Tribe

I have a lot of things in common with a lot of people, but not all of the things seem equally important. I do not mean to suggest this is unusual. Some commonalities are just too common to feel significant. Others are too superficial. You and I might both like Jimmy Buffet music, for example—lots of people do—but all by itself that’s not enough to build a friendship on. Or is it? Friendships can form around less. Ultimately it’s just a matter of clicking somehow, I suppose.

I find it interesting to notice which commonalities seem to predict my friendships best. And I mean “predict” is a scientific sense here, as in one variable that is frequently associated with another for reasons that may or may not be clear. I mean that if you made a chart showing what I have in common with the various people I meet and which of those meetings went on to become friendships, would particular commonalities look more important than others?

I don’t intend to actually make such a chart, but I suspect there would be patterns. Having the same home town would not be important. Having a similar taste in food would not be important. Liking Star Trek might look important, but I suspect that could be explained as some sort of sampling bias.

Being writers would be important.

I don’t know why, it’s not that I seek out other writers as friends, and I certainly don’t snub non-writers. It’s just that almost everybody I really like turns out to be writing a book, or to have written one. And it turns out, I really like having writers as friends.

I like talking shop. I like being able to ask for or offer advice. I like being able to discuss our projects, our processes, our frustrations. I like having other people understand this strange thing I do.

Some of my writer friends are or have been mentors, teachers, editors. Some are or have been proteges. Some are and always have been peers. Some are people whose work I’m definitely a fan of. Some may be fans of mine. We are all allies to one degree or another.

So let me put in a plug for having writer-friends. I’ve done it by accident. I continue to do it by accident. But if you are a writer, and maybe just starting out, I recommend making friends with other writers on purpose.

Reach out to people on social media. Chat with people in book stores. Ask questions. Write fan-mail.

Make allies.

Can I…?

New writers sometimes ask if it’s OK to do such-and-such with their writing. Is it OK to have the main character be the badguy? Is it OK to have characters using racist language if they are, in fact, racist? Is it OK to have a sex scene involving underage characters–teenagers DO have sex, after all?

(yes, yes, and probably not, respectively)

These questions always amuse me because of their wording. Can I…? Usually the answer is of course you can. You can write anything that’s not illegal.

Some writers may be under the impression that there actually are more rules than there actually are, that they might get in trouble somehow. I think most, though, would be better served by a slightly different wording.

Is this idea of mine really “a thing”?

Is there some reason this thing I’m thinking about doing is uncommon? Is it a bad idea?

If I write this, will people like it?

But now I have a question, and the thing is it really does feel like a “can I” thing. Am I allowed? Of course I’m allowed, what I really need to know is will readers accept it? Will they like it? But it feels audacious to even consider. Am I allowed?

Am I allowed to write three books about the same story, each from the viewpoint of a different character? Each one will stand alone, but if you read all of them your experience of the story will be richer. And they’ll all come out on the same day and have the same ending.

So, am I?

What It Was Like Last Time

There was an eclipse today. I did not go visit totality. I could have, but didn’t know whether I wanted to, so I let my husband choose for both of us, and he decided not to go. Instead we stayed home and watched through home-made pinhole-projectors, a colander, and seven-year-old eclipse glasses (hey, I DID use them again!). We got to over 80% eclipse in our area, and the sun went cool and dim, but only to the point of mild, novel eeriness.

I saw others experience totality on TV. Dan Satterfield, in totality for the third time, went incandescently joyous in a way that did my heart good to hear. Miles O’Brian was more restrained and later said that although his view wasn’t as clear as his first time, being able to experience it with others made it more special, his “favorite.” A woman whose name I don’t know–I think she was doing commentary for CNN–broke out in a bubbly babble and admitted she felt like crying. It may have been she or another who then went quiet–the dead air broadcasters dread–until her co-star had to remind her “you’re supposed to be providing commentary on this.”

None of the pictures do it justice.

Below, I’ve pasted my account of totality from seven years ago. Re-reading it, I see I was wrong. It did change me. For weeks afterwards I was different. Maybe I still am. For a long time afterwards, seeing images of the eclipse felt like a trauma trigger. I still nearly cry when I talk about it.

I’ve decided that today was the right amount of eclipse for me. More would have been too much.

…………………………………………………..

So, there was an eclipse yesterday. And although I usually keep this blog pretty focused on my craft, there are so many people I want to tell my eclipse story to (I’m a writer: I write) that I’ve decided to share it here.

I figure, Annie Dillard wrote about her experience of totality, why can’t I?

First, let me say that if you haven’t been in totality yet, however weird you think a total eclipse of the sun would be, it is weirder than that. According to my friend, who read the relevant essay, Annie Dillard wrote that totality is to a partial eclipse what marrying a man is to merely kissing him—kissing generally comes before marriage and is obviously related to it, but in no way even approximates what marriage is like. Annie Dillard is precisely correct. Having kissed men and being married to one, I can say that the comparison in no way diminishes the worth of either partial eclipse viewing or kisses. Kissing is indeed a lovely thing to do. It is only that the other is so totally more as to achieve a difference of kind rather than degree.

So.

Yesterday was also my fortieth birthday, an event I decided to greet with excitement, rather than the more traditional dread. After all, getting older is what happens as long as you go on living, and living is a good thing. Anyway, the increasing amount of salt in my pepper is coming in silver, rather than grey or white, and I’m going to look awesome with silver hair. And, I get a total eclipse of the sun on my birthday, so how cool is that?

I arranged to view the eclipse from Siler Bald, on the Appalachian Trail, with several friends whom I hadn’t seen in way too long. My husband couldn’t join us because of unrelated prior commitments, but I brought the dogs down with me—Una, the aging but still spry and cute beagle, and CurlyQ, the now definitely geriatric Lab/pit mix (she has a retriever’s thick, brown coat and fondness for water, and a pibble’s sweet loyalty and stocky, muscular body). Much discussion of logistics ensued, as you can imagine. We had initially assumed that Siler Bald, being a steep, two-mile hike from the nearest road and not well-known, would be an excellent but nearly secret viewing spot, but that was before a local paper spilled the beans. We decided to hike in two days early, to claim a spot, but then car trouble delayed us by several hours and we elected to camp at the base of the mountain and then go up only one day early. So we had a varied, if rather populous, little vacation on the mountain.

A ”bald” in the Southern Appalachians, for those not in the know, is a meadow on or near the top of a mountain. There are several of them, of varying sizes and shapes. Trees can grow on the balds, and would, except they are kept at bay by mowing or grazing. The balds predate European conquest, so while they were likely created by people, the record of why they were created has been lost. Some believe them to be a natural phenomenon, but my money is against that at this point.

Our first night was cold. I had not brought a tent, only a tarp I chose not to use, and the dogs had never slept out before without a tent. They were anxious, and barked at neighboring campers and especially the campers’ dogs through the night and then all morning. The thin-coated beagle shivered violently until I brought her in bed with me. Then we kept each other warm. The night throbbed with insect song, both like and unlike what I hear at home, and the stars shone spangled through gaps in the canopy as I fell asleep. By morning I was stiff and in pain in several different places (I am, after all, turning forty) but the light of the new day revealed wildflowers visited by bees and hummingbirds and a fascinating mix of familiar and, to me, exotic trees and shrubs, from northern species, like striped maple, to southern species, like great rhododendron.

After breakfast, one member of our party ran up the mountain to snag us a campsite isolated from other dogs (to prevent barking), and the rest of us moseyed slowly along at a pace CurlyQ could manage, taking time to filter water from a trailside spring and to admire mushrooms. Two miles, and close to three hours later, we arrived at the top, and CurlyQ lay down and slept as immovable as a rock until nearly dinner time.

Siler Bald itself is long and relatively narrow, climbing hundreds of feet from the high Snowbird Gap to the much higher summit, like a curiously isolated ski slope. The Appalachian Trail crosses the lowermost portion of the bald, and side trails run up to the summit and sideways to a separate, and much smaller and flatter meadow with a large and stately oak tree in its middle. We camped in the forest on the edge of that meadow. Around us, in the clearing, and up along the main bald as high as the summit, clustered other people’s camps, and hikers, children, and dogs wandered freely, finding and chatting with acquaintances old and new, reading books, and playing catch, in much the same way as they might have before a large outdoor concert, except this time the star of the show would literally be a star—our sun.

After another cold, yet much more comfortable night (I borrowed a hammock), I woke to a huge and distant buzzing shortly after dawn, the massed hum of flies drawn to dung, mosquitoes, and aerial drones observing the historic occasion. The festival went on as before, the tent city swelling as the day progressed until, by our count, there were over 160 tents and maybe a thousand people. The mood remained upbeat and friendly, and insects, birds, and the everywhere dogs went about their day like normal. The weather was hot, though pleasant in the shade, with intermittent piles of high, stormlike clouds.

There was no indication anywhere, except in the behavior of well-informed humans, that an eclipse was imminent, and yet the moon was already in the sky, invisibly, moving ever closer to the sun.

Remember that solar eclipses are caused by the moon blocking our sunlight. If you hold your hand, palm towards you, up so that it blocks the sun from your face, you’ll see it is impossible, from that position, for the sun to shine on your palm. In just that way, an eclipsing moon must be dark, hunting the blue day unseen, like some celestial shark.

But our clocks and our astronomers could tell us what our eyes could not; the day was special.

We packed up our camp and again sent up an advance scout to find a spot on the hillside and set up a tarp to shade us and to shield the dogs from all the things they might otherwise bark at. My friends, despite not having dogs themselves,  were excellent with mine, wonderfully considerate of their sweet but sometimes nervous doggishness.

We ended up a little more than halfway up the hill, our view encompassing at least a third of the horizon, the land stretching out below us like a rucked and rumpled nubbly green carpet, row behind row, all uninterrupted green out to the hazy distance. People around us talked and strummed guitars, talked about astronomy, and grilled aromatic meat over small campfires. A band of children battled each other with toy swords and worked together to create a network of tunnels and forts in the thick brush bordering the bald. A few enthusiasts set up telescopes and specialized cameras and cardboard camera obscura observatories. A nearly uninterrupted line of ever more people marched steadily towards the summit, looking rather like a train of porters hired on to some Himalayan expedition.

And the moon, invisible, approached the sun.

At the appointed time, we used our eclipse glasses to look at the sun and saw a little, seemingly inconsequential, chip on the side of the disk. Clouds massed across the sky and departed, eclipsing the sun in their more ordinary way, and we joked that our massed willpower would surely move the clouds away in time. Yes, I thought, but what about the will and the wanting of other people on other mountains? One person’s clear sky is always another’s shadow.

Another look through the glasses, and the chip had grown. The sun now looked like a cookie with a bite out of it.

Through the glasses, it is impossible to see anything but the solar disk, except for a vague luminosity, similar to those patterns of color and paleness that form and move behind closed eyelids in the red and personal dark. That luminosity might have been the corona, but it also might not have. Nothing else. Even the sun looked like a dull orange circle and no more. To look at clouds and trees and mountains and each other, we had to take our glasses off, and we spent more time looking around than up, both to save ourselves a crick in the neck and to avoid boredom. Nothing special, yet. Had we not been forewarned, we could not have known the bite out of the sun was even up there, let alone growing.

Eclipses are not like lunar phases. On the moon through an ordinary month, the curve of the shadow follows the nearest edge, so that a nearly full moon is missing a crescent of darkness, and the edge of that crescent grows flatter and flatter until a half moon has a perfectly straight edge. But the edge of eclipsing darkness never changes its shape, it is always curved, the edge of the otherwise invisible moon in front of it, so it is difficult to tell when half the sun has been covered.

Around the halfway mark, though, the air seemed suddenly cooler, though I wasn’t sure it wasn’t just a passing, random cool breeze. Then I noticed that the light of day had gone watery, like the sun in winter. Again, I wasn’t sure I wasn’t imagining it. But the edge was definitely off the day’s heat.

“Is it getting cooler?” I asked.

“Yes,” they others said.

“How much, do you think?”

“Well, it was supposed to be in the 80’s today, and I think it’s in the 70’s now. I’ve heard it’ll get to 65, like, just for a second.”

“I’m thinking,” said another, “whether I’d be able to tell anything was happening yet, if I was just out hiking and didn’t know about the eclipse.”

“If I was out hiking,” I said, “I’d notice. Because I’d be aware of the weather, and with the temperature drop, it feels like a storm is coming in, except it doesn’t look like it.”

It did look like something, though. The sun had shrunk to a thin crescent, and the light…it was hard to tell that it had grown darker, though obviously it must have, because the sunlight was still direct and still the color of ordinary daylight. And yet it was getting hard to see, as though there were something wrong with my eyes, or maybe there was some sort of thick, gummy substance darkening the air. That the darkness might be caused by a lessening of light the mind resisted, resisted strongly, because under normal circumstances, direct, mid-day sunlight and lessening illumination can never happen together. Yet here they were. Circumstances weren’t normal.

The festival was growing quiet, ordinary conversation ceased, whatever everyone on the hill had expected to be thinking and feeling being shoved aside by respectful, spontaneous awe. People spoke in whispers, neighbor to neighbor, or not at all. The temperature was still falling, each slight breeze cooler than the last.

My beagle stood up and looked around, alert. Our other dog, CurlyQ, did not react at all, simply slept the justified sleep of the ages, but Una was up and aware. And yet she did not look at the sky. She did not seem frightened, and she did not bark or bay. She just looked around. As a domestic animal, she was used to lights going on or off and sudden changes of temperature for no clear reason, but human behavior is literally her bread and butter, and she is exquisitely attuned to our species. I suspect she noticed the humans were acting strangely and wanted to know what that meant for her.

The denser crown up on the crest of hill clapped, cheered, and we did not know why. Could they see totality already as it came to meet us? Had they started “The Wave”? Had someone done a trick?

The passing clouds had long since stopped, paused, as though indeed by our wishes, for although a large cloud hung in the sky near the sun, it never passed over. It was thin and ignorable and so we ignored it. I’m not even sure it was there the whole time. Maybe it left or evaporated somehow.

“I’m starting not to like this,” I said, to no one in particular. Intellectually and emotionally, I was fine—fascinated by circumstance, glad and excited to be exactly where I was—but viscerally I felt a nervous nausea rising. The crescent had shrunk to a thin nail pairing of sunlight and the land around us had grown so dim as to be undeniable by even the most stubborn intuition, and yet the colors of daylight remained, though perhaps with a slight reddish shift, and the combination lent the scene a weird, hypersaturated darkness, a terrifying unreality, a camera trick for a monster movie, and not a very believable one.

“That cloud went dark!” I said, and indeed a large, puffy cloud low on the horizon had suddenly lost all its whiteness, becoming a pale, dull grey almost right before my eyes. Totality. I was looking at totality from twenty miles away as it rushed towards us across our planet’s skin.

“Three hundred, sixty-degree sunset colors!” someone shouted, and, yes, the clouds around as much of the horizon as we could see glowed yellow and pink around their tops and the surface of their woolly, piled bulges. The sky behind them had turned a smoky, pinkish orange. The land lay cloaked in dimness, range upon range, as far as the eye could see.

“It’s going!” someone almost shrieked, and I pointed my protected eyes upward to watch the arms of the crescent shrink and shorten, pulling rapidly into themselves, melting, the center swallowing itself, squeezed out, until….

There was nothing at all visible through my eclipse glasses. Complete blackness.

I ripped my glasses off, and a round, black hole hung near the top of a clear, midnight blue sky, pearlescent fire wreathing it, the pale, glowing flames undulating with barely perceptible, yet breakneck speed, each hundreds of times longer than the diameter of the whole Earth.

A few of the brightest stars stood out, but the land did not look like night. The horizon was still burnt orange, the clouds just outside the edge of totality still pinkish, and our hill itself was still bathed in full, albeit weird, color, the green and brown and straw of the recently shorn meadow, the green of the trees, the people and their multi-colored tents and sun shades crowding around in light incredibly still recognizably sunlike but dim as the land of the dead. It did not look like night. Even the brightest moonlight is not enough to allow the eyes to process color. It certainly wasn’t day, though.

One of our neighbors had started up a short eclipse playlist, and, predictably, the depth of totality was soundtracked by “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a song I absolutely hate for its catchy and romanticized maudlin pain.

“I’m sorry you have to hear that song on your birthday,” someone said.

“It’s to be expected,” I replied, vaguely.

“Happy birthday!” someone else said.

“Thanks!” I replied. “Please don’t mind the fact that I’m sobbing.”

And I was. I was sobbing in terror, my arms tingling, my hands trembling, and yet I was not afraid in the ordinary sense of the word. I had no intellectual worry, not even any self-consciously irrational paranoia. Emotionally, I felt nothing at all, except a vague, eager curiosity. There was no fear, except I had all the involuntary physiological signs of a greater fear than any I had ever known. I learned later that the other people in my group felt wonder, or awe, or a great sense of beauty, but none of them felt terror, nor did I experience any of the enjoyable things they later reported. To feel a feeling, truly, the intellect and the emotions, as well as the body must be engaged, and while I had no fear, despite my full-body terror, I could feel nothing that was not fear, either.

People around us, all over the hill, were crying out in what sounded like shock and wonder, not everyone, just sprinkles and jets of sound here and there. Sometimes people clapped, though maybe that was later, it’s hard to remember clearly. Of all the hundreds of dogs among us that day, not one barked or howled or in any way acted odd. Wildlife had long since been frightened silent by the mass of humans. Of all the species present on Siler Bald that day, the only one I saw or heard acting strangely was ours.

I could not look at the sun/moon itself for very long, I found I could not quite trust that it was safe to do so. The thing so wholly looked like something dangerous, though, again, I was not really frightened by it, nor did I even really perceive it as a hole in the sky, nor was I appalled by it in a conscious way, and yet the only way to accurately describe the terrible singularity of it is as dangerous, as appalling, as a hole in the sky, a maw gobbling the world.

Not trusting that I could stare, and not wanting to miss the other parts of the show, I kept glancing between sky and land sky and land, sky and land. And every time I saw the land, it was that sickly, greenish dimness. Every time I saw the sky, the corona flared silent and silver above in a way that memory insists must have had a sound, a low, breathy roaring, or perhaps an ominous, long drawn-out chord, or an inchoate, wordless vocal track, singing.

I shivered, though whether from cold or from fear I do not know.

The cloud that had gone dark went light again, and someone shouted, “it’s coming back!” I looked up with my glasses and a speck, then a lump, then a crescent of light stood forth and grew rapidly. The world was day again, the clouds brightened rapidly to white, except for a darkness off in the other direction, behind the trees that I could not be sure I really saw, and then could not be sure was really gone.

The sun was still a mere crescent above us, the air must have been dim, yet in contrast to stark totality, everything seemed normal, and hundreds of people immediately began packing up their stuff and walking down the mountain, like the crowds leaving a stadium after a concert. We hung around a little longer, sometimes looking up at the sun or out at the brightening day. I walked over to the edge of the trees, something I had not taken the time to do as the crescent waned, and saw, as expected, crescents of sunlight like piles of giant fingernail clippings, cast by the pinhole gaps in the leaves above. I could make my own crescents by holding up the tiny gap between my curled first finger and the palm of my hand, like a constricted OK sign.

We packed up our stuff and headed out, intent on getting my friends home at a reasonable hour and maybe meeting with other friends in Ashville for a late dinner. On our slow, CurlyQ-paced way down, I used my glasses three more times to check the progress of the sun. That last time, it was almost whole once again, just one chip missing from the one side.

I have not used my glasses since, though I may, you know, just to be sure that the sun made it, that it’s really round again. A curious thing is that, looking back on the eclipse, even from less than an hour after totality had ended, I found I could barely remember it. The unreality itself seemed unreal, inconsequential, and I retained only fleeting snatches of disjointed memory, like a dream upon waking.

I do not feel utterly changed by the experience—I do not feel changed at all, except that now I am forty, rather than thirty-nine. The terror has been and gone, leaving nothing but shreds of largely intellectual knowledge behind. I have spent the bulk of today, when I could have been doing other things, writing down this account, stitching together those shreds of memory into a narrative, so I can remember and understand what the hell happened.

A post-script, which I hope will be funny at some point, is that we might as well have stayed on Siler Bald and watched the run return to roundness and then slept there, because our efforts to return my friends home last night—let alone to meet anyone for dinner in Ashville—came utterly to naught. The human response to the bizarreness of the sky was almost equally incomprehensible, and we’d underestimated it badly—as had tens of thousands of other people, as we all hit the same highways at the same time, trying to go home, and failing. It took us five hours to creep some sixty miles, and we made better time than some. Firefighters, their firehouse on our route and likely blocked in by the traffic jam, stood handing out bottles of water to unprepared motorists.  Cell phone calls to find a place for dinner proved fruitless, partly because cell service itself was patchy, since everyone was online at once, and partly because the restaurants we did call were running out of food. The line at a gas station bathroom where we stopped took forty-five minutes for a desperately dancing little girl to traverse. Long after dark, the ordinary dark of night, we still crept slowly forward, tempers fraying, when an ambulance, lights flashing, came up behind us. We all crammed ourselves down into one lane somehow so it could pass, and felt like weeping for the poor sick or injured person inside and their family.

Even after we escaped the jam, traffic remained rush-hour heavy even well after midnight. Every single hotel room but one was booked. Rest stops along the highway spilled over with cars, people sleeping in their seats because there was nowhere else to go.

And then our car—my car—stopped working. Its power to accelerate evaporated. This had happened twice before, once recently, once last year, apparently due to overheating, but this time we were running along fine in cool weather on a fast, nearly flat road. It’s coolant levels were fine. And the car would not re-start even after it cooled down, not until we’d waited over and hour and a half. Three hours later, it happened again, and this time we sat on the side of the road for almost four hours trying various solutions and mostly failing (this is how we know there were no hotel rooms available), until suddenly the car started to work again. Dawn was coloring the sky by the time we approached my friends’ house. Sun returning.

I am told the problem actually exists in the transmission. I am nine hours’ drive from home, without a reliable vehicle, and no clear certainty when I will get one.

I would willingly go see a total eclipse again.

Outlines

I’ve written about outlines before, but not in a while, and since then I’ve gotten better at explaining exactly what I use outlines for–and it’s quite different from how I was initially taught.

I was taught, and I think most people were taught, that outlining is a planning technique. You figure out an outline of your book or your article or whatever it is you want to write, and then you use the outline like a plan–you follow it, you do what it says.

Some people find such outlining useful. Others do not. I do not, but I outline anyway–because I outline differently.

For me, outlining is a reflective technique.

I may write an outline when I first get an idea for a book’s structure, but I almost never refer back to that outline, and if the book I write has that structure, it’s a coincidence. I just write the outline to get it out where I can look at it. No, I can’t always get a good look at the things inside my own head. Having seen it, I can get an idea of what I’m doing. If I get a new idea, I might do that instead.

I write.

I write and I write and I write. I write all sorts of STUFF, including stuff I never thought about before. A lot of it’s good stuff, but it doesn’t always belong together in a novel. So I write another outline. Or many outlines.

These outlines are basically summaries of what I’ve already written. They’re how I find out what I’ve actually written–because if I’ve got a hundred pages, I can’t really get a good view of all of it at once. So I’ve got to zoom out, to write an outline so I can see it all at once. Because once again, I can’t look at it when it’s in my head, and until I write, I don’t know what’s going to come out.

Once I write my outline, I can see what my book is about. I can see which bits need to come out, which bits need to be expanded, and which ought to be there but are missing. Then I can really get started. Then I can rewrite the book and make it actually good.

I might have to go through this process several times. The first reflective outline might come early in the first draft or might wait until the first draft is done–or until several drafts are done. I might write separate outlines for different aspects of the book. I might use multiple outline formats and multiple outlining techniques.

The point is that I don’t know what a given piece of writing is about until I’ve written it–if I decide ahead of time what it should be about, I’ll be wrong. And it is the process of writing the outline that tells me and makes further revision possible.

So, when you write, just know that’s a thing outlining can be.

Following Tolkien, Maybe

So, I’m not Tolkien. Which is to say I am not an expert on languages. I do not geek out by inventing whole languages just for fun. I do on occasion invent partial languages just for fun. I seem to be doing so now. Who knows, maybe this one will become a whole language? It’s possible to speak either of Tolkien’s two elfin languages, maybe it will be possible to speak Itarish?

But what I’m really interested in is not so much the creation of a language as the creation of a fictional cultural environment that has language in an interesting and believable way. I’m working on a fantasy novel, and I want its cultural landscape to be both believable and exotic–figuring out how they talk, at least in a basic way, is part of it. How does their language influence their thinking? Their social behavior? For example, what if it’s grammatically impossible, in their language, to address someone as an equal? What does that do to social behavior? I don’t need to be able to speak the language to think about things like that, but I do need to figure out a few things.

It’s not just language, singular, either. It’s also accents and dialects and whole other languages interacting, how the way a character talks influences other characters’ perceptions and what, if anything, the first character chooses to do about it.

For example, Abbas grows up with mixed parentage and this a mixed accent. As a young adult, he works to lose his traces of his father’s urban working-class accent in favor of the higher-class speech of his stepmother–but then he moves to the big city and finds that the people there think he talks like a country bumpkin. Does he change his speech a second time? No! This time he chooses to keep his distinctive accent. Why?

I don’t need to know how his accent sounds to know that’s significant.

Itarish is a highly-inflected language with a structure somewhat like Latin, but its phonetic structure is quite different, full of soft consonants, consecutive vowels, and curious combinations. For example, the word iuthret, isn’t it lovely? Three syllables, accent on the second one. It means “unshaven.”

There are six cases, as in Latin, except in the working-class dialect that has only five. There are four declensions–which means there are four grammatical genders (only two of which have anything to do with social gender). Nouns also belong to types, of which there are several. For example, all feminine names and the names of all spirit beings (even male ones) belong to one type. All masculine names plus common names used to refer to individuals (e.g. “the tree in the front yard”) are another type. Common nouns used to refer to categories (e.g., “trees are pretty”) are yet another category.

If all this sounds confusing, consider English, where we have a suffix that specifically indicates that a word refers to a scandal (-gate), and another suffix that specifically indicates that a thing is very much like another thing but not quite (-ish). Languages are just weird and confusing, except to the people who actually speak them.

And then there are verbs.

To greet someone, you say “thanks!” (or the Itarish equivalent), which is short for “Thank you for your presence and your life.” When you part from someone you say “fly!” which is short for “Fly with the hawk until the owl takes you.” There are politeness-words that have no meaning except you sprinkle your speech with them to be polite. You use one set of politeness-words to address people of higher status than yourself and another set to address people of lower status. The latter is indeed polite, for there is no shame in this society in being of lower status, none at all.

Lest you think these people sound overly idyllic, let me explain that it’s more or less impossible to translate from this language into English politely because quite a lot of our slurs and insults are just their ordinary words for things. Their word for “foreigner” or “immigrant” translates most precisely as “barbarian.”

A lot of their words mean a great many things as they don’t have a very large vocabulary, by English standards. There’s a lot you just have to figure out from context.

Well, I gotta go to bed, but I thought you’d like to know.

Pretty Good, Actually

Yesterday there was a…plot twist. I was not happy about it. But it turned out OK.

I had asked a friend of mine to organize a launch party for my new book, Bifurcation Events. I expected it to be a public talk and reading where I could sell and sign books–I was not expecting to make a lot of money because I did not expect to be able to attract a large audience. Basically the plan was to have a party. But I did expect and prepare for a public presentation. It was scheduled for today.

Yesterday I learned that the only venue my friend had been able to get was impractical for a presentation. We’d do a signing only instead. He hadn’t told me earlier because he’d thought I knew–because I knew what the venue was and what it wasn’t. Well, he was wrong, I hadn’t known, but I can see why he thought I did.

The important thing to understand here is that I do not handle change well. Even a change I chose, planned for, and like can trigger a high anxiety episode. Time to leave to go on vacation? I’m going to panic. When it’s not only a change but a change of plans? I could melt down.

I managed to hold it together somehow, but I was pretty sure the whole thing was gonna be a disaster.

So I showed up for the signing. Only one person showed up other than my personal family and friends. Fortunately, sitting around with my friends and family is not exactly a bad time.

After a bit, I realized that there were other people in the place, people who weren’t there for me but were there and could certainly be told about my book. So I got up and went to go talk to them. I spoke to seven people, two of whom bought a book (the same one, to share). Two others said they would buy books later. The other three seemed happy to talk with me. Add to this the one person who did come to the signing whom I had not met before and the two friends who bought books, I sold six copies, introduced myself and my work to ten new people, and had a good time sitting around and chatting with my friends and family for two hours.

Which is honestly about as well as I did for the two prior launch parties that this same friend organized that DID include a dedicated space where I could do a presentation to a small crowd who had come to see me.

So it turned out pretty good, actually.

It’s Here! (Also, Some Daydreaming)

So, Bifurcation Events is available for purchase! Unfortunately, it’s not on Amazon yet, nor is the ebook available, but you can order printed copies from my publisher. Here’s the link.

I’ve also done my first online interview for this book. You can check out the audio recording here. A video recording should be along eventually. Watch this space.

Photo by Elisha Terada on Unsplash

Still here?

So am I!

Yeah, I know I should let the above momentous announcement just stand on its own, but really that would make for a very short post, and other things have been going on in my head that I’d like to share.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking recently about the writing of biographies–how each biographer has an objective and a perspective that shapes the book, and how readers have their own objectives that may or may not be met by any given biography. I’ve just finished reading a biography of William Tecumseh Sherman and am almost done reading one of Ulysses S. Grant, and both are good books, though I don’t regard either as perfect, nor do I suppose either will be the last word on its subject.

So how else might biographies of these people be written?

Both present the specific challenge of not being new subjects–most people likely to pick up a biography of either Grant or Sherman likely already know quite a bit about them, and indeed in reading reviews on Sherman biographies I do see reviewers making comparisons, complaining that this or that story had been left out, for example. So how to avoid just writing a new version of the same old book?

Also, both men remain culturally relevant, to the extent that their relationships with the American public have gone on growing and changing long after their deaths. Surely a good biography should address this ongoing relationship as well?

So here is one of my proposals. I might write it someday, but probably won’t, so if you get inspired to write, go for it, and I’ll happily read your results.

Biography of U.S. Grant

My idea here is to begin with a short biographical overview, perhaps twenty pages long, and then to do a series of focused pieces that each look at some aspect of Grant’s life and work through a particular lens. This way, while people who aren’t already familiar with his story will get the overview they need to stay oriented, the book would be able to go into a lot of detail in less well-known areas without having to expend time and ink recapitulating the entire story in chronological order.

Introduction

Basically just a how-to-use-this-book orientation.

Biographical Overview

As noted, a twenty-page mini-biography to introduce Grant to people who don’t know much about him and to help other readers get and stay oriented to his timeline.

Relationships

Rather than looking at an historical figure as an individual alone on center-stage, so to speak, one can also center relationships. This has already been done with Grant several times. Lincoln’s General’s Wives, which I still maintain ought to have been titled Lincoln’s General’s Marriages, has a chapter on Ulysses and Julia Grant. Grant and Twain: the Story of a Friendship that Changed America is obviously another example, though that book rather overstates its case. Grant and Sherman: the Friendship that Won the Civil War also somewhat under-delivers, though I enjoyed reading it. Anyway, I’d like to see a group of chapters where each chapter centers a particular relationship or group of relationships

In each, the other person or people would be fully profiled, a mini-biography. Both their perspective on Grant and Grant’s experience of them would be included. Of course, the stories would overlap to a significant extent, but each chapter would have a distinctive focus.

Fathers and Sons

U.S. Grant had interestingly imperfect relationships with both his father and his father-in-law. Had he become permanently estranged from both and then repeated their shortcomings with his own children, that would have been understandable–but that’s not what happened,

Julia Dent Grant

Mrs. Grant was not only the love of her husband’s life but also a major source of information on him, through her memoir. And she was an interesting and impressive person in her own right.

William Tecumseh Sherman

Yes, there’s already been a whole book on this friendship, but it left some important points out–like how did they become friends? What drew them to each other–why did the friendship work for each of them? And how did the later years of their friendship go? There was a falling out, and Sherman was critical of Grant for a long time, but to what extent they patched up their friendship, and to what extent they were actually estranged in the first place (Sherman was capable of being a devoted friend and an implacable adversary at the same time) seems unclear.

John Rawlins

John Rawlins dedicated his life to Grant to an extraordinary degree, becoming a virtual extension of him. Why? How? What does it mean about Grant that at least three people, Rawlins, Sherman, and Mrs. Grant, devoted themselves to him?

Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln was, of course, central to the context of the latter third of Grant’s life, but the two also became close friends.

Issues

I’d like the book to also contain a series of essays on issues–both personal and national–relating to Grant’s life.

Horses

Grant was a horse whisperer. Also, he liked horses the way some people of later generations like cars–he liked their speed and their beauty. It’s not possible to tell his story without them.

Friendship

The earlier section included several individual friendships, but this would more cover his social life in general–how was he with people?

Alcoholism

Not only was Grant probably an alcoholic, but accusations and denials concerning his drinking loomed large in his career, to the extent that it’s difficult to say how much he really drank.

Warfare

Yes, I would confine the stories of his soldierhood to a single chapter. Not that it’s not important, but it’s so well-covered elsewhere.

Civil Rights

Grant’s work for the welfare of Black people, Jews, Native Americans, and women, is startling, important, and complicated by contradictions. He committed the single most egregiously anti-Semetic act on American soil, later trying quite genuinely to make amends. He briefly owned a slave himself and allowed his wife to own one or more as long as doing so remained legal. And he honestly thought that the best thing for Native Americans would be for them to lose their culture and become just more American colored people. And over course his efforts to protect both Native American and Black lives ultimately failed, overwhelmed by a vicious tide.

Building America

Grant either started, tried to start, or at least proposed a long list of important things, from the Panama Canal to a form of international diplomacy that prefigured the U.N. He doesn’t get credit for this stuff.

Legacy

The concluding chapter would discuss not only what Grant’s legacy is but how perceptions of it have changed over time and why.

Half and Half

I’m really giving you two posts today, only they’re both short. Both relate to the creative value of leaving something out. And both refer to movies I’ve seen recently, but I am using these movies to talk about writing.

Fantastic Voyage

There’s a Dar Williams song that refers to a movie in which “a spaceship is riding through somebody’s brain.” When I first heard it, I thought the line was referring to Innerspace, an entertaining Martin Short comedy that did not make a strong impression on me. On reflection, though, I’ve realized the reference must actually be to Fantastic Voyage, a serious sci-fi flic that won an Oscar for best special effects in 1967. I saw the movie this week, and I must say, I agree with the Academy on this one. Without modern CGI, I doubt it would be possible to do better.

The premise involves a small sub (not actually a spaceship) and its crew being shrunk down to microbe size and injected into a comatose man in order to remove an otherwise untreatable blood clot in the brain. There is more to it than that, of course, a plot involving an international arms race and a possible saboteur, but the point of the movie is to watch a tour of the body. It’s a special-effects vehicle and an anatomy lesson. That it’s also a fine movie in other respects is a happy surprise–it’s rare for a movie or a book to hit on both levels.

Fantastic Voyage pulls it off by being very deliberate about what science it tackles at all.

The thing is that miniaturization, a relatively common trope in fiction, is not justifiable through physics. Even if the shrinkage itself were possible, which I doubt, a radically shrunk human would immediately run into all sorts of problems, most of them lethal. Basically, while some physical processes scale up and down without trouble, others don’t, and a body designed to work at human-size would not work at microbe-size, and vice-versa. Also, being microbe-size would not mean being able to see microscopic objects with the naked eye, because that’s not how optics works.

Also, there’s no light inside most of a human body, so how can the characters–or the audience–see what’s going on?

But the movie ignores all that, making no attempt to explain how the shrinkage is accomplished. There’s no technobabble hand-waving at all. It’s just the premise of the movie. It’s a bit like some of Randall Monroe’s “What If” scenarios, where various impossible hypotheticals are used as a doorway into some very interesting and accurate science.

You can’t have just a little physics. I discovered that accidentally as a kid when I tried to draw a picture of Peter Pan floating mid-air next to a child on a zipline. I drew the ziplining child first. I was and am a pretty good visual artist, and the child looked believably in motion–I’d gotten the angles of his body and of the zipline and related equipment correct so that if one assumed that the lines on the paper represented physical objects moving in the normal way through spacetime, the eye saw a child zipping. Them I drew Peter, and suddenly both children appeared to be floating, because Peter’s presence made clear that the rules had been suspended. The eye no longer assumed gravity. Similarly, you can include fantasy elements in your story, but if you do, the entire story becomes subject to the rules of fantasy and not to those of real life, and any attempt to pretend that your story is realistic except for this one little exception over here just dumbs the whole thing down and makes even the fantasy harder to engage with.

Fantastic Voyage uses fantasy (it’s right there in the name) unabashedly with respect to physics in order to allow startling realism with respect to anatomy. Because the fantasy is clearly bounded, it enhances the science rather than interfering with it.

Physics hasn’t been overlooked, it’s been deliberately excluded in order to make the story work.

Lincoln

I saw the movie, Lincoln recently. I’d seen it before a couple of years ago and was impressed, but I enjoyed it more this time, being able to catch a lot more nuance, in part because I’ve become more familiar with some of the people and events the movie covers.

The movie follows Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to get the 13th Amendment (freeing all American slaves) through the U.S. House of Representatives before the end of the war–but the movie is not really about the Amendment but about Lincoln. It’s a character study. And it’s very, very good.

Daniel Day-Lewis is amazing as Lincoln. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of people play Lincoln–generally not seriously (he appears as a character in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, for example), but still. It doesn’t look difficult to do a halfway decent job, in part because he is so easily recognizable and so familiar at least on a superficial level. By the same token, playing this “character” whom everybody and yet hardly anybody knows, presenting him as a full and real person, a man rather than a saint or a symbol or an angel, must be fiendishly difficult. Day-Lewis nails it, even substantially altering his voice and the way he walks to get closer to how Lincoln is said to have been, to the point that now when I read things that the real Lincoln said, I mentally hear it in Day-Lewis’ Lincoln voice. I’d be surprised if anyone has ever done it better, or ever will.

I suspect now that every character, and probably every thing, in the movie, is done with the same care–I read somewhere that the sound of a ticking watch, heard at multiple points throughout is an actual recording of Lincoln’s own pocket watch. But I know too little about most of them to say for sure–For example, I know nothing about the historical Elizabeth Keckley, other than that she existed, so while Gloria Reuben’s portrayal of her made for an interesting character in a movie, I can’t assess whether the character is close to or far from the real woman.

There are exceptions. For example, I have learned enough about Mary Todd Lincoln to know that Sally Fields’ portrayal of her is…I don’t want to over-use “amazing,” but I can’t think of a better word just now. She really gets the humanity of the woman down, including showing her as mentally ill in a very realistic way that does not submit to stereotype or stigma.

But I was most impressed by U.S. Grant, not just because Jared Harris does such a great job, but also because he’s really only on screen for about three minutes, not all of them in a row. Grant is no longer well-known or especially popular, and if they’d just hired a vaguely Grantish-looking person to more or less phone it in, that would have been forgivable–and more viewers would not have noticed. But I’ve been reading about Grant and…that’s him, that quiet, sweet, thoughtful, deeply powerful person. That’s acting, casting, writing, directing all hitting perfectly on all cylinders, just as was done for the title character, just to make three minutes of screen-time (or whatever it was) right.

And then there’s the person who wasn’t there. I wondered if he would be–I couldn’t remember, because last time I saw the movie I didn’t know or care much about him. Now I do. And he wasn’t there. William Tecumseh Sherman.

Of course, most of the movie is set in Washington DC at a time when Sherman was not in town. I’d have to look at dates to know for sure where he was exactly, but he was with his army heading north from Savannah. That he was there is certainly relevant, as it was his victories, not alone but disproportionately, gave Lincoln the political capital first to get re-elected at all, and then to push for the 13th Amendment. And it was he, again not alone but disproportionately, who had frightened parts of the Confederacy to the bargaining table (no bargaining actually took place, but the fact that a peace process had been initiated is important to the story the movie tells). Grant orchestrated the entire end-game of the war, but within that effort, Sherman and his army were pivotal. But he wasn’t in DC where Lincoln was, and it’s a movie about Lincoln.

But there is one scene where Lincoln and Grant are talking, and Lincoln says some things that the real Lincoln also told Grant and Sherman at a meeting the three of them (and Admiral David Porter, who took notes) at City Point. For strict historical accuracy, Sherman should have been in that scene.

Except that would have required all the same care in terms of casting, writing, directing, and acting that went into Lincoln’s portrayal itself–and Sherman would have been a difficult man to cast–for probably less than a minute of screen-time. There are so many levels on which that wouldn’t have worked. The audience could not have come up to speed on the character that fast, for one. For another, Sherman, if depicted well, would have stolen the scene. He wouldn’t have meant to, but he just would not have worked as a secondary character. Unlike Grant, he could not have occupied the background quietly and unobtrusively being as powerful as a small planet. Sherman wasn’t a planet, he was a shooting star. You’d have noticed him. A lot. But it’s not supposed to be a scene about him. It’s not supposed to be a movie about him.

And so he’s not there.

You can’t have just a little Sherman the same way you can’t have just a little physics. He’s either there in full, or he’s not there at all, and trying to include less than all of him in a story is going to make everything else unbelievable and superficial also because it’s suddenly obvious that your story is not a place for real people.

The Art of Absence

The take-home message in both cases is that sometimes something good, important, and fascinating is absent from a story for a good reason. And when it is, it’s usually better for it to be absent entirely.

Coming Soon: Bifurcation Events

So, it’s official! My next book, Bifurcation Events, is coming out soon! Launching on or before March 8th.

It’s a sequel to Ecological Memory, though it should stand alone also–that is, you don’t need to have read Ecological Memory first in order to enjoy reading Bifurcation Events. The two do take place in the same world and involve some of the same characters. I’m introducing some new cast members, though, plus I’m extending the story not just forward in time but also sideways and back.

That is, as most good sequels do, Bifurcation Events does tell you what the protagonists from Ecological Memory did next, but there are also other stories, most of them set before the events of the first book. The reason I did this is two-fold.

First, when I sat down to write the story of Andy and Elzy’s further adventures, what came out was a good deal shorter than what I’d intended. I tried to make it longer,, but we authors aren’t in charge of these things–it wanted to be short, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. So I started adding other stories. The completed book includes not just the short novel, Root Connections, but also two novellas and five short stories, all interconnected and thematically related.

But I wasn’t just adding pages. Ecological Memory is about the aftermath of a global pandemic, but at the time I wrote it, I hadn’t actually seen a pandemic remotely similar to the one I wrote about. And then COVID-19 happened, and I learned a lot. So Bifurcation Events is a chance to explore what really happened during and immediately after the catastrophe referred to so briefly in the first book.

I hope you like it.

ARG!

I still don’t have my dopamine booster, so my ability to accomplish stuff is still quite limited. And today I spent my available accomplishment-energy writing a block post that I subsequently decided I do not like and do not want to post (it wasn’t for this blog, so you’re not missing anything). And then I had nothing left for other projects.

I am not happy about this.

I did see Oppenheimer the other day. It’s a good movie and has an interesting take on the challenge of depicting advanced science for the non-scientist–there’s almost nothing in it explaining scientific ideas, but there are montages of weird visuals that impressionistically explore what it might feel like to be a top-level scientist thinking of ground-breaking new ideas. After all, the basics of quantum theory would seem very different to a non-scientist than to Oppenheimer, because of the radical difference in available context. Better to show flashing lights. Better to show Oppy’s mind blown than to attempt to explain what blew his mind.

To show scientists as people, among other scientist people, all of them perceiving as normal common ground information and ideas that the audience (or readership) can’t help but find alien, this is a challenge I’ve faced in my own writing, so it’s interesting to see others tackling it.