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November 2024

Anyone who writes a dystopian story hopes that it will never come true. A few years ago, my novella, “Wasting Water”, was published in Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change. It is a coming of age story of a young girl growing up in a world where continuous drought has ravaged the interior of the United States. This was my vision of a possible world where climate change had gone unchecked. When I wrote that story, I believed we could reverse the dangerous direction of our activities that contribute to this possible future. Sadly, the people on our planet may now have gone beyond the point of being able to reverse the effects of climate change and the deadly results of it. I am not alone is seeing the disaster unfolding.

The World Wild Life Fund says this: “More frequent and intense drought, storms, heat waves, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and warming oceans can directly harm animals, destroy the places they live, and wreak havoc on people’s livelihoods and communities.”

The United Nations says: “Climate change is the single biggest health threat facing humanity. Climate impacts are already harming health, through air pollution, disease, extreme weather events, forced displacement, pressures on mental health, and increased hunger and poor nutrition in places where people cannot grow or find sufficient food.”

This November there was an election. In the past, our new president-elect has stated that climate change is a hoax. He appears to have no intention of curbing the human activities that contribute to this undeniable future. Ironically, the very things he has promised to do, curbing immigration into the U.S. and reducing consumer costs, are the very things that a warming world will aggravate.

Climate refugees are fleeing places that can no longer support them through farming or that are so ravaged by extremes of weather that their homes are being destroyed.  Their numbers are increasing, and they will continue to flee to anywhere they can survive. They believe one of those safe places is the United States. Whatever measures will be taken to try to stop them, there will be more and more of them because they have no place else to go. Unfortunately for us all, the U.S. is becoming a place of doubtful refuge. Rising sea level, hurricanes of unprecedented severity, wild fires, floods, and droughts are causing people within the United States also to become climate refugees.

As for reducing consumer costs, especially the cost of groceries and housing, the new administration will have to deal with the challenges of food production becoming increasingly compromised by changing climate and the threats to housing in places ravaged by floods, storms, and fires . All of this is already observable.

The results of climate change increasingly threaten building and maintaining housing.  Even if a house can be built, no insurance company will take on the risk because it is too high, making getting a mortgage impossible. This may be a minor concern compared to the end of life on the planet, but for some people, this is such an urgent issue that the survival of all living things is secondary. That species are dying–the last white rhino died this week–and other species, both of plants and of animals, are declining in number or are vanishing, is less important than affordable housing. One’s own survival instinctively comes first, but the death of our fellow creatures is a harbinger of our own demise.

I don’t want my dystopian story to come true, but I’m afraid it has already begun. Perhaps, during this National Write a Novel Month,  I can write a new story. One where people change their behaviors to try to pull Earth out of the fire. Where people realize the world is fragile and full of humans and animals who deserve to live their lives without hate, fear, starvation, or extinction. Where there will be no wars across the globe causing terrible suffering. The role of science fiction has so often been to inspire hope. And perhaps even change. It may be too late, but I can’t give up. I owe it to my planet and all who live here.

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Are We There Yet?

Sometimes I wonder how you know when you have arrived. Who is a writer and who is a poser, who is an author and who is a writer? How much difference is there? A writer writes, of course, but an author is published. But how published, where, how often, and how successfully?

Barbara Cartland, the romance novelist, wrote 723 books including 160 that were published posthumously. But she pales in comparison to Maria Lopez, a Spanish writer who has written more than 4,000 novels. And what about translations? In 2006, Guinness World Records named L. Ron Hubbard the world’s most published and translated author, with 1,084 works in 71 languages. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has been translated into 85 languages, some with fewer than a million speakers. I’d say those folks have arrived.

About that posthumous publishing. If you are mostly known for things published after your death, are you a successful author? Emily Dickinson wrote throughout her life, but her only publications during her lifetime were one letter and 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems. The first volume of her poetry was published four years after her death, but a lot of her work was heavily edited because of her unique writing style. Since 1890, Dickinson has remained continuously in print, but it wasn’t until 1955 when Thomas H. Johnson published Dickinson’s Complete Poems that her original style was on display. Still, she’s is counted as a success by most everyone.

What about self published books? Are those worthy of being considered  successful? Reedsy Discovery has a pretty convincing list, with Paradise Lost, The Martian, and, for better or worse, Fifty Shades of Grey being among the publications we might all agree are successful in one way or another.

So, what about that writing? Do you have to make your living at it to be considered successful? Anthony Trollope worked a full time job as a civil servant but wrote 1000 words every day before breakfast. He wrote a heck of a lot, too: 47 novels in addition to short stories, essays, and plays. He was one of the most respected authors in Victorian England, all while working a day job. Stephen King spent some of his early writing career teaching, Geoffrey Chaucer was a politician, and the list goes on. Still, successful authors all.

If you are published, is someone willing to give you money for your work? What does that success look like? I discovered it can vary a lot. You’d think really prolific writers would make a lot of money, but that isn’t necessarily true. Prolific Stephen King is worth $500 million, while cartoonists Matt Groening (“The Simpsons”) is worth $600 million, and Jim Davis (Garfield) $800 million. The ridiculously prolific James Patterson clocks in at $800 million. J. K. Rowling, with fewer books but perhaps more movie deals, as of 2024, was estimated to be worth $1 billion. She is surpassed by Elisabeth Badinter, a French writer, philosopher, and historian, regarded as the richest author in the world ($1.8 billion). Better known in Europe than in the U.S., she  writes non-fiction, not novels or cartoons. You would have thought that someone as prolific as Barbara Cartland would have been pretty rich, but after her death, her estate found itself with a final value, after all the bills were paid, of $0. She’s in good company. H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde made money from their writing, but all died poor. Still, they are all regarded as successful in their craft. To my mind, if anyone is willing to hand you some money for the writing you did, that is success.

Let’s go back to the question of how much you have to publish to be considered a successful author. Harper Lee, who worked as an airline reservationist until she quit to work full time on her novel, famously only published one book, To Kill a Mockingbird. But when your one novel wins a Pulitzer Prize, that seems pretty successful. She finally did publish another book 55 years after the first one.

It’s not so very easy to know when you have succeeded. Success can take a lot of forms.  According to various dictionaries, you are an author if you create something literary with the intention that it will be published some day. By this definition, you just have to create to be an author however that creation is handled after the work is done. (But with editing being what it is, is it ever done? That’s for another blog post.)

I’m thinking if I keep writing, keep attempting to get more things published, and maybe die with a whole lot of stuff ready for my family to cash in on, I’m bound to be able to claim I have arrived in the hallowed halls of authors. In the mean time, maybe it’s time to focus on those 1000 words a day before breakfast.

Image: One thousand words before breakfast. By Marilyn Evans

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Vicarious

At a certain age, you’re supposed to make a bucket list–stuff you’re going to do before you kick the bucket. Then, later in life, you start doing the things on that list. Once upon a time, welding and juggling were on mine, but I’m not so interested in those things now. Not to say I won’t give them a try (again) at some point, but they are nowhere near the top.

Also at a certain age, you begin to realize there are things you are just never going to do. Still, you may feel like you’ve made enough of an effort that you can count those things as close enough.  I’ll never be in the Olympics, but I have managed to do all the things that are part of the modern pentathlon; that is to say, over the course of my lifetime, I have been a pretty good swimmer, I’ve been a runner, and a pretty good shot with a pistol, I’ve ridden my horse over some largish jumps, and I was a passable foil fencer in my younger days.  Among  other common aspirations, I’ve acted in a couple of plays, and been on television more than once. I’ve shaken hands with some famous people, most notably to me, a Nobel laureate. I’ve written some articles, novels, and short stories. But the time has come to admit, some things I’ll never do, like through hiking one of the three great trails: the Pacific Crest, the Continental Divide, and the Appalachian (although I have at least set foot on the PCT, a bit of which is pictured here).  It’s not looking good for writing a screen play either, but there’s still time.

My list is pretty long, and some things I may still accomplish, like seeing an active volcano and a glacier (visiting Iceland looks like the best bet for knocking out both of those). Other things just aren’t in the cards. A photography safari in Africa is looking iffy, although if I go to South Africa I can also visit penguins, so two tick marks on the list at once.

The good news is, I can experience a whole lot of bucket list things vicariously. We’re all vicarious athletes when the Olympics are broadcast. Thanks to You Tube, I can join through hikers on the three great trails and more trails besides.  I visit with hundreds of cats on line, solve mysteries through books, do all manner of strange things through podcasts, visit the far reaches of the world through documentaries. But best of all, I write my ambitions, fantasies, dreams.

I always thought I would live on a farm. That didn’t work out, but through my stories, some of my characters have. While the idea of owning a little shop very much appealed to me at one time, I know next to nothing about retail, but one of my characters does and is pretty successful at running her little store.

Writing lets me live my life vicariously through my characters without having to personally suffer all the things I have to put them through to make the story interesting. Researching what I dream of and desire, then living out the fantasy of that life or adventure vicariously through my characters is being a lovely way to round out my bucket list.

Image: The Pacific Crest Trail. By Marilyn Evans

 

 

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Garden Update, August 2024

We’re a bit more than half way through the summer, and it’s about time to let you know what the garden is doing. Short answer, amazing! At least compared to some years.

Early on I had a small but steady supply of blueberries. AND! Even a few gooseberries before the birds wised up. No mulberries this year, but I hold out hope for next year. Not sure about the potatoes yet, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have a good crop.

I have chard! Yes, huge red-stemmed, green-leafed chard. And a sane amount of cucumbers, one at a time, large and lovely and very tasty. No need to chase down people to give them away or leave them by night on the neighbors’ doorsteps. You will notice in the photo that the cucumber had a girdle mark–they keep insisting in growing into the netting.

The tomatoes have been amazing, but in spite of my best efforts, something is getting inside the netting and eating a few. As long as they don’t take more than their fair share, I’m good with that. I tried growing bok choi and am amazed both at how well it has done and how tasty it has been in my stir fries. I’ve even frozen some for the winter along with a good supply of the tomatoes to go into stews and soups and such like.

As for the less than glorious, the ears of corn were very teeny tiny, but still tasty. The green beans were few and far between, but still okay. The eggplants have been small, but nice in a ratatouille.

The jury is still out on the leeks. The pumpkin and cantaloupe vines are making blossoms, but I have yet to see much in the way of potential fruits. We’ll see. I’m letting the onions and garlic take their time. I’m hoping for a nice harvest someday soon. And the herbs have been, as always, a delight.

I had some nuts on the European hazel tree, but I’m pretty sure some people of the squirrel persuasion relieved me of that concern. However, the American hazel bushes have nuts that might actually become an edible sometime in the near future. And, of course, there are a gazillion black walnuts. Everywhere. More than even the squirrels can eat.

And finally, the wild flower bird and bee garden was a bit weak, but a huge stand of volunteer sun flowers (from the bird feeder fall out) made up the difference. My accidental tribute to the embattled Ukrainians.

In all, I’d say it has been a pretty good year, thanks, I suspect, to the early and often rainfall. Less intense heat would have made weeding a better time, but I’m not complaining. Much. Not with fat, juicy tomatoes like these.

Image: A representative sample of my harvest this year. By Marilyn Evans

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More Bingeing

I’ve said before in these posts that I’m lousy at delayed gratification and that binge watching television programs is a wonderful way to satisfy my intemperate lusts. I just finished watching all sixteen seasons of Criminal Minds over the course of the last year. That is a lot of mass murderers. I’ve slowed to a crawl for the rebooted series, now called Criminal Minds: Evolution. I’m watching television more than usual because I’m not reading much fiction at the moment. When I’m working hard on a novel, I prefer to read nonfiction to keep from stealing too much from whoever I’m reading.

Some of my favorite authors were/are wonderfully prolific. When I discovered Robert B. Parker, I cold-bloodedly found every book he had ever written (at the time), and with the help of inter-library loan and honest to goodness brick and mortar stores, read them in order. When he died, his greatest character, the private detective Spencer, had to live on in the hands of other writers. This seems to happen a lot in science fiction with other writers writing in the style of. Or in the case of mystery writer Dick Frances, his son took up the reins. Fortunately for me, Lindsey Davis, the creator of the Didius Falco and the Flavia Albia mysteries, is still alive and writing. My other current favorite, C.J. Box, creator of the Joe Pickett novels is also writing away, and I have a lot of reading ahead of me to catch up. But until I finish The Siege of Zarmina, no fiction for me.

To keep my brain busy while I’m between writing sessions, I’m indulging my new addiction, podcasts. Between If Books Could Kill and Maintenance Phase, along with a few others, these keep me company when I’m walking around the neighborhood getting in my steps or when I’m sweating away in the garden. As for nonfiction reading material, I’m currently enjoying The Way of the Hermit: My Incredible 40 Years Living in the Wilderness, by Ken Smith with Will Millard.  It’s a wonderful book, but I had a hard time acquiring it–the publisher can’t seem to keep it on the shelves, and the library didn’t even have it in yet but already had seventeen people on the waiting list. I did finally get the last copy at my favorite Barnes and Noble. Ah, to have a book so successful.

With any luck, Zarmina*, my third novel, will be done and ready for beta readers before the end of July. That’s the goal. In the mean time, I’m still waiting for the contract to come from the publisher who expressed interest in The Gingerbread House.  After that, a short break–probably to read a whole bunch of mysteries–then on to finishing Wickham’s Daughter, then starting the sequel to The Gingerbread House. Then maybe finish Head of the Family and take a serious stab at Jocasta of Thebes. Ambitious, I know, but I’m not getting any younger.

*The working title for The Siege of Zarmina has always been The Iliad in Space.

Image: Bingeing on nonfiction and podcasts between writing sessions. By Marilyn Evans

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In Two Thousand Years

My husband and I like watching Time Team, a British television program where a group of specialists swarm into a place somewhere in England, Scotland, Wales, and occasionally other places to spend three days trying to figure out what was going on in the past. Using written records, if there are any, and excavating with a series of trenches to find artifacts, they are able to tell from what they literally dig up what the people were doing in that spot and when. Some items they uncover are indicative of specific times and situations. If Samian pottery is found, there were some well-heeled Romans or Romanized Brits hanging around. If there are flint blades and axes, it’s prehistoric. Glazed floor tiles indicate medieval buildings, often churches.

I used to wonder what the archaeologists in the future will identify as our defining artifacts–early 21st century. When I went for a walk on Earth Day, I finally figured it out. Armed with a trash bag and latex gloves, I went around my neighborhood and the park picking up trash. The biggest contributor to the hoard I accumulated were fast food containers including cups and plastic single use liquor bottle. Those little plastic bottles show up everywhere. They are washed down the gutters into the sewer system then into the water ways and the ocean. They are sold in ten packs or individually. They are everywhere–liquor stores, grocery stores, convenience stores. And the plastic lasts forever.

I’ll admit, I’m mystified by why people throw trash out of their cars and onto the ground in the park’s parking lot when there is a trash can ten feet away. I don’t understand why it is so difficult to not pollute the place where you live and play and walk and drive. Who enjoys drifts of blowing garbage?

In one or two thousand years, if there are still people on Earth, the big blue marble circling the sun, those people may wonder who lived on the planet that we are so close to destroying–or at least making difficult if not impossible for humans to live on. When they dig down to our layer, they’ll find the index artifact to be single-use plastic liquor bottles. Then again, maybe, just maybe, we’ll stop making a mucked up mess of our planet before it’s too late. Fingers crossed.

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Aspirations

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“What’s on your bucket list?”

Two questions to bookend a life. Both ask, what are your aspirations. I wanted a pony when I was five years old. By the time I was fifty-five I had the ability to earn enough money to support a horse, had the knowledge to take good care of one if I had it, and knew how to ride. When I was a pre-teen, I wanted to be a mad scientist. In my twenties I got jobs working in laboratories. Maybe not a mad scientist, but perhaps a disgruntled one. When I was in high school, I had the idea I might like to write. Throughout my life I’ve written a lot of technical and business documents, but my first novel wasn’t published until I was in my sixties.

At some point, I got the insane idea that it would be really great to hike the Triple Crown of backpacking–the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, and the Appalachian Trail. I’ve never once in my life done an overnight backpacking trip. I’ve owned a Kelty Tioga backpack for decades and used it along with a Eurail pass to travel all over Europe, but that was another time and another aspiration. I’ve seen the movie and read the book Wild multiple times, listened to hiking podcasts, dreamed a lot. But my knees don’t think this long distance hiking with a heavy pack is a good idea. The days when I could even consider these treks is past. In fact, my sleeping in tent days seem to be over. And yet….

When I was in California on family business, my husband and I took a break one afternoon and drove an hour and a half up into the mountains. There, for the first, and maybe the only time, I got to set foot on the Pacific Crest Trail. I “hiked” about one hundred yards down and back along a trail that begins at the the U.S. border with Mexico and ends just over the border into Canada. To hike its 2650 mile length usually takes a through hiker many months. I’ll never do that, but I consider the aspiration to walk on that trail satisfied. I’ve been there, I’ve seen it, I set foot on it.

Not all aspirations, hopes, dreams will be fully realized, and sometimes it takes decades to accomplish even a part of a goal. But that doesn’t mean it has to be abandoned. Or that the whole trail needs to be hiked. I suppose over my lifetime I’ve come to be happy with adjusted expectations. And my bucket list keeps growing. Some items have been scratched off as complete, some removed as no longer important to me. It would be kind of nice to learn to juggle and to weld, but those aren’t really high on my list any more.

I think that I may yet set foot on the Continental Divide and the Appalachian Trails–not to hike their length, but to see them, walk a bit. My new aspiration is to earn the Jackson County Parks Department’s badge for hiking all the zone trails. That is doable, I think. And what do I want to be when I grow up? Well, I’m still working on that one.

Image: Me on the PCT. By Jonathan Hutchins

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The Late Winter Optimist

Once again I have succumbed to the siren song of the winter seed catalog. In spite of my optimistic post of the past, I really was teetering on the edge of full surrender to a life free of the agony of gardening. But that little bomb that came in the mail, in the bleakest time of the year for a Midwestern gardener, sucked me in. I perused. I made selections. I inventoried my existing stash of seeds. I ordered new seeds. I counted back from the days for the last projected frost, days to germination, best days to plant by the moon according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac. I have a three page blueprint for the layout of the garden beds with an eye to companion planting. I’ve evaluated my fences and acquired new posts to keep them upright. Of course, the weather, beasts, weeds, and all will conspire against me. I imagine the chipmunks in their underground bunkers laying plans for their spring assault. There must be some kind of twelve step program to help people like me, the gardening addicted. And yet, the leek seeds all germinated, spreading their tiny contagion of optimism.

Even in the deepest darkest throes of winter, there is room for optimism. There has to be. Otherwise we’d give up, shrivel up, and…well, you know. Recently a family emergency called me out of state. My cat sitter, who spoils the kids so mercilessly that when I come home I get the, “Who are you and what have you done with Aunt Laurie?” treatment, watered my little starter seedlings. Not only have the leeks survived, but they are thriving. I made it home just in time to plant the other seeds on schedule: tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and my eternal overachievers, the cucumbers. They may or may not come up in seven to fourteen days.

More dead-of-winter hopefulness has reared its lovely head: a publisher has expressed interest in The Gingerbread House.  Add to that the news from an editing client that his book has been accepted by a publisher, and things are looking pretty good. But to keep me grounded in reality, a flash fiction piece got rejected. Review, possibly rewrite, submit somewhere else.

I have discovered that sitting on a plane for several hours contributes to my optimism. I managed to do a first draft of a short story that has been tickling the back of my mind, and got down pages of notes on the various novels that have need of my attention. In fact, most of this blog post is the product of flying through the air in a metal tube. Perhaps if I become a world traveler I’ll get a lot more written.

Unfortunately, I may be headed back out of state in the near future. Probably all of the plants will die while I’m gone. I don’t care. I’m hopeful now. And that’s a good place to start.

Image: Optimistic leeks. By Marilyn Evans

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Algorithms, Censorship, and You

Have you been the victim of a static algorithm? You might be entitled to compensation. Well, no, probably not.

I’m a member of a Facebook group where people express candid opinions. Recently one of the active members had a post removed by FB because, it said, its algorithm identified inappropriate language (we think it was because of a four letter word associated with fornication and other fun activities). Now, this group has adult members who in the real world use some pretty salty language, and we would be shocked, shocked, I tell you (I said, clutching my pearls) if everyone suddenly went Church Lady on us. The algorithm apparently has set parameters for what is fine to post and what is not without taking into consideration the person using it, the group, or the situation. This is not AI as far as I can tell, because Artificial Intelligence learns and might in time figure out that this group likes its colorful language.

So, here it is–the problem of censorship in its infant phase, telling you what is and isn’t acceptable in a private group. Mind you, I totally agree with the unacceptability of hate speech, bullying, denigration, and all the other stuff that is not acceptable in just about every circumstance. But, I sort of wonder how these authors would promote their books on Facebook or other sites that make determinations about the use of certain words. And to top all that off, that same word shows up elsewhere on FB. Why one place and not the other?

As I have said many times, I don’t believe in censorship (except every copy of Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster should be burned), but if we must censor, shouldn’t it be from a set of agreed upon standards? Shouldn’t it be consistent, fair, take into consideration context? But that is harder than it might seem. In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was asked to describe his test for obscenity. He responded: “I know it when I see it.” He probably didn’t. We have been struggling with defining limits on speech and other forms of expression for a very long time.

We as a society have agreed to remove some words from use because of their charged past. Recently I was watching the television series about Bass Reeves, the first Black deputy U. S. Marshall west of the Mississippi, based on a biographical book series by Sidney Thompson. When a White woman, the former owner of Bass and his wife, offers to take them back into servitude and to be kind enough to keep their children from being “field n*****s”, it was profoundly shocking to hear the “N word” spoken. When Jennie slaps her and throws her out of her home, I was cheering along with everybody else, I’m pretty sure. Words do have power, and words can hurt. But knowing when to use those words can be important. I’m sure the actress who had to utter that word struggled to keep from flinching, but the power of that ugliness was necessary because it conveyed the ugliness of the time.

I think most Americans believe we are free and open minded. Yet a tiny handful of people have been challenging and succeeding in getting a huge number of books banned. Minority opinions have overridden the majority and demanded removal of access to literature often about other minorities, underrepresented people who struggle to have their voices heard.  It seems like a kind of madness for one tiny group to silence another tiny group when most of us want to hear what they have to say so we can judge for ourselves from a position of knowledge and exposure to different ideas and points of view.

High schools and middle schools have become a hot bed of censorship.  We appear to be so terrified of offending and controversy that we silence needed dialogs. The students of Jackson-Reed High School were denied the opportunity to host a  Palestinian cultural event, and the same school pushed back on teachers covering Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel “Maus” and “Night” by Elie Wiese which both deal with the Holocaust.  The thing is, if Vladimir Putin is determined that the Ukrainian country and culture have no right to exist,  and Benjamin Netanyahu thinks 25,000 dead Palestinians are not enough, perhaps children should be taught and adults reminded what genocide looks like.

So back to our algorithm. Who decided f*** is not okay for Facebook posts in a members only group? Why is it okay in some places and not others? Where is the contingency, the consideration for who and why it is used? Can we challenge it? (Apparently, these decisions can be challenged.) Or should we just let someone else decide what we can and can not say? To that I say, f*** no.*

*This is not a members only blog and anyone can find and read it, so I will in this instance self edit. However, if you would care to hear my vast array of colorful nouns, adjectives, epithets, and verbs, feel free to contact me, and the horse I rode in on.

Image: Me and the horse I rode in on. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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The Empty Table

My favorite Christmas movie is the 1951 film Scrooge (as it was called in England, but A Christmas Carol in the U.S.) starring the wonderful Alistair Sim. And my favorite scene, and I am not alone in this, is when Scrooge steps into the room adjacent to his bedchamber. and sees the entire room decked with greenery and a huge man dressed in a fur-trimmed robe, the Ghost of Christmas Present, enthroned upon “turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.” That is how Dickens describes him in the original 1843 story. A fire roars in the fireplace, and further light comes from the torch the Ghost holds that is shaped not unlike a cornucopia. This is the feast that is Christmas. And who does not try in some way to keep the feast, whatever winter holiday you celebrate?

Feasting is integral to our winter holidays, and in fact, to most celebrating of any sort. Yet in the United States, according to a November 29, 2023, report from the U. S. Department of Agriculture, in 2022, 12.8 percent of U.S. households were food insecure at least some time during the year, meaning they had difficulty providing enough food for all their members. That translates to about 44 million people, 13 million of whom are children. And why, in the richest country in the world would that be?

I just finished reading Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of Evicted. In the book, Desmond re-examines the debate about how and why poverty exists in America. The good news is, poverty can be defeated. The bad news is, the U.S. isn’t doing it–at least not very well, not as well as other developed nations. The Washington Post tells me 15 states with Republican governors have refused U.S. government funding for summer food programs for children who depend on school lunches the rest of the year to feed them. The reasons vary from, why do this when there is an obesity problem in the U.S. to “I don’t believe in welfare”. Meanwhile, children go hungry.

It has been argued that famine is not the result of lack of food but of the lack of distribution. In fact, the first food aid programs in 1939 were to help farmers during the Great Depression who could not sell their excess harvests and to get the food that would otherwise go to waste to people who were malnourished or even starving.

In my house, I have this strange idea that no one, man nor beast, should be hungry. We feed the birds, plant things that provide forage and nectar, compost our food scraps that help keep the opossum fat, donate to Harvesters, and worry over whether the little spider that lives behind the trash can in the bathroom has enough tiny bugs in the winter to get by. We take food to neighbors and gratefully receive it from them in return. Food is love, to be shared. It is also the most basic of human  necessities. Droughts and floods destroy crops but not in every part of the world all at once. Those disasters can be mitigated by people of good will who recognize the need and find a way to help.

The use of food as a weapon of war, or as political leverage is beyond the bounds of human decency. People in Gaza and Ukraine should not starve.  People in poor neighborhoods, urban or rural, should not go without. There is plenty of food, if only we share it, find ways to distribute it, make it available through food assistance, community gardens, donations.

Scrooge, in the end, finds his heart and learns to share the bounty of Christmas all the year. Our winter feasting may end when we decided to get back on that diet and lose a few pounds, but sharing our feast throughout the year with those who are hungry should never end.

Image: No food. By Marilyn Evans

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Write What You Know and Other Bad Advice

Most books, web sites, and instructors that are trying to teach you about  writing have some tired old saws that they trot out  and are certain, and think  you should be too, that they are the gospel for writers. Baloney, say I. Here are some of my quibbles with conventional wisdom.

Write what you know. The problem is, this implies you should write only  what you have personally experienced. Agatha Christie, as far as I have been able to discern, never killed anyone. But she knew about village life so Miss Marple has all the right moves. J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t personally know any elves, orcs, or dragons, but he knew a lot about ordinary folk facing extraordinary times from his experiences during World War I, and he had a deep and wide knowledge of European languages and mythologies all of which informed his writing. He did write what he knew, but in ways unrecognizable from his own personal experiences. Early on, Dick Francis wrote about the horse racing world that he knew so well, but he and his wife loved researching new and interesting worlds, and these filled his later works. I have written before about the importance of research. So the questions is, what do you know? You know what you’ve experienced yourself, what you’ve learned from many sources, what you can imagine, dream, create. But if you’re going to write something you don’t necessarily know personally, you can ground that in what you do know–family relations, small town or city life, love, unhappiness, all the rest of human experience. That grounding will make it real. And it never hurts to find a reviewer who has experience with your topic, if you can find one. But if you created the world you are writing in, you are the expert. Use your expertise to know and write about that world.

Another morsel of universal truth,  get a copy of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White and adhere to it religiously. Hogwash. The book was published in 1935 by Oliver Strunk and E. B. White who was at the time a student in Professor Strunk’s class at Cornell. That’s the E. B. White of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. Problem is, writing has changed a lot since the 1930’s. There is actually a 4th edition published in 1999, and it may have been sufficiently updated to make it more relevant to today’s styles, but the best place to find guidance for how to write is from the publishers you are trying to get to publish your work. They will often cite on their submission page a reference for their preferred style. By all means, get a copy of Elements and read it, but know what you’re getting into. Be aware that times change and so do writing styles and the rules of engagement.

No head hopping. This is the idea that you have to tell the story from one person’s point of view for any given scene. It is not bad advice because it’s less confusing for the reader, but honestly if you are careful, you can tell us what more than one person is thinking in a scene if that is required to tell your story. Jane Austen was able to pull this off, but if you’re not as good a writer as she is, you might avoid, if you can, jumping from one point of view to another within a scene. Still, if it works for the story you are trying to tell, give it a shot.

A million times you will be told: show, don’t tell. Have the action tell the story, not someone telling you what happened. It’s usually good advice, but sometimes you gotta tell folks what is going on and showing them is too darned complicated. But you can tell using clever devices, like Holmes explaining things to Watson. The trusty sidekick or the Everyman who has to have things explained to him (and to us, the readers) is a common device for telling what’s going on. Yes, telling, not showing.

We’ve already discussed Don’t Kill the Dog. But sometimes you have to. You just better have a really good reason. But, you are told, kill your darlings. Killing your darlings is when you have to get rid of some part or character or line in your work that just doesn’t fit or is jarringly out of place. It might have worked at one time, or maybe you worked really hard on it and you’re really proud of it, but it sticks out like a sore thumb and detracts from the rest of the story. The thing is, you don’t necessarily have to kill your dearest. You might just need to rehome her. Write a story where she fits in, where she makes the story work around her. Or give her a makeover so she fits in as she should in your existing story. In the end, it might be that she simply won’t cooperate. Then, by all means, murder her.

There are a lot of other writing rules that might not necessarily be bad advise, but you really should think about them and challenge them if that is essential to your creative process. My point is, advice is not law. If your way of telling the story requires you to ignore, bend, break, mutilate, or otherwise commit outrage on the rules of writing, by all means, give it a try. If it’s bad or your editor becomes apoplectic, you can reconsider and rewrite. But pushing the boundaries can lead to new and innovative  creations. You have my permission to push the boundaries. But maybe not your publishers’. They, for good or evil, have the last say.

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Keeping Heart

I had a good time at Reroll Tavern last Sunday for a novelists night. M.S. Chambers and I were the guest authors, and there were readings of works in progress by some of the attendees. I must say, these folks were impressive. I sincerely hope they continue writing and share their talent with the rest of us when they finish their works. I want to read the final products.

After my talk, one gentleman asked how do you keep from getting discouraged. My response was that I had a husband, two cats, a horse, and a garden. Also, I sew a lot. But he really deserved a better answer than that. Here is something that I hope will address his question.

If you submit, you will very likely get rejected–a lot. There are probably millions of submissions to various places every day. The chances of everything you write getting accepted the first time is minuscule.  Plan for that. The story goes that Stephen King had a spike where he impaled every rejection he got. It was really, really deep in rejections early in his writing life. His wife, Tabitha, famously retrieved Carrie from the trash can. You will reject things, editors will  reject things. There are reasons for this. It helps to know what those are.

You may reject something because you think it isn’t good enough or you’re sick of it or you think it’s too much trouble to fix. That’s giving up. Don’t do it. Set it aside, sure, but come back to it and make it right. Then submit it.

Editors reject things for a lot of reasons. Some you have control over. Some you don’t. If the story or book is wrong for that magazine, anthology, publisher, you’ll get rejected. Prevent that by knowing what the magazine or publisher wants before you waste their time and yours. They will clearly tell you on their website or their call for submissions what they are looking for, even sometimes what they will reject outright and what will be a hard sell. The happy accident happens when you have written a story that you like a lot and for no particular reason, then you see a call for submissions that is an exact fit. This happened with my short story, “Heart and Minds”.

Sometimes the work just isn’t good enough. You can rethink, rewrite, rework it until it is. Sometimes the market has changed. If you’re not keeping track, you may get left behind. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has changed so much in its 74 years that my husband, who subscribed for decades, no longer reads it. He’s gone elsewhere. You can too.

Some things you have no control over. Because we are all so connected by social media, television, books, movies, and in a thousand other ways, there is a zeitgeist that may inspire similar ideas in writers at the same time. When an editor gets three submissions of very similar stories, and they’ve already accepted the first one, you’ll be left in the dust, not because your story wasn’t great and a finger on the pulse of the universe, but because someone got there first.  Try somewhere else. Sometimes submissions will close because there are so many that the editors have stopped accepting new ones. When a call for submissions on a theme for an anthology rejects your specially written work, let it rest a bit, reexamine it, see if it needs some tweaking to make it less specific, and send it someplace else. This happened with “Between”, a short story I wrote for an anthology but wasn’t a good fit for that group of stories.  It has now been accepted by another anthology. Mind you, I rewrote it and submitted it several places until I found just the right fit.

You’ll notice a theme here: keep submitting. J. K. Rowling sent her first Harry Potter book to about a million publishers before it was accepted. Persevere. Somebody somewhere will want that story, if it’s well written and interesting.

When I worked in a research lab, sometimes our experiments would take years to get us to the point we could write up the results. Talk about delayed gratification. My way of dealing with that was to have hobbies that gave me instant gratification. I still have those hobbies.

You will get discouraged. Commiserate with family and friends and other authors, get back to work, if required, and keep submitting. You probably won’t get rich or famous, but you’ll have done something you (hopefully) love, and eventually, someday, you’ll see your name in print.

Image: Novelists Night at Reroll Tavern. By the manager, Russell.

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Brevity, the Soul of Wit

I just found out one of my flash fiction pieces has been accepted for publication. Mind you, it’s probably going to be a really long time before it shows up, like a year and a half or so. Still, as they say, any publicity is good publicity. The publisher is Vine Leaves Press. They electronically publish a story every day–they call them 50 Give or Take, and the stories are, you guessed it, 50 words more or less.  In Novembers they publish an anthology of the stories from the past year or so. Mine apparently will show up in the 2024 anthology, but maybe not. It’s story number 1436. As of this morning they hadn’t broken 1100. I don’t mind, really. Getting published is a waiting game, decidedly not for the impatient.

I sometimes wonder why I like writing short stories and flash fiction. I suspect it’s because I’m lazy. Still, writing a good story of whatever length takes work. My novels, Beloved Lives and The Ginger Bread House (the latter currently being reviewed by a publisher), aren’t epic 100,000 word tomes. Wasting Water wasn’t even a novel.  I’m suspecting Wickham’s Daughter is going to be a lot longer just because there is so much story to tell, but it’s not my usual modus operandi. The other novels still in the doodling phase of development may or may not be longish. It’s hard to tell at this stage.

The cool thing about writing short stories and flash fiction is that you are creating a little jewel, self contained and concise. The characters don’t take a lot of side streets and get lost. They go where they need to and do what they need to do. You tell their whole story in a snapshot.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a flash piece, usually less than a thousand words, shows a moment in time, a significant event contained within a careful word count where each word matters.

During this National Write a Novel in a Month November, I’ve taken a little detour from writing my current novel to jot down a flash piece that has been stirring around in my mind for more than a year. Just because flash pieces are short doesn’t mean you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them, developing them, writing, rewriting, and visiting them again and again.  I am pretty lazy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t work at writing when my muse pokes me. And she can be a real pain.

Now, back to the novel.

Image: Small things. By Marilyn Evans

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Why We Bother

Halloween is nearly here, and it’s time to evaluate this year’s harvest. And possibly think about gratitude for what the past season has brought me. Or not. Spoiler alert–it wasn’t my greatest ever harvest.

Whenever I read about someone who claims to have fed his or her whole family from a four by eight garden bed, I laugh. You have to wonder what they were eating during that time. Cherry tomatoes and turnips? Zucchini? I may not have a particularly green thumb  (on occasion I’ve claimed I have a plaid thumb because my results are so wildly erratic), but I know that even with a  green house and great care, you’re not going to get a whole summer’s worth, much less a whole year of food out of one four by eight bed for even a family of three.

A hunter-gatherer, depending on the climate and vegetative coverage, needs from seven to five hundred square miles to subsist. Obviously, gardening is intended to concentrate that food so you don’t have to range over miles to get your fruit and vegetables, but four by eight feet? I doubt it. Except, perhaps if you are a zucchinitarian subsisting solely on that vegetable. It is a well know fact that zucchini exist in only two states: none or too many.

My folks had a huge garden and fought off deer and other critters. They managed to grow a lot of food, but what and how much varied a lot from year to year. My garden consists of three four-by-eight beds and LOTS of pots. Even when I am able to fight off the squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, opossums, raccoons,  birds, and assorted bugs, my yields can vary from so many cucumbers that I chase down people on the street and force vegetables on them, to nothing at all. One year I had so much chard that I was freezing bags of it, and the next it didn’t come up at all. This year, I only got it to grow in a planter, and it was puny at best. Also this year, I planted eggplants twice and eventually got three plants that didn’t even start blooming until late September. So far, they have produced nothing but one eggplant that is the size of a pea.  After the rabbits ate the baby sunflower plants to the ground, I replanted (with sturdy fencing) and got some nice sunflowers that the birds thought were a really nice treat, thank you very much. I have enough Hungarian wax peppers that there will be a lot of goulash in my future, but the pablanos were a complete bust. So, you may ask yourself (I certainly ask myself), why bother? The supermarket is so much easier and even, one might argue, cheaper (cue the jokes about the $50 tomato).

The answers to why bother for me are as follows. 1) After three attempts, I finally got two tomato plants to survive into productivity, one of which made a few perfect, aromatic, delicious tomatoes every week or so. Those tomatoes, carefully fenced against all manner of beasts, made a salad or sandwich taste like paradise. 2) Remember Schrödinger’s potatoes–the tops of the plants were lush and green with lots of blossoms? Were there potato tubers underneath those plants or not? Until I dug up the plants, I couldn’t know. As luck would have it, I had a nice little crop of potatoes–not enough to feed a family of three or four, but enough for a few meals. That potato patch took up just about half of one four by eight bed. 3) Two pepper plants, one a Serrano and one a Hungarian wax, have made enough peppers that I’ve used them as needed, and I’m keeping the rest in the freezer for later use. 4) I harvested enough green beans, a small handful at a time, to freeze a few and to eat as a side dish from time to time. 5) The radishes never made any radishes, but the seed pods were delicious pickled. 6) The one and only little bitty cantaloupe that made it to ripeness (produced on a prodigious vine) was aromatic and richly sweet. 7) One of the four blueberry bushes made a few berries every day, and they were lovely. And the gooseberry bushes were wonderfully generous. 8) My third planting of sage produced nice perennial plants that will last me for years, the basil plants survived after the second planting, the volunteer dill was a treat, the oregano, mint, and thyme still look great, and the bay tree came back from the brink of death. There is nothing like walking out the door and gathering herbs to bring into your kitchen. And finally 9) the cucumber plants made more than I could eat, more than I could pickle, and more than I could give away. Seems like there is always one overachiever.

I’m probably not going to save any money by growing my own food, nor am I going to feed myself and others (except maybe critters) by the sweat of my brow. But being in the garden is its own reward, and its own lesson in survival, life and death, gratitude, and why everyone needs a breeding pair of pine martens–they eat squirrels.

Image:  Cucumber that died of exhaustion. By Marilyn Evans

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What Are Friends For?

For a while now, I’ve been a fan of Michael Brecht, one of the premier rat ticklers in the world. His lab in Berlin studies play and the brain, in part by tickling rats. When rats play with each other, whether it’s hide-and-seek or wrestling with lots of tickling, they make sounds that are the ratty equivalent of giggling. Play isn’t really well understood in humans or other animals though there is good research going on in the field by Brecht and others. What has been learned so far is that play is pretty important to health, happiness, and sanity. When you have friends and family you can play with, that’s a good thing at any stage of life.

One branch of my family is into board games. Another is all over jigsaw puzzles as a team sport. My immediate family liked card games, among other pursuits. I’m pretty sure I played enough games of Spades with my friends in the student union during undergraduate school to have earned a minor in it. That is at least one good reason to have friends: they are who we play with, and that makes us happy.

What else are friends good for? Dan Buettner, explorer and author, found that in the Blue Zones, the places on Earth where unusually large numbers of people live in good health into their 100’s,  having friends is a major contributor to their longevity. Friendships with people who have similar interests and goals, and sustaining those friendships often for decades can contribute to a long and happy life.

But if happiness and longevity aren’t good enough reasons to have friends, how about mutual aid? Lifting a tree off your shed after a wind storm can be pretty daunting, but friends can literally make the load lighter. Who do you call when your car breaks down? AAA, sure, but you might also call a friend. You can hire a service for practically everything these days, but it’s nice to have a friend drop you at the airport and a friendly face greet you when you come home again.  Friends help each other out, and you need never fear that you are alone in facing the world.

A friend of mine who just had some pretty major surgery is staying with us for a couple of weeks while he gets through doctor’s appointments and recovery. I can’t imagine not being with a friend or close family member under these circumstances.  That’s what friends are for. And friends are for telling you when you really, really need to take a bath, or for warning you not to invest in that dodgy deal, or for begging you to get the heck out of that job before it kills you. Of course, friends can get nosy and can intrude too much, but wouldn’t you rather have an honest opinion from someone who really cares about you than a whole lot of polite indifference while you careen toward the edge of disaster?

So who are these friends, anyway? My cats like to play with me. Cat tickling can be a rather bloody affair, so instead we enjoy hide-and-go-eek and pounce-a-boo, though, like Calvin Ball, I’m not sure anyone really knows what the rules are. Doesn’t matter. They make us laugh in our own ways. And Mikey sits with me in companionable silence in the evenings and sometimes brings me mice for breakfast (though they really aren’t on my diet, I appreciate the effort). My best friend, of course, is my amazing husband, but there are many others. Some of my friends are holdovers from my working days, some I have worshiped with, some are neighbors. I have friends who live close by and others continents away.

And what do we owe our friends? I would say to advise without intrusion, suggest without dictating, watch each others backs, make each other’s bail, help hide the body…. Well, maybe not that last one. But certainly we need to care for and about our friends and to make them laugh, with or without the tickling.

Image: Jan, Chris and me, hanging in the desert. Photographer unknown.

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Barbenheimer and Cocaine Bears

Those who follow me regularly know I love movies. I love them so much that I am fascinated by how they are made. Best thing about getting a DVD is the bonus material on “the making of”.  Though I loved everything  Dick Francis wrote, I especially loved his novel Wild Horses about the madness that is making a movie.

Since I’ve been reading about how to write screen plays, I’ve seen a whole new dimension to how a movie comes into being. The amazing Blake Snyder in his series of Save the Cat! books on writing screen plays tells what a person needs to know to get the bones of a movie into writing. Sadly, Mr. Snyder died in 2009, but his books and methods are as popular as ever.

As I’ve said in this blog before, when you have a new way of seeing things, suddenly all the world is new. I’ve begun to think about all the stories  that “would make a great screen play!” If only that were true.

I recently watched Cocaine Bear. It was every bit as terrible and wonderful,  hilarious and disgusting as you might imagine.  And, yes, I have committed Barbenheimer, not all at once like some brave souls, but about a week apart. I can’t make a stand on which one to watch first, but as it happens, I saw Oppenheimer first. It was a great movie, but only part of that had to do with the script. It was visually stunning along with sound, acting, timing, all the bits that come together to make a movie happen well when it all comes together. Barbie had a very clever script and amazing sets. I have to confess, I was slightly disappointed and can’t exactly put my finger on why–perhaps because the pacing in the middle fell apart a bit. Still, the opening sequence alone was priceless.

The tricky thing about movies is they are such a collaboration. Even with great actors, a bad director can scupper the whole thing. Bad editing, inappropriate or lifeless score and sound, lousy effects all can hurt an otherwise great movie.  Mr. Snyder points to the Tomb Raider sequel as an example of a movie that just didn’t work because we couldn’t care about the main character. Everything else can be right, but a “so what?” lead in his opinion doomed the end result. The poor performance at the box office bears him out.

I’ve begun to see patterns in movies and television shows that meet the requirements for the” beats” that must come to keep the story interesting. You might suspect that would be a problem like seeing the strings making the puppets dance across the stage.  Instead, it fascinates me. I suspect it’s going to make me a better author of books and stories in general. Mind you, I haven’t gotten very deep into trying to write screen plays yet, but that is coming. And hopefully this awareness will help me succeed.

I just finished Mr. Snyder’s second book, Save the Cat ! Goes to the Movies. In it he breaks down movies into 10 popular genres and describes the beats of 50 landmark movies showing how they achieved their greatness. It makes me want to sit down with my streaming services and soak myself in great film. Alas, I have a garden to tend, a blog to write now and again, and my own adventures in writing a screenplay. Wish me luck.

Image: Cloud, a cat not currently in need of saving. By Jonathan Hutchins

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Recommended Reading

I went to CryptiCon this year with my pal Dennis Young and had a pretty good time. The con had been on hiatus for a year but was back with lots of blood and mayhem, as is the way with horror cons. The guests were, as always, amazingly gracious and patient with all the fans, the vendors were interesting and in some cases horrifically creative, and the attendees sported some genuinely disturbing cosplay. My personal favorites were a dead ringer (see what I did there?) for Regan, the Linda Blair character in The Exorcist, and a couple of ladies dressed as xenomorphs from Alien. It was fortunate that I acquired a novel to read from the fellow with a booth next to ours because I also acquired a case of Covid. Mind you, I’ve had ALL the shots and wash my hands obsessively, but still….

So, the good thing about being a retiree who takes a few sick days is you get to read guilt free for hours on end. The bad thing is you feel really rotten for days on end. I’m better now, thank you, but this got me to thinking about books, what we read, how much we read, and recommendations from friends. I use the term friends here in the loosest possible way. Chris (you remember Chris, my good friend down in Tucson?) is reading The Kaiju Presevation Society by John Scalzi and finding it tremendously entertaining. I just finished my latest read, so I’ve started it myself. It is, so far, hilarious. The problem is, the author refers to Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson more than once. I haven’t read it in years, so now I’m going to have to go back and read it again. He also refers to the Murderbot stories, which Chris also enjoyed a lot, so, well, you see the problem.

You can get recommendations from all kinds of places, and there are a lot of books out there in the universe, more than any one person can possibly ever read. Most of the time, we have to be selective with our limited time and usually choose books we know we’ll enjoy. Our time is precious and must be spent wisely lest we rot our brains by: reading novels, watching television, or using social media (depending on which century you live in, 19th, 20th, and 21st, respectively).

NBC News sometimes asks Retired Admiral James Stavridis to comment on security and the world, and he invariably has some interesting looking book prominently displayed  in his office. I’ve suckered to his recommendations more than once. After all, the man reads a lot, has written several books and seems to know his onions. The problem is, one of his books, The Sailor’s Bookshelf: Fifty Books to Know the Sea, is a book about books. If you go down that rabbit hole, it may be a while before we see you again.

Jane Austen, everybody’s friend, refers to several books in her writing, some of them Gothic novels.  In fact, her heroine in Northanger Abbey is so enthralled by Gothic stories that she succumbs to suspicion and fantasy about her hosts and their lives. A rather good article in Book Riot discusses Jane’s reference to “the Horrid Novels” and how she resurrected some of them from probably well-deserved obscurity. Still, more than one person would have been enticed to seek out those books and rot their brain by reading them.

If you want to read, and want more time to read, please, DON’T contract Covid, but do take some time each day to enjoy books. Paper, electronic, audio–it’s all good. And my personal recommendations, besides everything listed above: while Hanging Chads by Evan Clouse was amusing enough and kept me occupied during my illness, I’m still a bit disappointed that the folks from Death’s Head Press weren’t at Crypticon again this year. I could love me some more Splatter Westerns.

Image: One shelf of many. By Marilyn Evans

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Where the Heck Have I Been!

People who read my blog: So, Marilyn, what have you been up to (instead of writing blog posts)?

Me: Grab a beverage, sit down. This might take a while.

First and foremost, sometimes I feel like I’ve got nothing to contribute to the world of literature at large. Other times I have lots of ideas but don’t seem to get them down and in the ether before they slide away. Either way, there can be a long pause. I apologize to my teeming masses of adoring fans.

Of course, there are other things in my life than writing blog posts. There is the eternal struggle with my garden, for example. Cloud, our opera singing cat, has taken it upon himself to keep the bunnies and chipmunks in hand (paw?) which my growing things much appreciate. At least those of the growing things that could be bothered to come out of the ground. I have discovered that our house is too cold in the winter for seeds to germinate. Maybe next year starting in February or March we’ll all snuggle together under the electric blanket. Then in the spring, out of doors it was first too cold, then too wet, then too dry, then too hot. The seeds stayed in bed. Not sure I blame them. But there is always one showoff—the cucumbers are going berserk. I have so many that pickles are inevitable. As for the rest? The tomatoes keep losing focus, the radishes have forgotten that they exist for roots, the cantaloupe and watermelon have all the vines in the world but not much else. I may have potatoes some day, but I’m afraid to look. I’ll just believe and hold out hope until I’m forced to dig them up. Schrodinger’s potatoes.

In other adventures, when I couldn’t get glasses to make things pretty and clear, cataract surgery it was. Since the worse of the two eyes is always done first, for a week or so you get to walk around switching eyes and saying, “Holy mackerel! I had no idea I have been looking through pond water!” Now I get to see without glasses for the first time since first grade, except when I want to read. Putting on glasses instead of taking them off to read is sort of weird.

And finally, what have I been writing instead of blogs? Query letters, synopses, cover letters, the things I hate most in the world. I know Stephen King says he loves all aspects of writing, but honestly, these are harder for me than anything. I’ve now sent off my father’s memoir to a publisher and The Gingerbread House, as well. I should be getting rejection letters in a few months, and then I’ll do it all over again. But now that those odious tasks are out of the way, on to the fun stuff.

First, I get to write a blog post moaning about my garden and the agony of trying to get things published. Next I’ll start working on my very first screen play, which I’m pretty pumped about. Mind you, I haven’t a clue what I’m doing, but that has seldom stopped me in the past. Between the scenes, I’ve started working on a nonfiction book. I’ve written way more nonfiction than fiction, so this should be easyish. Maybe. Perhaps. We’ll see. After those, there is probably going to be a Gingerbread House sequel, I need to finish Wickham’s Daughter, there is still The Iliad in Space (working title), and Jocasta of Thebes hasn’t even loaded into the starting gate. If I have a great time with the screen play (I’m doing my friend, Dennis Young’s, Mercenary because the tutorials say you should never do your own adaptation first), I will go on to do a screenplay for Beloved Lives.

So that’s what I’m doing on my summer vacation. You?

Image: Cloud taking a break from bunny wrangling. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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1800’s Science Fiction Part II

Part II of notes from the panel Jonathan Hutchins, Rachel Ellyn, and I had the great pleasure presenting a panel at Planet Comicon Kansas City. Anyone who didn’t  make it, or anyone who did and is curious about our list of works and authors and a few other fun facts, here it is! 

Again, let me say, for the purposes of this panel, the 1800’s included 1800 to 1899. Some of the authors wrote into the 20th century, but we did not include these. Also, we excluded for the most part, fantasy and gothic novels. Science fiction we defined (as did Mary Shelley) stories where the action is based on scientific possibility whereas fantasy usually has some magical element. Also please not, many of these stories have elements of misogyny, racism, nationalism, and other things that were current to the time and should be read with that in mind.

1870 Verne Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Another adventure story using advanced technologies including an electric submarine, gas-discharge lamp and a taser. It contains detailed descriptions of undersea life which would have been unknown to the readers of the day.

1870 Annie Denton Cridge “Man’s Rights; Or, How Would You Like It? Comprising Dreams”

Man’s Rights, a work of Utopian science fiction and satire, is the first known feminist utopian novel written by a woman.

In a series of dreams, the female narrator visits the planet Mars, finding a society where traditional sex roles and stereotypes are reversed. The narrator witnesses the oppression of the men and their struggle for equality. They start working towards their liberation after technological advancements free them from some of their grueling domestic chores. In the last two dreams, the narrator visits a future United States, ruled by a woman president and with an equal balance of men and women in the House and Senate. Legislators have begun to stop fining and imprisoning female prostitutes, and it is now the male clients who get arrested and sent to reformatories. A large number of women have taken up farming, and the nation has a promising economic future. The narrator concludes by asking whether this dream might not, after all, be a prophecy?

1871 George T. Chesney The Battle of Dorking First published as a magazine serial. Future war with the British navy defeated by a wonder weapon. The enemy wins and breaks up the British empire (US gets Canada). Futurism and advanced technologies.

1871Edward Bulwer-Lytton The Coming Race Subterranean super race is discovered by accident by a young traveler while visiting a deep mine. The Vril-ya use the force called Vril for destruction or healing (due to the popularity of the book, any health food or elixir was called Vril, i.e. Bovril). In the end the narrator returns to Earth and warns of the coming of this superior race.

This is the Bulwer-Lytton that the bad writing contest is named after.

1872 Samual Butler Erewhon; or, Over the Range A satire describing what at first seems a utopia, but on further examination is more like a distopia. “The Book of Machines”, a three chapter section warns that machines might become sentient and dangerous. In Erewhon, machines are not used for fear of this. This is one of the pastoral utopian stories.

1877 Verne Off on a Comet Another space travel adventure.

1880 James De Mille A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder Published and serialized posthuously and anonymously, its writing predated She and King Solomon’s Mines but is often compared to them. A lost world story with satire civilization in opposition to culture of the day. In a copper cylinder is the account of a man who, after being separated from his ship in a little row boat with boat mate, finds himself in a tropical paradise in the Anarctic.

1880 Percy Gregg Across the Zodiac; The Story of a Wrecked Record The first sword and planet fiction. Centering around the creation of a substance called “apergy”, a form of anti-gravitational energy, this details a flight to Mars taken in 1830. The planet is inhabited by small beings who, convinced that life couldn’t exist any where else apart from on their world, refuse to believe that the narrator is actually from Earth, deciding instead he is an unusually tall Martian from a remote corner of their planet. The book contains what is probably the first alien language in any work of fiction to be described with linguistic and grammatical terminology, and likely the first instance in the English language of the word “Astronaut”, the name of the narrator’s spacecraft. In 2010 a crater on Mars was named Greg in recognition of his contribution to the lore of Mars. Not an easy read for writing style, sexism and racism, not much plot, lots of political nonsense.

1883 Albert Robida The 20th Century (This and two other novels were combined into one book, including in 1887 War in the 20th Century, and in 1890 The 20th Century, the Life Electric) These are fun for checking against the predicted and the real. Takes place in 1952. Predictions include the world-wide media saturation, news and entertainment merging, and advertising dominating broadcasts; the English Channel tunnel; merging and homogenizing of cultures; the dominance of multinational corporations. Unlike Verne, he proposed inventions integrated into everyday life (like Mary Webb did), and the social developments that arose from them like the social advancement of women, mass tourism, and pollution. He describes modern warfare with robotic missiles and poison gas, a flat screen television display that delivers news 24-hours a day, plays, educational courses, and teleconferences.

1886 Verne Robur the Conqueror. The Clipper of the Clouds Robur develops a heavier than air ship, the Albatross. Screw driven by electrical energy. A bit like a helicopter, downward rotors and two for push, pull actions.

1886 Robert Lewis Stevenson The Strange Cast of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Scientist experiments with splitting out his baser self with whom he has struggled all his life. When Hyde appears without the serum, large and more frequent doses are needed to remain Jekyll. Finally, a salt that is essential to the potion runs out and new batches don’t work, apparently because the original had an impurity that allowed the reaction. A “mad scientist” story.

1887 Flammarion Stories Of Infinity: Lumen; History Of A Comet; In Infinity Conversation between a spirit who travels through the universe and a man. One of the earliest works to consider the matters of relativity, alien life, and the advancement of mankind. Flammarion tended touse elaborate explanations of scientific principles and even included mathematical calculations in some of his stories

1887 W. H. Hudson A Crystal Age Pastoral utopian novel (like News from Nowhere), published anonymously originally. Man wakes up more than 100 centuries in the future. (Author also wrote the more famous Green Mansions). The people of his imagined future possess only one piece of technology, a system of “brass globes” that produces a form of ambient music. Otherwise they have no machines and only simple devices. Only the “father” and “Mother” of the commune breed; everyone else lives like siblings.

1888 Edward Bellamy Looking Backward Time travel novel with strong socialism and anti-captalism themes. Julian West, a young American, who towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up 113 years later. He finds himself in the year 2000, and the United States has been transformed into a socialist utopia with nationalization of all industry, and the use of an “industrial army” to organize production and distribution, as well as how to ensure free cultural production under such conditions.

1889 Mark Twain A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Time travel. Use of future technology (1880’s) in a past time.

1890 Mary E. Bradley Lane Mizora: A Prophecy: A Mss. Found Among the Private Papers of Princess Vera Zarovitch: Being a True and Faithful Account of her Journey to the Interior of the Earth, with a Careful Description of the Country and its Inhabitants, their Customs, Manners, and Government. A hollow Earth and utopian story. First serialized then published as a book, “the first portrait of an all-female, self-sufficient society,” and “the first feminist technological Utopia.” The narrator Vera is sent to Siberia and goes over a waterfall to the center of the Earth where she finds a women only culture that practice eugenics. They are Aryan and abhor dark colored skin. The futuristic technology includes “videophones” and making rain by discharging electricity into the air. Though Mizora has no domestic animals, its women eat chemically-prepared artificial meat.

1890 William Morris News From Nowhere; or, An Epic of Rest Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance Pastoral utopian novel with utopian socialism. William Guest falls asleep and finds himself in a future society.

1891 Milton Ramsey Six Thousand Years Hence Includes space travel, hollow Earth and futurism. Proposes machine translators.

1893 George Griffith The Angel or the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror Aerial battleships and surface to air missles are predicted.

1894 Flammarion Omega: The Last Days of the World Another apocalyptic story in a future with international telephone service and the European Union.

1894 John Jacob Astor IV A Journey in Other Worlds Two interesting ideas in this: Earth axis straightening to end seasons, and a voyager to Jupiter and Saturn via a vehicle powered by “apergy” (fictious anti-gravity energy seen in a previous novel) and assisted by gravity (gravity assisted acceleration). Huge dams are used to power shifting the Earth, one at Niagra Falls (actually built 23 years later) and a tidal energy plant in the Bay of Fundy (built in 1980). Also proposes using Earth’s mantle heat for power.

A portion of the story involves looking back to the year 2000. Electricity does all the work including solar energy. (First solar cell 1883, ~1% efficient, in 2000 ~11% and today greater than 32 %). An explosive no power can resist causes people to abandon war; the Great War never happens. US ends up with most of the Western hemisphere (Canada, Central America).

Description of space craft is surprisingly close in some aspects. Today, beryllium is used and the dimensions of the interior are not off much those of the Apollo modules. But the story also includes packing fishing tackle, guns and canned food cooked on an electric stove in the space craft. The space travelers collect samples by shooting them; they have explosive bullets in guns. They describe strange and unique plants and animals including dinosaur-like creatures, pneumatic powered snakes and flowers that attract pollenators by sound. The travelers eat and drink from Jupiter’s animals and streams. On Saturn, spirits of the dead dwell.

(Astor died on the Titanic and was at the time, the richest man in the world.)

1895 Robert Comie The Crack of Doom A strange group proposes blowing up the world with what might be described as an atomic bomb.

1895 H.G. Wells The Time Machine Time travel, futurism, dystopia. A future where passive race of humans serve as “livestock” for a subterranean race of humans. In one version of the novel, the traveler goes to see the time near the end of the world when all life is gone and the atmosphere barely breathable.

1895 H.G. Wells “Argonauts of the Air” Men successfully fly but die when they can’t control the plane. Omitted from collections of the author’s works after the Wright brothers’ success.

1896 H.G. Wells “The Plattner Story” An alternate universe experienced.

1896 H.G. Wells “Under the Knife” An astral trip through the solar system and universe.

1896 H.G. Wells “In the Abyss” Bathospheric encounter with deep sea bipeds and their city.

1896 Wells The Island of Doctor Moreau Organ transplantation and human and animal hybridization.

1897 H.G. Wells “The Crystal Egg” Television-like method of viewing life on Mars.

1897 Wells The Invisible Man Originally serialized then in a book. An evil genius uses alterations in optical properties of tissues through chemical and electrical means. First he makes white cloth then a white cat invisible. Griffin is an albino. Issue of retinas needing to be able to absorb light to see explained away. He is the worst of the evil geniuses in literature.

1897 Kurd Lasswitz Two Planets Describes an encounter between humans and a Martian civilization that is older and more advanced. Martians are running out of water, eating synthetic foods, traveling by rolling roads, and using space stations. The spaceships use anti-gravity, but travel realistic orbital trajectories, and use occasional mid-course corrections in traveling between Mars and the Earth; the book depicted the technically correct transit between the orbits of two planets, something poorly understood by other early science fiction writers. It influenced Walter Hohmann and Wernher von Braun. The book was not translated into English until 1971 (as Two Planets), and the translation is incomplete. Auf zwei Planeten was his most successful novel.

1898 Wells The War of the Worlds First serialised in 1897. The novel’s first appearance in hardcover was in 1898. Alien invasion. Descritions of technology that accomodates a non-bipedal alien. Poison gas and death ray.

1899 Wells When the Sleeper Wakes Originally published as a serial. Reworked and rereleased in 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes. Dystopia future; a man sleeps for two hundred and three years, waking up in a completely transformed London in which he has become the richest man in the world. The main character awakes to see his dreams realised, and the future revealed to him in all its horrors and malformities.

Also, two stories by Rudyard Kipling, “.007” and “The Ship that Found Herself” suggesting machines that are self aware.

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1800’s Science Fiction Part I

Jonathan Hutchins, Rachel Ellyn, and I had the great pleasure presenting a panel at Planet Comicon Kansas City on the science fiction of the 19th Century. Anyone who didn’t  make it, or anyone who did and is curious about our list of works and authors and a few other fun facts, here it is! At least as much as I have time, space, and stamina to put down.

For the purposes of this panel, the 1800’s included 1800 to 1899. Some of the authors wrote into the 20th century, but we did not include these. Also, we excluded for the most part, fantasy and gothic novels. Science fiction we defined (as did Mary Shelley) stories where the action is based on scientific possibility whereas fantasy usually has some magical element. Also please not, many of these stories have elements of misogyny, racism, nationalism, and other things that were current to the time and should be read with that in mind.

1805 Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville publishes The Last Man, a novel about the end of humanity (and the world). Includes balloon flight from Europe to Brasil. The planet has lost fertility from overuse, and only one man and one woman remain fertile. Apocalyptic and futuristic.

1818 Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, considered proto-science fiction. Published in three volumes, sometimes called a three-decker or triple decker, this was a standard form of publishing for British fiction during the nineteenth century.

The 1831 “popular” edition was heavily revised by Mary Shelley to make the story less radical. The one most widely published and read although a few editions follow the 1818 text. Some scholars prefer the original version, arguing that it preserves the spirit of Mary Shelley’s vision (see Anne K. Mellor’s “Choosing a Text of Frankenstein to Teach” in the W. W. Norton Critical edition).

1826 Mary Shelley publishes The Last Man, an apocalyptic and dystopian novel set in the 21st Century after a global plague, one of the first pieces of dystopian fiction published. It was critically savaged and remained largely obscure at the time of its publication. It followed several other last-man themed works including a French narrative (Le Dernier Homme de Grainville’s book[1805)]), Byron’s poem “Darkness” (1816), and Thomas Campbell’s poem “The Last Man” (1824).

Receiving the worst reviews of all of Mary Shelley’s novels, but she later spoke of The Last Man as one of her favorite works.

1827 Jane Webb The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century Published anonymously in 1827 by Henry Colburn in three volumes. It drew many favourable reviews. In 1830, a 46-year-old reviewer, John Claudius Loudon tracked down the 22-year-old author and married her. She filled her world with foreseeable changes in technology, society, and even fashion. England is Catholic and ruled by Queen Claudia. Her court ladies wear trousers and hair ornaments of controlled flame. Surgeons and lawyers may be steam-powered automatons. Air travel, by balloon, is commonplace. A kind of Internet is predicted in it. Besides trying to account for the revivification of the mummy in scientific terms—galvanic shock rather than incantations—”she embodied ideas of scientific progress and discovery, that now read like prophecies” to those later in the 19th century.

1830 First intercity passenger railroad, Manchester to Liverpool

1833 Edgar Allan Poe publishes “MS Found in a Bottle”, a hollow earth story, submitted as an entry to a writing contest offered by a weekly magazine. The judges unanimously chose “MS. Found in a Bottle” as the contest’s winner, earning Poe a $50 prize. The story was then published in the October 19, 1833, issue of the Visiter.

1834 Cambridge University historian and philosopher of science William Whewell coined the term “scientist” to replace such terms as “cultivators of science” or “natural philosopher”. It was used to describe Mary Somerville, astronomical mathematician whose calculations, among other things, led to the discovery of Neptune.

1835 Poe publishes “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall“, a short story published in the June issue of a monthly magazine as “Hans Phaall — A Tale”, intended by Poe to be a hoax. He uses meticulous technical descriptions. The story traces the journey of a voyage to the moon. Poe planned to continue the hoax in further installments, but was pre-empted by the “Great Moon Hoax” which started in the August 25, 1835 issue of the New York Sun daily newspaper.

The “Great Moon Hoax“, also known as the “Great Moon Hoax of 1835“, was a series of six articles published in The Sun beginning on August 25, 1835, about the supposed discovery of life and even civilization on the Moon. The discoveries were falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, one of the best-known astronomers of that time. Authorship of the article has been attributed to Richard Adams Locke (1800–1871), a reporter who, in August 1835, was working for The Sun. Locke publicly admitted to being the author in 1840, in a letter to the weekly paper New World.

1836 First long distance balloon free flight

1838 Poe publishes the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket first as a few serialized installments, though never completed. The full novel was published in July 1838 in two volumes. Some critics panned the work for being too gruesome and for cribbing heavily from other works, while others praised its exciting adventures. Some hollow earth elements. Considered an influence on Melville and Verne.

1839 Poe publishes “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” an apocalyptic story first published in December 1839, and was included that same month in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Inspired by comets and religious end of the world predictions (1842 was proposed).

1844 Nathaniel Hawthorne “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a Gothic short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne first published in the December 1844, and later in the 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse. Giacomo Rappaccini, a medical researcher, grows a garden of poisonous plants. He brings up his daughter to tend the plants, and she becomes resistant to the poisons, but in the process she herself becomes poisonous to others. Scientist who experiemnts on his own daughter, her lover tries to “detox” her but she is a poison herself and dies.

1851 Jules Verne A Voyage in a Balloon has been described as a techno thriller. Verne uses the devise of the balloon travel to describe the then fairly unknown (to Europeans) areas of Africa. The first of Verne’s stories to appear in English. His works were widely plagerized largely due to the lack of copyright laws at the time.

1859 Hermann Lang The Air Battle: A Vision of the Future Ostensibly Lang is a German professor, but, there is no German edition of his novel and Lang is likely a pseudonym of a UK author. The novel presents a world several millennia in the future, long after European civilization has been destroyed by floods, earthquakes and other disasters. Peace-loving Black rulers of the country of Sahara dominate Africa, and in a final battle with other powers using their great heavier-than-air machine weapons establish a beneficial worldwide Pax Aeronautica, possibly the first use of air power in science fiction. Remarkably for this period, mixed race marriage is strongly approved of.

1864 Jules Verne Journey to the Center of the Earth Subterranean world. This is not strictly a hollow Earth story as the travelers only go a few miles underground but they encounter a lost world. A great adventure story.

Arthur B. Evans is regarded as the best translation of Jules Verne. Recognizing that there were so many bad and abridged and redacted versions, new translations are available including by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter. The translations available on Project Gutenburg are considered quite good.

1865 Verne From Earth to the Moon Space travel by means of a “gun”. Detailed technical descritions are included in this story. Suggests the use of a solar sail.

1865 Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures Underground Subterranean adventure

1868 Edward S. Ellis The Steam Man of the Prairies Possibly the first science fiction “dime novel”, preqels to “pulp fiction”. The Steam Man is based on a real invention, built by and patented by Zadoc P. Dederick and Isaac Grass (U. S. patent no. 75874). A fur trapper, two gold miners and a teenaged boy who is a brilliant inventor as well as a hunchbacked dwarf, use the steam man to aid them on their adventures to mine for gold. Many steam powered, robot-like mechanisms appear later in the Frank Reade series 1876-1893. Indians are encountered (during the 1800’s there were continuous Indian wars until 1891) as well as a gigantic trapper who wants to rob them.

1869 Edward Everett Hale “The Brick Moon”, a novella. Friends discuss the need for something akin to the North Star to navigate by but allowing east to west not just north to south; they propose building a brick moon. They build a huge satellite of hollow bricks, and a fly wheel, powered by a dam, to fling it into the air. A storm causes the families of the builders and others to shelter in the nearly finished moon when an accident causes it to launch prematurely. The narrator, with the help of an incredibly strong telescope, discovers the people are still alive and getting along just fine. They communicate with Earth by jumping up and down to send Morse code. The Earth people figure out how to send messages by huge sheets (reminiscent of how The Martian communicated in the film). They send some things by the flinging fly wheel (the ladies insist on sending baby clothes). In the end, they decide to just live and let live like letting a grown child go.

1869 Verne Around the Moon The sequel to From Earth to the Moon. Again, many detailed technical descriptions.

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For the Child I Was

I was one of those little girls who was mad for horses. And ponies. And equine creatures generally. On my fifth birthday, I blew out the candles on my cake and ran to see if my pony was standing in the snow. My father couldn’t get me a pony, of course, but that didn’t stop me from wanting and dreaming and loving, and it didn’t stop him from trying every way he knew how to make it up to me. When he built a house for himself and my two brothers and me, the wall paper in my room had horses, the lamp on my dresser was a black knight on a black horse, pictures of horses cut from magazines and traced from books covered the wall by my bed. When we went to the Kansas City Zoo, I always got to ride the ponies, a slow plod up and down a narrow track, once when we first arrived and once just before we left to go home. I must have been a strange figure, sitting completely still, holding on to the little bar on the saddle, solemn in the moment of bliss that had to last me until the next trip to Kansas City.

Fifty years after blowing out those candles, I finally got a horse. She was slender and delicate, a lady’s horse, copper colored like a bright new penny. I loved her more than I can say. When, after years of great adventures together, she developed severe laminitis, a terrible and painful affliction, she had to be put down. My heart was broken.

My husband still has a horse, and we ride her one or two times a week. I no longer fox hunt or go over jumps or even really gallop. But the little girl I once was needs to ride a horse sometimes. To have wanted something so much for so long, it would be wrong to deprive myself of that. On a cold day when it would have been easier to stay home and read than to go out to the stable and brush all the mud off of the horse and clean her feet and tack her up, I realized that the little girl I had been would have done nearly anything for the opportunity to brush that horse and ride her. That made me wonder what other things she had longed for, prompted me to try to remember what that the girl I once was longed dreamed about. I’m a grownup now and can fulfill her wishes. I can see an ocean, walk on a mountain, write a book, visit friends late into the evening. I can have a pet who sleeps in the bed with me. I can paint and learn to play the piano and write poetry. No one says I have to do any of it well. But she can. I can do that for her. For me.

Image: Amish Honey and me, by Jonathan Hutchins.

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Food of Love

Happy New Year everyone! This was supposed to go out yesterday, but as Bob Cratchit said in A Christmas Carol, “I was making rather merry yesterday.” So here is the last post of 2022 or the first of 2023, however you care to count it.

Over the holidays I did a lot of baking. I made cookies and candy and various quick breads, most to give away as gifts and most from old family recipes. While I was making all these holiday treats, I was remembering every person who had given me a recipe or a cooking implement or who had taught me some baking skill or who had been in my kitchen or whose kitchen I had been in.

Food is so often the language of love. We have our personal favorites , and when someone makes that dish for us, we know we are loved. I used a bundt pan that formed a ring of pine trees to make a cake for a Christmas party. At the party was the woman who had given me that pan, one that her dearest friend had bought some time before she died and, as far as I know, had never been used. I made the cake as a gift of remembrance and affection.

My stepmother and I, at times, had a rocky relationship, but time mellowed us both, and we came to have a great affection for one another. One thing she did touched me more than any other. When I was visiting my childhood home, I commented that her date pudding was my favorite dessert. Every time after that when I came to visit, she made sure to have that special dessert waiting for me. Eventually, I got the recipe, so now that she is gone, I can make it and remember her and the love she and my father bore for one another.

Some of the cooking I do for my husband has been reverse engineered. He will tell me what he remembers about the dish, and I will acquire recipes that approximate it and modify as required. My mother-in-law gifted me with the family recipes for some of the more exotic family favorites. One is a lebkuchen that is different from the ones most people are familiar with. This is because Jonathan’s Nana was Swiss and not German. He has always called them shuttle tiles (with a frosting that is obviously the tile adhesive) because of their intense crunchiness. They are spicy and crispy and amazing, and definitely  not German.

I consider the maintaining of gifted family recipes and utensils a sacred trust. My aunt’s pickles, my mom’s date pudding, the Swiss Lebkuchen, and all the other gifts of cookie cutters and pans and assorted utensils I’ll use, and I will remember every person who brought the foods of love into my life.

Image: Holiday cookies, by Marilyn Evans

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Hope Springs Eternal In My Garden

In An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope wrote, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” We quote him all the time, and because we dare not do anything but hope, because it is easier than wearing ourselves out with despair, or because we are fools, we keep hoping. I hope that next year my democracy will be intact, the climate will not kill us all, wars and assassinations will go away, and people will be civil to one another. I hope famine and homelessness will abate. But more than all of those, I hope my family and friends will stop dying for a little while, if only so I can catch my breath. And in addition to all this, I hope my garden will stop being an unmitigated disaster.

Yes, I know. With all the woes in the world, I shouldn’t be moaning about my garden. But honestly, the thing that is supposed to bring me joy and respite from the weary world is making me unhappy. Now that the beds are put to sleep and any pots that can be have been moved indoors, it’s time to take stock. In the war to have a few fresh fruits, vegetables, and flowers, I’ve lost most of the battles. But I have arms and armor. I have the entire winter to lay out a plan. So next year….

I keep hoping that rabbit-proof fencing will spare the greens, that diligence will thwart the squash bugs, that drip lines will make up for a complete lack of rain for weeks on end. I hope the squirrels will find someplace else to dig than in my flower pots. I hope I can give my poor, sad lilies of the valley some friends to fill their bed. I hope the stressed trees and shrubs survive the winter, the perennials come back, and the invasive species stay dead.

Gardening is always an act of faith. We trust the the dead-looking seed really is waiting to burst into life. We believe dirt and water and time will make a little sprout peek out into the daylight and reach for the sky. I watch eagerly as blossoms appear and insects travel from one to another, dispersing fertility. Every spring–in fact, every winter after the initial disappointment of the fall has faded a bit–I am wildly, madly hopeful that the spring will be wonderful, the summer will be bountiful, the autumn will be a celebration of abundant harvest. I hope the frosts will end early and return late. I hope to can and freeze and cook for everyone I  love. I hope to foist excess produce off on unsuspecting strangers.

So as we go into winter, I will lay out my battle plan for my garden. And I will vote in every election. I will reduce my carbon footprint. I will give plasma.  I will donate to Harvesters and the DAV and anyplace else that is fighting to stave off hopelessness. I will speak out against hate and violence, and I will strive to be kind. Because just hoping isn’t enough.

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More Editing

It’s been a long time since I posted and that was about editing. This one is too.

I follow Chris Brecheen’s Writing About Writing on Facebook, he of the “You should be writing” admonitions. He’s clever and wise and very funny, and occasionally he answers questions. He recently got a question about whether to use an editor or not. He comes down on the side of using one if you can possibly manage it. I have said before on this blog that everyone needs an editor. I am here to tell you that I am an idiot who sometimes does not follow my own good advise. However, sometimes I learn from my mistakes and therefore become slightly less idiotic.

As you know, I’ve been editing the Bloodlines vampire series for my friend Dennis Young, so of course, I got all over confident and decided to edit my dad’s World War II memoir. To do this, I typed the entire book into a format I could easily manipulate in preparation for publication. Now, I once took a typing test long ago, and we determined I could type about 5 words a minute with 25 mistakes—that is, I’m a lousy typist (world records have been well over 100 words per minute with no mistakes). But I was determined. Happy with the job I’d done correcting the typos and other issues that the vanity publisher had let pass in my dad’s book, I sent copies to some veterans I know for them to review. One kindly responded that he liked the story, though it brought up some difficult memories, and the other went radio silent.

My dad had only published the book to give as gifts to his family members and we were very grateful for them, never mind the minor issues. Because I was ready to move forward with making the book available to a wider audience, I went back to review it again. Holy cow! The manuscript I had typed was full of transcription errors, typos, and other embarrassing mistakes. I feel like a total fool and that I owe those two readers an apology. So, back to editing my own darn work, and then on the hopefully getting someone else to review and comment. EVERYONE NEEDS AN EDITOR!

Even if your editor or reviewer is not a pro, it should be someone who understands grammar, spelling (spell checker doesn’t catch homonyms or correctly spelled words that aren’t at all what your meant to say), and plotting. Find someone who is really interested and honest and won’t pull any punches. There are actually several kinds of editors, how many depends on who you ask. There is general agreement that among these are developmental editors, copy editors, and content or line editors. There are also proof readers. Each one looks for different problems with the writing. But anyone who is reading along as says, “I have no idea what the heck you mean here” should get your attention. We pretty much always know what’s in our head, but all too often that doesn’t end up on the page. And if it does, it may be misspelled. Or badly phrased.

Yes, we all need editors. Preferably one who isn’t typing the manuscript at the same time. Especially one who types 5 words a minute.

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Adventures in Editing

There are certain times in your life when you go back to visit old ideas and adventures that you’ve put on hold. Currently, besides all the other stuff I’ve been doing, I’ve gotten interested once again in backpacking and editing. The backpacking is something I’ve always wanted to do, but never seemed to get around to. The editing I’ve been doing in one form or another for a long time, but never really did a deep dive until now.

I blame my friend, Dennis Young, for seducing me into editing in a focused sort of way. I’ve been putting in my two cents worth on his Blood Lines series of vampire novels for some time now. That indirectly got me connected to someone who, sadly, wasn’t really ready for writing novels. Not that he was a bad writer–he just couldn’t make his story go in an orderly fashion toward a coherent whole. I wished him luck and ran.

When I was a lab rat, I wrote, edited, messed about with grant proposals and articles. When I was a corporate weenie, I wrote, edited and messed about with SOP’s , quality manuals, audit reports, and other such stuff that makes the pharmaceutical world go round.

This summer I got down and dirty with editing my father’s World War II memoir. I hope to have it up as an e-book sometime this fall or winter. I had a really good time doing that. It was like having a sit-down conversation with my late father. I got to hear his voice in my head, laugh at his humor, live some of his doubts and fears. The thing I probably learned most clearly in reading and correcting the typos in my dad’s book was not to change his voice. He spoke a certain way. That comes through in his writing. I’ve said here before that it was his voice I used, unaware, for the voice of my young heroine in “Wasting Water”, my novella in the anthology Undeniable: Authors Respond to Climate Change.

As I always do when faced with a new adventure, I hit the library. There I found a book on editing for journalists, The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists, by Arthur Plotnik,  that I wish I had read before or even during the time I was editing The Rune, a small-circulation, local magazine. Editing, I am finding, is a great opportunity to see how other authors work, help them avoid some of the pitfalls I hurled myself into, and encourage good writing. And it’s an opportunity to catch the homonyms, malapropisms, misplaced modifiers, and other stuff that makes you crazy when you’re reading an article or a book. To borrow from Jeff Foxworthy, if you make corrections to nearly everything you read, you might be an editor.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for my summer vacation. Now it might be time to get back to writing.

Image: Once again, my catastrophic desk. By Marilyn Evans.

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Revisiting Old Friends

I commented several years ago that now that I was retired, I could finally write. My friend, Chris, laughed at me. “What,” she asked, “do you think you were doing for The Rune and for classes you’ve taught and all the other things you’ve been writing for all these years?” Point taken.

The Rune was a small regional journal that I had written articles for before Lane Lambert and JoLynne Walz, the founders of the magazine, decided to do other things. That’s when I took over as the editor, and stayed at it longer than I care to admit. I had a lot of fun working on that publication, including encouraging new writers, tracking down events for the seasonal calendar, and the other jobs that editors with very small staffs find themselves doing. On a few occasions, we were a page short in the layout, and I had to figure out, on very short notice,  how to fill the space. Some of the more fun articles that I wrote were among those fillers.

Now that I’m getting on in years and looking back at all that stuff I wrote, I decided this was as good a time as any to archive, in a public way, all those good, bad, and indifferent articles. My blog now has a new section called The Rune Archives. Only my own articles and the ones from the Tarcanfel Society are there because all copyrights from The Rune have reverted to the authors. If you’re curious about the old articles, poems, stories, art work, and so forth, as complete a set of The Rune as we could manage to compile is at the University of Kansas Library.

I’m not posting all the articles at once, instead dribbling them out as I get to them. You see, I’m a bit busy at the moment working on making my father’s World War II memoir an e-book (available, I hope, within the next few months), gardening (also known as battling rabbits, chipmunks, and squirrels for meager scraps of vegetable matter), and attempting to have a social life in a cautious post-pandemic way.

I must say, revisiting the pages of that old magazine is being an entertaining stroll down memory lane. I hope you’ll enjoy the articles if you decide to visit them. And if you were ever a contributor to The Rune, thank you so much.

Image: Some issues of The Rune. Created by Lane Lambert. Photo by Marilyn Evans.

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Reading Lists

While I was visiting my friend, Chris, down in Tucson, I was admiring her late husband’s book collection. Selling beautifully bound “Great Book” collections used to be a thing–maybe it still is. I have my own collection of world fiction classics with leather binding, gold lettering, marbled end papers, and silk ribbons to mark your place. That got me to pondering what are the current best books to read.

I am a fan of nonfiction so I went looking for the ubiquitous lists that clog the internet. The Greatest Books gives you 1319 nonfiction titles, generated from 130 “best books” lists. That might keep you busy for a while, but if you are interested in more recent works, Book Riot gives you the top twenty nonfiction books of the past decade. Good Housekeeping has a list with a slight bias toward women’s and social issues. You obviously can pick and choose your focus based on the source of the list.

I get a lot of my ideas for books to read from the reviews in The Economist and other media sources. Whenever Retired Admiral James G. Stavridis is interviewed on NBC news, he has a book prominently displayed on a table behind him (he is often the author). The Sailor’s Bookshelf: Fifty Books to Know the Sea looked so interesting I got my hands on a copy. It’s obviously another book list and with a very particular emphasis.

One of the books I found on the Discovery weekly list of best nonfiction books was The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning by Maggie Nelson. This book seems to address the very issues I was writing about in my last blog post, Killing the Dog. I have it on reserve at the library now and can’t wait to read it.

I was surprised, and perhaps shouldn’t have been, at the number of these books I have read. I just might be better informed and well read than I thought. But there are a great many I have yet to read. These reading lists should keep me occupied all through the summer, deep into the winter, and well beyond. Great adventures lie ahead, and I am eager and ready to begin.

Image: Where the books live, Kansas City Public Library, Waldo Branch. By Marilyn Evans.

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Killing the Dog

One famous maxim about writing is “Don’t kill the dog”, its premise being readers will tolerate a lot, but killing a beloved pet is beyond the pale—you risk losing your readers who can forgive a lot, but not that. Of course, rules are made to be broken if there is a good enough reason. Old Yeller and John Wick both kill the dog. John Wick’s story has to justify the murder and mayhem that ensues because a horrible injustice was done to him and his dog, Daisy. This is how we know what bad people John is up against so anything he does is justified (and they are trying to kill him as well, so, self defense). It may be cheap and cheesy short hand, but it gets the job done. Old Yeller, like so many children’s books, is trying to teach kids a lesson that is good for them. I abandoned children’s books from an early age because of the “lessons.” I asked myself, incredulous, the Little Princess is supposed to suck up all the abuse she got when she was suddenly poor, then all was forgiven when she was rich again? I don’t think so.

Children’s literature disgusted my grade-school self, so I turned to murder mysteries. Death usually happened early and off-stage. The rest of the story was about catching the bad guy(s) (usually through cleverness and perseverance) and dispensing justice. I didn’t need those depressing children’s books. I learned my “good for you lessons” from “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”. The bad guys may not always have been caught by the authorities, but the universe had a way of evening things up. One way or another, justice came and no dogs were harmed.

Beyond avoiding killing the beloved pet, how authors write about death and violence depends on the genre. The mysteries I was reading when I was a child were mostly “cozies” with characters like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple or Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. But not all mysteries are cozies, and I have enjoyed gritty novels, films, and television programs as well. These can get extremely violent, and the morality sometimes is ambiguous. No one would describe the writing of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, or Thomas Harris as cozies. True crime can be the most violent of all genres, sometimes with little or no justification for the violence, but hopefully, because the crime has been discovered, solved, and written about, justice was finally served. In the end, most readers and viewers want some sort of justice, even if it is the Twilight Zone kind.

You may recall I’m a fan of horror fiction. Once upon a time, a lot of the violence in horror was fantastical and often had some moral basis underlying it. Fairly stern censorship also limited the depiction of violence during certain eras, but a sub-genre of horror has arisen in the last decades that is increasingly violent. Though “classic” horror still persists, non-human monsters and psychological thrills have in many cases given way to slashers and gore—who dies and how can be pretty much no holds barred.

Our views on violence have changed over time, and our attitudes are affected by the context. How would you write this story? A man slaps another man in a very public setting to defend his wife’s honor. At a certain time and in a certain place, this would demand a duel. In a tragedy, the loyal husband would be killed or maimed. A comedy, a mystery, a romance, a horror story would likely all handle the situation and its outcome differently. In real life, Will Smith gets shunned, and Chris Rock gets sold-out audiences. Assaulting someone in public is not acceptable, we say, suggesting nowadays we have a lower tolerance for violence in real life than in fiction or in the past. But do we?

A man claims self defense, and is free to walk the streets after killing someone. If the man “in fear for his life” is a White police officer and the “threat” is an unarmed Black man, how do we feel about that? How do we read it? How do we write it? Or if a man has a permit for his gun, is startled awake by yelling men crashing into an apartment, and reaches for his gun, is he standing his ground and defending himself? And if the intruders turn out to be cops with a no-knock warrant and possibly the wrong apartment, is that different? Is it a horror story, a tragedy, or an extremely dark comedy? Does race, gender, nationality, social status of the victim or the cops make a difference? Should it? I image how you read it and write it, may very much depend on your personal experience.

If you have a friend or relative who has been the victim of violence, or you yourself have been victimized, you might respond differently to a fictionalized account of an incident that resembles your own. If it’s personal, all abstraction is gone—this was real, this happened to me, and I’m not detached, I’m not okay with it.

How realistic is the violence in modern fiction? How realistic should it be? A convenient fictional device is to hit someone over the head to render them unconscious, removing them from the action but not killing them. In reality, this kind of attack can lead to permanent brain damage or even death. In the novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”, Stephen King describes a beating that renders a man permanently crippled. This is entirely possible. People who are violently attacked don’t usually jump right back up and carry on as though nothing has happened. Few authors describe the true toll of violence on the body and the mind.

Writers are told there can be no story without conflict. One quick and easy route to conflict can be a fight and a body count. The people who die may become ciphers, not real, not important except to show the prowess of the one killing them. In the real world, dead people have families and friends who mourn them. I have long thought that if more stories told about the aftermath of violence, the emergency rooms and months or perhaps years of physical therapy a victim might endure, it might seem less attractive to those who try to emulate their fictional heroes or anti-heroes by assaulting others. The quiet scene of the family at the grave side does little to show how damaged a death leaves family and friends. Yet for all the discomfort and reluctance authors (and perhaps their publishers) may feel, some stories have addressed the aftermath of death—its effect on those left behind, the ones truly grieving and feeling all the pain. Some novels and memoirs deal honestly with the pain of loss. Do we really want to read about this? Isn’t it painful and uncomfortable? Should it be?

I wonder how we will write the violence of the war in Ukraine. The Russian soldiers have been told a story—that Nazi’s are committing genocide against Russian-speaking people—so any violence they commit is justified. But even if they believe this, how could anything justify the torture, rape, execution of non-combatants, the indiscriminate deaths of children, pregnant women, and old people? Even animals are not safe from the violence. Ukrainian cows have been shot dead, in one instance while they stood in their stanchions waiting to be milked. I doubt there is any evidence that they were Nazi cows. Once violence is unleashed, it is often hard to contain. The Russian soldiers seem to have lost sight of what it is they are trying to accomplish, unless the death of every living thing in Ukraine is their true goal.

I fear violence and death casually depicted in fiction may desensitize people and should be used carefully, yet truthful depictions are required to ground a story in the sometimes grim realities of the world. Storytellers have a responsibility in how they portray those realities. I believe we must write honestly about the consequences of violence, the harm that can be inflicted, mental as well as physical. One of the things that makes Stephen King a great horror writer is that in as little as a paragraph he can make you care about a character so when he kills off that person in the next paragraph, you are horrified. And we should be horrified when someone is killed by violence. Anyone. Not just the dog.

Image: Bourbon, a dog who is very much alive. By Laurie Jackson-Prater.

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Making Families

A friend once invited me to a party with a lot of people she worked with. I didn’t know anyone there except her, but I’m a social critter so that didn’t stop me from interacting with this gang of university types. After all, I read a book once (and had recently dropped out of a PhD program, but that’s another story). There was this guy surrounded by a few folks who was spouting some crap about how the American family was imperiled and dead or dying. Never one to be shy about keeping my opinions to myself (especially when there is alcohol involved), I challenged him. My view is that family is so important that if we don’t have one or if the one we have fails to serve, we create a new family. My friend was utterly humiliated–the guy was a professor who taught family relations or some such. But he WAS wrong. I’ve seen all kinds of families that took the place of absent or dysfunctional families. I belong to some.

Social, recreational, mutual support, religious, and other kinds of groups can become the family we need when we need it. We will seek out people who provide emotional, social, and maybe even financial help. We need that. We crave it. And if your birth family doesn’t provide what you need, you have every right to join a different family, one of your own choosing, your own creation. The internet has made it easier to meet and become part of communities of support and to help in forming new families to fill the needs of those who can not get what they so desperately need from their biological kin.

This morning I read about Stepan, a social media sensation with over one million followers, an influencer who also happens to be a cat. He used to live in Ukraine. Suddenly, Instagram and TikTok posts from Stepan stopped. His followers waited an anxious two weeks before they finally heard that he was safely in France. His human, Anna, and her two sons were able to escape the heavily bombed city of Kharkiv. Once they were in Poland, help came from The World Influencers and Bloggers Association and the organization’s CEO and founder Maria Grazhina Chaplin. Last year this organization named Stepan one of the world’s top “petfluencers.”

Through the media, social networks, and other resources, a great many of us have joined an international family that  watches and waits anxiously as our distant, new loved ones deal with the atrocities of an unprovoked assault on their home. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has become our favorite cousin, loved and admired by the whole family, while Vladimir Putin seems like the creepy uncle you wish your Aunt Betty would divorce.  Through social media and instant news, we are closer than ever to people we can and should love and support.

As winter turns to spring, we all pray this war will end and restore our family and friends, human and animal alike, to a peaceful world. When it is finally over, rebuilding will be a long and difficult process. Hopefully the people of Ukraine will get some help from their new world family. In the mean time, I’ll be planting sunflowers in my garden.

Some information for this post came from the Washington Post article “How Stepan, Ukraine’s Most Famous Cat, Escaped the War to Safety” by Taylor Lorenz.

Image: Sunflower seeds. By Marilyn Evans.

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My Legacy

From time to time I write about books I’m reading, have finished, or am remembering fondly. I’ve just finished two books I got from the library: Quick & Legal Will Book and Estate Planning Basics, both by Denis Clifford, an attorney.  “Why, oh why, Marilyn?” you ask, clutching your pearls. It’s kind of a long story so stick with me. There’s something to do with writing at the end of this, I promise

Every time Jonathan and I fly, we look at each other and say, “We really need to have a will.” In spite of our addiction to the television program “Air Disasters”, we know flying is safer than driving, but still, when you’re together and should the worst happen to us both at the same time, what poor sod is going to deal with all our piles and piles of stuff? So I’m reading these books to help me get a handle on how to make a plan. I’ve seen the Bleak House disaster that is a contested will and the generalized mayhem that results from moving on to the next adventure without a will. I hope to spare my grieving friends and relatives (assuming, of course, they will be grieving) from the agony of a long, drawn out probate and other horrors.

Here are some things I have learned. Even lawyers admit the purpose of probate is to enrich lawyers and the state. There are ways to avoid probate with clever estate planning and tools like Transfer Upon Death, and Pay Upon Death, living trusts, Joint Tenancy or Joint Ownership, and cleverly giving away your stuff before you die so you know the things you want to go to certain people will indeed go to those people. I have learned that you don’t need attorneys. That different states have different laws (no surprise there). People probably have way more assets than they think. And most people don’t have enough total assets to need to pay estate tax.

Another thing I learned is that the hardest thing for me is figuring out who the heck to name as an executor. It’s got to be someone who likes you enough to put up with the pain and agony that is dealing with an estate. Fortunately, there is a guide book for that, too. And who do you leave what to? If I fall off my perch first, easy. Everything goes to my poor husband who has to deal with it, and I’m, ahem, free as a bird. Over the past few years, a lot of friends and relatives have passed, and watching their relatives try to figure out what to do with all the stuff has been painful to watch. So even if everything goes to Jonathan, a will might give him some ideas about how to dispose of some of the piles and piles of piles and piles.

But one of the more interesting things I learned–here is the bit about writing–is that you can and should leave you copyrights to someone. And that includes copyrights for things like blogs, short stories, articles, books, and so forth. Until I’d read these books, this had never occurred to me. If you’re curious about how long a copyright is good for, go here.

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf

Rule of thumb is the author’s life time plus 70 years. If you have anything that has been or should be copy righted, give this some thought. If I make it clear who has control of my publications, after I’m long gone and someone wants to buy the rights and turn my stuff into movies, my heir might get a nice check. Or I may sink into obscurity. I’m okay either way.

Image:  Books with legal advice. Photo by Marilyn Evans.

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Four Years and Fading?

Four years (and a month and a bit) ago I started writing this blog. I say writing, but it has been more like dropping in and out. There are lots of times, like lately, when I’m pretty sure I have nothing important or interesting to say. Other times I’m fairly burning with the desire to share my thoughts.

I recently saw a documentary about Rachel Carson, the author most notably of Silent Spring. I was surprised by how many things in her life were similar to my own experiences–like being hijacked by a love of biology in college when she had other plans for her life. One thing that particularly resonated with me was that she sometimes had trouble concentrating on writing when others things, hard things, interrupted her life. I know how she must have felt.

As always, ideas for what to write for this blog come to mind, often at night, but sitting down and writing them is another thing. Perhaps it’s time to retire the blog, I say to myself. There are so many, less important things I could be doing. For instance, there is a garden to plan and seeds to start, although it’s months before anything can go in the ground. And last year’s garden was so miserable I swore I’d never grow another thing…but then the days started getting longer, and the beds have a new layer of well-rotted stall cleanings, and what will the squirrels eat if they can’t raid my garden? I got a keyboard for my birthday, so I can finally get serious about learning to play the piano. And I have a new knitting pattern and a stash of yarn, so there is needle work to get on with. And Spanish to learn. And cats to annoy. And friends to stay in touch with.

I have a book written and only in need of some serious editing. Rewriting to completion should be as easy as falling off a log (not that I’ve done that lately, but once learned it can easily be repeated). And yet, I seem to keep getting stuck. My lack of focus has me a little worried. But honestly, if I never write another blog post or never finish the novel, will the world be in any way adversely affected?

I’m not one of those people who have to write no matter what. I know they are out there. But that’s not me. I can write or not. See here? I’m not writing. Don’t need to. Not missing it. But then again, just like I can’t walk past a seed display in the store and not want to buy the promise of something to grow, I can’t seem to kick the habit of wanting to put some words down and inflict them on my friends and family and other helpless innocents. The only problem is, there may be some really long pauses between posts. You’ve probably noticed that. I have no excuses. So perhaps it’s time to get back to it. There must be something worth saying. You can’t lead a life as dissipated as mine and not have garnered some insight or wisdom or opinions or cautionary tales. Stay tuned. I might yet write something profound. Or at least entertaining.

Now back to all the really unimportant stuff that is calling my name.

Image: Baby plants. By Marilyn Evans.

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Road Trip

I recently spent two weeks in Tucson, Arizona. The purpose of the trip was to help my best friend deal with being widowed. Let me start by saying death sucks. The death of someone you love and rely on, a friend and lover and soul mate, sucks maximally. Nothing anyone can do will make it better, so you can only do what you can do and that’s be there in case there is anything you can do.

I like airports–hiking up and down the length of the terminals, looking at all the people and into all the shops–but I’m not such a fan of airplanes. I was lucky because I managed to catch the window when none of my flights got cancelled due to blizzards or the pandemic. I did, however, spend seven uninterrupted  hours in an N95 mask, not fun but necessary. I was also lucky in that the weather in Tucson was lovely compared to what Kansas City was experiencing. Flowers were blooming, hummingbirds and vermilion flycatchers were flittering about, the butterflies were emerging at the Tucson Botanical Garden, and the sunsets on the Santa Catalina Mountains were spectacular. It was good to be with my friend and to try to help with the thousand little things that need doing when tragedy strikes. So many things you never think of.

You’ll recall from previous blog posts that I often get a lot of writing done when I’m in Tucson. I’m sure you’ll understand that I didn’t get a lot of writing done while I was there this time. Other things seemed more important.

I feel like I should have something profound to say about death and dying and those left behind and how we mourn. But there’s been too much death and dying over the past two years, both from the pandemic and the other things that take us away from our loved ones. So I’ll stop here and say, this is just a quick post to let you know I’m back, and there’s more coming.

Image: Sunset on the Santa Catalina Mountains. By M. Evans

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How Not to Write and How to Not Write

Stephen King’s wonderful book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, is something every aspiring writer (and maybe every reader) should read. I haven’t read it in quite a while and am due to revisit it. There are many great books on writing–how to, what the writer’s life is like, how to edit and plot, and all kinds of good stuff. I have a lot of these kinds of books and have read most of them and have gotten a lot of books on writing from the library. Some of the books are better than others, but anything that teaches you something useful is good. I haven’t seen too many books on how not to write, so let me see if I can fill a tiny bit of that void with some advice on how NOT to write and even how to not write. (They are different, trust me.)

First how not to write. Don’t write “in the style of” someone famous and much loved unless you’ve really made a study of how that person writes. You can certainly borrow plots (Shakespeare did) and some great stuff has come out of what was started out as fan fiction. But if you want to write in the style of, say Jane Austen, make sure you understand her wicked sense of humor as well as her time and culture. Paying tribute may be a great way to start, but honestly, you have your own voice. Find it. Use it.

Second, don’t slide over plot points. If it’s important to the story, give it some time and effort. Don’t spring stuff out of the blue without some foreshadowing. “Oh, and by the way, she was an orphan with a twin who was raised by witches,” you write in chapter twelve when suddenly, conveniently the twin appears. Readers hate that. It’s like cheating. Find a way to hint at or even tell about something that becomes important later.

Third, don’t pick you mom and your best friend for editors. They will love it no matter how bad it is. Get someone who will be honest AND instructive. “This is terrible” isn’t useful criticism. “I don’t understand this part” or “I wish you told me more about…” is. Part two of this is, don’t ignore criticism of your work. Fix it or explain it or make it better. If one person has trouble with it, likely others will too.

Don’t use “just”. The problem is, once you use “just”, it just invites all its relatives and just starts showing up everywhere, like in every paragraph and sometimes in every sentence. If you just mean “merely” or “simply” or “only”, use those instead if you must. If you mean “right and fair”, “just” is okay. Just do a word search and eliminate them all. Then if you re-read and in spots it makes no sense, just add it back. Just sayin’.

Don’t use cliches. I know everyone says this, but gosh it’s tempting to use the shorthand of cliches. Don’t do it. Don’t describe in exhausting detail things that don’t move the plot along. Don’t use slang unless your audience is familiar with it or unless it is integral to the story and you make it clear by the context what it all means. Don’t kill the dog. Or the kid. Unless that is what the story is about. Make sure you know what your story is about. And stick to it. The detailed sex scene may be earth shattering, but is it relevant? Of course there is a lot more, but this is only a blog post, not a book. Let’s get to how to not write.

You won’t get any writing done if you have no place to do it, no place where you and your thoughts can collude in some level of peace and quiet. And when you insist on not being disturbed because you’re writing, make sure you’re writing. You won’t write if you don’t have a time to write, a time set aside to focus on what you want to say. You won’t write if you put everything and everyone ahead of writing, if you’re never a little selfish, just for a little while. You won’t write if you spend too much time doubting yourself or thinking your work should be perfect on the first draft–it won’t be, but that doesn’t mean anything. You won’t write if you give up, but you also won’t write if you plug away at something that is making you bored and frustrated and disgusted. For Pete’s sake, give it a rest. You can always come back to it. And if you give in to the despair of writer’s block, you won’t write. But it will pass. An idea will mug you when you least expect it, and you’ll get back to writing and abandon not writing, so in your face, writer’s block!

I don’t pretend to know much about writing or how to write well, but I do write. I plan to keep doing it. Hope this helps.

Image: Some writing books. The rest are in the public library. By Marilyn Evans

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Autumn Rituals

Two big days happen at the beginning of my autumn (yes, officially autumn began September 22, but humor me). The first big day is Halloween, the second is November 1.

Halloween, Samhain, the Day of the Dead, whatever you may call it, is the time of year to celebrate and honor those who have passed on to the next world or to otherwise acknowledge Death, the other side of being born. It’s also a time to watch a plethora of terrible horror films and the Simpson’s Tree House of Horror, visit a haunted house, drink and feast (possibly in costume) with friends, decorate–sometimes extravagantly–but above all, it is the time to give away candy.

My love of all things holiday can be directly traced to my father. Passing out candy was one of the all time highlights of the year. I know there are those who say the Trick or Treaters have to be children in costumes, but I’m of the school that anyone who shows up at my house on October 31 gets candy or in some cases, if they are of a certain age and so inclined, a tasty adult beverage.

I was deeply disappointed this year when I only had four costumed children (and a mom also suitably dressed). Even in the midst of last year’s raging pandemic we had a better turn out. I fear “Trunk or Treat” events or other incursions into tradition may be eroding my pleasure. I pray next year will be back to my preferred normal.

The second big event is the start of National Write a Novel in a Month month. This is day two and I’m hitting my word count. I woke up this morning excited to write. This is a happy thing after the long dry summer with a few short stories and not much else including blog posts. I’m back in full swing and having a great time. I always promise myself that after November, I’ll write another novel in December and another in January…. You already can guess how that will work out, but leave me my optimism. I have ideas, plot lines, rough drafts, and a big bowl of leftover Halloween candy. What could possibly go wrong?

Image: Halloween Party Food 2002. By Jonathan Hutchins.

 

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Back in the Saddle Again

Maybe it’s the pandemic, maybe it’s the season or the era or something else entirely, but it’s been hard to write lately. I haven’t been the only writer having a long dry spell. I simply haven’t been able to get myself motivated. However, the contract with my publisher recently ended so he’s stopped supporting my book which means it has been listed on Amazon as out of print. That means I either had to find another publisher or self publish. I haven’t self published before, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I did a bit of editing (there was a continuity error that needed fixing and a couple of other things I wanted to add or change) and suddenly the second edition of Beloved Lives is on line and available as an e-book or paperback.

Mind you, I have been writing a tiny bit over the past months. Story ideas come in the night and poke me until I wake up enough to work them out and/or write them down. In the morning I’ll get a draft together, let it sit a while, then do serious editing after a decent interval. Then it needs to rest a bit more. It’s kind of like making bread with time between steps to allow the yeast to work and the loaf to rise. One story has gone off to be published eventually in an anthology. Anthologies are notoriously slow, so no telling when that will be in print, but there is nothing like getting an acceptance letter to get the juices flowing. And I have a couple of other new stories that are trying to find homes as well. When I’m sure of the publication dates or see actual contracts, I’ll let you know where and when these things might appear.

I have to admit, the process of reviewing and editing Beloved Lives got me in the mood to revisit The Gingerbread House, a mystery that wasn’t quite mysterious enough and needed a couple of red herrings thrown in. Over the past year it has been really hard to get back to it, but lately I’m having a lot of fun working on it. Revisiting my characters is being a real treat. I hadn’t planned to finalize and publish it until 2022, but Jonathan, my beloved spouse, thinks I ought to try to have it done in time for Christmas. If I work hard over November, that is a real possibility. Once all those things are done, perhaps I can finally get back to The Iliad in Space (working title, of course). That one has been in process for a very long time.

I do enjoy my stories, and I love my characters. It’s good to be back in the saddle, riding along with them into the publishing sunset.

Image: Fort Leavenworth Fox Hunt at Mulvane Ranch in the Flint Hills. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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A Legacy

Four years ago my mother’s oldest brother died. He had led a remarkable life, but in his old age his mind began to fail him. He never had children, although he had many nieces and nephews to whom he left his estate. The settlement of that estate took years for weird, Dickensian reasons. If you are familiar with the novel Bleak House, you’ll get an idea of the ins and outs of the process of distributing Uncle Bob’s worldly goods. His estate was finally settled, and his  legacy was bequeathed, but not without a whole lot of weirdness.

My father’s older sister died in the early summer, the last of a large family of brothers and sisters. She passed quietly in her sleep at the age of ninety-eight. She was the mother of my favorite cousins, the matriarch of an incredibly close family  who gathered every Sunday for feasting and sharing. These people understand my sense of humor because they have it too. My aunt was one of the greatest cooks on the planet. Ask anyone who knew her. The pastor who officiated at her funeral nailed it: “When Virginia meets Jesus, he’ll say, ‘You’ve earned your rest. Sit here beside me, and we’ll talk.’ And she will reply, ‘If you want to talk with me, we can do it in the kitchen. People are coming, and they have to be fed.’” Yep, that’s Aunt Virginia.

My close friend died a little over a year ago, killed by a speeding felon who hit her car. Mari’s greatest legacy, in my opinion, is the many, many people she taught how to ride a horse with skill and confidence. She taught people to love horses and how to care for them. Because of her, I fox hunted in Ireland and rode a horse over a three-foot-six-inch fence without dying. Besides teaching, my friend rescued countless animals, large and small. Those of us who remember her and miss her feel grateful for her legacy.

My stepmother died of cancer this summer. We had a rocky start but became really good friends over the years. I missed her during the pandemic when getting together got tougher. I will continue to miss her now that she’s gone, miss our conversations and time together.

A compelling reason for creating anything, for teaching anyone, for having children, is to leave something behind—to create a legacy. We often don’t have a say in how what we leave behind is interpreted. I’m sure there are people who were monsters but thought they were doing good things. They are the ones we damn for their legacy. Others may think they failed, but as time goes on, that proves to be incorrect. Georges Bizet died thinking Carmen, was a flop, and so it was at first. Now it is one of his most beloved works.

I think perhaps we should be kinder to ourselves. While we can do our best to do good things, to create, teach, raise children, care for animals, work for the welfare of our planet, leave money to our heirs; in the end, we have no say in how those we leave behind will interpret our legacy. All we can do is the best we know how, and love everyone we can, and tell them so often.

Image: One of my grandmother’s quilts. By M. Evans

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For the Love of Libraries and Books

In preparation for a long car trip, I got an audio book from the library, as I so often do. Listening in the car didn’t work out as I’d planned, but when I got home, I was so fascinated by the book that I got the print version (pictures!) The Library Book by Susan Orlean is ostensibly about the fire that consumed a great deal of the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986. In fact, it is a history of and love letter to libraries, librarians, and books. I had heard of this fire on a podcast about cookbooks–a cookbook collector who lived in a part of California subject to wildfires had donated a great many of her books to this same library where, ironically, they were consumed by an arson-set fire.

The Library Book tells about the history of libraries, the tragedies that have befallen some of them, and their resilience in rising from the ashes. She introduces us to librarians, ancient and modern. Ms. Orlean describes her magical childhood trips to her hometown library and the continuing magic that is the modern-day library, source of so much more than books. Today’s library contains books, periodicals, assorted historical documents, photographs and art works, computer terminals, voting registration information, support services for homeless people, and much more.

My own love affair with libraries started when I rebelled against the books foisted off on children such as myself where the animal so often died or the little girl was subjected to all manner of horrors until the end when all was forgiven. I was disgusted. Where, I asked myself, was the justice? That’s when I discovered the shelves and shelves of mysteries. If someone dies, it’s in the beginning and by the end of the book, justice is served. I worked my way through every mystery in the county library in my hometown.

I was fortunate to grow up in a house with books. I discovered Edgar Allan Poe and the beauty of his poetry at an early age. My brothers and I were known to act out bits of Shakespeare–we were mad for the ghost scenes in Hamlet. Owning books came naturally to me. Perhaps it has come a little too easily. My house groans under the weight of all the books it contains.

This summer I’ve helped my friend, Dennis Young, sell his books at a couple of conventions. Other people were selling books, too, so, yes, I came home with books. While at the horror convention, Crypticon, I discovered a new genre: splatter westerns. Imagine a slasher horror movie in the old west with elements of the paranormal. Not what I expected I’d be reading, but given my childhood reading material and my on-going passion for classic horror films, maybe not so surprising. Of course, I also came home with some mysteries, still among my first loves.

Audio and paper books from the library, old books on line from Project Gutenberg, new books from indie authors, I love them all. And librarians! There is a current internet meme about an Old English word for library that means “book hoard”. What a lovely word! It easily conjures images of librarians as dragons in their library lairs, protecting their books. But unlike dragons, librarians are eager to share their treasures. I salute all the library dragons and bless them for doing their best to keep the book hoards safe for us all.

Image: Partial book hoard.

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Without a Home

A post apocalyptic novel or film might have used this plot. The world has been ravaged by a pandemic, killing millions of people and wrecking economies. The most vulnerable lose everything. Into this world, a woman and her dog seek shelter in an open space, finding others in similar circumstances sheltered there as well. One of the inhabitants, someone she has seen before, begins to behave more erratically than usual, and, though her dog will defend her, she fears for her life. Though it’s late and dark, she seeks aid from a lighted house nearby. She asks to use a phone–she lost hers long ago–and begs the police to come and defend her.

This is a true story. This happened. A homeless woman and her dog rang our doorbell, desperate and terrified. The police told her they couldn’t run the guy out of the park, and she had best find somewhere else to sleep. We said she was welcome to spend the night on our front porch. The cops discretely warned my husband and me to be careful about letting her stay too long. Because of issues with squatters rights, she might be hard to get rid of. We considered inviting her into the guest room, but we didn’t think the cats would approve of the dog, and we knew she wouldn’t leave the dog all by himself. The cops warned her she would have to move on in the morning.

She had a can of dog food in her backpack, and not a lot else. We fed her leftover pork fried rice which she also shared with her dog. We gave her a thick comforter and a pillow that the dog quickly claimed.

I didn’t sleep much that night. In the morning I researched how to make dog food. When she started stirring, I made her toast, coffee and a hard boiled egg, and added two little oranges. My first attempt at homemade dog food was a resounding success. While she and the dog ate, I made two sandwiches (BLT and PB and J, my favorites) added carrot sticks and an apple to the paper bag. I scrounged up $40. We don’t keep much cash in the house. I wish it had been more. I packed the rest of the dog food in a container, and refilled her water jug. She was tearfully grateful when she left.

I’ve agonized for days over her. She said she’d be getting a check the first of the month. No matter how big that check is,  I doubt it will be enough to get her an apartment and medical attention for her aging dog or enough groceries to last a month.

Homelessness is its own epidemic, and it will only grow. Moratoriums on evictions have ended, and many people are still without work or resources. And how do you find work without a phone, an address, decent clothes to work in?Kansas City has begun to try to address these issues. But the books Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich, and Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond make it painfully clear that poor people are profitable for those who prey on and use them, and getting out the hole of poverty and homelessness is a massive struggle.

The woman and her dog are heavy on my mind. This could be any of us. So many of us are one paycheck away from where this woman and dog found themselves. The time to act is now.

Image: A home. By Jonathan Hutchins

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The Well-Edited Garden

I’ve lived in the same house for about thirty-two years. During that time, the park across the street has lost a lot of trees to old age, storm damage, and other causes. Also during that time, none of those trees have been replaced. I took it upon myself to write a letter to the parks department suggesting they might want to plant a few trees, you know, for shade and beauty and the environment. I didn’t expect anything to happen, so imagine my surprise when this spring, people and equipment appeared and planted forty new trees. I know because I walked around and counted them. Best of all, they seem to be entirely native species. Mind you, I might have made slightly different choices, including some chokecherries and hickories, but in all, I’d say they did a pretty good job. I look forward to watching that edited version of the park over the next several years as those trees grow.

I would like to have a native forest garden on my property with Missouri fruit and nut trees and shrubs and a few things introduced from other parts of the U.S. like ramps and wild ginger. But a certain amount of tending and editing is required to stay ahead of the conquering hoards of plants brought by accident or design from other continents.

I have personally declared war on the invasive species in my yard. Fortunately, I can eat the garlic mustard, so it’s not wasted, but when it’s gone, I won’t shed a tear. The problem with invasives is they squeeze out  native species and in some cases are a poor substitute for the native plants. Number one on my hit list is Chinese honeysuckle. It’s everywhere, hard to kill, quick to spread, and some people actually plant it on purpose. There was a time I was willing to let it live because it is a shrub that allows cover and nesting for birds and has little red berries that they will eat. Then I found out the berries are relatively nutritionally poor. Add to the that, the plants are a bit thin and therefore not as good cover as other plants are. On top of that, it starts growing up in other shrubs and, out competing them, kills them off and is the only plant standing. End of my compassion. You die, honeysuckle.

Even the desert needs help. You may have heard of the threat buffelgrass presents to the saguaro cactus and the desert habitat. Without an army of volunteers, habitats could vanish in a blaze of wildfires that benefit the invasive buffelgrass and not much else in the Arizona landscape.

I’m not saying all introduced species are bad. Apple trees didn’t come from North America, but who doesn’t love an apple?  And it goes both ways. The fruits and vegetables from the Americas have become essential to the cuisines of many countries around the world. But when I can, I’m trying to keep it local. And that requires constant editing out of things that would overwhelm my garden.

Let me bring this back around to writing, if I may. I’ve been doing a bit of editing for a friend who is in the process of finishing up yet another novel (Dennis seems prolific to me, but it usually takes me years to write a novel). One of the things I notice about writers, I am a perfect example, is that in some early drafts, certain phrases or words pop up again and again, pushing out other, possibly better words. I know this because my writing is full of these, and I have to weed them out when I’m reviewing my own work. It took a good editor to point this out to me, and I’ve been trying to share the wisdom when I can. That said, some writers are better at self editing than others, and Dennis is one of them. He leaves me little to do.

So, my friends, whether it’s writing or gardening, tend to your editing. Keep the weeds to a limit, but know that sometimes a weed is just a plant–or a word–that isn’t in the right place.

Happy gardening. Happy writing. Happy May Day.

Image: Chinese honeysuckle rising from the dead to kill my shrubs. By Marilyn Evans

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The First 100 Years

[This guest blog is an essay by my good friend Chris (you remember Chris?)]

The first 100 years is the hardest, I think.

Looking backward through the lens of all your most trivial possessions—this essential oil from the 1970’s—nobody makes this sort of thing anymore. Look at that hand-typed label.  Smell the subtleties, still caught inside this vial.
Nowadays if you try to buy a fragrance oil with this name you get a paltry counterfeit.

And don’t even get me started about the real perfume houses and the gems they used to make, which _maybe_ you could find, used, on ebay, for more money than the many hundreds they cost you already in the 1980’s.

Looking back at this kerosene lantern—nowadays nobody even dreams of trying to camp with that old biohazard!  For eight bucks, you can buy a realistic looking kerosene-lantern-shaped object loaded with LED lights, running on batteries that easily last all night, never presenting a fire hazard.  You don’t have to pump it to pressurize the fuel.  You don’t have to know the dark secrets of burning the new mantle down to ash first, if you’ve had to replace it because it got bumped.

Those glorious, circular, wicked Aladdin lamps…hard to get…THOSE lamps cost hundreds of dollars.  The last time I saw one, I saw three…all brass polished and silver.  Their owners had lived by them while homesteading in Alaska for two decades.  They still looked new.   I pull the little LED flashlight from my pocket—cost me $5.

The first 100 years is the hardest because you are still rather moored to your technology, and nostalgia is still possible.

This Swiss Army knife-like phone in my pocket—what DOESN’T it do?
I still have my real Swiss Army knife…with 22 functions, including a magnifying glass. (“In case I needed to start a fire with no matches,” I told myself the day I bought it.)  That princely $40 I spent as a teen (investing in the best, following the wisdom of adults who had their own first 100 years from which to advise me), would be like spending $250 today.  Good knives, bright lenses…these, I was promised, would always serve.  But I haven’t pulled it from my drawer in a decade now.  My phone magnifies; my Bic lights fires.  Don’t even get me started on sturdy lost Zippos, or (equally lost) refillable butane status markers—engraved, sometimes.

The other day, I realized I no longer carry a car key. There’s a tech that’s slipping away—remember when it was a rite of passage to admire a muscle car?  To gain a license?  To OWN one of these things?  I hear the kids don’t even want one.  Too much trouble.  Just hire it.  Use your phone. And now, with a trace of contempt, we speak of “ICE”…Internal Combustion Engines.
It’s no longer taught in high school.  Why would it be?  People laugh aloud when a particularly old one goes by, and you can smell it for a long while after.

I think back.  Grama’s keepsake wedding china was shoved off to some Goodwill, I am sure, because that glorious gilt pattern couldn’t tolerate a microwave.  Heh.  Microwaves.  Remember when your first microwave cost $800 and lasted about 20 years?  Remember appliances that were meant to be repaired?

What other buggy whips do I have lying around? I have digital buggy whips!
I have a digital clock so old that it remembers THE FIRST daylight savings time.  Every year it shifts itself forward about three weeks too soon.  Every year it falls back three weeks too late.  I have to manually intervene… there’s no update for the onboard chip that old.

For a brief time, I got out my old wind up clock—a travel alarm of which I was enormously proud.  But it makes a racket, and it needs winding every day.  I finally let it run down again, because my spouse couldn’t abide the noise.  For his sake, I also had to tear the batteries out of the modern clocks that are not really mechanical, but they “tick” anyway.  What a legacy!  My phone doesn’t tick, always knows what day it is.

After the first 100 years—I think that the older I get, and the farther removed I become from the tech of my childhood, the easier it will be to just wave it past and mumble, “Ah, there goes another one.”  I haven’t worried about warming up the TV in many years.  I haven’t had to adjust the vertical roll that started when the CRT was too hot. Likewise, I haven’t had anybody invite me inside to admire the fact that the image was IN COLOR, and we all had to come over to see the first of us to manage getting one of those! Now… the screen goes from “WYSIWYG” to “Retina-display” with barely a shrug.  Somehow, we take that for granted.

Remember how we all laughed at the idea that we’d PAY for TV?  That’s what commercials were for! Remember VCRs were supposed to liberate us from that? Remember Blockbuster? Remember when Netflix came in the mail?

Remember going to a movie theater? Does anyone remember when the insides of the “movie house” were as ornate as jewelry boxes?  Balconies and carved ceilings and layouts that reminded more of cathedrals than of cushy living rooms?  I think it’s harder to have lost the ornate theater space than it was to say goodbye to VCR’s and their blinking 12’s.

First hundred years….
I think I shall barely notice passing through my second hundred years.

Image: Jonathan’s Swiss Army knife. By Marilyn Evans

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Calculated Cuts

For some reason I can’t quite remember, I decided to count all my books. Of course, it was only ever going to be a rough estimate. I’m convinced the books move around when they so desire, just like the Rollright Stones, so you never get a true accounting. Still, I gave it my best shot. It was upward of 2000 on the first and second floors, but not counting the attic. In this book count, I didn’t count the electronic books. There are a few thousand more of those.

Now some of these belong to my husband who has a formidable science fiction collection. His collection includes many classics and some books that are truly awful. I, on the other hands, have a lot of mysteries. I’ve given away many of the ones I’ve already read, and some that are part of a series, I’ve borrowed from the library. When I used to fly a lot for work, I’d buy a book in a series, read it on the plane and at the hotel, then leave it behind for someone else.

It occurred to me during this exercise of counting books that a lot of the ones in my house I had never read, and some I had only scanned. So for the new year and here around my 70th birthday, I have decided it’s time to start making my way through the paper books at least, then consider giving away any that aren’t necessary references. So far I’m on my seventh gardening book.

I had no idea I had so many gardening books. I’m learning a lot, and kind of wonder why I hadn’t read these sooner. It could have saved me a lot of time, effort, and failure. One of the books that has really impressed me is Pruning Made Easy. These books have taught me that pruning isn’t just keeping the size of your plants under control, it’s increasing their productivity. You gotta cut to be kind. And you know where this is going, don’t you? Yep, editing writing has much the same effect. Not just cutting down on the hyperbole but making everything more direct and concise.

Now, I have to qualify this cutting down with the qualifier: I have been known to write like a scientist–just the facts without description, discussion, explanation, and all the other stuff that makes reading a story interesting. The trick in both pruning and editing is not to cut the good stuff or too much, but just the stuff that needs to be cut. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: a good editor is worth their weight in whatever you’re willing to pay. The same can be said for a good tree surgeon.

So I’ve been pruning my blueberries (I was wondering why their yield had dropped so much), and anything else that can be pruned this time of year. I’ve been offering my services to a friend as a proof reader (he pays in barbecue). I’ve been doing some writing that I am editing as I go and again after it rests for a bit. I’m doing some indoor gardening and lots and lots of reading.

After the gardening books, on to the horse books. That may not be until well into spring. Did I mention I have a lot of gardening books?

Image: Tools by Marilyn Evans

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In the Dark

I haven’t been able to write for a while. You may have noticed. Or not. I’ve been in the dark–the dark of winter, the dark of the pandemic, the dark night of the soul.

Winter has come with too little rain or snow, too much cold, too few encounters with my fellow humans. Over three hundred thousand people have died from the pandemic. My husband and I are refusing invitations, trying to be safe, trying to be responsible, though we so want to see our family and friends. The holidays should make it brighter, but this is the first Yule season without my good friend who was killed in the spring.

And I’ve been wondering about writing. Do I even like writing? Writers say they write because they have to. I don’t really have to. Anyway, it doesn’t seem like I have to. Am I really any good at it? Should I even be bothering? I had planned to work hard in November, but more than a week into December I still couldn’t get started. Is it time to just stop?

Still, in the darkness of this season of festivals of light, it’s not so very dark. I’ve sent cards and cookies and gifts, called people, stayed in touch by social media. I’ve gotten through my Buffy the Vampire Slayer binge watch, and it wasn’t as dark as I remembered it. I’ve been working my way through all my gardening books, because it will be spring again some day. There is a vaccine for the virus, and it’s already in use.

And the writing? I get a regular newsletter that has calls for submissions. One of my stories seemed like a good fit for a call. It was ultimately rejected, but had made it all the way to the final round. I got the nicest rejection letter I’ve ever had.That encouraged me to send it out again. Another one of the magazines, published four times a year, uses the same opening line for all the stories in that issue. The February issue’s opening line intrigued me. I wrote a story. I polished it, adjusted it, sent it to a friend for review, polished some more and sent it off. It was fun. I enjoyed the writing and the editing and the submission process. It might get rejected, but maybe, just maybe, I’m not done writing quite yet.

Maybe the darkness is lifting. We’ll see where I stand a week or two after the Solstice. I bet the world will be just a little bit lighter.

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Bingeing and Other Indulgences

My husband and I binge-watched Game of Thrones a few months ago, at least the last several seasons we hadn’t seen. I followed this with a binge of Lord of the Rings–Peter Jackson’s great films. I have now moved on to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and will follow that with Babylon Five. I actually own all of these so I can watch deleted scenes, interviews, “making of”, and anything else my little heart desires. I especially love the “making of” bits. I like seeing how and why what was done was done. The details–set design, costumes, special effects, and all fascinate me.

I love film and well done television. I actually also love live theater, but that’s not happening right now. Books are amazing, and I read obsessively, but I really like seeing someone’s idea of how something should be brought to life on the screen, the television, or the stage. And it’s always fun to see a new or different interpretation, a re-imagining. Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes all have been remade a hundred times, and I’m always fascinated. The real reason I wrote Beloved Lives was because The Hunger was such a great re-imagining of the vampire world that I wanted to see the same take on The Mummy. I was not impressed with the new films, so I wrote my own version. I’d love to see it be a movie some day. Not holding my breath, though.

Writing can be somewhat collaborative, but mostly it’s a solitary affair. On the other hand, making a film calls on the talent of a vast number of people. Even the shoestring-budgeted indie, Pi (not to be confused with Life of Pi--see info at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/), had quite a few people to pull it together.

A film can be made or broken by the strangest things. A bad director can get a lack luster performance from a great actor, the wrong music can kill a film. Terrible special effects can turn a potentially great film into a laughable cult classic. But when it all comes together in the right way, when all the moving parts mesh, the result can be epic.

One of my favorite books by the late Dick Frances is Wild Horses about the madness that surrounds making a film. In the end, a mystery is solved, a great film gets made, and everyone hates the director and treats him badly, but he doesn’t care because he’s already thinking about his next film. That’s kind of the way I write. I don’t write great things, at least not in my opinion. But I enjoy writing and sharing what I’ve written. If no one likes it or reads it, never mind. I’m on to my next book or story or article or blog post. And if anyone ever decides to turn any of what I write into video, I’ll be fascinated to watch how it was made.

Image: Jonathan and friends settled in for a binge. By Marilyn Evans.

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The Variable Muse

My muse can be a pain in the butt. Anyone who has a cat can sympathize—sometime around four in the morning, or some other equally inconvenient time, I’ll get a poke, poke, poke. Cats usually want food, to crawl under the covers, petting. string pulling—cat things. Muses want to tell you their ideas. The following is a nearly word for word conversation between the pain-in-the-butt and me. Nearly.

“Are you awake?”

“No.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I wasn’t until you poked me.”

“Yeh, but you are now. So, I have this great idea for a story.”

“I’m trying to sleep.”

“Yeh, but it’s a great idea. It goes like this.”

And off she goes. Sleep is a distant memory. Sometimes it really is a great idea—or at least it seems to be at four in the morning. It needs work. The details need to be hammered out. That takes thought and time. By six I’m up and writing. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But she is a persistent bugger. And if I ignore her, she gets huffy and doesn’t speak to me for a long, long time. That is a bad thing. A very bad thing.

She is extremely unreliable, my muse. If I court her and pursue her and beg her for her attention, she pretty much blows me off. Worst of all, she’ll sometimes show up when I’m having a party night, and if I’m drunk, so is she. She has great ideas. She pokes me. I write them down. If I am sane, I wait until I’m sober to look them over again. A drunk muse is not a dependable muse. Never, never write a story and submit it while drunk. That way lies embarrassment. Yes, I have done it. Only the once, and thank goodness the editor politely told me to take a flying leap. Otherwise I would have publicly embarrassed myself and her. My muse and I had a stern discussion after that.

I’m not sure where she gets her ideas. She might be stealing them from other writers. Maybe that’s where she goes when she’s gone for so long. Maybe she’s hanging out in a bar with other muses, trading ideas, brainstorming, eavesdropping. Sometimes I wish she’d steal ideas from a better class of writer. But I suspect it’s not her inspirations that are wanting but my weakness as a writer. She does her best.

Two nights ago she poked me. I did not want to be awake. She had this story. It was good. It was really good. I mulled it and chewed on it, wrestled it to the ground, beat it into submission, coaxed it, coddled it, and got it all written down. I waited a little while, then reread it and adjusted it. I sent it to a friend. He had great suggestions. I fixed it. Then I fixed it some more. Then I sent it away. It may flop. It might get published. But my muse, for all her being so annoying, really came through.

Now if she would just get back to work on the novel I’m currently trying to write. But like I said, unreliable.

Image: Muses partying. Source unknown.

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Strange Past Times

Pandemics make for peculiar past times.  My friend, Chris, is making Viking grease horns for her needles and tying knots around bottles. Besides the usual writing and the more mundane gardening, I’m reading tarot cards and cataloging my weeds.

You may recall, I was the crazy cucumber lady last year; this time it’s tomatoes I’m inflicting on anyone who will hold still. I have promising cantaloupe vines, but the fruit seems to be slow to ripen. I suspect my impatience and not the vines is the issue here. 

This year for the first time, I have a butterfly garden. Among my guests have been a tiger swallowtail and a pair of monarchs. It’s also a favorite hiding place for the yard bunny.  I don’t usually realize she’s there until I water and she runs out, all indignant. I don’t mind deviling the chipmunks, but I really don’t like terrorizing the bunny. You know my opinion of squirrels.

My yard is really good at growing brush but the traditional edibles have been struggling. In fact, all the fruit trees in the neighborhood are bare. It will be a lean year for some of the creatures who rely on them. But you can always count on the poke weed to have fruit, little poison bombs the birds eat with impunity but that can kill a human (the seeds are the poison part). My chokecherry tree had a lot of fruit, too. The birds got all of it, but I don’t begrudge them. It makes lovely jam, but I have jam enough for now.

If you remember that the apocalypse I have always been preparing for is retirement, you’ll appreciate that I’ve discovered many of those weeds in my yard are culinary, medicinal, and otherwise useful. It’s weird how much we don’t use these days that in the past were the stuff of home remedies and the dinner table. But while chicory and dandelion root coffee may be interesting, I think I’ll pass for now. I’m not that desperate yet. Still, all this is useful fodder for writing. Especially the poisons. Always gotta love the poisons if you plan on writing mysteries. Did you know…never mind. Wouldn’t want to give bad ideas to anyone stir crazy from quarantine.

As for the writing, it’s had its ups and downs. Last night I wrote a really terrible flash fiction piece. In fairness, I was quite drunk. I’ve got to stop writing drunk. It may have worked for Hemingway, but I need all my wits to keep from embarrassing myself. If somehow that story ever escapes into the wild (it’s about taking a van to the apocalypse), promise me you’ll ignore it.

It’s being fun releasing a chapter at a time of The Gingerbread House. I’m making final edits as I go, and it’s good to revisit it from a distance. I don’t know how the experience is for the readers (drop me a line and let me know, if you are reading it), but I’m liking it even better now than I did before.

That’s how I’m doing. Now back to the tarot and my weeds.

Image: Butterfly garden. By Marilyn Evans

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Plague Journal

As I’ve said before, my survivalist and prepping interests have always been to prepare me for the impending disaster, not of nuclear war or a solar flare or the zombie apocalypse–but for the disaster that will be my retirement. If I don’t manage to have enough savings or investments or social security to feed my husband, myself and the cats, the disaster will be right there in our faces. Turns out, the disasters have hit a bit sooner than I expected, so I’ve upped my timeline. Toward the goal of being less dependent on the world at large that is failing to provide, I’ve started by analyzing my yard. As Euell Gibbons used to say, many parts are edible. I’ve been amazed at the variety of medicinals and edibles merrily jumping out of the ground that most people would be dumping weed killer on. On top of that, the herbs I’m growing, especially basil, seem to cure everything. If I have food and medicine covered, what’s next?

Since I’m planning on being in quarantine until there is a safe and effective vaccine (for the sake of the at-risk people I might infect if I should get sick), I’m staying in and trying to keep from dying of boredom. I genuinely believe people can die of boredom. It’s caused me to leave more than one job. Our first line of news, education, and entertainment is probably the television followed closely by the computers and magazines and newspapers. But my greatest source of comfort is reading a book–paper, electronic, audio, it doesn’t matter. Besides, as so many writers have said, you have to read to write. I’m chest deep in reading material right now. My husband is slightly horrified at how many books I currently have piled on my desk. That happens when you’re trying to research more than one topic at the same time.

The library has a reserve and pick up service so, like your favorite takeout meals, I can carry out books I want to read. Right now, among others, I’m reading Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. While it was published in 2016, and covers Milwaukee, I figured it would be relevant to our times of people not being able to pay rent or mortgages. Even with eviction moratoriums, homelessness is coming. Already the park across the street from my house has more homeless people camping out in it. One has a dog. One has a scooter. I’m not sure what will become of them when winter comes. Maybe by winter things will be better, but that’s not the way I’m going to bet. I worry about these people a lot. As for us, for a retirement present, my husband paid off the mortgage. If we keep up the taxes and don’t have a tornado, earthquake, fire, or gas explosion, we’ve got a place to sleep.  The way 2020 is going, I’ll keep my fingers crossed, even though it makes typing tough.

Then there are family and friends, essential survival resources for sanity and humanity. My mom is in lock down in an assisted living facility. I call. It’s not the same as visiting. My neighbors are cautious about visiting at a distance. We chat across yards and streets. My friends post on Facebook. I’ve seen a couple of them in person, carefully after self quarantine when there was any chance of exposure. We chat on the phone or by e-mail. It’s not the same.

And finally, the other essential of survival, useful employment, to keep up my sense of self worth. I’m writing. Finally. The pandemic took several months away from me, but I’m finally writing again. I eased back in with non-fiction, but I’m working on fiction again. I’m posting The Gingerbread House as a serial on tapas.io, and I finally know what the sequel is going to look like. You may have noticed (or not) that I haven’t been blogging much. It’s hard to know what to say when you’re not writing and everything you want to say seems so bleak. But here it is, my current survival status. I hope you’re surviving as well. I worry about you. It’s what I do. And I write.

Image: Basil, a universal cure? By Marilyn Evans

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Buy My Books! (Or Read for Free)

How’s that for shameless self promotion? Thanks to everyone who has already acquired one or both of my published works, the novel Beloved Lives and Undeniable, the anthology that contains my novella “Wasting Water”. And to all who are about to buy them. I appreciate the support.

But if you’re broke or are not willing to spend money in anticipation of further impending apocalypses, you can read my newest book for free (Yes! Free!) by going to https://tapas.io/series/The-Gingerbread-House

Tapas offers free serialized novels, comics and other such fun stuff. You can subscribe for free, tip the authors in some cases, and in other cases the authors can have ads on their pages. I’m still working out all the ins and out of it, but so far, so fun.

My novel is The Gingerbread House , a mystery that is being released as a series, two episodes a week. Here’s the summary:

Philly MacPherson is stuck in the Midwest with a struggling tea and herbs shop, a surly cat named B. Bub, and the responsibilities of being a “public” witch. While she might be up for advising possibly-pregnant teens and Ouiji-board-haunted college boys, she’s a little less prepared for the wealthy Lawrence Michaels asking her to banish a destructive ghost from his 150-year-old house.

Meanwhile, a local missing persons case might be just another runaway wife, or something more sinister involving a homeless veteran with PTSD or the missing woman’s jilted lover. When Detective Wilmount of the local police finds his search keeps bringing him back to The Gingerbread House, Philly and the detective decide to join forces to solve more than one mystery. 

The story has a cat (of course), a witch, haunting, romance, Tarot, tea and herbs, mystery, a good-looking police detective, and what is sometimes called magical realism. The latter means nothing that happens in the story is out of the realm of everyday life, if your life contains a few inexplicable things from time to time.

I had a lot of fun writing The Gingerbread House, and I hope readers will enjoy it. If you subscribe, you’ll be notified when new episodes come out, and I’ll get nice praise and angel kisses.

Image: The Gingerbread House cover. By Marilyn J. Evans.

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In Context

Those of you who know me know I’ve been going through a rough patch due to the sudden death of a close friend. The tragic car wreck that took her life left her daughter and son-in-law and her friends stunned. As we have tried to sort out her belongings and deal with finding homes for horses and cats, we’ve also tried to find the best places to take her most important things. Some will go to charities, some to friends and relatives. But the hardest things are the most personal ones.

When people in the midst of disasters are asked what they try to save first, often it is family photos. These have no monetary value, you can’t eat them or wear them, yet they have great value to their owners, so much so that people sometimes risk life and limb to save them. But the thing is, without someone who knows who and what those photos represent, they are random pictures, pictures of strangers or strange places with little or no relevance to anyone not familiar with their context.

When my father passed away, we were going through a building used for storage of long neglected items and found some boxes of old photos. I took some of these to a family reunion so I could ask my father’s last living sibling, an older sister, who the people in the photos were. She knew some of them, but not all. I wished that I had known about these pictures when my dad was alive so I could have asked him to tell me the stories they contained, but now everyone who knows is gone.

In our home we have a screen saver for our computer that runs a slide show of all of our archived photos. I haven’t labeled all those pictures, but I think I should, otherwise we may in time forget the circumstances that the photos represent. There are lots of people who love to hate on Facebook, but I have found I really enjoy posting pictures of family and friends, of places I’ve gone and people I care about. It is a record not only of the pictures but of the context for those pictures.

Let me share this bit of wisdom: share your photos with people you love and tell them the story behind the picture. Give them context so they won’t some day just be random pictures that no one will understand or remember, stories lost for all time.

Image: Brother-in-law, Vestal, NY. By Father-in-law.

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The Strangest Apocalypse

I grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s when we were all pretty certain that sooner or later someone would drop a nuclear bomb on us. We went from the naivete of duck and cover to building underground bunkers with at least two weeks supply of food, medicine, and other essentials. The reasoning was that after two weeks, the radiation levels would be sufficiently low to allow us to emerge and get back to whatever was the new normal. That was before the days of really dirty bombs that could Chernobilize a nation and render it unfit for humans for centuries.

Perhaps this childhood was the cause of my life-long love of disaster and post apocalyptic books and films. I am prone to critiquing the characters and assessing how well or badly they addressed their particular disaster. I loved the TV series “Doomsday Preppers”, and even follow some on-line “prepper” sites. I have on occasion contributed articles when I felt I had anything useful to add to the conversation. My novella, “Wasting Water,” is an environmental, post-apocalyptic story that originally started as a how-to article for dealing with climate change, but I realized would make better fiction.

I’ve always kept a full pantry and freezer, know how to forage and garden, can come up with sour dough yeast and bake on a stone, if required. I even have a zombie apocalypse plan. But what we are dealing with in the days of Covid-19 is not what I think anyone was expecting.

This is a strange apocalypse where there is plenty of inexpensive gasoline and lots of food and supplies except for the rolling shortages–in my neighborhood, first toilet paper, then bread, then flour and yeast. But so far the supply chain is unbroken, and if you wait, the shelves are restocked in a few days. Contrary to everything we came to expect of an apocalypse, the way to avoid danger during this strange time is to stay home and amuse yourself.

It is safe to walk the streets and in the parks, enjoying spring, as long as you stay six feet away from everyone else. So far, there are no raiding gangs or angry mutants, only friendly dog walkers and neighbors eager to say hello. People put teddy bears in their windows so children in their neighborhoods can be comforted and amused as they walk by with their parents. Children, sent home from schools, are being taught remotely by sometimes frantic teachers learning to navigate on-line classes for the first time. The National Home School Association (https://nationalhomeschoolassociation.com/) has dropped it’s annual fee to $10. If children who got their meals from schools still need them, organizations are doing everything in their power to see that they are fed. As businesses close, food pantries, restaurants, churches, and volunteer organizations do their best to help those who have been laid off to have what they need.

Books, movies, concerts are all free and available on-line or on television. Museums give virtual tours, zoos have live cams of penguins and otters. People share information and comfort on line or by phone. Drive-by celebrations are held for any occasion that once would have drawn a crowd, helping to maintain social distance. Restaurants have switched to carry out and curbside pickup. The news is uninterrupted, there is water and electricity.

Our heroes are health care professionals, but also grocery store workers, trash collectors, anyone who keeps us safe and cared for. No novel or movie in my experience ever foresaw the level of mutual support and cooperation that has occurred during this pandemic. But we have had our villains–hoarders, deniers who encourage people to gather under unsafe conditions spreading the illness, incompetent or self-serving politicians.

Although this is unlike the horrific scenarios of the apocalypses we expected, hardships and loss of life are real and will continue to grow, nor has the worst passed. We may yet see the people who think an arsenal is necessary in the face of any crisis have their opportunity to protect their stores from the desperate. But in light of what I’ve seen so far, I think we will find ways to aid and support one another rather than “hunker down” and turn away those in need. The question we seem to be asking most often during this strange apocalypse is not “How can I protect what’s mine,” but “How can I help?”

The novella “Wasting Water” is in the anthology Undeniable: Authors Respond to Climate Change, available from Alternating Current Press or Amazon

http://www.press.alternatingcurrentarts.com/2020/02/undeniable-writers-respond-to-climate-change.html

http://www.amazon.com/Undeniable-Writers-Respond-Climate-Change/dp/1946580155

Image: Forsythia. By Marilyn Evans.

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Doing Good

In 1902, the Agriculture Department’s Chief Chemist, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, began what he called “hygienic table trials,” but soon the Washington Post reporter George Rothwell Brown came up with the name The Poison Squad. Dr. Wiley was attempting to prove that additives and adulterants in everyday foods were unsafe and unhealthy. In doing so, he took on powerful industries and their bought-and-paid-for government supporters. It took years of fighting, issuing reports, doing the right thing, but it wasn’t until Sinclair Lewis published The Jungle in 1906 that headway was finally made. Dr. Wiley’s story is told in Deborah Blum’s book, The Poison Squad, and in the  documentary based on the book (you can watch it in it’s entirety at the American Experience website https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squad/).

One of the many things that disturbs me is that over one hundred years later, the same excuses are being used to prevent doing the right thing. The arguments go: changes will adversely affect business, it’s too expensive, the people advocating for change are misguided radicals or alarmists, and other common protests. Special interests still buy off politicians, seek to cut funding to watchdog groups, delay, sue, ignore the law–whatever it takes to not do the right thing.

Writers have a unique opportunity to draw attention to bad behavior. Certainly journalists and writers of exposés do this, but writers of fiction sometimes make far more headway in capturing the attention of the public, raising awareness, and calling people to action. Sinclair’s novel was written to draw attention to the inhumane working conditions of the meat packing industry, but in exposing it his disclosures inspired  changes in hygienic practices. Science fiction writers have a long history of asking questions, proposing worst case scenarios, making us look at ourselves and the people we trust but maybe shouldn’t. Fiction puts us in the story so we can see the real costs of failure to do good.

I feel strongly that truth has great value, that lies once told take on a life of their own and can cause real harm. I believe doing the right thing s may sometimes be difficult but is never the wrong way to go. I am proud that my writing has been included in the anthology Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change. I am proud to be one of the voices saying, take notice, this is important, we need to act. It is my personal goal to always try to write with truth and compassion. Though I may not always succeed, I will always try to do good.

Image: The Members of The Poison Squad. THE U.S. FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION/FLICKR/PUBLIC DOMAIN

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Why We Walk

My friend, Chris, used to read Lord of the Rings in its entirety every autumn. She stopped for a while, but is back to it this year, although she started later than usual and is reading it through the winter. The appeal to me of LOTR is the journey. I’ve always loved any story that involves a long trek on foot. I have the same passion for movies that depict grand journeys.

Sometimes the algorithms work, and Amazon Prime offers you movies like the ones you just watched that might interest you. That’s how I got sucked into watching several documentaries on hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the Camino de Santiago, the Hayduke Trail, the Appalachian Trail, and others. What I’ve found interesting about the people who take on these really long journeys is why they do them. Often they are looking for something, usually wildly different somethings. Some are looking to escape, some to spend serious time inside their own heads, some are running toward something. I don’t think anyone who starts one of these great treks is the same person when the journey is done. All of them seem to find something, but it isn’t always what they expected to find when they started.

There was a time when I would have aspired to hike one of these trails, but old age and sin have taken their toll, so not likely in this lifetime. That’s not to say I won’t try something less ambitious–the Katy Trail, perhaps. Maybe I haven’t started one because I don’t have a good enough reason yet. Just walking to walk doesn’t seem like sufficient justification to ignore everyone and everything and walk for a couple of weeks, although a walk across Missouri in the spring seems like a pretty good reason all by itself.

Of course, I can’t help but make a comparison to why we write. I suppose there are as many reasons to write as to walk. The beauty of crafting words is perhaps comparable to scanning a spectacular vista. Spending days inside your own head, plumbing the depths might reveal the means and motives of a character. Writing for redemption, for amusement, for adventure, to find out who we are.

I’m not sure I’ve taken the really grand trek in my writing yet. In many ways, I feel like I’m still at the trail head. But as I write more, I think I’ll be moving on down the road, and perhaps some day, when I’ve reached a stopping point, I’ll have found something transformative. And when I do, I promise to share.

And speaking of writing, I’ve just read the final proof of my novella, “Wasting Water”, that is due out this spring in the anthology Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change. It’s been a long time coming, but finally seems to be on its way.

Image: Chris and Marilyn walking at Dragonfest in Colorado, 1999. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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The Year Gone By

The year that we just got through, 2019, was the fiftieth anniversary of a bunch of things. In 1969, men walked on the moon, Woodstock happened in a bigger way than anyone imagined it would, the first troops were withdrawn from Vietnam, the Stonewall Riot occurred, Sesame Street premiered, and a lot of other pretty remarkable things happened. And, by the way, I graduated from high school.

I sometimes think getting old is the price you pay for not dying, and while it’s not really punishment, there are days that feel like it. When I went to my fifty-year high school reunion in the early autumn of 2019, I found a lot of old people there. Not me, of course, I’m not so very old, or maybe….

My graduating class was just under 200 people. Some of them are dead, some didn’t come. Some people I wouldn’t have known without their name tags, some looked nearly the same. In all, it was a slightly frustrating experience because you can’t really summarize fifty years of life lived in a few minutes. I haven’t stayed in touch with any of my fellow graduates, so there would have been a lot of ground to cover if I’d tried to reacquaint myself with everyone. Still, it was interesting.

I grew up in a smallish town and went from kindergarten through high school with many of the same folks. At the ten year reunion, I saw little kids running around and knew exactly who their parents were because they were the spitting image of their parents at the same age. It was eerie.

This will probably be the last reunion for my class, but I’m glad I went. I’ve always thought my greatest accomplishment was escaping the small town I grew up in, but it was nice to go back and revisit the place. There is nothing to go back to now except my father’s grave. I have no friends or family there. Still, it’s where I’m from, and it gave me a lot of the foundation for who I am. But more than the place I’m from, my family gave me myself. I was reminded of this when, after the reunion, I went to visit my father’s last living sibling, my Aunt Virginia, and many of her children and some of her grandchildren. It was good to be reminded where so much of my personality was formed–my cousins have the same sense of humor as my dad. They get my jokes.

So this autumn, I got to revisit my roots. Now, going into 2020, I’ll have the opportunity to grow and change and experiment and, now and then, even go back and remember who I am and where I came from.

Image: Bittersweet, squash and pumpkins at the Chillicothe Kid’s Day Parade. By Marilyn Evans.

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Only God Can Make a Tree

I’ve probably mentioned this before–when I was a scientist, I saw a tree as a living entity with a paleobotanical history, a structure, metabolism, reproductive cycle. In short, I loved it as only a botanist could. Then I learned to oil paint. Suddenly I had new eyes, artist eyes. Now I saw a tree as texture and light and shadow and a play of color that changed with the changes of the day. I had learned to love it as only an artist could.

But I have recently acquired a new addiction. I have discovered woodworking. I’ve flirted with it for a while, but with the aid and abetting of my husband, I’ve begun to acquire the tools, the patterns, the materials for yet another hobby. And I have begun to see trees in yet another way. That dead branch doesn’t have to be fire wood. It could be almost anything. I just never knew it before, I could never see with a woodworker’s eyes until now.

We all know knowledge is a dangerous thing. It makes us do crazy stuff. It opens worlds. For a writer, the fun part is often that once you know the things you get the joy of telling someone else about them. They say write what you know, but learning, research can lead to a whole new “what you know.” And once you know, don’t you have to share?

One of my favorite mystery writers, the late Dick Francis, worked with his wife who apparently loved doing research. Mr. Francis started writing his stories in the racing world, a world he knew well. But later he  and his wife took me into other amazing worlds, each one described in a way that drew me in, convinced me he knew what he was talking about.

Lately I’ve gotten a little crazy about learning new things. I’ve been experimenting with “going back to school”, but by way of home schooling. It’s like this: every day I spend an hour studying Spanish, an hour in gym class (exercising followed by yoga), then at least an hour writing (English class). Home Economics is all the cooking and other household chores. That leaves time for Science–watching “Nova” or some other appropriate video– then Shop when I do my woodworking. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish in a day if you’ve got a schedule. Not sure how long I can keep this up. I might become a drop out, but so far, I’m having a lot of fun.

I like having all these eyes. I like seeing things in a new way, and I like how old things, old friends like trees, become new again. The trick is the sharing part, sharing well and letting everyone else have the fun of discovery.

Enough English and writing. It’s time for shop.

Image: Sunset through trees. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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“Wasting Water” Update

I’ve heard from Alternating Current Press at last. The anthology Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change will be published no later than the spring of 2020. If the editing process goes smoothly, they hope to have the collection published in winter 2019 for a holiday release. That will change if the editing or printing process does not go as planned, but the release would be no later than the end of this winter. They want the book on their table for next year’s AWP writers conference and book fair in March 2020, so it will definitely be completed before then. Being the good and dutiful author that I am, I’ve already sent the latest version of my novella, “Wasting Water” with edits and corrections. There will probably need to be a few more changes, editors being how they are (always right), but that shouldn’t be a problem.

In case you’re interested, the 2020 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference where Undeniable will be featured is March 4-7 in San Antonio, Texas.  Here’s the link.

https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/bookfair_overview

I considered going, but I’ll probably use my time and money closer to home. HOWEVER, if anyone wanted to pay my way…just sayin’.

Anthologies are notoriously slow to get to publication, but I’m glad this one is finally on it’s way. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for an early holiday release!

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Creating Legacy

I just finished reading Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik of Wired magazine and his wife, Monica Murphy, who has degrees in public health and veterinary medicine. The book is entirely fascinating, but one of my favorite parts was the description of Louis Pasteur and all his work with vaccines. I always knew Pasteur was awesome, but I never realized how totally awesome. His legacy includes vaccines for anthrax, rabies, and (with a significant contributions by Emile Roux) chicken cholera, not to mention saving the French wine industry, as well as establishing the method for purifying and protecting food that bears his name: Pasteurization. Add to this his establishing the Institut Pasteur and all that it has accomplished both during his life and since his death, and you can’t help but be impressed.

Within the same day of finishing Rabid, I came upon a story about J.K. Rowling and what is likely to be her legacy. Beyond the beloved Harry Potter universe she has created, she has donated hundreds of thousands of her millions to charities, especially those that preserve families and aid orphans. Being someone who knows what struggling to survive is like, she is giving back in a significant way. I contrast this with the probable legacy of another extremely rich person recently in the news–Jeffrey Epstein. I think that people will not remember him as fondly.

I’m not sure people think much about their legacies. In a television program I like a lot called “A Craftsman’s Legacy”, the host, Eric Gorges, asks each person he spends time with two questions: do you consider yourself a craftsman or an artist; and, do you think about your legacy. Some folks are conscious of what they are leaving behind. Someone who creates a body of work or has trained a lot of students tends to have an awareness of their effect on the world and that it will linger after they have gone. Some people think about their children as a legacy who will carry on their genes and names, their looks and maybe their mannerisms, perhaps even their businesses and skills. But whether we realize it or not, everything we do “leaves a mark,” and people don’t often act as though they understand that. Abuse often begets abuse as families of abusers can attest. Kindness and generosity, often the same. I see my father in my family members and hear his humor and turns of phrase. He was a man who loved his children unconditionally, and I’m happy to say I think that legacy survives in his children and in the people whose lives he touched.

I’m not sure what my legacy will be. Nothing from my days as a researcher is significant as far as I know, but at least a few people lived and didn’t die because of things I did in the lab. I have some writing, fiction and non fiction, that may last a while, for better or worse. I have had students, and they have had students, so I think that’s good. It’s hard to say what will survive after we are gone. I’m no Pasteur or Rowling, but I hope my legacy will balance on the side of leaving things better rather than worse after I’m gone. Maybe between now and when I fall off my perch, I can add to that legacy in a positive way. Best get on it.

Image: Stable dog (not rabid) at Harrowway House, Penton Mewsey, Hampshire, UK. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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Getting It Right, Getting It Wrong

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” Popular Mechanics (1949).

The wonderful actor, Rutger Hauer, died recently. I’ve loved him in so many movies, but Lady Hawke and Blade Runner are two my friends have been talking about a lot. In Blade Runner (made in 1982), Mr. Hauer plays Roy Batty, a replicant or bio-engineered being. The film takes place in 2019 Los Angeles. Some people are noting Rutger and his character, Roy, died in the same year. The film has flying cars, bio-engineered people and animals, and references to mining operations in outer space. Here in the real 2019, we don’t much have those things. Blade Runner was based on Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, first published in 1968. Dick’s version of Los Angeles was post nuclear war, and the story takes place in 1992, then in later editions, in 2021. So far, we’ve avoided nuclear war, and we still don’t have replicant pets, although cloning is making strides.

Sometimes stories of the future get it wrong, sometimes they get it right. Sinclair Lewis, in his 1938 novel It Can’t Happen Here, was probably thinking about Huey Long when he wrote his story of a potential totalitarian regime in America, but the satire bears an uncanny resemblance to the rise and rule of Donald Trump.  Orwell, Huxley, Wells, and Verne got some things right, perhaps more right than most other science fiction and futurist writers, but predicting the future and how we will live in it is hard. Some things we think will change don’t or do so very slowly, other things change at an unimaginable pace. Dick Tracy’s two way wrist radio, introduced in 1946, is a more accurate description of today’s technology than many science fiction stories of a similar era.

Even near future predictions can be tricky. Throughout the 1950’s, we all expected nuclear war, nuclear accidents, and the results these things would bring. We weren’t expecting global climate change. Now that we’re experiencing it, we may still get things wrong. In my novella, Wasting Water, I was expecting massive droughts throughout the United States. Instead, we seem to be having floods, followed by droughts followed by severe storms, excessive heat, excessive cold, and who knows what next? The droughts may come and stay yet, but it’s hard to predict. It would be nice to be right, but I wouldn’t wish that on my planet.

In 1949, it was hard to predict that computing would become what it is today, not a 1.5 ton machine, but portable, readily available, and ubiquitous. I often wonder what breakthrough will make the next unpredictable leap in technology, the next science fiction moment. It may be decades in the future, or maybe just around the corner. Perhaps we’ll get those flying cars yet. After all, we got our Star Trek communicators.

Image: Even with Abby standing on them, none of my computers weighs 1.5 tons. By Marilyn Evans.

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Difference of Opinion

I’m always at a bit of a loss what to say when I disagree with the prevailing opinion of the general population. I don’t mind disagreeing with critics–their job is to find excellence, and sometimes I’m not in the mood for excellence. Sometimes I just want to be entertained. The Kansas City Star, K.C.’s local newspaper, used to famously send Robert Butler to review all new film releases. Butler pretty universally hated genre films. You knew he wasn’t likely to review science fiction or horror films favorably, but that didn’t tell you if YOU were going to like them. The Star finally wised up (or Butler decided he’d suffered enough) and started sending genre fans to review the movies. Finally you could trust the reviewer to tell you if you were going to like the latest installment in the “Fluffy Invades Io” franchise or not.

My problem is, what happens when a movie or book is highly praised by critics and the population at large, and I think it’s grot? When “ET the Extra-Terrestrial” came out, the guy I was dating and his son raved. The critics loved it. The film was universally praised. I thought it was cute, sure, but it was manipulative and predictable. I never found it as compelling as everyone else seemed to.

I’ve been out of step more than once. I wanted to slap Anna Karenina (“Get a grip, woman!”), ditto the silly twit in The Thorn Birds. The Red and the Black strikes me as a soap opera. Hawthorn is a mixed bag, but “Young Goodman Brown” was utter crap (at least I thought so when I read it in college).

Which brings me to my latest read, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir. The critics seemed to have liked it, but a few of the readers on Goodreads were a little more aligned with me. I loved Wild, another book about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and had high hopes for Girl. Suffice it to say I was disappointed. But what makes critics and reviewers like this book so much? Some of the writing is good, even lyrical, but the book as a whole is rambling, repetitious, and disjointed. The author comes across as a really dis-likable person, but she is struggling with the aftermath of a rape, so does that make it okay? I can’t quite figure out what those who give it a five star rating are seeing. Did we read the same book?

My opinion is no predictor of greatness, because who the heck am I? But I am part of the reading and viewing public, so theoretically my opinion matters. It matters even more for my own work. If I can’t figure out what people will like, I may be wasting my time. Then again, I hope to avoid manipulative Steven Spielberg tricks. But writers are supposed to write for themselves. Uh huh, sure they are. Then maybe when we are long dead, someone will discover our greatness. I’m thinking that’s not the way to bet. So I suppose the line to tread is to give the people (if not the critics) what they want within reason, yet maintain your integrity. Now if only I could figure out what the people want….

Image: Chris in the woods, Colorado 1999. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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In the Family

For all its flaws and foibles, without her family, Elizabeth Bennet would never have fallen in love with and married Fitzwilliam Darcy. Pride and Prejudice is about family: Bingley’s, Darcy’s, and Elizabeth’s. And where would Game of Thrones be without the highly stressed and often dysfunctional Lannisters, Starks, Targarians, and the rest? Families define circumstances, characters, conflicts, and so much more.

About thirty five or so years ago, at the invitation of a friend, I attended a party where one of the guests was holding forth about “these kids today” and the demise of the American family or some such tripe. I found his thesis interesting but flawed. I jumped right in (I’m seldom shy at parties where I don’t know anyone and there is alcohol) with a comment that family is so important to “kids these days” that if their own family didn’t work for them, they’d create a family out of friends and fellow travelers. My utterly humiliated friend drug me aside and hissed, “Do you know who that is? He’s the professor (at the local college) of family studies!” Unabashed, I responded, “He’s still wrong.”

Everybody comes from somewhere, and even orphans, a la Charles Dickens, end up with someone close to care about or devil them. Even a nameless assassin with no past like Jason Bourne will claw his way back to being David Webb, a man who once had a family. Because you can pick your friends but not your family, kin folk can bring a story tension and conflict; allies, or rescue at the appropriate moment; insight into the protagonist and his actions; even insight into why the bad guys got the way they are.

My family has been, at various times, not fully functional, so when I went out into the world on my own, I figured I could do a better job of running my life without bothering with family interference. For the most part, that worked for me, but, as I said, family is so important that, in time, I made my own–my own community of friends, people with similar interests, drinking buddies, allies, and so forth. I also, in time, made peace with my family, or the fragmented bits of it that have presented themselves over the years.

When I started writing, I wanted my characters to be independent and self sufficient. But I found if I introduced some of their family as well as their friends, colleagues, and lovers, the story got richer, like the stories of many of my favorite fictional characters who have lovable or maddening or otherwise noteworthy family members.

Some of the family that show up in my stories are modeled after my own relatives. But I have had enough scrapes with other families that I think I’ll have a supply of notable characters for the rest of my writing career–enough to round out a lifetime’s worth of  work.

Image: A slice of my husband’s family. By Warren C. Hutchins, Sr.

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Back in the Saddle

If you check now and again to see if I’m posting to my blog, you may have noticed I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus from writing. Between funerals, the kitchen remodel, a two week visit by my best friend (involving much drinking and conversation), and a few other things that took my mind elsewhere, I’ve been unable to really focus. Last night I re-read all of my blog posts. At the risk of seeming immodest (oh, who am I kidding–I haven’t a modest bone in my body), I have to say there seemed to be some pretty good advice in a few of those posts. I’ve decided to follow my own advice and get back to work.

The first thing I did was drop by the library and get new books, both to read and to listen to as I drove to the stable to see my husband’s horse. I realized after reading on my blog about reading that I haven’t been doing enough of it lately, and I know reading is a strong stimulus for getting me to write. I’ve also set aside time each day to write, either at home or someplace that works for me–coffee shops and the library are among my favorites. I get a lot of writing done in waiting rooms, but if I just plop down in one and help myself to their coffee and donuts without a good reason to be there, I might get asked to leave. I haven’t actually tried it yet.

I’ve decided I need to take another look at publishers for my second novel. I also need to take a good, long look at the short stories I’ve written to see if they are salvageable and should be sent out on the endless merry-go-round of submission and rejection. Always a good time. I was inspired to this by a friend I recently had lunch with. She has multiple plays being produced this summer at multiple venues in multiple cities. This success is the result of sending out masses of plays and then forgetting about them. I found that inspirational. I shall go forth and do likewise.

I did have some encouraging news. Alternating Current Press has finally closed submissions (again) for Undeniable, and they project an early autumn publishing date. Of course, there’s still a chance they’ll decide, “Oops. We don’t like your novella after all.” I should know by the middle of June.

So it’s back to the keyboard, I go. Time to get back to work.

Image: Me on Amish Honey in 2013. By Jonathan Hutchins.