Author Archives: DMZ

I can’t do it

I was in my workshop yesterday night, joking about how the way to get published for sure was to write vampire fiction, especially raunchy vampire fiction, and I took up the gauntlet. I intended to write a really horrible, break-every-rule-of-writing short, but my problem is I keep making it turn funny, or philosophical, so it’s this bizarre mix of horrible vampire parody with occasional scenes of my standard writing, so it kind of succeeds on neither level – it doesn’t fail in the way it’s supposed to fail.

The Norm Cash Double

or, Derek’s Cheater’s Guide Drinking Guide

When I was working almost 16-hour days during the home stretch (July-August) I used to make these when I was taking a break. I don’t recommend this at all, as it seems likely it has the same horrible side-effects that alcohol-with-energy-drinks do. Except that there’s no taurine.

Anyway, I used to drink this at 9, 10, when I was running out of steam and also really stressed out, and it did the trick for the last half-shift of writing.

The Norm Cash Double
—
– Using your Aerobie Aeropress or the method of your choice, make two espresso shots with a nice Sumatran bean. Don’t skimp on the quality of the coffee. Pour into glass.
– Pour in equal measure of good-quality Irish cream liquor.
– Drink warm.

Really nice taste, mellowing effects, plus it’ll keep the eyelids peeled.

First ever podcast! Free fiction!

I’ve been writing science fiction shorts for a workshop I’m doing, trying to get back into fiction writing, and I thought it might be cool if I put some readings up.

Here’s me reading my short story “Transcript of the Best, Most Powerful Symposium Presentation That Is Strong, Funny, and Promises To Respect You In The Morning”

I hope this turns out okay – this is my first time doing anything like this, soooo… let me know. Troubleshooting if you find anything would be good, too.

If this goes well, I’ll start putting others up, maybe early versions of stuff I’m working on, and so forth.

I hate copyright

And I’m an author.

Here’s the problem: copyright doesn’t serve any of the semi-noble purposes it was intended to.

I’m writing a book and I wanted to use some great old photos I found. But the magazine they were in had long gone out of business and the photographer, as best I could determine, was dead. None of the big archivers (Corbis, Getty, etc) had bought up an archive that owned the photos.

So we had two choices: skip using them or scan them from the printed material and run them ourselves, and if someone came forward and claimed the rights, we’d have to either pay them off or go to court. We skipped.

These are fifty-year old photos with no locatable owner. And that’s one example – I have a whole folder here with photos I can’t figure out how to clear. It’s crazy. No one’s helped by this situation.

Why? So Disney can keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain. The public domain is great! Everyone wins with public domain! I’m seriously thinking about releasing all my short stories (and anything else I can pull this off for) under a Creative Commons license just to avoid inflicting anything like this on future generations.

Parisians

Here’s why I loved Paris: I went there with some almost-entirely forgotten French and a phrasebook (which I read constantly while we were there). In almost every case, when we were out somewhere, the people at the shops and wherever else were happy to meet me halfway. If I was struggling with something, they’d try to figure out what it was in English. It was so great to try and go as far with French as possible and have them willing to give me the assist when it didn’t get there.

And really, almost everyone we met was like that: kind, happy to talk to us, and I think a little amused that I was trying so hard to speak French.

I went to Paris expecting to not like the French at all, and out of all the people I dealt with, only a couple weren’t great.

That said, here’s how Parisians are dicks:
– Making fun of your pronunceation. It’s a little power trip, where they make a big deal about how you’re not saying words correctly – repeating the thing you said, acting confused, the whole deal. I was in a bakery and asked for two pain aux raissons (these cool pastries with raisins in them) while making the thumb-and-finger “two” and pointing at the pastries I wanted in the display, and the young woman behind the counter made a huge deal about how I wasn’t saying it right. “Poisson?” she asked, which would be fish. She protested that they didn’t have any fish pasteries. Which then would make it really strange for me to ask for fish pasteries, right? And since I’m pointing to something that sounds pretty close to what I asked for, it’s probably a pretty good bet that that’s what I want.

There were people behind me in line and this was embarassing. I did my request again, asking for the pastries, the sign for two, pointing, and she repeated my words with the same confused look. She drew this out for a while.

This is distinct from conversations I had with people who wanted to talk to me about improving my French, which was sometimes pointed but done in a friendly way.

– The indignity of work. This happens everywhere – there were a couple times where I’d walk up to a counter to buy something and the clerk would make a big deal with the body language, huffing as they stood to walk over, sighing as they opened the register. They only work 35 hours a week – come on.

I spent almost almost two weeks in Paris, working my ass off to speak to people, and by the time we left I could have reasonable conversations with shop keepers (including asking them to please speak a little more slowly). I felt really good about it, and it helped make my time in Paris much more fun.

Train travel in the UK

I’m a huge fan of trains.

They’re cool.
They’re environmentally responsible, far more so than air travel.

There’s also a much more complicated argument for redundant systems I want to make here, which is essentially that if you’re overly reliant on any single means of transportation that system becomes an extremely lucrative target, and it makes recovering from any attack dramatically harder. But I’ll skip that.

We took trains from London to Edinburgh, Edinburgh to York, York to Bath, and Bath to Paris by way of London.

London to Edinburgh was great. Looking out on the sea, all the little towns, the English countryside — totally worth it. The only weird thing was because of the bank holiday (they went crazy for the bank holiday, it was bizarre), everyone headed out of London headed out one station, where they caught trains elsewhere. We had a bunch of shorts-wearing jersey-clad guys on the way up, who stood between cars, occasionally making offensive comments to women, and drank beer continuously.

The strange thing, at least to me, was that they were the only group of tattooed people I’d seen in London, and they weren’t young, they were older, middle-aged ways.

Edinburgh-York was fine, except that it was a Virgin train which (seemingly) meant that “quiet car” (no cell phones/needless noise/etc) was entirely ignored, but whatever, you don’t really expect things like that to mean anything, much as you might hope. York-Bath though…

We’re traveling along, minding our own business, when we smell something that smells like loaded baby diaper. It gets worse. People on the train start looking at each other, around at people who just got on, the babies… and it gets worse.

And worse.
And worse.

Later, my wife and I argued over how bad it got – she argued it was the worst smell ever, and I argued that while it wasn’t the worst ever, it was the worst smell I’d ever been exposed to for any length of time.

What was amazing was the response of the people in the car. There was a great reluctance to say anything, much less react visibly, but the smell was so bad people found pretexts to touch their mouth, bring handkerchiefs or other articles of clothing up to cover their noses, until finally many people were openly pinching their noses closed.

This was the great British stiff-upper-lip reserve.

I was, weirdly, reminded of an X-Files episode (weirdly because I didn’t watch the show that often).
Cop: “They say it cuts the smell if you don’t breathe through your mouth.”
Mulder: “They lie.”

I ended up leaving the car, which you’re not really supposed to do because the seat assignment is regimented and standing is as enforced as having a seat (weirdly) so it’s hard to give up a seat even if you’re nauseated by a smell and about to be sick.

I ended up between the cars, unable to take it as almost all the rest of the British endured without complaint. A conductor came by and said to the refugees (and I don’t know how to punctuate this to convey the humor he managed) “There was an accident with a dog. (beat) Allegedly.”

He went through and sprayed something in the car that either
a) removed the smell or
b) deadened the smell sense of car riders

I went back to my seat, now weirdly less smelly than between cars where the stink cloud had moved. A cleaner came on two stations later, and whatever he did, the situation got even better.

Then London-Paris… the thing about trains, if I may, is that being far more economical than air transport, it makes sense to make the seats at least somewhat more spacious. Especially if you’re me and really tall, it seems like an obvious conclusion, trains = more space. But the train through the Chunnell was really cramped and annoying, and its only redeeming value was that it didn’t have the horrible security and general hassle of flying from London to Paris.

Edinburgh, York, Bath

Edinburgh was much friendlier than London, though of course it wasn’t nearly as cool. We arrived at the end of the Fringe festival, which meant there were uncountable things going on, shows and street performers and all kinds of stuff. We went and saw “Watson and Oliver” which was really funny, but was also essentially put on in a cargo container with two performers in front of 40 people. It was also strange to sit around and have the performers, their friends, and random assorted hangers-on come by, ask you if you would be around at showtime, or “looking for a show tonight?”

I wanted to stop some of them (“Hey, you’re going on stage in a couple of hours, you should take a break here…”)

I have a criteria for seeing comedy. It must be funny. The whole genre of applause comedy bores me. Whee, politics are so stupid! Clap clap clap clap! The furthest I’ll go in this direction is Lewis Black, who gets a lot of applause but is also really quite sharply funny and willing to make fun of himself.

York was great. It’s also an excellent demonstration of the problem with trying to preserve old cities today. Narrow streets designed to admit one horse carriage, if that, can’t handle car traffic and pedestrians. Trying to build roads through them is a fool’s task, but businesses will demand them (like Nordstrom and Westlake Center!).

So in York, within the walls, there are all these crazy narrow, crooked streets, hordes of people on feet, and annoyed people on cars trying to get around (for some reason), honking their horn.

Just ban the cars from those areas, at least from say 9am-7pm when they can’t safely coexist. I’ll come back to this in a later post.

Bath was okay. Not a lot to see once you’ve taken the walking tour, unless you’re interested in hanging around at the spa. Weather was also really strange while we were there – gusting wind, rain, cold for much of the time.

This lead to a great British moment. I loved the dry, understated British humor every time I came across it, from the Beefeaters at the Tower of London (who described a medal they got for meritous long service as the “Undetected Crime Medal”). In Bath, I tuned into the BBC for the weather and the report, essentially, was “winds between 0-20 kilometers an hour from the west and north, sunny and cloudy with sprinkles and showers” and for the rest of the week, it would continue to be “inconstant”.

I cracked up.

Then we headed to Paris.