Author: Frances K R

I’m telling you stories.

By then serials were dying anyway, and of what use was a green suit with a long cape and wings on the sides of its cowl? In the real world, there was no room for Green Falcons.

Got to work this morning and I couldn’t get “Night Calls the Green Falcon” out of my head. It’s from Robert R. McCammon’s Blue World collection, or at least that’s where I first read it.

A shriek like the demons of hell singing Beastie Boys tunes came from the speakers.

So I went looking, and bless the man, he has the whole thing up on his website. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised; it’s written as a serial, it really suits being posted online.

“No, I haven’t seen him for a while, but I know what his name was.” He grinned, gapped-tooth. “John Smith. That’s what all their names were.” He glanced at the Green Falcon. “Can you breath inside that thing?”

It’s about a man who used to play a hero in the old movie serials–you know the kind, right? Ten chapters to a story, dramatic cliffhangers, come back next week for the next thrilling episode in this dynamic mystery, “The Star and Question Mark”!

“Hey, amigo,” the man said, and flame shot from the barrel of the small pistol he’d just drawn.

I mean… okay, it is not entirely surprising that I am a sap for stories about people trying to live up to the stories; ones about the power of stories to change the world. Galaxy Quest. Shakespeare in Love–not the romantic plot or subplot or whatever it was, but the sheer weight of the theatre, the “I don’t know. It’s a mystery.” Hogfather, and the difference between the sun coming up and a giant ball of flaming gas illuminating the world.

He kept going to the stairs, burdened with age.

“‘Dear Davy,’” the voice rang out. “‘I am sorry I can’t come to Center City this summer, but I’m working on a new mystery…’”

The Green Falcon stopped.

I’m not saying it’s great art. It’s a four-colour story, bright and simple and clear. It has a grim and bloody moment or two, but then of course it does; they always did.

Who was he? somebody asked. The Green Falcon? Did he used to be somebody? Yeah, a long time ago. I think I saw him on a rerun. He lives in Beverly Hills now, went into real estate and made about ten million bucks, but he still plays the Green Falcon on the side.

Oh, yeah, somebody else said. I heard that too.

I heard that too.

Life lessons

Yesterday, I fell asleep in the late afternoon, and woke up around ten p.m.  I was feeling a bit muzzy, and it seemed too late to cook, so dinner happened by virtue of the fact that a 24-hour restaurant (at least over the weekend) has recently opened up.  So after getting out of the house (which can take a while, when there is no great hurrying deadline) and having dinner, I got home around one a.m., meandered slowly in the general direction of bed, and fell asleep two hours later.

I woke up around ten this morning, and I was feeling fine.  Got up and helped make chowder for the crockpot, made coffee, and sat down in the living room.  There was a little TV, a lot of poking at the computer that didn’t really accomplish much, and a sort of quietly increasing anxiety.  I managed to make dinner anyway, and was just sitting down to it when I looked at my plate and a sudden realization struck me.

This was breakfast.

Food and a lot of water helped the stress and tension, some.  I’m currently tidying up the kitchen (alright, I am taking a break from tidying up the kitchen because everything is handled except waiting for the dishwasher to finish at which point I can cycle the next load through), and being mildly annoyed at myself.  A whole day, drat it.

Things I have learnt: Don’t do this.

Matter of time.

I can’t find my copy of The Feminine Mystique.  This has been on my mind–not overwhelmingly so, but definitely noticeable–every day this week.

See, there’s this one part that mentions a study on the time spent housekeeping; what I remember, loosely, is that when the work was given to another household member, it got finished in half the time.  Sometimes less.  And combined with how quickly I was getting through physical filing when I had to concentrate on it (due to the lack of a computer), and how quickly work seemed to go when I started the job…

I want to reread it.  Right now I have the impression that (1) the household chores are feeling alot more overwhelming than they actually are, and (2) maybe I can get over this if I can change it up somehow.  Maybe the time it’s taking isn’t really the time it takes.

(Maybe I just want to read about someone cleaning an entire house and making lunch and doing groceries and still being done by mid-afternoon.)

Long weekend coming up.  I’ve gotten a lot of work done, and some of it’s stuff that isn’t even necessary, it’s in the “I said I would” category.  But it sems there’s been very little time for what I want to do, or that when I’ve done it I haven’t gotten any lasting enjoyment out of it.

Know this kind of thing comes and goes.  Just really don’t care to sit back and wait for it to go if there’s something I can change to make it go, preferably sooner rather than later.

Helps a little to articulate this, at least.

What a month

I had plans for last weekend.  Unfortunately, I also had stomach flu, and that sort of trumped the plans.  And work was as busy as short work weeks tend to be, so I didn’t actually get here until now.

In any case!  I got nominated by What’s it all about and other stories for the Tell Me About Yourself Award. It was kind of startling, but in the good way–like having the cat appear from nowhere to jump onto your lap and start purring, actually, which is totally not an example drawn from recent personal experience.

So… wow, okay. Five Things About Me:

  1. I knit. Most of the time this is very satisfying, kind of a cross between assembling a puzzle and getting a room cleaned.  But occaisionally I get anxious over the fact that what I do with it isn’t creative, and it ties up my hands so that time spent knitting is time taken away from typing.  (I also knit stuff with no idea of who it should go to, and probably need to start clearing out a few things.)
  2. I find it easy to get involved in stories, to think about what they mean in an idealized way.  I read a horror novel and I see how it reflects King’s ideas of Appolonian and Dionysian struggle; I get into a gaming setting and start gushing when I try to describe it, the idea that among the crooked or the corrupt or the afraid, you may look into the darkness and pick up your weapon and stand your ground.  I can get sappy over TV Tropes; I know that so much of what’s there is pulp, but (as they say) tropes reflect life, and they are about celebrating fiction, not mocking it.
  3. I spent the first four years of my life that I remember in London, England–age three to age seven.  I got the chance to go back three years ago and it was lovely; I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt so comfortable in a place.
  4. I have depression.  It’s currently being managed, but I’m still dealing with a chronic condition, I’m not better.  I try not to hide it, because I don’t want to feel shamed into pretending I’m well in order to live my life.  I’m near-sighted, I’m physically weak, and I have a neurochemical imbalance–describing it as diabetes of the brain seems to help some people get it, and to not sneer at my meds.
    It’s hell.  There is no-one in the world I can imagine ever, ever wishing it on.
  5. I love the TV show The Wire; I honestly think it’s the best one I’ve ever seen.  It’s an exception to point 2: the world is so low-key and plausible and compelling and honest that it comes in feeling almost more like a documentary than a story, a roman a clef, and the story’s so vital that there’s no inclination to wander into the abstract.  It’s brilliant and harsh and honest and sad and funny, and the kind of thing I buy on DVD specifically so I can loan it to people.

EDIT: This post was originally titled “What a week”.  I’m still not finished.  Posting as it stands, for the moment, and will update with a list of people.  Apologies for the delay.

Matters of sense

I shall not argue on the Internet when sick and annoyed. First, I might get mean. Second, I might misunderstand. Third, I will probably not be thinking clearly and may make logical arguments which I am later embarrassed to have attributed to me.

…it helps, sometimes, to remind myself of this.

Haven’t been posting lately. Need to fix this.

This just in…

…and by “this”, I mean “me”.  Just got in from the late showing of The Avengers.  We were going to the earlier one, but it was sold out, so we all went for dinner and hung out for a bit.  And now are home.

Some quick notes, not spoilery:
(1) Much love for Banner.  More the more I think about it, actually.  I… really bought him.  Been there, know that guy.
(2) Heee, the lines.
(3) Liked Loki and Thor much better than in the Thor movie.

But yes.  And aside from that, something happened on the way to the movie:

I ran into a friend.

This hasn’t happened in… years?

I mean, I see people, sure.  But I don’t meet them by chance–and no, I don’t count meeting a knitting friend that I know from knitting at the knitting store where we both go a fair bit as meeting by chance.  Meeting the knitting friend that I know from knitting because she is headed one way after dinner and I am headed the other for a movie and our paths happened to cross?  That is meeting by chance.

Nice feeling.  Makes this place seem a bit less lonely.

Right.  Sleep is in order, now.

Settling through

I had a couple of ill-advised over-enthusiastic book purchases this year, and my number of owned-but-utterly-unread books is edging uncomfortably close to triple-digits.  (In fact, I think it might be over triple digits, but I am not checking at the moment; the list of eighty-six is quite unnerving enough without entering the books from one particular bookcase.)

(The list was actually at eighty-nine as of April 30.)

In light of this, I’m making a serious effort to read what I own.  I liked them enough to buy them, and as flip as I may occasionally be about this, that’s not a casual thing.  And an untouched book strikes me as a horribly sad thing.

I just finished Terry Lamsley’s Conference with the Dead yesterday. I discovered I’d read a couple of them before–this isn’t atypical, I’ve read horror anthologies and magazines for a couple of decades, and it’s actually getting a bit hard for me to find an anthology or collection that doesn’t have something I’ve read before. Still, it was long enough ago that I decided it was worth a reread.

His writing seems quite plain–not in a bad way, but plain in the way M.R. James is quiet. The later stories in the book are slightly weirder; there’s the same calm explanation as always, it’s just relating how reality is doing a quiet little fever-dream melt and slip. They never quite end up portraying the misunderstandings of a character as reality, though–it’s something I associate very much with Ramsey Campbell, and with him writing the introduction, I was a bit anxious about the possibility.

Overall, a very good read.

(Please understand; I like Campbell’s writing, but I’d settled into the quiet ghost story mood of he collection, and I don’t think the style would have fit.)