Batgirl

Fiction by Ray Sikorski

She’s an evil batgirl genius and I want to have my way with her. I would like any woman who’s any one of the three, evil or batgirl or genius, but to be all three at once, well, that’s something special. Of course all the other guys think the same thing and they all want to have their way with her too, but being an evil batgirl genius she can simply take her pick, and she gleefully picks nobody.

She’s not a skintight leather-clad batgirl like in movies and TV, she’s a feather-weight aerospace skisuit batgirl. Her batsuit is a set of wings of her own design, super-light space-age fabric wings going from her ankles to her wrists, spreading out wide as she raises her arms above her head.

She does this on short skis on windy days, and one day she’ll ski uphill, and one day she’ll fly over the engineering building, over the heads and hearts of me and all the others who have taken a number. We know this will happen soon, and we either want to stop her or join her or sleep with her before she flies over us all and we never see her again. We all know she’s evil, or think we know, and once she flies she’ll patent her batsuit and make millions and never talk to us again. So we all hate her desperately, and long to get in her pants.

I offer to accompany her into the woods, to carry her wings, her notebooks, her pencils, her snowpants. Of course, so do all the others, but perhaps she pities me. “Can you conjure a wind?” she asks when we get there, and I try, I pray, I blow, I hope and I wish, but I don’t think she cares. Does she need a squall, or a hurricane? She just wants me to sweat, I’m sure of it. It’s ugly, the power she has over me, over men. It is a thing of beauty, a mind, and when it is so beautiful as the wings she wears, it is blinding. I pray, I wish, I huff and puff… how does one conjure a wind? Alas, I am no witch.

But her. Once she’s prepped, her skis on, her wings spread, her body perky and cute in her snowsuit, a wink is all it takes, and then there is… a breeze. Certainly not a squall or a hurricane, and certainly it defies reason and gravity and friction, biology and physiology and even the kinds of loaves and fishes miracles you read about in sacred texts, because she’s quite a way uphill before I can make any sense of it, and I’m still not making any sense of it. I’m supposed to be recording my findings in the notebook, but really I think she’s just showing off. This isn’t engineering! It’s magic and it’s pissing me off.

She ends up at the top of the hill. “Are you coming back down?” I shout up at her.

“No,” she shouts back.

“Am I supposed to go up there, too?” I don’t want to climb all the way up there, I want bat wings too, I want to just wink and shoot up there like her and then have my way with her, but of course that’s never going to happen.

“Just stay where you are,” she shouts down. “Make sure the notebook’s ready!”

“Oh, it’s ready.”

“Have you been taking notes?”

“Oh, yes!” I say, and then quickly jot down the time and the date and “Subject defies all laws of physics and gravity and compassion for I am smitten and she doesn’t care.” And before I’m done scribbling she’s skiing down the slope and lifting up her wings and going over a jump and flying… and I know it’s over. It’s over for me and for all the others because she’s flying over my head and circling and spiraling and going up and swooping down, and I know that now we’re all screwed because she’s magic and she’s a genius and she’s evil and she’ll win the Nobel prize for it all, all of it, and we’ll never see her again and she doesn’t care. And I jot that all down in the notebook along with the time and how long she’s been in the air.

If she goes too close to the sun, like Icarus, will she come crashing to the ground? One can hope, one can pray, but she’s no Icarus. She’s much, much better and smarter and cuter. I know it’s over and we’ll lose her and she’ll be famous and we’ll have no one to lust after who’s evil and a genius and a batgirl. I write this in the book as well.

So the next day there are TV cameras and newspaper reporters and the whole enchilada, even more because there are Nobel people from Sweden, and there are people from Ronco who want to sell batsuits on TV. But she just says, “I’m glad I can fly, it was fun. I’ll do a demonstration for the TV cameras because my assistant was nice but not very good at recording.” So everyone, the TV people, the newspaper people, the Swedes, the Ronco people, my fellow engineers, and myself all truck out to the woods for the big demonstration. And this time she doesn’t mess around with the shenanigans, she just gets up there, winks for the breeze, skis around for show, and flies. She flies over our heads, and up and around and down and up again and barrell rolls and nosedives and pulls out and goes very, very high, and… flies away.

Me and the engineers and the TV people and the newspaper people and the Swedes and the Ronco people look and look and look and look, but she’s gone. We titter: “Where did she go?” “Is she still up there?” “Is this a trick?” “Will she surprise us?” The concensus is that she’s pulling some kind of clever stunt, to show how long she can fly for, and at any minute she’ll zip by with with a big smile on and land and have a nice speech and a good laugh and accept her Nobel prize and have Ronco make batwings for everyone in TV land. So we wait.

But she doesn’t come. We wait until we’re hungry and we order pizza and the pizza guy comes and waits too. We have all fallen in love with her, now everyone, not just the engineers, everyone even in TV land knows of this horrible evil-batgirl-genius-unrequited love that I have been tortured with for so long. And because I have acted as her assistant I feel I know better than anyone that she won’t come back.

It gets dark and we finish the pizza and we keep waiting. The TV people play back the batgirl video, over and over, and we watch, we can’t stop watching. She is so beautiful when she flies, she is so evil, such a genius, such a batgirl, that she can’t help but be beautiful, and everyone hates her so much for leaving, for abandoning us, and for being beautiful. We wait some more, even though it’s dark and there’s no more pizza. We wait because we want to have our way with her, even though she has already had her way with us.

Write a novel in a month? No problem!

Damn Good Padding


At last, it's finished. "Tinker Visits the Woods," that is, or," Thoreau, I Like a Girl." All 506 chapters of it, and it only took me 30 days to write.

Yes, it's my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) novel, started on November 2nd (so actually 29 days) after I saw a mention of the competition in the Montana State University Exponent. It's not really a competition, in that there aren't really any prizes... I like to think of it as the equivalent of running a marathon for writers.

Me and 80,000 others from around were involved in this marathon, including about 130 or so from Montana. There was plenty of camaraderie in our little bunch, which included NaDruWriNi and a cut-throat battle for wordcount with Saskatchewan, in which we kicked their Canuck butts.

See, the trick to writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days is to concentrate on quantity, not quality. None of this editing nonsense, just crank out the words. Don't even look back, there'll be plenty of time for that in December. As for me, I didn't even have an outline going into this thing. All I had was the character Tinker, who made his first appearance in a story in my book "Driftwood Dan and Other Adventures." I just wanted to take Tinker and roll with him, and roll we did.

Undertaking the writing of a novel while having no idea of what the plot will be is admittedly a little strange. With Tinker, I handled this issue by making him a writer (which he was in the original story) who's writing a novel and searching for a plot. Clever, huh? That enabled me to essentially free associate the first 10,000 or so words, i.e. "I need a plot, Tinker thought"; "This sucks, not having a plot"; "I wonder how I can find a plot"; "Every other writer must have a plot by now"; etc.

The problem revealed itself when I was eventually forced to find a real plot, which ended up being something in which the character Tinker created became his antagonist, and for some reason Tinker felt compelled to have sex with a bunch of different women, some of whom only existed in his imagination. I should note that on the NaNoWriMo website they included interviews with authors who had successfully written NaNoWriMo novels in the past, who offered helpful advice on padding: when in doubt, bring in a new character, plot twist, sex scene, or have all the characters sit down to a gourmet meal. I repeatedly did all but the last one, and that's only because if I think about food when I'm writing I get hungry and the whole thing goes to hell.

So, basically, I ended up with 47,000 or so words worth of padding. And I think there's something to be said for that. It's damn good padding. Sometimes I thought the whole thing sucked and should be drop-kicked into the landfill, but when I actually got around to re-reading some of it (I separated it into 506 micro-chapters, and since finishing have made plans to name each one -- I'm up to Chapter 94 so far), I sensed that it wasn't that bad. Not good, mind you, but not bad.

I've only shown it to one person so far... but that's mainly because I'm embarrassed by all the raunchy sex scenes that ended up in there. It's amazing the things writer's block will make you do.

Does anybody want to see it? Let me know!