KJToo

“Run through it one more time for me, Tom,” the President said, squinting slightly against the sun. The sky was clear, not even the contrail of a passing jet detracting from the pale blue firmament. This isn’t right, he thought, frowning as he watched a lone bird—a hawk by the look of it—soar quietly overhead. I’d always imagined this sort of thing to be done in the dead of night; certainly not in broad daylight…and certainly not with worldwide media coverage.

The reporters were held at bay perhaps a hundred yards away, lined up behind the cemetery’s high, wrought iron fence. The President knew they were there, but didn’t bother to look; he knew their cameras were likely focused on him, trying to catch a glimpse through the broad-shouldered throng of Secret Service agents. He knew that even from this distance, the cameras would see every detail of his face—his furrowed brow, the hint of tears welling up in the corners of his eyes, the downturned corners of his mouth—and broadcast it all to millions, perhaps billions, of television sets across the globe.

“Yes, sir,” Tom said. The advisor adjusted his tie—a nervous tic he hadn’t managed to overcome despite nearly four years in the public eye—and gestured to the coffin that had been exhumed several hours ago. “When you’re ready, we’ll open the casket. Secret Service will do one final security sweep, then all personnel will retreat to the ten yard perimeter. Once the perimeter is established, you will light the torch at each vertice of the pentagram…”

The President looked at the coffin as Tom ran through the procedure for the fifth time in as many days. He nodded slowly, only half-listening to his advisor. The polished wood gleamed brightly; either the concrete vault had protected the coffin exceptionally well, or someone had spent a considerable amount of time cleaning it after the exhumation. Surely the corpse within would not have remained as untouched by the ravages of time as the vessel in which it had been interred.

The President waited until Tom finished, then took a deep breath. “Let’s get this over with,” he said, shrugging off his suit jacket and handing it to an aide—Camryn, he reminded himself for no particular reason. He loosened his tie and watched as the sexton—the only person on the cemetery grounds who wasn’t part of the White House staff—opened the heavy coffin lid.

There was a brief, heavy moment as the sexton looked into the casket, his face ash-white, before the Secret Service descended upon the open coffin, visually inspecting the vessel and the remains it contained while two German Shepherds sniffed for explosives and hazardous chemicals.

This isn’t right, the President thought again, this is a desecration. He wondered if his predecessor, the first United States President to grant the ultimate pardon before leaving office, had felt the same way. No, he didn’t expect she had. He didn’t expect she had felt much of anything at all.

“All Clear!”

In seconds, he was alone. The Secret Service and the K-9 unit had retreated to the perimeter, along with Tom and Camryn and the rest of the President’s staff. He took another deep breath and hefted his old Bic lighter—a present from his father, of all people; his father who could not abide smokers. He ran a thumb over the worn emblem on front of the stainless steel, an American eagle whose color had been rubbed away years ago, and thought that this, too, was wrong. Surely he was not going to begin the sacred rite by flipping his Bic.

But he did just that, and the flame was as strong as it had ever been, barely guttering in the afternoon breeze. The President lit the first torch, nearly burning his knuckles as whatever concoction soaked the tip came ablaze with a soft whump. He crossed from the northern point of the star to the southwest, then to the northeast, then northwest and finally southeast, deliberately not looking at the coffin that lay in the center of the pentagram.

All five torches lit, the President snapped the lid of his lighter shut and dropped it into his right pocket, the weight a familiar reassurance. He took another deep breath and stepped to the side of the coffin, finally looking down at the body within. Time, as he suspected had not been kind. The face was drawn and desiccated, lips pulled back to form a grotesque grin around teeth that seemed too large for the sunken features. He was suddenly very glad of the arcane rules that governed this macabre proceeding: to be eligible for raising, the individual must have died while the President raising him or her held office. Four years had not been gentle to the corpse; he shuddered to think of how cruel forty would have been.

The President lifted a trembling hand and rested it on the wrinkled forehead. The skin was dry beneath his palm and felt so much unlike human flesh that he had to fight back the urge to vomit. My approval rating is bad enough, he thought hysterically, I can’t imagine how low it would plunge if I puked on national television in the course of performing my last official act as President. He almost looked up at the cameras he knew were there, at the members of his staff he knew were watching, but instead he blinked away fresh tears and took another deep breath.

I don’t want to do this. Oh, God, I do not want to do this.

But he had taken an oath, and whether he wanted to perform the ritual or not didn’t matter; only that he believed the ritual would work. And he believed. Oh, yes, he believed. On his inauguration day he had watched his outgoing predecessor perform the ritual herself. Had watched a dead man rise from a coffin much like this one. Oh, yes, he believed.

His voice cracked as he spoke. “By the power vested in me by the citizens of the United States of America, I release you from death. I welcome you to a new life.”

Again the President nearly vomited as warmth blossomed in the forehead beneath his hand. His breath caught in his chest and he staggered back, his fingers cramping and twisting, his palm burning with a cold fire that spread up his arm. The President fell to his knees, unable to breathe, staring as manicured fingers gripped the edge of the coffin and the figure within rose.

***

Tom didn’t look at the body on the ground as he stepped forward. “Madam President,” he said, smiling and extending his right hand.  “Welcome back.”

---

The preceding story was inspired by Mur Lafferty’s new project, The News From Poughkeepsie, wherein she plans to post a story idea each day for a year. Today’s writing prompt asks what would happen if the President had the power to raise people from the dead at the end of his term.

This is pretty much a first draft, though I did do some on-the-fly editing.

I’ll let Mr. Miller summarize his own efforts; not because I don’t know what he wrote all week, but because I can’t bring myself to admit that he wrote more than I did.

Monday

I started a new short(?) story tentatively titled “The Long December” and discovered that immortality is simply a matter of who’s in charge. Word count: 299

Tuesday

I continued “The Long December” after a late arrival at the coffee shop. Word count: 285.

Wednesday

Faced with the uncomfortable fact that “The Long December” was turning into a parable, I wrote a blog entry: Coffee Shop Writing: Day 3. Three days into this experiment and the meta-writing has already begun. Word count: 650ish.

Thursday

Zombie Day. Due to issues with Puppy Linux, I abandoned it in favor of Kubuntu, which I didn’t *quite* manage to get configured Wednesday night. Goodbye (for now) Geany, hello Kate! I didn’t get any writing done at all today; I need more than four hours of sleep before I can write. If I can’t get more than four hours of sleep, I need four hours to wake up so I can write. Later in the day I wrote another blog entry, Tomorrow is Arbor Day. Celebrate with The Secret Lair. It’s about 375 words, but I didn’t write it in the coffee shop, so it doesn’t count. Word count: 0.

Friday

Instead of sitting down to write, I distracted Chris1 by talking about Kubuntu’s apparent lack of an e-mail client,2 the audio quality issues we’re having with episodes of The Secret Lair, and pretty much anything that wasn’t writing. It worked. I should be ashamed of myself.

Then I decided to fire up Kate and write this summary. I announced that I was writing just as Chris was packing up his things and heading back to his home office. “What are you writing?” he asked.

I told him.

“Good God!,” he exclaimed. “I’ve never met anyone who could write so much about doing so little!”

So true. Word count: 401.3

1. To be fair, he had a 200+ word head start by the time I arrived, thanks to a writing prompt at Plotstorming.com. [back]
2. The default client is Kmail, which is—according to the Adept Package Manager—installed, but which nobody thought to provide a link to. Is this what I get for downloading a release candidate? EDIT: Kmail is the e-mail component of Kontact, which has a handy shortcut on the Kubuntu taskbar, but which I mistook for an address book. This is because I am an idiot. [back]
3. Total for the week: about 1,600. [back]

The first panel of Natalie Metzger’s latest webcomical creation for The Secret Lair provides an insight—one some might classify as profoundly disturbing—into the decidedly non-traditional celebrations Chris Miller and I have adopted for certain of the minor holidays observed here in the United States.

Lest anyone get the wrong impression, let me assure you that none of our festivities involve any sort of violence toward this particular holiday’s honorees, despite the fact that certain deciduous individuals among them persist in perennially covering our lawns with their palmate-netted castoffs. Indeed, The Secret Lair is as environmentally friendly as any facility housing a trans-dimensional alien power siphon, an unregulated plutonium refinery and three separate sub-basements dedicated to various (allegedly) biohazardous experimentation possibly can be. We’re not technically a “green” facility, but there is a very nice hyacinth in Mr. Miller’s office and one of the minions has planted daffodils on the west bank of the moat.1 In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that the koi pond near the Visitor Center is an artifice: a hologram designed to disguise one of our surface-to-air missile batteries.2

If you are in northeast Ohio this Arbor Day, you would do well to avoid The Secret Lair.3 However, admission to The Holden Arboretum is free beginning on Friday the 25th and continuing through Sunday the 27th. Mr. Miller and I are—due to the aforementioned non-traditional observances—banned from the grounds for life, but we hold no grudge and encourage you to visit the Arboretum this weekend if you are able.

1. These are, unfortunately, no longer officially being tended, as the would-be floriculturist severely underestimated the tentacle reach of the giant squid. [back]
2. Astute visitors will surely notice that the koi swim in a pattern that is repeated every ninty-two-point-five minutes—or rather, they would notice the pattern if they weren’t fleeing the hunter-seeker robots that are automatically deployed when our hidden DNA scanners detect the presence of unauthorized personnel near the Visitor Center. [back]
3. The facility and its immediate surroundings are slightly out of phase with the “normal” time/space continuum; we expect the issue to be resolved no later than Wednesday of last week. [back]

One of the tricky things about blogging for me is that I almost always compose blog entries in WordPress’ editor. This means that I have to have an Internet connection in order to write. Only one time in recent memory have I begun writing a blog entry offline: my love letter to giant crocodilians was born on my Treo 650 while I was in a restaurant waiting to meet Laura and Kyle for dinner after work one day. Writing on the Treo isn’t anything approaching fun. Granted, it has a “full” keyboard, which I prefer when sending text messages, but anything beyond the 140-character bursts of text that comprise SMS messages is a bit of a chore.

I used to carry a small notepad and pen in my back pocket, intending to write blog entries (and story ideas and anything else I needed to capture when I was away from a computer) longhand and then transcribe them to WordPress at my leisure. It was a great theory, and if you can’t see where this is going you haven’t been listening to me whine about not being able to write long enough.

This week, Chris Miller and I began meeting at a local coffee shop for an hour before work to write. I started working on a short story that had been rattling around in my head for all of fifteen minutes before I sat down at the coffee shop; Chris wrote a blog entry. I couldn’t get on the coffee shop’s wi-fi network until this morning, when I finally realized that I needed a WEP key. Now I have access to the dread Internets and all of the distractions they bring; I could, were I so inclined, fire up WordPress and bang out a blog entry—writing is writing.1

Instead, I’m writing this in Geany, the Puppy Linux equivalent to Microsoft’s Notepad. It’s an experiment of sorts: focus on the content and worry about the formatting later. Because when I write in WordPress, I’m constantly previewing the entries to see how they flow on the page (especially if I’m including any kind of graphic) instead of just writing until I feel like I’m done and then going back to tweak and nudge things or, in other words, edit. It’s bad enough that I constantly edit the content while I’m writing (something I’ve never really been able to completely abandon, despite four years of NaNoWriMo), but when I’m in a WYSIWYG editor I constantly mess with the formatting, as well. I just have a hard time dealing with the concept of a draft; everything has to be as finished as I can possibly make it before I move on to the next page, paragraph, sentence or word.

Writing doesn’t work that way in the real world, and I’m very well aware of that. Of course, there’s a big difference between recognizing your weakness and overcoming it. But this is the first step in a new experiment: content first, formatting last. I’ll finish writing this draft in Geany, then copy and paste it into what passes for a Write Post interface in WordPress these days2 and make any edits before posting. Or maybe I’ll just delete the whole damn whiny, introspective, woe-is-me mess and move on and no one (except Chris, who knows I’m meta-blogging right now) will be any the wiser.

1. It feels like a cop out to be meta-blogging on this, the third day of coffee shop writing, but the fiction I’m writing has turned into a parable, for crying out loud, and all of a sudden I need to have a moral for the story; I, who can never see the end of a story when I begin writing it, need to be able to wrap the whole thing up and say this is the lesson we’ve learned, children. Yikes. [back]
2. Bitter much? [back]

Shortly after I installed WordPress 2.5, I blogged at length about my experiences with (and dislike of) some of the “new and improved” features of the administrator’s interface. The Write Post interface was a particular bone of contention with me, but my co-host at The Secret Lair made it known that he thought the entire design of the administrator interface was poorly done. You can find our discussion in Episode 0009 of the podcast, beginning at the 07:57 mark.

A couple of days ago, Matthew Hill1 left a comment here directing me to a very helpful post on the official WordPress Support Forums. As I began exploring the forums, I discovered that Chris and I were hardly alone in our feelings toward the WordPress 2.5 Admin interface. There are several threads at the forums devoted to the administrator interface, with special attention on the Write Post screen and the Widget control panel.

One thread in the Requests and Feedback forum caught my eye, as there were more than 100 replies when I began reading it, with new replies continuing to trickle in at a fairly steady rate. I felt somewhat vindicated to learn that other WordPress users were being very vocal about their dislike for the new Admin screens, and more than a little disheartened at a forum moderator’s attitude toward people posting on a forum that is clearly labeled as being designated for feedback and criticism:

Well, prepare to continue to be annoyed then…

WordPress developers generally don’t comment in these forums, as a rule. They’re too busy developing. If you want a say in the code development, then login to the bug tracker and make your comments there. Submit patches to the code. Whatever.

But really, please, stop complaining about it here. These are support forums, for people with actual problems. Not liking the layout is an opinion, not a problem. And this is really not the proper place to vent opinions or to suggest changes to WordPress.2

More disheartening than Otto42’s attitude, however, was his assertion that the development team simply doesn’t pay attention to the “Requests and Feedback” forum, leading me to wonder why they would even bother having forums in the first place.

Fortunately, a number of users were doing more than just expressing their dislike for the new Admin interface: they were diving into the WordPress code to do something about it. The post Matt linked to contained information about a hack created by Judy Becker of the knitting blog, Persistent Illusion. That’s right, a blogger whose focus is knitting hacked WordPress 2.5 in order to make the Write Post screen resemble the old WordPress 2.3.3 interface.

Judy’s hack moves the Categories, Comments & Pings, Tags, Post Author and Password Protect sections (what someone collectively referred to as the meta-data sections) to the right of the editor window, much as they were in WordPress 2.3. Unfortunately, since the changes require modification to some core WordPress files, it doesn’t appear that what Judy has done could be accomplished with a simple plugin, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me.

I applied Judy’s hack and, lo and behold, the Categories section was back where it belonged: to the right of the post editor. If only there were some way to fix some of the other design flaws:3 an overabundance of white space above the editor, unnecessarily large typeface for the blog title, etc.

Then I found the Fluency Admin plugin, which “re-skins” the entire WordPress Admin interface. Fluency arranges the major admin functions (Dashboard, Write, Manage, Design, Comments, Settings, Plugins and Users) in a column on the left side of the screen, while displaying sub-functions across the top. The interface feels cleaner and tighter, though I still think that some of the space above the fold could be put to better use.

Unfortunately, the Fluency plugin didn’t look so great with Judy’s hack: the repositioned sections overlapped the editor, making the whole thing feel very cludgy, which it was; the hack and the plugin weren’t designed to be complementary, after all. Rather than give up, I decided to do a little hacking myself. I tweaked some of Judy’s CSS to fix the overlap problem and hacked the postbox JavaScript file to remove the “twisties”4 from the section headers. The result is very satisfying. Compare the two screen shots below: the first is the default WordPress 2.5 Write Post screen, the second is the Write Post with the Fluency Admin plugin and Judy’s hack applied.

There are a couple of drawbacks to this approach. First, the Fluency Admin plugin only works on CSS2 compliant browsers. That’s not a major problem because I do the majority of my blogging from Firefox, SeaMonkey, Flock and Safari, all of which display Fluency quite nicely. Every once in a while, I’ve got use Internet Explorer 6 or 7, neither of which is CSS2 compliant, so the Admin interface reverts back to the default theme with the hacks Judy and I made. It’s not entirely pretty, but it’s still functional and still better than using the standard interface.

But ultimately the biggest problem is that I’ve had to utilize a hack to fix a user interface issue, a hack that will be overwritten with the next WordPress upgrade. The likelihood that the interface will be improved with that upgrade seems slim, given that a request to revert the layout of the Write Post screen was deemed “invalid” by the developers,5 which means that I’ll have to re-hack WordPress after the upgrade.

Okay, I was wrong: the biggest problem is the lack of any kind of official response to the community feedback. Several people have reverted back to WordPress 2.3.3 rather than fight with the new Admin interface, some are simply not upgrading, and I suspect that others may jump to another blogging platform. Me? I’ve got a hack in place that I can live with for now, but I’m only going to re-hack WordPress so many times before I start looking elsewhere.

1. Check out Matthew’s own views on the change in his blog post, WordPress gets it wrong…and goes deaf. [back]
2. Initial response to users by forum moderator Otto42. [back]
3. Yes, I call them “design flaws”, and I will continue to do so. The attitude that the only constructive approach to resolving these issues is to suggest a solution that does not involve reverting back to the WordPress 2.3.3 design because that would constitute a step “backward” is simply pig-headed. The changes to the design could hardly be called a step forward, as they forced efficiency and functionality to take a backseat to making the screen look simple “above the fold”. [back]
4. Also known as “disclosure triangles”. [back]
5. So much for following Otto42’s advice. [back]