Saalon Muyo

(If you missed it, you can read chapter 1 of Broken Magic here.)

What is Broken Magic?

We all have our kryptonite. People who push just the right buttons, who make some idiot part of your brain start singing about capital R Romance. That’s just about when you run head first into a wall. Whatever it is about them that grabs your brain and shakes it is fantasy, and fantasy works best from afar.  Get too close and things get real. The fantasy breaks. Or you break, hoping if you do, the fantasy will stick around. It’s not always the other person’s fault. It’s yours, and your fantasy’s. You can become a slave to chasing it if you let yourself.

Magic’s like that. Uncontrollable, as likely to burn as to bless. But seductive. Not in spite of. Because of.

Broken Magic is about fantasy and magic, and the cost of trying to control them. Also theater, and high school, and finding yourself through painful and embarrassing mistakes. I could have stopped that sentence at “high school.”

Now, chapter 2.

2. Thanks, Babe

Somehow, I go from sitting next to Laura, feeling uncomfortable, to sitting at a table with Ridley, Celeste and all of their trendy, musically literate friends – and feeling way more uncomfortable.  I think this is what happened: Laura accepted an invitation to hang with Ridley for a bit, and I followed her without a thought.

Here’s what I’m not so sure about.  Did I follow Laura because I wanted to be close to her, or because it happened to put me at a table with Celeste?  If I said I did it because it got me away from the teen thespian squad, would you pretend to believe me?

The musicians and groupies, or whatever you call the group of friends every local musician brings with them to gigs, have pushed four tables together.  At one end of the line of tables sits Ridley.  And Laura.  I am not at the end with them.  Through confusion that may or may not have been faked, I became separated from Laura as soon as the tables were rearranged.  I took the first convenient, open seat.  That put me directly to the left of Celeste.  Go figure.

Everyone starts heaping praise onto the musicians.  They say intelligent sounding things that really aren’t intelligent at all.  It’s like someone opened up Rolling Stone and started reading random phrases out of the music reviews.  But Ridley’s expression makes it clear he’s digging it, so who knows?  Attention turns to Celeste, and I finally have an excuse to really look at her without having to stare.  I don’t bother to pay attention to what everyone is saying.  I could care less.

I try to figure out how I’ll describe her to people, later. I can’t say she’s beautiful, because that doesn’t get it right.  I know I said cute before, but I’m talking about someone I can’t take my eyes off, not my cat. It’s like her features are a bit off, but somehow fit together perfectly. Eyes just a little too large. Cheeks slightly too pronounced.  Hair too messy to have been styled, yet too tame to be unplanned.  Pale, but not vampiric, skin.  She sounds more like a deviantART drawing than a person, doesn’t she? I’m doing a terrible job of this.

By this time, the hangers-on have turned their attention back to Ridley.  In response, I think, to something Laura has said.  I must have missed it.  This leaves me with a second more to watch Celeste before it gets creepy.  Unless, of course, I say something.  Which is impossible.  I’m a coward.  I’m a coward with nothing of worth to say.

“You sounded great.”  Ugh.  Should have kept my mouth shut.

Celeste’s eyes move to me, and she smiles. When she speaks, she sounds just a little bit shy.  Shy I was not expecting.

“Yeah?”

I tell myself this is not time to turn into jelly and mumble off a few idiotic comments and spend all week regretting it. Then I squeak out a pitiful, “Yeah.”

“I don’t know.  I’m just filling in.  I don’t have much experience on stage yet, you know?  This was just practice,” she says, continuing to smile, like I’m doing nothing wrong. Like she’s not already looking for the exit ramp for this conversation. Like she wants to talk to me.

“Then I guess I can’t wait to hear the real thing,” I say, sounding suddenly all confident and smooth. Like I’m good at this. Only I’m not.  It’s just her that smile is making it impossible to feel awkward.

“You mean that?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Wow.  Thanks, babe.  That really means a lot, coming from someone who just met me.”  She grabs my hand, the one I’ve got lying on the table, and shakes it.  “I’m Celeste, in case you missed it the ten times Ridley introduced me.”

“Neil,” I say, and let go before I give myself the idea that the cool touch of her hand means more than hello. Boyfriend. She has one. She’s friendly, not interested.

Ever notice that the outside world has a real problem keeping to itself?  It sends its favorite agents of annoyance, the trio of doom, straight to the table to make a scene.

“Hey, some of us need to work tomorrow, Laura.”  It’s Karen who speaks, with the other two standing behind her, nodding.  I look up to watch, and so does most of the table.

Laura, interrupted in the middle of flirting with Ridley, doesn’t turn immediately.  I know that kind of look.  She’s trying to come up with a reason to stay that doesn’t give her away to Ridley.  Flirting is like that.   Owning up to your interest kills the whole game.  Admitting attraction comes later.  With open mouths.  And tongues.

Or so I hear.

“You guys drove separately.  We don’t have to go home together.”  It’s a weak try, especially for Laura.

Karen glances back at the table, pretending to care about other people and their needs.  The only time she can act is when she’s screwing someone over.  “Sally has to work, too, but she didn’t want to say anything.”

Laura relents.  She was Sally’s ride.  “Give me a minute, ok?”

Karen smiles.  A win.  “Sure.  We’ll get our coats.”

Celeste is still over my shoulder, but I can’t bring myself to look at her.  I don’t want to say goodbye right now.  I’m never, ever going to see this girl again.  What was the point of even meeting her?  It’s not like I can ask her for her phone number.

  “So,” she says, maybe a little disappointed.  Maybe. I turn before she finishes the sentence.  “I guess that means you’ll be going, too.”

“Unfortunately.”  I manage to say it with a smile.

“Definitely unfortunate.”

Ever watch any anime?  You know how, when they get surprised, their blinking makes this plink plink noise?  That’s basically my response.

“Neil,” I hear Laura say from behind me, “let’s go.”  She sounds pissed. If she can’t stay, no one can.

I try the talking thing again, one last time.  Not to Laura.  “Well, it was great getting to meet you.  Maybe I’ll get lucky and run into you again.”

“Yeah,” Celeste says, still smiling.  Then she, I don’t know, bounces in her chair and makes a sort of “Oh!” noise.  It’s a little weird.  “I’ll be playing again in two weeks at the Quiet Storm. Eight o’clock.  There’ll be some kind of party afterwards, too.  You definitely should come.”

Is she…inviting me to a party?  What the hell is going on?  “The Quiet Storm?”

“Neil!”  Everyone’s impatient with Laura, so she’s taking it out on me.  I gracefully ignore it.

“It’s on, um,” Celeste nods quickly as she tries to remember, “oh!  Yeah.  Penn Avenue in Bloomfield.  You know where that is?”

Laura again:  “Neil!  Come on!”

“No, I don’t,” I say, getting up from my chair as I talk.  “But I’ll find out.”

Celeste gets up too, and, God help me, she’s still smiling.  Boyfriend, boyfriend, boyfriend.  She says, “Great!  It’s Saturday at 8. Not the next one. The one after.”

“Cool. Right. I’d, uh, better go.  Now.”

“Thanks for the support.  Seriously.”  She waves.  “See you Saturday.”

I can’t wave.  I’m pushing in my chair and trying to back towards the door before I get killed.  I nod and smile, and hope I don’t look like a moron.  When I reach the door, I’m greeted by glares from just about everyone.  I ignore them.  There’ll be plenty of time later to worry about Laura hating me.  First, I need to figure out how to get myself back into the city in two weeks.

I finished my first novel, Broken Magic, in 2007. Since then, it’s seen the inboxes of about a dozen publishers and agents.  When there was a response at all, it was what you’d expect: Sorry, but it’s not what we’re looking for.  There have been gaps where I just gave up, gaps which are the greatest cause of embarrassment for me. I mean, I got through the pain and suffering of finishing a novel, only to sit on a query letter for eight months?  One of those queries are out right now, and I’m coming up on the point at which I need to decide that I’m never going to see a response.  The Silent No. The only thing worse than the Form Letter No.

That leaves me with a choice. Do I continue to send out letters, or do I decide that this is not a novel that will be published?  Before the latest round went out, I’d been on the verge of self-publishing.  I’m sick of the thing sitting, mostly unread, on my hard drive.  I like it. I wouldn’t still be sending out rejection bait if I didn’t.  But it was finished so long ago that it’s getting to be a bit of a drag to have to talk about it in the abstract.

Today, I got dared.  I should have made them double dog dare me, but I fold like a 1,000 thread count bedsheet.  The dare? To post the first chapter of Broken Magic for all to see.  Or, to be more specific, for all ten of my readers to see.  Because I fold so easily, I agreed. And because I’ll talk myself out of it if I give it too much time, I decided I’d need to do it immediately.  I hope, in some way, posting this will force my mind to make a decision, and that next week I’ll be sending out another query letter, or formatting Broken Magic for publication on my own. Because the first two chapters form a more coherent mini-story than the first chapter alone, I’ll be posting chapter 2 – “Thanks, Babe” – on Monday.

Beyond that, without further ado, the first chapter of Broken Magic.

1. Small Blonde Thing

There is someone playing music in the back of the room, right hand making maddened up-and-down motions across guitar strings.  I can’t hear a note of it.  Instead, there is the screeching, bubbling nightmare-sound of hot steam forced through milk.  I’m paying more attention to a college student making cappuccino than the musician.  I can’t remember the guitarist’s name, but I’m pretty sure the girl making cappuccino is Ann.

I haven’t come alone.  There are ten other people with me, spread out across three tables.  All theater kids.  I guess I’m one, too, but I don’t feel like it.  Last week was the deadline to join tech crew.  I signed up on Friday.  Today is Saturday.

I’m out of place.  With the theater clique.  With everyone in this place, this coffee shop not meant for suburban high school posers.  At least I’ve learned enough about coffee to have ordered without sounding like an idiot.  I can only hope knowing the difference between a latte and cappuccino is enough to keep anyone here from realizing I don’t belong.

Ann, or whatever her name is, turns off the steam.  Musician-guy finishes a song.  Another one begins.  It is ten minutes before I fall very, very hard for someone I’ve never met.

For now, I’m here because of the girl to my left.  I’ve never done theater before.  The only theater I’ve seen? Musicals.  I’m not even sure if I like theater.  But she’s the best actress in school.  If you want to spend time with her, you’re going to have to be near a stage.  Her name is Laura, and I’ve been mooning over her for two months.  It took me all of that time to get the courage to sign up for tech crew.  Where I found the cojones to sit next to her, I’ll never know.

Laura knows I exist just long enough to say hello to me.  Then she’s talking to a friend, flirting with one of the fifteen other guys in the room who aren’t me, or just plain ignoring me.

At the moment, I think she’s perfect.

Most of the people with me are girls.  There’s Sally, a sophomore, who is either Laura’s protégé or rival, depending on what day it is.  Janet Haller, who I’ve never heard called by anything less than her full name.   Kevin, Greg and Karen, the trio of doom, the worst actors in the school whose only talent is bulldozing over other people’s good ideas.  Paula, who threw up on stage on opening night during last year’s musical.  She won’t be getting another lead.  Nina and Francie, the token lesbians of the theater program, who aren’t actually lesbians at all.  But being called dyke is the price you pay for dressing in black, doing theater and hanging out with another girl all the time.  Actually, being called dyke is the price you pay for going to high school, being female and not dressing in Tommy.  Nina and Francie are just easier targets.

And there’s Laura.  Queen of the theater.  Short red hair.  Dressed in the kind of almost-ratty, old-looking clothes that only a trendy actress could pull off.  I don’t think they even match.  Tall and thin, small busted but shapely.  She’s beautiful, she’s talented, and I’m pretty sure she isn’t wearing a bra.

Everyone female is enamored with the man playing music.  Laura set the tone as soon as we sat down.  “Damn,” she said, and that was enough.  No one has spoken since.  That half of every song was obscured by cappuccino-sound is irrelevant.  A hot man is playing music, and conversation can wait.

I have lots of time to think about how the music really isn’t all that good.  Simplistic.  Trite lyrics.  Lots of stupid crowd pleasing ad-libs, like inserting the name of the coffee shop into the song.  I think of voicing them, tearing the man apart to take some attention away from him.  But really I just want to talk to Laura, or listen to her talk, or imagine that she has something resembling attraction to me.  That last one is sort of hard, what with the need for a drool cup every time music-guy starts a new song.

Rebellion begins with the trio of doom.  Whether or not they’re enjoying the music, or find music-guy attractive, is not the point.  Fifteen minutes of silence because Laura wants to gawk is far too much.  Greg fires the first shot.  “You think he’d go out with me?”

Laura peels her attention off of music-guy.  Turns to Greg.  Her ability to switch moods on command is frightening.  Remember, she’s an actress. “Don’t be a tool.”

“He’s probably would.”  Everything Karen says has a lazy slur to it, like she’s barely got the energy to speak.  It irritates the hell out of me.  “Grunge isn’t your type, though.”

Greg shrugs.  “True.”

“But he’s definitely hot,” Kevin adds, making sure to keep an eye on Laura as he talks.

Laura knows what they’re doing.  Getting her angry is what they want, and Laura isn’t the alpha for nothing.  “You really think he’s gay?”  She says it like she’s disappointed.  Like she believes them.   For a second, I wonder if the trio has won this round.

“He’s a little bit feminine,” Greg says.

Karen nods in agreement, suddenly acting sympathetic.  “He’s got the aura, you know?”

Laura considers this for a moment.  Everyone at the table slides a little forward in their seats.  I want them to be right.  I want music-guy to be gay so she can stop staring at him.  But I don’t want to see her dropped a peg by these three.  Stupid conflicting emotions.  Why did I come here tonight, anyway?

A song reaches its banal conclusion.

“I think I’ll just go ask him out for you.  We’ll know for sure, then.”  Laura’s response comes out all happy and helpful.  It’s enough of a shock that no one moves to stop her in the second it takes her to get out of her seat and walk away from the table.  Greg’s mouth opens.  Closes.  Everyone but the trio holds back laughter.

The guitarist looks up as Laura approaches.  She smiles at him.  He smiles back.  The likelihood of his homosexuality seems slim.  Then Laura is whispering into his ear, and I – like everyone else – am wondering if this was a bluff by Laura, or an object lesson for anyone interested in staging a coup before this year’s musical.  Music-guy laughs.  Just a little.  Karen squeezes Greg’s hand.

“Uh, hey everyone.  I just got asked a question by uh…what’s your name?”  The music-guy asks the question like he’s about to ask her out.  I hate him and his generic music.

Laura answers quietly, so only music-man can hear him.

“Laura.  Nice to meet you, Laura.  I’m Ridley.”  He laughs a little and turns back to the crowd.  “Anyway it was a well timed question, because I’m about to take a break anyway and introduce you to someone special.  While I get some coffee, you get to be the first to hear the best new musician in the city.  Uh, Celeste?  Wanna stand up?”

At a table between me and Ridley, a small blonde thing stands.  All I see is the back of a white tank top, a calf-length, blue and green skirt and short hair.  She turns to look at the crowd, but shyly, so no one really gets a look at her at all.

“This is Celeste, and no, I’m not just lucky enough to have someone as talented as her to play while I’m on break.  I’m lucky enough to be dating someone as talented as her.”  Not gay, but not available.  Perfect.  He turns to our table.  “So, sorry Greg, I’m taken.  You seem like a nice guy, though.”

Rippling laughter moves across the crowd.  If the redness in Greg’s cheeks is embarrassment or anger I’m not sure.  Advantage, Laura.  She won’t be flirting with a hot guitarist tonight, but public humiliation will be enough to keep the trio from bringing that fact up.  Her work done, Laura gives a little wave to Ridley and walks back to the table.  If it had been me, I’d be still awkwardly standing there, making a fool out of myself.  Laura knows how and when to make an exit.  Ridley even waves back before continuing.

“Anyway, enjoy the show.  I’ll be back on for another set in a while.”  Celeste, the small blonde thing, walks up to the stage.  Ridley touches her hand,  kisses her cheek, and heads straight to the counter to order something trendy.

Laura returns to the table and gives the trio a look.  Remember your place, it says.  Then she looks at me.  At me.  Triumphantly.  I try to return the look, and fail miserably, I’m sure.  Before I feel awkward, I look away.

Celeste sits down, pulls out a guitar and gives the crowd a nervous smile.  I can see her face, and despite the close presence of Laura, I can barely take my eyes off her.  At the moment, I’m not even sure why.  “Just give me a second,” she says barely loud enough for me to understand.  Begins tuning her guitar.

My eyes are still on her when I get the guts to speak.  “I wonder if she’s any good.”

“Eh,” Laura says, and that’s all.  A good actress knows her competition, she told me one day in English class.

With the trio silenced, and Laura stewing over her hot musician target being taken, the others at the table realize they’re able to speak.   Francie, who’s been wanting to say something all night, makes her move.  “What do you think about the new director?”  Ms. Holtmeyer, the theater teacher, is no longer directing our productions.  An outsider has been brought in to direct, to give her more time to concentrate on her classes.  A subtle way of saying parents have been complaining.

Like she’s been prepped for this conversation before Francie spoke, Nina responds.  “It’s totally unfair to Ms. H.”

Paula answers as she always does.  Monosyllabically.  “Yeah.”

“Holt was a crap director.  Anyone would be better.”  Laura’s words are dismissive, almost  bitter.  I’d try to say something – anything – to support her, except somehow Celeste’s guitar tuning is the most entrancing thing I’ve ever seen.

I see Sally nod out of the corner of my eye.  Holtmeyer never cast her, but she doesn’t want to sound like Laura’s shadow.  A silent response is her most political choice.

Celeste is almost finished tuning, but it’s taking her too long.  She’s losing the crowd.  She offers everyone a placating smile.  I’m awed by how cute she is.  Not beautiful.  Cute.  That might sound like an insult, but note that I’m still staring at her.

“I guess he seems fine,” Janet Haller says from behind me.  She got a bigger role than she expected in the play.  “But I’ll miss Holt.”

Nina tries again.  “I just don’t think it was fair.”

“Well, that’s theater.  Get used to it if you want to have a career.”  If I was paying more attention I might find Laura’s cattiness a turn off.

Only Celeste is starting to play.  In ten minutes, the night has changed meaning for me entirely.  I know, somewhere in the back of my head, that I’ll be back to following Laura around tomorrow.  I know I’ll be building sets and moving lights just so I can get five minutes with her to say nothing at all.  That’s tomorrow.  Now, my eyes watch a pale hand caress the fret board of a guitar, readying itself.  Now, I’m smitten by someone small, blonde and even less available to me than Laura.

 ”You don’t have to be such a bitch about it, Laura,” Greg says in an attempt to regain the upper hand.  “It’s not like it matters who’s directing.  You’re the lead no matter what.”

Laura’s voice rises at the wrong moment.  Celeste’s right hand is raised just above the strings.  No pick.  Finger picking only.  I want to hear this more than anything, but instead I hear, “I’ve earned every role I’ve gotten.  That’s more than you three can say.”

The opening chord is delicate, and it’s ruined by the argument.  I hear the next three, and Celeste’s music just makes her more entrancing.  This is different than Ridley.  Not just because she looks good, I swear.  The argument continues, blasting away the song again.  “Can we not do this tonight?”  Sally’s attempt to be forceful fails.

“We audition the same as you,” Karen says, leaning across the table, “we just don’t suck up as well, apparently.”

I almost say that she’s gotten it all backwards, but arguing with actors is the last thing I want to do, even if it means sticking up for Laura.  Celeste’s mouth is opening, and all I want is to hear her voice.

I’d say my heart skipped a beat, or my breath caught in my throat, except that would sound really, incredibly stupid.  Everything does stop for a moment, though, when she sings.  Almost like the world around me just blinked.  I’m convinced the theater argument has continued and gotten worse, but I can no longer hear it.  I thought Celeste would be, at best, pretty good.  Cute girl singing songs, worth paying attention to, but not much more.  Instead, she’s incredible.  No microphone, but every word is clear and resonant.  Lyrics that aren’t just lyrics.  They’re poetry.  Really, freaking good poetry.

I only joined theater because of Laura.  I’m sitting in a coffee shop I don’t belong in so I might have the chance to say two or three things to her and stare at her the rest of the time.  So why can’t I even focus on what she’s shouting next to me?

Because of the small blonde girl singing on stage.

Apparently I’m the only one able to ignore the battle erupting around me.  Ridley, hot music guy, is standing at our table as soon as Celeste’s song ends.  He smiles, directly at Laura, and politely asks if we wouldn’t mind keeping it down while his girlfriend plays her set.  I’m barely aware of the seething quiet that descends on Laura, or of the smug satisfaction on the trio’s face in seeing Laura humiliated by Ridley.  After all, Celeste just started a new song.

Chapter 2, Thanks, Babe has been published here.

Two years ago, I shot a film for the 48 Hour Film Project. It was the last thing I shot, and the first time I’ve gone that long without shooting without the regret overpowering the relief of being free of it all.  My relationship with filmmaking has been troubled. I love writing the script, and I really love every single on-set moment. I love shooting, working with actors and the way everything is so unbelievably alive when a dozen people are bouncing off of each other and time and money are in far too limited supply.

Everything else sucks. Casting sucks. Scheduling sucks. Realizing you didn’t get the shot you thought was great because you shook the camera sucks. Listening to audio that got screwed up by an HVAC system, or realizing you forgot to hit the record button sucks.  Everything that isn’t writing and isn’t shooting is dealing with things you can’t control, and I hate things I can’t control.  Dealing with it over a handful of short films, only three of which are even worth watching at all, wore me out.

I’m starting to miss it again. We’ll see if missing it leads anywhere, but for now I’m thinking about what shooting again might feel like.  I’m watching movies and paying attention to editing and camera movement, I’m thinking about what I didn’t get right that I want to get right next time. And I’m apparently talking about it, because I got asked yesterday for a link to what I’ve shot and it was entirely because I was mouthing off.  You know I’ve been struggling with filmmaking when I’m not even mentioning it in front of people.

There are two (maybe three) films of mine online.  One I shot in 2005. “Tomorrow” is more interesting to me than good, and is possibly not much of either to anyone else.  I watched it for the first time in years last night, because I asked if I could qualify said films before showing them, and I needed to know what I was qualifying. I considered just sending Mels – who asked for the link – an e-mail, but thinking about the films made me contemplative. I thought that if I wrote about it, if I got into my troubles a bit more publicly, it would be better for me. I’m clearly a little fear-paralyzed by filmmaking, and if I’m ever going to do it again, I need to actually address those fears.

“Tomorrow” was an experiment; 12 minutes, shot in a continuous take in an apartment, dealing with a suicide and the moments prior to the arrival of emergency services.  About half of it I can still watch without cringing or just skimming past the awkward, too earnest writing. Amidst that half are some moments and stagings for which I still feel a bit proud.  It was a heck of a thing to shoot. My lead actress was deathly ill, and would power through each take, then collapse onto the floor while we reset.  In two days of rehearsal and a morning of shooting, we shot a not uncomplicated, single-take film.  It even got good (capsule) reviews from the Post Gazette and City Paper. But it was an experiment, and part of me wishes it wasn’t still out in the wild for people to see.

The other film was what I shot for the 48 Hour Film Project.  The way it works is pretty simple: You gather on Friday night, where everyone reaches into a hat and pulls a genre.  You then get a piece of paper that’s the same for everyone telling you a character name, a prop and a line of dialog that you have to use. 48 hours later, you have to turn the film you wrote, shot and edited within that time.  We pulled Surprise Ending as our genre, which is just an awful genre to pull when you didn’t even know it was a possibility.  (Actually we pulled Musical/Western, which is the Genre of Death, and handed it back in to take a wild card genre instead, because neither of those genres were an option for us).

Looking back on “co workers”, the film we produced, is not as hard.  If I had been able to sit on the script – or even the edit of the film – for a couple of days I’d have reduced and rewritten a lot of the first two minutes. It had been a while since I shot, so there’s an awkwardness to the opening I wish I could magic wand away.  After that, though? Well, unlike most things, I’ll let it speak for itself.  For something we wrote between 8PM and midnight, shot between 8AM and 6PM the next day and edited by that time the following evening, I’m still pleased.  Actually, I’m kind of pleased with it anyway.   The restrictions forced me to actually produce something, front to back, without being able to back out.  While I don’t have a lot positive to say about the 48 Hour Film Project competition itself, it was, I think, the experience I needed.

I don’t know where this will lead. Maybe I’m just flirting with this again but will shrink away from what’s an absolutely unpleasant set of challenges. I can always write without filming. Do I want to? Do I want fear and fatigue to be the reason I never film again? I don’t know. I’m still working through it.

I ask you this: Watch “co workers” first. If you think it’s crap, don’t go on to “Tomorrow”, because that film is – in most ways – a step back in quality. If you like “co workers” enough to want to watch the other, know that it is, to my eyes, a interesting experiment that serves as a troublesome artifact of an early writer-filmmaker Eric with whom I not entirely comfortable.  I considered not even posting it, but if I can’t look back at what I didn’t get right, I’ll never have the guts to go through with this again. I’d really like some of those guts back.

So, without further ado, I give you “co workers” and “Tomorrow”.

“co workers”

“Tomorrow”

If it was math, it might have made sense.  Two negatives making a positive.

I hated seaQuest. My first review for my school’s newspaper was of the seaQuest pilot, and it was a fine example of youthful, hyperbolic vitriol. I tore the crap out of that pilot, and boy did I think I was funny as I did it.  Unlike Babylon 5, a show I came to truly love, I never warmed to seaQuest.  It had a stupid-voiced dolphin, an obnoxious Wesley Crusher wannabe and it looked like it took place in a jar of Welch’s Grape Jelly. Trash, people. Pure trash.

I never hated fan fiction like I did seaQuest, but I never had much interest in writing it. The problem is that wasn’t real. I never minded people writing it, I just couldn’t understand why they enjoyed it. For me to invest in what I’m writing, I have to buy into it. I have to believe it. These things, in this tiny bubble universe I’ve created in my mind, are actually happening and actually matter.  Without believing that real, irrevocable things are happening to the people under my control, I can’t possibly sell that lie to anyone else.  Fan fiction was a bridge too far.  These characters were on tv, doing other things and did not care what hell through which I was putting them.  Fiction is all about lying, but even lies about people fighting with monsters or flying deep spice freighters need to feel real. Fan fiction always felt like a facade with nothing underneath.

So there I am, writing seaQuest fanfic.

My life got tied up in seaQuest fandom almost as soon as I started hanging out on Scifi’s Icarus IRC server.  My wife? The one I met on IRC? Her username was LWQuestie. Lucas. Wolenczak. Questie. (Lucas being the aforementioned obnoxious – but apparently cute – Wesley Crusher ripoff.)  There were other Questies bouncing around on the server, so it was only a matter of time before I ended up in a chat room with one of the two head writers of a seaQuest fanfic “show” called seaQuest 2047.

Like most things, it started because I mouthed off.  Why I read any of 2047, I don’t know. A link someone sent to me, or perhaps out of pure trollery. Either way, I’d read some of 2047. I had things to say. Shockingly, I did not have nice things to say. More shockingly, Matt – the 2047 writer in that chat room – private messaged me, and not to tell me to please stop flaming the thing he was writing.

Instead, he asked, “What would you do to make it better?”

The fastest way to get me to do something against my better judgment is to appeal to my ego. I answered enthusiastically. What I said, I don’t remember, but it led inexorably to an offer to join the effort and write me some seaQuest fanfic.  Out of what I can only imagine was a desperate need to write something people would read, I accepted just as 2047‘s second season was ramping up.

This was just as I was graduating high school and heading into college. I was still sorting out whether or not I had any confidence in my writing. I was doing it, but it was just this thing that happened. I had no idea how it was supposed to fit into my life. Getting into 2047 was one of a couple things that cracked everything open. Sitting in chat rooms with the other writers, flaming back and forth on e-mail threads about future plot developments and obsessively reading reactions on message boards made the whole thing real to me.

The combination of not actually being a fan of seaQuest and the fact that the show featured primarily original characters – it was set 15 years after the end of the show proper – made it easier for me to buy into what I was doing. I dove into it enthusiastically; more so that I even remember, apparently, because I looked back at the episodes and my name is on more scripts than I’m ready to admit. For nearly two years, Eric Sipple was a seaQuest fanfiction writer, and he enjoyed it.

It ended badly, as these things do. People leaving, people you like less coming in.  It was a group effort and I wasn’t in charge, so when the person who’d taken over started getting flirty with someone with whom I did not get along, the writing was on the wall. We finished the second season and I went off on my own.  When I say “on my own” I mean, “I followed a friend to a spinoff of the fanfiction show I was writing,” but my shame level is getting a bit out of control, so let’s just pretend I rode into the sunset.  (To be fair, that spinoff fanfiction series was a great time, and I did a bit of not-embarrassing writing as a part of it, but please, dear God, let me stop talking about this.)

One of the two founders of 2047, Rachel, is still a close friend, and in retrospect it was the fact that she was a wonderful writer that made working on the show seem like a good idea.  There’s one particular script – the one I talked about co-writing – for which I have particular pride. The way that experience cemented my relationship with Rachel makes the fact that you can still find fan fiction bearing my name on the internet worth the embarrassment. I also met Adam, another friend and writer, and the one I spun off with before making my final exit from fanfic. You can’t argue with a year or two of your life that leaves you with two good friends.

It also gave me some perspective on fanfic, something I’m glad to have learned.  It confirmed the feeling that writing something that I can’t believe as real is a waste of time.  At the same time, it showed me another side of that coin.  In your early days of writing, you’re a geyser of crap.  Almost everything you write is trash, and the rest should have been incinerated on the spot.  There’s no way to get to being good at telling a story until you’ve seen every possible way you can do it badly.  Don’t underestimate how damaging those early days can be to your ego.  It sucks to suck, and it really sucks to be aware of how much suck you’re producing.  That feeling that you are simply a terrible writer is very, very difficult to overcome.

Fanfic, for me, worked as a set of training wheels. Or maybe a safety blanket. Safety wheels?  Anyway, it gave me an outlet to write an awful lot, to see my writing put in a public place and to react to it as finished work.  I learned a lot through those few years of writing fanfic. I produced a lot of terrible but finished stories that made me better, and did it under a structure that supported some of the burdon for me.  There’s something close to a dozen television length scripts I wrote or co-wrote in my time as a seaQuest fanfic writer, and whatever horror I feel in reading them now, they gave me a chance to write and to be read. Maybe I could have been spending that time on better pursuits, but it was what it was, and it came with more good than I expected when I got involved.

Sure, a lot of people use fanfic purely as fantasy fulfillment – sometimes as way kinky fantasy fulfillment – and many will write little else.  That’s fine, though I remain confused (but not dismissive) about what pleasure people take from it. Most people probably didn’t write fan fiction for a show they hated, either, so I’m not sure how useful an example my experience is.  The point, I think, is that there will come a time when you’ll need to start writing things all your own (it’s usually earlier into your work than you think), but that time spent in the attractive nuisance that is the world of fanfic can be helpful if you use it to your advantage.

Except for the part where you spend the rest of your life terrified of someone stumbling across it and asking, “So, what was seaQuest 2047?”  That part just plain sucks.

I came into the Cultural Trust just as they were heading straight into a full rewrite of the Cultural District website. They’d hired a consulting company to handle development, and I’d be doing co-development with them for the duration of the project.  When the engagement ended, the website would be mine and the consultants would ride off into the sunset (so that you’d be blinded if you tried to follow them and blame them for all the bugs, of course).

There are a hundred reasons doing co-development with a consulting company can be a headache, but the one we’d chosen came bundled with Agile – a software development methodology that encourages speedy development by wiping away all the stupid manager-driven bureaucracy and replacing it with an insane process-driven bureaucracy.  Like so many Agile enthusiasts, they didn’t trust me to get into the game on my own without a little hand holding.  They sent out a developer to babysit me for a few weeks (actually a very nice and extremely talented developer) and teach me the ropes.

The ropes, in this case, being something called Pair Programming.  Here’s how it works: You find a desk. Stick one (1) computer on the desk, along with one (1) keyboard and one (1) mouse.  Find two (2) chairs, place them in front of the computer and sit the developers in them.  Demand that the developers work together, trading the keyboard and/or mouse between them.  While one is working, the other sits over his or her shoulder and, if the “driving” developer should pause or stop to think, they are encouraged to chirp ideas into their ear unbidden.  If this is insufficient, they may take the keyboard and/or mouse and interrupt their partner completely.  Continue forever.

I hated Pair Programming. It’s on a very short list of development practices that are cause to immediately reject a job, regardless of the bigger picture.  It’s not that sitting with another developer to work through a problem is bad.  It’s not. In the days before I was Solo Señor Web Developer, I regularly pulled people into a problem, or was pulled into a problem by another.  But in those days, I could always send them away when it was time again to start working. Pair Programming forces you to deal not only with the problem at hand, but with the impatient, fidgety reactions of someone wondering if you’ve gone quiet because you’re stumped or because you’re thinking.

It’s easy, after a few bad collaboration experiences like that, to get gun shy about collaborating with people at all.  Luckily, outside of the noxious environment of enforced Pair Programming, collaboration with other developers tends to be a fairly healthy process.  I’d kill for a few more developers in the room, just so long as they don’t try sitting at my desk and taking the keyboard when I’m in the middle of something.

My experiences co-writing have been more mixed.  This is, I’m sure, partly because co-writing is a far more finicky business than co-development.  In development, there are empirically verifiable outcomes.  You needed a button to open a window with these three fields, and the button does that.  There are plenty of religious wars to be had about programming, but by and large, most problems you have to solve can be stuck in front of someone, and that someone can say, “Yep, that’s what I wanted.”

Not so much with fiction. While certain types of bad are hard to argue – I can send you some objectively horrible stuff of mine if you need proof – it gets more subjective at the ‘good’ end of the scale.  That’s why every professional screenwriter has a litany of horror stories about the notes they get from executives and show runners.  Even the sane notes can pull a story towards a very different notion of good than what the writer had in mind.  Collaboration on anything artistic brings out the worst in a lot of people, as they try to get a story to not just be good, but as close to the platonic ideal that they had in mind when they came up with it.  Don’t believe me? Ask some people about the end of Battlestar Galactica.  And, since none of them actually wrote the thing, multiply their flame war by the heat of the sun. Most collaboration doesn’t get that bad, but falling out over how a story or play or movie should turn out has ended many friendships and professional relationships.

Having your work ripped apart by people can be rough.  It sucks. In development, there are things called code reviews that no one does like they should (though it would be in their best interest). One or more people pull down what you did over the last week and tell you all of the ways it should be better.  The outcomes of development are pretty empirical, but the methodology of how you got there can be just as subjective and religious as writing fiction.  But, like writing a collaborative project where you each get your own territory – an anthology, or being in a writer’s room on a show – you can take the beating from a position of safety.  You have a finished thing. You spent some time working out all the awful you could find before you gave it to them.  You have confidence in what they’re about to shred. That matters.  That really, really matters.

But like pair programming, co-writing something is having someone criticize you about things you don’t feel great about, either.  It’s someone watching you work and seeing all of the really crap ideas that would never see the light of day if there wasn’t someone at your desk with you, pointing out your indiscretions on the monitor.  That’s why collaboration can get so damned ugly. Your lack of confidence makes you turn nasty at criticism, even when it’s in the story’s best interest.  Someone telling you that sentence or block of code is trash stings.  You snap about how you know it’s bad, that you’re just trying to see how it looks before you keep going, how you just want them to shut up before you smash their stupid face into the keyboard to see if that makes the sentence better.  A story, an idea, a plan; they’re fragile at first, and even when criticism might be helpful, if it hits at the wrong angle it can shatter the confidence you need to be clear-eyed about how to make it work.

Co-writing – and, I suppose, pair programming – doesn’t just require the right amount of respect for each other. It demands the right kind of respect.  You have to trust that the person you’re about to hit with the ruler is smart enough to have chosen to do things a particular way for a reason.  You have to trust that the person criticizing you knows you’re not a screwup, that when they say that something kind of stinks that they’re seeing something you might have missed.  It’s not just that you respect their talent.  To let someone into the process that early, you have to trust that their judgment is sound. That they aren’t just seeing a good version of the story, but something close to your good version of it.

Otherwise, how do you let that person sit over your shoulder while you type some of the worse garbage you’ve ever put into pixels without feeling self conscious?  You don’t.  That’s why pair programming is so nasty a standard practice.  The number of people I would be able to collaborate with that closely is way smaller than the number of people with whom I’ll work in my life.  To make co-writing the norm – to make sitting at a desk with another human being while I expose myself to ridicule normal, to make that the standard – is lunacy.

Yet, I can understand the appeal.  When it works, when you do have someone you can respect that way, things fall together in fast andunexpected ways.  It’s lovely to have someone with whom that can work.  Earlier this year, I reconnected with my friend Rachel.  She’s the only person I was ever able to work with at that proximity, and a story I cowrote with her is one of the first really good things I helped produce. It would probably make me cringe to read it now (we wrote it years and years ago, when we were young and stupid), but it was an important piece of writing for me to finish.  Working with her again has brought that all back to me.  A really good co-writing partnership is magic.

Magic, though, isn’t reproducible.  It’s not predictable and it does not play by your rules.  I can’t say that, because the best early thing I wrote was the product of a collaboration, I will forever co-write everything, regardless of who my partner will be.  That’s insanity, just as saying that because the right programming pair can work faster than any two programmers alone, the same benefit will apply to any programming pair.  There are development houses where programmers have to rotate partners every few weeks.  Thinking about working that way makes me sick.  I’d lose my mind.

You aren’t going to produce most things alone. Your code will be tested and used by others. Your stories will be hacked at by publishers and executives.  Fellow developers and other writers will shred what you’ve done for your own good, and they’ll push you to make something far better than what was there to start.  You will collaborate.  But collaboration does not all happen at the same distance, and finding the right distance for you and your co-workers and co-writers will keep you from sharpening the knives when backs are turned.

Back to an exercise I dropped before it even began. It’s likely to continue until I can look back and know, clearly and confidently, just how embarrassed I should have been to post these.

The rain comes again.
It stops only to remind you
how things were before.
You remember how sunlight
looked without passing through clouds.

(Not the show. I like the show but this isn’t about the show. If you came to read about the show, here’s your Certificate of Disappointment.)

Not to beat a dead horse, but boy are we screwed up when it comes to our preference for violence over sex in our entertainment. Shoot a dude in the face and you can probably CGI-wipe enough of the blood to swing a PG-13 rating. Flash a boob and we’re already into R. Show some wang? Woah doggie, you tryin’ to make porn or what?

This always comes up when a show or a movie uses a lot of “gratuitous” nudity and sex and people want to show their intellectual bona fides. It’s sexist, it’s not sexist, it’s better than violence, it would be better than violence if it was justified–

–actually, let’s stop right there. Justified. I don’t want to rehash a lot of stuff about whether nudity should be justified or not. Same goes for violence.  This justified question makes me a little itchy. Like when that giant eyeball asked the Doctor if the human race was important and he asked, “Important? What does that mean, important? Six billion people, is that important?”

On second thought, maybe that quote doesn’t apply.  Cool quote, though, right?  Anyway, back to justification.

It’s kind of bunk, this justification thing, isn’t it? What justifies a naked boob, or a gunshot to the head, or Frank Langella’s balls shot in close up from behind and underneath? Is there ever a narrative reason for me to wach Frank Langella’s balls flapping all over the place? When he was about to sit on that piano bench, did we need to drop the camera to bench level for when he flapped that robe back so we could catch one more glimpse of the guy’s sack?

Maybe asking if nudity or violence is justified is the just asking the wrong question. But before we get there, let’s note – once again, for fun and giggles – what a double standard we have on the topics of sex and violence.  Culturally, we are totally, happily, gleefully fine with using violence purely for entertainment. Dude punches dude in face, girl engages in motorcycle kung-fu, Stephen Segal slowly breaks the bones of his attackers one at at time; we’re fine with all of it. I’m fine with all of it. I like watching people beat the crap out of each other. I saw a trailer for this Indonesian movie called The Raid where this guy wrestles another guy to the ground before sticking  gun to his head and shooting him multiple times and made giggly happy noises. I am going to see this movie specifically so that I can see as much well-staged gratuitous violence as possible.

Now. Let’s imagine a trailer filled with an equal amount of genitalia (Except for Frank Langella’s balls. Don’t think of Frank Langella’s balls!). Think the movie that trailer is selling is getting into as many theaters as the one with violent cranial trauma? (You’re totally thinking of Langella’s balls, aren’t you?)  You think if it was semen and not squib-blood splattering onto people’s faces,  you’d even be able to see that movie in that failing indie theater in the middle of nowhere?

But we know all of this, right? We realize we’re cuckoo for violence and terrified of sex. That’s not news. But I think it bears interestingly on this fallacy of justification.  Because you don’t justify sex or violence in a story any differently than you justify any actions a character takes.  Robert Parker spends a lot of time describing Spenser cooking, eating and drinking. How is that justified? Spenser likes to eat and drink. The guy can cook and enjoys it. We see it because it says something about Spenser and how he lives his life.  You should be “justifying” everything you do in a story, but really that means the story needs to justify itself.  If a character has a well drawn reason to want to screw someone, the sex is justified.

There are a lot of other things you can ask, if you’re interested in getting further into this. Does it move the story along? What would the story feel like without it? What was the scene supposed to make the audience think and feel?  All good questions, but they’re essentially the same things you’d be asking about a twenty page dinner scene or the end of 2001.  My point is that I don’t see how sex and nudity require special justification outside of the way you’d decide what else did or did not make a movie better.

Having said that…

What’s with the boob to penis ratio? I don’t argue this on my own behalf, but really, what’s the deal with guys freaking out every time they see a penis on screen? Have you imparted that much mystical strength into your own member that you think they have the power to turn you gay on the spot? Do they have Medusa like powers when you gaze too long at them?  Is that why the only times we see a penis on screen is when it’s attached to guys like Harvey Keitel and Gerard Depardieu, so that guys can freak out about the rest of what they’re seeing, too?

I mean this seriously, though. It bothers me that, once we’ve decided it’s OK to have some sexy time in a movie, we still have boundaries around whose nudity is ok to see.  You want to justify that topless girl? Show some man flesh, too.  Roger Ebert has written that erotica was one of the first uses of motion photography, and thus erotica is a valid genre of its own. I agree, but that needs to swing both ways. Almost all of the problems I have with nudity in film (and, let’s be honest, I don’t have that many) come back to the inequality of nudity.  If men felt as pressured to drop trou as women did to take off their bras, life in Hollywood would be a better place.  If we were more concerned with presenting people with a full and realistic portrait of sex than with the nonsense notion that sex requires special intellectual justification, we’d all be a little happier.

If justifying naughty time in film is that important to you, let’s start here.  Tell your partner that the next time you’re really ready to go, that they are not to oblige you until you justify why you want to have sex and what it will do to push you forward as a person. Have them demand an essay on the topic. If the justification is insufficiently complex, you’ll be forced to make do with Frank Langella’s balls and a sex toy of your choice.  Let me know how that works out for you.

A guy like me is supposed to say he’s used to rejection. Never popular at the best of times, abandoned by every friend and acquaintance just before high school, fumbling when it came to talking to women even after graduation; rejection is in my blood, right?  Well.

The thing about being the right mix of awkward and unpopular is that you learn quickly not to put yourself in the way of rejection if you can help it.  If someone starts giving signs of turning on you, you find a basement or a doorjamb and you wait it out like it’s a tornado. You might get hurt, but it’s what you expected. You never asked them to stop.  And women? Don’t you have to know how to talk to them before they can reject you?

It’s not as if I never got rejected. It happened plenty of times. It’s just not something unpopularity, shyness, and social awkwardness gave me special experience to handle. What I learned by being a loser is to hide. Invisibility is my super-power, not invulnerability.  Being a loser may have helped with my writing, but it taught me all the wrong lessons on how to turn that into a profession.

I got a rejection letter yesterday. It wasn’t the first and it’s assuredly far from the last. Rejection is what happens when you ask someone to pick your book out of a pile of other ones and tell you what they think of the first ten pages.  It happens in any profession.  We send resumes that don’t get response. We go on interviews that don’t work out. Getting hired is the end of an often long, humiliating process.  There’s a difference when someone rejects something you wrote, though.  Something that’s hard to describe.

Getting hired for a job is an exercise in perception.  Interviews, code samples, psyche tests and the rest are all just tricks people use to try and figure out if maybe you might be good at the job.  When they turn you down, they’re turning down their perception of your abilities. You can apply for a job you’re utterly qualified for, but get rejected because you didn’t make the sale.

At first, it feels the same way when someone says they don’t want your novel. It could be the query letter or the synopsis.  Maybe by the time they got to reading the novel, they’d already decided it wasn’t their bag.  They might have never gotten to the sample chapters.  It’s just a marketing problem or the wrong agent, you say, and you send the book out to the next one.  Continuing to think that after the tenth letter? That’s where it gets complicated, kids.

It takes a while, but the rejection letters start to whisper to you.  They make you wonder if it’s actually your marketing they’re rejecting.  Maybe your novel just isn’t any good.  Job hunts whisper nastiness in your ear as well, but HR is always one step removed.  The editor has a piece of you in his or her hands and is writing on it in red ink that it just isn’t good enough.

It starts to feel familiar. Like the last time you asked someone out and they got a look in their eyes that said you weren’t even on the same playing field as them. It’s rejection that cuts to a soft, exposed spot. You lifted up the armor and gave them the shot, hoping they wouldn’t take it. They did.

Here’s the thing though. All of that? It’s crap.

What I was supposed to learn when I was staying under the radar is that when someone takes that shot, it’s just one person. You think the people who can reliably troll a club and go home with someone, seemingly at will, didn’t get told no about a dozen times on the way to success?  They took the hits, adjusted a bit when something wasn’t working and kept going.

Yeah, ok, maybe you could tweak a few things.  Maybe your novel turns out not to be something no one wants a piece of.  It happens. It happens a lot.  Somewhere along the line, it might be time for some soul searching to figure out why so many people said no. It’s not like a lot of books don’t get rejected for good cause.  Maybe yours was one of those.  Maybe your novel does suck. That, though? That’s all beside the point.

The point – at least for someone like me who never learned to take the hits – is this: Getting punched in the gut is no excuse not to ask for another. If the book is great, if it sucks, if it’s just not what someone is going to pay you for; none of that matters.  You don’t stop being single by hiding from women, and you don’t get published by letting a rejection letter convince you to let something you spent a year on sit on your hard drive.

My last rejection letter was a year ago. I decided that I was doing a crap job marketing it and that I needed to rewrite my query.  That would have been fine, except that it took me a year of avoiding the thing entirely before I got back to it. I got antsy about being told no again, because I didn’t know how many more rejections I could take before I started to believe them.  The answer, I think, needs to be all of them. Soul searching and lesson learning is important, but it’s no good if it’s just another reason to stay under the radar. A haircut and a new outfit might help you get some attention, but it helps less than just asking the next person out.

Get back out on the dance floor.

I had a mental breakdown, I guess, because I came home last week and there was a bread machine waiting for me on my doorstep. Amazon tells me I ordered it, so if wasn’t my clone, it was insanity.

The recipes in the bread machine book were predictably terrible, so I decided if this thing was going to take up shelf space, I might as well learn how to use it.  Erin and I hit up Barnes and Noble, pulled every single bread machine recipe book off the shelf, and used the most scientific method to make our choice: We opened up the first one, then we bought it.  We got lucky, because every single thing we’ve made out of it has been fantastic.  You should go buy it immediately if you have a bread machine.  Because–

–hey, wait? $12.47? I paid twenty-one $%#&@&# dollars for that book at B&N! What kind of a moron am I?

Anyway, the main thing mental-breakdown Eric wanted from a bread machine was to make some good, Italian bread. Because I’m a good Italian boy and I’m ethnocentric about my carbohydrates. I had to to the store not once (for semolina flour) but twice (for instant potato flakes) to get what I needed, but I finally got to try it.

Erin might not have any bread left to try by the time she gets home. I’m going all anti-paleo on this sucker.

Pane Italiano

Ingredients

Liquid:

• 1 2/3 cups water

Dry:

• 3 1/4 cups bread flour
• 7/8 cup semolina flour
• 1 1/2 tablespoons instant potato flakes
• 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 tablespoon gluten
• 2 teaspoons salt

Yeast:

• 2 1/4 teaspoons SAF yeast
  or 2 1/4 teaspoons bread machine yeast

Instructions

1. Place all the ingredients in the pan according to the order in the manufacturer’s instructions. Set crust on medium or dark and program for the Basic or French Bread cycle; press Start. (This recipe may be made on the French Bread cycle using the Delay Timer.) If using the Basic cycle, after Knead 2, press Stop, reset the machine and start the cycle again, allowing the dough to be kneaded an extra time.  The dough ball will be moist.
2. When the baking cycle ends, immediately remove the bread from the pan and place it on the rack. Let cool to room temperature before slicing.

Known in some corners as “What is Eric failing to put enough time into today?”

1. Broken Magic - Finished eons ago, it has too few rejection letters attached to it.  After some brutal but lovely query letter criticism from Jon Merz, I hope to get this sent out to a few smaller presses this weekend.  In the meantime, I’m exploring the possibility of self publishing, since I’m sick of it sitting around, even if a big reason it’s sitting around is because I’ve only given it a half dozen chances to be rejected.
2. Seanchai - The mythical, magical soon-to-be awesome self-publishing website platform for the 21st century.  A blog for long-form writers. WordPress for novels.  I’ll get a cool catch phrase soon, I’m sure.  Maybe.  I started work on before work utterly overwhelmed me. I’m getting back to this, since it’s both a good idea and something I would really like to use myself.
3. Big, Long Project I Don’t Talk Much About - It’s a novel.  Three months ago I had 40,000 words done. Then I decided those all sucked, so now it’s down to 20,000.  I’m in the midst of the Chapter From Hell, which I’d like to finish so I can make some progress on something again. At this rate, the expected completion date is sometime in the summer of 1754.
4. Untitled Climate Change Short Story - When Rachel Brody wants to collaborate on something, I say yes. The month of September will likely be the month of writing a SF story wrapped around the theme of climate change. I’ve gotten as far as deciding it has something to do with wine. That last sentence bound to give Rachel heart palpitations.
5. Mimesis - A modern, young adult horror/fantasy novel about a very doomed love triangle. It’s been living in my head long enough that it’ll likely not go away until it’s written. This still needs some structural work, but I might use NaNoWriMo as an excuse to focus on this later this year.  Of course, that’s what I said last year, so be ready to point and laugh come December.