Tristan Palmgren

Posts after long, unexplained absences are always the awkwardest.

Hi.

Um.

I am still alive and getting writing done. I've just been buried under graduate school.

Progress report posts are boring as hell, so no more of those. The general rule about writing anything remotely public is to be entertaining (except in academia), which is something that, over the summer, I hadn't been doing my best at. I started tuning myself out. Somehow I defied stereotype and got too full of myself before I started grad school, not after. I'm a clown; I should dance. And I don't mean that in a demeaning way, either. If my chief goal in life is to be a public entertainer, I should be doing much more interesting things with my words. Or at least provocative.

So I need to figure out what I'm going to do with an online journal. Or if I even need it. I don't know yet. It's nice to have sometimes, but if I'm ever entertaining or provocative I usually like to put that into my stories instead. And if the past few months have been any guide, I can go long stretches without feeling like I need to post.

Does the Internet really need one more blathering keyboardist? Can I be anything more than that? Stay tuned.

I'm with the NYT. We need a labor week.

6 freshmen sample essays critiqued, check
5 workshop stories read and critiqued, check
4 techniques exercises read, check
1 lawn mowed, check

If grading freshmen essays takes as many hours as these ones, I'm going to be in for a fun time when my kids hand in their first rough drafts this Friday.

Today's Words: 1,078
On: "Anomie"
Total Words: 75,940

What's the key word in the title? I'm out.

Today's Words: 1,186
On: "Mystery in the Year 2000"
Total Words: 1,837
Today's Action: Traveling to the Queen's Seat of Power on the Potomac.
Chosen Sentence(s): "All of the great inventions credited to her husband – the Transatlantic Cannon, the Invincible Bathysphere, the Tesla Rifle, even trifles like the Newtonian Chain Hammer – were hers. Other creations followed in the years subsequent to our meeting, including the steam-powered aeroplane: a ghastly metal insect that looked like it was more out of the pages of H.G. Wells than Jules Verne, and had a great deal of military potential."

Today's Words: 651
On: "Mystery in the Year 2000"
Total Words: 651
Today's Action: Some guy died. People are mildly upset.
Chosen Sentence(s): "Jonathon Heiden was one of the most mesmerizing individuals I've ever encountered, but not because he was a complex man."

Today's Words: 725
On: "Anomie"
Total Words: 74,862
Today's Action: Now that he's idle, Nalor's feeling himself slip into a depressive episode.
Chosen Sentence(s): "He was a fugitive, a killer; a stupid child who hadn't just murdered people with his own hands, but who'd had other people die to protect him from his mistakes."

Very tired.
Long hours tomorrow.

Only one hour of class today*, and I'm already feeling overwhelmed.

I have eleven hours of them tomorrow.

Today's Words: 1,014
On: "Anomie"
Total Words: 74,137
Today's Action: Summarizing a few weeks of farming chores.
Chosen Sentence(s): "Her life's experiences [stolen memories] integrated into the static background fuzz of knowledge."

*It's the work outside of class that's killing me.

Today's Words: 1,073
On: "Anomie"
Total Words: 73,123
Today's Action: Nalor's settling into the farmhouse he'll be spending the next few weeks healing in.
Surprises: Just fitting together some pieces of the regional economy.
Chosen Sentence(s): "Now it had a distinctly sugary, fruity odor. No-- frooty. Almost exactly like Froot Loops, or the generic equivalent Ma had always bought him."
Actual Work Work: Reading essays and workshop stories.

Today's Words: 1,259
On: "Anomie"
Total Words: 72,050
Disclaimer: Total word count doesn't add up with last time's because I scratched a scene.
Today's Action: The family protecting Nalor made their escape from a burning town.
Surprises: The tense is suddenly very retrospective, in part to help me justify skimming over the next few weeks of Nalor's life.
Chosen Sentence(s): "With juice that smelled it had come out of a fish flowing down the stubble on his chin, Nalor leaned back and realized he could see the man on the moon."
Actual Work Work: Teaching and juggling classroom schedules.

Some actual work done amidst the hailstorm!

Today's Words: 1,111
On: "Emergent Phenomenon"
Total Words: 1,111
Today's Action: The universe was created. Draft finished.
Surprises: The story was told entirely through dialogue, and the characters of the two speakers gradually swapped as the conversation went along. It worked out, though.
Chosen Sentence(s): "It's full of hodgepodge quantum and relativistic contradictions, for Christ's sake."
Actual Work Work: Writing an essay assignment sheet, as well as getting caught up on reading, and drafting another syllabus.

Why, you'd almost forget there was a person underneath these big stacks of paper.

Oof.

Today's Words: 1,086
On: "Anomie"
Total Words: 71,393
Today's Action: The town Nalor took refuge in is under attack, and now he's feeling suicidally guilty about the danger he put these people in.
Hair-Pulling Moment Du Jour: "Host" and "Roast" rhyme and so shouldn't be put together in a sentence, but I couldn't think of anything to replace either word with.
Words Word Didn't Know: Manipulable
Chosen Sentence(s): "After three shots snapped off in a rapid burst, the air outside the house was suddenly full of them, like the town had decided to hold a popcorn roast."
Good Vibes: This is close to the end of a long, tense chase sequence.
Bad Vibes: I'm clumsy around words today.

Today's Words: 871
On: "Autocide"
Total Words: 2,415
Today's Action: Infodump overload.
Chosen Sentence(s): "Cy didn't even want to think about the kind of evolutionary circumstances that led to that."
Bad Vibes: Damn, this is taking a while to establish.

Today's Words: 951
On: "Anomie" and "Autocide"
Total Words: Anomie: 70,307 Autocide: 1,544
Today's Action: Skipped ahead several scenes in "Anomie", and did a little touch-up in "Autocide". In the unlikely event that anyone's keeping track of the word counts, the one for "Anomie" today doesn't add up because I hacked off a scene segment.
Surprises: I jumped ahead a little in "Anomie" to write a little fragment of dialogue. I didn't expect that to suddenly become a scene.
Chosen Sentence(s): "You're not afraid of their sexuality. You're afraid of human sexuality. Theirs isn't all that different from yours. If you're going to whine about different expressions of the same substance, then you'll never cope with the larger things out there."
Distraction Du Jour: Today was the last day of GradSTEP. Three days until the semester officially begins.

Today's Words: 701
On: "Autocide"
Total Words: 1,423
Today's Action: Went back and added more to Nephew's section, and then back to Nephew trying (and mostly failing) to speak with Cy about his product recall.
Chosen Sentence(s): "You/we cannot recall sperm, Cy Arit Kinash."
Good Vibes: Liking the individual scenes so far.
Bad Vibes: The more I think about the broader plot I have planned, though, the more hackneyed it becomes. I need something else.
Distraction Du Jour: Today was the last day of the graduate school's general programs. But I still have GSW training left to get through.

I don't even want to talk about it.

Today's Words: 722
On: "Autocide"
Total Words: 722
Today's Action: Early establishment of facts and crisis. Cy is about to issue a product recall on the weapons he's been selling to the Bancalo.
Surprises: A lot, mainly about the Bancalo and how they live. It's been a long time since I've tried to get into the head (or midsection cavity) of a non-human intelligent species, AIs notwithstanding.
Chosen Sentence(s): "Missionary position unacceptable question mark?"
Continuity: This is the same Cy that appears in "Anomie". This story takes place a few years beforehand.
Distraction Du Jour: More GradSTEP. I'm starting to worry again -- I'm not sure I'll be able to maintain an appropriate classroom persona. The real me just doesn't lecture, walk around the room, appear very eager about a textbook he doesn't like, or project his voice. I've been advised to let another person take me over for the duration of the class period. I'm not sure I'd like to meet the kind of Tristan that acts like that.

Only 366 words today. Most of my time went into GradSTEP training, and most of my thought went into plotting out a short story. The reason for this is the momentary panic that caught up with me when I realized that, yes, I will be expected to have a new short story for grad workshop very quickly -- and, yes, either the stories I have are either too long for workshop, or at least one other person in the workshop has already seen them.

Today could've started off better. Just recently, I found out that, in order to get paid for my assistantship, I'll need two documents that I left back home -- and the warning that I would need these documents was sent out Wednesday afternoon. I'd left home Wednesday morning. Today, we figured out this will mean a delay in getting my first paycheck. Meantime, I have a precariously tiny bank account to sit on.

Today's Words: 1,227
On: "Anomie"
Total Words: 69,157
Today's Action: Nalor's been drugged by the family who dragged him in from the cold, wet swamp. An extradimensional merchant is tinkering with Nalor's mind and checking him out to make sure the new arrival doesn't pose a threat to his exporting business.
Surprises: Some weird sexual play between Nalor, the mother of the family, and her son. This was always going to be here; it just happened sooner. Cy, the merchant, also showed up earlier than he was supposed to.
Chosen Sentence(s): "Nalor had been split into two minds. This him was here, in this senseless void with the black man who had stolen Felix's voice. Over a long, impossibly narrow bridge, a rainbow of sensation shone at him. His real body, in the brick house. He was more aware of the chasm between him and it than anything coherent on the other side."
Distraction Du Jour: Forms, forms, forms. I'd created a decent rough draft of course requirements yesterday, but somehow it got lost in the great electronic ether. I had to rewrite it, as well as a rough syllabus (one detailed syllabus for me, one abridged copy for my students). Also, I had to tell the Ohio Department of Public Safety that I wasn't a terrorist. Because, y'know, if I were, the Ohio Department of Public Safety would totally be the first on my list of organizations to inform.

Today's Words: 1,084
On: "Anomie"
Total Words: 67,930
Today's Action: Nalor stumbled into the right clearing, and found the town whose inhabitants he is currently being sheltered by.
Surprises: I introduced a few new minor characters here, and though I knew who they were, I hadn't known what they'd look like. Their appearances surprised me.
Chosen Sentence(s): "Her body was covered in matronly fat, but Nalor couldn't avoid detecting the thick bundles of muscle underneath. She gripped his shoulder with iron-strong fingers."