This took a bit of patience. For a comparison, here’s a thumbnail of the original:
Basically, this just took a lot of patience to get rid of the phone lines and such. I shot the original from my backyard and in future I intend to do some further manipulations and other cool stuff. But I wanted to put something up for the beginning of the year. Ad Astra!
So we survived the night. The mad hordes banging on the steel shutters disturbed our sleep not at all. This morning we looked out at the devastation and counted ourselves among the fortunate survivors, nevertheless aware that this year—this year—is the one to fear most…
I never make resolutions and usually I don’t even make plans. Over the last many years I’ve found that all I accomplish is an increase in guilt when I fail to live up to my promises to myself. I have enough self-deprecation already, I don’t need to make an annual celebration out of it.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t have things I want to accomplish.
I think I’ll keep most of it to myself. Anyone keeping up with this blog has a pretty good idea what my ambitions are, and they don’t really follow an annual cycle. If there is one thing, though, that needs to change, it is my deep conviction that much of what I wish to do will never happen. I surprised myself between 1990 and 2001 by doing exactly what I had till that decade thought I’d never manage—publish.
The fact is, I have always held back from myself the kind of faith that opens up possibilities. I’m ready to accept successes when they happen, but I always seem to keep myself from believing they will. Sometimes—often—this can result in self-sabotage. Never intentional, always unconscious, but effective all the same. And I don’t know why. Thirty or forty years ago, untried and with nothing to show for any effort, it made a kind of sense. I hadn’t proved anything to myself or anyone else.
Starting in 1980 that changed and I have a track record now. So it’s maybe time to start believing in myself. At least more than I have been. And enjoy it.
So here’s a few things I’d like to try to do this coming year.
One, publish a new novel. At the very least get a contract for one.
Two, take a long vacation or two with Donna and travel to some new places.
Three, maybe actually mount a decent photographic exhibition. It’s long overdue, I have a lot of good work that will, if I don’t do something about it, disappear into oblivion without anyone ever seeing it.
Four…
Well, four, have a better time.
So, irresolute but with purpose, I welcome 2012 and wish you all the very best in the coming 12 months. I’ll keep you posted on how things go.
And thank you for paying attention and giving a damn.
Over the weekend my mother presented us with something that surprised, pleased, slightly embarrassed, and produced a slew of other less-definable reactions. Mothers do this sort of thing, I’m told. We have no children to whom we might have inflicted this on, so I’m unable to say what must go through a parent’s mind on such occasion.
But it’s sweet and important and after my initial “What the hell…” reaction I was really very pleased. She came out with a big file folder full of “stuff” from my grade school years. Among the items were class portraits and…well…
Yes, this is me, circa 1965. Note the three-piece suit? I was very much into my James Bond period at this time and dressing well was part of it. Obviously I didn’t wear a suit every day—this was special—but when I did, I took Sean Connery as my model and did it up right.
Of course, I didn’t really know how to wear it. Posture was still a work-in-progress and my hair has only ever been in control one year, about two years after this when I went through my heavy Brylcreem phase, with pompadour and everything.
And of course note the smirk. I have no idea what I was thinking at the time, to produce such an expression, but doubtless it had little to do with what was going on around me. Doubtless I was trying to exude some semblance of cool, something I’ve never possessed in any measurable degree, but in my own head I certainly was.
Now here is the next year’s version—same school, mind you, Emmaus Lutheran School.
Note the sartorial change. This would have been my Man From U.N.C.L.E. phase—that or Lost In Space—and turtlenecks were the fashion of the moment. Now this I likely would have worn most days. I had some notion then that clothes made the boy, hopefully into the version of the boy desired. Illya Kuryakin cool, someone not to mess with, in the know, capable and maybe a touch dangerous.
Yeah, right, with that face. Dangerous. Uh huh. Cute kid, isn’t he? In 1966 I would have been 11 or 12, depending on the time of year this was taken, and I don’t recall that anymore. I look at that face now and I wonder what happened to that kid. He actually looks happy. And I suppose most of the time I was fairly happy. Not in school, though, but I learned to play a part, and I was playing one there, I’m sure. The pictures were always for that, I remember, the chance to get down in the record what I thought I was and what I wanted to be. It never worked, I always ended up looking like any other hapless kid, goofily unaware, and absurdly pleased to be getting my picture taken.
But that smirk…that, I think, stayed with me. Take a look at this one from almost 30 years later.
A friend shot this for me as a promo image for the writing career I was convinced I was about to have. You can still kind of see that kid there, cocky, a little divorced from reality, and somehow knowing something the photographer or the audience doesn’t. A bit more practiced, obviously, and the freckles are gone. In a way I kind of miss the freckles. (For many years I actually found freckles erotic—I’d had a couple of girlfriends who had them in ample supply, fair-skinned and somehow the freckles just…anyway.)
Now, along with the pictures, I found in my mother’s file a couple of report cards. Mind you, this was from a parochial school, and for the most part I was unsurprised. I was a poor student. Mostly Cs and C-s. The surprising grades were in Religion, which generally were Bs and As. I tell people when it comes up that at one time I was a righteous little christian and evidently it showed in my classroom performance.
What else? There was one composite, one of those sheets with thumbnails of the whole class, and I was asked if I remembered them all. This was the 4th Grade and I did amazingly well. I think I named 80% of them. There were a few I didn’t recognize, and a couple I did but could not put names to.
There were also merit badges and such from my Boy Scout days. I didn’t do well in that, either. I had a merit badge in fire safety, marksmanship, basketweaving (yes, basketweaving—don’t ask), first aid, and a couple others, plus achievement patches from state Jamborees. I’ll tell you about those sometime—the second one I attended was cause for me quitting the scouts.
It felt more like a record of someone else’s life, to be honest. Not me. I’ve worked to distance myself from that kid in a lot of ways. He did not impress me at the time, though he hid it well. But I have to wonder how much is still in here, still influencing, still informing who I am and what people see. I mine my own past for material to build stories with and I have utilized my childhood often. I am still surprised sometimes by what I find.
It seems unlikely I’ll finish another book before this Sunday—if I do it will probably be Stefanie Pintoff‘s second Simon Ziele mystery, A Curtain Falls. I read the first in the series, In The Shadow of Gotham, not too long ago and enjoyed it. It’s a period mystery, set in 1905, and features a progressive police detective from New York—Ziele—who teams up with an amateur criminologist, Alistair Sinclair, who is attempting to construct a science of criminal behavior. Ms. Pintoff avoids many pitfalls by keeping the level of expertise firmly locked in 1905 and Sinclair makes as many if not more wrong conclusions as right, but it was an entertaining piece of work and the evocation of 1905 New York was excellent. Somewhat more engaging than a similarly period series by Rhys Bowen, the Molly Murphy mysteries, which are also rich in period detail, but a bit more of a stretch about an Irish immigrant who falls into the detective business rather by accident and then tries to make a go of it. These are set during and after the McKinley presidency and one book even deals directly with his assassination. For a peek into the more bohemian parts of New York, they are wonderful. Ms Bowen sells the conceit well, but once you put one of them down you have to wonder just how likely it would be.
I found myself reading a lot of mysteries this past year. As I’ve been moving into that genre—two of the novels in the hands of my new agent are mysteries, one a historical, the other contemporary, and I have every intention of continuing them as series (and even the alternate history is largely a mystery thriller)—I decided I needed to become better acquainted with what’s being done. I read a couple of the more obvious ones—Laura Lippmann and Tess Gerritsen made the list, as did a couple of Michael Connelly’s and one James Patterson—but I also found some less obvious ones (at least to me).
One series I’ve become quite taken with is Margaret Maron‘s Deborah Knott series, beginning with Bootlegger’s Daughter. I’ve read eleven of these, all this past year. They are charming. Deborah Knott is the only daughter of a man who was once the biggest bootlegger in North Carolina and adjoining states. He’s out of the business—sort of—and she has become an attorney. By the end of the first novel she’s decided to run for a local judgeship and through the rest of the series she is a judge. This is of the “stumble into murders” kind of cozy mystery writing. It’s as much about the people of the area and the history as it is about solving a murder and the first-person narrative is comfortable and evocative. I found myself devouring one of these over a weekend like popcorn.
I also continued reading Laurie King’s Mary Russell books, ending this year with The Pirate King, which is a comedy. Not quite as successful as the rest of the series, but not bad. I caught up on her Kate Martinelli novels, too.
Among the other mysteries this past year I read another of Cara Black‘s Paris mysteries featuring Aimee LeDuc, private investigator. This one was set on the Ile St. Louis and I read it as much for that as for the mystery, since I have upcoming scenes in one of my novels set there. If you like Paris and you like tough female detectives of the Honey West pedigree, these are worth the time. (I recall the first one of these I read annoyed me because it involved a WWII Occupation mystery. Some of this is becoming a stretch by now—these people are getting ancient and dying and I have to wonder how credible contemporary plots concerning survivors from 1942 can continue to be, but…)
I mentioned I read a James Patterson. I’ve been hearing so much about this guy that I decided I had to read one. I won’t even mention which one, it was terrible from the first chapter. Cliched writing, facile plotting, and predictable…everything. I put it down wondering, what is supposed to be so great about this guy? But he comes out of a marketing background and the sheer volume he produces—much of it now with other writers—must simply overwhelm the public.
However, both Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly did not disappoint, although in Lehane’s case the level of mayhem seemed borderline cartoonish. Nevertheless, he held my attention, quickened my pulse a couple of times. Connelly proved solid, at least in the one I read, Blood Work. In Lehane’s case, I found a curiosity, a historical novel, The Given Day, which is on my list for next year. So as this is about what I read in 2011, you’ll have to wait.
I also continued my Ross McDonald reading with The Drowning Pool. I have a bunch more of these to read, but they are so far all gems. Ross McDonald is I think underappreciated. He was a master of the noirish and hardboiled style. Which segues into a classic I read which I’d never read before, James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce. I don’t know exactly what I expected, based on The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, but it wasn’t this, and it was a surprise. It’s not a mystery—at least not in the detective sense—and yet you can fully feel the noirish elements come through in this story of a woman during the Depression who boots out her philandering husband and then has to make a go of it on her own. She subsequently becomes a very successful restaurateur, but her attempts to live up to the standards her daughter—a true enfant terrible—thinks she should embrace end up bringing her down, even as the daughter grows up to get just about everything she wants. At the end Mildred is back with the husband and you get the sense that she’s going to build it all up again—and this time make it stick, since the daughter has finally been banished. I put it down with a “Jaysus” reaction.
I can also recommend new writer Rebecca Cantrell‘s series, beginning with A Trace of Smoke about a female reporter in pre-war Berlin. This would be a decent companion piece to Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series.
I read my first Val McDermid novel, A Distant Echo, which I highly recommend. It details the consequences of a false police accusation on four friends over the years. They find the corpse of a barmaid in a cemetery, but as the police have no leads going anywhere else these four become the prime suspects. Of course, nothing connects them to her murder, either. But the press gets ahold of it and their lives all take unexpected turns. Then, years later, someone starts killing them and two of them work to solve the crime.
Among the non-mysteries I read this past year were also a couple that I ought to have but never got around to. I read Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations, which is a kind of tour-de-force of kitchen sink writing that ties Bach’s music into the unraveling of the genetic code, all through the lens of a woman trying to solve the puzzle of a scientist who should have been one of the luminaries of the discovery of DNA but instead suffered the end of his career and ignominy. Tight, colorful writing, bizarre connections. It reminded me of Thomas Pynchon, only more controlled and with a readily-discernible plot.
I also read Charlotte’s Web for the first time ever. I am woefully under-read in childrens and YA literature. During the time of my life I should have been reading this, I was deep into comics and then my mother’s book-of-the-month club books, which were all adult. At the same time I discovered science fiction and, well, that’s one category of Jeopardy I always fail. Along with that one I also read—for the first time ever—The Phantom Tollbooth. I doubt this is going to signal a spree of children-and-YA reading, but both of those books were well worth the read, especially the Juster.
I only read one Dickens this year, The Old Curiosity Shop, which has to be one of the most maudlin of his novels. I kept thinking about Little Nell “Will you bloody die already!” But I can see how this would have been a show-stopper when it came out. It may be one of the best treatments from the period of addictive behavior, especially of gambling addiction.
I finally read Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, which has been on my shelf for a decade at least. It’s not an easy one to get into, but once you realize what’s going on—a trio of telepaths who don’t quite realize that this is what they are finding solace with each other through the changing landscape of wartime and post-war London—it is marvelous. Moorcock is deceptive in that he has written some real crap (The Blood Red Game should be avoided). But he is a truly fine stylist and a first-rate imaginative intellect when he chooses to be and Mother London is a fine novel that should be considered a classic.
And speaking of London during the war, I read Connie Willis’s massive opus, both volumes—Blackout and All Clear—and can recommend it to anyone who is seriously into WWII history. She has clearly done her homework and her decision to write about the Blitz from the viewpoint of the residents, albeit using her time traveling historians as vehicles, has produced a fascinating take on London at the time. (I must say, though, that one of Willis’s hallmark plot devices—the continual miscommunication and near misses of people trying to find each other—which has worked effectively in the past, is growing wearisome by now. We get it, reality does not follow a neat plot logic, people fail, messages don’t get delivered, etc etc—but enough is enough already.) This may be the end of the Mr. Dunworthy stories, though. May be. This is time travel, after all.
I read a couple of newer novels that I want to recommend, both more or less science fiction. The first is The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer. This is a steampunk take on The Tempest. Sort of. I don’t wish to get into it too deeply, but I was taken with it primarily because it is steampunk without zombies! I am growing tired of the monster-of-the-week in genre fiction. Vampires, now zombies. Dead things that move around do not fascinate me and too often they entail grue for the sake of grue. Enough already! (I put aside two steampunk novels that looked otherwise intriguing because, within 10 pages, there are zombies.) To me, good steampunk is in the vein of The Difference Engine. And Palmer delivers. The writing is elegant, the world evocative, the symbolism and metaphors nicely deployed. Not the best it could be, but high up on my scale.
The other is by a good friend of mine, Carolyn Ives Gilman. Isles of the Forsaken is a novel with which I’ve been familiar for a long time. It was the first manuscript Carolyn gave me for a critique. It has finally come out—though this is but the first half—and it is wonderful. Set on a world that is like but not like ours, during a period much like the hegemony of Great Britain in the 19th Century, it is about the clash of cultures. Bear in mind, who is the good guy and who is the bad guy is pretty much dependent on the reader’s expectations. This is fine stuff.
I didn’t read much science fiction this past year. Out of the 79 I read cover to cover, only 16 were definitely SF. I can recommend Leviathan Wakes by James S. Correy—a very good thriller, a shitkicker, well-written and realized. First one of a series (of course—I miss they dominance of the stand-alone anymore). I also read Keith Roberts’ Pavane, a classic alternate history, and a fine, fine piece of writing it is.
The other SF novel I’m recommending is Gene Wolfe’s Home Fires. It’s been a while since Gene has done a straightfoward science fiction novel (if any of his work can ever be called straightforward!) and this one is a subtle study of mismatched personalities and desires that will not be thwarted. It’s love story with a relativistic time-dilation element complicating it. Now, I tend to like almost anything Gene does, so take this recommendation in that context, but I think it may be one of his best. He has pulled back from the epic vistas of some of his earlier SFnal efforts, like The Book of the Long Sun and such and centered this through one viewpoint character and closely-controlled scenario that is almost claustrophobic compared to his other work. But it works.
I read some flops, but I won’t go into them here—except for the comments on Patterson above—because I’m not sure if the books were really bad or if they just bounced off. (One of them I thought a derivative bit of schlock, phoned in by an author who has done excellent work in the past, but just took a stroll on this one.) There was another that was a convoluted bit of experimental strain that couldn’t decide if it was a mystery, Kafkaesque, Pynchonesque, or an exercise in abstruse symbolism.
I will read less next year. I already know that. I have several bricks on the pile that will require long hours and extra attention. At least, it is my plan to get through some of them, but we’ll see how that works out.
Among the others that I enjoyed and can recommend I offer: Counting Heads by David Marusek, Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss, The Gift by Lewis Hyde, On Mozart by Anthony Burgess, and Birth of the Modern by Paul Johnson. Allen Steele has a new one out, Hex, set in his Coyote universe and well worth the read. Scott Philips also has a new one out, The Adjustment, which is a fine example of Scott’s idiosyncratic noir style.
Notice that the book links included all go to Left Bank Books. I’m going to be doing that from now on, at least where I don’t link directly to an author’s page. Support your local bookstore. You’ll miss them when they’re gone, so don’t let them be gone. Believe me, there really isn’t much Amazon can offer you that a good independent bookstore can’t, and that sucking sound of local tax revenue leaving your community and your state is the sound that accompanies our current fiscal woes.
End of sales pitch. I’ll talk about the other things in 2011 later.
We didn’t get around to sending out cards this year. It’s been busy and in some ways not particularly festive, but we’ve had worse years, so there really is no excuse. Time just got away from us.
Which happens more and more lately. So in lieu of a card (which we promise to send out next year) I thought I’d post this and for those of you who come by, we can wish you well and hope for a terrific next year.
We had Changes of Great Significance happen in 2011. I signed with a new agent(s) and promptly spent a good chunk of the year rewriting a pair of novels at their requests, which is a good thing. The attention they have given me, shown my projects, has increased my optimism and I now have real cause to believe this writing thing will work out. For Jen and Stacia I am most grateful and wish them particularly wonderful holidays.
The two novels in question are much improved.
Donna is free from a job that was slowly killing her. Money really isn’t everything, not when it comes at the cost of health and well-being and the time to do anything worthwhile with it. We were able to put enough in the bank that she can be a bit choosy in her next job and I can still concentrate on my writing. For now.
I acquired a new camera and have begun—tentatively—to do photography again.
Most of our friends are doing okay, some better than others, but none of them are in dire straits. We haven’t seen enough of most of them. (Sorry.)
We didn’t take the trips we’ve been intending to take—but that’s been true for a few years now. Perhaps with the time we now have we can do that.
I started working part-time for Left Bank Books, doing a kind of goodwill public outreach task to bring people into the stores. I have no idea if my efforts had anything to do with this, but they showed a sharp increase over last year, especially in the downtown store (which is the one for which I was hired to act) and this is a Good Thing. The people who work there are great, every one of them, and now that I’ve seen it from the inside, so to speak, and I can say that a special thing is going on there.
I read a bunch of good books this year, which I’ll talk about in January (still reading) and we ate some great food, made some good music, smiled a lot, and have come through in good spirits.
We’re both going to the gym now, something we haven’t done together in many years.
It’s been okay. It will be better. So while I apologize for the lack of a card in the mail, please accept this instead and know that we wish you all well and look forward to another year on a planet with such fine people living on it.
Be well.
This is just very yeah.
When asked why I write, I have many answers, but this captures the entire inner gestalt of why.
Not getting to live all the lives I wanted to. I know what she means. I assumed at one time I would be a writer, an actor, a musician, a producer-director, and all the other things that attach to these ambitions. In a way, I did get to do them, but not the way I thought I would.
Anyway, this is marvelous.
This is an unscientific response to a ridiculous claim. Rick Santorum, who wishes to be the next Bishop In Charge of America (or whatever prelate his church might recognize) recently made the claim that Gay couples are going to destabilize the family in America in order to accommodate their lifestyle.
We’ve all been hearing this claim now for, oh, since gays stopped sitting by and letting cops beat them up on Saturday nights without fighting back. Ever since Gay Pride. Even on my own FaceBook page I had someone telling me I was blinded by the “Gay Agenda” and that the country was doomed—that because of the Gay Agenda little children were being taught how to use condoms in school and this—this—would bring us all to ruin.
So….okay. How?
If we collectively allow homosexuals to marry each other, how does that do anything to American families that’s not already being done by a hundred other factors?
I’ll tell you what destablilizes families. And I’m not genius here with a brilliant insight, this is just what anyone can see if they look around and think a little bit.
Families are destabilized over money. Mainly lack of it, but sometimes too much will do it, too. But lack of it will do a number on a family worse than almost anything else. We’ve all grown up hearing the “love is all you need” line that never seems to run out of gas that a lot of people find out fairly quickly once they start living on their own is patent bullshit. It is true that in order to have a fulfilling life, you need love. But in order for love to last, you need everything else. Housing, food, clothing, some degree of security, a smidgen of leisure activity. Without money—someone’s—you don’t have all that.
And that love thing, heterosexually? Children tend to result from one of the basic activities, and they cost a lot of money. A lot. Hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime, and the more you have, the more money you need to maintain a level standard of living, and believe me, this is not cynicism, this is the way of human nature, when your standard of living erodes, this is not the source of great joy. It becomes a grinding, frustrating daily chore to make due with less.
Love has a very difficult time surviving such stress. It can be done, it is done, millions of people probably manage it, but one should envy them their devotion rather than assume something is broken inside all those who can’t manage it.
Money aside, children will destabilize a family. Let’s be real for minute, not everyone is constitutionally able to be a parent. Living day in day out with one other person can be a challenge, even if that person is an adult. If you find that hard, then adding more to the mix, especially if they are not adults, is probably a recipe for craziness. While lack of material resource exacerbates this condition, it is not necessary for it to be the case. Some of us are fortunate that we recognized early on our own unsuitability to be parents, for many people, riding on the promises of the romantic fairytale we grew up with, this fact is not discovered until it is too late and there are children who, while perhaps fine people in and of themselves, nevertheless drive the insanity meter up and up and up.
Was a time it didn’t matter. We had no choice. People got married and no matter what their circumstances, they didn’t have the option of divorcing and starting over, they were stuck. We have in many ways romanticized this fact as some indication that modern people lack values. Nonsense. If they could have, our forebears likely would have divorced at as high a rate as we do.
Why? Because like it or not, people change. We are not the same today as we were ten or twenty years ago. It is the height of unreasonableness to think we could or should be.
But that doesn’t mean the changes automatically drive us apart. What it means is that when we get together in the first place we didn’t pay enough attention to who we were then to realize that in five or ten years certain traits were going to drive us or our partners nuts.
Which brings us to one of the most fundamental reasons families fail. Basic incompatibility. Let’s be honest—that is what we’re trying for here—there are, have been, and will be many people who pass through our lives with whom we want to spend time with. Some of those people, the time spent will be intense. That doesn’t mean they will be lifelong arrangements. Shall I be blunt? Okay. There will be many people with whom we will want to have sex with, but that doesn’t mean we’d make good longterm partners. Too many people confuse lust with love.
Worse—too many people confuse love with like. Longterm is not sustained by love—love is a peak experience and the high is not sustainable. It may come in waves. We may “fall in love” with our partner time and time again, but there will be troughs, and in those periods it is not love that carries us but like. Friendship. Too often no one tells us this. Your life partner, if you’re going to have one, has to be your best friend. You have to like them. A lot. It’s different than love. Love is great, but the fires die down. The embers rest in how much we like each other.
Finally, though, some relationships have a natural lifespan and it is silly to expect them to shamble on past their demise. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it’s usually only one not both who realize this. But it’s true and it would be wrong to insist on maintaining something that has died.
If you have built a family on the basis of eternally staying together, you may find that all these factors will bring about a lot of hurt and destabilization. What destabilizes beyond a fundamental lack of the resources to maintain is a violation of expectation.
Now. In all that, where’s this bullshit that allowing gay people to marry will impact your marriage? How does that work? I get the impression that Mr. Santorum thinks that expanding the marriage franchise will somehow debase it and make it something worth too little for people to want to participate in.
But if that’s true, then it is already worthless. If the idea of it is that fragile, then preventing gays from marrying will make no difference, it’s already trashed.
But if it was worthless, then why would gays want to do it?
Mr. Santorum most likely wants to see people forced to remain married. He likely wants to see the end of divorce. In order to do that, he has to wage war on freedom of choice.
Everyone’s freedom of choice.
The fact is, factors that have little to do with venerable institutions and traditions work to destabilize relationships. Making the claims he does shows that he doesn’t want to talk about those things. Because talking about the realities opens the door to all the other things he has come out against to be discussed openly. People aren’t getting divorced now because gays live the way they do. They get divorced because they can’t sustain their marriage—because there’s no money or they should not have become parents or the dreams of one or both partners have changed or they frankly should never have gotten married in the first place. It’s what is between them that is at fault, if fault there is, and the circumstances in which they live.
On the other hand, what exactly does he mean by destabilize? Because there are many families that have suffered divorce that continued to be families. The new mates were added in, a larger pool of siblings was created, Christmas cards and birthday wishes go out to a bigger list, and while mom and dad may not be together anymore, no one is fighting and everyone talks and sustains each other. The family changed shape, it didn’t collapse. Families survive, albeit in different configurations. Divorce doesn’t destroy the family, it causes it to evolve.
Oops. That’s another thing Santorum doesn’t believe in. Evolution. No wonder he doesn’t recognize what I’ve just described.
Not this morning. It’s hard, I know, because so much is going on that I could comment about, but…
The novel revision I mentioned a couple of posts back is done. Done and at my agent. I did a top to bottom revision, adding in the new material that desperately wanted to be included, and except for yesterday it all went remarkably well.
Yesterday, though…yes…Murphy was in residence.
We went to the gym and then Donna had an errand to run, so I descended to the dungeon office and began. I’d already started the final work on the last chapter a couple days earlier, but I had Other Things To Do on both Tuesday and Wednesday that kept me away. That was fine, it gave my subconscious time to work out some kinks and so I was more than ready to work on the remainder.
It was good stuff. I say that because much of it is gone. I practically rewrote the entirety of the last chapter and I was very carefully laying in the new material and deleting the old as I went. But I became caught up in the work—it happens—and neglected to hit SAVE as often as I should. (Yes, I have a timed save, but it was not quickly enough to prevent what happened.)
Revisions complete, I had a large chunk of old text to delete and I proceeded to highlight it for destruction and—
It crashed. Don’t know why or how but suddenly WordPerfect complained (it never does this!) and shut down. When I rebooted I found everything intact, but now I had this little box telling me that since it hadn’t exited properly, in order to preserve the back-up I had to open it and rename it, which I tried to do, but something was preventing it from “taking” so I tried cutting and pasting to get the changes into the original and then it crashed again and—-
The long and the short of it is, I lost my revisions on the last chapter. All of them.
By which time Donna was home and I was fuming. No, that’s not quite it. I was in a blood-red, Conanesque rage, stomping around the house, yelling, cursing computers and the spawn that created them, almost but not quite punching things.
We had lunch. I returned to the deeps, sucked it up, and started over.
In all this, I had forgotten the dog. Coffey still needed her walk and I forgot. I’m a bad owner. Donna came down and asked if I wanted her to take Coffey and after a few minutes of guilt-ridden negotiation, she did.
And I finished the last chapter.
Then I went on to make the final corrections to the epilogue, saved the puppy, and sent it to my agent. (And then another weird thing happened to it, but that’s all straightened out now, so never mind.)
When I began the revisions, the manuscript was just a hair under 90 thousand words. It’s gained 4,000 and a lot more cohesion. In my humble opinion, it works now, whereas before it merely sufficed.
You might get the impression from the foregoing that I don’t enjoy my work. Quite the contrary, the reason I tolerate these little instances of Murphyesque meltdown it because I love it. I slept the sleep of the righteous last night, and this morning I am thinking back over the work and smiling. Though I know I have at least one more pass to get through with it, when Stacia gets done making all her notes and edits, at this point I am pleased with the product.
What I now have to do, which is long, long overdue, is clean the dungeon office. I have piles of stuff everywhere. It’s been a few years since I’ve done a really thorough cleaning in here, which includes new bookshelves, sorting through notes that have lost all significance, finding things I’ve forgotten I misplaced, and just generally making the room livable. When I work on a novel, there is a kind of conservation of chaos at work—as order increases in the story upon which I labor, a commensurate increase in disorder occurs in the immediate environment. So as the novel nears completion, its maximum point of order, the room falls apart in near ruin.
In the last few years, I have written one and a half new novels and rewritten two from top to bottom, without pause. You can imagine the task before me.
So…is Gingrich still the GOP frontrunner?
It’s Hallowe’en. No news to anyone, we’ve been immersed in it for weeks now. But this year I’ve been doing a lot of introspective reminiscing and I’ve come to realize that Hallowe’en should always have been my favorite festive occasion.
See, I’ve been wearing costumes all my life.
The last time I went out on a Hallowe’en night in costumes I was 14. A little old you say? I agree, but I wasn’t doing the trick’or’trreating, I was being part of the security detail accompany a group of littler kids. Nevertheless, I always liked getting into costume, into a character, and I went as a town sheriff, complete with a six-gun on my hip. That would be questionable today, especially as the weapon I wore was a Mattel Fanner Fifty, which looked real. Except for some high-end models, toy guns don’t look real anymore, and I understand the thinking behind it. Even when I was a kid there were incidents of robberies done at (toy) gun-point, because for over a decade toy companies, following the Mattel model, made more and more realistic guns. The Mattels were all like three-quarter size, but in the heat of the moment that’s not going to count for much. So gradually, authenticity yielded to social reality, and now you have all these bizarre looking things out of bad SciFi movies with tell-tale orange tips screaming TOY!
Anyway, I went out for a couple of hours, acting as protector of the smaller children, wearing a beard made from burnt cork, a dime-store Stetson, and my six-shooter slung low on the hip.
I loved it.
But you get older, some things that were adorable at eight are just weird at eighteen. Going to dress-up Hallowe’en parties in my adolescence and early adulthood were not that common. Besides I lost all my toy guns.
(I had a double-holster set of Mattel “shootin-shell” pistols, black holsters, silvered with fake ivory grips. They were wonderful! You could get bullets for them with pressure-plate releases on the back of the spring-loaded cartridges that, when the hammer struck, launched little plastic shells about five or six feet. I was rough on my toys, always was, and eventually the grips came off, they broke, they ended up neglected and one day tossed. Here’s a picture of the set:
I loved that set. Outrageously expensive now. Here is a site with all the Mattel western toys of the period.)
Even before that, though, I used to get creative. When first introduced to Hallowe’en, the costumes were less than wonderful. Basic sized pull-overs, like jump suits, tied in the back, and a molded plastic mask with large eye holes. The fabric was cheap, the costumes usually ill-fitting, and almost always ending up in the trash. The last one of those I had was a Superman costume when I was eleven—it was a little embarrassing because they insisted on tricking it out with glitter on the chest sigil and there was no symbol on the cape. No matter what, you didn’t look like Superman.
(Yes, I know—eleven? Seriously? What can I say? I prolonged childhood as long as I could. In some ways, I’m still a kid.)
Childhood for me was a series of roles in which I would immerse myself. Anything, I suppose, to escape the prison of my own self. Despite my “delicacy” I was really invested in being a soldier. One year I even had “real” fatigues. Never had a steel helmet, but I recall the Sixties being a very cool time for toys like this. I had a G.I. helmet with the mesh for stuffing camouflage in—leaves and the like—which my mother hated because I tracked debris into the house after a hard day fighting Nazis or Japanese. I had a real cartridge belt with canteen, the envy of the neighborhood, and a couple of very cool rifles. I had one of the first battery-powered M-14s in the neighborhood. This one actually made a very neat sound, a heavy thum-thum-thum as the tip of the barrel moved in and out (in what now I can see was a rather disturbing sexual motion, but then it was all about killing bad guys).
I took on a James Bond persona for a few years—my best dressed time in childhood, even my hair was perfectly groomed (lot of Brylcream) and I had a couple of automatic pistols—but never a shoulder holster. Awkward when trying to carry a replica Luger in the small inside pocket of a sport coat. It kept falling out every time I bent over.
Much of that faded through high school, but by then I was trying to write. I look at it now and I see that I never stopped putting on costumes, only now I do it in my stories. Try on a character, go through an adventure, be the cool secret agent or starship trooper or whatever.
We dabbled briefly in costuming when we started attending SF conventions, but drifted away from it fairly quickly. That wasn’t the aspect of the community that really attracted us, though I confess to a deep admiration for the skill and dedication some costumers bring to their passion.
But tonight we will sort of dress up for the kids coming to the house to receive their booty and admire and enjoy their glee in being Something Else for the night. Looking back, I admit that sometimes I got a little weird with some of it, but in the long run it did me no harm and probably a great deal of good to try out different personae. And I haven’t actually stopped. Just that the wardrobe is more expensive now—and fits better.
Have a boo-tiful evening.
I have two things to talk about that are related by the slenderest of threads. Bear with me.
First I’d like to say something about how marvelous is the age in which we live, at least from the perspective of someone who has now lived in a couple of “ages” since arriving on this planet in 1954.
A short while ago I had lunch. While having lunch I like to watch something, so I popped the DVD of The Right Stuff into my player and settled back to my roast beef and movie. While watching, it occurred to me how blase I’ve become at this technology.
See, growing up, movies were a Big Deal. My parents went every other week at least and took me. Going To The Movies holds a special, nostalgic place in my memory. It was a shared event, but more than that it was in fact An Event. TV was there, sure, but it was crappy and even at age four I kind of recognized the difference. Movies were Big, they were Special, they were Unique—and they went away. Though it was dependable. The first run theaters got the new films and ran them for a week, maybe two. The next batch were due in and they swapped them out, so the films went to the cheaper neighborhood theaters, usually only for a week. Plus, these were double features. You sat in the theater for up to four and half hours to see two movies. Before I was born, it would be two movies, plus—cartoons, a short subject, maybe a news reel. Going to movies was a significant amount of time and a major outing.
We brought our own snacks. Mom would make up some popcorn or put a brown bag of candy together, and we might—might—bring a bottle of soda to share. The concession stand was more than we could afford usually.
And after the movies left the theaters, they were gone. If you hadn’t seen them when they came out, during the three or four weeks they were in town at one or another theater, you were s.o.l. Some of the bigger hits might be rereleased a year or two later and a few films were perennially rereleased, but the vast majority did not come back. You had to remember them.
Television changed that somewhat when networks started leasing movies to show at certain low-traffic times, and then in the late Sixites and early Seventies there were a variety of movie programs—Movie of the Week, Thursday Night At the Movies, A Picture For A Sunday Afternoon. Suddenly all these old films started turning up again, and of course after ten P.M. local networks aired a lot of B pictures or films from the Thirties and Forties, but you had to stay up for them, and you never knew what you would get. (Some of my favorite memories with my dad come from Friday nights, sitting up late, watching some of these movies, some of which were unintentional howlers at which we’d poke fun.)
A lot of people today probably don’t see the wonder in being able to go to a store or online and buy a film and watch it at home. VCRs didn’t come in till the late Seventies (and the early models weren’t great), but it ushered in an age of comparative cultural wealth. The idea, when I grew up, that I could actually own one of these movies, for myself, and watch it when I chose to…
You forget occasionally to sit back and appreciate what we now have. It is amazing—the technology, yes, but the fact that I can drop a disc in a machine and watch The Maltese Falcon or Gone With The Wind or The Right Stuff whenever I please is…incredible.
That’s the good part.
The other amazing thing is this vast and complex online community—several communities, actually, some overlapping—that we have with more ease than it used to be to make a long distance phone call. It’s amazing. I can communicate with people I would never have known existed in one of those previous “ages” and talk about things only a rare handful of people I ever met face to face would even have been interested in before. Like-minded, like-enthused, like-whatever people around the globe who can now “chat” online.
And with whom one can trip over an area of sensitivity so fast and so inexplicably that it makes your head spin. I have recently had this shoved in my face just how easily some folks take offense and how impossible it can be to explain yourself or extricate yourself. Unless you want to be an ass, it is often better to simply leave the group in question rather than see the crap continually stirred.
But because it is so easy to leave, not to mention remain anonymous, I think many people never learn the nuances of real interaction. Distance used to serve a vital social function, namely keeping people apart by virtue of the difficulty of communicating. Letter-writing requires thought—the trouble you have to go through to draft the letter, address it, go to the post office, etc. I think tends to make people more thoughtful and thorough. It’s not like a casual conversation, which the ease of communication has sometimes turned the most serious conversations into because it is difficult to tell when it is time to stop cracking wise.
Further, though, once a foul has been made, it doesn’t go away. It perpetuates, spreads, and suddenly people all over may know all about the reputation you have earned through misadventure.
Part of the problem—a big part, I think—is the fact of the words remaining behind after the conversation is over. Spoken conversation has a half-life, very short, and events carry people past ill-considered phrasing or cliches, aided by the visuals, the body language and facial expression. But when you write something down, it has weight, and online exchanges acquire significance never intended for a brief exchange. You can consider the words, read them over again and again, and derive meaning and intent whether it’s there or not.
The wonderfulness of our enabling technologies render us lazy, allow us to take for granted things which in an earlier time, with less speed and availability, would not have been so poorly used.
So instead of a thoughtless sentence being immediately apologized for, brushed aside, and forgotten, the offending sentence lingers, a solid legacy that reminds and continues to irritate. The down-side of modern ease.
Part of the pleasure of all these things should be from not taking them for granted, from a near conscious recognition of just how cool things are. On the one hand, we maybe have to grow thicker skins—certainly we have to learn new interpretive skills—and on the other maybe let our skins thin a little so we can sense the amazing gift much of this world is. Hard to know where to apply what and for a whole generation or two there is the perfectly understandable if annoying question, “What’s the big deal?”
Unfortunately, if you have to ask…