I Held the Two Quadruplets

  • by Kentnot going to have fingers covered in cheese juice
  • the human mind can imagine
  • dragged him beneath the water
  • hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating
  • take it easy baby

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I held the two quadruplets not being nursed, who complained at high decibels, which woke the twins strapped to the blue panda. They joined the caterwauling and made the din almost intolerable.

“Fleur,” I said, “we need to discuss a matter of national security.” She made a pinched face and shook her head. “There’s a plot of some kind,” I said louder, but she still couldn’t seem to hear me. “Various factions have, very suddenly, taken an interest in my ejaculate,” I shouted.

Harry bellowed, “I, for one, am not going to have fingers covered in cheese juice.” At that exact moment, Fleur passed the two quads she’d fed over to Isolde, and beckoned for me to hand her the others. Thus, the rotating restaurant had just fallen silent apart from his odd remark to Isolde. The human mind can imagine connections between any two random events, but something about the hostile gleam in Harry’s eye convinced me that his utterance had been somehow for my benefit.

A moment later, toad-like Harry hopped up from his seat and intercepted a waiter who was passing the large fountain in the center of the restaurant. Harry seized the startled server by his cummerbund and dragged him beneath the water.

Isolde shrieked, “Harry!”

I moved toward the fountain with the idea of rescuing the waiter, but Harry was already hauling him back up.

“Next time, don’t be so late with the cheese course!” Harry scolded his dripping victim. “I don’t care if it requires hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating to one another across the kitchen, you’ll do it!” Flecks of spittle adorned Harry’s drooping mustache.

“Harry,” Isolde cooed, “take it easy baby. We’re not in a hurry.”

“I like cheese,” Harry croaked. “I just really, really like cheese.”

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You Know How

  • by jenif you are mind-controlled
  • escaping from his own thoughts
  • that inescapable sappy love ballad
  • “You remind me of a boxer I used to know.”
  • We’re all adults here.

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You know how, if you are mind-controlled, your thoughts are fuzzy and you feel like a man who is overusing drink as a way of escaping from his own thoughts? That’s how I felt, watching the Crystal Clown and her comical steed Nigel disappear down the beach. My brain was in a fog, but I knew not whether it was hormonal in nature, or due to exhaustion, or if Titania had perhaps poisoned me with an infernal clown toxin. My brothers Jove and Jupiter were both married to clowns, but I had always avoided their ilk as bedmates. One hears so many tales of clown treachery, it seemed wisest to avoid joining any in a compromising position. And yet I had just spent the past hour joined in several of the most compromising of positions with the deadliest clown I’d ever heard of. I counted myself lucky to be alive.

My journey back to my senses was hastened by a quartet of crying infants, as my newborn sons awoke from their naps. I quickly donned my soggy morning suit, and scooped the children into my arms. I assumed they were hungry, but I had nothing to feed them. I settled for singing to them, hoping the lullaby would soothe them for a short while. But I couldn’t remember a single lullaby and had to resort to that inescapable sappy love ballad from Titanic. You know the one.

One of my sons, the chubby bruiser on the left, socked me in the nose with his tiny fist. I chuckled at his grit and said, “You remind me of a boxer I used to know.”

Shortly I made my way back to the zeppelin docking spire. I hoped Fleur was still there in the restaurant at the top, and yet I hoped she wasn’t. It would be incredibly awkward, and perhaps even dangerous, to introduce her to these infant sons of mine. I could only hope that she would take pity on them and feed them, as I was incapable of doing.

The elevator ride to the top of the spire was long, and when I emerged into the rotating restaurant, the babies were once again fussing. Fleur and Isolde and their retinue were easy to spot, as they were the only customers in the place. From the looks of the dishes on the table, they’d barely made it to the 5th course, which left plenty of courses to go.

The first person to spot me was Harry, Isolde’s husband. As attractive as I found Isolde, it was a relief to no longer need to act as her proxy husband. My life was complicated enough at the moment. Harry nudged his wife, who nudged her sister. Fleur looked up from her plate of escargot caramels and spotted me, sandy, damp, and bedecked with infants that were not hers. Her eyebrows arched. With a flick of her wrist she signaled the maître d’ to escort me to her table. Harry bristled and wrapped his arm around Isolde, who sat open-mouthed.

All I could think to say was, “We’re all adults here.”

“Well obviously not,” Fleur said. “Those are babies you’re holding, you idiot, and they look hungry. Hand them to me two at a time, and I shall feed them.” She started to unbutton her top. “And while I do that you can feed me my escargot and explain to me just where these children came from. The last I saw, you were leaving in the elevator with an extremely rotund man.” Her eyes grew wide. “Are these the prophesied Seahorse Children?”

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Format Wars

The Music Novel is not a slender tome. It’s a beast, frankly. A big, complex story richly told.

Part of that richness is expressed in the complexity of the formatting. It’s a thing that we did with footnotes, but they’re not really being treated like footnotes so we had to get tricky with it. We’ve found it works well to provide it as a PDF, because that way we can be sure that the reader will see each “footnote” where it’s supposed to be.

To a great extent, writing is independent of the visual stylistic choices of fonts and layouts. The words are the words, regardless, and they should mean the same even if the letters look a little different. But, design is also communication. The choice of font really does affect how readers respond to the text. Reading comfort is part of that, but also the mood of the font, even if it’s not an especially funky font. Juxtaposition is a powerful way to link ideas. For instance, a footnote needs to be on the right page (even if you’re being too clever for your own good about what a footnote is for). Presentation matters as much with a novel as it does with a meal. Hence, our preference for PDF, which gives us lots of control over such things.

Well.

Our agent asked if we could provide it in Word format instead. Like, right away.

Okay, couple things there. We don’t use Word. We work mainly in Scrivener, but one of the very few things that application won’t let us do is set up footnotes on arbitrary pages. So for the Music Novel’s clever formatting stuff we used Pages, which is essentially Apple’s version of Word, and then exported to PDF.

Pages also allows us to export to Word format, so that was at least a start, but then the output had to be tweaked. Fancy fonts that embed just fine in a PDF and look the same everywhere were a big nope, so we had to change them to standard fonts. Page breaks didn’t fall at the same places, so things had to be checked and adjusted in (no shit) about 500 places.

So, it made for a late night with no actual writing progress to show for it. But the request wouldn’t have been made if there wasn’t a reason, so it was something we were happy to provide.

The ironic part of all of this is, messing with the formatting was supposed to be one of the problems that we could offload to the fine professionals at our publisher when we got one, but this sojourn into tweaking and fiddling about with such minutiae came up as part of our quest to get a publisher. At least we have each other, so we didn’t need to do it alone.

Titania Seemed, For the Moment at Least

  • by Kent“Go, Nigel, go!”
  • kiss it with a sister’s kiss
  • whose reputation, I am sorry to say, was none of the best
  • the house smells like dodgeballs
  • include tortoises, elephants, fish, crickets, beetles, chickens and

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Titania seemed, for the moment at least, non-murderous and in the mood for chit-chat. Of course, if her mood shifted I would be a dead man. I decided to push my luck, just a little.

“Now that you’ve got it, can you tell me what it is? I’d love to understand what the fuss is all about.”

She wagged her finger at me. “That’s a trade secret. But, I guess there’s no harm in sharing a few interesting details. The special substance in your semen is not useful on its own, but must be combined with exotic biochemical agents sourced from other animals that include tortoises, elephants, fish, crickets, beetles, chickens and cobras. I can always tell when Tesla and Tallulah have been tinkering with the recipe, because the house smells like dodgeballs.”

Did she mean the house on Gratin Avenue? The one where Tessa grew up, on the forest-shrouded lot whose reputation, I am sorry to say, was none of the best?

Nah, it was probably some other house.

Titania rolled onto all fours, dropping me a wink over her shoulder as she crawled up the beach a few yards. She plunged her hand deep into the dry sand there and hauled out a black and white backpack. She stood up and put it on, still naked otherwise. “Well,” she said, “this has really been fun, but it’s time for me to get back to the place on Gratin Avenue to complete the formula!” She turned her head to kiss the shoulder strap. To kiss it with a sister’s kiss, which triggered the nanotech fabric of her backpack. It flowed over her skin to form a sort of leotard, and last of all a hard, faceted mask came up over the top of her head and settled over her face.

She took a small red sphere out of a hidden pocket, and stuck it on her nose. She gave it a pinch, releasing a shrill beep.

A strange creature galloped from behind a nearby dune. It took me a second to identify it as two people in a horse costume. The Crystal Clown leapt upon them, crying, “Go, Nigel, go!” and they sped off in a cloud of sand.

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“I Thought You Would Have Guessed By Now”

  • by jenstuffed with bears
  • a confusion of alternating nightmare and oblivion
  • some crazy hallucinations
  • but a pretext for murders, raids, and pillage
  • on her head

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“I thought you would have guessed by now,” my most recent paramour said with a lazy smile. “I’m Titania.”

My blood ran cold and my heart felt as if it were stuffed with bears scrambling to escape. Titania! The name brought a confusion of alternating nightmare and oblivion, like the worst acid trips of my youth. You yourself may have endured some crazy hallucinations, but I assure you they were nothing compared to what I was currently enduring.

Titania was the sister they never spoke of, the one who scandalized her family and the entire Academy by turning her back on her heritage and embracing the circus life. She’d given up her true name and was known now as the Crystal Clown, and all of her merry antics were but a pretext for murders, raids, and pillage. There was a substantial price on her head, and here she was, lolling naked beside me on the beach. Her proximity to my children filled me with terror.

The Crystal Clown’s smile grew less lazy. “Don’t get so worked up. I got what I came for.”

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And They’re Off!

Composition has commenced! Sibling of Music Novel is under way! We hit the ground, if not exactly running, then at a leisurely jog. We’re 3,000 words in, and are really pleased with which 3,000 words we’ve chosen, and the order in which we’ve put them. We say “we,” but so far Kent has done all of the writing of the actual novel proper. Jen’s been writing stubs (which we’ve talked about at length before). She’s got the first 16 scenes specced out beautifully for whichever half of Rune Skelley picks them up, and four more after that roughed in.

It’s just about time for her to put that project aside and join Kent in the prose mines, at which point our daily word count output should double. Sometimes it’s difficult to decide how many stubs in waiting is enough. Right now Jen has her eye on a particular event in the outline, and she’d like to get the stubs finished up to that plot point. It should only be another 5 scenes or so. The problem being that her target keeps shifting. Originally she was only going to do a dozen stubs to get us started, and now we’re looking at at least twice that. It’s not hard to imagine her making excuses to keep going and going. Which wouldn’t be the end of the world, since it’s work she’ll have to do eventually anyway. But it’s not unheard of for things to shift as we write the actual scenes, and if things shift too much then the stubs from the far future have to be scrapped or completely rewritten.

All that to say that Jen has, at most, two more work sessions of stub writing before she has to put on her mining helmet and join Kent in the pit.

Planting Kisses

  • by Kenthold your *own* hand for a change
  • I’ll let you see it if you want to
  • with a long-lost sister
  • “What poem?”
  • applying his left thumb

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Planting kisses all over the woman’s body seemed a good pretext for getting a look at her ass, where Tessa sported a cybernetic unicorn tattoo. But, my carnal companion twisted and shimmied and always kept me from obtaining more than a tiny glimpse of her ink. There was something there…

“Say, why not hold your *own* hand for a change?” she scolded playfully, guiding my grip toward something that was definitely not my hand. “You’re after my butt, aren’t you?” she said with a giggle. “I’ll let you see it if you want to.”

“Of course I want to,” I purred.

“It’s just, you’re going to be surprised when I show you, and I don’t want that to ruin the moment.” And without further ado, she flipped over. The tattoo was a bio-mechanical unicorn spewing rainbows, but it was facing the wrong direction. “Don’t stop now,” this temptress said. So I didn’t. There must be a special term for a man who so eagerly gratifies himself with a long-lost sister of the woman he claims to love, and I’m sure it’s unflattering. At that moment, I didn’t care one bit.

“Recite the poem!” she cried.

“What poem?” I grunted.

“Make something up!” Her voice was a peal of ecstasy. “It should be something about the man applying his left thumb to… Yes, to that.”

Laying with the babies in the shade of the umbrella afterwards, I asked her, “Aren’t you going to tell me your name?”

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A List of Tessa’s Sisters

  • by jenknows less than nothing about Norway
  • Oh, it’s too confusing
  • hovered overhead
  • my mouth is poison
  • on the rest of her body

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A list of Tessa’s sisters sprang into my mind, complete with little facts about each that might help me identify which of them I was currently engaged in intercourse with. Was it Tara, who hates cheese? Tanya, who can’t spell worth a damn? Perhaps Taylor, who sings like a banshee, or Tallulah, who knows less than nothing about Norway? Or was this in fact Tesla, the sister who was less-than-adept at oil painting?

“Oh, it’s too confusing!” I cried.

“It’s anything but confusing,” my partner assured, and she showed me what she meant while Inimical hummingbirds hovered overhead. And she was right, it was all quite simple when you left the mental aspects out and concentrated on the physical. I gave up caring, and tried to kiss her, but she pulled away.

“My mouth is poison,” she murmured. “One taste would kill you.”

I ignored her mouth and planted kisses on the rest of her body, whichever sister she was.

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David Byrne on Collaboration

Kent is reading How Music Works by David Byrne, as everyone he knows is already aware because he keeps recommending it. (It’s really good.)

One of the themes expressed throughout the book is collaboration. Now, Byrne is talking about music and lyrics rather than fiction, but it’s remarkable how little that seems to matter. Working creatively as part of a team is subject to some universal rules, it seems.

Of course, a lot of this collaboration theme comes out when he’s telling about how Talking Heads’ music came into existence. Working with bandmates is the fundamental form of musical collaboration. But it comes up again and again in other, less expected ways too.

An especially interesting passage connected to this theme describes the process of creating the songs for the theatrical production Here Lies Love. There were multiple layers of collaborative activity. First of all, the lyrics were inpired by, and when possible directly quoted from, things that Imelda Marcos actually said, making her a contibutor to the process years after the fact. The subject matter and story line were established before any music was even contemplated, providing a set of constraints the he had to operate within. Launching a show takes a long time, and well after the music was “complete” Byrne got notes from the producers of the play, not wanting to change words or tunes around, but a desire for specific character motivations and plot points to be added to the songs. They told him what their story needed, and trusted him to figure out how to make it happen.

This really resonated with Kent, because it felt a lot like how he and Jen find their way through a manuscript. The pre-writing tells us what we need, and then composing the actual scenes is when we make it happen. In our case we both wear both the writer hat and the editor/producer hat, but the analogy is still very strong.

Whatever kind of art you create, teaming up with a partner can make the process more productive and rewarding.

I Know That For a Lot of Couples

  • by Kenthave some tea, some popcorn, some kale
  • “There are balloons.”
  • worried about the poachers
  • I met a man with seven wives
  • also the smartest and the strongest

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I know that for a lot of couples there’s a great deal of ceremony around intercourse, and they can’t proceed unless they have some tea, some popcorn, some kale, and a bushel of lemons. But Tessa and I are not so formal. Peeking around the top hat, she said, “There are balloons.”

“You should be chasing Olga right now,” I said, while I made that impossible. But Tessa clearly wasn’t worried about the poachers among the White Faces or what they might do with the sample. She assured me I didn’t have have to worry, either, while she made worrying impossible.

Working undercover my first year out of the Academy, I met a man with seven wives, all ex. He told me the trouble with his all marriages was because of woman number eight, the one he never married. There in the sun on the sand at the scene of my recent victory in combat, I was becoming ever more sure that Tessa was my woman number eight.

“… and also the smartest and the strongest,” she was saying.

Flattery. Huh. That proved this wasn’t Tessa. But which sister was it?

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