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230. Blackie Ryan

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Blackie Ryan began as a priest and worked his way up the ladder to Arch-bishop while solving crime. Unlikely? What does that have to do with whether a series if fun to read?

Every time I sit back and think about Father Andrew Greeley books, I am amazed that I like them. They are so lame in so many ways, but every time I open one up and begin reading, I am immediately hooked. I wish I knew how he does that.

Father Blackie Ryan is aware of Father Brown. In Blackie Ryan’s “real” world, Father Brown is a fictional character. It’s charming to hear an imaginary person, living in an imaginary world, refer to another imaginary person, living in a different imaginary world, as if the former were real and the latter were fictional. 

I have to admit to a fascination with Catholicism. I grew up as a Southern Baptist, where I was taught that the Devil twisted the word of God in the early days after Christ’s resurrection, and spawned the Catholic Church. When I became an unbeliever, that became moot, but I think there is still a subconscious fascination with the forbidden driving my feelings.

Certainly, if I were to go shopping for a religion, I would look for something like Greeley’s All Dogs Go to Heaven version of Catholicism. I would steer clear of Chesterton’s harsher version. In Father Ryan’s world, everything will come out well in the cosmic long run, even if half the characters in any given novel end up dead. In Father Brown’s world, evil comes oozing under the door like black smoke.

It must be nice to know that everything will come out right in the end, no matter how many bad things happen along the way. For the reader, it makes the Blackie Ryan novels the literary equivalent of comfort food. I suspect that accounts for a good deal of their popularity.

Sex probably accounts for another share of their popularity. It seems odd that a series by a priest and about a priest has more sex in it than a secular thriller. I don’t intend to engage in long distance psychoanalysis, but the driving force of priestly frustration can’t be completely discounted. If all you can do about sex is think about it, you might as well write novels.

Probably the most irritating quirk in Greeley’s style is his overuse of foreshadowing. It seems sometimes that everything that is going to happen get’s a preemptive comment. If I had only known . . ., If she had only told me . . ., I should have realized . . .. These are key, repeated phrases in Greeley’s way of telling his stories. They match up with the way Ryan solves crimes through intuition. His subconscious sees the answer, and his conscious mind gets glimpses of it which fade frustratingly away. Eventually, all becomes clear, the elevator door stays open (that is Greeley’s conceit, not mine) and the crime is solved. Just in time. Or just too late, depending on how Greeley chooses to  spin it.

All this makes it sound as if I don’t like Greeley’s writing, but then why am I talking about him? Hmmm. I”ll have to think about that while I’m reading Rites of Spring for the tenth time.

Raven’s Run 20

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Raven’s hair was free and streaming back and she seemed to be having the time of her life. I know I was.

I showed her how to steer and after a while I gave her the chance to practice. She attacked the task ferociously, and after half an hour she was beginning to develop a fine and delicate touch.

I tried to lead her into talking more about her family, but she avoided the subject. She did not seem secretive so much as she seemed uncomfortable, as if she didn’t want to think about them. Until I mentioned siblings. 

“Brothers, no; but I have a sister. Daddy’s favorite. The kind of girl who can do no wrong. Never gets in trouble. Never gets less than an A in school. Always the best at everything she does. She’s really great!”

Her voice was heavy with sarcasm. I said, “Older or younger?”

“Younger. Eight years younger than me. She’s an ice skater. She’ll be in the Olympics someday, if she doesn’t break her leg or something.”

I smiled at the venom in Raven’s voice, and asked, “What’s her name?”

“Pilar. You know, after the Virgin Mary, the first pillar of the Church.”

I laughed and Raven looked daggers at me. I said, “Even her name is perfect.”

“Exactly!”

“I watch ice skating sometimes, but I have never heard of her.”

“Do you go to the meets or just watch on TV?”

“TV.”

“A big meet will have a bunch of skaters, but the networks only show four or five of them. They shoot a lot of footage, then after the meet is over they splice together what they need. When you see it on television, it looks as if they just happened to film the winners. If someone makes an unexpectedly good showing, they go back to stock footage from previous years so that it looks as if they knew all along that she was going to be a winner.”

“How long has Pilar been the family favorite?”

“Since forever!”

When I had first fished Raven out of the water, she had spoken standard English. Now that she was becoming relaxed with me, her schoolyard Chicano-English mannerisms were beginning to creep out. She asked, “How about you?”

“I have a sister, and an older brother that I thought was perfect. Donal, was his name; he was much older so we didn’t compete. I haven’t seen him in years.”

“Why?”

“He left home when I was nine. Just disappeared. I never knew where he went or why. Maybe my parents did, but they never said. He used to fight with my dad all the time.”

“Boy, I can relate to that!”

*****

At least ten years before I wrote Raven’s Run, I wrote the first sixty or so pages of a novel called Eden Lake. The names were different, but the main character had a father who had run away to Canada after causing the drunk driving accident in which his wife was killed. The son in Eden Lake was saddled with raising his younger sister, an event that led to mutual alienation.

Ian is a different character, but I grafted the Eden Lake backstory onto him, complete with estranged sister, and added Donal. All this was to provide plots for future novels should Ian have become a series character. more tomorrow

229. Travis McGee’s Women

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John D. MacDonald, who wrote the Travis McGee books, had a schtick he loved and did very well. McGee would make a meaningful aside, through internal monolog, of some event that advanced the story and put it in context. His musing about the plate spinner in Dress Her In Indigo was one of his best.

Here is a decidedly lesser instance, written for this post by me, not by J. D. McD.:

I knew a man who had a yard full of stray cats. He fed them, petted them, and adored them. At first he named them, but he kept losing them to coyotes, to hawks, or to automobiles. After a while, he could no longer remember his first ones; they had all become interchangeable. He still adored them, but he stopped missing them when they went away.

I gave you this, instead of quoting MacDonald himself, because it encapsulates the problem of women in men’s adventure fiction. If you want to see MacDonald’s writing, go to wikiquote. If reading those selections doesn’t send you scampering to the used book store, nothing will.

Make no mistake, women are a problem in books for men. Their treatment is a balancing act. They have to be there, they have to be sexy, and there has to be sex. It isn’t a genre for eunuchs.

Of course, there are fully sexist writers who have no problem with women. They parade them, penetrate them, then shoot them. I acknowledge that these writers exist, but they don’t exist in my world, and that is all I have to say about them.

At the other end of the continuum are the characters who are married or seem relatively sexless. Most of them are found in puzzle mysteries, where the protagonist’s relationship to those around him is primarily cerebral. Holmes is the prototype. Bony, the half-aborigine outback detective who is one of my current favorites, is married to a woman who is never seen. His relationship to the sexually attractive women he deals with is always avuncular.

For the rest of the genre, there have to be beautiful women and the hero has to have a sexual relationship with them, whether consummated or not. In keeping with the fast paced nature of such writing, there are likely to be more than one woman per book. Possibly several.

If the hero is a series character with say, twenty-one books, and he romances (heavily or lightly) two or three women per book, how can he keep track? And how can book twenty-one show him as anything but shallow and jaded? That’s the problem for the writer – and for the reader as well, if he reads multiple books from the series.

Romantic literature is about finding the one. Men’s adventure books, whether thriller, mystery, or spy novel, are partly about finding the one for right now. That’s a major difference in tone.

John D. MacDonald handled the balancing act quite well with Travis McGee. J. D. McD. was a methodical writer. Before he signed a contract to do the series, he wrote the first two McGee novels to see if he could live with the character. He tried to make sure that he had disposed of each novel’s woman by the last page. He (spoiler alert) killed off McGee’s first, at the end of The Deep Blue Goodbye. It wasn’t always that lethal, although it often was. Others left in other ways. Some got married (not to McGee), some went back to their husbands, or to whatever life they had temporarily escaped from. The one notable woman who stayed over into the following book was killed in the opening chapters, setting up a revenge motive. (see 49. The Green Ripper)

When McGee was with his women, he was protective, but distant, caring but manipulative; he was self-centered and self-serving. A self possessed loner with deep wounds, well hidden, would be the romantic cliche. Women loved him. At least the fictional women in his books did. A glance at Goodreads reviews will show that women readers weren’t always so enamored.

You could fantasize being him, but you wouldn’t want your real-life sister to meet up with him. Travis McGee was a partial model for what I wanted Ian Gunn to be in Raven’s Run, but also a model for what I didn’t want him to be.

Raven’s Run 19

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I barely even knew her name, or maybe I didn’t know her name. Raven was too melodramatic to be real.

“Where do you live, Raven.”

“Our original home is near Santa Cruz, but I really grew up in Sacramento.”

“I know both places. I went to college at San Francisco State. I spent a month in Sacramento once as part of my classes.”

“In what?”

“Political science. My friend Will and I both plan to go into the foreign service.”

“The friend who is in France? The one who owns half of this boat?”

“Yes. He was just posted to the consulate in Marseille a couple of months ago. He had to leave the Wahini in Jamaica and fly to Washington for briefings, and then on to his job.”

The ship’s name seemed to amuse her. “And that is why you are sailing alone?”

“Yes.”

“Why the foreign service?”

“It seems exciting, and it provides a chance to travel. I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin and never got far from home except for an occasional canoe trip to Canada. Then, when I was in the Army, I spent three years in Germany, and another three months wandering around Europe after I got out. After that, I didn’t want to take a job that would keep me in one place.”

“That’s funny,” she said. “I was just the opposite. When I was little we moved from place to place so much that I would have given anything to settle down and never move again.”

“Because your father was in politics?”

She shook her head. “Before that. He worked for the FBI for ten years. They don’t have that many Chicano agents, so he was always in demand for field jobs.”

“Could that be why you were tossed off that ship? Revenge for something he did, or leverage against him for something he is doing now?”

“No, of course not. He has been out of the FBI for a long time.”

“You think.”

“What?”

“You think he has been out of things, but if he were mixed up with some clandestine operation, he certainly wouldn’t tell you. So you don’t really know.”

#          #          #

The afternoon was fading fast and I had repairs to do. I took another inspection tour of the ship and decided that I could set sail once I repaired the strained backstay. It took most of two hours, then I set the jib and mizzen and hauled in the sea anchor. The mainsail repairs would wait until tomorrow. The wind was still about force seven, and I thought it would be a while before I could set more canvas anyway.

Raven went below, and when she came up again she was wearing Will’s ski parka under his oilskins and looking as if someone had inflated her.

The wind was dying down more quickly than I had anticipated, but the waves were not and it took a quick hand at the wheel to pick our way among them. It was a roller coaster ride. Raven sat across from me with her legs enlaced with mine. Her hair was free and streaming back and she seemed to be having the time of her life. I know I was. more tomorrow

228. Father Brown

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There is an obvious connection between the Catholic priest-detective Father Brown and the Catholic priest-detective Father Blackie Ryan. Since Father Brown came first, we will look at him first, and move on to Father Ryan on Wednesday.

Before we consider the real Father Brown, we have to dispose of the imposter who has recently begun a series on PBS. I watched the first two episodes with anticipation, but they were travesties. If they had not stolen the titles from Father Brown stories (without taking anything resembling the content), and if the main actor had not been so physically wrong for the part, and if they had called him Father Green or Father White, then these first two episodes would have been pretty good versions of typical British detective drama. But as Father Brown stories . . .

This bovine actor in no way resembles Father Brown, the clucking hens and stock police detective that follow him around are no substitute for Flambeau, and the plots are unrelated to the originals. As Nero Wolfe would say, “Pfui!”

Let me know if they get better, because I won’t be watching.

Now, let’s turn to the real Father Brown.

G. K. Chesterton’s friend Father John O’Conner, in a discussion of one of Chesterton’s upcoming publications, convinced him that his conclusions were wrong. He did so by quoting to Chesterton facts about criminal behavior that shocked him to the core. Far from being innocent of evil, Father O’Conner was well versed in it from hearing the confessions of criminals. This was the genesis of Father Brown.

Let’s look at an excerpt from The Sins of Prince Saradine. Father Brown and his friend Flambeau are vacationing in a small boat, on a small river in England, when they are awakened by a full moon shining through the foliage on the overhanging river bank:

“By Jove!” said Flambeau, “it’s like being in fairyland.”

Father Brown sat bolt upright in the boat and crossed himself. His movement was so abrupt that his friend asked him, with a mild stare, what was the matter.

“The people who wrote the mediaeval ballads,” answered the priest, “knew more about fairies than you do. It isn’t only nice things that happen in fairyland.”

“Oh, bosh!” said Flambeau. “Only nice things could happen under such an innocent moon. I am for pushing on now and seeing what does really come. We may die and rot before we ever see again such a moon, or such a mood.”

“All right,” said Father Brown. “I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous.”

As you may guess, the experiences which follow would not properly fit into a child’s fairy tale.

Father Brown was not a detective, despite the genre into which he has been placed, and despite the fact that he solves crimes. He is a priest. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less. He sometimes aids the law and sometimes ignores it. His notion of justice refers to a higher power than the courts, and he often finds the criminal as worthy of his attention as the victim. He comes to his understandings by intuition rather than ratiocination. He is more concerned with the soul than the body – even though there are plenty of bodies lying around in a typical Father Brown story.

If you want to know the real Father Brown, you should start with his oldest stories, found in The Innocence of Father Brown, and in the Dover edition Favorite Father Brown Stories. You may hate them; you may love them. Either way, they will be unlike any other detective stories you have encountered.

Raven’s Run 18

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Chapter Six

We live by conventions. Like the old fashioned western movies where the hero wakes up in the bedroom of the rancher’s daughter, to find out that he has been wounded and she has nursed him back to health.

When I woke up, it was like that. The mess was gone from the floor and the smear of coffee grounds and ketchup was gone from the bulkhead. There was a smell of fresh coffee in the air, and Raven had untangled her hair again. It hung in a fluffy cloud around her face and down across her shoulders, shaming Will’s ragged wool shirt with its elegance. Raven was leaning against the back of the opposite transom seat with her feet braced. She was three-quarters asleep.

I could only remember snatches of our later conversation. I must have been more tired than I had realized. Raven, too, although she had clearly outlasted me. At least I didn’t think the good fairies had cleaned up the mess.

The storm had abated. It was time to be getting out and beginning repairs. But looking at Raven, that wasn’t the first thing on my mind. Her foot was bare and close at hand. I brushed a fingernail from her elegant toes up to the cuff of Will’s baggy jeans. Her skin jumped under my fingers.

There was no getting around it. I was miles ahead of her in readiness. Rescuing her had given me a feeling of ownership; seeing her naked and vulnerable when I had first dragged her aboard had aroused me intensely. If I went ahead at the speed I wanted, it would frighten her terribly. She seemed to have accepted that I was not going to take advantage of her helplessness, but I could still easily lose that trust.

This trip wasn’t going to be easy. The Wahini didn’t even have a cold shower.

Raven yawned and stretched, and said, “I wasn’t sleeping.”

“Me, either.”

“Ha!”

She rose and went to the cupboard, poured coffee for both of us and handed me mine. Her motions were sure and easy; she must have spent a lot of time while I slept familiarizing herself with the layout. She said,  “Hungry?”

“Starved.”

“I couldn’t find any eggs.”

“I used the last of them a week ago. There are powdered eggs in that plastic jar, or you could open a can of hash.”

I left her and went on deck. The waves were still sizable, but nothing compared to what they had been. It was late afternoon and the sun was peeking in and out of scattered clouds. I made a slow circuit of the ship, assessing damage.  The mainsail was out of commission until I could repair it, but most of the standing rigging was intact. Only the port main backstay was strained beyond immediate use. Apparently the boom had hit it when it went overboard.

Raven shouted, “Come and eat.”

She was standing at the stove when I came below. I fished Will’s safety harness out and cinched her into it. Her clothing was not enough insulation for the electricity I felt pass between us. I felt! She just nodded and served up the hash. We ate it on deck, leaning against the deckhouse to stay out of the wind.

I set my plate on the deck and said thank you. She laughed and said, “Thank you, sir, and let me add that this has been one hell of a first date.” It was so unexpected that I laughed out loud.

We were sitting side by side, looking back past the lashed wheel across the dying but still lively waves. I wanted to take her hand, but decided not to. There was a feeling of companionship between us, but we were still strangers. I liked the way she looked, the way she smiled, and the sound of her laugh. I liked the way she had stood up to hardship and danger, and the way she had made herself useful without any fuss. And yet I knew nothing about her. I barely even knew her name, or maybe I didn’t know her name. Raven was too melodramatic to be real. more tomorrow

227. Mentors in Detection

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“We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants.”
             John of Salisbury, Issac Newton, and a million lesser lights attempting false humility.

‘What pen name? What market? What can we steal? . . . Correction. Not ‘steal.’ If you copy from three or more authors, it’s ‘research.’”
               Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love, and in a half dozen other novels in almost identical words.

There is very little in this world that is new and unique. We all borrow from those who went before. Some people borrow from giants, some borrow from pygmies.

Some people borrow from Shakespeare and screw it up royally. Some people borrow from third rate writers and turn the result into something memorable. But we all borrow.

I have made no secret of my mentors in science fiction, first Andre Norton, then Robert Heinlein. I write only a little like Norton and nothing like Heinlein (I would pay real money for his touch with humor.) Nevertheless, they both live in my head, all the time.

There are a thousand other authors whose work has moved me, but Norton and Heinlein got there early. Only Harold Goodwin (John Blaine) and the Bible got there sooner.

Over in Serial, my novel Raven’s Run is being serialized. It is a “men’s adventure”, a genre that is no longer recognized. In modern parlance, it would probably be classed as a thriller, although the tension level is really too low for that. It is also something like a detective novel, but not much. Genres today are so small and tightly defined, that RR crosses several of them. It resembles the Travis McGee books in that way.

In connection with mentors and influences, I will be covering three detective series next week along with one spy novel. McGee was a real influence on my writing. The two Fathers taught me a few things, but they are basically just stories I like. I’ll explain the Shrike when I get there, next Thursday.

Detective literature started with Holmes, both in the world at large and in my reading. I read him when I was in high school, and I still do, occasionally, although it is harder now that I can lip synch all the stories. I didn’t read other detective stories – or Westerns for that matter – until I was writing science fiction and fantasy full time and needed something to cleanse my mental palate between writing sessions.

McGee was by far the best and most influential. I’ll talk about him next Tuesday. Dashiell Hammet never appealed to me, but Raymond Chandler was superb. Robert Parker’s Spencer was great for the first ten books while he was imitating Chandler; after he started imitating himself, they went down hill fast. I enjoyed Chesterton and Greeley enough to give each his own post next week.

Quite a few of the authors who come to mind were actually writing spy stories, like the gritty early James Bonds before they degenerated into farce.

There were authors with a few books whose work stuck with me. E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case was worth reading. So were the few Bertram Lynch mysteries by John Vandercook. That particular series was a recent discovery, in ancient, battered copies at my favorite underfunded library – you know, the one that never throws away a book. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe is the series I am working my way through now, since I have read the covers off all my previous favorites.

To be certain that I didn’t forget any old friends, I went through several “best detective authors” lists on line. There I found Alistair MacLean (author – under a pen name – of The Black Shrike) and John Buchan. I would not have called them detective novelists, but they are among my favorites.

Not every detective lives in contemporary England or America. I fully enjoyed the five or six Cadfael novels I read before the spell wore off. I own and frequently reread every Judge Dee book, and Bony (Napoleon Bonaparte), the half aborigine Australian detective is very nearly my all time favorite.

Raven’s Run 17

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Everything seemed intact. The line to the sea anchor was becoming chafed where it passed through the anchor bits. I should have pulled it in somewhat, but that was out of the question. All I could do was let it out three feet to keep it from chafing further.

Up forward, the motion was severe. When the Wahini crested a wave, the deck fell away beneath my feet like a high speed elevator dropping from penthouse to basement. The line to the sea anchor was as hard as a steel rod; droplets of seawater danced on its vibrating length. I felt like Ishmael on a Nantucket sleigh ride. No amount of reason could convince my senses that we were moving backward more slowly than the waves. My eyes knew that we were surging forward.

I returned to the main hatch. Raven was there, her hair a black bramble in the wind. I took the canvas, hammer and nails, and dragged the hatch closed. The frame was shattered, but there was nothing I could do about that now. I simply nailed canvas over the hole, and trimmed it with my knife. Then I slid the hatch half open and clenched the nails over inside, took a last look around, and went below.

Raven was waiting. She looked so melodramatically woeful and bedraggled that I had to smile. I said, “Where were we?”

It took her a moment to shift mental gears; then she smiled too. “We were in each others arms,” she said. “Were! Now, you are going to tell me whether or not we are going to sink.”

I motioned her to the transom seat and sat opposite her, bracing my feet against the ship’s motion. “No, I don’t think so, but we’ll never come that close again and live to tell about it. The wind seems to be dying down just a bit, and the Wahini is riding properly again.”

“So we’re all right?”

“No guarantees, but probably.” I decided not to tell her about the Wahini’s inherent instability. “How do you feel?”

“Scared. Fine other than that, I guess. Tired. I haven’t gotten much sleep.”

“Me either.”

“So who was doing all that snoring?”

I smiled. I had to admire her for trying so hard. From a cruise ship, to near drowning, to this – she appeared to be holding up well. I wondered what it was costing her.

“What is happening to us?” she asked.

I explained about the rogue wave and the broken boom.

“Does that mean we are stranded?”

“No. It means we may have some heavy repairs ahead of us when the storm lets up, and that we may take longer to get to Marseille.”

She bit her lower lip and asked, “Will we have enough food?”

Another point for her, for intelligence this time. Not many people would have thought of that. I said, “Don’t worry.”

“I have to worry. I’m the one that got you into this mess.  Because I’m here, you have two mouths to feed.”

I shook my head. “No, Raven. I’m not putting you off. Don’t worry because there is plenty of food aboard. We stocked the the Wahini for two before Will had to fly on ahead. If we are much delayed, we may run out of luxuries like coffee, but we won’t go hungry.”

“I don’t want to be a burden.”

“You aren’t.”

She laughed bitterly. “So who went out to repair the damage and who stayed inside safe and warm.”

“This conversation could get tiresome. No, I didn’t invite you aboard; but you didn’t choose to be here either. There is no blame involved, and nothing to apologize about. You are welcome aboard, Raven.

Very softly, she said, “Thank you.”

“I think I could get to like you very quickly.”

Her face lit up. She couldn’t have looked happier if Ed McMahon had knocked on her door with ten million dollars. I wanted to say more, but I sensed a reserve in her, and the last months had left me emotionally drained. Perhaps that was part of the reason I was falling for her so hard and so fast. Not that I needed a reason beyond the fact that she was beautiful and we were alone in mid-ocean. If you rescue a mermaid, you’re expected to fall for her. more tomorrow

226. Cyan is Not Forgotten

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I’m not complaining, honest.

Publishing is a strange business, and you couldn’t pay me enough to be an editor. Still, I haven’t mentioned Cyan since May ninth, and that is a problem.

I started this website about a year ago in support of Cyan, which had been accepted for publication as an e-book. Not self published, which offers no guarantee of quality, but published by EDGE, Canada’s premier publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

So what happened? Nothing very terrible, or very unusual. The editor who was handling EDGE-lite, as they call their e-books, decided to work full time elsewhere. I would guess from the vagueness of some emails I received that this decision took a while to make. I don’t know any details, and I wouldn’t give them if I knew. I’m not a fan of gossip. Anyway, the handling of my book has changed to a new editor, and that always leads to delay.

I finally got the word of what had happened in July, from Brian the publisher.

I am writing this on September fifteenth; I have mentioned before that I hate deadlines, so I try to have my posts ready well in advance. I expect word soon on what will happen next, but I can’t wait any longer to comment.

I have followers who have been with me for over a year, and new people who drop in every day. The former have probably been wondering what happened, and the latter have never heard of Cyan. So here goes.

Cyan returns to the style of science fiction in which the restrictions of relativity were exploited as plot elements. It gives a full picture of the exploration and colonization of one planet through the eyes of characters who are somewhat larger than life, in a tone designed to attract the general reader as well as hard core SF fans.

The story begins en route to the Procyon system on board the starship Darwin with her crew of five men and five women, and details their explorations. The planet they discover, Procyon A III – Cyan – stands straight up in orbit, with no inclination and no seasons. It has bands of unvarying temperature, from burning desert at the equator to permanent icecaps. Near 40° latitude is a broad band of eternal springtime.

Just as the explorers are falling in love with Cyan, they discover a group of creatures who have the beginnings of intelligence and culture. For the first time, Man has encountered a truly sub-human species. They call the creatures Cyl. Viki Johanssen, their anthropologist, recommends denying colonization to protect them, but Keir Delacroix, the crew leader on whom the novel focuses, will not endorse her proposal. 

The remainder of the book deals with this conflict and much more.

This is the first part of the summary I sent EDGE; I have chopped the last 342 words to avoid spoilers.

Scattered among the last year of posts are discussions of and excerpts from Cyan. You could go to the tag cloud, but it wouldn’t help much. The earlier posts were not tagged (I was still learning how to do a blog) and many of the later ones bear mention of Cyan without being primarily based on it.

I could bring you an annotated index of Cyan posts, as I did for early posts at 212, or I might recycle them. It all depends on when Cyan is going to be published.

Cyan is not forgotten. Stay tuned.

Raven’s Run 16

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The hatch was canvas covered plywood, framed with oak. Something had punched a fist sized hole in the plywood near the back and the whole thing was jammed. I forced it open. The wind, fierce as it was, seemed to have abated slightly. We were once more on an even keel, riding to the sea anchor, but at a sharp angle to the waves. The Wahini’s main boom had torn loose from the harness that supported it’s outboard end at the mizzen, and was dragging in the sea along our port side. The mainsail was still furled between gaff and boom.

It actually seemed to be improving the way the Wahini met the waves, but I couldn’t leave it in the water. I did not have a spare mainsail; if we lost this one, we were dead in the water. Maybe literally. The sheet seemed to still be intact, so I tried hauling it in. The great mass of wood and canvas bent double, and I knew that the sound which awakened me had been the boom breaking. I released the sheet and threw the bitter end of it around the base of the mizzen. With that new angle I could drag the furled sail back toward the boat with less damage. To the sail; not to me. I had to brace one foot against the mizzen and put my back into it. Near the end, I had both feet on the mast and was lying on the deck with the sheet around my shoulders, heaving with my thighs, then taking up slack. Like doing deep knee bends to lift a Buick out of a well. When the sail finally came back aboard, I lay panting and sweating before I could get up to lash it to the deck.

Raven was standing with her head out of the hatch, looking scared and helpless. I moved to the pump, a hefty, old-fashioned type set amidships with a pair of short handles like an old pump handcar. I went to work. The pump dredged up gallons of seawater, smelling of gasoline and colored with ketchup and coffee grounds, and dumped them on deck. Passing waves quickly swept it clean again. Raven said something, but I lost it in the screaming wind and just shook my head. I put my hand on top of her head and pushed gently. She gave way and I stuck my head through the hatch where she could hear me.

“Forward, through that door, in a cardboard box marked canvas. Bring me a piece of scrap, at least a foot square. Then look under the ladder, beside the engine, high up on the left. You’ll find a tool box. Bring me a claw hammer and a dozen roofing nails. Those are rough gray nails with big flat heads.  OK?”

She nodded and I let her go while I shifted my harness line and worked forward. I scrunched along with my feet in the scuppers and my hands on the edge of the cabin house while the wind tried to pick me up like Dorothy and carry me away. Definitely, this wasn’t Kansas. more tomorrow