Month: June 2021

There is a neighborhood in Houston called Nottingham Forest. I’m sure the people who came up with that presumed they were clever. I’d be willing to go so far as saying they thought they were building something wonderful that would harken back to old wealth and interests. Instead they made a place for rich people that reinforces the idea that rich people don’t really have any good ideas outside of how to stay rich and get richer. All of it feels like someone else’s fantasy that they get off by living in. Why else give your kid a sports car he didn’t earn? Why else live in Nottingham Forest… in the United States. Yes, there is a real place of the same name in the so-called old country and yes, there is a Robin Hood school there, and that is dumb too.

My, I’m a testy one this Father’s day. I’m like a less funny Jon Oliver with cleaner language and worse teeth.

If there is one thing I can reflect on with positivity it is that I’ve gone through this day with nearly all of the people I truly love and have left in this world. I connected with all but one of them. The last I reached out to, casting messages into void with no response. He’ll come around. We’ll talk. It will be as it always is. Beyond the one the rest of us were all connected in some fashion and I am glad that my circle, however small, remains unbroken. Overall, I am glad. I am fortunate. There are ups and downs. There is light and darkness. Through it all I continue to love and be loved. Through it all I cast out words onto the emptiness of the digital paper and try to form worlds out of what lands there and lands here for it is the one true purpose beyond love I’ve ever believed. In of itself the words are a form of love as this blog is a form of love. On days like this it is easy to remember that because of the love sent back towards me powering me up and allowing me to see beyond my cynicism towards what is and what could be.

I am grateful. Grateful that I am not alone.

I’ve been doing these later and later at night largely because after the morning chunk of writing I want to be doing anything else but write for a spell. However, I am transitioning between projects today and that felt like a perfect time to start things off with a blog. Many things to say, but not about a specific subject, so I will collect them all under the banner of…

Some Thoughts:

1. I am in a better headspace with the writing and thinking through a spiritual connection to the words and the worlds being created. For a long time I’d lost touch with that, which is a terrible thing because my writing comes from a place of connection and without it I am just a dude trying to imitate the best parts of what I see.
2. I see a lot of junk. I watch a great deal of bad tv, including TV I thought was great at the time. I was thinking about that last night after watching another episode of Lisey’s Story. The way Apple TV constructs their menu is interesting. The have a page dedicated to Stephen King which includes the things he watched in the 80s. He watched a lot of really badly done horror. Almost kitch level stuff. Me? I watched Fringe. At least I watched 3 seasons of the stuff. Apparently there are 5 and I’ve been slowly rewatching the entirety of my childhood including Fringe, and it is not as sharp and bright as I remembered. Still, there are gems. JJ Abrams is a specific sort of dude, BTW. Easy to source.
3. I’ve been thinking about the blog and how many words hit a page, so at the end of this I will do a wordcount so I know what I came up with in this particular state of mind. I do wonder how long the Bloganovella will be. 12 chapters in and we have not even gotten to the heart of the thing.
4. Getting to the heart of this thing, I am starting (resuming) a new (previously shelved) project that I am excited (relieved) about getting (back) into. This is going towards the edge of science fiction–not the far edge but that near edge of what could be possible right now. I feel like sci-fi has two edges, one being the possible and one being the limits of what we can imagine. I remember watching Babylon 5 and thinking about the order of technomancers whose claim to fame was to dream beyond what was possible and from that create the impossible. I think that is our role as futurists…
5. Out of time… just under 500 words this time.

I found a coffin motel near the shore close enough to a skimmer I know named Jack that I’d be able to count on him in the morning to get me over. The job called for me to be on Manhattan Island. When I was a kid I saw this flatvid called Escape from New York. I thought it was hilarious how bad the CGI was, but facts being as they are, the flick was damn near prescient about the rotten apple. It isn’t a prison per say, but it is locked up tighter than the crown jewels. The fake ID fed me the juice to get in, supposedly, but I wasn’t ready to test that theory until I absolutely had to. From my limited time with the cops I knew that IDs worked like show tickets. Every time you ran it you left a mark there that built a file that tallied somewhere and people who had nothing better to do would look at those tallies and figure out who you were and where you’d been. With this being the first tally for the ident, I’m guessing those bored folks on the other end of the digital feed might pop up and ask the wrong kind of questions if I went from no hits to several in one day.

That’s what led me to Jack.

He and I had done work before. His professional title is skimmer. in times past they called his type coyotes or the nonspecific trafficker tag that made people so uncomfortable. He got people across the dark waters separating Manhattan from everywhere else. Others like him did it with various technologies that skimmed folks across the surface, giving the job it’s cute and fluffy name. Jack was different. He worked with magic and spirits. When he sent you across the water it was just you, shooting out over the East River, barely touching the black surface of the water as his mana powered you from point A to point B. Cool. Crazy. Flat out exhilarating. Also, scary as hell. That being said, I was looking forward to the trip.

When I was a kid, my mom was all about language. She’d teach me a new word every day and tell me to use it in a sentence. Some of them stuck. Calumny stuck. There’s something about the way it rolls off your tongue. cal-ummmm-neee. I liked it. I didn’t entirely understand what it meant until the 5th grade at shitty corporate academy #3 when a kid tried to roll me for my backpack and when I beat him back he told everyone I’d jumped him in the bathroom and wanted to touch his wee. Bullies can be really irritating when they lose. By shitty corporate academy #4 I fully understood the word and how to use it to my advantage. I didn’t have to fight another bully again until, well, tonight I suppose.

I spent the back half of the evening casing the Executive Body Enhancements storefront where Choi was scheduled to have surgery the following morning. I was on the list too. Tojiro Suziki. Deeply unoriginal cover, but they provided a deep enough set of paperwork that it would pass inspection with a Delta level cyber clinic. That was almost payment enough itself.

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.