Bow. James Bow.

The photograph above is entitled Fog During Lunch and is by David Kinney. It is used in accordance with his Creative Commons license.

Icarus Down Scorecard
Word Count: 41860
Increase Since Last Report: 7030 (Jan 22)

I’m pleased to say that I’m on a bit of a roll with Icarus Down — pleased to say, and also a little reluctant, as I don’t want to jinx it. But I am enjoying this part of the writing process, where I’m discovering the tale, much as if I was reading it for the first time.

Here’s a scene from the middle of the story, after Simon has finished his rehab, and has returned home to his dorm room at the flight academy. He’s a little bummed out because he wasn’t able to say goodbye to Rachel at the Infirmary, and the Flight Master won’t let him fly, since all non-essential flights have been grounded by order of the mayor’s office.

I jiggled my key into the lock of my dorm-room apartment, and shouldered open the door. I set down my overnight bag and shoved it aside with my foot. Then I looked around my room.

After four months away, the narrow room with its cot, bedside table and desk felt like a book I hadn’t read in years, but the memory of it hit me instantly. The cleaning crew had kept it meticulous. I slid open the door to the bathroom and looked inside. Yes. Meticulous.

I pulled open my blind and looked out the window. I saw the cables of my city laced around me, the umbrella of the city’s roof arching comfortably down. Below, the chasm stretched as a white ribbon between black banks. There were more steam jets in the distance as sunlight glittered off the cap, but these were far enough to be safe.

An ornithopter swept into view, buzzing towards one of the fringe cities. I turned away, then turned back sharply. Hadn’t the Flight Master said that all non-essential flights had been grounded? What had been so essential about this one? I watched the ornithopter until it was a speck on paper, but found no answers there.

I sat on my bed a long while, tapping my knees and looking around my room. I didn’t want to sleep; I’d done more than enough of that in the Infirmary. Idly, I pulled open the drawer of my bedside table and fiddled around with the stuff inside. Then my hand fell on something familiar and comforting, and I pulled it out.

My father’s pocket knife.

I turned the fat lump of metal and red plastic in my hands, then idly flipped out the attachments. The knife. The screwdriver. A pair of scissors and something to clean my fingernails with. A strange spirally spike of metal that I had no idea what it did (I also used it to clean my fingernails). I ran my fingers over the edges, and the engraving of a cross on a shield that may have meant something to someone some time ago. All I knew was that this had belonged to my dad. It was all I had left of him. After a few more minutes of turning the thing in my hands, I closed the attachments, and shoved it into my pocket. I needed it close.

Maybe the Flight Master’s advice wasn’t so bad. Maybe I should just wander around. It was certainly better than moping in here. My muscles still needed rebuilding. But first I needed a shower. I stood up and pulled my shirt off over my head, and stepped into the bathroom.

Washed and dressed in civilian clothes (which looked like my uniform, only less starched and pressed), I set about unpacking. My body was still working up to the task of not moping in here. Fortunately, there wasn’t much to unpack: a change of clothes, some toiletries — some of which might have belonged to the Infirmary, but I didn’t think they’d ask after toothpaste — and the books that had kept me sane while I lay awake those long hours in my hospital bed. I sorted through the ones I’d have to return to the library as soon as possible.

Picking up the most recent book — the one I was pages away from finishing — I casually flipped it open when something dropped from the pages and skittered beneath my desk. It looked like an envelope. Frowning, I crossed the room, got down on my knees with some difficulty, and fished it out.

It was an envelope, addressed to me in thinly-drawn letters. Rachel’s handwriting, I realized with a jolt. I ripped the envelope open and pulled out the letter, which smelt of anti-septic. I sniffed it and smiled as if it were perfume.

Sorry I couldn’t say goodbye, said the letter. But I still want to see you. Please meet me at the Junction Fountain after my shift ends at 1800. We can have dinner, and go to a movie. Let’s call it a date.

My heart pounded. I felt behind me and sat down on my cot, hard. A date! She wanted to date! She really liked me!

Don’t be late, the letter continued. Rachel. XOX

She’d signed it with a kiss! And there was also a p.s!

P.S. Turn out the lights, draw your curtains, and look around you. Look carefully.

Huh?

Look over your shoulder when you walk.

Wha—?!

But that was what the letter said, and that was what it still said when I read it a second time.

What the heck did she mean? But then I thought there was one way to find out. I pocketed the note, closed the bathroom door, drew the blind over my window and, crossing the room, turned out the light. Then I came back to the middle of the room, stubbing my toe on the end of my bed, and stood there, holding my breath. I turned in a slow circle, examining the walls of my room.

Two turns later, I was about to head to the light-switch, angry that Rachel had played a trick on me, when I saw light out of the corner of my eye. I found myself staring at the picture I’d hung on the wall soon after I came here from vocational school. It was a photograph of my parents and I, in happier days. And there was a pinprick of light shining by one corner of it.

I came over and stared at the little point of light. I put my hand in front of it, and saw the light shine off my palm. Then I peered close. It was a hole. A hole in my wall. Putting my eye to it, I blinked when all I saw was distorted light. There was a lens in the way.

I leaned back, my mouth hanging open. A peephole. Someone had stuck a peephole into my apartment. I closed my mouth. I clenched my teeth. Then I left my apartment to give my neighbour a piece of my mind.

I pounded on my neighbour’s door. “Ezer! Open up! I want to talk to you!”

No response. I started to feel a little sheepish, standing in the corridor, pounding so loudly. A couple of my fellow students passed. Some looked at me, then shrugged, before walking on. When things were more private, I pounded on the door again. “Ezer! I’m not going to go away until you talk to me!”

“He’s not there,” said a voice behind me. I turned around, startled. An upperclassman who’d walked past me had turned back. He stood a few feet away and nodded at the door. “You’re looking for Wheezer Ezer, right?”

I nodded. Ezer struggles with allergies were legendary.

“Well, he’s not there. He’s on assignment.”

I blinked. “He is?” Come to think of it, I hadn’t heard him sneeze since I’d arrived home.

The upperclassman nodded. “Two months, interning at the flight bays of Scylla. Got his papers last week. I helped him pack.”

I blinked again. “He barely shows up to class. How’d he land such a cushy assignment?” I felt jealousy rising up inside me.

The upperclassman shrugged. “Maybe he knew somebody in a high place. I heard the order came from the mayor’s office.”

“But he doesn’t know anybody in the mayor’s office!”

The upperclassman shrugged again. “Maybe somebody took pity on him. I don’t know. Point is: you can knock on his door until your knuckles bleed, it’ll make no difference. Apartment’s empty.”

I thought, empty? Then I thought, mayor’s office?!

Nathaniel.

“Has anybody been in the apartment since then?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said the upperclassman. “How’d you know that? Maintenance crews have been fixing the ducts in his ceiling, I’ve heard. Lucky coincidence he isn’t around to deal with all of that disruption.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking at the door. “Lucky coincidence, that.”

The upperclassman nodded and walked off. I watched him go until he turned the corner, then I glanced at Ezer’s door one more time, before heading back to my own apartment.

I sat on my bed, reading Rachel’s letter over and over, and glancing at the clock. That’s when I heard heavy boots and what sounded like a ladder in the corridor. These noises entered Ezer’s apartment and soon hammerblows started to resonate through the pipes above me. The pinprick of light on my wall darkened as a shadow pressed against it. I could feel eyes on me.

Fine, I thought. Time for a walkabout. Let’s see what Rachel meant by looking over my shoulder. I pulled on my uniform jacket, and stepped out into the corridor.

In my parents’ library there’s a book collecting the best New Yorker cartoons of the last few decades or so. It was a Christmas gift from years back, and as I was in a phase when I devoured all cartoons everywhere, I breezed through that book in about a week. It says a lot about me that I got as many of the jokes that I did, but one cartoon in particular stood out. It had a man, who was obviously a writer (you could tell by the pen in his hand and the beret on his head), sitting at his desk in front of a blank sheet of paper (itself another dead giveaway). As he looked at the blank page, you could read his thoughts, which went something like this: “Yes… the paper is ready. My pen has fresh ink. The room is warm, and the light is just right. Hmm… Maybe the room is too warm…”

The joke of course is that writing types like me end up being very, very picky about the places where we write. The slightest distraction, or the slightest wrong note could thwart our creativity, make us stumble in our narrative, or even plunge us into full on writers block.

It is and it isn’t true, of course. As writers, we have to contend with all sorts of distractions, and many of us do have certain rituals we perform, certain times of day we block off, or certain places we make our own in order to get the words flowing from our pen or into our keyboard. And these places and these rituals are as individual as the writers themselves. Erin has built a routine these days where she goes into “work” to write. When my carpooling parents come along to take Vivian up to the University of Waterloo’s Early Childhood Education Centre, Erin often goes with them, and spends her morning working at a table in the coffee lounge at St. Jerome’s University. I, on the other hand, have greatly benefitted from Ontario’s Early Years Program, where Vivian and now Nora were granted a couple of hours of play time with kids their age while I retired to the school’s kitchen for coffee and work time while ensconced in iTunes.

But while these places work well for us, we can’t stay in these places forever and, besides, we could sometimes use variety. And so, when we get other chances to step away from our kids for a while (thanks to the generous support of their grandparents), we end up looking for other places to write. But where do we go? I wrote about this subject before, but I’m revisiting it because, of course, the situations have changed, and changed again. When Vivian was an only child, Erin and I slipped into a weekend routine where we’d bundle Vivian into her carseat at roughly around the time she was due for a nap. I would then drive outside the city, usually to a Chapters or Indigo bookstore in a neighbouring city like London or Burlington or Ancaster. In the two hours or so that Vivian slept, Erin would work at the laptop. The beauty of this arrangement is that, when we arrived at the Chapters or Indigo, Vivian would wake up and have a place to play while I stayed at the Starbucks and worked on my own projects.

Now that Vivian has given up her afternoon nap, and now that Nora is around to keep the both of us occupied, this arrangement doesn’t work anymore, and to some extent we’re still adjusting. This is the reason why Erin has, essentially, a writing “office” up at St. Jerome’s University, and why I head into Toronto every couple of months or so.

When Erin and I drove on our writing excursions, it was important that we head out of town. I think this was because the effort this took encouraged us to not waste this opportunity. Similarly, I’ve made great progress on various projects, especially The Night Girl, on my day trips into my old hometown. And maybe the energy of the commuter traffic (note, this only works if I take the train in, rather than drive) transfers itself to the written page in some lamely indescribable way, but I always look forward to these trips, and not just because of the opportunity to spend a few hours away from the kids.

Of course, not every place to write in Toronto is created equal, and not every place fits every project. The Night Girl benefitted from these trips into the city because the story is set in the city, especially in the PATH Network of shopping tunnels between the skyscrapers that I and others refer to as “the Underground City”. Many of the identifiable places in the book are real, including Corned Beef House on Adelaide where Perpetua and Fergus had their breakfasts together.

For Icarus Down, I’ve found that, while there are a number of good places in Toronto to write in, I’ve yet to find a really great place in the city. And thinking about the features that make the good places good, I think I’m in search of certain criteria:

1. Coffee. Coffee houses are inextricably linked to creativity not just because these places welcome loungers and don’t persecute loiterers (much) so long as you keep your cup filled, but also because they have coffee, which sharpens the mind and keeps you from falling asleep at the keyboard — an important consideration when you’re raising two young kids.

2. Free wi-fi. This might be a distraction to some writers, and it is one reason why getting out of the house is often more effective in getting my creative juices flowing than writing at home. It’s too easy to excuse web browsing and answering e-mail while you’re at home. If you’ve come all this way out of your house to write, and you waste time surfing, you feel the shame more keenly and often get back to writing. With that potential for distraction reduced, wi-fi becomes an interesting tool, as I’m able to access the Internet for some quick research into various issues which might crop up in my writing. It’s useful to have various astronomy websites at my fingertips while writing Icarus Down, and it saves me having to get up and flip through an encyclopedia.

   The problem here is that there are few places I’ve found which offer truly free wi-fi. Starbucks cardholders get two free hours of wi-fi with their daily coffee, but for me that only covers a morning. Many other places charge as much as $10 for a day’s Internet. Tim Horton’s doesn’t offer free wi-fi at all, and the wild open-access signal is getting fewer and farther between as people figure out how to turn on their wireless router’s security features.

   The web site Wireless Toronto offers maps of various locations that offer free wi-fi, and Blog TO has done its own search for the best Internet café, but I still notice a dearth of sites in the downtown itself. It would be nice to find something within walking distance of Union Station — although the coffee place at 401 Richmond Street West (at Spadina) offers a good signal with its coffee, on those rare occasions when there’s space at its tables.

3. An interesting ambiance. This varies from writer to writer. Some people don’t want distractions and would like a secluded seat in the back and not much noise. I like a lot of light, and an opportunity to people-watch. For the longest while, my favourite place to write in Kitchener was the Krispy Kreme outlet at the corner of Ottawa and Strasburg (now, unfortunately, a family restaurant, now that Krispy Kreme has bowed to the superiority of Tim Horton’s), mostly because of its airy interior and the fascinating machine they had to make doughnuts on premises. The last time I was in Toronto, I spent a lot of time at the Tim Horton’s at the corner of Wellington and Scott Street. You would not think of Tim Horton’s as a place to lounge or write as you would, say Starbucks, but I had a seat by the window, nobody bothered me, and I had a good view of passing crowds and, during rush hours, streetcars. To each their own.

4. Plugs. That Tim Horton’s I described above had none. Enough said.

So, I’ll ask this question again: where do you like to write? What amenities do you need when you write? What rituals do you perform? Feel free to answer in the comments.

Image via Wikipedia

Over the past four weeks or so, I've noticed a significant increase in attempts to shove comment spam into my various posts. Fortunately, the fact that I moderate all 'anonymous' comments (that is to say, comments from commentators who don't sign in) has kept these comments from polluting my blog, but dealing with them is proving to be a chore. More embarrassingly, over on the Waterloo Wellington Bloggers Association blog, people who post there have found a number of notifications for moderated comment spam appear in their mailbox. I'll start searching for a way to route these just to the system administrator, if it's possible.

The spam problem has been compounded by my switch to Movable Type 5.0 which broke an old plug-in that used to close comments on old entries. However, Movable Type does now offer captchas, which I am testing to see if it can limit the comment spam. And that's where you come in. I've posted a few test comments, and the system seems to be working. That doesn't mean a thing in the real world, however, until I hear from other people who have tried the same thing. So if you have any problems commenting on this blog, please shoot me an e-mail (click on the link at the bottom of the text in the column to your right) and let me know.

The move to Movable Type 5.0 also included a clean install into a new database. I think this was a good thing because the old database that used to hold this blog and a handful of others had ballooned to half a gigabyte. The new database which holds this blog plus a number of others in addition to the ones the old database had before, has yet to reach 40 megabytes. Which tells me that a lot of legacy material from my days of running Movable Type 4, 3, and even 2 may have contributed to a lot of bloat and perhaps some instability.

What this means for you, though, is that some of you who have been signing in to comment may have lost your commentator accounts. I hope you'll consider re-registering, since those who sign in to comment won't have to deal with captchas and will even have their comments posted immediately, without moderation holding you back. If you have problems registering, or if you find the whole prospect daunting, please let me know by e-mail, and I'll craft an account for you.

And now, for my obligatory spam rant: (ahem)

Spammers are EVIL! Spammers are LICE! I hope their computers spontaneously combust and set their underwear on fire! I hope that people see them on the street and laugh at them!

That'll show 'em.

You know, if a groundhog saw its shadow and could guarantee that we’d only experience six more weeks of winter, I’d be a happy man.

The meme of using a clip of Hitler’s epic rant from Download and using subtitles to link it to any sort of rant-worthy episode was getting old a year ago back when Hitler stood in for Stephen Harper on some issue. More recently, it’s been applied to the iPad, while violating the dramatic principle of the thing: anything Hitler rants against is clearly a good thing. If you intend to use the rant to criticize the device’s inability to multitask, you undercut your own point.

So it’s with considerable delight that I caught Nicholas Russon’s link to this parody of the Hitler rant parody. Can we officially call this meme dead now?

My prayers go to Newfoundland premier Danny Williams as he heads to the United States to undergo heart surgery. That’s never fun, and the recovery is pretty hard. One wonders if Mr. Williams won’t be stepping down, at least temporarily, while he focuses on his health.

The use of an American hospital to perform this life saving surgery will, of course, raise another debate on the merits of the Canadian health care system (which is pretty good, thankyouverymuch. We perform almost as many surgeries for Americans as Americans perform surgeries for us). Unfortunately, I suspect the presence of so many individuals with axes to grind will prevent the debate from being productive. Or, as the good folks at 37 Days in Ottawa put it:

What you will see: Emotional arguments based on anecdotal evidence, possibly calling people who disagree with you ‘Nazis’ or ‘communists.’ Possibly some non-sensical statements couched in ideological language about how this “proves” that we need to dismantle our current healthcare system.

What you won’t see: a look at exactly what procedure needed to be done and why it wasn’t available to Premier Williams.

Danny Williams deserves better than that, and so do we all.

The thing about Terry Pratchett’s latest novel Unseen Academicals, the important thing about the novel, is that it’s not about football.

Sort of.

Terry Pratchett has had a pretty good year. When he announced that he had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers, his many fans were heartbroken, but he sternly told us to buck up and said that he still had several books in him. He then followed up with Nation, a non-Discworld coming-of-age novel which was one of my best reads ever, and then for Discworld, he wrote the recently released Unseen Academicals.

Although I have enjoyed all of Pratchett’s writing, some of his fans have tempered their enthusiasm for his latest novels. I’ve heard people say that he’s softened the hard-edged humour of his earlier works, and that while he has become a more thoughtful writer, they mourn the loss of his wild approach to fantastic parody. And while I as a fan entered Pratchett’s world with (in my opinion) superior later offerings like Wee Free Men, Going Postal and The Truth, I had to admit that he lost the thread a little with Making Money. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise; after all, how can you write nearly forty books for a fantasy series and manage to maintain the intensity?

However, I would say that Pratchett’s latest novel, Unseen Academicals, is a fine return to form. His writing is as thoughtful as ever, he maintains his warm, idealistic cynicism of humanity, and he employs a number of compelling characters to tell a story about the game of football which, as he states emphatically, is more than just about the football. More importantly, it’s funny. There are many laugh-out-loud moments, and many of the idiosyncrasies of our own world, from football hooliganism to the world of fashion design, is deservedly skewered by his ticklish pen.

Please note that the rest of this review contains spoilers, so if you don’t want to be spoiled, turn away now.