The Enchanter's Theorem

I have nothing to say.

Hmm.

Well, there’s a lie of the first water, ain’t it? And I use ain’t intentionally, because after today and the Ancient Grammar Nazi, I think I’ll mutilate the English language to my heart’s content. Consider it homage to my rebellious youth. Yeah. Rebel, rebel. That’s me.

Not.

That’s really the crux of it all, ain’t it?

I’m no rebel.

* * *

It’s simple, really. I have this job. It’s part time. It doesn’t pay well and it’s working for the Ancient Grammar Nazi. She’s a nice enough old lady when she wants to be, but the rest of the time she makes me want to pound my head into my console. She’s 63. Doesn’t look a day over 40, considering all the work she’s had done and the work her nanites continue to do. She’ll be a perpetual 40 till the day she dies. She probably could have retired three years ago. But…

Y’know. I don’t think she has a life outside of the office. Outside of the daily feeds and the daily stock trading between us and the Asteroid Belt. Heavy metals and hydrocarbons. Euros, Yen and Dollars. It’s all she has.

Oh, and me.

* * *

Y’know how you’re going along one day and you hit something, some event that makes you drop your drink? Makes you look up from whatever your humdrum existence is (and believe me, my life is effin’ humdrum) and go, Christ on a cracker, I gotta make a change?

That was Tuesday.

Mary (the Ancient Grammar Nazi) has this client out in the Greater Dark. Personal asteroid colony, high effin’ net worth, whole family’s on that rock, making bank, hand over fist, in hydrocarbon and platinum mining. Regular modern-day robber baron. Protected from security exchange investigation, because it takes a few weeks to get auditors out there and back and in the time it takes to transit? Well, it’s gone by then, covered up all the way. There’s only so much you can track over the Solar Net. With the kind of high paid jockeys this guy has, well, you’d have to have more money than he has to crack their ice.

Well, you get the idea. You can hide a lot of crap with that kind of lead time.

It’s not like I didn’t know this guy’s dirty laundry inside and out. Anti-money laundering rules aside, the things that Mary and I have done for this bozo over the years has probably made and ended more personal fortunes than I like to think on.

I won’t say I slept well at night.

I don’t.

But there’s a line apparently even I won’t cross.

Like I said, that was Tuesday.

Apparently I have problems with the idea of someone deciding they want to ruin a small country for fun. Okay, the Consolidated States aren’t exactly small anymore. But it’s my home, bankrupt as it is. I’ve never known any other. Never traveled. It’s got problems. Who doesn’t? Our Dollar is crap.

I don’t know what bee got in the bozo’s bonnet. I just know that he ordered us to dump every Dollar we had in his portfolio and at a loss, Tuesday morning.

One client. No big, right?

Yeah.

This one client was going to crash the effin’ market.

* * *

I sat staring at the order on my console, jacked into the Solar Net like I am every morning, the day’s ticker scrolling under my eyes on my internal feed. I don’t even have a cube. Just the desk, across the room from Mary’s. Hers is always buried in chips and memory sticks, no matter how often I clean, file or organize. She’s entropy in action and on an accelerated time scale.

I looked over at her. She sat slouched in front of her own console, jacked in like me, eyes half-glazed over, looking at her own internal feed.

I turned my attention back on the blinking order.

Looked back over at Mary.

She didn’t move.

* * *

I could have just deleted the order. Pretended I never saw it. But that’s just it. He would have just resent it. Double coded it to Mary’s eyes and that, as they say, would have been that for the house that Jack built.

I didn’t delete the order.

With a flick of my eyelid, I pulled up the break out for International Markets, sub sector, Developing World. Markets in East Asia and Africa started scrolling across my console, with comparative data analysis scrolling now on top of the ticker in my internal field of vision.

There.

Myanmar.

Another storm had wiped out more coast. Market starving for Dollars. Could only afford to pay what the guy wanted and no more. Cheap Dollars needed for expensive aid.

Another eye blink.

I dumped the Dollars in Myanmar.

And then did the one thing I swore I would never do when I finally achieved my Series 7 certification.

I falsified the order and indicated it had been dumped in the Consolidated States. Back tracked, dumped my IDs into a pirate hedge fund I’d been following on my own time and data corrupted the rest.

It wasn’t perfect. It wouldn’t stand up to long term scrutiny. But it would do the job. By the time the trade was checked and uncovered, it’d be too late.

Myanmar had its boost.

And my home wasn’t swimming through another bankruptcy like it did through the Oughts.

* * *

Mary nearly fired me when it came out two weeks later. Apparently, the influx of cash enabled Myanmar to buy vaccine and aid to quash an epidemic. The economy rebounded and tourism rebounded, yes, even in that short time. Things move fast nowadays.

And the guy?

Well, he couldn’t take the order back, now could he? Dollars dumped. He made a profit. Straight conversion to Euros. Smart investment for his portfolio.

But he found out what I had done.

Mary found out what I had done.

And now you’ve found out what I’ve done. And I’m not out in the Outer Dark, so what, it only took you an hour to get here to my dear Angeleno home? My little apartment in the ghetto? Hope you didn’t leave the flitter parked on the street. The neighbors’ll have it stripped for the ‘tronics in half a beat.

No?

Good.

So. Yeah. Rebel, rebel. That’s me. Couldn’t take it anymore. Day in, day out. Amounts of money that I don’t think even you can comprehend, trading hands for what? It’s the kind of money that isn’t even worth counting anymore. It’s just big numbers. Meaningless.

Why’d I do it?

It’s been twenty years, don’tcha know. The Ancient Grammar Nazi would have a cow for that sentence. Twenty years of pushing money into markets that don’t need ‘em. Taking money out of markets that do need ‘em. All because of what?

Because some jerk in the Outer Dark got pissed? Someone said he wasn’t big enough endowed in the right areas? Some politician didn’t kiss his butt? What?

Who cares.

Some egomaniac decided to go nutso on the exchange. Decided he was going to eff with my home because he could. Not because of anything we’d done. Just because. Because when the money’s that big, the numbers that meaningless? You start looking for different thrills.

And that’s what that jerk was looking for. Just a damn thrill.

That’s why Mary didn’t fire me.

She just looked at me with her old, sad eyes in her young face, one eyelid twitching as she executed trades off of her own internal feed, a feed I had no access to. For all I knew, she’d undone my little act of rebellion.

Except that I know she didn’t.

My own feed, my own ticker told me that.

She let it ride.

“Let’s not have anymore of that then, shall we? Rebels don’t live long, Paul.”

I just nodded, plugged into my console and would have gone to work.

But that’s when you all showed up.

So what’s it to be? Jail? Personality restructuring?

* * *

I’m still scratching my head, y’know.

Giving me a new rig and an advanced jack isn’t my idea of punishment for what I did. I don’t understand all of your gents reasoning. I don’t think my little act of rebellion matters for anything.

But apparently, you don’t agree with me.

So.

Here I am.

Trawling the Solar Net for more like the bozo. More guys looking to eff with the market because they have nothing better to do with their time and ludicrous wealth. Looking for Dollars, Yen or Euros being dumped. Looking for stock not doing what I know it’s supposed to do in a right market.

Remember? Twenty years.

I know a good and right market when I see it.

And now?

If I catch another one? Another bogus order?

Well, I hear there was another earthquake in China Republic. They can certainly use some unlooked for lucre.

Who knew the world needed someone like me? It’s not the kind of thing that I thought existed. But then that’s what you said you wanted. A little hidden rebellion. The kind you never see coming.

And ain’t that just me in a nutshell?

Rebel, rebel.

Originally published at Angela N. Hunt. You can comment here or there.

I have Dust in the Wind doing the earworm thing right now and I am just fine with that. One of the few songs that I just love.

But moving on.

So. Busy, busy, busy week. Lost Tuesday to rain, so I’ve done this week’s training runs back to back to (tonight) back, which I was worried about, but which the body is responding to with not even a hiccup. It is *wonderful*. But it does mean that on the 8 miler nights, I get nothing else done but running. Which is actually fine. It is more than enough to get home, love my family and then run 8 miles under the full moon.

The new novel continues to slowly accrete mass, like they do. I am debating what I want to write for ScriptFrenzy, if anything. I have yet to dig up my old screenwriting idea file.

Not much else going on. I run. I write. My camera and easel languish right now. But the marathon is less than six weeks away. I will need them then, for after.

Originally published at Angela N. Hunt. You can comment here or there.

Alice, in her own section of Wonderland, was making good time when she saw the mansion. She really hadn’t meant to stop. Just meant to poke her head in, say hello to Cook and pinch the baby and be on her way. She wanted to get home and with her errand not exactly completed in the sense that the Rabbit still lived, contrary to Red’s desires, she just… Well. The truth was, she didn’t really have that many friends. And she rather liked Cook’s pepper soup. So she turned her steps to the gray stoned manse and walked around the house on it’s gravel drive, heading for the back and the kitchen door, the gravel crunching under her feet in a way that made her wince, because sweet Jesus, it was too damn loud and anyone could hear her coming.

Except the hearth was cold when Alice let herself in to the enormous flag-stone paved kitchen. And no pepper flew through the air. No smell of baking bread from the ovens. No Frog had been at the door either, which rather surprised Alice. The footman was always coming and going with some nonsense for the Duchess from Red and no sign of the jerk.

Cook sat by the hearth, slumped, apron bundled in her lap, brown skirts clean, not a streak of flour on them anywhere, her beige shirtwaist equally clean. The dishes were stacked and neat by the drain board. The only consistent thing was the baby, wailing away in his bassinet, alternating between pig and human form. But Cook moved not at all to console him, which was nothing new, but something… Something was just not fucking right.

“Cook?” Alice ventured.

Cook looked up slowly, veritably this world’s or any other’s ugliest woman, followed only by the Duchess. But Cook didn’t smile, seeing Alice there on the threshold.

“Oh. Hello,” she said.

Alice stepped all the way and went over to the baby who had graduated to hiccuping sobs and oinks, picked him up and began to rock him. He clung to her neck, fat little arms holding on tight, his white baby clothes smelling of detergent and baby.

“What’s wrong?”

No soup. No broken dishes. No pepper. No footman. What. The. Hell, Alice thought furiously.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Cook started to move, her face clearly saying that yes, something absolutely was fucking wrong. Alice went over to the ice box, found the baby’s bottle and began to feed him. He didn’t need changing, which meant Cook hadn’t been completely checked out.

Meanwhile, Cook shuffled to the hearth and swung the huge cast iron soup pot out of the way on its hook and began to build a fire, but she didn’t move in her usual jerky fast way. She moved like an old woman.

“Why is everyone lying to me today?” Alice asked, not meaning to use her trained killer voice on her oldest friend, but it rather slipped out.

Cook slowed and then stopped, faggots half built in the fireplace.

“How can you possibly understand? No one’s ever told you. No one’s ever known.”

Okay, the riddles were to be expected, Alice decided, but sweet Baby Jesus!

“Cook. Please,” she tried instead.

“What’s older than Time, what lives for Wonder, and what would you give for your Heart’s Desire?”

Alice blew a breath out in a short puff. Baby had settled down, redness going away and retaining more of his baby form, only the pig snout to indicate his other shape.

“Must we? Really?”

“It’s riddles or nothing, my love,” Cook said and went back to fire building. Had a fire going in short order and began the back and forth trips to fill the pot alternately with small buckets of milk from the ice box. The ice box never ran out of milk, a fact that Alice was very jealous as, since every time she was at home, there was never a damn drop of it.

“Like that, is it?”

“Like that.”

Alice sighed.

“All right then.”

“I’ve said more than I should.”

“Alices are that important, are they?”

“Not Alices,” Cook said, shaking her head. “The Alice.”

Alice felt her eyebrow rise. So much for her damn Game Face.

“The Alice.” Alice just left it hanging out there, but Cook didn’t rise to the bait. “Huh.”

“I’ve said too much.”

“Everyone keeps saying that shit and it’s getting old.”

“It’s a rare truth. You should be grateful for it.”

“Can’t say that I am,” Alice remarked and put Baby down, who had nodded off on her shoulder and tucked him back in to his bassinet.

“You shouldn’t have come back. You should have stayed away, like you promised,” Cook said, stirring the pot desultorily and pouring in the pepper, but with none of her usual gusto.

“Red…” But Alice didn’t finish. Cook was right. She hadn’t been forced to jump down the rabbit hole. No one had showed up and pointed a gun to her head. Just a big fat red envelope and like she’d never shredded orders before and pretended she never got them? Yeah, right.

Her gut tightened. She was already peeved by the whole thing already. But this was shaping up to piss her completely off. Timothy said she had anger issues. She knew she had anger issues. She didn’t see why she needed to deal with them. Waste of time. But he made a point and often that her anger clouded her ability to analyse situations. She always had countered that analysis was for the analysts and she was a shooter, yes?

He never agreed.

Worse, she was starting to see his damn point.

But seeing his side of the argument didn’t stop the fact that she was now officially fucking angry.

Which wasn’t helped a damn bit by the Cat materializing in the door.

“You’re still here? Shouldn’t you be getting a move on? I thought you said you wanted to get back in short order? Or was that not true?” the Cat queried disingenuously. “Shouldn’t you be at the March Hare’s already?”

“Bite me,” Alice replied. Drew her handcannon and fired in one smooth, well-practiced move. Except the damn Cat was already vanished, leaving behind the grin.

Cook threw a dish on the floor in solidarity.

“I should be going,” Alice sighed.

“If you hurry, you’ll get to the March Hare’s in time for tea.”

Alice shuddered.

“Oh, come now. Anyone could have made that mistake,” Cook chided.

“I’ll take your word for it. Feel better, Cook.”

“Get smart, my love. Your gut isn’t going to be enough this time.”

And on that last cryptic warning, Alice let herself out just in time to see the Frog Footman coming up the drive. She nodded at him as she walked and rotated her shoulder, holstering the hand cannon. As she left, she could hear Cook begin to sing to the baby:

Speak fiercely to your little boy,
And train him to be fearless:
Give him rifles, bombs as toys,
Because he’ll needs be deathless.

Chorus

Hoorah! Hoorah! Hoorah!
I speak fiercely to my boy,
I teach him to be fearless;
For he can kill with joy
His skills with guns are peerless!

Huh, thought Alice. That was new.

Originally published at Angela N. Hunt. You can comment here or there.

The husband loves this one for the Mouse’s expression. I do too. “Make the crazy lady stop squeezing me!”

Too perfect…

* * *

The end of the current novel is being a stone bitch. I know what happens. But unpacking it into actual action is killing me. I don’t know why. I am resorting to my usual trick of going to YouTube and watching fight scenes from my favorite movies for inspiration.

There are just not enough epic sword fight scenes in movies anymore…

Originally published at Angela N. Hunt. You can comment here or there.

Again. Pearl Harbor Day. The Galileo probe reached Jupiter in 1995. And nine years ago, this evening, my father left the planet as we all will one day. For those of you new to the blog, last year I wrote the memoir about my father, the high energy physicist.

Here is another excerpt from it.

The Accident

In these early days, and early memories, I knew my father worked very hard. When he wasn’t at work, he worked away in the front room on his own things.

My father came home very early one day, very early. Too early. Said that there had been an accident at the Lab and they were on lockdown.
My father held me for a very long time.

It scared me badly.

I’ve never found out what happened that day. But I did begin to hear other stories. My father told me about the Demon Core, a criticality accident at the Lab back in the early days of nuclear physical research. The research scientist in charge had physically reached in and pulled apart the core they’d been experimenting with, when the screwdriver he’d been using to hold them apart had slipped, causing the halves of the core to touch and begin to go critical. He then shielded it with his body to buy enough time for the others to evacuate the lab.

It killed him.

I didn’t learn his name until I was an adult. I just knew that my father revered the man’s memory and used his story as a dire illustration of the dangers of the work and field he studied for both himself and others.

You don’t think of a bunch of slide-rule-carrying, pocket-protector physicists as being heroic. But the day my father told me this story, I learned that they were and often did things in quietly heroic ways that never got reported. They didn’t take hills for the Marines. They didn’t demonstrate to save the environment. They just tried to find ways to harness the atom to make the lives of everyone better and in extreme cases, they gave their lives to save their fellow researchers.

It left an indelible impression.

* * *

Today, in memory of Harry Daghlian, Louis Slotin, and my father – Hugh M. Hyatt. For more on the Demon Core, start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core Let it never be said that the pursuit of knowledge is for the faint of heart.

Originally published at Angela N. Hunt. You can comment here or there.

Shall we go and piddle our toes in the water?

* * *

As most of you know, I’ve once more dived into the glorious mayhem that is National Novel Writing Month. I’ve been doing it since 2004 and it is my devotional of choice when it comes to my writing. Out of all the years I’ve done, only twice have I not finished and the first was my first year and the second was that I was just pregnant with the Mouse and throwing up all the time.

Good times.

I thank NaNoWriMo for being the thing that took me from being one of the world’s slowest writers (we’re talking Thomas Harris slow) and turning me into someone who can write to a frikken’ deadline. I was so upset by not finishing my first year, that when 2005 rolled around, I buckled down and just pounded.

It was a revelation.

It’s not for everyone. But for those of us with competitive spirits and a desire for community, a desire to know we’re not alone in our solitary madnesses, it is the best thing that has ever happened to me or my writing. Some years are hard. Broken Rainbow I had to fight for every word, tooth and nail. Alice Assassin was fun, but I never did more than just what I had to write every day.

This year, I can’t seem to stop writing, the words are coming so fast. It’s like NaNoWriMo helped me find that door in the page that Stephen King talks about, helped me pick the lock, open it up and finally, finally, finally helped me fall through the page.

It’s a gift.

So, thank you, Chris Baty, and all the NaNoWriMo staff. Thank you for helping me unlock the page. Thank you for starting a grand and foolish event that makes the world a better, more beautiful, weirder and more glorious place.

Bless you. For all the words and all the words to come.

Originally published at Angela N. Hunt. You can comment here or there.

Check out the inscription there.

Books Invite All, They Constrain None

That? That right there is why I became a publisher. Why I started writing at five-years-old. Why I read like a starving woman eats. Voraciously.

Here’s the thing about books. They’re always an opportunity, even the bad ones. They’re a chance to learn. They’re a chance to live another life. And more than once, they can save someone’s life. The right book at the right time changes everything.

It doesn’t care who you are. It doesn’t care what you are. It can’t see the color of your skin, the shape of your eyes or whether you like boys, girls or none of the above. A book just invites you in.

And opens *you* up.

If you let it. If you’re willing. If you’re not afraid to change. Yeah. Let me be more like a book.

Invite all. Constrain none.

Originally published at Angela N. Hunt. You can comment here or there.

But still slogging through Broken Rainbow. I’m at page 238 as of last night with 27+n pages to go (n = missing scenes needing to be written).

I won’t make my deadline today.

*sigh*

It is what it is. Deadlines get blown. I just need to kill it dead and I will probably do so (knock wood) this week. But it’s a wee bit demoralizing. And of course, Life in General does not care that I am on deadline. My girls want their Momma, my husband has this weird thing about wanting to spend time with me, and my sister apparently likes to talk to me. Never mind the rest of my family. And y’know. Cats.

So I keep slogging. It’s a substantially stronger book for this edit. It has been brutal and my editor has more than once pissed me off, but only because she’s been right. This is why editors are important. The key is that even when they piss you off, have a big enough dose of self-respect and self-reflection to *listen.* Editors aren’t the enemy. They’re there to make you better. Always. I’ve never talked to a single editor that wasn’t striving for the best book possible.

It doesn’t mean you have to agree with them all the time.

But for the gods’ own sake, it does mean you have to listen.

I don’t know what I would do without my editor. Ree, Madam Editor, this one’s for you.

Originally published at Angela N. Hunt. You can comment here or there.

I went to work on photos last night.

Photoshop refused to load.

I had to shut down the entire computer at that point. Not the Beast’s fault. Clearly a software issue.

*sigh*

It was really the punctuation to a rather hard day. The cats have taken it upon themselves to leave bodily fluids of every description on every surface they can find. No one can take Lou or Speckle which breaks my fucking heart. So I’m getting them the full set and spectrum of shots and chips and letting them outside. Because keeping them indoors is destroying everything I own and making me want to cry on a weekly basis.

Yesterday was the first time ever in my life that I wished I didn’t have pets.

Oh, and my husband broke his leg and walked around on it for two weeks. Yeah. That happened.

The edit continues to be a slog.

The press continues to accrete mass.

But I haven’t painted in weeks and I haven’t looked at photos and that part of my brain wants to scream.

Send an assistant with a bottle of Patron. I’ve got a lot of work to do.

Originally published at Angela N. Hunt. You can comment here or there.

Got through 310 pages of the final edit last night. It's all scalpel and razor time now. If it doesn't make sense on this pass, I'm cutting it wholesale. Only twice did the surgery cause me to wince, but to keep the meme going, you have to kill your darlings.

It's a stronger book for it.

I still see though the vast distance I've traveled since I wrote, "Coils and coils of blackness," while sitting in a falling down hotel room in Paris on the Left Bank. The difference in my story telling ability from 1996 to today, 2010, is staggering to me. But the book doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out anymore and that's all that matters.

Even if my eyes are bleeding from having read it one too many damn times.

The other thing that comes through and hammers on my brain is just how damn much work writing is. And I do this anyway. Certainly not for the Money, Power, Glamor and/or Fame. It upsets me a bit, in light of all that's been going on about the Macmillan/Amazon slapfight. The perception that authors are greedy bitches for *gasp* wanting to get paid a decent wage for their work. Cause, y'know, writing's so fucking easy.

Yeah.

Whatever.

I started writing Strange Weather all these years ago, in that crappy hotel room, because I had to. Sabine Parsons and her journey wouldn't leave me alone. I knew how it ended *back in 1996*. I wrote for fourteen years, just so I could stand with her on the bones of the USS San Francisco and see that end in my mind's eye.

But there was another thing driving me the entire time. The desire to put it out in the world and tell her story to everyone who might even remotely find that story appealing.

Getting a couple bucks in return doesn't seem like a very high price to ask for the entertainment.

So there it is.

Strange Weather goes out to the people who've been waiting on it some time this week. I'll let you know when, how, and where it'll be coming out after that, probably in another month or two.

In the meantime, it's time for me to buy a new pair of walking shoes. Coop and Alice tell me it's their turn and I'm hoping it won't take me another fourteen years to walk through Africa and Wonderland.