Thursday, December 12, 2013

Lost in the woods

Last week we got a tree. It looks like this now:

It's displaced me from what Girlfriend "affectionately" calls my "nest," that alcove by the window which was just the right size for a big, squishy chair or a decorative conifer. I guess they'll take turns.

It happened that the closest Zipcars to our house was taken the day we decided to get the tree, so we went along the trail to the metro station, where the next closest ones were. The trees on either side of the path were bare for the first time that I'd been around to notice, and I could see pretty deep into the forest. Something square caught my eye. Bricks, apparently. An oven? A fireplace? What looked like a foundation around it. We didn't have time to check it out just then, but it made for an interesting change in our impression of the formerly impenetrable woods, which had seemed to contain nothing but spawn points for deer. It's easy to forget that forests aren't necessarily old, and this one had sprung up where something had apparently been built. Had someone lived there? Had there been a road there?

On the way back from dropping the car off, we had more time, so we veered off the trail to see what we were looking at and maybe take some pictures. It would have been silly to expect too much, but I will admit to harboring some residual fantasies from my interest a few years ago in ruins photography. I wasn't hoping for anything spectacular, but some pictures of an old house abandoned in the woods, two stone's throws from my own house, would have been tremendously neat.

An aside, to point out the first thing I learned, which is something I knew objectively but have instinctively forgotten lately because I've been playing Skyrim: it's really hard to get anywhere when you go off the path. Sandbox games may have taught me to make a beeline for the floating triangle in the distance, but in real life bees make lines because they don't have to push underbrush aside. And on the subject of floating rectangles, once we were in the woods we didn't end up exactly where we had set out to go anyway.

Which was odd, because we did sight a square pile of bricks and go more or less directly toward it. But it wasn't an oven or a chimney, it was just... bricks.

And nearby were more bricks.

Also one of these:

But mostly the woods were just full of bricks!


The bike trail had once been a railroad track, so we figured this must have been the remains of some railroad-connected building, but that was as far as we could speculate. Chunks had fallen pretty helter-skelter. This one block may be what I mistook for a fireplace from the path, but I never did get my bearings that precisely.

Not everything was strewn around like that. Some foundations were in place, particularly some walls around a hollow that looked like they went pretty deep. Maybe this hinted at the purpose of the whole mess of structures, or would hint if I knew anything about railroads.

A culvert? Was there a bridge here? Only just now am I regretting not going deep enough into the woods to look at this from the other side. But in my defense, it was cold, and we were nearly out of sight of the path, and the bricks just kept going.

So the mysterious bricks remain mysterious, at least to me, and my dreams of ruins are... well, not ruined. Tempered?

The next day, our trudge through a Maryland forest still fresh in our mind, we decided to do what any reasonable people would do: we watched The Blair Witch Project. Which I'd never seen, despite being the perfect age to have been scared bejeezusless by it when it came out. Now that I am a fogey, I was able to watch it and keep most of my bejeezus, but that last image did get under my eyelids as I tried to go to sleep that night.

And when geese go overhead (it's weird to me to have geese still going overhead this late in the year), I imagine their honking as an ongoing argument, the one in front shouting, "We are going south! We've been going south!"

Thursday, December 5, 2013

How I spent my Thanksgiving vacation

The week of this Thanksgiving I visited my family up in Long Island. It happened to be the final week of NaNoWriMo (or ShoStoWriMo, in my case), with me planning on busing back to Maryland on the 30th, meaning I would have to either hit 50,000 words a day early (unlikely) or cross the finish line in transit. I would be getting home so late that trying to get in a day's writing after I arrived would surely tempt the wrath of the muses, and possibly defy logistics outright.

The day before I left--a day which I had earmarked for a long push in an involved freelance project--my laptop began acting sickly, clicking and stalling and generally toying with the idea of becoming a brick. I was able to do some necessary work in Safe Mode, and then I spent my first day with my parents like this:


I didn't intend this picture to be a selfie when I took it, but there I am. As might be gathered, I was not feeling too great myself at the moment, a heating pad wrapped around my neck like a brace. The bus ride up north was pretty nice as these things went, but it had left me pretty sore and I probably had a cold too.

What my computer is doing in this picture is mostly magic to me, but I did find a way to conceptualize what I think it was doing and explain it to my parents:
Inside my computer lives a cloistered monk, in the medieval style. He sits at his table with a quill and ink, and a massive tome containing all the information on my computer. When I ask my computer to do anything, this monk finds the information I want through a convoluted series of cross-references, or else writes whatever else I want to record wherever he can find enough white space on the nearest page.

In the centuries of computer time that have passed since 2008, this tome has been through a lot. Some of the pages have been marred by water and others by fire. Vandals got in on a few occasions and their additions have been meticulously crossed out. But in all that clutter lately my dutiful monk has spent more time squinting at certain hard-to-decipher passages than he has actually doing what I ask him to do.

So the work my monk is doing here, if I understand the process correctly, is to go through the entire book, from one end to the next, and wherever he finds a page or line that is hard to read, to figure out to his satisfaction what it actually says and then re-write it clearly on the blank pages in the back of the book.
Anyway, that was how I described the process to my parents and to myself, and it made me less likely to rail against fate for how long the process actually took--four or five hours. There's a lot of data in this computer but that monk can scribble pretty fast.

Whether or not I had it right, the process revivified my computer. I still kept the computer in Safe Mode while I worked; I was walking on eggshells. (And if hearing that makes you want to bang your head against the wall, rest assured I suffered for my ignorance... I think. Read on?)

So in the last four days of November I put out almost 15,000 words. Ironically I think these were some of the best words I had gotten down the whole month. My graph, courtesy of Nanowrimo.org, ended up looking like this:

With the highlighted part happening at my parents' house. The days on either side were spent on buses. The day in the middle was Thanksgiving.

It seems a shame not to mention Thanksgiving itself, but the day was not the stuff good stories are made of. My extended family was good company and all the food turned out well. I discovered that my father actually prefers marshmallows on his sweet potatoes, which I had previously dismissed out of hand as a barbaric custom, but beyond that what's to tell?

When I got on the bus to go home and settle in for my final lap of the month's writing, I discovered that the last 10,000 words or so of the project were gone.

Why? I'm not certain. Did they refuse to save because I had been working in Safe Mode? Perhaps, but that doesn't some things that didn't disappear but should have. I don't have a better theory, anyway. Maybe the end of story number 4 and the beginning of story number 5 are still knocking around inside my computer, but they are beyond the reach of my own feeble magics. To adapt an old saw, God and I were both there when I wrote the first draft, but I fear that now God has the only copy.

But I'm taking credit for the words because dammit, I wrote them.

As I said, this was intensely frustrating because I think what I lost consisted of some of the best writing I had done that month, including several thousand words of Robert E. Howard pastiche that felt (I'll probably never know how they stand up to rereading) pretty spot-on. Luckily, I do think I remember enough of the content and the feel that the stories themselves won't be lost to the world.

The five short stories, for the curious, are as follows:

1 - Three Go players try to slip out of human space to play a game with an enigmatic race and prove that human beings have souls.

2 - In a world crisscrossed by traveling storytellers, one boy in a village that executes them as blasphemers becomes obsessed with what he's missing out on.

3 - Humans develop humanlike AI and promptly find a way to have sex with it. One programmer wants more.

4 - When a nigh-omniscient computer takes on the utilitarian calculus of governing a country, its citizens come to worship it as God and set out to conquer the rest of the world. An ambassador visits their capitol to sue the computer for peace.

5 - An author with a telepathic link to a sword-and-sorcery hero tries his darnedest to kill the character off.

Anyway, it was a fun month and an... exciting last week.