Flight (#FridayFictioneers)

PHOTO PROMPT © Ron Pruitt
PHOTO PROMPT © Ron Pruitt

“This ain’t gonna work,” VJ grumped.

“Shuddup,” I said.  “He’s not gonna find us.”

“You were just on your phone,” VJ said.  “Bam.  Signal everywhere.  Tied straight to you.  You turn off the GPS yet?”

“Dunno how,” I said.

“Just turn the damn thing off.”

I did.  I’d ditch the electronics a town over, switch to burners.  No updates anywhere. Radio silence.  It’d be okay.  Until I needed money, and used a card.

“You ever robbed anybody?” I asked.  At least stolen money was clean.

“Just the once,” VJ said.  “I’ll let you know if we get away with it.”

Word Count: 100


Friday Fictioneers is a weekly blog hop hosted by Rochelle. She posts a photo prompt then challenges readers to write a 100 word story inspired by the prompt. It’s a fun challenge. Give it a try! Check here for the info then write your story and post it, link up and enjoy the other stories!

By the way…

Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is free today, if you haven’t taken advantage of one of those yet.

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An observation 

  
I am not sure which is cooler:

  • That I wrote all four of those, and you can tell– my name’s on ’em!
  • Or that my 2016 is already planned out, and that the first book of 2017 might be too.

Authoring is AWESOME.

¡Drogas! ¡Más drogas!

Clonazepam-150x150Saw the doctor today.  The people in the office are starting to recognize me; that’s how often I’ve been there lately.  The receptionist just waved me off without formally checking me in today.  That many times.

Everything’s fine!  Except that my brain is still screwing with me.  So we’re trying Clonazepam for a little while, because all the test results from last week have pretty definitively ruled out my adrenal glands as the culprit.  I’m out another week of work, too, because she’s expecting the drug to hit me kinda hard.  Seeing as how I stopped taking the last one because of side effects, I’m not super excited about this.  But the Lexapro is definitely out of my system– I can tell, because I’ve been nervous and twitchy all day today.  So we’ll hope that Clonazepam helps where Lexapro didn’t.  If not?  Well, whatever the next thing is, I guess.

It’s still not lupus.


Anyway.

I keep almost writing a short story about the Dyson Sphere thing, only the only thing I can come up with is basically a dialogue between two characters about it.  Which… okay, I can do that, but it’s kinda boring without any actual meat on the bones.  I’m just nervous that if I don’t get it out of my system now it’s going to end up as an infodump in Starlight or Sunlight or whatever that book is called now.  Which I need to start working on again soon.  Just as soon as I finish the three other things I’m working on right now, which… well, soon.  That’s all I’m saying.


I will be here in June.  Get your tickets now!  Meanwhile, you’re running out of time– less than a week!– to pre-order Searching for Malumba.  The print edition looks fantastic, if I do say so myself; I’m never not using their creme-colored paper again, because it looks so much better than the white.  That’ll be available on the 27th if you prefer your books on paper.

Okay, I think that’s all I’ve got.

A couple of observations on that #EpisodeVII trailer

  • I still think this is going to be too scary for my son, which is very disappointing.  We haven’t even managed to get him through the OT  yet, which is my current greatest failure as a parent.  We have not tried the prequels.
  • I think my favorite thing about this is what they’ve done with the music.  The Force Awakens trailers have had a very different tone and feel than the previous six films, and this one is the most sonically different.  I really like it.
  • In the very last shot, Finn takes one look at Kylo Ren’s lightsaber and does a little hop backwards like he wasn’t expecting to see it.  You’re in trouble, bwah.
  • Speaking of John Boyega, make sure to check this out.
  • …and I haven’t mentioned Daisy Ridley’s Rey yet, but check this out too.
  • The amount of stuff I still know nothing about going into this movie is astounding.  Did you know Max von fucking Sydow is in this movie?  And NO ONE knows who the hell he’s playing?  That that’s Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata character doing the voiceover along with Rey and we don’t know what the hell she looks like?
  • My wife and I thought it was Leia; I don’t actually know Nyong’o’s voice, and am going by what everybody else is saying on that.
  • The shot of Rey descending into the bowels of the Star Destroyer is outstanding.
  • There’s been a lot of talk about the complete absence of Luke from these trailers, other than (presumably) the shadowy, robot-handed figure reaching for Artoo in that one shot.  Fewer people appear to be noticing the absence of C-3PO, who hasn’t appeared in a single shot in any of them.  I can come up with plenty of reasons to hide Luke.  Fewer for Threepio.
  • It’s looking more and more like the movies are going the opposite direction from where the original Expanded Universe went: Luke does not appear to have re-founded the Jedi order, and damn near no one has seen a Jedi in several generations (since the purge) by this point.  I wasn’t super happy with losing the EU but at least they’re not bothering to retread any of the same stories.

What did you think?

Every sick day should be like this

its-not-lupus-black-t-shirt
One of the tests was for autoimmune diseases! It really isn’t lupus!

I’m about to write a whole bit about all the fun & productive stuff I’ve done today since I didn’t have to go to work because I’m on medical leave.  Let me start with this, though: we have an elderly cat.  I got her when I moved to Chicago in 1998, so she’s seventeen and some change, not that you can tell from interacting with her.  She has been a puker for as long as I’ve owned her.  Last night I was ripped out of sleep by the sound of a cat preparing to hork on my bed.  I snapped awake and tossed her out of bed, resolving to clean up whatever she did to the floor in the morning (this may be why the carpet in my bedroom is so shitty) and then rolled over and went basically immediately back to sleep.

And then it happened twice more in the next hour.

And the third time it triggered another of the same type of attack/”episode” things that have been keeping me out of work lately.  The only difference is this happened in the middle of the night, but it was the same thing: simultaneously freezing cold and sweating, nauseous, weak, shallow breathing, generally awful.

Turns out, when your cat wakes you up trying to hork, it generates a bit of an adrenaline surge, and the third such event in maybe an hour fucked me up bad.  I still say there’s something wrong with my adrenal glands, but I keep getting test results from all the blood I had sucked out of me on Saturday and so far everything is normal, so I have no goddamn idea what the hell is going on.  I do know I couldn’t have gotten out of bed at 6 if my life had depended on it; I didn’t feel human until 11, at which point I was able to haul myself out of bed and take a shower and start my day.

How do I feel now?  Completely fine.  Which is the most frustrating thing about this; I’m either completely fine or I have medical professionals hovering over me and telling me to go to the ER.  It kinda sucks.

But anyway.  I did a whole bunch of shit today!  Have the rest of my day up to now in bullet point form:

  • Went to the bank to clarify some stuff about our recent mortgage refinancing.  Turns out I need to pay my own homeowners insurance now as the bank doesn’t do escrow.  Annoying, but manageable.
  • Checked a couple of mattress stores for a new bed for my son, who is now big enough for a twin bed.
  • Bought my son a bed at one of said stores, which will be here tomorrow.
  • Had lunch at Five Guys, a rare treat since basically just setting foot in the place will probably kill the boy, who has a peanut allergy.
  • Went to the Apple Store and scratched my “need a new thing” itch by buying one of these.  Almost certainly not the wisest use of my money, but I use two monitors and the massively increased size over the previous version won me over.  Using a trackpad instead of a mouse is wonderful.
  • I’m generally a big fan of Apple’s fetish for minimalism, but it really hurts them on mice and keyboards.  I can’t use their mice at all, and this is my keyboard on my desktop.
  • Actually saw one of the $17,000 Apple Watches in person for the first time, and walked away surprised by the fact that I actually prefer the look of my $250 Pebble Time Steel.  The leather on the Apple Watch actually looks kinda chintzy, and the gold is way too shiny for my tastes.
  • Speaking of surprising things, walking past a Mennonite woman piloting an electronic wheelchair via an app on her iPhone was my moment of Zen for the day.
  • Hit the grocery on the way home.
  • Since getting home, I’ve applied for a job and done some light cleaning.  I’m making dinner tonight, too.  Chorizo Mac and Cheese!

Tonight: Walking Dead!  Assuming, like, my son doesn’t jump at me from around a corner and put me in a coma or something.  I’m naming my disease Reverse Hulk Syndrome until someone comes up with something better.

Whining: do not read

whining4Blech.

An announcement: I’m tired of basically the entire world right now, particularly the American politics and Internet parts of the world, but also including wide swaths of the entertainment and publishing and technology industries.  I have this weird Need for a New Thing going on right now that might indicate that capitalism has finally carved an unfillable hole in my soul and may just indicate that I’ve spent most of the last three weeks sitting around the house and not doing much.

Also possible: that I’m just Sundaying.  My doctor has already told me I’m not going back to work next week, meaning the next day that I need/get to leave the house to earn a living will be a week from Tuesday, since we’ve got a fall break coming up next weekend.  I need, somehow, to put together lesson plans when I have no real idea what’s gone on in my classroom for the next two days and don’t actually have any textbooks or materials handy.  That’s going to be interestingly tricky, and by “interestingly tricky” I mean “I very well may try to have one of the other fifth grade teachers write my lesson plans for me.”  Which I’m sure they’ll be very happy to do, seeing as how I’ve been totally useless to anyone I work with for the entire month of October.

I need to find something to do today other than kvetching and staring at electronic screens.  I have a couple of fiction projects that I want to work on this week but I feel like I probably ought not to worry about them today in favor of… something else.  Anything else.   I just dunno what.

What’s new in your life?  Gimme something interesting I don’t know about that I need to check out.

#WeekendCoffeeShare: Anything But That edition

CL42-OSUAAAEGr5

Let’s see.

If we were having coffee, I’d…

Hmm.

I actually just got back from brunch with one of my oldest friends and her husband.  They’re in town about once a year, when they come in for a home Notre Dame game, and we tend to meet up for breakfast just north of campus.  What did we talk about?  The last three weeks, mostly, and doctors, and my job.  Shared some parenting stories; their daughter is a year and a half or so older than my son, and they have a 2 1/2 year old son too.

Problem is, I’m kinda tired of talking about the first 2/3 of those topics, because they’ve been consuming my life lately.  I made it through breakfast without mentioning a certain book I have coming out, too, and I feel like that’s a victory.  So it’s the parenting stuff.

Ooh!  I never mentioned this: we had our first parent-teacher conference as parents this week, which was kind of fun.  I’ve been on the other side of the table more times than I can count as an educator, but I’ve never before been the parent in that scenario.  The fun thing was figuring out that the teachers were a little gun-shy, almost as if after several years of working together at my son’s rather ridiculously expensive private school they were used to parents not really wanting to listen to criticism of their special snowflakes.

I love my son rather a lot, and he is a lot of things, but he is emphatically not a special snowflake, and he’s also not perfect.  My kid’s four.  He’s gonna screw up and do dumb stuff at four.  Their job is to let me know about it and my job is to fix it, not argue with them.  This is definitely one place where me being on the other side of the table is going to help.  He’d had some sort of stupid little personality conflict with another kid in his classroom this week, which required a bit of investigation on my wife’s and my part and a few clarifications from the other kid too.  I don’t know how the other parents reacted to it, but the teachers seemed to think we were gonna dig in our heels on the whole thing.

Nah.

Once I get past that, though, I’m not sure how much I’ve got left.  I’m looking forward to spending this week and next working on some short stories before I get back to the Skylights sequel in November.  I’m hoping to have the first draft of that done by the end of the year, but you all know how slow I write.  Not super likely.

Anyway.  How’re you?  Read any good books lately?