It... might be quiet

Beautiful Wife is out of town for the remainder of the week. Fortunately, her parents are picking the boys up from school. That still leaves me handling the bedtime routine, though - right after, right after we got an email from one of Secondborn's teachers that he hasn't been doing his homework, and right after Firstborn's Orchestra teacher informed us that he'd be keeping a practice log that we needed to sign off on. So I added those to the evening schedule.

Last night went perfectly. We caught up most of Secondborn's homework; Firstborn did his music practice. Everybody ate. I ran laundry. I managed to shut off the TV and get them into bed with a minimum of arguing and without anybody going into a meltdown. But, well... that was only the first night.

Tomorrow night? When we have to do this all over again? Yeah, that's when the screaming is likely to start.

And you know, despite how unbelievably well the boys handled themselves, by eight o'clock last night I was tired down to my bones. Just exhausted. Enervated, even. Which... {shakes fist at sky} ...isn't how it's supposed to work.

I'd psyched myself up to not try to do anything except keep things running and get the boys down. Everything else could wait. But I would have loved to have squeezed in an extra half an hour of writing before I went to bed myself, even if it was only character sketches or making little vignettes of the world and some of its settings. Instead, I watched a few horror movie previews on Youtube (apparently that's something I do to relax) and then went to bed.

I think I'm going to promise myself that if I can just get through tonight, I get to play half an hour of one of my comfort games (like comfort reading, but a video game). Meanwhile... well, it's going to be a slow day and we're just going to have to muddle through.

Music: Smoke Signals

Phoebe Bridgers:

Dear Diary: Still Missing

Year 331, Twelfth Age
Leaffall, Day 17

Dear Diary,

I saw Mrs. Puffblossom last night. She was spying on the house again, just like usual. Except... well, Diary, the thing is... Mrs. Puffblossom has been missing since the ghost possessed her. So it's not really Mrs. Puffblossom watching the house. It's the ghost.

I'm worried, Diary. I mean, bad enough that I called up a ghost strong enough to possess zombies and other people, but... now it's watching me. It wants something, and I don't know what.

I need to get the ghost out of Mrs. Puffblossom and dismiss it properly. It's not just for my own safety... but, I mean, it's not because I much care what happens to Mrs. Puffblossom, either. She's a nasty, gossiping old biddy and it's her own fault for trying to spy on us. But... if I'm going to be a necromancer, a real necromancer, this has to be how things work: the undead do as I command. I can't call them up and then have them running loose, or thinking that they're in charge.

So I'm going to do this. I'm going to figure out a way to track down this ghost, and I'm going to send it back beyond the Veil. Either that, or I'm going to bind it to a tree.

Cool Wind In My Hair

So we pulled into this weird hotel - hey, it'd been a long day, we were on a dark desert highway, and we had to stop for the night. If it hadn't been for those voices down the corridor, we probably would have stayed. Instead, we pulled over at a rest stop half a mile further on and slept in the can. I think that was the better choice, but I can't help wondering...



You want to write good fiction? Or tell good stories? Listen to songs. Find the ones that tell stories. Look at the way they pack their stories into just a few important words, how they rarify the essence of the tale and set it to music. It's not the only way, not the only thing, but if you're prone to Writing All The Words and Explaining Everything the way I am, it's surprisingly helpful.

Asking for what, exactly?

Tucker McCrady:
"I get pretty angry when someone suggests that women are 'asking for it' if they dress a certain way. And up until today, my outrage was mostly directed at the notion of “asking,” the notion that dressing a certain way is a request of any sort. People should feel free to dress however they want! But of course, our choice of dress does communicate things, and we all know that; we all have reasons for dressing one way on one day, and another on the next. Pretending otherwise isn’t quite exactly to the point.

"What is to the point, what really is outrageous, is the notion of 'it.' When people say women are 'asking for it' by dressing provocatively (whatever that means), the 'it' they are referring to is sexual harassment. Which, if you think about it, is saying that if you dress in a way so as to stimulate or invite sexual interest (which you are perfectly entitled to do), you are simultaneously asking to be sexually harassed...as though men just can’t be expected to worry their pretty little heads about the difference between sexual interest and sexual harassment.

"Which of course is the whole problem; men all too often don’t know or care what sexual harassment is, or at least not enough to not do it.

"If I ask for a pat on the back and turn so you can give me one, I suppose I am taking the risk that you might instead strike me so hard as to injure or even cripple me. But taking that risk is my business; if you do decide to crack my spine, it is beyond absurd to say that I asked for it. There is only one person to blame for an assault, a harassment, or even a professionally inappropriate expression of sexual interest that might be appropriate in another context. It’s the person who chooses to do it, not the person trying desperately to juggle risks in a screwed-up, misogynist world.

"So the next time someone refers to someone as 'asking for it,' ask them to clarify what 'it' means. My guess is they’ve probably never even thought about it."

Superhero Bar Stories: Most Surprising Power

Made it rain frogs? The guy actually made it rain frogs? Okay, right, that's surprising. And honestly, I don't know if I can beat it. But the most surprising power I've ever run into personally, well...

Picture the scene: Midtown Bank, down on Fifth and Ocean - you know it? Good. Okay, so, this is about two years back. Made the news and everything; you can look it up in the morning.

It was a bank robbery, is what it was. About eight guys, most with pistols or shotguns, plus one idiot with a grenade launcher. Yes, to rob a bank. Classic M79 - no idea where he got it. Anyway, they stroll in wearing their ski masks, wave their guns around and start yelling for everybody to get down on the floor. Which is basically what happens, except that one of the tellers manages to kick the silent alarm. So by the time they've got the money and are starting for the door, the first police units are pulling up outside.

So the robbers change plans. They close the doors and decide that everybody who was in there is now a hostage. A couple of them go around to cover the sides and the back, make sure nobody's getting out or coming in. If I'd gotten there just two minutes earlier I could have walked right in unnoticed, but by the time I arrived the place was closed up tight. And it's a bank, so it's not like anybody's going to leave a window open on the second floor or anything.

Well, the police settle in for a hostage drama, and I settle in with them. Captain Amazing shows up too, but he doesn't want to bust through the wall or even the windows. Too much chance of hostages getting killed. So we wait, while the negotiators do their thing.

And we wait.

And we wait.

And finally the bank robbers start getting impatient, and grab one of the tellers, march her right up to the front door, and threaten to shoot her if the police won't meet their demands.

That's when he moved.

You know The Viper? Yeah, well... apparently he banks at Midtown, when he's not on the streets. He'd come in just before close of business, just before all this went down, and he'd been waiting with the rest of the hostages. But I'm looking in the windows from a nearby rooftop, and while everybody's attention is on the robber and the hostage at the door, I see this one guy at the back just kind of... shift... into the biggest freaking snake I have ever seen in my life. And he slips around the robber next to him and starts squeezing. And he's fast enough to do it before the guy can say anything, and after that it's too late: the guys being squeezed too tight to breathe, much less yell.

Maybe half a minute later he slides away. I can sort of see the other hostages reacting, but... well... giant freakin' anaconda. Most of them just freeze, or maybe scoot quietly away. Maybe some of them were wimpering, but it wasn't loud enough to give him away. So he comes up behind the next robber, and it's the same thing again: a lightning-fast strike, and then he's coiled around the guy. And that's it for that guy.

He's almost to the next one when the guy happens to look around. Maybe he heard something; I don't know. But he looks back, and the snake rears up and strikes. I don't think it even bit him, just slammed its head into him and punched him straight back into the wall.

At this point, there's only two of them left in the main room. The other three are watching the back and sides. Well, these two open fire, and...

Nothing. The giant snake is either bulletproof, or close enough to it. And it's fast. It flows across the floor like a river of evil scales, slaps one guy down with its tail, and coils around the other guy. The hostage? The teller they were threatening to kill? She finally starts screaming. Fortunately, she starts screaming and runs out the door. Which means the rest of us can get in. Which means the robbery is effectively over, because the remaining three perps are all in different areas, and all well away from the hostages.

I talked to the guy afterwards, once he was a guy again. Nice kid, just... sometimes he's a giant, super-powered snake. And that was the most surprising superpower I ever ran into.

The Cold War-est Book Ever To War Coldly

So, my dad is sorting out old books (many of them from my childhood), which mainly means putting them in boxes and letting us go through them. Some of them are classics; some of them are odd. I mean, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is a respectable title for any childhood library. I discovered (and found that I had fond memories of) Danny Dunn on a Desert Island, and passed it along to Firstborn, who also enjoyed it. On the other hand, some of them are just... kind of creepy. I'm still baffled by The Lemming Condition, for example. And only marginally less creepy is today's selection:

The Rescue
A Novel by Elizabeth Faucher
Based on the Motion Picture Written by Jim Thomas & John Thomas

"Now A Major Motion Picture from Touchstone Pictures," the cover proclaims proudly, disdaining any sensible rules for capitalization. (I have no memory of such a Motion Picture ever existing, but I'm sure it did.) But the real wonder of this thing is the summary on the back. The book was apparently published in 1988, which puts it firmly in the same era as Iron Eagle, and... well... just read it:

Their fathers are locked up in a prison camp behind the Bamboo Curtain. Their government has decided that it's too risky to attempt a rescue mission - it could lead to war. So now it's up to the SEAL kids - J.J., Shawn, Adrian, Max, and Bobby - to rescue their fathers and bring them back to freedom and safety.

That's right, kids: it's your responsibility to Save America by doing Something Insanely Stupid That Might Actually Cause A War Heroic. Yeah.

You go right ahead with that.

Man, I grew up in a weird era.