Day: June 19, 2021

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.