Storytellersunplugged

By David Niall Wilson

I wanted to take some time, now that the long cold winter of my disconnection has passed, to revisit one of our favorite topics. Regardless of how many times it is asked and answered, the question of where stories are found, bought, traded or raised through arcane ritual is most prevalent (even beating out ‘Do you know Stephen King,” and “Have you written anything I’ve read?”). I’ve been in a unique (and very frustrating) position over the past few months, and it has allowed me to take some notes.

Most of you know I’ve been completing my 30 year quest for an AA degree. I finished that up last week, and the sensation of freedom is overwhelming. While the college work put a strangle hold on my creative output, it did nothing to slow or stop the processes running in the background, so I thought I’d use this essay to get some of that into perspective and examine it from different angles.

I’m always a bit bemused when confronted by people who can’t figure out what to write, or by those who believe I should be dying to write what they have come up with, as though my own imagination wouldn’t have anything in the back of the bus trying to shove its way forward. If I could just write down all of the ideas and inspirations that hit me in a single year, allotting them a single sentence apiece, I’d have a novel. It would be a mess, composed of disparate thoughts and plots and elephants, no doubt, but a very large data dump indeed.

I tried to go back through my battered brain in search of things that caught my eye just over the past few months - things that immediately tripped my “writing gene” into overdrive, though I was unable to act on the instinct at the time they first confronted me. For writer’s, it’s been a banner year, particularly writer with a macabre leaning.

They have genetically combined goats and spiders to create very strong silk through the goat’s milk. This silk is hundreds of times stronger than any known material. In fact, it is being produced for use by the military.

In Surabaya, a city in Indonesia, they are repairing a wall they built to stop a mud volcano named Lusi from burying them alive. This disaster was caused by a greedy company who drilled in an unsafe manner – the company, ironically owned by the Minister in charge of Public Welfare – has fought tooth and nail against accepting blame. Meanwhile, scientists are dropping giant concrete balls into the crater (I would assume while covering their ears and running very fast) hoping to plug ol’ Lusi up. As those of us who are old know, even Ricky Ricardo couldn’t do that, no matter how much ’splainin’ she had to do.

A man in Germany, upon beginning divorce proceedings, drove to the country house he and his wife shared, cut it in half with a chain saw, and carted his half back to his brother’s yard on a forklift.

Iran has gone into mass nuclear production – but it’s just for the generation of power. I mean, they have so little fuel to heat their desert homes…and really, Charlie Brown, I won’t pull the football out. I’ll hold it, and you can kick it.

A company bought bits of junk from the wreck of the Titanic and turned them into incredibly expensive designer watches.

A woman lost a court battle to have her father’s ashes compressed into a synthetic diamond. Upon researching this, I found that this is a big industry, and you can even have the ashes of your pet compressed for a price.

Scotty beamed up.

This doesn’t even approach the tip of the iceberg of ideas, impressions, ironies and impossibilities that has frozen around me in the time since I was last writing regularly. Just from this small assortment, I can pluck a dozen stories I’d love to tell.

Let’s give it a try. We’ll take a glimpse into the chaos I call a mind and see what I can fish out of the soup.

When I first saw that they were going to make watches out of Titanic debris, I thought it was a stupid idea. What difference does it make, after all, where the metal came from? Why would that give such a timepiece more value than a good stainless steel Timex?

Of course, I know the answer. That watch ticked the seconds away within earshot of a band that played through one of the most incredible disasters of modern history. That watch might be part of the ship’s compass – the captain’s chair – the bar. It might be something carried by a passenger, or cherished by a crew member. I never walked the deck of the Titanic, but I could wear a piece of that moment – that history – on my arm and dream about its origin. I sometimes think that Alanis Morisette should study the Titanic. A ship is built to be the safest, most unsinkable vessel in history, and it sinks on its maiden voyage. THAT is ironic.

Where’s the story? How about this? A man loves a woman who is fascinated with history. One of her ancestors died on the Titanic, and she feels a strong connection – so strong she’s become obsessed. She dresses only in period clothing. Her family grows slowly alienated as she loses track of what is real, and what is fantasy, what is present, and what is past. Now she is old. She has forgotten her husband, the man she loved. His love doesn’t falter, but he can’t get her to notice him. He can’t get her to love him, or to remember their life together. He becomes little more than a caretaker in a museum where she is the center display. The one thing in his life that matters – being part of her life – has faded.

He is dying, and though she is aware, it is dim for her. Those that she believes she belongs with died so long ago, he is like a voice in her dreams, or a memory she can’t quite place.

Before things got so bad – she gave him a gift. A watch, formed from the wreckage of the Titanic – a chance to draw him in and make him part of what she feels. It didn’t work, of course, but he wears it to his deathbed, where a woman in a business suit visits him. He manages a few croaked words. A question – a test to see if she has memorized his instructions perfectly. She shows him a photo of a gemstone set in a brooch – a brooch last seen in photos of a woman who died at sea. His eyes fill with tears…and he dies.

A delivery reaches his widow, wrapped in vintage paper, and seated in soft tissue. It is a brooch – an exact duplicate of the brooch in the photo, centered by a large, blood red ruby in the shape of a heart. Her eyes fill with tears as she holds it, though she doesn’t know why. A card falls to the floor…”Ashes are Forever” – this stone is a genuine ruby created from the carbon of your loved one as a memorial to his life. The setting – as requested – was created from his watch….

In the background, an antique Victrola plays “Nearer My God to Thee.”

She clutches him to her heart.

There are stories all around us…welcome to my world.

Onward,

DNW
Deep Blue Journal

By Dick Hill

The other day Bill Maher spoke of new theories that link the disappearance of bees with microwaves from cell phone usage, or some such thing. With no bees, plant life disappears. Guess who’s next. He quoted Albert Einstein, the great forward thinker, who said that if the bees died, mankind would follow within four years. Mahr then opined that if this theory proves correct, he still didn’t believe our society would surrender their phones. Sadly, I guess I have to agree with him.

There’s ample evidence that our wanton consumption of fossil fuels is threatening the way humans live on this planet. Indeed, if we will continue to live at all. Yet we seem incapable of recognizing this global threat and rising to its challenge. Americans, in particular, seem so committed to dangerous foolhardy behavior……..ecologically, politically, personally. Unable to see beyond the comfort of the status quo. Is there a leader who could make clear the dangers of how we live. Our disregard for the long term, for our neighbors, the poor, the underserved? Call for a national effort, a national sacrifice on the scale of our great national effort in the last World War, when it became a point of pride to support the effort? And if such a leader appeared, would we have the resolve, the strength of character to follow? Days like this one I doubt it. I doubt myself. Give up cell phones? Unlikely.

Unseen waves of death.
As the bees go, so do we.
The call is vital.

I think I’ll go trade these dark thoughts for a bar of dark, 70% cocoa, imported chocolate. I’m prediabetic, but what the hell does THAT mean anyway. I don’t feel any different than I did before the doc saw those blood sugar levels. Maybe I’ll call Dial-A-Joke. Would it be such a loss if mankind were to disappear anyway? We’re just part of the big cosmic expression of the ONE, aren’t we? Maybe that’s how we make it to the next level, the true realization of the Universal Self. Then again, I may be fulla’ shit. Often am.

—Dick Hill

Wayne Allen Sallee
04.28.07

Okay, bad pun. I’ll admit it. But at least a large amount of the SU group will get the reference; I used this as an entry title on my blog, and I know the cigarette slogan went right over the head of most of my readers. (I digress, as usual, but that advertisement had to be meant for people who drove cars. How the hell FAR is a mile that makes Camels so special? I’d walk a mile for a damn Butterfinger). But my attempt was to find a witty way to throw a new word I’d learned into my title.

I am sometimes amazed at how long it takes me to read up on certain things. In my twenties I learned about solipsism from reading Philip K. Dick. Ten years after that, I learned about vestigial twins–too much, actually–from researching a story for one of Ellen Datlow’s anthologies, LITTLE DEATHS. (A cousin in Kentucky that I use as the Cook County Medical Examiner in my stories because of her medical knowledge mailed me a packet of photos from a manual that would make pictures of suicide bombers on Rotten.com seem tame).

And a week ago, while reading a website about the tv show LOST, of all things, I learned about Julian Jaynes and his theory about the bicameral mind. Right now, this aspect of my thought process is at work; I am thinking in my head as if I were talking out loud, hesitating as I choose words to make each paragraph into its’ separate brick.

Jaynes was a professor in Princeton who wrote a book in 1976 entitled THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL BRAIN. The simplest way to explain his ideas are to compare modern-day schizophrenics with ancient cultures who believed that the “other voice” in their head, i.e., the one I’m using now, was a religious vision. He gives a literary example in Homer’s THE ILIAD, stating that “there is in general no consciousness” in the tale. There is no subjectivity, the heroes of the book heard voices from various gods whom pushed the men about like robots. The men from The Iliad had no internal mind-space to provide for introspection. An argument could be made for, say, the Epic of Gilgamish, a tale from out of Mesopotamia which predates Homer’s work and illustrates the ideas of individual volition and emotions. The flip side of that is that the original writer is unknown and changes could have been made as the story was told repeatedly over centuries, a retroactive continuity of sorts.

Some brief brain biology here: there are three speech areas in our grey matter, the supplemental motor cortex, Broca’s area, and Wernicke’s area, the last of which is responsible for human speech. Jaynes focused on the corpus callosum, that little bridge as narrow and curved as one of Homer Simpson’s two remaining head hairs, that collects information from the temporal lobe cortex, but also the middle gyrus of the temporal lobe in Wernicke’s area.. If I think to myself how I’d like to walk a mile for a Camel, one of my ancestors might be hearing a voice he thought was God, possibly a benevolent one who thought that all tobacco lobbyists should burn in Hell.

I do my best writing when I am using first-person narrative, I write a bit faster and more excitedly, the atmosphere of Chicago–its’ smells, sounds, its’ entire being– is lost if I try and write something descriptive without it meaning something to the person describing it. As another example, it would take me much longer to write this if I was asked to write an article without the use of first-person. (Yea, yea, I can hear Dave from here, saying, if you’re so fast, why am I getting this in my email basket when I wake up on Saturday morning?!!!). Blame my bicameral mind, I think too much in my narrator voice–tonight I “sound” like William Demerast, Uncle Charlie, from MY THREE SONS, frazzled as I try to squeak this out before Dave wakes up at the crack of dawn– before actually writing, and then typing, it down.

My first published story, “Rapid Transit,” is the personal albatross around my neck. A lot of people seem to like it, and it has been reprinted seven times in four languages (Brian Hodge and I share having our stories reprinted in a Danish book, along with Joe R. Lansdale’s “Bubba Ho-Tep,” God help those throughout Finland). But there is not one shred of dialogue in the story, about a man who witnesses a murder from the elevated train platform and is too cowardly to do anything to stop the deed. But there is a huge sensory overload, a heaping helping of the intersection of 23rd and Western on a warm October Chicago night in Sallee-o-Vision.

Compared to my later work, I see that very few of those sights and sounds came from Dennis Cassady’s mind; it was me describing the area in photographic detail– I still take photos for later reference–tossing in a few nuggets about the smells of certain restaurants and fast food chains. But it wasn’t cowardly Cassady using his five senses; he only accomplishes this later in the story when he has nightmares about what he saw. My next published story, “Heartless,” about–get this–a guy who doesn’t get a Valentine and wakes up after a drunk night out to find a human heart in the mail slot of an apartment, at least had a sense of the main character initiating the descriptions of the bar scenes and the, um, gooey mess that dripped from…well, enough said already.

Years ago, as I waited on downtown train platforms in weather too cold to scribble in, I would talk into a small cassette recorder, much to the disdain of people who most likely now are carrying on conversations wearing one of those cell phone things that fits in your ear like a piece of designer shrapnel. Back in the eighties, I might have been a lunatic when it came to seeming one-sided conversation. I despise technology, as most of you know, but I found a battered cell phone a few months back; I carry it with me to pretend I’m getting a call to avoid having conversations with opinionated buffoons who seem to populate only the bus stops where I am waiting each day and evening.

There are still times that I will talk out loud, just to hear myself say something that I will then understand to be foolish or wrong to write in some certain passage. More often, it is that inner voice that sounds it out, which might be a lot easier if my consciousness sounded like Robert Mitchum and not Phyllis Diller after smoking a blunt.

My inner voice is now asking Dave if it is time for me to climb back in off the window ledge and let the next guy have some room. If you need me, I’ll be somewhere out in back.

Of my skull.

—-Wayne Allen Sallee
jonalgiers@aol.com

Thomas Boswell famously titled one book of essays on baseball Why Time Begins On Opening Day. There are plenty of reasons for the baseball fan, casual or fanatic, to agree with him. After all, baseball is the writers’ game. Look at the bookshelves. From Moneyball to Feeding the Monster to The Echoing Green, the books give witness in ever-increasing numbers that writers love baseball. From bookish Bill James to elegant Bernard Malamud, from the precise George Will to the masterful, late David Halberstam, all were called to write about the game, and so many others with them.

Of course, the game offers much to those who’d take up the pen in its honor. Maybe that’s the reason writers are drawn to it. The season is 162 games, long enough for plots to unwind themselves at their own pace without hurry, with enough time for reverse and counter and a last, mad, desperate dash to the climax. Say “1978” in Boston and you’ll hear all about it.

Or maybe it’s because there are always stories in there, as many stories as you’d want to dig for. The aging veteran seeking one last shot at glory, the out-of-nowhere rookie who shines against all expectation, the part-time player who seizes the spotlight, the wily pitcher whose stuff has deserted him but whose guile enables him to befuddle those younger and stronger than himself – are these not the characters of epic? Of tragedy? Ask Roy Hobbs or Donnie Moore; they certainly thought so.

But I think Boswell’s wrong.

Writing is like baseball because for every superstar there are a hundred guys in the minors, doing whatever it takes to hang on because no matter what, they’re still playing baseball. They’re still doing what they love. They’re still chasing the dream, and they will keep chasing it as long as they can. Sound like any writers you know?

There are reasons writers love baseball, above and beyond that elegiac pace that suddenly goes accelerando when you least expect it. Basketball fails to surprise, the gap between the best and the worst too large. Too many of its heroics are wasted in hopeless situations and pre-ordained playoff series. It’s a game of superstars, and everyone else is forgotten.

Football’s season is too short, as are the careers of too many of its heroes. Their faces hidden, their bodies armored, on the field they become military units, manifestations of the coach’s plan. Individual achievements emerge only in the context of Super Bowls won, otherwise they fade into insignificance.

Doubt me? Then tell me off the top of your head what the career record for touchdowns scored is, or receiving yards in a season, or career sacks.

But everyone knows what 755 means, and we could see Hank Aaron’s face as he jogged around the bases after going deep into the left-field bullpen for homer #715.

Writing is like baseball because it’s a case of individual prowess projected on a team stage. It’s batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball, writer versus manuscript, a series of single moments that play out into a coherent, compelling narrative.

Find the themes. They’re there, waiting. Consider the Yankees, arrogant and rich and powerful, locked in eternal fratricidal combat with Boston. The Red Sox, forever beset by tragedy and lost opportunity, until delivered by miracles and a bloody sock. The Cubs, lovable losers basking in the sun at Wrigley while the beer vendors shout “Old Style!” and the fans watch from rooftops across the street. The Dodgers, gone from beloved Bums to the laid-back kings of La-La Land. These are the tropes, the stories that have been built up over a century, the archetypes that are so easy to play with. Pick up the threads; it’s almost too easy. After all, other hands have been weaving them for years.

Then again, maybe it’s just that there’s so much there. Every game has its heroes and villains, its underdogs and its goats. Each team gets the same fair shot – 27 outs whether you want ‘em all or not, 9 innings, 9 men on the field – to do with as they will, a multitude of encounters matched in duality. If the hero is the crippled pinch-hitter who has one good swing in him and goes deep in the bottom of the ninth, he’s matched the goat, the guy who gave up the bomb. It’s serious stuff. So sayeth Kirk Gibson and Joe Carter, so sayeth Mitch Williams and Dennis Eckersley.

Or it could be because baseball makes everyone a storyteller, because the score never tells you what happened.

Never.

Writing is like baseball because they’re both about the precision of inches applied over vast differences. Willie Mays made The Catch 450 feet from home plate. An inch of difference one way and that ball is popped up, an inch of difference the other and it’s gone. Instead, it’s poetry. Change one word and see what happens. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

Time doesn’t begin on opening day. It ends there, and on every day the rest of the season. Every game is somebody’s first, someone’s magical moment, someone’s legend born and retold. Their story, for them to tell and retell for the rest of their lives.

For me, it was September 26, 1980. It was a night game, Phillies-Expos, both teams fighting for the N.L. East pennant. Our seats were borrowed field boxes, right at the end of the Phillies’ dugout on the first base side. Nine years old and the proud possessor of almost a complete set of 1978 Topps cards, I’d brought some cut-down 5”x 8” index cards with me for autograph hunting. During the game my father passed them to the security guard stationed at our end of the dugout. “Can you get someone to sign them?” he asked. The guard nodded and disappeared for a minute. A few seconds, or minutes, or pitches by Montreal’s David Palmer later, he returned, a card in his hand. There were five names on it:

• Catcher Bob Boone, who later set the record for most games played at the position.
• Shortstop Larry Bowa, a slick-fielding All-star and future manager with a fiery temper. He was my favorite Phillie, as much for his diminutive stature as anything else. Years later, he’d manage my beloved Phillies into the ground, but that would be later. In 1980, he was the little guy who caught everything.
• Outfielder Bake McBride, a former Cardinal with a ferocious ‘fro. 1980 was his last hurrah. After the season, he’d never play regularly again, but that night, he was magical.
• Ramon Aviles, a backup infielder. Good field, no hit, and in 1980 he’d hit the only 2 home runs of his career. I was a fan; I can still lay hands on a half-dozen copies of his 1981 card at a moment’s notice.
• First baseman Pete Rose. Liar, gambler, tax cheat, fraud, drug addict, American Ixion in the making. All that was in the future; in 1980 he was a first baseman with a high on-base percentage and no power, the Phillies’ first dive into that newfangled free agency thing. The other story had not yet been written.

None of the autographs were personalized, except that by the mere fact of their existence, they all were. They were mine, made for me in the heat of battle and given to me from the mysterious depths of the dugout. Bowa’s signature was cramped and tight, Rose’s fat and loopy with a “P” than ran all the way out to the “R” of his last name. McBride’s signature was smooth and flowing, the downstrokes going way, way down below the letter line. Boone’s looked distracted, the letters written one over the other. Aviles? His “R” went down and his “A” went out, and every other letter went every which way. I stared at it, heart thumping, fascinated.

If a foul ball had come our way, I would have been doomed, as I refused to let them out of my hands all night.

I still have that card. It’s on my desk now. And when lumbering left fielder Greg “Bull” Luzinski saved the game with a running, stumbling catch by the left field foul like, it seared itself into my memory. When Bake McBride, the same Bake McBride who’d signed that piece of cardboard for me, hit a home run to break a 1-1 tie in the ninth and win the game, I was plunged into pandemonium.

Shake’n’Bake, the scoreboard said. 27 years later, and I still remember the scoreboard, remember the ball disappearing over the outfield wall, the ballpark erupting into chaos.

Pure magic.

And the next day, I couldn’t wait to tell all of my friends all about it.

Writing is like baseball because both go better with a beer. Or maybe that’s just me.

Just as I still have that card, I still tell the story of that game. Maybe my memory of that night is faulty, maybe I’ve jumbled details and filled in gaps and built a myth out of the first game out of yet another three-game series that honestly didn’t decide all that much.

Except that in my story, it does. It’s a story I learned that night and that I’ve been telling ever since. That’s what keeps me going back to the ballpark, the search for another story like that one. I’ve gotten close a few times – a game-winning grand slam by a long-forgotten catcher named Bo Diaz, a Keystone Kops triple play in Kansas City as the Tampa Bay Devil Rays ran amuck on the bases, a start for a one-armed pitcher named Jim Abbott at Fenway Park against the dreaded Roger Clemens, a My-God-Did-You-See-That? Play from Durham Bulls wonderphenom B.J. Upton throwing out a runner from his backside. There have been other moments – heckling a player only to discover his girlfriend was sitting right in front of me (she agreed with me, for whatever it was worth), agreeing to look at an old autographed baseball as a favor and discovering that the autographs turned out to have names like Aaron and Spahn and Mathews, sneaking into my father’s bedroom closet to oh-so-carefully take down his old Brooklyn Dodgers yearbooks and read once again about Campy and Shotgun Shuba and all the rest.

Moments. Stories told and retold, and me always looking for more.

Did that game make me a storyteller? Probably not, but it did demand that its story be told. And so does every game, because every game has a story, or two, or as many as there are players and moments in it. The score says nothing, the agate type of the box score is merely a plot outline. But the game itself, and every other one played, is a story waiting to be composed and relayed, made up and told.

That’s the real link between writing and baseball, I think. All the rest helps, but all the rest is details. It’s a game of stories, and it calls to the storytellers in us. Not all of us, perhaps, and not every time, but enough of us, and more often than not.

So maybe time does begin on opening day, and end there, and everything else in between. That’s my story, and I’m sticking it to it. And the story? It’s sticking to me.

by Janet Berliner

As often as I’ve met Ray Bradbury, he’s always said, “Do I know you?” each time. I’ve seen him riding around Santa Monica on his bicycle. I wave and he waves back, but I imagine him saying to himself, “Have I met her?”

The first time I officially interviewed Ray was in Santa Cruz, around the mid-eighties. Since many people had interviewed him before, I decided to keep one question paramount: What kind of inner world does a man like this inhabit? I knew that it would be difficult it was going to be to sort out the emotional overload of an hour with him, so my I asked my psychiatrist friend, Stancil, the one we had met in Santa Barbara, to design and ask the questions. My motives multiple and selfish. Stancil has an unusual perspective on human behavior. We were working together on an annotated Winnie-the-Pooh. He’d never done an interview or had anything published (since then he’s the proud author of the definitive book on Frisbees–I am not kidding) but he wanted to learn and I thought his knowledge of behavior might come in handy.

We had arranged the interview for lunchtime, at a Chinese food restaurant. Lunch with Ray Bradbury is definitely an event. His creative unconscious, that which psychiatrists call the “primary process,” bubbles like a flowing artesian well, no matter where he is. What makes it fun is that, while this “primary process” pours forth, it sweeps his listeners–and at times Bradbury himself–into uncharted waters. Though a virgin to Chinese food, or so he said, he attacked the food zealously. When one last Szechuan dumpling lay on his plate, he looked at it regretfully and stood up. “Every once in a while, when I am at someone’s house or at a party,” he said, “my enthusiasm runs away from me. I hear my voice ricochet off the far wall, and I know it’s time to leave.”

His timing was magical. We had run out of tape and out of energy. Not so Ray. Ready to tackle the afternoon session of a day-long seminar, he headed for the limousine that had sparked our first questions of the interview: Why does a man who is part space traveler and an architect of arcane worlds refuse to drive, and why is he afraid to fly?

Ray doesn’t believe in short-form answers. “I’ve flown for the first time within the last five years, but I was terribly drunk when I did it. When I was young, I was too poor to own a car because my income didn’t start to go up until I was 35, or at least 32. Gradually over the years, I realized I didn’t miss it. You know, you don’t miss it because you’ve never had it. And then I saw a lot of people killed on the highway when I was young. I don’t like high places, either, and I think imagination makes things worse than they really are. I think I was afraid of being afraid.”

I had told Stan to jump in at any time, preferably with something more sophisticated than standard psycho-babble. Jump in he did. “In psychiatric treatment today, it’s suggested that the way to overcome a fear is to face it…behavior therapy, you know,” Stan said. “What about the fear that many writers have of being successful? How did you overcome that?”

My first reaction was to think the question rather too simplistic but, always happy to find a way to talk about his mentor, Robert Heinlein, Ray launched into his answer.

“I had someone to encourage me–Bob Heinlein. He was my teacher. I met him when I was 18. I joined the Science Fiction/Fantasy Society in L.A. We had meetings at Clifton’s Cafeteria every Thursday night because we were all poor and you could eat there cheap, or you could eat there free too. Mr. Clifton had a rule, and it’s still there today. He’s given away millions of free meals over a period of 45 years or so. I met Heinlein there and Kuttner and Edmund Hamilton and Leigh Bracket, Ross Rockman. All of them became my friends and teachers. I used to go to Heinlein’s house and watch him type, which was exciting because I’d never sold anything myself.”

Bradbury added that life in general, and the war in particular, contrived to keep him from seeing Heinlein for thirty or so years. They finally had a chance to talk at Jet Propulsion Lab, a couple of years before Heinlein’s death.

Joseph Mugnaini, artist, filmmaker, teacher, writer and, that day, part of Ray’s entourage, offered the information that Heinlein had his place in Santa Cruz electronically protected, which meant that he was imprisoned every time the electricity went off. He considered that to be “…a wonderful Science Fiction irony.”

We had been introduced to Joe as a special man whose friendship and work had long been a part of Ray’s life. He had a wonderfully craggy face and an intensity that rivaled Ray’s. I determined that I would arrange to interview him, too, at another time and place, and asked Ray if he had any ties to SFWA–The Science Fiction Writers of America

“Oh, I belong,” he said, “but there’s no time to get involved in any of their fights or arguments. I can’t keep up with all the writing. It’s impossible, so then I just feel ignorant. If I kept up with the writing, I’d have to quit writing myself.”

Hoping to find someone we knew in common, I asked him if he had read much Harlan Ellison.

“Yeah,” Ray said, “I’ve known Harlan for years. I haven’t read all that much, but a certain number of his short stories, which I like. And Harlan is great fun. A lot of people hate him, but I love him. We’re totally different…totally different people. Maybe that’s why we get on so well. I find him very funny. Yes, I’ve played pool with him at his house. He’s an enthusiast, you see. And I respond to someone who’s that manic about things. It’s Harlan who’s rebuilt his house and put caves in it and rabbit holes…he has Vivaldi on half the time, which is super.”

Ellison and Bradbury! Harnessed, they could replace the Diablo Canyon reactor, I thought.

In a matter of a few minutes, we had moved from Heinlein to Ellison, from mushu pork to rabbit holes. We were staying ahead of the cataract that is Ray Bradbury only with great effort.

I looked for a change of pace. “We’ve heard you’re a Francophile. How’s the Science Fiction there? Any outstanding writers?”

Ray was off and running. “Oh, they’re mad for it. They’ve got a lot of Science Fiction bookstores. There are no contemporary French Science Fiction writers that I know of. I think there were a couple of Russian boys living in Paris that write. I can’t think of their names, I think they’re twins. There are very few good Science Fiction writers in the world in general, and they’re all Americans with a few English, but there are no French. The Russians write it, but boy are they stodgy.

“You know what motivated our first trip to France? The French government invited me over to celebrate Jules Verne’s birthday. So we got a free trip over and a car and a driver, and all the best hotels, all the three-star restaurants for three weeks. We went down to the South of France. The French government asked, ‘Who do you want to meet?’ My wife said Charles Asnavour, so we spent a day with him.”

Asnavour! I practically melted. Ray laughed. “So you’re in love with him, too.”

I nodded. “What about you?” I asked. “What did you want?”

“Two things. First of all, I wanted to stay at Vaux-le-Vicomte, the 17th-century chateau built by Nicolas Fouquet. Tourists come there in the daytime and look around, but it is owned by a private family. No one is allowed to stay there. They gave me what I requested, but I had to arrange it myself. I wrote to Connoisseur Magazine editor Thomas Hoving, with whom I’d once lectured in San Jose. Hoving arranged an overnight stay in exchange for an article. Fouquet, you know, was Louis XIV’s finance minister. When Louis came out to see vaux-le-Vicomte, he was infernally jealous that it was better than anything he, Louis, had. He suspected that maybe the money had come out of France’s treasury, which it hadn’t, and sent D’Artagnan to arrest Fouquet, who was jailed for the rest of his life, fifteen years. The legend of the man in the iron mask grew up around Fouquet. So the whole thing is full of romance as well as horror. There’s a room with a tapestry screen with all of Fontaine’s animals worked into it. Fontaine slept there. The sculptured ceilings and the bas reliefs are all so beautiful and warm. There is an amorous, frivolous touch to it. The angels are just a little more than angels. You feel you could really pinch them.

“As for which living person I wanted to meet, it was Jean Louis Barrot. See, I was supposed to do The Martian Chronicles directed by Barrot in 1968, and then the students ruined the theater. I’ll never forgive them. When revolutions run over my projects, I get very illiberal sometimes. To hell with them. Why would they close down a theater? We weren’t doing anything political.

“I’m a liberal democrat, but I admire ideas, not parties.”

“The world knows you best as the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, and of innumerable short stories and film scripts,” I said. “You’re in love with France, in love with life, in love with Chambord, a spired castle that grew out of the imaginations of kings. You’ve slept among tapestries and danced in the halls of monarchs. Where would you like to play next?”

I don’t know what I expected to hear, but Ray’s answer took me by surprise.

I’ll tell you about it next month.

By Stan Ridgley

Indulgence is a scarce commodity in our coarse, impatient world.

Yield a bit to me, please.

I touch upon several related points, as is my wont and compulsion in these monthly essays — the conundrum of “vision,” the connection between the worlds of business and art, the difficulty of communicating a truly unique vision, the entrepreneurial writer, the dastardly nature of corporate leavening that leeches away the lifeblood of creativity, and through all of it — the problem of writing what you actually mean to say, so that the message received was the message sent.

These are all topics that weave their way into a semester’s worth of my lectures in my business strategy and global management courses. I knit together much disparate material in this way . . . but, alas, forgive me if the medium of the essay form does not provide the tractability of the classroom with its stage and its various multi-media crutches.

And if I wander, well please just wander with me and let’s see what we find, keeping our fingers crossed that it will be useful.

Vision.

George H. W. Bush might have called it “the vision thing.” He beat me to it by about 15 years, and while it might have been a phrase suitable for ridiculing an uptight politician, I think it does capture its amorphous quality.

The vision thing.

It seems that the vision thing is amorphous . . . to everyone but the visionary. To the visionary, the vision is clear, rational, bright as white phosphorus burning on a moonless night. And quite as hot.

At best, the visionary is surrounded by lesser minds whose feeble synapses cannot loop themselves about the vision. At worst, they are idiots and obstructionists.

Of course, we all have visions.

To us, our own visions are clear. They are indeed rational, bright as white phosphorus burning on a moonless night. And quite as hot.

Exciting visions, and visions that are bound to disappoint us as we make others aware of them.

For no one else understands. Because . . . communicating that vision may be as difficult as confecting it in the first place.

And for every sympathetic ear lent to you by a fellow visionary who has been put through the meatgrinder of negativity, there are 100 naysayers eager to turn the crank on your vision.

No . . . 1000 naysayers.

Not that naysaying is always bad, mind you. All visions are not created equal, and some can be downright nasty.

The man or woman with a vision could easily be an artist or architect, or could well be a developer scarfing up land to lay down asphalt for a superhighway or to lay foundations for a new Trump Tower.

Or it could be an entrepreneur — wild-eyed, committed, driven by a vision.

Or a woulde-be novelist with one good plot in him . . . or her. Or a dozen plots seething and straining at release from the prison of our poor imagination. A would-be novelist, driven to write. Or driven to distraction.

Is there so much difference between an entrepreneur and a writer? For novelists are entrepreneurs. Each time the bold writer casts a blank page upon the screen to begin a new tale, it is a fresh project, new to the world and unlike anything that has gone before. One hopes.

The endeavor requires a particular set of attributes. Determination, patience, acumen, imagination, education of a sort (not necessarily formal), experience in life, literacy. And the ability to communicate . . .

This last, of course, is the trick.

For words are the medium most of us use to convey our vision, whether a novel or an idea for a product that does not yet exist. A product that meets a need that we do not yet know we have. A story that resonates with feelings we have not yet explored.

Even the painter must use words to “explain” his art to those unable to grasp its subtlety or significance — such explanation, by its very nature, is usually a forlorn exercise.

The vision thing. Our visions can be great or small, creative or mundane.

In my classes on business strategy, I talk about the vision thing in oblique terms. I actually broach the concept of businessperson as artist. The artistically inclined in my courses (and some liberal arts folks do slip in) look askance at the idea, and most of the fact-motivated business-inclined in my courses don’t seem to care. Or, even if they were to care, simply do not understand the point.

The notion is not warmly received.

Perhaps the point is nonexistent. Or strained. Or ludicrous.

Perhaps it is a futile exercise. Perhaps it is something that I see that others do not. And even so, it is possible that this thing that I alone see does not necessarily have value.

But I do believe that there are no disciplinary bounds that contain creativity. Many of the products of advertising agencies abound with creativity – at least in their initial stages before the corporate leavening process strips away edginess and originality and anything which might prove too startling for public sensibilities.

For corporate leavening is designed to package knowledge in comprehensible, digestible segments. It is designed to link information seamlessly into the already-known world of popular culture, more to massage viewers with familiar verities and comfortable genuflections than to stimulate thought. It is the proverbial cooks spoiling broth.

And so it is with business generally. There is an art to business, but it is never described as such lest such creativity be hooted from the room. This is the realm where ideas are “run up flagpoles” and such like, where outside-the-box thinking receives the obligatory tip o’ the hat, but where genuine “outside the box thinking” is neither expected nor appreciated.

The articulation of true thinking outside the corporate box is risible, if anyone unschooled in the unwritten corporate rules dares to give voice to such heresy.

This is the conundrum. The paradox.

Now, we all engage in pop-psychology from time-to-time, and this allows us to speak of the “average person’s” attitudes, beliefs, and reactions as if we, ourselves, are free of this “average person’s” afflictions. But indulge this hubris for a few more moments.

The conundrum is that when the artist, the visionary, thinks outside the box, it leaves others feeling threatened and insulted that they, themselves, are perceived as restricted to thinking inside this box.

Likewise, the average person tends to interpret his own inability to understand a vision as the other person’s quackery . . . whether the artist is a painter, composer, writer . . . or businessman.

There is a balance to be struck here.

Those of us without calluses on our fragile psyches can be wounded by the mass rejection of our vision, such rejection leaving us questioning our sanity and ability. And those of us informed by our own arrogance and too callused may be deaf to legitimate criticism or to gentle suggestion.

Thus, the conundrum of the vision. Visions are difficult.

I said that not all visions are created equal. Not all are salutary or benign. Some are unsavory, insidious, dangerous, cold.

Others are just boring, derivative, smug, pale.

But I desire not to judge a man’s vision. Not hereabouts, anyway.

These problems of distinguishing good vision from bad are worth essays and books in their own right, essays and books that are perhaps beyond this scribe’s abilities to pen.

Rather, at this point, I call attention to the angst and anguish of the man who perceives that his vision cannot be grasped by others. His impatience with naysayers, his irascibility, his inability to compromise, his propensity to scoff rather than to explain.

And, ultimately, his resignation that any explanation will not be enough. For if it were explicable to the average mind, then the average mind would have long ago seized upon the vision and made it corporeal.

That is yet another conundrum for the entrepreneur, the artist, the visionary. Perhaps it has always been this way, and it is not necessarily restricted to those of genius stature.

If the vision itself, indeed, is true art — an assemblage of something truly unique, then of course it will not be immediately apprehensible to the hoi-polloi. And so not to sound haughty, perhaps it could be better said: “immediately apprehensible to us of the hoi-polloi.” To those of us not privy to the vision’s intricate fabric, the obscure linkages, the high concept that informs the few.

Let me issue a caveat that complicates the issue. There are those in our lives who exhibit a raft of negative characteristics—irascibility, inability to compromise, the sneer of the wise — without the saving grace of having a vision or anything resembling it. But shrewd and clever folks are afoot, and they know the trappings of the visionary, the finery of the thinker, the vernacular of the annointed.

But he is hollow. And how to spot this poseur?

Again, I digress in the interest of clarity and refinement. Back to the point-of-the-moment, and that point is this:

Communicating the vision is incredibly difficult. It is difficult because of snags all along the communication chain. It is difficult because of flaws inherent in the visionary, in the medium, and in the those receiving the message. And given this, it is a wonder that useful communication occurs at all.

Think of the equation: An irascible, haughty, driven, and quirky entrepreneur attempts hurried and imperfect communication with an unresponsive, suspicious, and fallow audience.

For inevitably, the recipient of a fresh, new, insightful, electrifying, unique confection of art, vision, or theory will respond in predictable manner.

The recipient of this revolutionary information responds to the truly new by filtering the information through sensors that massage and mold it into images and words and reality that are already known. For it all has been heard before, seen before, considered before, and catalogued before.

Nothing is truly new . . . especially to the clever man, who for the most part has no personal stake in recognizing and processing novelty.

If perchance, an idea takes root, a theory is accepted, art recognized for its texture, nuance, and universalism . . . well, the problem of communication is instantly forgotten after the fact.

After the fact, of course, it is all different. We all recognize novelty, genius, the great idea after the fact. Long after the fact. It becomes “obvious.”

The unserious novels of Charles Dickens. The absurd notion that people might appreciate a service that provides overnight delivery, a service with the ridiculously stuffy name “Federal Express.”

In each of these dramatically different cases, an entrepreneur recognized something that others, perhaps much like us, could not or would not.

Entrepreneurs and novelists are usually driven people. I tend to believe that they are one and the same. Would-be authors are entrepreneurs. In fact, they are repeat performers, whether crafting fiction or non-fiction . . . every new book is an entrepreneurial effort.

They visualize what is not there, what others cannot see. Or can see only through a mist of reality that clogs the imagination. Imaginative and single-minded, they embrace their mission with religious zeal (and I do believe that those two words, religious and zeal, are joined at the hips, much as to “redouble one’s efforts”).

A touch of the maniacal, the obsessive, the glassy-eyed dreamer, the take-no-prisoners, uncompromising drive. The determination that compels one to rise each day to face the idea that no one understands, to embrace yet another day alone in one’s belief. An attitude that says “do not tamper with this vision.”

This is, of course, the only way for entrepreneurs to succeed. If they were any other way, they wouldn’t be entrepreneurs.

Which brings me to the final point that is not so disentangled from what has gone before to be a standalone.

I have waxed on about communication and its difficulties. The word has become almost a cliché in that everything these days can be labeled a “communication problem,” even when the problem is not lack of communication, but rather too much accurate communication.

The “communication” conundrum I refer to afflicts anyone who would write to inform others, who would convey thoughts and notions and concepts.

In fiction, and even in non-fiction, I have noted a disinclination on the part of many undergraduates and some graduate students to edit their work. As if such editing is equivalent to the “corporate leavening process” I mentioned earlier. They confuse the goal of clarity with senses-dulling censorship.

Strunk and White touched upon this, and where Strunk and White are sometimes looked upon as too basic, their insights provide a solid technical foundation that many young writers would do well to absorb. Strunk and White observed a tendency among young writers to confuse spontaneity with genius, to affect a breezy, careless, even world-weary style. I believe the modern vernacular for this is the “been there, done that” posture.

But of course, such an attitude leads to ambiguity and sloppiness in writing — whether one is conveying exactly a child’s appropriate emotion in a funereal scene, or whether one is conveying the impact of various liquidity ratios on a novel business model.

Inevitably, what is communicated on the page is not what the writer believes he or she is conveying. First drafts are always afflicted with a primitivity of communication. Yet, ironically, the first draft carries for many writers an aura of spontaneity and genius that resists change.

The solution? Editing.

If there is a single act that can improve this communication issue, it is careful and ruthless editing. Only through editing can clarity, focus, and meaning be teased from the morass of words. This is a lesson taught on Storytellers many times, but it demands repeating.

The daily difficulties of communication abound. When the subject is new or the product unique, the obstacles increase dramatically, for all the reasons I have listed in such disorganized fashion. Through the act of editing, perhaps we can at least overcome one obstacle in the difficult task of communicating our vision.

The problems lie all along the communication chain — in the personality of the visionary, in the unique nature of the vision itself, in the inadequacy of the medium with which we communicate, and in the prejudices of the recipient.

Is there a formula to address all of these issues along the communication chain? Probably not. I certainly do not have the answer. But at risk of sounding like the cookie-cutter b-school professor, let me iterate that the good news is that awareness of a problem and its proper identification is a giant step toward its resolution in our personal strategic planning process.

The more rarefied the vision, the more intractable and personal the issues we must deal with. And as a result, I suspect that each of us must define our own problems and search out our own answers to our communication issues.

For only we can grapple with them and, ultimately, deal with them.

(I want to apologize to Richard and everyone. I had to drive to VA to pick up my sons today, and did not post this in the morning…I hope it will get the exposure it deserves … and I hate it when I screw up…(sorry Rick)- DNW

By
Richard Steinberg

“These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice . . . and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart,” Gilbert Highet

Silence.

Pained, stilled, threatening, coercive, obscene.

Silence.

Can you hear it? It’s not far from you – down the block, across the street, maybe within sight or across town – but I promise you it’s there.

Lurking.

Smirking.

Growing.

My last two essays here were given over to the beautiful children of Justice Myron E. Leavitt Middle School; their questions and my answers from the day I spent there at the beginning of March. I give this column over to them as well; not as co-authors, but as a gift that I hope will still the silence, and open up a cacophony of voices in their lives.

During a break in that blessed day, my host, Mr. Loren Levine, took me – at my request – over to the Leavitt Library. I love libraries. To me they are simultaneously holy places, and places of the people. They were the only thing that kept me together (in my youth) when my family disintegrated. They were the only thing that kept me together (in my young adulthood) when my life disintegrated. They are today – in their bookish way – the only thing in the world I know beyond all doubt that I can rely on.

But on entering the rather lovely and large room that is the Leavitt Library, I felt as if the life had been forced out of me; like cresting a pacific hill on a pleasant day’s hike and suddenly seeing a lifeless (or more precisely a life destroyed) desert that went on forever.

The neat and clean and sparkling facility with good people running it, and caring people worrying over it, lay forty percent empty. More even, as the five shelf bookcases (two shelves of each lying empty) lined the perimeter walls only. No shelves crossing the room, no shelves creating study alcoves, no sense of the forest of strength and growth that this place should be.

There were all the necessary accoutrement: nice study tables, relatively comfortable chairs, wonderful lighting, and staff that know their stuff.

But minimal books.

I cast no blame here. Principal Shana Mack Pippin and her hard working staff do everything they can. EVERYTHING! But in an age where schools are compelled to spend more on testing than they do on books; in an environment where underpaid and overworked teachers spend several hundred dollars a year out of their own pockets for adequate classroom supplies, replacing old, worn out, falling apart books just isn’t possible. And buying new books? Not a chance.

So forty percent of the shelf space lies empty, as does much of the rest of the room, and the wondrous journey that each of these children should be allowed the chance to choose to take is denied as cruelly as any backwater, fascist police state ever did by banning books.

There is nothing unique here, I’m sad to say. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of public school libraries are in various states of disarray and decay with no hope in sight. No: “. . . voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart . . .”

I consider myself a strong man, a caring man, but there is little to nothing I can do about all those emptyish rooms that should be filled with the sound of books speaking to the minds and the hearts and the souls of those we would give stewardship over the world to come.

But I can – I hope – do something about the library at Justice Myron E. Leavitt Middle School.

They need books.

Many of you who read this are writers – either in fact or in hope. You understand that need.

David Lilienthal once said that a man should be judged by what he is for, not what he is against. Let us then declare that those of us who believe in the power of words to heal the sick or afflict the sickening stand with the children of Leavitt Middle School. Let our actions ring out as a clarion moment of crystalline statement:

“HERE, AT JUSTICE MYRON E. LEAVITT MIDDLE SCHOOL, WE BEGIN TO FORCE BACK THE SILENCE AND REPLACE IT WITH VOLUMES UPON VOLUMES OF BEAUTIFUL NOISE MADE UP OF THOUGHTS, DREAMS, LESSONS, FANTASIES, AND TRUTHS!”

They need books. Fiction, nonfiction, adventure, history, biography, technical, vocational, fantastical.

They need books in hardcover, paperback, trade-paper, audio (with equipment to play them) collections, and magazines.

They need the basic wherewithal that a library requires to thrive.

The students are ages 11 through 13, for the most part. Bright and inquisitive, they want to read. They want to learn . . .

Do we care enough to help them?

If you cannot donate books or equipment, money – as ever – is acceptable. But the money MUST be very specifically donated ONLY for the improvement of the Leavitt Library. And we’re not talking only of big donations . . . ten bucks can buy a book, sometimes two.

The details are fairly simple; and in this harsh world in which we struggle with our art being judged almost solely by its commerciality, also very hard.

I ask you, dear, dear gentle readers, colleagues, publishers, suppliers, any and all that read these words and believe that a child’s right to learn is ABSOLUTE and not a gift that might easily be taken away on the whim of a policy change to contact Mr. Loren Levine, a fine and dedicated teacher at Leavitt, and offer your help.

Mr. Loren Levine
lllevine@interact.ccsd.net
or: EaglesVoice@att.net

“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves,” Anna Quindlen

So long as there were enough books to fill those shelves.

The beyond vast majority of you may not give a damn about a school named after a man you never heard of, in a place far from your homes.

Fair enough.

Find a more familiar school closer to home. Walk into its library.

Then do what has to be done.

I am tired this evening as I finish this draft. Physically ailing, beat up mentally, sick and burned out by the bullshit that piles higher by the moment. By publishers grown too cautious, by bookstores grown too rote, by a public that seems to genuinely care less and less about more and more.

Tired.

I see good and close friends dying in far off hostile lands . . . and there is little to nothing I can do about that.

I see the country that I love discussing cosmetic issues while homeless children starve and good people die of eminently curable diseases.

I see us all – like fighters who have taken too many blows – becoming unwilling to summon up within our hearts the will to go on for one more round.

And yet, here – on those empty shelves in that room that needs even more shelves crowded with books and with them opportunities for empowerment – I see an opportunity for us to do that most difficult thing for any writer to do:

Substitute actions for words.

Each month from now on I will, at the beginning of each essay, call to your attention another school library in need; along with a contact for that library. Act or don’t. That decision lies with you. Support one of your local school libraries instead . . . a sensational act if you don’t want to help the ones I name.

But you, I beg of you, must . . . ACT!

For only through our inaction will the silence grow until it is so loud, so stultifyingly complete, that books will go the way of art and music and culture in our public school.

And libraries will become conference rooms or be broken up for classrooms, or perhaps will simply lie empty and alone.

A billion voices silenced and the future lost.

Silence reigns.

Until a voice is raised in action.

And, together, the silence is vanquished forever.

Please . . .

Believe!

by Jeff Mariotte

It should go without saying—but these days, it seems even the most obvious sentiments need to be expressed or people will assume they’re not felt—that last week’s shootings at Virginia Tech were an abominable act performed by a seriously disturbed person.

What was worrying from a long-range perspective was the amount of attention paid to the shooter’s writings, apparently violent and full of rage. That attention seems to have been eclipsed for the moment by consideration of his multimedia “manifesto,” but I still fear that we’ll return to it in the months to come.

Americans are already living in an environment where a student’s writings about a fictional presidential assassination can trigger a visit form the Secret Service, and where students can be suspended for “violent” writings. We should all remember—and where necessary, remind “the authorities”—that the world of the imagination and the world we live in are two different places. Very seldom does anyone confuse the two, as the VT killer seems to have done. Young people in particular struggle with all kinds of powerful emotions, as their bodies change and their minds are exposed to new information and they try to follow their individual paths toward adulthood. Through writing, they can express some of those emotions, study them, understand them, and to take those writings as literal statements of intent is foolish in the extreme.

Fiction is about conflict. Since the beginnings of literature, that conflict has often been expressed in violent action. I believe that writing about violence has a therapeutic effect in most cases, and is rarely, if ever, a genuine spur toward violence on the part of the writer. Has Thomas Harris, after all, really enjoyed brain sherbet? Has Stephen King mangled victims with laundry equipment? Has Lee Child shot dozens of people?

And on the flip side, this past week also brought the tragic anniversaries of Waco and Oklahoma City and Columbine and the birth of Adolph Hitler. Had the people responsible for those deaths written stories of rage and murder? Not that I’ve heard about. Now, though, the shooter responsible for more deaths than any other was an English major and an amateur writer, so it’s assumed by the media and the so-called experts that his writings, properly examined, could have predicted his future actions.

That’s nonsense, and they should know it, and they should not jump to that conclusion the next time a writer expresses boiling anger on paper, or even tells a story of extreme violence just because it’s what speaks to him at the moment. We’d be better off, I think, to let people work through those issues on paper, and maybe cancel the third week of April altogether, because all those anniversaries piled upon one another bring a terrible psychic weight to bear on us all, and that, more than any story or play, seems destined to lead to more violence.

#

I wrote, several months ago, about the pleasures of writing about what you want to learn about. Knowing there might be a check at the end of the research makes the time spent on study more enjoyable and worthwhile, and the more a writer knows about his or her topic, the more informed and convincing the final book can be.

These past few months, I’ve experienced both sides of the coin. I wrote two novels based on TV shows, one on the CW series Supernatural and one on the CBS program CSI: Miami. For Supernatural: Witch’s Canyon, my editor suggested that it might be cool for the Winchester brothers to visit someplace they haven’t on the show, like the Grand Canyon. I hadn’t been to the Canyon since moving to Arizona anyway, and love seeing it, so I made the trip, did some research on the region (since the story itself doesn’t take place in the National Park or right at the canyon) and enjoyed every minute of it. The words flowed when I got to the keyboard. I think the book is good, although that’s not something I’m in a position to judge for myself yet.

For CSI: Miami: Right to Die, however, I didn’t get to go to Miami. I’ve been there several times before, and I had books and maps and the internet to help me. Location wasn’t the tricky part in that one, though. As on TV, the science in the book has to be right, even when the application of that science (CSIs investigating murders beginning to end, for instance) is not accurate. And science is not something I have ever been (or will ever be) entirely comfortable with.

The language of science, like the German language, seems to believe that there’s no word that can’t be made better by the introduction of several additional words that may or may not seem related at first blush.

Writing the novel, I not only had to try to understand scientific language, but to translate it into something I could describe in real words. It’s not enough to grasp how cyanoacrylate fuming or tetramethylbenzidine testing works, but in a novel that has to be expressed in sight and sound and smell. Which, if you’re scientifically challenged like me, makes the work much harder. I think it all works, but again, someone else will have to determine that—I’m still too close to it.

#

Recently I’ve taken on various tasks that pull me away from writing. I’m a judge for this year’s World Fantasy Awards, and behind me in my office are—no, I don’t have time to count them; let’s just say about a hundred books that have arrived in the past couple of months, with more showing up all the time. I’m chairing a subcommittee for the International Thriller Writers, and after having spent yesterday in the mountains there are more than forty emails in my in-box about that work. And I’ve been doing whatever I can to promote my supernatural thriller Missing White Girl, which goes on sale next month. Any of these could easily become full-time work, at least temporarily. None of them come with a check attached, and only the third of those works to my semi-immediate financial benefit. But only after spending plenty of time and money on the process.

Which leads back to time management, and the necessity of saying “no” once in a while. You can bet that’ll be my answer the next few times I’m asked to take part in something above and beyond. It’s too easy for a full-time writer to think, sure, I’ve got an hour I can spare here and there. When those hours grow into days and weeks, they can become a problem. It’s one I’ve managed to avoid, but now, suddenly, I’m in the middle of it. Anybody got a shovel?

Dragon Claws?

I have a lot of vivid memories of Hurricane Isabel. Isabel was a Category 2 hurricane when it hit my home town of Hertford, NC in September of 2003. There were trees uprooted, roofs sheared off, and roads cut off completely to traffic. I was caught in the middle of it with my family. The widow’s walk tore off the roof of my house and fell in the pool while I stood on the porch and watched. Trees older than my great grandparents would be, if any of them were alive, ripped up and fell. My street was without power for a week; living through that storm, and the power-outage that followed was an eye-opening experience.

Many of you already know that I wrote my memories of that storm, and a lot of other things, into my novel “The Mote in Andrea’s eye.” There are other stories, though. Things like hurricanes leave big marks and the memories they carve are deep and lasting. I was reminded of one just the other day when I saw an odd mark in the asphalt in a parking lot. It looked (and looks still) exactly like a giant footprint made by a rubber wading boot, complete with the distinctive tread and the shape of the foot. It is such a startling likeness that my imagination kicked immediately into overdrive. It also made me remember something else about Hurricane Isabel that I thought I’d share. File this on the shelf with all the other places we get our ideas.

When they finally cleared route 17 back through the Great Dismal Swamp, which runs for about 12 miles directly along the long coastal waterway that stretches all the way to Florida, I returned to work, and life. I had an hour commute one way, and every day I drove through that swamp. All long that road crews had come through with chainsaws and just sawed the fallen trees off even with the road – there were too many for them to carry away, and the best they could manage was to cut a swatch through where the road ran to get traffic moving.

I took it all in, driving a little more slowly than usual. It’s a dangerous, narrow road in the best of times - has a sign at either end proclaiming the number of those who have died on the road to be 26 since some year in the 1980s - hasn’t been updated in a long time, but the message is clear enough. Since then they’ve installed a bypass with four fast lanes and fewer dangling trees, but that’s not important to this little tale.

So – there I was, driving along, when suddenly, I saw something, did a double-take, and I had to stop. I pulled to the side of the road, crossed over and stared at the pavement. The edge of the asphalt was scored. Deeply. It wasn’t like something crushed it, but more like huge claws had dug into it - about six of them, a huge saurian back foot ripping the pavement in passing. I’m not particularly superstitious, but that sight chilled me. I was the only car on the road, most businesses were still without power, and people were home.

I looked into that swamp, and I wondered. I knew the marks were probably the mark of the roots of some old tree that was picked up and bodily dragged across the road by the storm, except that I couldn’t see it that way. I couldn’t see how a tree could make the marks, and I couldn’t think of anything else that could make those marks — so my mind built a dragon. It even put the smashed trees into a different perspective, because on one side of the road, the trees had fallen one direction, but on the side with scored ruts, they were smashed in the opposite direction. That means they fell against the wind of the storm.

I never pass that spot without looking at the gouges in the asphalt, and wondering. I see the giant rubber boot print every day on my way to work. One day the words will come…

This has been David Niall Wilson, standing in for the lovely and talented Justine Musk…

Onward!

DNW