In the beginning was the void, for there were no computers, and I wanted one badly.

When I was in the Navy, before I had any intention of writing novels, there was a time when I thought writing non-fiction articles and books might be a good way to pick up a little side money. I began with a book on woodworking projects. I still have the prototypes I designed and built, but the book went nowhere. I did sell two articles, one on ”A Basic Toolkit for the Home,” for Woman’s Day, and one on bicycle camping to Travel and Leisure.

I used the money to buy a Smith Corona electric typewriter and retired the portable manual I had used through high school and college. Three years later, just out of the University of Chicago, I was ready to write novels. (see 2. Turn Left at Chicago and 3. It was 40 YearsAgo Today)

Those were good days. Writing was a joy and selling had not yet turned sour. My cat China Blue spent his time draped around my shoulders. Leonard Cohen, on vinyl, kept my mood carefully balanced between ecstasy and depression, as only he can. I had a head full of characters, images, and ideas, and time to write them.

Unfortunately, my fingers spent most of their time arguing about who was going to go first, which doesn’t make for smooth typing. In high school typing class I used to brag that my speed was sixty mistakes a minute.

There are so many conceptual and artistic errors in any first draft that fumble-fingered typing is not a real issue. Eventually, however, you get to the final draft.

I couldn’t afford a professional typist and the correction technology of the day was crude. My TYPEWRITER had a function that allowed me to BACKSPACE and shift to a white RIBBON which would OVERSTRIKE the previous letter, if the paper had not shifted on the PLATEN. If you recognize those words, you are of my generation and you have my sympathy.

I didn’t just want a computer, I needed one.

More next post.

Earth’s inclination causes our seasons. It would be hard to find a more ordinary fact, or one less valued. Yet everything about the Earth derives from that inclination, even our religions and our philosophy . . .

Those are the words of Gus Leinhoff from the upcoming novel Cyan.

I like axial tilt as a means of individuating planets, so much so that I have run the bases, hitting all the possible extremes. Cyan, the planet from the novel coming out in January, has no axial tilt and no seasons; Stormking, around Sirius in the as yet unwritten sequel Dreamsinger, lies back at a Uranian inclination and has seasons you wouldn’t believe. Harmony, from the novel Jandrax has a tilt of 32 degrees resulting in heavy glaciation with a narrow habitable band around the equator; it has two summers and two winters each year.

So does Earth – at the equator.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that. One of the great pleasures of world building is finding things you should have realized, but missed. This is one of them.

Let’s imagine the changing tilt of the Earth as the seasons progress. Of course I know the tilt doesn’t change; it only appears to do so from an earthbound perspective. But twenty-seven years of teaching science to middle schoolers has taught me that casual language gets the message across better than an excess of formality.

Today is the equinox, autumnal in San Francisco, vernal in Sydney. The sun lies above the equator at noon, and will (seem to) move southward in the coming weeks. I won’t waste your time telling you what you already know, but consider what you know from a new perspective.

Today at the equator the sun is overhead (call it summer) and for the next three months it will move southward until it gets as low and ineffective as it will ever be (the equivalent of winter), then it will come north for three months until it is overhead again (summer), and continue northward to its other lowest position (winter again), and so forth. Two “summers”; two “winters”.

Earth’s dual seasonality is masked by local conditions, at least in its oceanic regions. The world in the novel Jandrax has a stronger tilt and its oceans are tied up in glaciation. The refugees naturally settle at the equator, where summer and winter really do come twice a year.

Here is a story so old that I have no idea where it originated. A group of Irishmen were sitting in a bar, solving the world’s problems. One of them asked the rest, “If a cataclysm were to destroy all the poets in Ireland, how many generations would it take to replace them?” One of the others simply held up his hand with a single finger raised. (If you know the origin of this, let me know.)

You will note that this is not an ethnic joke, but a comment on how the Irish view themselves. It is also true – and not only about Irish poets, but about any of those human traits that lie latent in all of us until circumstances call them forth.

That includes the capacity for religious controversy.

Before Martin Luther made his opinions stick, there was a long history of dissent within the Catholic Church. Dissenters were called heretics, and they were usually burned at the stake. Look up Jan Hus (AKA John Huss). Once Luther opened the floodgates, here came Zwingli, Calvin, Knox, and good old Henry VIII with his political and personal agenda.

Quakers, Shakers, Anabaptists, Methodists – you get the picture. As someone once misquoted scripture, “Wherever two or three of ye are gathered together, there will be a fight.”

When I needed a religion for my first science fiction novel Jandrax – available battered and cheap in used bookstores everywhere – I came upon Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces. I read the introduction, saw the notion of the monomyth, and the entire religion I needed exploded in my mind, complete in a heartbeat. I closed the book and never went back to it, not wanting to dilute the purity of that flash of inspiration.

Some hundreds of years in the future, Louis Dumezil, a scholar with a self-imposed mission of peace, collates all the world’s religions, winnowing out the common core, and setting it down in his Monomythos. His hope is that a common religion for all men, carved out of mankind’s various faiths, will bring an end to sectarian fighting. Fat chance. In fact, Dumezil unwittingly sabotages his own work by coming out with later, updated editions of his Monomythos.

You can guess the result. His initial success at setting up a pan-human religion based on the Monomythos breaks down into warring sects killing each other over which Monomythos is the correct one.

In Jandrax, the title character is a disillusioned former zealot who lost his religion in the sectarian fighting on Hallam’s world, and now finds himself marooned on an unexplored planet with a shipload of purists.

This week’s posts will come on Tuesday through Friday, to match up a post scheduled for the equinox.

Across the way in Serial, today is the first post on the short story Into the Storm.

It’s the oldest joke on the subject of language – “If I can’t spell the word, how can I look it up in the dictionary?”

People don’t realize that the joke could read – “If I can’t pronounce the word, how is a dictionary going to help?”

Here are two vowels, followed by their example words, followed by their pronunciations, as given by the Pronunciation Guide to the Oxford Dictionary. (URL below)

i        sit        /sit/
e       ten      /ten/

Just like the dictionaries I consulted as a child, this is gibberish.

I pronounce the word “ten” as the Oxford people would pronounce the word “tin”, so this confirms to me that “ten” and “tin” are pronounced the same. Therefore, “often” is pronounced “oftin” – except that teacher said to drop the “t”.

The Oxford Dictionary tells me so, and the southern half of America agrees.

It is the fatal flaw of dictionary pronunciation guides that they must refer back to previous knowledge. Linguists use complex and difficult systems independent of the user’s native tongue, but they do nothing for a fifth grader who goes to the dictionary to learn to talk better.

Let’s see what the Oxford people say about the letter “r”:

“The symbol (r) indicates that British pronunciation will have /r/ only if a vowel sound follows directly at the beginning of the next word, as in far away; otherwise the /r/ is omitted. For American English, all the /r/ sounds should be pronounced.

Of course, this does not include Boston, where all the “r”s that should have been pronounced elsewhere are saved up and put into words that don’t need them.

The fact is, America does not have just two dialects, Southern and normal; or as my people would say, Northern and normal. America has many dialects, and it should. Britain had many dialects, and their speakers migrated to different parts of America, including one non-dominant English dialect that ended up in the Boston area.

PBS documented this in 1986 in a nine-part series The Story of English, which I recommend highly to those who find a copy and a VHS player to play it on.

Meanwhile, if a kid from Savannah and a kid from Boston meet in the home of a kid from Seattle, it might as well be the United Nations. And a dictionary won’t help.

oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/about/pronunciation_english

Bob Dill wrote the song Good Old Boys Like Me, which contained the words:

But I was smarter than most, and I could choose.
Learned to talk like the man on the six o’clock news.

If you live south of Tulsa, you know that he meant the newsman used more words, bigger words, used them in the right places, and didn’t say ain’t. But he pronounced his words just like everybody else.

In Stairway to Danger, one of the books out of my childhood, the Spindrift Island folks were building a remote controlled bulldozer that responded to voice commands, which they nicknamed Tractosaur. They chose a set of command words which were pronounced the same throughout America, including get.

Get? Really! Is there any word which is less universal? Everyone north of Tulsa pronounces it “get” and everyone south of Tulsa pronounces it “git”.

I am an expert on this, as Okie is my native language. Okie is a less extreme version of the language of the deep South.

When I went to college in Michigan things got a little confused. When I first met my new roommate, he said he understood that Oklahoma was a big state for rustling. I said that I hadn’t heard of too many cows being stolen lately.

Rustling was his Michigander way of pronouncing wrestling, which everyone in Oklahoma knows you pronounce wrasslin’. After he got used to me, he translated everywhere we went.

I married a Michigan girl, and after forty-seven years, we still can’t agree on the difference between “i” and “e”. She writes with a pen; I write with a pin. (Actually we both use the computer, but you get the point.)

I can say “pen”, but it hurts my mouth, and I can hear the difference. In fact, if you challenge a non-Southerner, they will pronounce the difference so clearly that you couldn’t miss it if you tried. But catch them when they aren’t thinking about it – especially on the word “open” – and you will hear a sound that falls somewhere between “i” and “e”.

The worst case of i-e confusion came from a vendor selling a pattern at a quilt show in California. She was clearly from the South. Someone had cautioned her against using “i” when others use “e”. Clearly she couldn’t hear the difference, so she stopped using “i” altogether. She gave her demonstration saying, “First you put a pen her, then you fold the cloth this way and pen it again here . . .”

This silly disagreement led me to many hours of reading on linguistics and the history of language. I will spare you the details, but next post I will tell you why Okies can’t use dictionaries.