy and it didn’t seem like I had time to go digging out of my bedroom. So, I grabbed a knife out of the kitchen and held it behind my back. The apartment wasn’t high tech. There was a camera by the front door, but once inside you had to rely on the classic peephole to see who was out there, or just open the door. I did the latter, spreading my legs and bracing one foot against the door as I opened it about a foot wide.

I recognized the boy on the other side. I said, “Larry.”

He said, “My name is Jae-Sung, slitch. You freakin know it.”

The boy wore a leather jacket and jeans that were tighter than they had a right to be. His tee shirt advertised a Seattle-based techno band, ARO dreams. He was scowling. He was also armed.

I said, “I prefer Larry. I also prefer you leave.”

Not-Larry said, “No can do, omae. Boss wants to see you. Says things aren’t square with the bet.”

“Bulldrek. I won that fair. Giants came through.”

“Yeah but he says you owe him anyway. Says since you didn’t put up the full up front there’s a tax.”

There is such a thing as being too sore of a loser. My bookie was definitely that guy. Here he’d sent this kid to do the lifting on what was obviously a shakedown, only I didn’t know why. My only guess was too many of the bets he laid out came back good for the other guy and he wasn’t willing to pay his end. Also bad business for a bookie. Out loud I said, “Bad business for a bookie to cut on his bets.”

Not-Larry frowned. He held a small pistol at his hip, thinking it would motivate me. It didn’t. By the time he brought that thing up I’d have the knife hilt deep in his chest. Then I’d have another set of problems. I started thinking that maybe that was my bookie’s play all along.

It didn’t come to that. Not-Larry said, “I leave and go back without you, I get yelled at. You wanna know what you get?”

“Another visit?”

He nodded and smiled and stepped away from the door. I closed it and like that he was gone. I sighed. I needed to be gone too then. All gangers like that needed was a reason to cause a problem. It was cheaper to cause a problem than to pay out on a bet–especially one as large as I laid down. See, I was confidant the Giants would win. So much so that I’d leveraged that months rent against the possibility of three. Big payout if it happened.

I sighed and started getting dressed. I had two choices this evening. Find somewhere safe to sleep, or go find my bookie and put an end to this proper like. I knew exactly what the right choice was, but I decided to go the other way.

I still wasn’t sure of the logistics of a snake having a kid. Hell, I wasn’t even sure I believed it was her kid. The thing about running is that it is a need to know environment. The Johnson always tells you what they think you need to know, never mind if what they tell you is a flat out lie. For them it is not a question of truth but one of ease and convenience.

There wasn’t any food in my apartment, at least not anything I could eat. The trideo still wasn’t working so the best I could do was ride my commlink into the matrix and find a postgame feed to let me know if I owed money or was due some. Lucky day. My team won. Pyrrhic victory though, the reports suggested our QB might be out for the rest of the season. I diverted from that disappointment down the long rabbit hole to figuring out who this person was I would be protecting.

Peter Choi was not a Naga. By all accounts Choi was a plain human with no evidence or history of magical ability. He was originally from Singapore, which made sense. Singapore was one of the places that accepted Naga as citizens, so if he was adopted it would mean that Ms. Johnson was a citizen of somewhere.

I jacked out when my proximity detector informed me that someone was ringing my doorbell. That didn’t make sense. I didn’t have a single neighbor who liked me enough to say hello. That meant whomever it was wasn’t from the building. That was also a problem, because nobody else was supposed to know where I lived.