Bullshit

The Avery Cates Series in Order

Author: August 12, 2020 0 Comments

Since I started writing new Avery Cates stories a few years ago, things have gotten out of hand in terms of keeping track of the order of the stories. With novellas that combine into novels like Voltron, it gets even messier. So here’s the master list of Cates stories, in series order.

AVERY IN ORDER

Short Story: The Kendish Hit

Original Book Series:

  1. The Electric Church
  2. The Digital Plague
  3. The Eternal Prison
  4. The Terminal State
  5. The Final Evolution

New Book Series:

  1. The Shattered Gears:
  2. The Burning City

Hope that clarifies!

Bullshit

All Creatures Great and Small

Author: July 30, 2020 1 Comment

I want to tell you about the summer I spent reading James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small in the galley of a tugboat.

A writing career doesn’t just happen. You come to writing in your own way, along your own path. By the time I was sitting in that tugboat’s galley, I’d already been writing stories for a few years. Sci-fi and fantasy, mainly, with some weirdo crime stories thrown in for spice. In high school I wrote some stories that threw wild Twilight Zone twists into careworn plots because everything seemed new to me, and I wrote some stories about high school kids who committed terrible crimes, disappeared for a decade, and suddenly showed up at their high school reunion to reveal what really happened while their former classmates gasped and sighed and schemed to seduce them. You know, typical stuff. Pretty bad stuff.

My parents, god rest their souls, insisted that my brother and I get paying jobs once we turned 14. Of course, my brother and I were generally loafing incompetents, so the actual finding of said jobs was kept out of our hands. My father worked at a local bank (this was back when there were such things as local banks), so he got us jobs in the mailroom. I spent a summer walking around an office building delivering mail and listening to music on my Walkman1. Then I would go home and my mother would confiscate my earnings and tell me I was lucky. I didn’t feel lucky, but you couldn’t argue with my mother.

The next year, however, that job wasn’t available, so we had to get creative2. My father had an acquaintance who ran a drilling company, and he finagled a job for me3. The job wasn’t very closely defined, so one Monday morning my Mom drove me to the asscrack of Jersey City4, and a bunch of befuddled and slightly hungover men pondered what in hell to do with me.

The Tug Boat, Exciting and New5

After spending some eye-opening days with the functioning alcoholics who worked for the drilling company, I was eventually assigned to help spruce up an old tug boat. The company kept a few tugs in order to tow their drilling platforms around, and this one looked and smelled like it had been bought at auction around 1870 and left to rot for a while.

My ‘supervisor’ for the tug reclamation project was an older gentleman who was also living on the tugboat6. This disturbed me, because I would show up every morning and he’d emerge from the cabin, coughing and scratching himself, which made me feel like I was visiting some distant cousin, because all of my cousins emerged from their own bedrooms coughing and scratching in exactly the same way7.

I don’t remember the guy’s name. Let’s call him Earl.

Earl never assigned me any work. He made a few vague suggestions here and there, usually without any sort of context or explanation, and I quickly figured out that I could ignore these suggestions with impunity. Earl would then go off to do mysterious things in the engine area, emerging frequently to smoke cigarettes. I kept waiting for Earl to burst into flames after spending an hour shoulder deep in gasoline and engine oil and lighting up. As the summer dragged on, this became an increasingly attractive possibility.

I was borrowing my parents’ car to get to work every day, which was a perk. Once, leaving the yard, Earl asked if I would give him a ride to a local bar. About six other guys piled in, and I remember being impressed with how fast Earl could move when properly motivated. He made it from the car to the bar within seconds. I was too young to appreciate the value of this skill.

Anyway, since I had no actual work to do, I spent a lot of time in the tug’s filthy galley, where I found a single book: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot (a pseudonym). These stories are about a veterinary surgeon who lives and works in a small English town. This is not exactly what 16-year old Jeff would have chosen to read, but I didn’t feel comfortable bringing activities to the job. It’s one thing to sit on your ass all day for minimum wage, it’s something else entirely to flash about how little work you’re doing. So I had nothing else to do but read that book.

And I read the hell out of that book.

It’s delightful! And charming. And completely different from what I’d been reading my whole life, and in that sense, transformative. I’d never imagined I could be so enthralled with these stories of animals and quiet country life. Sure, boredom was a factor. Possibly also fumes of some sort. But it taught me that I needed to be a little more wide in my reading, that perhaps stories that had survive for years or decades or centuries did so because they were awesome in their own way.

Eventually, it was discovered that I was basically doing nothing on that tug. I didn’t get fired, because technically no one had told me to do anything. I was not and am not a lawyer, but I lawyered that situation. And basically managed to get paid to read a book, which makes me a genius under international law.

Bullshit, Writing

Sweat Equity. Sweat the Small Stuff. Sweat Everything. Sweat.

Author: July 23, 2020 0 Comments

Photo by Hans Reniers, Unsplash

FRIENDOS, I am a sweaty man.

I inherited this from my father, who was a deeply unhealthy man who could often be found eating entire jars of peanut butter at the kitchen table at 3AM. Seriously, we had to hide the peanut butter from him, but he always found it. When my father did chores around the house, he would tie a bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes, because that man was one enormous sweat gland.

And so am I, despite the fact that I don’t eat entire jars of peanut butter. I can only conclude that this general air of sweatiness is inherited. The Somers genes are certainly miraculous. I try to imagine what possible evolutionary advantage this level of sweat could possibly afford, and the best I can come up with is that it lubricates us in terrifying situations so we can squeeze through extremely narrow spaces. This makes sense, as we Somers’ are clearly a prey species.

In the modern world, however, where we Somers’ are allowed to burrow deep within the comforting fluff of civilization and are thus spared from most forms of predation, this full-body dampness serves little purpose except to make me appear consistently nervous or consistently on the verge of a heart attack.

IN WHICH I MAKE MY WIFE UNCOMFORTABLE

There are people in this world who enjoy eating outside, al fresco, no matter the temperature or the sunlight situation. God love these people, these happy idiots. I am not one of them. I sweat under arctic conditions, and sitting in the sun while eating hot food (or cold food, or ice cubes, or just breathing in a steady and unalarming manner) causes me to perspire wildly.

My brother, Yan, is someone who can sit in full sunlight when it’s 105 degrees out and eat a piping hot bowl of pasta without complaint. Just thinking about that makes me sweat through my shirt. How this genetic disparity happened, I don’t know, though it supports my long, deep suspicion that my brother and I are not actually related.

The other day my wife, The Duchess, and I were sitting outside in the sun, for some reason, having lunch. This was not my choice, as I am well aware of my dislike for sweating, or being outside, or eating my own lunch like a sucker instead of having it fed to me like the emperor I was born to be. This was, in other words, a triumph of The Duchess’ will. Meaning she insisted.

It was extremely hot, and so my body did what it always done when I eat in the heat: It assumed I was being force-fed by Imperial Torturers and began to shut down in self-defense. This is also, apparently, part of my genetic code, and the reason that the Somers family has survived into 2020 where so many other famous families have not. There are no more Caesars or Plantagenets, friends, but the world is lousy with Somers’.

My wife soon realized the true cost of her victory. Staring at me in horror, she declared in a terrified voice that we would never dine outside again, nor speak of the incident. I went home and toweled off.

The Doom of Jeff

Being a Sweat Person doesn’t weigh very heavily on me, normally. This is because I am also a Recluse Person who hardly ever leaves the house. Under normal circumstances I can sweat my ass off in private and never have to explain to people that no, I am not having a heart attack, this is just how I am.

Someday, of course, I’ll have my brain transferred to a cyborg chassis (like in a certain book) and sweat will no longer be a problem. Existential dread? Possibly, but not sweat.

Bullshit

The Hair Situation

Author: April 29, 2020 0 Comments

FRIENDOS, after years of casual use in both my writing and my conversation I was recently forced to look up the meaning of the word hirsute. This is because the hair situation is getting dire. I’m not speaking solely of the haircut situation during our current emergency; as regular readers of this blog know, haircuts are one of my great obsessions owing to the social awkwardness of having someone touch your head and make small talk with you while wielding a sharp object. I regard the haircut as a huge waste of my time, but insecurity stops me from simply shaving my head or letting everything grow out to monstrous proportions, leaving me to simply complain weakly. Which I do on a regular basis.

No, while the haircut situation is, of course, dire, I am also an old man at this point, which means my body is in full revolt, which for some evolutionary reason beyond my understanding involves hair exploding out of unexpected places, in unexpected and unwanted volumes. Ears? Check. Nose? I pulled a nose hair out of myself a few days ago that was easily seven feet long. Back? Sweet lord. My DNA is apparently loaded with Gorilla bits. And I never really put much thought into my eyebrows until a year or so ago when my regular barber suddenly frowned mid-cut, retrieved some clippers, and carefully shaved what felt like a sweater’s worth of eyebrow hair away.

This is disturbing on the one hand due to mundane, common anxiety: It’s all evidence of advancing age, after all. It’s enraging for other reasons: I was promised (it might have been implicit) by the universe that adolescence was the last time I would have to sit by and watch helplessly as my own body humiliated me on a daily basis.

Full Body Sculpting

A big part of this horror is Reverse Vanity; I’ve always told myself that I am that particular brand of Cool Dude who doesn’t care about things like his hair or general presentation. This results in shaggy hair, sloppy clothes, and a generally dubious attitude towards Hair Product or Tools; when I let my so-called beard grow, I never trim it or groom it. I just let it grow wild until I look like an insane person and then shave it off, setting off a fresh cycle of shame.

But this is just a different kind of vanity, tied into the image of Laissez-Faire Jeff who is too cool to worry about meaningless stuff like whether he looks like Grizzly Adams after a rough weekend. So caring about the tufts of hair my body is now producing is off-brand, in a way, and doing anything about it would be seriously off-brand. So I just sit here, slowly being consumed by my own hair, which makes it sound like my body hair is some sort of parasite feeding off me, growing longer and more lustrous as I shrink and shrivel. Which is kind of what’s going on, actually, and now I am totally freaked out and regret writing this essay.

Of course, I have a complex relationship with my hair. First of all, the Blonde Betrayal. When I was tyke, I looked like this:

So I can be forgiven for assuming I would remain a fair-haired, adorable little moppet for life. Instead, by my teen years all my adorable moppetness had evaporated, leaving me the wreck you know and love. When I allowed my hair to grow in college, I didn’t do any sort of grooming (branding!) so it quickly became a pile of crap on my head, which made me feel less cool than I assumed long hair was supposed to. When I went to my old barber on Winter Break for a ‘trim,’ he sadistically ruined my hair to teach me a lesson.

I still bear all these hair-related scars. So all this weird new hair is just a cosmic insult.

Here at Somers Rules Ltd, however, we believe in science! to solve all problems, so I have embarked on an experiment to discover whether excessive alcohol consumption can cure the Hair Problem. I’ll keep y’all posted, though I suspect one look is all it will take to determine if it’s working.

Bullshit

Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions

Author: January 19, 2020 0 Comments

Photo by Scott Umstattd on Unsplash

SO, this is going to be a post about the dishwasher. Fair warning.

I grew up without a dishwasher. As a kid, washing dishes was one of the chores our parents assigned to my brother and I in exchange for our allowance. It was also one of the chores that they more or less had to re-do after we were finished because we were trash at it. As an adult, Present Day Jeff is disgusted by Past Jeff’s willingness to run a dish under lukewarm water and call it clean. But hey, I was, like, 10 years old.

In college, I was kind of a dick roommate. I was that guy who literally took all the dirty dishes out of the sink and put them in my roommate’s bed, to make a point. Which was not made. I can remember making tiny fists of rage every time one of my roommates took a dish out of the sink, washed it, cooked something, and then put it back in the sink and walked away.

It wasn’t until many years later that I realized I was kind of the dick in that situation, trying to force people to live according to my rules. I now embrace the fact that I am pretty much always the dick in every situation; this attitude has clarified many things for me.

Flash forward to today: I have complex feelings about dirty dishes and dishwashers. They’re triggering.

Is It Weird That We Only Own One Cutting Board?

The Duchess is a firm believer in the power of convenient modern appliances, and she has resolved to never wash a dish by hand, ever. I can respect this, actually, I really can. The problem is that we only have a finite number of dishes, utensils, and cookware pieces. And we’re only two people. When you do the math on that, it means that if you use the one and only example of a certain item — say, a cutting board — on Monday, and then put it in the dishwasher, it sits there until you accumulate enough other dirty dishes1 to justify running the dishwasher.

Which is madness. I need that cutting board every day.

Maturity — adulthood — is often more or less the humiliation of your younger self. Where once I saw myself as a rebel who refused to do the dishes well in order to spite my parents, now I am a man who does the dishes constantly in an effort to always have a cutting board available. I am, in other words, a small man shaking tiny fists of rage at my own dishes. No wonder I drink so damn much. You would too.

I wind up washing many, many dishes by hand every day in order to ensure I have them when I want them, but I admit this also contributes to the problem: Because I hand-wash so many dishes, the dishwasher never fills up enough to justify running it. Which in turn means I hand-wash more dishes, onward and downward until we’re all pants-shittingly drunk on the kitchen floor, laughing uproariously at our own incredible stupidity and meaninglessness. I mean, a star exploded billions of years ago in order to supply the atoms that I currently use as a flesh shell, and here I am getting pants-shittingly drunk while washing dishes.

Why We Write

This is why I write, I think2. In my fiction, I control the universe, and thus even if it never makes it to the page I can rest assured that the people in my fictional universe handle the dishwasher properly, at least according to my weird Universal Weak Theory of Dishwasher Protocol.

The urge to impose your will on the universe shouldn’t be discounted as inspiration; we love to talk about ‘storytelling’ and ‘world-building,’ but sometimes it boils down to a desire to create a sandbox where you can impose what you think is the right way to do things and then use a sequence of thought experiments to see how it might actually play out. At the end, having a marketable manuscript is just a bonus.

I also only have one vintage Playboy shot glass left to me by my father, and that baby gets a lot of use, so it gets hand-washed constantly. Just sayin’.

Bullshit, Writing

Goodbye, Year

Author: December 25, 2019 2 Comments

WE’RE in the end game, now.

Normally, I live my life like one of those only-in-movies characters who has some sort of specialized amnesia that makes them wake up every day like Frosty the Snowman, without any memory of their lives before. I live in the moment, not because I’m living like I’m dying as Tim McGraw instructed us, but because my brain is weird and crumpled and I am almost incapable of remembering anything that didn’t happen within the last few hours.

Oh, I remember things, kind of. They’re vague impressions. Let it drift. I’ll never remember your name, don’t be insulted. I often confuse my many, many Catholic cousins named Mary and John. Let it drift

Around this time every year I like to look back in anger on the year in writing I just had. It’s fun. And depressing. I am a man obsessed with statistics pertaining to his own existence, as if the number of things I accomplish will somehow protect me from being completely forgotten within a few decades of my death, unless I am lucky enough to die embracing another man under a mountain of hot ash and am discovered centuries later by fascinated scientists wondering about our relationship. So in these sorts of posts I like to tabulate stuff and somehow equate it with accomplishment, to stir up the illusion of forward motion. I am that guy who measures his life in coffee spoons.

MY YEAR IN WRITIN’

So this is Xmas, and what have I done? On the freelance side of things, I had a good year with a sad ending; I picked up a few new jobs (most notably over at BookBub, which has been a blast) but of course the Barnes & Noble blogs shut down, which was a total bummer. I’ve been writing for the B&N blogs since 2014, and it was an incredible experience. Not only did they pay well, the editors were uniformly smart, fun, and excited about books. It’s been a few weeks since the news, and I still can’t get used to not pitching every idea I have about books to them. (Seriously, I pitched a lot to my B&N eds. They must have braced themselves every time one of my pitch-bomb emails arrived).

Still, freelance-wise this was a good year. Anyone who pays their bills by writing words knows that every day is a fresh opportunity to starve to death, so making it to December without having done so is a triumph.

Fiction-wise, also not bad. I finished 11 of my monthly short stories, so far (and trust that I will finish #12 in a few days even if I have to kill all the characters in a plane crash). I also finished 4 other stories outside of that monthly exercise. I didn’t complete any novels this year, but I’m 50k words into one and 40k words into a short-story cycle, so I wasn’t napping. I also finished and completed 50k words worth of novella-length parts of the new Avery Cates novel The Burning City and published them, so there’s that. And my agent has two novels in hand that we think have legs, and that’s never a bad position to be in as an author.

I submitted a ton of stories (74, to be exact; note this doesn’t mean 74 separate stories, but 74 submissions of a few stories I currently think are great), as usual, and sold three of them, of which two have published: The Company I Keep in Life is Short and Then You Die, edited by Kelley Armstrong, and Zilla, 2015 in The Lascaux Review. My system for submitting stories is sloppy and disorganized and probably favors volume more than it should, but it is my way.

And I started a podcast, like everyone else in this sadly imitative world. The No Pants Cocktail Hour actually launched in December of 2018, but I produced 16 solipsistic episodes this year and had a blast talking about myself, as usual.

So, the stats say I had a good year. Active, creative, somewhat lucrative. I hope your own writing year was a good one. Tell me about it in the comments, or on Twitter, or by tracking me down in a bar and leaning in too close and putting your hand uncomfortably on my thigh as you tell me the tale with far too much detail.

Happy 2020, folks. It’s coming whether you’re ready or not.

Bullshit, career, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Short Stories, Writing

Thoughts On Going to Music Venues as a Young Man and a Not Quite So Young Man

Author: November 26, 2019 2 Comments

I chose an outfit like dressing up for Halloween, trying to attain a level of cool and threat that I could not actually pull off. Torn jeans, camou jacket, old Chucks, tattered old Mets cap. It is vaguely ridiculous how long it took me to dress for the show, but I am comforted by the fact that everyone else is just as concerned. We have visions of the sort of people who turn up in music clubs in New York City to see punk-funk metal bands and we imagine them to be terrifying.

I don’t change clothes, I just pull on a hoodie and go downstairs to wait for my friend Ken. I’ve been wearing the same pants for three days in a row.

The New York City subway system is a mystery, a sordid, dirty series of tubes and hot, humid stations where people glare at us. In the confused dash for one transfer, two of us are left on the platform, staring through the grimy windows in abject horror as the rest of us are carried deeper into the city. They are never seen again, and may still be there.

Ken drives. We linger for a moment in the kitchen, slightly awkward in that way old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while can be. We chat while I compose myself, making sure I have keys, cards, phone. I lock up and we stroll around the corner to his car, new-ish and comfortable. He asks where we should grab some dinner before the show, then suggests a gourmet burger place he likes.

We pregame by pouring cheap vodka into soda cans, drinking as we walk to the club. The neighborhood is dirty and dark, the streets empty. The people we pass scare the shit out of us but we pretend they don’t, that this is a normal Friday evening for us, prowling Manhattan’s dank corners.

Ken and I stroll through Jersey City to the venue, chatting. People are hurrying home from work, carrying take-out orders, talking on their phones. We’re talking about video games, and how I lack the basic skills of survival to play them.

The club is crusty and dark, the music playing over the PA incredibly loud. None of us had believable IDs so we have been stamped as underage, which allows us to enter the club but does not allow us to drink. I get a soda just to go through the motions and am shocked when it costs me $8, which is one-third of the cash I have on me.

The club is largely empty. We’re frisked pretty thoroughly as we enter, but I’ve wised up over the years and when I enter public spaces these days I bring nothing but the absolute essentials. No bags, no extra layers, no totems in my pockets. I’ve sweated through too many shows and know it’s better to be slightly cold outside than boiling inside. There are two bright, welcoming bars and I buy us drinks, local beers from local breweries that cost me $14. I don’t carry cash any more, and am informed there’s a $20 minimum for credit cards, so I leave it open.

The opening band fires up and the club is quickly divided between people who just want to dance (and people who actually like the band) and the rest of us. The rest of us hang around the margins, nodding our heads while the mosh pit instantly spins up. It’s too loud to talk, so you just stand there and nod. I can feel the bass line through my sneakers. My ears are already overloaded.

The opening band takes the stage and a small crowd gathers. Ken and I stay at the bar and watch politely. They’re not bad, and have a few true fans in attendance. I keep trying to hear the name of the band but I keep missing it.

In the bathroom, a fight breaks out and I am shoved into the urinal I’m urinating into, which leaves me soaked in pisswater. I am momentarily angry, but then figure this augments my image as a bad motherfucker and decide to roll with it.

In the bathroom, there’s just one other guy. It smells like violets. We nod at each other.

The headliners takes the stage and I fight my way closer. A mosh pit opens up around me, and I’m thrown violently against the wall of people around us. I push off and dive back in; it’s not so much dancing as just crashing into people over and over again. My glasses get knocked off my face, and are swallowed in the maelstrom, never to be seen again.

The headliner takes the stage and we meander closer in. Everyone stands, swaying slightly. Some people lift their phones to film and take pictures.

Heading home, I’m soaked in sweat and exhausted, half-blind and half-deaf. It takes something like forever to navigate the subways and trains back home.

The show ends with a fake-out encore, and I ask Ken why bands still do this ridiculous thing. He has no answers. On the drive home we discuss our holiday plans, and when I get home The Duchess is waiting and is amazed that I am home so early.

Bullshit

Look On My Works Ye Mighty

Author: November 20, 2019 1 Comment

Photo by Christa Dodoo on Unsplash

I’m a writer who’s obsessed with his own statistics as proof of his existence. This dates back to long before I started writing, in fact; I have every book I’ve ever read, for example—every single book—because the sight of all of those physical spines on a bookshelf is evidence that I am here. I have every baseball card I ever bought for the same reason, and also because of the mystical relationship between baseball stats and my own personal existential scorecard. Barry Bonds may have hit 73 home runs in 2001, but I read 37 books that year, and wrote 12 short stories and 2 novels1.

Over drinks recently a fellow writer told me they still print out hardcopy of their work each and every night2. Whatever they’d managed to write that day, they printed. They had stacks and stacks of paper everywhere, monuments to their work. I experienced a pang of regret, because my desire for those same kinds of monuments has run straight into my desire to live in the future, because like a lot of people, I’m running a 100% paperless writing career right now3.

But I miss the paper.

Stacks and Stacks

I held out for a long time. Until some time in 2005, I wrote all my fiction on a 1950s manual typewriter I stole from my sainted mother. Every story, novel, and failed experiment was tapped out on that old machine, resulting in a new stack of tidy white paper to add to the existing stacks crowding my apartments4. Moving house was a logistical nightmare thanks to the books and the manuscripts, and I quickly ran out of friends willing to show up for a slice of pizza and a beer5. That was okay, because all that physical paper reminded me that I was there. I had done things. Those ideas and stories weren’t just my imagination, I’d made them real.

It’s different today. Are the new ideas real? I don’t know. I have an obsessive spreadsheet where I keep track of finished works, and the numbers are comforting6. But it’s not the same. First of all, unfinished works have their own charms to the writer7, and they are invisible to the spreadsheet. And all those ones and zeros—no matter how many clouds you back them up to—exist only because civilization exists, because of the power grid and the technological infrastructure. When the world ends, and it inevitably will, when everything shuts off, in a split second everything I’ve ever created will more or less vanish until some super-evolved species of ant rises up from the radioactive slush and re-invents computer forensics.

In so many ways, the modern writing career is an improvement. Research is a matter of a few clicks. Submissions don’t require a trip to the post office8. Social media allows me to pretend to be much, much more successful than I actually am. And, yes, I can now move my entire life’s work to a new house by sticking a thumb drive into my pocket as I leave9.

But I miss them, the stacks of paper. Because if the health department isn’t called to my Collyer Brother-like mansion because I have died after being trapped for weeks beneath a collapsed pile of ancient manuscripts, did I even actually exist10??

Bullshit, Writing

The Long Walk

Author: November 8, 2019 0 Comments

I recently discussed my strange wish to do nothing to celebrate my birthday, and I mentioned that my wife, The Duchess does not share my feelings. For The Duchess, birthdays are opportunities to spit in death’s eye and do all the things.

Naturally, since we are legally married, this means I must also do all the things, although I have contractual carve-outs that allow me to do so with incredibly poor grace and passive aggression, escalating steadily until I finally go too far and have to spend several weeks cleaning up my mess.

For her most recent birthday, The Duchess wished to do some serious hiking, which has been a sore point between us ever since I claimed to love hiking when we were first dating. This was a lie, as I remain scarred by several hikes I engaged in as a Cub and Boy Scout in my misspent youth1, one in which I was almost led to my death and one which seemed to go on for so long I longed to just sit down and let the elements wash me away.

So, birthday hiking wasn’t exactly exciting. I had no idea what I was in for, however.

You Mean Leave the House?

What friends I have left, and there ain’t many, remark on the fact that getting me to do just about anything that separates me from my whiskey collection and forces me to put on pants is as close to impossible as anything in this universe. I mocked for this as part of a complex web of mockery that has grown to encompass just about every aspect of my life, but I can’t argue the point, because I do hate going places. And doing things. And talking to people.

Contrary to popular belief, this isn’t because I hate people, or at least not solely because of that. It’s because I’d rather be writing, or working on some other project.

I’ve never understood folks who want to write novels or paint pictures or what have you who don’t want to do those things all the damn time. I mean, not literally all the damn time, because we all need to take a moment to enjoy a nice single malt or an episode of Watchmen or read a good book or something, but generally speaking that’s my default setting, and activities that take me out of the house usually mean I can’t work, which makes me sad.

Of course, this kind of obsessive attitude leads to grinding, the joyless mashing of keyboards with no inspiration behind it, which isn’t very healthy. Being forced to go out sometimes is good for me. It gets me out of my head, forces me to experience real life, and lets my brain do some background work on whatever I’m writing. Long story short, I piss and moan about having shit to do, but it improves my writing so I should shut up and enjoy life.

So, we went hiking.

Death Hike Part Tres

I’ve written before about the times The Duchess has attempted to murder me via hiking (see here and here). This time we headed to upstate New York and the Catskills for a few days filled with some shopping, lots of eating, and, as I learned on our way there, an apparently infinite amount of hiking. We spent the first day there gathering intelligence by asking locals about hikes we could do.

If you know The Duchess, you know that the easiest way to get her to do something is to imply or state that she can’t do it. So the moment one very helpful guy in a bookstore suggested that walking to this one hike and then doing the hike on top of the walk there and back was way too much for mere mortals, I was doomed. The next morning we ate a hearty breakfast and then began walking … to the trailhead. Where we would walk more.

Was it all more or less uphill? It sure fucking was. Did I contemplate my existence several times along the way? I sure fucking did.

I also had fun, mainly because of that sense you get sometimes (more often, in my experience, when you’re young) of going against society’s rules and rubbing people the wrong way. Every time a car passed us and the driver gave us a look that translated to hey look at those weirdos I felt like a revolutionary, or a hipster, neither of which I’ve ever been but fuck it, roleplay can be fun.

And I thought about writing.

That’s the thing about writing, isn’t it? Writing is just 10% the actual words on screen or paper. The rest is thinking, and reading, and researching, and talking to yourself, and drinking heavily, and watching TV, and going to museums, and listening to new music, and, yes, fuckit, hiking. That’s writing.

Sure, I was sweaty and my feet hurt, and there was a soul-breaking moment when we’d been walking uphill for hours and discovered we had several hours to go, but I also had some good thoughts on the writing projects I was working on, and came home energized. And triumphant, because despite her plans The Duchess once again failed to kill me.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s probably something to do with good-quality shoes. If there’s a second lesson, it’s that writing happens all the time, no matter what you’re doing, so it’s okay to leave your house sometimes.

I said sometimes, dammit.

Bullshit, More Shit I Gotta Do, Writing