It's A Monday Through Friday Thing

It's a Monday through Friday thing.

She waits every day at the same place to catch a bus that remains parked down the street, within sight, obeying the almighty schedule. Cars pass by in the morning gloom, their tires a constant sussurus, their engines a constant rumbling flatulence.

By the fifth day it's routine, but the hundred and fifth a habit: walk to the assigned point on a map drawn be people who might've passed the corner once, stand in the cold, and look at the bus parked a hundred yards away, lit and warm. The cars have their own pattern, unchanged and ever changing. There are irregularities to witness amongst the patterns.

Every day the silver truck with the dent in the right front fender comes around the corner too fast, the driver is somehow perpetually surprised by this and brakes excessively. Some days an espresso from the stand up the street is in his hand, others his phone. Once he almost killed someone in a head-on collision, the portly old lady coming in from the ferry. She supposes that at forty you've probably lived a full enough life, but still.

There's the guy that rides his scooter like it's sport bike, everything so shiny he must think he's Tom Cruise or something. He's old enough to think Cruise is cool. He putters by every single morning at 7:52AM on his own personal highway to the some danger zone. She even set a borrowed watch by it once, then compared it to her phone later. It was strange; no one wears a watch anymore. Not anyone from this century anyhow.

In a strange way, though, these strangers are commonplace and familiar. The wait becomes like any other line, anywhere else. She amuses herself with a quick vine of the Seinfeld soup nazi. The solace is music. With the music on the wait blurs into choruses and stanzas, the ebb and flow of the bass, the songs on a constant rotation.

Every changing, always the same.

It's a Monday through Friday thing, after all.

Call Me Something Other Than Ishmael

So it's fairly obvious that I never finished NaNo. I'm not too concerned about it. I've discovered that unless i am absolutely obsessed with a project (to the point of willingly shutting out my friends and associates) then I am not going to achieve a massive word count in any given day. To do that I must love my project.

I guess the real problem with the Embassy, which started cute, but got melancholy too quick, was that the tone was far off, and I just couldn't get any emotional latch to any character. Now, three months later I couldn't even name any single character in the draft.

Mur Lafferty (http://murverse.com/) spoke recently on her podcast "I Should Be Writing" that she was going to use a word count goal of 200 words a day. This seems very small, especially if you're trying to bang out a novel, but it's a real easy goal to reach, it builds a work ethic, and at the end of the year even if you're only half trying you should have at least a 60,000 word/200 page book. It isn't great, but darn it, it's a book.

Maybe this is why Martin and Jordan take/took so long to release their epic (read epoch) fantasies...

Current prompt: Take a story from the Bible and set it against a sci-fi background.

Answer: Liberal theft. I'm modifying some of Barsoom (I love flying ships and the ability to still have sword fights), and throwing a fantasized version of Israel from the Book of Judges into an alien world. The story will follow a version of Jeptha from Judges 11, and be told from the POV of his chronicler, a man named Irin (which means Watcher, apparently.) So yes, there's more theft, since it's meant to "pay homage" to Melville. If you don't get it, that means "Call me Ishmael."  If you still don't get it, read Moby Dick or watch a bunch of Star Trek.

So, if you read this, wish me luck.

--ZG