Category Archives: A Writing Life

220. Planets in Motion

Leave a reply

planet story stick 5

Two hundred posts in a little under a year is something of a milestone. What began as an attempt to generate readers for my fiction has almost become a way of life.

I had planned to place this non-writing post as number 200, in celebration, until scheduling issues got in the way. You see, writing a blog isn’t the first activity that I began for the sake of my fiction — which then went on to take over my life. In the early eighties it was clear that I wan’t going to make a living writing novels, and needed a day job. I began working as a substitute teacher to earn some extra money. I was strong, loud, and male so they sent me to middle schools. Substitute teachers don’t like middle school. If you think back a bit, I won’t have to tell you why.

Maybe I’m odd, but I thought the kids were a hoot. I told the dispatcher that I actually liked middle school kids, and suddenly I had full employment. After a year, I went back for my credential (I already had two masters degrees) and got a job at one of the small rural middle schools where I had substituted. I taught there for twenty-seven years, mostly science.

It was an underfunded school and I was a carpenter, so I built a lot of my own science equipment. I shared some of that in posts 201 and 202. A lot of the curriculum sent down from the state was crap, and I was a writer, so I wrote a lot of my own material. I had less hassle from the bosses than most of my friends because good science teachers are hard to find. Ones who aren’t just biding their time, waiting for a chance to move on the high school, are even more rare.

I kept on writing, but at a reduced output. It wasn’t how I had planned my life, but it worked. I once figured out that about 4000 students passed through my classroom during my tenure. I’m proud of that.

Now that I’m retired, I am writing this blog and its sister blog Serial four days a week. Now that’s a day job. This post provides the details about the last big project I built for my science classroom. Pass this on to your science teacher friends.

From this point on, things get technical. If you are a planet geek or a DIY person, you will probably enjoy the details, even if you don’t need the product. Maybe you could make one for your kid’s school?

*****

You can show the scale of the solar system with a model you build yourself (see post 202), but showing how the planetary orbits interact with one another takes some time. I figured out how to do it near the end of my career by building a poster that changed over the course of a school year.

You need a piece of hardboard, 6 ft by 6 ft, 1/8 inch thick, a pint of black or blue-black paint, four tubes of artist’s acrylic (pale gray, blue, green, and red), a one-inch brass drawer pull, four foam daubers, (half inch diameter foam cylinders attached to the end of a dowel, used for laying down stencils), and a measuring device you will have to make yourself.

You find the center of the hardboard poster by running lines from corner to corner; they cross at the center. There you drill a 1/8 inch hole and feed the bolt for the drawer pull from the back. Add a matching nut on the front, tighten, then add a drop of Super Glue to keep things from moving. After you paint the board black or blue-back, spin the drawer pull onto the bolt to represent the sun.

For the four colored circles which will represent the inner planets in their initial position, you will need to go to the website www.theplanetstoday.com. Use the double headed date arrow at the top of the page to chose the date of your initial array. Use the measuring device (building instructions below) to establish each distance from the sun and, referring to the website, make your best visual estimate of where to initially put each planet on its trip around the sun.

At the outset, it won’t look like much, but every week you will add another four dots. By the end of the year Mercury will have circled the sun more than twice, Venus nearly once, Earth about eighty percent of the way, and Mars will have moved a fairly short distance – given the length of a typical school year. I put on new planet circles every Wednesday, since Wednesday almost never has a holiday.

Your students will soon have a clear picture of how the planets move in relationship to each other. When Venus is visible in the west at sunset, or in the east at sunrise, or is not visible at all in the night sky, your wall chart will show them why – assuming that you explain it to them, and keep them at least somewhat excited with assignments like, “What is that red dot in the sky, half way up from the eastern horizon at eight o’clock tonight?”.

The measuring device you will build allows you to place additional planet-circles at the appropriate places for subsequent weeks. It has a single 1/8 inch hole at the left, and eight larger holes. Once a week you will remove the drawer-pull-sun and put the small left hole over the bolt. Place the initial Mercury-hole over the previous week’s Mercury circle and put on a new pale-gray circle into the other Mercury hole, using a dauber. Repeat for all four planets —Mercury pale gray, Venus blue, Earth green, and Mars red. Replace the sun drawer pull and  you are done for the week.

planet story stick 3To build the measuring device, begin with a piece of hardboard 36 inches wide and seven inches high. Draw a line about 1 1/2 inches above the bottom and parallel to it. Clearly mark a point on the line about 1 inch from the left side. This will locate the sun-hole. When all further measurements have been made, an 1/8 hole will be bored at the sun-point and 5/8 inch holes will be drilled at the four pairs of planet-points. Don’t drill anything until all nine holes have been marked accurately.

So far, I have used feet and inches since we have been talking about carpentry. The rest of the dimensions will be in millimeters.

On the base line, measure 215 mm from the sun-point and put a point for Mercury. Continuing on the base line, and still measuring from the sun-point, put a point at 402 mm for Venus, a point at 557 mm for Earth, and a point at 848 mm for Mars.

Each planet needs a second hole, the distance between the two representing the distance the planet moves in one week. For me, these required four radii and four calculated angles. I have simplified (honest, it’s simpler) by giving dimensions above (perpendicular to) the base line, and back toward the sun (parallel to the base line).

For Mercury, this will be 104 mm up and 26 mm back toward the left.
For Venus, this will be 78 mm up and 8 mm back toward the left.
For Earth, this will be 67 mm up and 4 mm back toward the left.
For Mars, this will be 53 mm up and 2 mm back toward the left.

These twin dimensions place the pairs of planet-points at two points on a correctly dimensioned circle, representing the orbit.

Drill the sun hole 1/8 inch to match the bolt holding the drawer pull. Drill the eight planet points 5/8 inch to allow clearance for the 1/2 inch dauber. The outline of the measuring device can be trimmed down to any convenient shape, as long as it encloses all nine holes.

219. Required to be Equal

Leave a reply

Do you remember the game telephone? Here’s how the game is played in the halls of education.

“All kids deserve an education.”
“All kids deserve a chance at a decent education.”
“All kids deserve an equal chance at an education.”
“All kids deserve an equal education.”
“All kids deserve the same education.”
“If all your kids are not coming out of your school equal to one another, your school has failed.”

I hope we all agree on the first three statements. The fourth looks good, like a hand grenade wrapped up in pretty paper. Whether it is reasonable or crazy depends entirely on how you define “equal”. If you mean equal quality, bravo. If you mean that every kid needs to learn calculus and quantum physics, or needs to understand Chaucerian verse in its original language, or needs to know how to play basketball . . . sorry. You’re off on a well-traveled wrong road.

When Thomas Jefferson said “all men are created equal”, he didn’t mean that strangers could come in and drink his wine, or borrow books from his library. He certainly didn’t mean that children lacking math ability should be tortured with equations, or that children who already run, hike, play and explore should be forced to trade that for the tedium of organized, competitive sports.

The fifth telephone response is simply wrong on the face of it, and the sixth is the discredited concept called No Child Left Behind.   (see 48. No Child Left Behind)

*          *          *

If educators had the courage to tell the truth, these are the words which would be carved over the entrance to every school in America:

Children are NOT created equal.

Some children have many gifts, some have few, and none have the same gifts. They are all wonderful, and all different. One size does not fit all.

If a poor black child wants to be a doctor, and has the talent for the job, it would be a crime for his situation to hold him or her back. That is the impetus behind No Child Left Behind, but in education, good ideas get the life crushed out of them during implementation.

Every child deserves to go as far as his/her talent and ambition will allow. But no mother’s love, or teacher’s pity, or governmental decree will make a doctor out of a child who lacks talent or lacks ambition.

Every child who has the talent and ambition, should go to college.

That’s just good sense and nearly everyone would agree. But that statements has a flip side:

Children who lack talent or lack ambition should stay the hell out of college.

Now put that on a bumper sticker and see who salutes.

Somewhere along the line, Americans seem to have changed the reasonable notion that, “Everyone should have the chance to try his or her hand at winning,” to “Everyone should win.” That’s bad philosophy, bad morals, and bad arithmetic.

There are two casualties of this way of thinking – those who don’t make it into college because of overcrowding, and those who go to college because they were told they should, and then find out they don’t fit.

Our high schools should produce graduates who are ready for life. Instead, they focus on college prep. That’s proper for perhaps twenty-five percent of students. The rest are being cheated out of their educational birthright – a high school experience that educates them for the life they will actually live.

218. It Couldn’t Last

Leave a reply

I normally avoid long quotations, but  I have to share this one from the novel Cinnamon Skin, written by John D. MacDonald in 1982. The technicalities of this seem a little dated, but his understanding of human reality is still spot on.

Walking back through the mall to the exit nearest our part of the parking lot, we passed one shop which sold computers, printers, software, and games. It was packed with teenagers, the kind who wear wire rims and know what the new world is about. The clerks were indulgent, letting them program the computers. Two hundred yards away, near the six movie houses, a different kind of teenager shoved quarters into the space-war games, tensing over the triggers, releasing the eerie sounds of extraterrestrial combat. Any kid back in the computer store could have told the combatants that because there is no atmosphere in space, there is absolutely no sound at all. Perfect distribution: the future managers and the future managed ones. twenty in the computer store, two hundred in the arcade.

When MacDonald wrote this, I was facing the reality that I wasn’t going to make a living with my writing, and considering options for a day job. Two years later, Apple introduced the Mac. Two years after that, I was teaching middle school and had accumulated enough money to buy my first computer, a Mac SE. It was a joy to use. SuperPaint by Silicon Beach had both dot matrix and vector graphics in one program. I’ve used more sophisticated graphics programs since, but I’ve never used a better one. Microsoft Word for Mac was lean and fast, nothing like the slow, bloated, obese monster it would soon become. HyperCard showed what hypertext could do, long before the internet made it the center of everything. We became masters of our lives, makers instead of consumers, with a powerful tool that answered our commands seamlessly.

If you are reading this, you are probably under forty. If I could take you back to that golden age, you would hate it. It would seem like nothing to you. It would be like trying to imagine what it felt like to ride the first tractor, instead of walking behind a horse, avoiding the semi-solid horse exhaust. Or trying to imagine how empowering it was to shoot the first bow and arrow, instead of throwing rocks at your food.

It couldn’t last. I saw the handwriting on the wall a few years later when Apple came out with its first oversized laptop. For the first time, there was room for more than a minimal keyboard, and laptops could finally handle the third element. The keyboard handled words, the mouse handled graphics, but there was no proper input for numbers. Scientists and businessmen alike needed the ten-key function that was (in those days) on every keyboard of every full size computer. I was sure it would be added, but when I saw the rollout, the keyboard was still minimal. Instead there were a pair of oversized speakers so games would sound better.

It was all over. From that time on, Apple catered to consumers instead of creators. When Steve Jobs came back from Pixar to save Apple, and created an I-Mac that looked suspiciously like the Pixar logo, I knew it was really all over.

The change from creator culture to consumer culture happened in three stages: first the pre-Windows IBM computer was so hard to use that all your effort went into mastering it, not using it. Then the Mac and the mouse made the machine transparent, and you could make things you never dreamed possible. Then came a day when all you had to do was push a button and the finished product appeared, with none of your input and none of your personality.

Life happens. Progress happens. But I liked stage two the best.

217. Interview, by G, part 2

Leave a reply

There must be a thousand Democrats that would make a better president than Hillary, and a hundred thousand Republicans who would make a better president than Trump. That line is from yesterday’s post. Since this is part 2, you really should read part 1 before continuing.

G.: “If the choices are so unpalatable, would you choose one anyway?”

Leap: “Choice isn’t really the word. I would vote for Hillary if I could, but since I’m on the run from the media, there is no way I can get within miles of my polling place.”

G.: “You wouldn’t vote for a write-in, or a registered third party?”

Leap: “Third parties never win. Third party candidates don’t expect to win, they are just using the election to make a statement about their beliefs. If a third party candidate won, it would scare hell out of him. Just like me.”

G.: “So you don’t really like Hillary, you think third parties are throwing away your vote, and you don’t want the job. So why not Donald Trump?”

Leap: “The wall. A million reasons, but most of all, the wall.”

Leap continues: “Let me tell you a story. I worked as an engineer all my life. The company I worked for built farm equipment. Once, they sent me to California for a few years, to a plant near Salinas.

“There weren’t any undocumenteds in our facility, although more than half the staff were Mexican American. Several of them became my close friends, and they are the ones who opened my eyes to the facts.

“I spent a lot of time in the field, watching the equipment we built being used. Everywhere I went I saw swarms of migrant farm workers. Mexicans – that’s what everybody called them. Whether they were Mexican American, legal immigrants, or illegal immigrants didn’t matter. Mexicans. I saw how hard they worked and under what terrible conditions. I saw the shacks they lived in, and it didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem American.

“I asked my Mexican American friends back at the plant and they explained. Farm workers live in fear of immigration officers. Even the ones who are here legally know a whole community of those who aren’t, or at least are on the borderline of legality. Children who were born here, American citizens, live in fear that their parents will be deported.

“It makes them pliable. Deportation is a whip in the hands of their employers.

“A wall – what a joke. We have a wall. It doesn’t stop the hungry, because it isn’t supposed to stop the hungry. It exists to let workers through, and then remind them that if they step out of line, they will find themselves back on the other side.

“America couldn’t survive without a wall that lets through workers who will be silent and docile and work for slave wages under slave conditions.”

*****

Foolish Leap. He set up the interview to show how much he didn’t want to be a write-in candidate, the made the mistake of letting his passion show. He made the mistake of making sense, in a world that is hungry for sense, so of course he made his own life worse.

The interview galvanized the nation. Leap’s anti-candidacy went from being a curiosity to being a real alternative. New websites sprang up everywhere, along with tweets by the hundreds of thousand, and even a dozen fake Facebook accounts.

The biggest of them all was hashtag #Leapthewall. Commentators were forced to search for a new term to replace “went viral”. Viral didn’t do it justice.

And Leap went back on the run.

216. Interview, by G, part 1

Leave a reply

If you are new to Leap’s plight, you can catch up at 178. Leap Boy, back in the news, 192. Billy Joe Takes a Leap, 200. The Last Sane Man and 203. Leap on the Bandwagon.

Leap Alan Hed is on the run, not from any crime, not from angry criminals, but from the insatiable news media. When Billy Joe Barker proposed him as a write-in candidate for President, they descended on his house and he fled. Now a couple of weeks have passed.

He went north at first, toward the Canadian border, but he couldn’t find a way to pass over without being spotted. He turned south-west and tried to lose himself in the Rockies, but things have changed there, too. Where every cirque and valley used to be filled with old-time prospectors, broken down cowboys, and overly hopeful hippies, now every mountaintop is capped by a mansion with a movie star living inside.

I’m not sure where he went after that. He didn’t confide much to me, and after the paranoia set in, I don’t know how much of what he said was true. Being on the run will do that to you.

The media was hot on his trail and they have almost infinite resources. They would have found him in no time if they had cooperated. Instead, they guarded their sources, set misinformational rumor afoot, and generally got in each other’s way.

Leap stayed one step ahead of them, but it wasn’t a life worth living. He finally decided to give an interview to satisfy the world’s curiosity, and get everyone off his back. Poor fool. Giving one interview was like the old story of the man who reached for a bucket of water to put out a fire, and found out too late that it was gasoline. But Leap was an innocent, and innocents are doomed.

He wrote a letter to G. at —BC news, proposed a time and place. They met in the home of a distant relative (who was himself harassed for the next three weeks).

*****

G. spoke to the camera, briefly outlining events to date, then asked, “Why did you run and why have you agreed to this interview?”

Leap described the siege of Dannebrog, and some of the things that had happened since, then said, “I’m hoping that telling my story will convince the American people that I am not someone they want to write in for President, and that I can just go home and get my life back. That would be a miracle.”

G.: “I’m not sure that is a miracle we can provide, but go ahead, tell us why you think Americans have become so fascinated by your candidacy.”

Leap: “I’m not a candidate. I’m not running for President. I’m running from President.”

Foolish Leap. He still didn’t understand the phenomenon he had become. Those three words – Running From President – which his farmer friend had said in Grand Island, became the stuff of a thousand headlines and a million tweets.

G.: “Why do you think America has embraced your non-candidacy, then?”

Leap: “Look at the alternatives. We have three hundred million people in America, and this is the best we can put up for President? There must be a thousand Democrats that would make a better president than Hillary, and a hundred thousand Republicans who would make a better president than Trump. But I am not one of them.” The interview continues tomorrow.

215. Cash Crop

Leave a reply

I was a young man during the sixties. The summer of love came about in San Francisco while I was off on a summer archaeology dig in Michigan. I read about it in the magazines. A geology major friend of mine was on the west coast that summer, working for an oil company. He brought back some interesting vegetation and some interesting pills.

It was a strange time in Michigan, legally. Possessing marijuana was a felony but possessing LSD was a misdemeanor. The law hadn’t caught up to the pharmacopeia.

I won’t say some of my friends were pushers; that paints an inaccurate picture of grown men hanging around the middle school parking lot with baggies of pot. However, they bought wholesale and sold retail to their own acquaintances to finance their personal indulgences.

I didn’t participate. Not that I was holy, but I had my own issues. I was going to college on a scholarship. It was my only shot at leaving some ugliness behind and getting on with the life I wanted. I didn’t plan to let anything jeopardize that.

I let my hair grow long. I wore a beard – but that was in imitation of a favorite archaeology professor. I doubted everything – but I had learned that when I was a kid in Oklahoma. I dressed like a farmer – but that was because I had been a farmer. I hated the war.

I didn’t wear love beads or bandanas and I didn’t smoke pot. I was about half a hippie.

When it came time to write Raven’s Run, years later, I needed to know more about pot and its culture than I had picked up living on the edge of things. I took a drive north to Garberville which was the center of it all and soaked in the local color. 

I did my library research as well, and found a superb reference in Cash Crop: An American Dream by Ray Raphael. It consists of a mixture of interviews with law enforcement, growers, enforcers, and near-slave laborers, along with personal stories of Raphael’s days in and around the trade. If you have ever read a book by a professorial type who seems too far removed from his subject to be believed — this isn’t that book.

I was particularly taken by one interview with a old time cop who was thinking back to the early days. He said (this is a near quote from memory, I don’t have the book at hand), “We used to spend all day running around the woods rousting out moonshiners when alcohol was illegal. Then we would relax after work with a joint. Now we spend all day running around finding pot farms and burning the weed, and after work, we kick back with booze.”

Incidentally, here is lesson in the virtue of never throwing away a good book.  Amazon is offering Cash Crop used from $44.14 and the only new copies available start at $200. At that rate, my jammed back room full of cheap paperbacks would sell for a million bucks, if I could find a buyer with the same weird and eclectic taste that I have.

214. The Eternal Wannabe

Leave a reply

It’s been nearly 110 degrees for a week as I write this. The humidity is under ten percent, thank goodness. It hasn’t rained since April and it won’t rain again until October. There is water in the two lakes that lie a few miles west and a few miles east, but the one our drinking water comes from was dry six months ago.

Welcome to the foothills of the California Sierras.

I saw a rattlesnake go by yesterday, carrying a canteen. He was having a heck of a time keeping it up, since he doesn’t have hips and he doesn’t have shoulders.

No problem. When February comes, it will look like the green hills of Ireland again. But it won’t last.

**     **     **

I grew up in Oklahoma, fifteen hundred miles from salt water, and fell in love with the ocean, though I had never seen it. That’s what comes from too much reading, and from having a beloved grandfather who lived in Florida, had a boat, and had joined the Coast Guard auxiliary.

I went to Michigan for college, found my wife, and married her. That gave me another maritime connection. Her father had crewed on a Great Lakes racing schooner when he was a young man,  a decade before I was born.

My draft number was 41 and they were drafting Marines, so I joined the Navy, but it wasn’t a happy time. Given a choice during boot camp, I chose to be a dental technician; it meant I would never have to man a gun. I spent my naval career on dry land, working at a hospital. I never regretted it. I loved the ocean, but not at the price of pulling a trigger.

I spent a year in Chicago, then came back to California, and settled in to write. I tried to find a place to rent on the coast, but I could only afford inland housing. And here I am.

Everyone has dreams. Most of mine have come true, but we still have to make choices. Choosing one dream often means abandoning another. Most of us have another life, the life we would have lived if things had gone differently. We may not regret our choices, but the things we might have been stay with us.

I wanted to build a sailboat and sail around the world. Not an unusual dream, of course. If you gave me the chance to go back and do that instead of what I have done, I wouldn’t consider it for a second. But still . . .

Because of that dream, I have spent a lifetime studying small boat construction, naval architecture, and maritime history. My second MA thesis was on shipbuilding during the nineteenth century.

Fortunately, I am an author. I can write a novel and call it Raven’s Run (see Serial). In it I can set off in the yawl Wahini, heading for Marseilles, and who knows, maybe a mermaid will fall into my lap along the way.

213. Borders

Leave a reply

I don’t need to remind you what Europe is like today. Everyone knows her troubles. Refugees, and terrorists disguised as refugees, are flooding in, and once they arrive, they can move more or less freely from country to country. BREXIT came largely as a result of this crisis, with the threat of terrorism and economic dislocation driving the vote.

It was very different in 1989, the year in which the novel Raven’s Run (see Serial) takes place. There were no open borders, even between friendly countries. When my wife and I traveled from Switzerland to Italy during that era, the train crossed the Italian border at 2 AM. It stopped and a cadre of officials came aboard, moving from car to car, waking everyone up and checking passports. Of course, as Americans, it was a formality. Our passports carried us through without strain, but if there had been an irregularity . . .

There was an irregularity later, coming back from Hungary. A young and carefree European, French as I recall, had gotten into Hungary – God knows how –  with a passport, but without a visa. He confessed his lack to everyone in the coach, and laughed about it. Some very surly individuals took him off at the border. I never saw him again, but I had to wonder how funny it seemed a few hours later.

I had my own irregularity, harmless but thought provoking, earlier that same summer. My wife and I were camping at Innsbruck, Austria. When you camped or stayed in a hotel in those days, the owner confiscated your passport when you checked in and returned it when you left. It was the law throughout most of Europe.

We took a day trip from Innbruck to Reuthe, also in Austria. We did not know that the train passed through Germany on the way. As we crossed the German border, some very severe guards, with automatic pistols at their hips, came demanding passports. My wife had hers; I didn’t.

I took German in high school, which is very close to not taking it at all. I tried to ask why, but my one word “Warum?” (Why?) got me nowhere. The border guard repeated his demand for my passport. My weak German “Ins camping.” (It’s at the campground.) must have made sense to him. He had to know that holding passports at campgrounds and hotels was the law. It didn’t melt his icy stare.

Now I have met many people traveling through Germany, both before and after this incident. They were universally friendly and helpful, and they all spoke English, especially after trying to deal with my attempts at German. Not these guys. They just looked pissed. It was probably an act, but they had me convinced at the time.

Those of us with passport irregularities were taken to another car, without explanation, with just gestures and an intense glare, where we were sealed in. We passed through a piece of Germany and back into Austria, and were released.

It wasn’t life threatening, nor the stuff of spy novels, but it was very much a part of the system the Eurozone was designed to overcome. Open borders did away with a lot of annoyance, and allowed a freedom of movement that helped bring prosperity to Europe.

Today, new circumstances are bringing Europeans to reconsider that openness.

212. Old Posts Retrospective

Leave a reply

I would have preferred to post this last Wednesday, one year after the first posts on this website. However, the introduction of Raven’s Run over on Serial took precedence.

I did some of my best post writing during that early period when no one was reading. Everything was fresh and new, and I was introducing myself for the first time. I reposted a few when it was appropriate, particularly in March of 2016 when I began Jandrax over in serial, but most of those early posts are still unread by those who are with me today.

Eventually, I plan an annotated index of all posts, but for now, here is a partial version so you can dip into the past if you want.

2. Turn Left at Chicago – How a fortuitous failure set me on the road to writing.

3. It Was 40 Years Ago Today – The act of sitting down to write a first novel.

6. Planet Oklahoma (1) – From birth to my first encounter with a library.

7. Planet Oklahoma (2) – A library changes my life.

9. Old Libraries – Old libraries, old books, and re-reading.

10. Book Words – Being the only person who reads

11. Why the Tractosaur Wouldn’t Go – Hearing and speaking Okie.

12. Why Okies Can’t Use the Dictionary – Mispronunciation guides.

211. Raven Comes Aboard

Leave a reply

New month, new year, new novel.

Today we begin the second year of this website. In the Serial half, Jandrax, my first novel, published in 1978, just wrapped up in a serialized and annotated form. I spent enough time and effort explaining the decisions behind the text that it has become something of a how-to for new writers.

Today, in Serial, we begin the novel Raven’s Run. This time I plan to keep most of the commentary over here on the AWL side, but we’ll see how that works. I make no promises.

Raven’s Run was written in the early 90s, roughly speaking. I never kept a writing diary, but it was fashioned after events from my 1987 and 1988 trips to Europe, but not written until after I had finished Symphony in a Minor Key. Early 90s is as close as I can come.

I spoke of Raven’s Run in 24. Following the Market. Notice that I haven’t put a tag on that reference. You don’t need to go there, since I am covering the same ground today, with a fair amount repeated.

*          *          *

Some people say write what you know. Some say, follow your passion. Some say find your natural readers. Others say follow the market, write what the reader wants to read, position yourself just back of the leading edge of the latest trend.

I only followed the market advice once, when my science fiction and fantasy work was hitting a brick wall for sales. I decided to write a contemporary adventure story. It was something I had wanted to do anyway, from the beginning. After going to Europe I had enough material to start.

By today’s standards, Raven’s Run would probably be classed as a thriller. Ian Gunn, the protagonist, is an ex-PI, sort of, now assigned to the State Department, waiting for his first posting. Despite that, there are no spies involved (except in the prolog), and the detecting is minimal, so not espionage and not a mystery. An adventure, because a girl falls into his life (literally) in chapter one, bringing troubles with her. In terms of the time it was written, it would have sold as a men’s adventure. That sounds like a Mickey Spillane woman bashing story, but in its day men’s adventures were filled with a wide range of character types, some quite civilized.

I had always wanted to write my own equivalent of Travis McGee.(see 49. The Green Ripper) Who wouldn’t? Neither detective nor spy, he went his own unique way and provided adventure for a generation of readers. But McGee was too much of con man for me, and he wasn’t enough of a loner. His buddy Meyer accompanied him in every other story. My guy, Ian Gunn, would be younger, better educated, but very much at odds with the world his education had prepared him for.

So I wrote it, and I liked it. When it was finished, I sent Raven’s Run to my agent. He was full of praise, especially for the exciting opening chapter. Then he said, “. . . but I’m afraid I can’t sell it. The bottom has completely fallen out of the men’s adventure market, and nobody is buying.”

So much for following the market.

Raven’s Run is now twenty-seven years old. I am not referring to the date it was written, but the the date of the internal action. It exists in that limbo state between contemporary fiction and historical fiction, not quite fully one or the other. That provides both problems and opportunities, some of which I will talk about in future posts. For now, I’ll simply note that the prolog which forms today’s post in Serial was added to place the main novel in context.