Category Archives: A Writing Life

142. Still Worthy of Praise

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WOPYesterday, I compared my elementary experiences with what happens in our schools today. Today I’ll talk about my high school, repeating a post from last October.

I started out to be a scientist, then defined myself as a writer, but along the way I became a teacher. Not an educator; that term is ruined for me by the fools in high places who have all but destroyed our schools.

I want to acknowledge some of my own teachers, but since I didn’t live a traditional childhood, this won’t be traditional praise. None of what follows will make sense unless you remember that my elementary school class had only eight students and my consolidated high school only brought the number up to thirty-seven. A larger school would have led to a different experience, even in Oklahoma in the early sixties.

My typing teacher was tough, knuckle slapping perfectionist, and she wasn’t afraid of public opinion. We called her The Warden. She was the only teacher who ever gave me a B. Dyslectic fingers killed me, no matter how hard I tried. She gave me exactly what I deserved and I respected her for it.

Later, when I was teaching science, my favorite exercise was a long term project where students had to build a gizmo to perform some physical feat. It was different every year, and they could only build it in class to keep their parents’ sticky fingers out of the works. Every year kids who only knew computer games and multiple-choice tests found themselves depending on their teammates who knew how to use hammers and wrenches. It was humbling to them; I smiled serenely and remembered The Warden.

My math teacher had a sense of fun. Whenever an unknown appeared in an equation, he would draw something barely recognizable as the back view of a bunny and say “That represents the number of rabbits in Rogers County”. His grin was infectious; he always looked like he was about to break into laughter. He kept us moving at top speed and made it impossible to hate or fear math. From him, I learned how to teach.

In science, I typically had read the textbook by the fourth week. I sat quietly in class and answered only enough questions to show I knew the material, then let the other students take their turns. My science teacher’s gift to me was trust. He let me work in the lab unsupervised except for his presence next door. I spent my study halls there building science projects, and that is where my science education really happened.

My English teacher gave me similar freedom out of a mixture of wisdom and laziness. I turned in every assignment early and better than required; in exchange I frequently wandered the school at will when I was supposed to be in his classes. I would never let one of my students do that, but it worked for me. I spent my time running errands for teachers, building things for the school, or working in the science lab.

It would have been a disaster for most kids, but it was the perfect education for me.

At home, my parents were hyper-controlling. Freedom was not an option. When I scored high on the National Merit Scholarship test and wanted to go to Michigan State University, they would not let me apply. It would have let me to move beyond their control.

My high school counselor let me fill out the application forms in his office and use the school as a return address, so my parents would not know until it was too late. He was putting his career in jeopardy, but I think he saved my life.

141. K-8 in Another Century

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This is Teacher Appreciation Week, and I’ve known a lot of them. The good ones are a treasure beyond price and the bad ones ought to be shot – metaphorically, at least. Fortunately the bad ones are fairly rare and they usually don’t last.

Back in October I praised my high school teachers in a post that I plan to run again tomorrow. After high school and a couple of decades of assorted adventures, I became a teacher myself. I didn’t plan it that way; in fact, it was the shock of a lifetime.

I grew up in a different world. In many ways, a farm in Oklahoma in the fifties was closer to the nineteenth century than to the twenty-first. The same could be said about my elementary school. Those old ways were not necessarily better. Neither are our new ways, but a comparison can be useful.

I started school in first grade. Kindergarten existed in the cities, but not where I lived, and preschool was unheard of. Talala School had shrunk over the years as the town lost population. The building was half full of students when I enrolled. Mrs. Stout taught first and second grades in one room. There were eight first graders and about ten in second graders. We first graders were taught reading, then we worked on our own while the second graders were taught reading. Then we were taught spelling; then we worked alone while she taught spelling to the second graders. And so forth. We spent half of every day working uninstructed, but under her eagle eye. By the end of the year, we had heard everything she taught to the second graders. The next year, we heard it again, in the same room, with new kids in our old first grade desks.

Third and fourth grades meant a new room, a new teacher, but the same pattern. Fifth and sixth meant the same pattern again, except that in fifth grade the Russians launched Sputnik and science was added to the curriculum. By sixth grade the high school was consolidated and gone; we moved to the high school end of the building, but still with two classes per teacher. For the last three years of its existence, Talala School was seven-eighths empty and haunted by the few students who remained. When I was in eighth grade, there were still eight students in my class, but the only two remaining in seventh grade. They were moved on to the consolidated school and for the first time in my elementary career, we had a full-day teacher all to ourselves.

Educationally deprived? Don’t you believe it. For seven years we had worked and learned all day, every day, and that was plenty. Having a full time teacher in eighth grade was no better, and no worse.

Fast forward through high school, college, military service, more college, becoming a writer, more college, until thirty years later I found myself teaching sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. Now we had Kindergarten, and pre-school, and pre-pre-school, and nursery school, and before school help, and after school help, and tutors, and ———

A true believer might say that students needed all that help. A moralist might say that they had to be made to work more hours because they were lazy. A cynic might say that somebody had to warehouse the kids until their parents got home – whenever that might be.

Algebra was moved from the ninth grade to the eighth. The theory was that  they needed readiness, which is code for, “If they aren’t smart enough do learn algebra in the ninth grade, start teaching it in eighth. If that doesn’t work, start in seventh.” All down the line, I watched subjects get moved earlier and earlier, while the students’ scores went lower and lower, and pre-school started a year sooner.

The goal, clearly, was pre-natal algebra.

Somewhere in the middle of my career, a local high school announced that they were going to begin teaching Advanced Placement classes. That sounded like a program where I would fit in as a teacher, so I attended their orientation. Maybe I misjudged them (I don’t think so) but I heard nothing about better teaching or deeper understanding. Instead, I heard a lot about more hours, more work, more reports, a chance to get ahead of the other guy, and to earn college credits while still in high school.

I was not impressed. I returned to teaching challenging things which were age and skill appropriate – to filling my students’ days with knowledge, while leaving their nights and weekends free for the other lessons life would teach them.

While you’re learning, learn. While you’re playing, play. If you’re in high school, get what high school has to offer. If you are too advanced to do that, move to college.

If this be treason, make the most of it.

140. I Have a Bad Feeling

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For the explorers returning to Earth from Cyan, seven and one half years have passed, but that perspective comes from twin journeys at near lightspeed. Twenty-five years have passed on Earth, and there have been changes.

Tasmeen was at the controls; Stephan stood behind her with his toes hooked under her seat.  He said, “Stand by to cut.  Cut!” 

The torch died, weightlessness returned, and the static that had been a soft background accompaniment to their actions became understandable speech.  Sort of.

“Bellig-acq.  Akno ID.  Bellig-acq, hype.”

“Huh?”

Gus said, “I would have expected to understand her better than that, even after twenty-five years.”

Stephan said, “That sounded more like code.”

“Or military jargon.  Roger-wilco kind of stuff.”

The message was repeated, and the tone of voice was more harsh.

“We’re still several light minutes away,” Stephan said. “Those messages were sent when our torch was still burning. Any minute they’ll figure out who we are and we’ll get a message that makes more sense.”

Sure enough, the grating, official voice now said: “Unidentified craft approaching Ganymede, are you the Darwin? If you are, acknowledge and proceed according to agreed flight plan. If you are not the Darwin, identify yourself quickly or we will assume belligerence.” The message repeated.

“Bellig-acq. Akno ID,” Tasmeen mused. “Belligerent acquisition, acknowledge identity?”

Stephan cut the gain and said, “That doesn’t sound very friendly. I wonder what happened to Ganymede Station?” He keyed the mike and spoke into it, “Ganymede Station, this is Darwin returning from Procyon system. Our trajectory is nominal for the approach we agreed upon twenty-five years ago. If you want any changes made, tell us quickly. We don’t have much delta-V to play around with. Are your ready to receive a flash synopsis of what we found?”

Stephan increased the gain again. The voice of Ganymede Station droned on while Stephan’s reply ran past it at the speed of light. Keir looked at the viewscreen, but there was nothing to see but stars. Even the sun was just a fat, bright dot in the sky. 

“Darwin, Darwin. We copy your message. Do not, I repeat, do not make uncoded transmissions.  Utilize protocol 7Y4B. Your old flight plan is fine. We are kicking a freighter out of her berth, but we’ll have a place cleared for you by the time you arrive. Welcome back.”

There was little welcome in the voice that said it.

“Jesus Christ, is that all they have to say?” Angrily, Stephan punched the mike key and said, “Ganymede, I will be glad to utilize protocol 7Y4B or whatever makes you happy, as soon as you tell me what the hell it is. What’s gotten into you people? Go get the NASA site administrator.”

Even as Stephan was speaking, Ganymede Station was replaced by another, more pleasant voice.

“Welcome home, Darwin. You will find the language of this year somewhat different than it was when you left. When the Dog Star returned in 2088, we found that it would be best to train comtechs in the jargon of your departure year, and that is the reason for this tape. I know you’re as full of questions as we are, so I’ll save you a time lag. No, we don’t have FTL drive yet. Relativity falls deeper into disrepute every year but no one has come up with a comprehensive theory to replace it. Yes, Dog Star, Europa, and Magellan have all returned. Dog Star found what would have been an Earth type planet, except that it has a Uranian inclination to the ecliptic. They call it Stormking, for obvious reasons . . .”

The tape cut out and the original voice returned. “Darwin, Darwin. Stand by to copy at flash, protocol 7Y4B.” Tasmeen made the connections. There was a high pitched whine as the flash transmission was fed into the computer. Then the tape resumed where it had been interrupted.

“. . . Europa and Magellan both found prime planets. We’ll fill you in on them later.

“The biggest change you will have to be ready for is that NASA no longer exists . . .”

Again the tape was interrupted by the voice of Ganymede. “Darwin, Darwin, copy this carefully. There is no NASA site administrator. You may continue transmitting in clear, but restrict yourselves to necessary navigational queries and replies. No other transmissions will be responded to.”

“. . . because after the general elections of 2103 the people of North America decided to combine all space efforts into one military organization. You are all now members of the Federated Space Service.”

Tasmeen said, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

139. D-i-v-o-r-c-e

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DIVORCE

If you don’t recognize the reference, D-I-V-O-R-C-E, sung spelled-out with a powerful twang, was a country western song from my childhood. It dealt with the horrors of divorce as a sad lament. If you wonder what it has to do with science fiction or A Writing Life, hang on until I set the stage and I’ll tell you all about it.

I have been married forty-six years (so far) to the love of my life. My marriage is the most important thing to me – more than my writing, my education, or my teaching career.

I equally believe, firmly and unalterably, in the healing power of divorce.

I was twenty-one when we married. It was the end of the sixties. People were beginning to live together without marriage. If we had done that, we would still be together. We stayed together because we wanted to, not because we had to.

Marriage between the right two people is the greatest thing on Earth. Marriage between the wrong two people is sheer hell. I’m sure you’ve seen examples of both.

***

When the issue of gay marriage arose, I was largely unmoved. Of course I thought, “Yes!” It seemed inevitable and right. It reminded me of arguments about racially mixed marriages during the sixties and seventies. What was shocking then, goes unnoticed today.

However, in those states where gay couples had all meaningful rights except the name marriage, I had to shake my head at all uproar. Advocates of gay marriage and those opposed to gay marriage both seemed to be missing the point.

After gay marriage, then what? Triads? Quartets? Hockey teams?

And if marriage is a bond between one man and one woman, then what man and what woman? Siblings? First cousins? Second cousins? Blacks and whites? Catholics and protestants? Jews and Muslims? 49er fans and Raider fans?

The plain fact is that when any two people say marriage, chances are they are talking about two different institutions. Marriage is undefined – or rather, it has a thousand definitions.

It’s all about property . . . and children . . . and wills, and power of attorney , and hospital visitation and . . . and sex . . . and infidelity. It’s about growing old together . . . or not. It’s about financial rights while you’re married, and who get’s the dog when you divorce. Or who gets the kids. Or which kids inherit when you die. (Remember that old fashioned term illegitimate child?)

There are rules about this, but they vary from state to state and from decade to decade. When Heinlein and his wife-to-be Virginia  were essentially married while waiting for his divorce from his previous wife, they had to hide out because it was illegal to have sex with someone you weren’t married to, and getting caught at it would have screwed up the divorce. This was not that long before Stranger in a Strange Land, the sixties, and free love.

Polygamy was once such a horror to “right thinking Americans” that the Mormon church removed it from its doctrines. Then the sixties came along and any number could play, as long as you didn’t get married.

Talk to any woman old enough to have fought her way through the feminist movement about what marriage meant in 1916. You will hear horror stories of domestic slavery, about an absence of financial rights, an absence of the rights to have or not have children, and about laws that did not consider forced sex to be rape, as long as it was done by the husband. The next time you hear the words traditional marriage, think back more than a decade or two.

Talk to any man who has divorced outside of a no-fault state, and he will tell you that marriage is still slavery of a financial kind. But don’t mention the word alimony.

There is an answer to all this confusion, but it doesn’t have emotional resonance, so it’s a hard sell. Marriage has two components. It has the deep seated comfort and life affirming excitement of loving people sharing their lives. And it has the rights and obligations that go along with the joy, which have to be spelled out during marriage, and litigated if the marriage ends. In my opinion, only the latter is the business of the government.

It’s time to stop pretending that one size fits all, that traditional marriage ever existed as a stable entity, or the the government can define the undefinable. Let there be contracts with choices of clauses to protect the rights of those involved. Let them be written down, debated, agreed to, and ultimately, signed or refused. Call them what you want, but don’t call them marriage.

Then let let every Baptist and Jew and Muslim and Catholic and unreconstituted hippie call whatever floats their boat marriage if they want to. Let them wrangle and argue to their heart’s content, but outside of the courts.

Do you think that will ever fly? I don’t. People would rather pretend that their answer is the answer, and force everyone else into their mold.

If it did fly, then two women, three men, and a transgender going either direction could write a contract that met their needs and call it marriage. Others could disagree as a loudly as they wanted. The Catholic church could excommunicate them, the Baptists could damn them to Hell, and it wouldn’t matter. The contract would go on independent of the in-fighting, spelling out and protecting the rights of those in the group.

138. Alone, and more alone

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In the novel Cyan, due out shortly from EDGE, the starship Darwin carries ten explorers at relativistic speeds to explore the Procyon system.

Ten explorers working eleven light years from Earth. As the only humans on the entire planet Cyan, the death of any one is sure to send shock waves reverberating through the group.

Keir Delacroix, groundside leader of the explorers tried to put this into perspective upon the death of one of his colleagues. You will note a deleted name, to avoid a spoiler.

It seems to me that funerals are for the living, for saying things that we already know, to put life and death in perspective and find some comfort.

“We are alone here. We are more alone than any other humans have ever been. When one of us hurts, we all hurt. When one of us dies, a piece of the whole dies. We must be very careful with one another, because we are all we have.

“We come from an Earth that is overflowing with people. One death there is nothing. Had (***) stayed behind, and died, no one would have noticed. Here, her death puts our whole world out of balance. And that is why we are on Cyan — to find a world where individual lives can be valuable again. At least, that is why I am here. Not as a scientist; not even as an explorer; but as a man searching for a place where humanity can find its soul again.

Death is a hungry beast, seldom satisfied with just one victim. And exploring a new planet is no safe endeavor.

***

When pioneers arrived on the east coast of North America, the forest they faced was vast. It was later said that a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without ever having to touch the ground. That forest is no more.

When Heinlein’s pioneers reached the stars, flaming laser axes in hand, they wrought similar destruction. Today’s reader knows better.

I wrote Cyan as an exercise in seeing, not what could happen, but what probably would happen, in near-term stellar exploration. That includes both the pressures for colonization from an overcrowded Earth, and a knowledge of the ecological disasters which need to be avoided.

The explorers on Cyan are careful in their daily actions and in planning for future colonization, but they are not prepared to find a truly half-human species. Viki Johanssen, crew anthropologist, demands that Cyan be placed off limits to colonization for their sake. Keir disagrees, and colonization plans go forward.

Viki is faced with a decision. Being one of so few is a lonely thought, but could she survive being truly alone? What if she stayed behind when the Darwin returned, to study these creatures while they were still pristine, before human colonists came in.

What would you do, if you knew that mankind’s only chance to study this half-human species was at hand, but you would have to become the sole inhabitant of an entire planet, certainly for decades, perhaps forever?

Would you choose to stay behind?

137. We Reserve the Right

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we reserveIt’s Sunday morning, April 10, 2016. I’ve been watching the news, and that always stirs me up. I refuse to get sidetracked into politics again, but I am a science fiction writer, after all, so I’m going to give you a time travel story. Let’s go a year into the future, on a timeline where Ted Cruz wins the presidency, a grandson of Oral Roberts becomes a Supreme Court Justice, and the North Carolina Religious Liberty law is not found unconstitutional.

A few news reports from
Sunday, April 9, 2017
timeline HAB38766J.

Protesters spent a tenth day in front of a bakery in mid-town today. The proprietor, a devout Muslim, continues to refuse service to women who try to enter his shop with their heads uncovered, citing his religious liberty to refuse service to those who do not follow appropriate behavior. “They are scandalous, and I will not allow them in my establishment,” Mr. Hamid said. Sign carrying members of the local Christian Interfaith community said that they would continue to march in protest indefinitely.

***

Anderson’s Pharmacy on the west side continues its controversial policy of requiring all patrons to have proof of their religious affiliation on file. Mrs. Anderson, the owner, said, “I don’t care who buys opiates, or bandaids, or foot powder, but I won’t fill prescriptions for contraceptives intended for Catholics. All the other religions can go to Hell however they please, but I won’t help Catholics defy the Pope.”

***

Owens, Jennings, and Philbrick Bank on the south side defied Federal authorities again today over their lending policies. “The Bible is very clear,” said Enos Philbrick, “that a woman should be subservient to a man. Federal regulators have been giving us trouble, trying to deny us our God-given constitutional rights, by saying we won’t lend to women. That is utter nonsense. Any woman who wants a loan is welcome in our bank, as long as her husband is willing to co-sign the loan.

Of course we don’t think divorced women are a good risk. It’s simple logic; if they ran out on their husbands, they would probably default on a loan.

Unmarried women? They need to get married, not get a bank loan.”

***

On a recent radio interview, Harvey Carter said, “Of course I’m not a racist. Any black man, or woman, or family can come and sit down in my restaurant any time they want. They’re all welcome. And any white man, or white woman, or white family – they’re equally welcome. There’s no prejudice here. But if a black man wants to sit down with a white woman, well that’s just wrong. God said stay with your own kind, and I’m not going to serve any mixed race couple. It’s my God-given right!”

A follow-up caller asked the radio station if the restaurant owner was white or black, but they had to admit that they did not know.

***

Okay, I think I’ve heard enough from that timeline. How about you?

136. A Groaning in the Earth

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There is a groaning in the Earth. In every corner of the globe, we hear the daily rumble of seven billion footsteps, raising dust in the desert, and pounding the concrete of city streets back into the rubble from which they came.

Earth Day is Saturday. It’s a beautiful idea, and ecological consciousness is long overdue, but all our good deeds matter little in the face of seven billion hungry souls. The band plays, but the Titanic still sinks.

Still, it is not in our nature to lose hope. We do what we can here at home, and dream of new frontiers. Like Cyan, where a minor character is about to bring a small dream to fulfillment.

***

As he walked down toward the fence that kept predators out of the settlement, Mitchell was torn between feeling excited and feeling foolish. He had been raised in a midwestern town on the Kansas-Nebraska border. It should have been an outdoor life, but every field was owned, and every farmer was ready to shoot on sight anyone entering his land. The crops of wheat that grew around the little town gave broad vistas, but there was nowhere to walk.

The town had been Mitchell’s prison and the wheat fields his prison walls.  Within the town were only a few tired locust trees, and across one corner an ancient creek bed cut a path. It had never held much water, and now it had only a sluggish flow of muddy outwash from field irrigation. When he was very young, Mitchell had tried to fish there, but the water was empty.

Mitchell’s body had lived in the town, but his imagination lived in the fishing books he checked out from the local library. Funds were low, so there were few modern books, but that suited Mitchell. His interest was in books from the last century; books about fishing in clear mountain streams for trout, grayling, or small mouth bass. 

Eventually, Mitchell grew up, moved away, went to college, got a job, and had as good a life as anyone could hope to find on overcrowded Earth. When Cyan opened up for colonization, his childhood dreams led him to apply. Now he worked as a chemist, stared through the fence that protected this new town from the wilderness beyond, and still dreamed. Until today.

Mitchell passed through the fence and closed the gate behind him. He walked down to the bridge over the Crowley and paused to admire the glint of globewombs far overhead. Then he crossed over and moved downstream. He had picked his place already, a sand bar just within sight of the bridge. Delacroix had told him that the pharagals could leap upward and shoreward, but that if he stayed at least three meters back from the water, he should be safe. But no guarantees; about Cyan, Delacroix never gave guarantees.

Now Mitchell opened a plastic jar and took out a fly. The hook had come from Earth as part of the precious ten kilograms of personal equipment each colonist had been allotted. He had tied it using cloth frayed from his jeans. He attached it to a Cyan-spun kevlar leader and tied that to his precious only fly line, just removed from its original package last night. The reel was also from Earth. It was an antique he had bought before he ever heard of Cyan because it was from a twentieth century company called Mitchell. Like him.

Carefully but unskillfully, he began to cast. He had never used a fly rod before, but he had read and re-read every book on technique. Eventually, he was able to get the fly out over the water and let it drop. It floated in the sluggish current, a wad of cloth trailing a snarl of frayed cloth legs. Probably no more pitiful excuse for a fly had been tied in a hundred years.

But on Cyan, no fly had ever been used. A dimple appeared in the water and the fly was gone. Mitchell pulled back on the rod, and something exploded into motion.

Five minutes later, Mitchell dragged his catch across the sand bar to a point where he could safely examine it. It was slim and bright blue, with a blunt head and twin tails that reminded him of pictures he had seen of seals. Down each side of the Pseudopisces was a row of interlocking cream and maroon triangles. It was gaudy and ungainly, but to Mitchell, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

He unhooked the fly and put it away carefully, reverently rewound the line onto his reel, and picked up the . . .

Trout! The Cyanian blue trout. It didn’t matter what this species had been called by the scientists. To Mitchell it was a trout, and to the tens of thousands who would read his fishing books over the next four generations, a trout it would remain.

135. John Gierach

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John Gierach, writer. If you aren’t a fisherman, you have probably never heard of him. If you want to write, you should probably check him out.

I don’t fish. I once wanted to, but my old car wouldn’t reach the mountains, the local rivers only held carp, and I was too busy trying to be a writer anyway. I could read about fishing though, and that’s how I found John Gierach. It was a happy discovery; I’ve learned more about writing from him than I have from Hemingway.

Sports Illustrated said, “If Mark Twain were alive and a modern-day fly fisherman, he still would be hard put to top John Gierach in the one-liner department.” If that seems excessive, note that they are only talking about quips.

Like Twain, Gierach’s charm lies in understated humor layered into everyday experience. Gierach is an absolutely American writer, sending a message about the America with which today’s urban dwellers have largely lost touch. He grew up in farm country and understands a working man’s simple pleasures. My father, who never played a day in his life, would have understood Gierach instinctively if he had ever done anything as frivolous as read a book on fishing.

Gierach’s work has a cumulative effect. Beyond the one liners there is a picture of a life well lived, described with clarity and simplicity, and a steady hum of understated humor. Here is an example:

It also occurred to me, for some reason, that I now had just about everything I’d wanted when I was fourteen years old and was just starting to hang out with men I admired and wanted to be like. . . . I remember that, as a boy, the men seemed glad and competent in the field, but there was also sometimes a kind of subdued melancholy about them, too. I didn’t understand that as a kid, but I do now. . . . Anyway, somewhere in the past, based on the little I knew for sure, I had fastened on the perfect life as one based on art and sport, plus a few other things like love, friendship, pretty country and good food. Given a loose enough definition of art, that’s what I had.
               from The New Pond in Even Brook Trout Get the Blues, by John Gierach.

Not at all profound. Or is it?

If you are a would-be writer, try him; but if you are seduced by the ease of his writing remember that nothing is harder to pull off than the appearance of ease. And don’t write everything in second person – only Gierach can get away with that.

*****

I originally wrote this post months ago but couldn’t find quite the right time to run it. Two things have changed. First, I just got John’s 2014 book All Fishermen Are Liars and his first story, A Day at the Office, is the perfect thing for me to recommend if you only intend to study his chops. But don’t blame me if you get hooked.

Second, my new novel Cyan is due out shortly. It is, among other things, about the rediscovery of nature by people fleeing an overcrowded Earth. In addition to exploration, adventure, and danger, there is one brief scene about a colonist who grew up reading old fishing books on an Earth where all the fish were dead, and who achieves his lifelong ambition by catching the first fish on the new planet. I think John would like that.

134. The Long Road to Cyan (2)

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This is a continuation of yesterday’s post. The writing of Cyan began about the time Jandrax was published. Why it took so long is a tale for another time, or maybe never, but the mechanics of bringing it into the twenty-first century will be of interest.

I followed the rise of OCR (optical character recognition) technology as it became available, but didn’t have a functioning system until about 2008. By that time I had two novels in published form, a novella in Galaxy, and five novels in typescript. I also had two other novels which were born on the computer. About half of Cyan was still in typescript and half was digital.

OCR is wonderful. It scans in text, flyspecks, pencil corrections, stray pencil marks,  coffee stains, the shadows from clumps of white-out, the shadows of paper creases, and an assortment of self-generated fantasy marks. Afterward, you have to read the result side by side with the original and make lots of changes.

Actually, scanning dismembered paperback books and magazines is relatively accurate. When I scanned To Go Not Gently before including it in Serial, OCR only made about a dozen mistakes per page. But when it scanned old typescripts . . . well, it took months to undo the curse of the typewriter. Then I was ready for final correction and polishing before Cyan could go out into the world.

Publication in the age of Cyan (2016)

Writer’s Digest and all its daughter publications used to be the bible for authors. Now they are only a place to begin generating lists. You have to go to the publishers’ and agents’ websites for details, or you’ll be lost from the outset.

The digital age has empowered publishers and agents – to be picky. They used to be happy if you typed double-space in pica instead of elite. Now they specify, and nobody specifies the same thing. Some want Times, some want Verdana, some want Courier – or was that Courier New. Some want .rtf, some want .doc, and some want .pdf.  Some still want paper, believe it or not. If they want paper, they don’t want return postage. It’s cheaper to shred at their end and print fresh at yours.

So, let’s say magic happens. Your novel is accepted. Now things really become different from the old ways.

Early in your search for an agent or publisher you were not allowed to send attachments to your emails. That will probably change now, and you will send your ms. formatted in the manner they prefer, as an email attachment. Just like the bad old days, you can pretty much count on months of no contact. Email makes it easier for them to contact you, if they need to, but it also makes it easier for everyone else to contact them. For agents and publishers, being too busy never seems to go away.

In the old days, you would spend this time writing your next novel. That is still true, but it is also the time in which you start preparing to promote your novel when it comes out. Once upon a time you didn’t promote your own novel because you couldn’t. Now you can, so you have to.

How? I can’t fully tell you because I’m still learning, but you can find a thousand people on the internet who think they know. Be careful; some of them charge money. For me, the main thing was to start this website. It has been going for eight months now. You are reading post 134 on this blog, with even more on the sister blog Serial. That’s a day job in itself.

You can get a business page for your Facebook account. I did, but it didn’t work for me. I was already saying everything I needed to say here, so Facebook was redundant. I am getting ready to tweak my author pages on Goodreads and Amazon. I may even try Twitter, but I’m not sure. I don’t think I could clear my throat in 140 characters.

Cyan is coming out from EDGE, a Canadian publisher specializing in science fiction and fantasy, as an e-book. It has been sixteen months since it was accepted, which I understand is not a particularly long wait. Since I’m writing at the end of March, I will probably know the release date by the time this goes online.

In mid-March I got the proofread manuscript back from EDGE and had to learn a whole new set of skills. Change tracking is a function shared by Pages (the word processor I use on my Mac) and Microsoft Word (used by the business world, including publishers) which allows an editor to make changes which are tracked and identified as hers in a sidebar, and allows her to make boxed entries in which she can ask questions, make suggestions, and share concerns. As author, I can then either accept or reject her changes. I can also recognize good criticism, but rewrite a segment in my style instead of accepting her changes. I can make notes in the sidebar for her attention, especially since format changes are better made by her than me. I can even explain the reasoning behind some decisions that might seem arbitrary.

Change tracking is one more reason why these are the good old days. Thanks, Michelle at EDGE, for a great job of proofreading.

About the first of March, I received a questionnaire for the publicity department which asked for such things as an imaginary interview with me, and imaginary interview with one of the characters in the book, three blog-entry style pieces, and the story behind Cyan. They also asked for a one paragraph, a two paragraph, and a four paragraph excerpt from the book, and for a 10 word, a 25 word, and a 75 word statement that might be used for cover blurb. I also received a questionnaire on cover design which asked for a physical description of the main characters, and gave me a chance to suggest a scene for the front cover.

They are still free to make any decisions they choose, but I am hopeful. EDGE seems to want to do things right.

133. The Long Road to Cyan (1)

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Keir and his friends travelled eleven light years to get to Cyan. I sometimes feel as if my journey has been longer. I first wrote down the names of the ten explorers, carefully chosen to represent ten different countries, in 1978. That was about the time my first novel, Jandrax, was accepted by Del Rey.

Cyan will be released in e-book form from Edge, probably in the next month or two. As of today (Mar 30) I don’t know the exact date.

A lot has changed between the two releases. Since many of you are here primarily to find out how to get your own novels published, I’ll give you a rundown on the old and the new of it.

Publication in the age of Jandrax (1979)
(You can skip this until part 2, tomorrow,
or you can stick around and laugh at the bad old days.)

When I sent Jandrax around, most publishers accepted queries, then often asked for samples or full novels. You never sent the original. Once a typed and corrected manuscript was complete, it was precious. A coffee spill could destroy weeks of work and you couldn’t just push print to get another one. You sent a photocopy, and you included postage for its return. After a few publishers had seen your novel, the ms. copy started looking pretty ratty.

All this was expensive for a would-be writer, since photocopying cost a dime per page, coin fed, one page at a time, at the local library. There were hard learned tricks to this process, as well. Without computers, there was no headers function. Typing your name, address, phone number,  book title, page count, and page number on each page was out of the question. I typed all this once (with the word page, but no number), trimmed the copy close, and taped it face down on the platen of the xerox machine when no one was looking. After copying all the pages, I filled in each page number by hand.

I’m sure Heinlein had people for this.

In August of 1978, Del Rey bought Jandrax. It was published in April of 1979, which is a pretty quick turnaround. I didn’t have much to do with the process, and certainly had no say in decisions made. I didn’t see the cover until I got my 20 free copies in the mail. It’s a great cover, even though the “reviewer” at Locus mocked it instead of reading the book.  The back blurb was another story:

JAN ANDRAX
As a scout he’d tamed
four planets — and more women than
most men ever see . . .

Well, not really. I wasn’t too embarrassed though, because every reader knows that back blurbs are made up by sex crazed maniacs who haven’t read the book.

My only input between purchase and publication was to review the galley proofs. Galleys don’t exist anymore, but before computers, the typeset version of the book was run off in long sheets, about four inches wide and eighteen inches long, and sent back to the author for approval.

From the obsolete word file — stet. Not stat, that’s doctor talk for right away. Stet means “No, no, no. Put back that sentence you red-lined out. That was exactly what I meant to say, and I don’t want it changed!”

Truthfully, despite horror stories you might have heard, all the proofreaders I’ve encountered have been good at their job.

Jandrax came out and sold some copies, but never paid back its modest advance. That was normal for a first novel, back when first novels got any advance at all. There was an article in the local newspaper, I had a book signing at a local bookstore, and my wife bought me a T-shirt with Jandrax printed on it. That was the publicity campaign.

Things are different today, as I will explain tomorrow.