Dodging Storms

A study in opposites: a computer tech programming websites next to a full-face white helmet, white armored leather jacket, black armored pants.
I hurry my gear on, throwing the jacket with the spine protector over a canary yellow polo. My wallet, phone, ipod, and car keys are nestled in the backpack beside 2 laptops and a kindle. A struggle later and it’s slipped over my armored forearm. I’ll be the most expensive thing on two wheels in a minute or two.
It doesn’t look great out, the clouds are a little too ominous, the air is a little too sweet for less than a mile off the parkway. It’s going to come down, and I’m not quite ready for slick roads on two wheels.
“Hold on, your backpack is open.”
“Are the zippers on the side? Can you put them there?”
“Huh?”
“Uh, can you pull the zippers around to the side? When they’re on the top it opens. I’ve gotten home two or three times and it’s been wide open.”
“Yeah.” He closes my backpack up and I can feel him pull the zippers over.
“Thanks man! Have a good weekend.”
I snatch my helmet off the desk and walk down the hall. It occurs to me that I look huge; the armor adds a good inch to my frame, riding boots add another to my height, and I’m moving fast. I smirk at the thought of secretaries hurling stacks of paper as they dodge me.
I wave to the security guard as I pass his desk then pull my helmet over my head, snug against my face. Every piece of gear is important, every piece protects. When I see someone on a bike with shorts and a wifebeater, I wonder how long they’ll have their skin.
My bike stands out among behemoth SUVs, a dwarf there in the center of its allotted space.
My visor collects tiny gems. The storm is here.
Grasping the right handbrake I throw a leg over and sit in the saddle, turn the key, and kick up my kickstand.
Ignition.
Now to dance.
I slip through the parking lot, weaving on the asphalt floor and slithering around cement islands. Is it coming from the West, or the East? How long do I have until downpour?
The light to the on-ramp is red and I can see traffic is stopped going East from my vantage point opposite. If I go left I can do a few traffic tricks and jump the gridlock, but I’ll miss the HOV entrance. And the rain is coming.
The light changes.
Now the race.
I pull around the car in front of me and take the inner lane, jumping to the speed limit with a throttle wring then jumping lanes again to get around an SUV napping at the newly changed light. If traffic is light at the overpass…
Bingo! I slip in before the light changes and ride the service road. Traffic is still backed up. What a mess.
I wring the throttle again and leapfrog a line of cars using the entry to cut off the traffic, nestling in to the highway and starting the slow migration left toward the HOV.
There’s that feeling you get in traffic sometimes, after you’ve made a decision you wouldn’t normally make because of some new data - a sign blinking ‘Two Lanes Closed Exit 53’ and you wonder how close to 53 you should go before jumping on to the service road to dodge the bulk of traffic - and I’ve got it.
Thing is, in the car I’d just be in for a boring crawl in climate control. On the bike I’ll be taking a shower. Soppy wet underwear in waterlogged khakis. Raindrops at 55 miles an hour hurt.
Should have made the left.
But, I’m not wet yet. Keep crawling. Still have time.
I look over at a woman in an SUV scowling at the backup. Everyone seems to notice when you look at them from a bike, or they’re always about to look at the bike and you only sometimes notice. She turns to me, looks down at my two wheels and gives me a snide look. You’re fucked. Yep.
The lane moves. We’re a good quarter mile off and I swing out to peer down the lane. It’s open, the cars are favoring the right. That’s an invitation, right?
A drop of rain on the back of my neck. Go!
The white striped pre-entrance zone to the HOV will be deadly in another five minutes, coated by rain and slick as oil. For now its an ally against the traffic. I pass over it like a bird gliding over the ocean. Before me the sky is open, bright and blue but behind it is dark, ominous and vivid.
The entrance opens and I transition, no one near me.
I pull the throttle all the way out and catch the wind like an open parachute: every gust shakes me, I lock my neck to resist the buffeting winds. The storm approaches, gnashing at my back. Always check the weather in the morning. Idiot.
Little gemstones populate my visor, headlights flash on in my mirror. The clouds dance above, wisps and tails twist like tendrils, a shadow growing behind. 56. 55. Exits and miles between. A midnight blue Honda Accord, a white pickup truck. I wouldn’t wish a white pickup truck on my worst enemy.
Green sign overlooking the lane. “Motorcycles Permitted”. Thank god.
It’s darker. Raindrops on my windscreen. You never know when the rain will make every strip of paint a frictionless plane. Coming up on a bumper and the HOV exit to my real exit approaches.
I dart over the dotted line and pull the throttle, popping up to 70 and jumping past about fifteen queued cars. The road at the head of the snake is clear, I swing out and migrate to the outside lane.
The sky roars, a fine burning slice of light in the dark behind me. There’s a particular way the front of a storm looks, like a haze masking the vehicles, the paint on each car a shade darker then they should be.
I jump into the entrance lane, discarding all pretense of politeness. I’m about to be soaked, you’ll all be warm and dry. Let me squeeze on by, I swear you won’t even see me in a quarter mile.
I come up on backup up traffic at the merge, pick my spot between two cars, and slow for it. But the car I’ve picked isn’t moving as traffic accelerates. Is he napping? I jam the break, slow to a stop beside him.
He waves, knows perhaps. Or realizes why I am urgently darting between the hulking metal death machines. I wave, throw into gear and move up a spot. No time for pleasantry's my good man. Storms to dodge and all that.
The traffic eases, unbinds. We move. Storms comes.
There’s my exit. What’s another traffic violation? Go!
The great round burn. Exit arc.
Green light at the intersection: Bonus time! Left turn and I’m parallel to the storm front.
Weave like a skier, burst like a sprinter. Those your strengths, wouldn’t you know?
A grand curve, a switchback. Heading back at it. Can you dodge something you’re driving straight toward?
Answer: Yes. Dodging storms.
Home stretch, coasting to my parking spot.
Cover it, protect it, engine’s burning hot.
But we’re safe and dry.

Why Write? Oranges

Why write?

It's a devious question to ask. It's a dangerous question to ask. There are things you can do that have much simpler explanations: Why do you ride roller coasters? Because it's fun, it's a rush, I like that weird screaming/laughing thing people do on it. Why do you ride a motorcycle? I tried to convince myself it was because it was eco-friendly, but shit I just like the marriage of grace and screaming death you get from riding. Why do you drink? Because drunk. Simple.

But why write?

Writing is something for masochists. You basically go through 5 stages of writing a work and they follow thus:

1) Get an idea!

I have this great idea! I should write a (novel, poem, short story, etc).
You're super excited about your idea. You develop it in your mind, flesh it out, rack your brain on how to start it. Pretty soon it's boiling out your ears and all you want to do is commit it and rake in royalties for the next 10 years. You may piss off at work to scribble sentences in a notebook, you might spend lunchbreaks on a laptop, you may even carry notes in your cellphone.
Perfect title! Well, maybe a working title: "The Ur-Angeh"

2) You start to really write it

Yeah, now I'm getting in to the meat of it. The ideas are coming out on to the paper, it's all beautiful and pretty, and so easy!
You're etching meaning into something with permanence! Yes! Every sentence is another shining beacon of intellect and witty humor. You can smell the benjamins from here, move over 'Catch in the Rye', you're about to drop a bomb in the American subconscious.
That funny thing you did with the oranges was awesome, people are going to buy it just for that shit.

3) You start to really... actually... write it

Ugh, why is it taking so long to get this stuff out? I've been writing for 5 weeks straight! I've only got like, 40 pages! What the hell! This writing thing takes too long.
That boundless energy wears off. Now writing is just a second job you do at night once you're done cleaning off the barstools or teaching orphans how to read or murdering drifters to sell to the roach coach on Northern Boulevard.
I'll just half-ass some of those chapters. I can fill them in later. People will still be high on the oranges thing.

4) You finish it

I... I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! I've only got forty pages and twelve storylines to tie in, then off to the presses!
Ah, you're very close! Perhaps you're like me and you like to write the last chapter at the midpoint and see how well things tie in, maybe you just know how it ends and you just 'feel' it coming. Either way you're just about there. Not long now, then you can take a break from your indentured servitude.
Maybe if I bring back the orange thing right before the end, then that first orange thing was only foreshadowing the real orange thing. Yeah, that's good.

5) You start editing it

I get to read it in it's entirety! This is going to be great, I can finally see where all my hard work went and OH MY GOD THIS IS AWFUL. WHAT WAS I THINKING? I used "orange" nine times in two sentences! What is wrong with me?
Now you get to start from the beginning and read the whole thing through as if you weren't the putz that wrote it. That will be fun right? WRONG. You learned things while you were writing, probably read books and generated a style for the story. Now the beginning is wonky and you can tell the exact moment that phase one wore off because the writing takes a dramatic nosedive. Now for the pain of editing...
Fucking oranges man.

In short, I write because I hate myself on a very deep personal level and I prefer the hell I control to the one I'd experience huffing paint fumes in the alley behind the Walmart.

Or because it's great to create an entire world, a society, and to lay a glamor over someone else and bring them into it to experience a world created entirely from your imagination. But that sounds a little too trite.

I'll go with 'drunk' again.

Twilight and the "Reading Decline"

[Ed note: I have not nor do I plan to read the twilight series. It's not because I'm counter-culture or anything, I just don't care for romance novels. I have read one of Stephanie Meyer's other works and think that she has great potential as a writer of science fiction and I wish her the best of luck in the future]

I was putzing around reddit.com's r/writing subreddit (Instead of actually writing) and came across a very interesting series of comments about the Twilight story and its success. People are surprised and appalled by the success of the series because of a laundry list of complaints; the characters are one-dimensional, the conflict can be resolved simply within the setting, it sets a bad example for tweens, whatever.

No one pisses and moans when a war strategy book appeals to a wide audience (Ender's Game), or when wizard stories grab children's imaginations (Harry Potter), or when a group of children murders one-another in cold blood for 3 books (The Hunger Games). But god forbid if you grab some tween attention from a book with some plot holes.

Look, girls and woman are going to dream about their perfect romance. If they're channeling it through a sparkly vampire, whatever. Stephanie Meyer created a work in the public space that became popular, and pioneered it into a series of movies that did well at the box-office because the books were popular. That is a huge achievement. It may not be the best writing, the characters might not be incredibly deep or interesting, but she got people reading. How can anyone, as a reader, be mad about that?

According to the National Endowment of the Arts research paper Reading on the Rise (2009), American adult readers have grown almost 7% since 2002 with the 18-24 age bracket growing by 3.4 million readers. Mind you that the first Harry Potter came out in 1997, the next two books in 1999, next in 2000, then 2003, 2005, and the last in 2007.

This is the first time the NEA has seen growth in readership in 20 years. Previously we were looking at a loss of 20% of readers since 1982. Now it's only 10%, and hopefully it will improve from there with more 'blockbuster' young adult lit (whether or not people deign it to be acceptable). On a personal note, I'm excited to see the reading of fiction is responsible for nearly half of the increase.

Readers and non-readers in the US are now to polarized groups each at near 50% of the population. It's an interesting demographic change!

Also note that poetry is in steep decline. Sorry guys! :(

Literature (yes literature) like Twilight, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games are going to feed adult readers. It may not be in earth-shattering numbers but it will be. And as a writer and an advocate of literature, I just want people to be reading and consuming content.

If it starts at Twilight, maybe it will evolve to be Nietzsche some day. Maybe someone will find, from reading about sparkly vampires, something people identify with having more 'meat' like the book I am Legend. I think we need to stop attacking people for their taste and just be glad they're licking.

A writer can dream, can't he?

Yale Writer's Conference

For the weeks of June 12-22 I was off in New Haven Connecticut for a Writers Conference at Yale. It's been quite an experience and I met some thoroughly amazing people there.

The idea of a writing conference is to bring a large number of angsty writer types together, stick them in a room and have them do battle using their overripe and easily bruised egos. Hopefully you come out of it with a better handle on the craft, a glimpse in to how readers might view your work, and a few friends you can bounce ideas off of. There was also a master class scheduled for some point during the two week period and some panels involving editors, literary agents and publishing houses.

We were housed in Calhoun College for the summer session and given the normal amenities available to Yale students for the duration. When New Haven was bored of trying to drown us we were hit by a heat wave that brought us into the upper 90's. Realize that our dorms included a 10x20 room fit for a gerbil with double thick insulation. I kid (mostly), we were warned about the heat in the dorms well in advance and I should have bought a fan.

Now for the meaty part. I'll be candid, this was my first proper critique workshop.

Other workshops were less stringent and the writers less involved. In short, an amateur group. I feel that the 'no barrier to entry' thing, much like in the e-publishing scene, causes a drop in quality. In those workshops I was dealing with people bringing in their rough drafts more often then not, and it was painful to try to critique at that level. What do you tell someone who hands you their first attempt?

Our workshops held 12 writers each with a faculty member who oversaw the critiquing process and guided us through the discussions. My adviser was John Crowley who actually teaches creative writing at Yale and is a published sci-fi author (what I aspire to be).

Luckily at this conference, and specifically my group, everyone was great. They were reading and gave great critiques. My class had interesting stories and good ideas for how to improve one-anothers works. We worked well as a group and had great banter, even when we disagreed with one-another it was done respectively.

I'm actually jumping back and forth from my manuscript critique and this blog post, and the written comments are even more insightful then some of the discussion. I truly had a great group of people!

The other works that I was critiquing ranged from fantasy to fiction to creative nonfiction about family genealogies, and the size of the works ranged from packets of short stories to novel excerpts. Everyone brought something different to the table and the writing was superb.

It being the first writing conference at Yale, there were going to be some bugs which will need to be worked out and I actually spoke directly to the organizer who agreed with what I had to say (How often do you get to just chat up the organizer? He was so polite about us critiquing the conference!).

Most of my complaints were just that there was too much in one day. We would have our critiques for several hours, then a student reading followed by faculty readings. Of course all the readings were optional, but having them right up against each other made many people skip quite a few (I'm guilty as well).

The master classes were a big let down. Instead of being an actual class with an established author we ended up at a very personal book talk. This is partially because there wasn't a structured class format given to the authors and also because of the people who attended; our master class author had some exercises with him but people just kept asking questions about his book. This would have been better served at the reading he was doing in 2 hours rather than during our 'class'.

I ended up being too exhausted to do much writing but I did get plenty of reading done, which was something I'm severely lacking in my personal life. I was given lots of reading suggestions in my genre after my critique, and all of the books so far have been dead-on and I'll be reviewing them in the weeks ahead.

The panels about current trends in publishing, how to send in your manuscript, publishers houses, the Penn-Faulkner group, and literary agents were dead-on! I got a lot of great information about every step of the process. I wish there was even more of that and that it hadn't all been (mostly) the same day which made it hard to get through the editors panel.

The grounds of Yale itself are beautiful and have wonderful architecture. I enjoy a bit of photography so the chance to wake up in the college and run around collecting pictures of the grounds was a great experience for me. I've got a large album of pics to run through once I have the time.

I think the Yale Conference has a bit of maturing to do but I would definitely do it again if I had the money and time. The people I met there were amazing and the knowledge I gained about the craft will hopefully help me get my novella ready to publish.

After all, now I have competition.

Short Story: Escape

Escape

That’s why you ride.

To get out of your head. To get out of the grind. To save on gas. To be with friends. To dance with modern day predators. Cat and mouse. Bug and bird. Man versus metal.

Even though the season is ending, its a great day for a ride. The last ride - after this I’ll fill the gastank, coat the chain, and cover it for the winter months. But this is too nice a day to give in. I just need to get my work laptop, what’s the worst that could happen?

I crest the first hill of a small valley and do the usual assessment of the situation: The light is red but will be green by the time I get there, no cars leaving any of the stores, no one making the left turn of death from oncoming. The four-way intersection is empty.

The signal turns green and I see a sedan approaching from the right street. Their blinker is on to take the right in to my lane. But no one could be that much of a-

The sedan jumps out

I swerve into the left lane

Gun the throttle.

I’m beside them, alive. Then the front left turn signal comes on and they merge in to my lane.

I jam both breaks, swerve and lay on my horn, the bike vibrating like a jackhammer. I’m riding the yellow line and just as I’m about to ditch the bike he swerves away, I release the breaks and gun the throttle.

Escape

That’s why you ride.

Escape

That’s how you survive.

I flip him off and coast away to the waiting red light, shifting in to the right lane in case he decides to rear end me to complete the full gambit of dumb shit to do to a motorcyclist. My heart is beating in my ears, I’m sweating in my helmet, and my hands are shaking, but I’m fine. No worse for the wear.

It’s only another hundred feet to the first turn that leads to the highway and that’s where I forget the damage that was done to my good mood. The momentary doubts of whether I should ride anymore are gone, I’m leaning in to the turn, dodging the potholes and wringing my throttle to slalom the staggered vehicles.

It’s good to be riding one more time.

I make it to the highway as night proper sets in, the streetlights make halos on the asphalt. I watch my shadow get impossibly long then squish and squat then spin off me like the hand of a stopwatch in retrograde. You only get so many nights like this to ride on Long Island.

There’s barely any other cars around and I’m smirking behind my helmet, the cool air slips around me. Now that’s air-conditioning. There’s no apprehension when you’re alone on the highway, no fear of other people, there’s just you, your bike, and all the asphalt you can traverse. It’s beautiful.

I gun the throttle to 75 for a moment then ease back to 65. I was told somewhere it’s good to break in the engine with a few blips. I’ve still got less then 1000 miles on it, that needs to change next season.

I need an excuse next season.

Escape

I’m at my building before I know it and my laptops secured in a blink. I have the rest of the ride back to think about how much of a waste this is. I just wanted to be on the bike one more time.

And when I get on?

Escape