You say Polymath like it's a bad thing...

NaNoWriMo: An excerpt

Writing is, strictly speaking, a craft. This blog is meant to showcase my crafts. Thus, an excerpt from my novel this year, which is currently sitting pretty at just over 33,000 words.

This particular scene is about halfway through what I have so far. Two main characters are rival mercenaries/assassins, and one has been sent after the other. In answer, Kami’s boss calls her in to discuss the contract on her head. Then she goes out on the town. There are absolutely no spoilers in this excerpt.

——–

Kami was displeased. She had never been one to appreciate being called in, like a dog. Her boss had her number; why couldn’t he just call her with information? Instead she would get some cryptic message and have to drive to the city just to be given a name and general location. All of that could be done in five minutes over the phone.

She stopped the bike in front of the headquarters of the Inagawa-kai and glowered at the door for a moment. Her approach to the door was without pomp, but the guards showed her reverence anyway. She gave them a sarcastic salute and entered, making a bee line for the staircase, ignoring the secretaries who tittered at her.

She took the steps two at a time, stopping at the door at the top. She popped her neck a few times, pushed it open and walked in, “Sunny day today.”

Her boss looked up from the desk and the quiet conversation he was having. He wasn’t happy with Kami’s general disposition, but he had grown accustomed to it. The man speaking with him was obviously unfamiliar with Kami, however, because he stood abruptly and turned, “Who do you think you are?”

Kami arched a brow and watched him approach.

“Answer me!”

Kami smiled and tilted her head, glancing over at her boss. He stood calmly and sighed, “Hanaka-san, please-”

“You do not barge in on private meetings. Someone must teach you a lesson, clearly,” he raised his hand to strike, and Kami almost laughed. This clearly only angered him more, but the retort was cut off when Kami grabbed his arm, roughly pushing it back and stepping around him. When she had his arm pinned behind him, she turned him around to face her boss, “Clearly.”

Ishii-san sighed, “Kami. Let him go.”

The man tried to peer over his shoulder, fear obvious on his features, “Kami? Kami Mitsuko…”

Kami smiled and let go of his arm, “You didn’t know. I realize,” she looked over his shoulder, “You called me here.”

Ishii-san nodded, “Yes. Hanaka-san, you may go. Kami, please come in.”

The man stepped away, bowed, and then walked out, giving Kami a wide berth. She took a seat across from her boss and waited.

“Are you aware, Kami, that the Yamaguchi-gumi have put a contract on you?”

Kami looked over the desk, scanning for anything of interest. She saw nothing that caught her eye, “Of course.”

The man sat in his chair and leaned on the desk before him. He looked across at Kami, fingers crossed in front of him, “Are you planning to do anything about it?”

She considered this for a moment, “No.”

He sighed, dropping his head, “I thought that might be your answer. This doesn’t bother you at all? You have no concerns?”

“I am not concerned, no. But it does bother me…in the way that a fly being in my house bothers me.”

Ishii-san sighed, “I will trust your judgment for now, but if things continue to progress, I will have to send you out in retaliation.”

Kami nodded, chewing her lip for a moment, “Okay. Why couldn’t we do this over the phone?”

He smiled, “You know I don’t like doing business that way.”

“Yeah,” she stood with a sigh, “I’m really not worried. I’ve met the guy they sent after me, and he’s not going to do it.”

“And when they take him off and put someone else on it?”

She shrugged, making her way to the door, “I’ll deal with that if it happens. I’m sure the Yamaguchi-gumi will get over it, right? The guy was a fat pimp. He probably was more trouble for them than anything, and as soon as they realize it…and that their number one assassin can’t even take me in, well, they’ll get over it,” and she walked out.

Waste of a drive, she thought, but I might as well take advantage.

She waved to the guards as she mounted her bike and took off down the street. She felt confident she could find at least one good bar in the area. She had agreed to meet with Mary Elizabeth in the morning, so a crazy night was probably out of the question, but what could happen?

* * *

The impact was perhaps more than she had anticipated; the wall creaked behind the weight of her hitting it. She slid down the wall and took a moment to catch her breath before standing again, using the wall as a support. She shook her head free of the fog that was creeping up on her.

“That…all you got?”

* * *

The sun made red streaks flash across her eyelids, and she groaned. She searched her memory for what woke her – oh, yes, knocking. There it was again. She pushed herself up slowly, still unwilling to open her eyes to face the sun. Based on what was under her fingers and the position of the sun, she placed herself on her couch. She shuffled to the door, still working on the details of how she got home, and opened it, “Yes?”

A few days in the life

I decided to pause my hiatus from this blog during NaNoWriMo to make a post. I have a lot of reasons to post right now.
First, the superficial good news: my novel writing is going great. I have over 30,000 words with 16 days to go to get to 50,000. My pace doesn’t seem to be slowing much, and my idea is going strong. It’s reshaped itself a little bit over the month, but I think for the better, and the story seems to excite those that I share it with.

My job is keeping me busy, and last night I had my first night out without Eric. My coworker (also named Sam) had her birthday on Monday, and I joined her and a few others last night to fete her. It is nice to have coworkers that I like on a personal level, with whom I feel comfortable. Despite the cold creeping up on us, I feel like Michigan could be home in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time.

But a few states away, things are not so great.

Last week, Eric and I flew down to Georgia to celebrate my mom’s birthday and upcoming holidays with my family. We’d been looking forward to the visit for a while; I even negotiated for it in my interviews for BBY. Tuesday morning, after voting, we drove to Grand Rapids to catch a flight to Atlanta. We arrived at my parents’ house around 5:30, beating my mom and dad both. We had to sneak in the back way because the door was locked, and we had a few minutes of down time to decompress before dad got home. It would turn out to be a preview of our visit.

Tuesday night my brother started getting sick. By Wednesday night, he was still sick, and as a child with a host of medical conditions and syndromes, my parents decided it would be prudent to take him to the hospital. The local hospital sent him to the specialists in Atlanta early in the morning of my mom’s birthday. Eric and I drove down to Atlanta to visit them in the hospital Thursday, and we spent that night and the next day cleaning my parents’ house, so they would have a nice, clean home to come back to.

We said our goodbyes to mom, dad, and Joe on Saturday night in the hospital. We had to sneak back into the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (Joey’s been in all of the ICU’s, I think) to say goodbye to him after visiting hours were over. He was sedated. I don’t know that he even knew we were there.

We flew back home on Sunday, more exhausted than we had been when we arrived. My husband is the best; he was nothing but helpful and supportive the whole time we were there.

As of today, Joey is still in the ICU. He is stable, but not stable in a place that promotes stability. He is still on a ventilator; he is still connected to IVs, and they are still monitoring his heart beat, O2 levels, and other vitals. He has one nurse assigned to him because he has so many needs. He has crossed the line into “medically fragile,” so that at school, he will require one-on-one care at all times.

I’ve said, and others, too, that Joey makes some people uncomfortable because they remind them of their own mortality. I have been thinking about mortality today; it’s a dark cloud that’s been hovering over everything I do. My novel’s main characters don’t help (one is a mercenary, one an assassin, and one medically fragile herself). I was thinking, strangely, about actors and singers – people well-known and beloved who have died. It is such a strange thing to think that one day someone exists and then the next they don’t.

It’s made me think about the afterlife. What happens when we/you/I stop existing? People retain memories of lost loved ones, but what happens to them, their essence? Are they reborn? Is there a heaven? Are we only composed of neurological signals and predispositions that we acquire genetically? Do we just cease to be anything but memory? What about ghosts and spirits? Are they just memories manifested and fed by belief?

If I’m being honest with myself, death scares me. It is the typical fear of the unknown, and I understand how every culture has tried to answer that doubt. No one wants to disappear. Isn’t that why we struggle to be the best, to see our names in print, or even to create pictures of ourselves?

I recently deactivated my Facebook account (again), but today I’ve been thinking about how it’s become a sort of poster child for our fear of being forgotten. Perhaps if we post enough pictures of ourselves online, our memory will be imprinted forever in the ether, a sort of twisted deus ex machina. How much of our everyday lives are fueled by this fear?

One thing I can say for sure is that Joey brings out the best and the darkest in me. Being his big sister is a daily struggle in and of itself. I feel simultaneously connected and disconnected from him and his life, partially because of the distance between us (chronologically and geographically) and partially because he is such an enigma. I feel like, since he was born, since I was sent away because my parents feared the worst, I have kept him close but always detached, always knowing that there will come a day when I will lose him. The simple fact is that the chances are great that I will outlive my brother who is 14 years my junior.

Joey makes people uncomfortable because they are forced to face their own mortality. Joey makes me uncomfortable because I am forced to face his.

But not yet.

NaNoWriMo Eve

Remember yesterday when I was going to do some crafting, but I had to work because someone called in? Well…at 9:45 this morning, my boss called and asked me if I could come in today. So still no crafting.

I wish I could say I was disappointed, but the fact is, all the hours I put in today were overtime hours, which means cha-ching. I can’t complain about that. And, sure, maybe by next Monday I’ll have worked for 12 days in a row, but I get 6 days off to visit my folks.

I do still have a project that needs to be started. And I still have all of the Christmas gifts to start, but I am confident that they will get done if I plan ahead enough.

Most important to me right now, however, is that there are a mere 4 hours to go before November, which means a mere 4 hours to go before National Novel Writing Month begins. In addition to working, this will keep me amazingly busy. But seeing as writing is a craft, to keep this place living and breathing, if I am unable to do “traditional” crafts, I’ll occasionally post updates on my novel for this year.

All told, I’m feeling pretty good about things right now. I hope you are well, and if you are writing this NaNoWriMo, may you have as much inspiration as you can handle!

Polymath Cooking: Make it up as you go

Working full time is great. Unless coworkers start calling off work, and I am asked to fill in for extra shifts. On my day off today, I am going in at 4 to close. My plans for today probably could have been kept because I have/had most of the day available. Most of my energy has gone into what to make for my late lunch/early dinner and Eric’s dinner when he comes home.

Since we are leaving next Tuesday for a visit with family, I didn’t do much in the way of grocery shopping, so I have been trying to put together a kind of pasta salad idea. Not having a whole lot of ingredients, I needed to be a little creative. Tuna, peas, various beans, some tomatoes from our plant outside, and pasta.

I ended up nixing the tuna.

I simmered the peas, tomatoes, and garbanzos in some oil and vinegar with parsley. For the record, I also cooked the pasta. When the pasta was done, I threw all the ingredients in a bowl, spritzed some lemon juice on the mixture, sprinkled a little bit of cheese, and voila!

It came out pretty tasty. Now I have about 15 minutes to get ready for work, and I’ll let this little concoction chill in the fridge for Eric. There is enough that we’ll probably both have lunch for tomorrow, too.

Ahh. Nothing beats cooking by the seat of your pants.

Changed the title

My original post was titled “Working Girl”, and then I thought about that a little bit. I don’t want to give the wrong impression here.

So I managed to hem some pants before work the other day, and that was great. But I haven’t done much since then. Wednesday was Eric’s birthday, so I cleaned the house, set up a game to play, went to the bank to talk about mortgages, and then I took him out for dinner. No crafting potential there. Thursday I worked and just slept in a little bit. Friday, which I’m pretty sure was yesterday, was insane. I started working on my e-learnings around 9:30. I went in to work at noon, and I was asked to stay to close because someone called off, so I worked until 9:45.

Long story short, I’m still recovering from yesterday, and I had to work today, too.

I have a great idea that I want to work on, but I also have lots of work coming up. If I wake up early enough tomorrow, I’ll get on that ASAP.

In other news, Eric is in Traverse City today through a little bit of tomorrow. I ordered pizza. I’m enjoying a Leinenkugel’s Creamy Dark and watching new episodes of the Office. So…I am immensely boring, and for that I am not sorry.

I am enjoying the new job. I am enjoying being busy, and I like my coworkers. In fact work today was a delight, all things told. I’m not sure why I started this post. That’s a lie. I totally know why I started it, but I am choosing the ignore that reason and instead end this post awkwardly.

Got a few hours to spare?

I’ve traded my 5am part time shifts for full time work and occasional late nights. That means, of course, that instead of leaving work, coming home, and being too tired to do anything, I get up at a reasonable time and don’t go to work until the afternoon. I also need more pairs of khakis that I previously owned, so I bought a new pair. Alas, they were too long.

Luckily, I have a sewing machine!

For whatever reason hemming pants is a difficult task for me. It seems easy enough when I start – measure, cut, sew. Once I get into it, though, I start second-guessing and fretting over details and length and such. So I re-measure, hesitate about cutting, and then measure again.

Today I spent 3 hours working on the pants, and they came out okay, all things considered. I mean, the length is right (that is a first for me!). But this wouldn’t be a Crafty Polymath post if something hadn’t gone wrong with the whole process, right?

My sewing machine decided, somewhere at the end of the second leg, that it didn’t like…sewing, I guess. I’m not entirely sure what it did, but it started making a weird noise, and then when I looked at the finished product, there is a knot of thread just kind of…there. I’m not sure what went wrong, and honestly, I’m not that upset. The pants are the right length, and the knot isn’t that obvious.

So I’m quite proud of my accomplishment. Pants all hemmed and with an hour to spare before I leave for work.

In other news, Ann Coulter is at it again, being a big, mean-spirited source of evil. And I mean evil.

Anyway, there we have it. Ann Coulter is evil, and I hemmed some pants. I guess things sort of balance out…maybe.

Another birthday

Yesterday Eric and I drove to Lake Odessa to visit with Mark’s family and celebrate October birthdays (Eric and Mark, in fact). Since Eric already got his gift, I didn’t bring it with us, but he got some very thoughtful gifts from the folks there.

Mark is my mother-in-law’s boyfriend, and he is a wonderful man. He is very generous, thoughtful, and he is super geeky, so we get along great. He bought the furniture that is in our guest room, and he is basically just a great person. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do for him, but after they came over for dinner one night, and he seemed very appreciative of my homemade pasta, I decided to make him “Italian Dinner in a Basket.”

I forgot to get pictures, but here’s the process:

1. I opened a beer and played some Hugo on my iTunes.

2. I made some sauce from scratch. At the suggestion of my mom, who is brilliant, I cooked the tomatoes for about an hour instead of just blending them right away. I blanched them first, peeled them, chopped them, then let them simmer in oil, red wine vinegar, garlic, and spices. This was the best sauce I have made yet.

3. I have semolina flour finally! So I did half semolina, half all purpose, and I made some fettuccine with my pasta maker.

4. I canned the sauce and let the noodles dry over night. Then I bagged the noodles.

5. We bought a middle-of-the-road wine (Mark used to work at a winery, actually) and included that in the basket.

6. I wrote an instruction card, and we covered the whole lot in a nice dish towel.

We also made him a card. I bought a pack of photo cards (you put your own photo in there) on my last day at Michaels, and we painted the front to make it look less…white.

It was quite a hit! And, fittingly, my sister-in-law gave him a decorative cork holder. In vino veritas, my friends!

So now it’s onto my mom’s birthday gift and then Christmas. I am getting excited about it all. I am also getting psyched for NaNoWriMo, and it will be interesting to see how I fit writing and crafting and cooking and full time retail in together.

Coming up next: I will turn an over sized t-shirt into a fitted tee! Theoretically.

The unveiling

So for about 5 weeks, I struggled with ideas and execution on Eric’s birthday present. I knew I wanted to make him a board game because he loves board games, but I wasn’t sure how to create game play that could capture all of the facets of his personality, his life, and our life together. I toyed with the idea of a card game, a board game similar to Monopoly, and I got frustrated enough to stop thinking about it for a while, which was a bit unfortunate.

Finally I realized that I had an old copy of Trivial Pursuit that we never play, and the format was clear. I would create a trivia game with questions about Eric!

The only problem was that I wanted to unveil the game at his dad’s war gaming club, and not everyone there knows enough about Eric to do well, and I didn’t want it to be boring for people. In answer, I made one category about Eric specifically, and the others would be about things he likes, so I ended up with one category about Eric, one for entertainment (music, games, etc), one for general history, one for arts and literature, one for the Packers, and one for war history.

The biggest challenge was the trivia part. I spent weeks coming up from work and scouring the interwebs for good trivia. It was exhausting. I managed to put together 50 cards with each of the categories, which amounts to 300 questions. I hand wrote all of them, too, in tiny letters, so they would fit on the playing-card sized paper.

The code card and trivia cards. A 6 hour labor of love.

I spent so much time on the cards that I almost ran out of time to decorate the box. Even that has a great story. I had decided to do minimal changes, so I called the game “The Trivial Pursuits of Eric”; I simply added the letters and words I needed to the box.

After I had changed the title and put a picture of Eric on the cover, it seemed a little empty on top, so I decided to name it the “30th Anniversary Edition.” Easy! I used the same Sharpie I had used on the rest of it, but sometimes when you’ve been awake since 4am, things kind of run together, and I ended up with “30th Anniverary” instead.

No problem! I cut out a star burst of yellow construction paper and wrote it on there, then used Mod Podge to decoupage it onto the box.

Oh wait, though. When the construction paper got wet, it began to bend, and I ended up with a lump in the center where it hadn’t stuck to the box. I discovered this before the adhesive dried, luckily, and I attempted to flatten it. But in doing so, the ink of the marker smudged.

I took the whole star burst off, but the outline was still there.

My final answer (geez, this is even longer typed out than I thought…this is good, though. It gives a great feeling for what I went through) was to paint the star burst shape with the same bronze metallic paint I used on my dad’s clock and re-write the title. I retitled it “30th Anniversary Bronze Edition”, and it was done!

And I finished it all with literally one minute to spare. I completed the last card and put the cover on the game just before Eric got home from work last Friday. We left that afternoon for Grayling to visit the folks up north and attend GWC, where I would unveil the game!

Alas, we did not get to play the game at club, but I did give it to Eric, and he was a fan. Since we didn’t get to play, I asked him all the trivia questions on the drive home on Sunday. He actually missed some of the ones about himself, which I thought was great.

Eric’s displayed the box on his game shelf! Hooray!

To be honest, I feel a little crappy that we didn’t get to play it, like somehow it’s not as cool a gift since we skipped the whole game play part, which was sort of the point. But I’ll make it up to him. Next week, on the actual day, I don’t have to work, and he has an early day, so I’m thinking I’ll set up a board game to play for when he gets home. Of course, we also have an appointment with the bank that day to start talking about home loans and all that jazz.

Regardless, it all worked out, and I have a lot of crafting ahead of me! But for today, I’m just going to watch the Avengers again.

I cannot sit idly by

This is ridiculous.

I can relate to this father; the word “retard” and its various forms never really registered on my radar of hurtful words before my brother was born. Sure, I understood how “the n word” was inappropriate and could hurt feelings. I even knew that to say “gyp” someone was an aspersion on the Roma. I never used racial slurs regarding people from Asia, the Middle East, or any other place in the world. At the very least, 99% of people know not to use such words in the presence of the people that they slander.

The problem with “retard”, though, is, well…there are a lot of problems. The first is that you never know if you are around someone who might be hurt by the use of that word. The second is that it’s belittling and mean. And finally, if nothing else, it shows a deplorable lack of vocabulary.

Many people are affected by mental disabilities – not just those who have the deficiency. My parents are affected by my brother’s struggles; my mom changed her career to accommodate his increased needs. They spend a lot of time going to therapy and doctor’s appointments, worrying and struggling themselves. I am affected by my brother’s struggles. I face a future of caring for him when our parents are gone. I certainly do not walk around with a sign that reads “my brother is disabled!” Most people would not know to look at me that mental retardation is a fact in my life, not just an “amusement.” So careless use of the word “retard” is usually what gets me.

Beyond that, if the only word that a person can think of to describe something they don’t like or don’t understand is “retarded,” then they show a severe lack of creativity. Is “retarded” seriously the best word to describe anything and everything? I once had a friend that wrote, on Facebook, “Mornings are retarded.” We got into a debate about use of the word, and we parted ways – what a silly reason to lose a friend – but my main argument was that mornings cannot have mental disabilities. What she was saying was that she hated mornings, despised them, found them deplorable or unbearable. She could have described her feelings in any number of ways. Here are a few:

Mornings are worse than a stab in the eye.

Mornings make me want to punch myself in the face.

Mornings are intolerable.

Mornings are infernal.

Mornings are the bane of my existence.

Any of those phrases would have conveyed her meaning – she doesn’t like mornings – without simultaneously belittling an entire population of human beings.

Finally, and I cannot stress this enough, a person gains nothing by using the word “retard.” They only prove themselves to be mean, thoughtless, selfish, and basically a deplorable human being. Often I hear the argument that we have the right of free speech – Free Speech! Free Speech! I can say what I want! – but this isn’t about that, and anyone who thinks that it is is clearly unfamiliar with what that means. “Free speech” only means that you cannot be arrested, and I cannot sue you, for being an asshole. This is not about free speech.

This is about coexisting with our fellow humans and not being totally shitty at it. It is really hard to describe what it is like to someone who does not love a disabled person. There is no way for me to compare someone using “retarded” to describe something to something that other people might understand. There is likely no clear way for me to insult their child in such a broad and socially-accepted way. For instance, “I hate these pens. They are so brunette!” does not accurately convey the sinking and nervous feeling I get when someone calls their phone “retarded.”

That’s just the problem, though. We don’t insult things or people by calling them out on their uncontrollable traits, except when it comes to the word “retard.” For whatever reason, people just throw that around like it’s an everyday adjective, completely ignoring that it actually, scientifically describes a portion of the population. How is it that people don’t see how cruel and thoughtless this is? How is it that people in my own family ignore this simple act of decency – not hurting those around them?

Finally, and then I’ll be off my soapbox, this isn’t about us being sensitive. Sticks and stones can break our bones, and words have always been hurtful. That is why the pen is mightier than the sword; that is why bullying leads to teen suicide.

If you use the word “retarded,” I only ask that you think twice about it next time. Are you sure there’s not any other word you can use? Are you sure that you don’t mind being hurtful toward a whole population, and their families? It’s about empathy, and there’s not enough of it in the world; please help spread the word to end the word.

http://r-word.org/

</soapbox>

Haunting Sunday

Alas, the Packers lost today.

Despite that, Eric and I were fantastically productive. We got laundry done, cleaned the living areas, and we redecorated our porch with the new Halloween decorations that my MIL graciously gave to us. We also decorated a little bit inside, but I must say that our porch is sufficiently creepy, and I am looking forward to scaring small humans on the 31st.

We received a healthy list of frightening props from MIL, but I wanted something a little crafty to celebrate and showcase, so I revisited my bottle painting of a few months ago.

I had an extra wine bottle hanging around, and while Eric painted a wooden skeleton to put outside, I went about priming the bottle.

Here is what I did:

1. After priming, I did a base coat of black paint.

2. I decided to class it up, and I “labeled” the bottle en francais!

Basically, this is my witch’s brew of crow blood. Mmm.

3. Finally, I had to make it clear that this was a bottle of blood, so I used a dark red and did a few drops. Now, to do this realistically, I had to first mix the red and black together, then slowly add more red as the streak went down. I then made it “pool” at the bottom. I am please with the outcome.

Bloody

No crows were harmed in the making of this craft

This has certainly put me in the mood for Halloween. We also got Christmas decorations, and anyone who has seen me around Christmas knows that I am OBSESSED!

Perhaps the best bit of goodies were the books with recipes and craft ideas. I got some wonderful gift ideas from them already, and I think they will be rather simple to do, which will be good. Can you say excited?!

Yesterday also was my orientation on the new j-o-b. I am definitely tempted by the kool-aid. Mmmmmm.
Hope you are all ready for holiday decorating! Keep it crafty. 😉