Tag Archives: literature

715. Pettus Bridge, a fable

Leave a reply

Once upon a time, there was a lovely young woman. Unfortunately, she was black, enslaved, and living in Alabama. The year was 1815.

Her owner was just back from fighting beside Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. He was a hero.

His wife didn’t think so. She had been running the plantation all the time he was gone. She hadn’t enjoyed that, but she enjoyed having him home again even less. In bed, he was quick and crude, and after three weeks his wife moved into a different bedroom.

A week later, he found the lovely young black woman in the fields. He ordered her to take off her clothes and lie down on her back in the shade of a tree. Ten minutes later he was on his way again.

Nine months later, the woman gave birth to a beautiful daughter. Nineteen years later, the hero’s son caught the daughter in the fields and did the same thing to her that his father had done to her mother. Nine months later, another lovely black girl-child was born, but now things had changed.

The plantation was failing. The hero’s son had become too fat to chase women, even slave women, and too drunk most of the time to miss the chase. The plantation was sold, the slaves were broken up and scattered. The girl-child stayed with her mother a few years, then was sold to a plantation south of Birmingham. When she turned seventeen, she was sold to a brothel.

When she was twenty-four, she gave birth to twins — but not identicals. One she named Flo; it had been her mother’s name. The other she named Cécile, since the father had been a Frenchman. She thought so, anyway.

The blood of Cécile’s white father, and grandfather, and great grandfather were strong in her makeup. He nose was small, her skin was pale, She would be a great addition to the brothel when she grew up. Flo had inherited the other side of the genetic lottery.

Both would remain slaves. Both were black, Cécile’s white looks notwithstanding, since the doctrine of that day was the one drop of blood was all it took to make you black.

Little Cécile was a favorite of all the men who came to the brothel. When her head was only up to their elbows, she had already learned how to lean against them, smile up at them, and laugh like she didn’t have a care. She earned coins that way and she kept them hidden. She listened to what they talked about as they waited their turn upstairs, and she remembered. She stored everything away in her finely tuned mind and she planned. She learned about Birmingham, but more importantly she learned about Memphis from a traveler who came often. Soon she knew all the street names, where blacks lived, and where they didn’t.

When she was fifteen, she ran away. Two months later, she was in Memphis. Her name was Celia, now. Celia White, because she had a sense of humor. Her name was White, and she was white, because she was intelligent enough to know that that was the only way to survive. Her husband never knew. Her children never knew.

Celia had eight children. Every time a child was born, she was in mortal fear that the child would have dark skin and kinky hair, but it never happened. When one of Celia’s grandsons had a black appearing child, he beat his wife for her infidelity, since the child clearly could not be his. Celia said nothing.

When Celia was 53, her husband moved to Selma, Alabama. Within a year most of the children and grandchildren had followed. Now Celia was only seventeen miles from the town that held the brothel where she had been born. She said nothing.

Celia’s mother was emancipated in 1865, but Celia never contacted her.

Celia had emancipated herself already. While the others traded slavery for Jim Crow, Celia had made herself white. Her emancipation was real, and she had no intention of jeopardizing it.

Celia live to be 71. They buried her in Selma, in a cemetery that black folks couldn’t use — but she did.

She had eight children, forty-seven grandchildren, and one hundred six great-grandchildren. Most of them remained in and around Selma, and many went into law enforcement.

In 1965, Celia would have been 116 if she had lived that long. She never saw her mother again after she ran away from the brothel. She never saw her twin, Flo, either. For most of Celia’s life, Flo was alive and in the area, having children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, just like Celia, but they never met again.

On March 7, 1965 near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Celia’s great-grandchildren, thinking they were white, brutally attacked Flo’s great-grandchildren who knew that they were black and always would be.

Behold, America, clubbing itself to death over the myth of race.

714. The Soul of the Menhir

Leave a reply

Religion fascinates me. I had it, I lost it, and I have told that story too many times to repeat it here, but the fascination remains.

I invented a master religion in Jandrax, where Louis Dumezil wrote a compilation of all the things which religions have in common and called it the Monomythos. It was meant to end religious wars. It went through many revisions, after which religious wars were fought over which version was the correct one.

In A Fond Farewell to Dying Ram David Singh found his research impeded by those who believed in the Christian concept of a soul and by those who believed in the Hindu concept of atman.

That is the way I exercise my fascination. Whatever my personal opinion, I write about characters working out their destinies, guided by their own beliefs.

Of course, I nudge.

In the menhir series, menhirs are gates between worlds. (See post 710, January 28, 2026) How they are powered in the rest of the multiverse is not explained, but in the world of the menhir they are repositories of souls, and are fed by the ai (power) of the souls which are bound (enreithed) to them.

I’ll let my favorite priest, Dymal, explain further:

— <<  >> —

From Morning of the Gods . . .

Dymal paused outside the hedge and shook his head.

“Most improper,” he said and, looking at the direction the late afternoon shadows fell. He walked around to the eastern side of the thorngall hedge and pushed through. As Tidac and Cinnabar followed him, he said, “One always approaches a menhir from the direction of the rising sun.”

“We didn’t know.”

“Of course not. No harm was done. It’s just that you came in the window when you should have entered by the front door.”

Dymal stopped to survey the besh. It was rounded and lichen covered, a boulder perhaps a little under man height. He raised his hands and spoke a word, listened to the echo of his voice, then said, “Not a menhir, but certainly a stone of enreithment.”

Tidac was puzzled. His education should have included the details of menhir worship, but it had been cut short by Marquart’s death. Cinnabar knew even less, and said so.

Dymal accepted their ignorance with good grace and fell into a didactic mode of speech. “When one dies,” he said, “where does the soul go?”

“It is enreithed,” Tidac said.

“It hoovers above the body for a time,” Cinnabar said. “Then it sometimes goes into some object, or it just fades away.”

Dymal smiled as if his pupils had said something profound. A dozen years of teaching priest candidates had given him the skill of setting young ones at ease, and making the ignorant feel smarter than they were. “You are both half right and half wrong.” he said.

“No one knows where souls come from; the last great mystery is who you were before you were born. But once installed in a physical body, our soul, our essence, clings with such tenacity that not age, nor weakness, nor sorrow, nor torture can drive it out. Only death can free a soul, and in that terrible last moment it becomes abahara — bodiless. The word means disconnected, and there is no greater torment than that state.

“Thousands upon thousands of years ago, wise men discovered a way to attach those bodiless souls to inanimate stone, and give them rest. Over the millennia, as soul after soul comes to find rest in a single stone, those souls form a commingled whole — a gestalt soul, if you will. Thus a mere stone becomes a besh, as this one is.”

“But not a menhir?” Tidac asked.

“All menhirs are beshes, but not all beshes are menhirs. This one will never be more than it is. It is too far from where men now live. But in other places, as more and more souls are enreithed, the power of each soul — each soul’s ai — contributes to the ai of the besh. If this goes on long enough, the besh becomes a menhir gate, through which the powerful can pass from world to world.”

— <<  >> —

Thank you, Dymal. I’ll take over now.

Menhirs are gates between the worlds, but only in the world of the menhir are men so attached to them. They are every man’s or woman’s desired ending. Death is not particularly feared, if it is followed by enreithment and a commingling with all the souls who have gone before. However, it is much feared by travelers and soldiers, whose deaths may come too far from a menhir. They truly die. Their souls arise out of their bodies and hover in fear and agony. Over a few days they dissipate. It is the ultimate in loneliness, and those who endure it are called abahara.

But not ghosts. Once these abaharas are gone, they are gone. They do not return.

There is passage between living worlds by way of the menhirs, for those who have the personal power to compel them. There is passage into the menhirs, once and forever at death. The eternal loneliness is averted, but individual identity is lost.

There is no land of the dead for the abaharas to return from. The unenreithed are simply dead, irrevocably and eternally.

It’s a tough world. I wrote it, I enjoy visiting and watching my word-people working out their destinies, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

— <<  >> —

BACK IN POST 695 BIRTH OF A SERIES I gave my best estimate of publication dates for the Menhir series. That has been revised to:

The Morning of the Gods

May 27, 2026

Firedrake

July 15, 2026

The Lost Get

September 2, 2027

Whitethorn

October 21, 2026

The Scourge of Heaven

December 9, 2026

713. You and Me

1 Reply

 

About sixty-eight years ago I was sitting in a fourth or fifth grade classroom, learning that I should always say, “You and I,” and that I was never supposed to say “Me and you”. I didn’t know that right there in small town Oklahoma I was being given a double-whammy of British imperialism and English politeness.

I did know that every child was going to continue saying “me and you” outside the classroom, and I suspected that the teacher probably would too. Adults were always full of advice they didn’t follow themselves.

I also knew that the adults in my little town didn’t talk like the people on television, and certainly didn’t speak the same English that I was finding in all those books from the county library.

I’m not talking about accent. Books are silent. Whatever was written in them, echoed in my head in the same Okie accent that I spoke. Even the local newsman on KTUL Tulsa, who used different words in different places than the people in my town, did so in the same Okie accent.

The teacher said, “Never say me and you. Always say you and I.” The implication was, memorize it and don’t ask any questions.

It wasn’t even grammatical. Let’s assume that we keep the other person first and ourselves second — it is “you and I” if we are using it as subject, and “you and me” if we are using it as an object. They didn’t teach us that.

Putting the person spoken to before the speaker didn’t really have anything to do with grammar. It existed because America grew out of British culture, before the rest of the world arrived. Britain was a stratified society in which you kept your head down unless you were top dog.

Don’t step in front of your betters. Don’t complain if they cut in line. Don’t speak until spoken to. And put your betters first in the sentence.

Any stratified society is dangerous, because your place in the system is never permanent or safe. If you work hard enough, you can rise — but if you slack off, you will fall.

That’s for the upper strata. If you are too far down, you had better plan to stay there, or your “betters” will make you wish you had. We are referring to Brits in Britain, high caste Hindus interacting with low caste Hindus in India, or anybody White in the era of my childhood, anywhere near the South, talking to anybody Black.

Until recently, and maybe still, that also included women trying to interact with men.

The English politeness — you and me, but never me and you — is not a matter of Mary Poppins sweetness and light. It is a word to the wise. Never assert your own value in a stratified society. Never put yourself first. Those above you will slap you down if you do.

— << >> —

In that class, I was actually being taught that grammar (in the larger sense of rules of language, both acknowledged and hidden) is what language is all about. It would be years later that I realized that an equally compelling case could be made for the idea that usage is what language is all about. Finally I came to realize that it is, and probably always will be, a struggle between those two positions.

To be short and snarky, usage is what people say, and grammar is what intellectuals tell people that they should have said.

So who cares? You do, probably, if you are or want to be a writer.

Language is always changing, and one advantage of being seventy-eight and being a writer is that I have lived long enough to see it happen. A disadvantage (from the same viewpoint) is that language always seems to move toward the more simple, at the expense of the measured, the stately, and the beautiful.

I hate it. I throw metaphorical bricks at my TV screen every evening because of the way the characters are talking.

Nevertheless, the changes are real. They reflect the language people actually speak. They make up the language you readers will expect to read.

— << >> —

When I was about fourteen, I knew I wanted to go to college, and I knew that the people there were not going to speak small town Okie. I got an authoritative book of grammar, Strunk and White, and made it part of my thinking. (It didn’t help my accent, but that’s another post.)

Even then, I didn’t buy into S&W as if it were the word of God, and over the years I have found that much of their advice was not helpful. No problem. I have never read a book without muttering, “Yeah, maybe?”, from time to time under my breath.

I know now that sentence fragments are as legitimate as sentences, and are frequently a great deal more expressive. Strunk or White would slap my knuckles for that, but who cares.

Are you a writer, or a would-be writer? I can’t imagine you coming this far into this post if you aren’t. There is a great variety of English out there. Pick and choose. Make it your own. Decide who your audience is, and how far you want to go toward sounding like them.

Especially,  be prepared for more changes in the future. Like it or not, change is coming.

710. Star Gates and Menhirs

Leave a reply

Stonehenge: the most famous menhir.

Star gates have been around a long time, often under other names. They have given us passage to elsewhere in science fiction and in fantasy for decades. They seem to work equally well in either genre.

Is a star gate science fiction or fantasy? The term seems to imply science fiction and looks a bit like a wormhole. The concept of a gate to elsewhere, however, could be either or both.

The first time I saw the term was in the title of Andre Norton’s 1958 novel called Star Gate. It was science fiction, but with some magic thrown in. I saw it next as the title of a theatrical movie Stargate in 1994, which had nothing in common with the Norton novel but the title. That movie spun off the television series which everybody remembers. It ran from 1997 to 2007, then spawned numerous additional spinoffs. You can find it on re-run channels any week.

I can’t speak authoritatively of the TV series. Military fiction isn’t in my wheelhouse so I rarely watched it, but I assume the places they were sent to were in our physical universe. That would make it science fiction.

Let’s drop the prefix star and continue.

Heinlein used a teleportation gate to other planets as the basis for his novel Tunnel in the Sky. Gordon Dickson used such a gate in Time to Teleport (a pretty good novel with a lousy title). It’s a fairly common device for authors who don’t feel like inventing a faster than light drive to get their characters to some extrasolar planet.

Also still within science fiction are alternate universes. Sometimes a whole novel takes place in one such alternate without any travel between them. More often, characters from one universe travel to one or more other alternate universes. Sometimes they go in time-space vehicles (example: Heinlein’s Number of the Beast). Sometimes they travel via a gate-like device that sends them directly to their destination.

Andre Norton used such a device in her 1963 novel Witch World to get Simon Tregarth from prosaic Earth to a magical world. Norton would preside over her Witch World as she and a few others spun off novels and short stories for forty years. She referred to the device that transported Tregarth as the Siege Perilous, referring to Arthurian legend, but essentially it was just another gate.

Was Norton’s Siege Perilous scientific or magical? Who knows? Who cares? If you are going in a book to a wonderful place, what difference if you get there by a space ship or you step through a magical wardrobe?

— << >> —

Now, a slight detour. Some time in the mid-sixties I stumbled upon a book. I can’t tell you the title or the author, but if you are a reader you will understand why I can’t remember them all. It explained that for thousands of years there was a culture of menhir builders who left megalithic monuments across Europe and the Middle East. No one knows why these menhirs were built. We now have some notion of by whom, but that wasn’t known when the book was written. It was all a big mystery.

I was intrigued by what I had read. I fantasized about the menhir builders. I wrote an unremarkable short story, then tossed it. Then I more or less forgot about menhirs for a decade, but they didn’t go away.

Years later, I dreamed up this medieval kid whose father was killed, but who didn’t want to seek revenge. I told you about his origin last October fifth.

In 1976 I began to tell his story, and that led me to build a world for him to occupy. Those fascinating menhirs came crawling up from memory and insisted that they become the center of his world. In fact, his world came to be called the World of the Menhir, and I plan to publish the first five novels this year.

The boy’s name was Tidac. I already knew that five minutes after he crawled into my brain in 1972. He had been introduced to me during a seance with a Ouija board in Oklahoma City in 1965. The board (or the lovely and imaginative young lady who seemed to be the one manipulating it) said that I was reincarnated from a Norman prince named Tidac. Who was I to argue with a lovely young lady?

When Tidac crawled out of Beowulf in 1972, I knew him immediately and I knew why he didn’t want to take revenge for his father’s death. He wanted freedom from his father’s shadow. I had wanted my freedom for similar reasons, only a few years earlier.

That’s not coincidence; that’s how a writer’s mind works.

707. A New Start

Leave a reply

A New Start

It is already January fourteenth, but the year is still new and the re-start of A Writing Life is still fairly new. It’s time to present something special.

On April 17, 2019 I was trying to write a review of a novel. I remembered the book clearly but didn’t remember enough details, and I needed to explain why I was going to postpone writing about it. What I wrote then does more to tell why I created this blog than anything else I have written.

— << >> —

I have written quite a few books over the years, but it is never enough. Writing books is just too much fun.

The fact is, reading a book is ten times better than watching a movie, but writing a book is fifty times better than reading one. And takes fifty times as long.

Besides the hundred thousand words a modern novel demands, there are the other hundreds of thousands of words you have to go through while getting to the right ones. And there are all those books you have to burrow through looking for just the right bit of information or inspiration to help you understand how that next chapter is supposed to come out.

Just reading a book for fun gets lost somewhere. I read the things I need to read, and late in the evening I read comfort books, like the thirtieth Nero Wolfe, which isn’t that different from the other twenty-nine.

It wasn’t always that way.

— << >> —

I was an only child on a farm in the fifties. We had one black and white TV that got two channels, which my parents watched in the evenings while I read. Of course I became a reader; what else was there to do? From the time I discovered the county library, there was no time I didn’t have a stack of books waiting for my attention.

But I didn’t talk about it.

My mother read occasional romance novels but she didn’t talk about it. My dad read the Bible, but he didn’t talk about it. The habit started early.

I read books about hunting and outdoor life. I already lived outdoors, but on a tractor. I never hunted, barely fished, and I had never seen a tent. My outdoors wasn’t for play, it was for work, and that wasn’t enough to satisfy me.

Looking back, I know that the place I lived as a boy was rather lovely, in a muted sort of way. It was farm country, lightly populated by humans, but with plenty of birds, and occasional coyotes and possums.

Nevertheless, every patch of ground was either under the plow or turned into grazing land. There was nothing wild. I wanted forests and streams, fish and game, and real snow, along with the freedom to wander through them.

That was all available in books, along with a thousand other adventures to be found all over the globe.

My fellow students in my little school read what they had to read — but nobody talked about it. Nobody read science fiction. Nobody wanted to know any more about science than they were required to know. I was reading and studying continuously, preparing to head for college to be a scientist — but I didn’t talk about it, because no one wanted to know.

When I got to college, one of my roommates was a science fiction fan. We talked about it, but only a little. By then, my habit of silence was pretty well set.

A lifetime later I started this blog. For the first time I got to really talk about the books I love and why I love them. Like right here, right now, talking to you, telling you why I had to postpone a review.

Hi. You see, there was this book called The Road to Corlay . . .

— << >> —

I began A Writing Life in support of an upcoming novel, but it quickly evolved into something larger. It became a how-to, and a “How I did it”, and a “What I’ve learned about how others did it.”

Many of those posts, somewhat modified, are gathered together now in a pair of books for writers called Learning from the Masters (that would be Heinlein, Clarke, et al, not me bragging about myself) and So You Want to Write Science Fiction. Because 2026 will be fully occupied with the Menhir series, they are scheduled for release in 2027. Tentative dates are:

Learning from the Masters

March 17, 2027

and

So You Want to Write Science Fiction

July 7, 2027

705. The Year That Never Ends

Leave a reply

The Year That Never Ends

Once upon a time, in tenth grade, they force-fed me Dickens in the form of Great Expectations. No one should do that to a teenager. It put me off of Dickens for thirty years.

Then I discovered A Christmas Carol, and Dickens rose to the top of my pantheon. I loved the book. I loved the other four Christmas books he wrote in subsequent years. I loved the movies made from the book.

I wanted to write the next great Christmas tale. (Don’t we all?) Instead I wrote a novel that was half Dickensian and half dystopian. It centered around the Clock That Ate Time and the Great Babbage, but it did take place in a variant Dickensian London.

The immediate call to write was both visual and visceral. It was a scene from the musical Scrooge, drawn from the book and repeated in most movie adaptations. Bob Cratchit’s children are waiting for him to finish work on Christmas Eve while staring through the window of a toy shop. And what a toy shop, filled to the rafters with all the kinds of toys that rich Victorian children might be given, but which were forever out of reach of poor children like Tiny Tim and his sister. There were even mechanical wonders like the clockwork strongman who suspends himself horizontally using only one hand.

Who was the man who ran the shop? He was nothing in the story that Dickens told, but I wanted to know. Who built the mechanical man? I wanted to know. What possessed the owner to set up a shop in the poorest part of London, where none of the children staring into his windows would ever have a chance to buy his wares? I wanted to know that, too.

Yes, writers are like that. They are likely to stare at a potted rose and wonder what kind of soil is in the pot.

The novel I wrote is called Like Clockwork. The toyshop is there. It is also called Like Clockwork, and it is overfilled with mechanical wonders all created by the man who runs it. His name is Snap. He is the man who built the Clock That Killed Time, although he has lost all memory of building it. He, and everyone else in his pocket London, will live forever — but at a cost. Every Midwinter Midnight, the citizens gather around the Great Clock to watch the year 1850 end — then begin again, invariant forever.

What follows is the Prolog to Like Clockwork, in the form of a note written by Snap’s wife, Pilar of the Sorrows, as the old year closes.

— << >> —

Prolog. (Or is it an epilog?)

“Tonight Snap has gone down to the Clock for Midwinter Midnight. In just a few minutes, the reversion will occur and I will forget writing this note. It will be midnight of January first, 1850. Not next year, nor last year, but the only year there is.

“It isn’t a bad year and it isn’t a particularly good year, but if it is to be my only year, I want more.”

Pilar laid down her pen and listened, straining to hear the song they always sang at midnight:

The year that ends, but never ends,

That ‘ere again unfolds,

We live that year forever and

We never shall grow old

It was probably her imagination. Surely voices could not be heard over such a distance. She rose to move closer to a window and as she did the note she had written ceased to be. All her memories of the past twelve months ceased to be. Her body sloughed off a year of age and it was January first of the last-this-next-only year.

Again.

— << >> —

You’ll get a chance to read Like Clockwork, but not for a while. There is strategy and pacing in how I intend to release my novels, and that grand plan calls for Like Clockwork to be published no sooner than 2028.

This isn’t intended as a mean tease; its just that I wanted to acknowledge Midwinter Midnight as, unlike Snap’s world, 2025 rolls over into 2026.

702. Reaching Cyan

Leave a reply

Reaching Cyan

The year was 2086, the place, half way to Procyon. Stephan Andrax wrote in the log of the Starship Darwin . . .

There are two chronometers on the bulkhead. One forges forward at the speed of Everyday, ticking off seconds and minutes and hours and days that make sense to the body and soul. The other races. Seconds flitter by. A new day is born every three hours and twenty-two minutes. Einstein told us this would happen, a century and a half ago; when an object approaches the speed of light, time slows down.

Beside the chronometers is a viewport and beyond it are Dopplered stars which sweep through my field of vision as the ship spins. We are nearly six years into our journey. Halfway through our journey. Yet, for me, only a year and a half have passed.

And through all the years and hours of our journey, the smaller, fleeter chronometer will rush ahead at Earthtime while our time is slowed. All those I knew and loved, except my companions here on the Darwin, are aging seven times faster than I am. When we return, my agemates could be my parents, and my parents will be dead.

The mind perceives what the heart cannot comprehend.

— << >> —

Obviously, one of the joys of writing near-future extra-solar exploration is dealing with the delicious complexities that come from working in a relativistic universe. Thank you Albert Einstein.

The novel Cyan opens with the words of Stephan Andrax, but he will not be the main character. He is the great great (I never figured out how many greats) grandfather of Jan Andrax, who gave his name to the novel Jandrax. I wanted an obvious connection between that novel and its sequel (prequel?), but I kept Stephan mostly in the background by making him the captain of the Darwin.

Imagine that you are planning a ten person expedition to an unknown extra-solar planet. Assume a giant starship, designed for travel only in space, and a landing craft to carry the explorers down to the surface. That seems like how things would actually be arranged. What would happen if all the explorers were killed while going about their business? What if the landing craft were damaged beyond repair leaving everyone marooned on-planet?

Contingencies are what planning is all about. If everyone on the ground were killed or stranded, the knowledge obtained up to that point would still need to be transported back to Earth, so the planners of the Procyon expedition arranged to always have one crew member on board the Darwin. They selected an astrophysicist who would be best positioned to study Procyon’s system of planets by staying in orbit, and made him Captain. He would stay with the ship, just like one astronaut stayed in the CSM while two others descended to the surface of the moon in the Apollo program. That made Stephan important but mostly off camera, which is just what I wanted.

The groundside leader was the character I chose be our eyes for most of the action. Stephan Andrax was Captain in space; Keir Delacroix was “captain” on the ground.

Everyone except Keir had one or more Ph. D.s and was at the top of his or her field. Keir was also highly intelligent, perhaps at the next level down, but his skills came from a life spent in the outback of Australia. He was a rarity on overcrowded Earth, a man who had spent his time in one of the few places that was still wild. Each other crew member had a scientific specialty to bring to the study of Cyan. Keir was there to keep them all alive.

I chose the name Keir Delacroix in tribute to the actor Keir Dullea who argued with the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Here is the list of the Darwin‘s crew, alphabetically, with their specialties and their alternate fields of knowledge.

Stephan Andrax    captain (spaceside) – astrophysicist
Debra Bruner        microbiologist – astronomer – medic
Petra Crowley       geologist – soils scientist
Keir Delacroix       groundside crew leader – generalist
Viki Johanssen      anthropologist – paleontologist
Gus Leinhoff         zoologist – biochemist – medic
Leia Polanyi          paleontologist – geologist
Ramananda Rao  meteorologist – cartographer – geologist
Tasmeen Rao       first officer (spaceside) – pilot (starship and landing craft) –  engineer
Uke Tomiki           botanist – biochemist – medic

— << >> —

I have a lot of things to do in this rejuvenated version of A Writing Life, largely having to do with upcoming releases, but I won’t forget Cyan. I will return to talk about how it came to be, perhaps once a month. You can get a jump on all that by typing Syd Logsdon Cyan into Amazon and reading it now.

next week there will be Christmas posts on Tuesday and Thursday

701. Approaching Cyan

Leave a reply

Approaching Cyan

Cyan is the name of a novel and the name of a planet.

I’ve been writing science fiction for fifty years, but I’ve been reading it even longer. When I began, NASA didn’t exist and the word astronaut hadn’t been coined. I was ten years old.

In the science fiction novels that filled my childhood, I rode on a thousand spaceships or starships to explore a thousand planets, but there was one novel I could never find. I never read of the discovery, exploration, and colonization of a planet — all the phases of what would actually occur — under one cover.

I really wanted to read that book. Eventually, I had to write it myself.

The kind of science fiction I prefer — and write — is based on reality, humanity, and scientific accuracy. The key question I continually ask myself is, what is likely to actually happen when the day comes. And the day that interests me most is something past tomorrow, but not too far past.

I can imagine 2050, but it really doesn’t interest me. It will look too much like today. I prefer to look forward a hundred years or so.

The novel Cyan opens in 2086, which seems a contradiction to what I just said, but I began writing it about 1980. It just took a long time to complete.

I also had to keep changing the year dates on what I was writing. Real world manned space exploration had slowed to a crawl. Who could have predicted in 1972 when the last astronaut left the moon, that fifty-three years later no more humans would have gone beyond low Earth orbit? Certainly no science fiction writer would choose to imagine that.

So what planet would I want to colonize? Mars? Of course not. Half the fun of science fiction is world building, and Mars is far too well known to be of interest. It would have to be a planet around another star, and if it was to be colonized in the next hundred years or so, it would have to be nearby, at least in stellar terms.

Actually, any extra-solar colonization in the next hundred years requires a major stretch of the imagination, but science fiction writers are in the imagination business.

So what are out near neighbors in the galaxy? Here is a list:

Sol, our sun, as a starting place.

Alpha Centauri, about 4.3 light years away.

Sirius, about 8.6 light years away.

Epsilon Eridani, about 10.5 light years away.

Procyon, about 11.4 light years away.

Epsilon Indi, about 11.8 light years away.

Tau Ceti, also about 11.8 light years away, in another direction.

Other than specks and oddballs, that is the full list of star systems within five parsecs of us. I will add two more, just beyond five parsecs, because they were part of Gordon Dickson’s writings in his Dorsai novels. You’ve read them, right?

Formalhaut, about 16.6 light years away.

Altair, about 16.7 light years away.

— << >> —

Click here (or type in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars ) for a Wikipedia article that will list 56 of the nearest stars, including some very small ones, and tell you more than you ever wanted to know about them.

— << >> —

Jandrax, my first published novel, was a lost colony story. The FTL ship Lydia malfunctioned during a jump, stranding colonists and crew so far out that they would never return.

The novel Cyan would be a prequel, taking  place hundreds of years earlier in the same imagined universe. It was intended from the first to be one of a group of novels, so I wasn’t just choosing a star and planet for a single story, but deciding what to do with the whole nearby neighborhood.

It seemed during my youth that every author of a novel about early extra-solar exploration landed on Alpha Centauri. I didn’t want that, so I made the planets of that star system barely habitable. Alpha Centauri lives in the backstory, but I don’t plan a novel about it.

Sirius, on the other hand, is 23 times as luminous as the sun. It struck me as a perfect place to put a colony of humans who were quite satisfied to live in space habitats, with no desire to take up planetary life. That became the setting for Dreamsinger, a novel which I have been sparring with for several years now. I offer no predictions about when it will be completed.

As the novel Cyan opens, limited colonization of the planet Cinder, around Alpha Centauri B, is underway. Explorers have not yet returned from Sirius. When they do, half way through Cyan, they will tell of a system unfit for colonization. Later, a group of dissidents will prove them wrong, leading to Dreamsinger.

There are three starships waiting to leave Earth. One is the Darwin, scheduled for Procyon and the as yet unknown planet Cyan. The other two will head out to Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti where they find prime, Earth-like planets.

Writing a story about the exploration and colonization of a prime planet would be a dead end for me. Something not related to the actual colonization would be needed to jazz up the story, and that was exactly what I was trying to avoid.

Cyan, on the other had, had plenty of challenges on its own. It was — and was designed to be — a place to tell a story about how exploration and colonization might actually take place.

I’ll tell you more about Cyan next week, but if you don’t feel like waiting, just go to Amazon and type in Syd Logsdon Cyan and you can buy the novel today, as an ebook or as print on demand.

more about Cyan next week

696. Then Life Happened

Leave a reply

Then Life Happened . . .

Donald Maass, noted author and literary agent, said that there are many authors who have “both published and perished”, referencing the publish-or-perish dilemma facing young academics.

In 1984 I was one of those authors.

I had been writing full time for about eight years. Just looking at the dates you would say nine years, but I had taken a 15 month hiatus from writing to become Stanislaus County Red Cross Director, a job of massive satisfaction and hair-pulling frustration.

My third novel publication, Todesgesanga, came in 1984. It was a German translation and renaming of A Fond Farewell to Dying. Todesgesanga means Death Song, which I admit is a more accessible title.

Counting a cover novella in Galaxy in 1978, Todesgesanga was my fourth publication, all by major magazines or publishers. David Hartwell was my agent. If you don’t remember him, he was top notch. He was reading everything I sent him.

Life was good, on the surface, but my two ongoing novels were both fighting back.

Cyan was a bigger SF novel than I had yet attempted. The world building was huge, but by 1984 that part was finished and the novel was well underway. My ten explorers had made the near lightspeed journey to the eponymous planet and had completed their year of exploration. They had returned to a much changed Earth where I provided about 30,000 words of near disaster to disrupt their lives before they returned to Cyan with colonists. They were saved on Earth by the villain of the piece, Salomon Curran, but now that they were all back on Cyan, Curran’s presence had become a problem I couldn’t solve.

Curran was so huge to the story, and such a bastard that he would dominate the rest of the novel if I let him. Cyan would become about Curran instead of being about the colonization process, and I couldn’t have that. I finally killed him off, summarily, and submitted to novel to David Hartwell. He rejected it, and he should have. It wasn’t finished; Curran had to die a different way. But how?

I was alternately writing in Cyan and in The Menhir Series. That work was even bigger in concept. I could write scenes in that world all day long, but which scenes? I still have boxes of lovely, useless text that I wrote before I knew what it was that I needed to write.

I was in the middle of world building, and character building, and arms and armor building, and city building, and religion building, and magic building. Even horse-replacement building. I needed all that to write the right words, but writing words was the way to discover all of that. Some of one led to some of the other, which led to some of the first, which led to . . .

Looking back now, I see that I was doing it all correctly. I just didn’t have a clue how long it was going to take.

Basically, my problem was that I wasn’t making a living.

In those days novelists were given relatively small advances against earnings. If the author’s percentage of the publisher’s earnings exceeded his advance, he got paid more. If he had a best seller, he got paid a reasonable amount, and his next book got a larger advance. Several good sellers in a row, and an author could eat, sleep, and pay his rent. Several best sellers in a row and he would be well off.

That rarely happened. The norm was that a book by a non-best-selling author would never pay back the advance. The authors of those books had both published and perished.

For one cover novella, two novels, and a foreign reprint, I made about $10,000. That is for eight years work. Even in 1970s dollars, I could have made more digging ditches, or on welfare.

Something was going to have to change.

— << >> —

But not right now. Next week we have to talk about Trump again. (Sorry!) Then comes Thanksgiving, which will call out two special posts not related to writing. Our present conversation will continue on December third.

695. The Birth of a Series

Leave a reply

We interrupt this post . . .

     Today’s post is still here, a few paragraphs down. However, last night Prop 50 passed in California, and I have to address that first.

     Most Trump haters and most Democrats are celebrating. I am not, even though I am as anti-Trump as anybody. I understand the logic of the proposition. I understand why so many supported it. If it helps move Trump out of power, great. But . . .

     Proposition 50 is a blatant gerrymandering of California. It is Trump’s evil, perpetrated by his opponents. It disenfranchises about one-third of California voters.

     When those who oppose Trump look for moral leaders in the days to come, where will they find them? Not among California Democrats.

Now back to the post in progress…

This is a rune board, a device for divination in the World of the Menhir.

The Birth of a Series

For me, the road to becoming a writer was convoluted, largely because becoming a writer was never my goal.

I wrote well, including snatches of fiction that never went anywhere. I wrote college papers by the dozen and my first masters thesis, without ever considering being a novelist. That would take five more years. I’ll have to zip through those years quickly to avoid boring you.

In 1969 I was a senior in college. In the first draft lottery my number was 41. That would mean a letter from Uncle Sam saying, “Greetings, Boy, you are now in the Army.” That notice would come five minutes after I graduated, so I joined the Navy on a delay program.

I spent the next four years as head surgical tech in the dental service of the Camp Pendleton Naval Hospital. I became head tech almost immediately on arrival because I was the only enlisted man with a college education.

I stood across from the oral surgeon handling the suction and handing him instruments as we extracted about a thousand impacted wisdom teeth. (That’s a calculation, but not an exaggeration.) We were getting Camp Pendleton marine recruits ready to go to Viet Nam, where wisdom teeth would be the least of their worries.

After nearly four years of that, the Navy let me go three months early so I could go back to school for a masters degree. The war was winding down and the military was cutting back, so they were happy to see me go.

One thing happened during those four Navy years that would change my life. I just didn’t know it at the time.

My wife worked at the base library, and early on she took a reference librarian class at a local college. It was a night class, so I went along with her when I could. One night in the stacks, with nothing to do but watch her do her homework, I took down a copy of Beowulf and thumbed through it. One short phrase jumped out at me . . .

— all that lonely winter —

. . . and I had a vision of a young boy, sitting at an open wind hole, high in a stone tower. It was quite visual, and it came with a full understanding of his plight. The vision had nothing to do with Beowulf, beyond being vaguely medieval. Beowulf was just the trigger.

The boy was an orphan. His father was a knight who had been killed in battle. The tower was part of the castle belonging to the uncle who had taken him in, and the boy was destined to become a pawn to his uncle’s plans. He would to be raised as a warrior with only one task, to kill the knight who had killed his father.

That man was his uncle’s primary enemy. The boy was a means to remove him, with no repercussions against his uncle. But the boy didn’t want to kill anyone. He only wanted to live his life in his own way, and that wasn’t going to happen.

The next day I went to work as usual. In the afternoon, we had a patient cancellation, so I took that hour to write the opening chapter of a novel that would tell the boy’s story.

That was nothing new for me. I had written many first chapters of novels to nowhere when I was younger, but this one felt different. I wasn’t a writer then, and had no plans to become one, but this felt like the start of real story. The year was probably early 1972.

Three years later I sat down and actually wrote a novel. It went unpublished, as it should have. I a wrote another one — Jandrax — that was published. Then I pulled out the twenty hand written pages about the boy in the tower, typed them fresh, and kept going. By the time I had written a manuscript as long as Jandrax, the story was just getting started. I knew I wasn’t ready yet to write the rest, so I wrote another science fiction novel instead, A Fond Farewell to Dying, which was published in 1981.

Time passed. Lots and lots of time.

On Jun 9, 2021, I finished the boy’s story. Actually, he turned out to be a great deal more than just a boy. I made a note to myself that said, “Finally, after 49 years, I am satisfied.”

The result was one very large novel, or a series of five moderately short ones. It would work either way. I plan to release it through most of next year. Overall, it will be called The Menhir Series. Tentative dates are:

Let me interrupt. This was posted on November 5, 2025. The dates then given will not be met and have been removed. As I said at that time, things are fluid.

My new best estimate of publication dates, as of Dec. 3, 2025, are:

The Morning of the Gods

May 27, 2026

Firedrake

July 15, 2026

The Lost Get

September 2, 2027

Whitethorn

October 21, 2026

The Scourge of Heaven

December 9, 2026

Caveat — everything is still fluid in this relaunch of A Writing Life. These are the new projected dates, but much of what I will have to do to make them happen is new to me. Stick with me and I will explain things as I learn them, just like I did while Cyan was being prepared for publication.