Marilyn Evans

December 10, 2023

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.

November 25, 2023November 26, 2023

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.

November 17, 2023November 17, 2023

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

October 24, 2023October 24, 2023

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

September 18, 2023

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.

July 22, 2023

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.

March 20, 2023

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.

January 11, 2023

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.

January 1, 2023

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

Author: Marilyn Evans