Writing is Like Being That Ginormous Life Making Machine Doohickey in the 5th Element

Lately my fiction writing has come to a grinding standstill. Sprawling satirical space operas that attempt to say something about the drug industry (both legal and none) is apparently kind of tricky.

I've taken refuge in reading books (Story by Robert McKee and Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass) about fiction and story. These deal with down to the bones ideas on craft and artistry and how best to go about constructing your work. There is a lot to learn, and so much I don't know. But the beginning writer, such as my self, is always in conflict with two urges: one, to write it, get it down, work as fast as you can and maybe the dreaded Writer's Block won't catch you; and two, dear lord PAY attention to fundamental principles of story design and structure!

It's not unlike being that Ginormous Life Making Machine Doohickey in the 5th Element. You know the machine that rebuilds Milla WhatsherfacesomethingthatsoundsRussian? There it is, furiously working, trying to make a living organism from a single cell that happened to survived inside a glove, creating the bones and nervous systems, muscles and what not. And then they flash the end product with UV light, skin is made, and Boom! Milla is once again an action hero who is outweighed by her weapons by a ratio of 4 to 1.

Writing is exactly like that, for me, at least. Except for the end product, replace a European model with a three legged, profanity spewing orange hippopotamus with a partially working digestive track attached to its tail. I look at it and think, "Something just iiisn't right here." Just a nagging suspicion, I'm sure.

There are fundamental, down to the bones error in some of my pieces (I've thus far finished 2 novels (one through it's 3rd draft, one 1st draft), and like, 80% of this space opera (nothing published)). But I feel like I'm too close to the works, and not entirely sure what I'm looking for. Part of me thinks, "Well hell, it's living and breathing, technically, it's an organism.", and the other, rational, less forgiving part of me things "Oh dear god what have you done!?" I avert my eyes. I can feel that an abomination against the universal laws of Story have been committed. Something, or many somethings, just isn't quite working.

It's troubling. To say the least.

Email : Server, down.

So our network server's hard-disk filled up, and when that happens, the entire office gets a repeating network message, which gets somewhat irritating. This is what I sent to the entire office, yes, I'm a prima donna. Yes, I have undue faith in my job security.

Once upon a morning dreary, while I programmed, alert, yet weary,
Over many a hard and contorted lines of forgotten lore,
While I focussed, near exhaustion, suddenly there came a popup,
As someone gently messaging, messaging on my windows core,
"Tis some friend, " I muttered, "IMing at my Window's door-
Only this, and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I rememebr it was in the bleak of winter,
And each separate bugging message wrought upon my Window core,
Eagerly I wished the stopping, vainly I had sought Stop Popping!
From the IT staff of five, stop the buzzing of the hive -
For the sought and beautiful silence which is popups no more -
Unheeded here for evermore.

And the sad unbidden message of the disk is fillen,
Chagrined me - filled me with terrors of servers dying,
So that now, to still the beating of my mind, I sat repeating,
"Tis some IT staff will get it,
Some time soon the staff will get it
Before the server has a fit"

Email : I've never rambled, ever.

I've posted a few emails that I've written that I though weren't half bad, this is one of them to a person in my writing group, concerning my rambling style.

I have never rambled in my entire life! Now, maybe
like an itinerant and slightly loghorheatic vacuum
salesman with a poor grasp of English, I've felt a
need to extrapolate and finely craft the inner and
outer details of a subject. I may have, on occasion,
used points and counterpoints on my prose like so much
bling on hard-hitting gangsta rapper (originally from
Vermont). There may have been pinpoint of weakness in
the timeline of my writing, in which a short snappy
sentence might have created a world of it's own, an
interior life replete with absinthe fueled imaginings
of how if only it could be discovered it would move to
Paris and finally finish that post-avant-garde
pre-anti-post-modern epic poem in Swahili.

I admit, that how fleetingly, a sentence may have
added compounding to it's own compounds, until the
weight of it's commas and semi-colons brings it to its
knees, grasping for the quickly failing vision of
whatever point it was trying to make.

However unfair, critics may have taken up arms against
my fondness of words in which twenty or ninety words
might be used in the place of three or four.

But ramble? Ramble?

Surely not.

Figures

News is suppposed to keep one informed about the world. Besides giving us details on the latest arbitrary tragedy, lascivious details on the most recent car crash, or how fast the last police chase was, I mean. Ideally, in an ideal world, the news should be informing us. We would put off, I think, if we turned on the 6 o'clock update to hear them speaking latin backwards through a trumpet mute.

That's why I'm always amazed when they just throw out a figure, and assume that everyone knows what the hell it means. For example :
"Crude oil production is down 3 million barrels this quarter."

What the hell does that mean?Is that a large percentage? Historically, does this happen often? What's the percentage change, even, would be nice. If you told me crude oil production was down 10% last quarter, even me, a OPEC ignoramus, would have a rough idea on what this means.

But now, they just throw it out there, and hope that the five people in the audience who even havve the faintest clue what it means and why, will tell the person next to them. Maybe they have hopes that, like a country wide game of telephone, the useful bit of information from that odd piece of data will make its way around.

I mean, can you imagine if everyone else did this in real life?

"I see your blood is pumping at 1 litre per39 seconds now...." as doctor stares ambigiously at you.

"Our special today is the roasted duck, which is $1.20 per 45 grams. Would you like to see the wine list?"

Life would be that much more frustrating.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that many professions do just that. Spout off facts and figures assuming that you will understand, or that you will be too embarrassed to ask for clarification. Some mechanics come to mind, that annoying IT guy who feels that much better about himself because he knows how to reseat your RAM. The land of mystery, of the unknown. Many professions, I'd grant almost all professions use it for ill and for good. I don't particularly want to know how they make my sausage. That's a good mystery.I do, however, want to know what a gasket is, why it's blown, and why it costs $500 to 'get er done'.

I can give them a pass on it though. It's the way they do business, hell, it's the way many of them stay in business, but the news? The business of the news is to inform you. Giving us figures without any context or significance behind it makes me glad I get all my news from the web.

Cocaine in the Water Cooler

I don't know what it is about certain service workers. Whether it's the deli woman who's far too enthusiastic to take your order of turkey on rye or the Mastercard phone rep who seems to be doing speed as he's talking to you, they are veritable beacons of over-cheer in a land of Just Trying To Get Through The Day With My Dignity Intact.

They must put cocaine in the water cooler or something. Maybe their bonuses are based on serotonin levels?

It's much worse when they interacts with you on a daily basis. That overly cheerful barista who must come from the land of Sunshine, Lollipops, and Electroshock Induced Happiness in order to maintain a level of blithe joy is a daily attack on my attempt to keep my head down and plough through the day.

They must have watched, and taken to heart, every movie with Robin Williams where he keeps a child-like innocence about the world and admonishes the stuffy authoritarian figures 'that if they just let their inner child laugh and play, if they just smell the roses once and a while', everything will be fine. Never mind that they'd put you in a mental institution before you could say Lithium or "I have a slight aversion to bovine tranquilizers".

It takes a measurable amount of energy out of me to even look at them, much less talk to them; energy I'd much rather put into thinking about "what the hell I'm going to blog about next", or "how much coffee would create a lethal caffeine blood level?". They are energy vampires. They must take pleasure out of culling from their customers every line of cheerful pitter patter, every last ounce of Disney-inspired goodwill towards men and small forest animals.

Maybe they are really soulless harpies who realize the amount of subtle pain they inflict on their customers and take a secret glee each day in extracting the hidden wince and under the breath groan. After all, it's good to be cheerful right? Enjoy your job, bring joy to others? That's the current train of thought anyways.

Personally, I'd be much happier if we could just buy everything out of vending machines. At which point, of course, I'm sure the vending machine technicians would start getting on my nerves.

People You Meet on Transit #3

The hipster. This is the guy (I have yet to recognize the gal variety) listening to the newest iPod as conspicuously as possible, with fashionably tousled hair, a rakish grin and a scarf that costs more than my coat.

They are like a Gap commercial come to life, if Gap's name-brand cheerfulness and ability to swing dance at will was replaced with a sardonic mind that framed all the world in either post-Chomskian analysis or as fodder for their next avant-garde three act interpretive shadow puppet dance featuring the vocal stylings of the only ethnic person they know.

It must be tricky being a hipster, since by default everything they say or think has to be sarcastic. Now, at some point, that has to get cliche,so does one layer sarcasm on top of sarcasm? Does sarcasm work like negative numbers, where two negatives multiplied together creates a positive? Are optimists merely pessimists who have gone too far? Or does sarcasm work like watercolours? Where if you layer enough sarcasm together, it all looks like a grey mess and you can't be sure if you just used the dirty water where you store your brushes or have created a new NEW grey which may be featured in your friends next art show at the corner gas and frappucino bar.

I imagine that when multiple levels of sarcasm are layered upon each other - in a slave-like fashion not unlike how the pyramids were built; every layer more difficult to lay upon the previous one, and the all the while the previous layer bringing all sorts of doubt as to it's structural strength - the sheer weight of analyzing everything for pop-culture reference, blatant hypocrisy or whispers of post-consumerist neo-capitalist faux-objectivism must get tiring.

The hipster, I'd imagine, gets crushed.

I mean, you can't seriously wear those twill houndstooth jacket with the army surplus hats forever, can you? At some point it all looks fairly ridiculous. At some point, you are going to be mocking your own ability to mock things, which in turn can be seen as a transparent grab at seeming extra edgy and on the envelope.

Dang, I don't even know where I'm going with this, except to say hipsters are the black holes of the Transit universe, they eventually implode. What comes out the other side, well, someone must know. Do they become the power-broking attorney who works 100 hours a week but smokes weed every three months so they are 'still cool'? Do they metamorphosize into a barrista with visions of finally doing a proper edit of Casablanca?

Where do they go off to? There are no 40 year old hipsters.

Maybe they just eventually save enough money for the downpayment on that Jetta they've been eyeing.

"Debt" Part 4 of 4

Freddy, their Met Police contact, turned out to be both their police contact and the right underworld contact. The bar was so smoky the patrons were never sure if they were with their friends or just high-backed chairs with some listening ability.

Hank focussed on his drink. He didn't want to let it sink in that he had gotten involved with Sneezly. If there was one thing you wanted to avoid, it was getting on Sneezly's radar, because once you were on it, the only way to get under it was to go six feet down. And now he was at odds with Sneezly, it wasn't as if his Debt wasn’t a problem enough.
The broad and her case were bringing all sorts of trouble Hank's way, the fact that he had predicted just this situation was as comforting watching a firing squad slowly load their weapons.

Across the table, Freddy wiggled .

"I don't know what that is, I don't know why she would want it."

"She?" Hank gave an evil eye to the blur across the table.

"I didn't say she, I meant, you know, he, she, doesn't matter."

The raisin shaped head jittered as it talked. He looked around, as if waiting for someone to end the meeting suddenly, possibly by the use of small arms fire.

Hank took out his sizeable if questionably functional gun and thumped it on the table.

"You know, Freddy, I'm not a usually violent man."

"He has only killed or maimed 23% of his contacts in the past quarter," offered Greg.

"See? I'm not usually. But when a trusted friend and confidante -- such as yourself -- starts lying to me, then tries to cover it up...” Hank paused, ”Well."

"23%." repeated Greg. Hank wasn't quite sure if Greg knew how menacing he could be with statistics.

Freddy, or the shadow that was Freddy, stopped, as if considering which dangerous and probably lethal option to take. It was an agonized silence.

"Alright, alright. A lady, she was wrapped up, she came by and offered me triple what you guys usually do. She went in. Honest, I had no idea what she was after."

"What did she sound like? What did she look like?"

"I don't know, it was all via text to my Desktop. She didn't say anything. She smelled like violets though."

Hank's mobile transmit went off. He checked the display, it was Him. Hank answered it, his voice went low, and his eyes stuck to the ground.

"We gotta go Greg."

"Just when things were getting interesting? We are walking away from our lead in this case just because you received an unsettling phone call? Honestly, this is a bellwether of where your career is heading."

"It was from Him, who I owe the debt to."

"The Debt?"

Hank nodded as if any sudden movements might set off a heretofore unseen bomb.

************


They walked out of the bar and into a large robot that smelled of expensive oil. It grabbed both Hank and Greg and walked into waiting ship. The ship lurched as it shot into the skyway.

It was dark. A speaker somewhere above crackled on.

"It seems, Mr. Pirelli, that we have a friend in common. Say hello to, oh I suppose you call her Jane or some similarly dreadful name."

"Hello." the voice was sultry, and almost too close; it sounded like silk being drawn under duress, too tight.

"You okay Jane?"

"I'm fine, for now."

"You had the pendant all along didn't you?"

"I... I did."

"Then--"

"I had to have someone distract other people who might have been interested in it. I’m kind of important."

"Right." Hank tried not to breathe in her smell too deep, warm violets. He put his brain to thinking of some sensible plan that didn't involve him screaming and possibly fainting. He grimaced. Trying to save yourself from almost certain death and looking cool was nearly impossible.

The lights came on, and Sneezly Simpernel strolled into the cargo bay. The floor rumbled, the ship was going an appreciable speed down the skyway. He had come to gloat, thought Hank. Sneezly held the Perma-Ice pendant on his fingers, playing with it.

"So.." he began.

Jane's hands flashed and out flew throwing knives, long thin and silver. They skewered his hand, he screamed, the pendant fell to the floor. In a fluid motion she dove, caught it in the air and rolled to a crouch. She looked back at Hank then up, her eyes widening.

The very large robot with the expensive smelling oil whirred to life. Greg in the confusion had already made his way to the back of the larger robot. When turned on, he lept up onto it's back, snapped a few tools from his wrist, removed the robot's head panel, and rewired a good portion of it before it could take single step forward.

"Old robots are old and tired, it's true. But we learn a fair bit along the way. Lady, and gentleman, shall we depart?"

Sneezly had activated a not so silent alarm, and suddenly the sound of running boots echoed down the hall. He screamed, drew a long sleek gun and leveled it at Jane as she ran towards Hank. Without thinking about the possibilities of a terribly disfiguring misfire, Hank drew and shot. The weapon made a sound like crashing metal. Sneezly dropped to the ground, from fear and shock. A sizable hole was in the opposite wall, quite far from anywhere Sneezly might have been.

Hank and Jane clambered on the large robot, and Greg drove. First he made it rip a good hole in the bay.

"This is the sort of robot that has thrusters, isn't it?" yelled Hank over the howl of the outside wind.

"I do hope so."

The large robot jumped out of the ship, and they free fell. The repeat of laser weapons roared behind them. Hank's eyes streamed tears from the ripping wind and he tried to focus on the worst problem. The fear from the shooting goons was replaced by the terror of dropping at terminal velocity at an Earth that could not be dodged. An explosion like TNT being detonated with a few hand-grenades went off. The robot had finally fired it's rockets. Hank and Jane held on and Greg maneuvered the robot to safety.

************

The Debt was being called. In a small dark oak paneled room with darker carpeting Hank waited. Greg waited with him, quiet, almost non-plussed. Hank had not gotten the money, or enough money. He hoped his death would be quick.

The Mayor, as he was known, walked in. He was a tall thin man, wore the same grey suit, and spoke quickly, cutting every word with the precision of a particularly high achieving surgeon.

"It's come to my attention that there is a Debt to be paid."

"Yes, Mayor."

"A very serious one, in fact."

"Ye--"

"Don't interrupt me." The Mayor motioned towards the door and in walked Jane.

"My daughter is the most important thing in my life, Mr. Pirelli. When I heard that she had been taken by Mr. Simpernel, there was no telling what destruction and wrath I was prepared to unleash upon the city. He's man who would like nothing better than find an excuse to kidnap my daughter, and excise some blood from me and my territories. Imagine, he said my daughter had stolen a pendant.”

Jane fluttered her eyes down. She was a delicate flower to her father. A victim in this whole ordeal, Hank kept quiet.

“ Something one of his men had been transporting when he had been, uh, liquidated. Naturally he needed an excuse to hold her hostage, to maintain face in front of the other Families.

"I was stuck, Mr. Pirelli. I couldn't challenge his honour. It was his word against mine. And I couldn't launch an all out rescue attempt, not without bringing the wrath of all the Families upon me. And then there you are, suddenly, saving her, delivering her to my doorstep.”

He gave a brief appraising look at Hank.

"In short, Mr. Pirelli, your Debt is paid."