Tag Archives: memoir

212. Old Posts Retrospective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Book Words – Being the only person who reads

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

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

211. Raven Comes Aboard

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New month, new year, new novel.

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

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

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

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

*          *          *

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

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

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

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

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

So much for following the market.

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

210. Close to the Ground

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During 1987 and 1988, we spent 130 days in Europe, traveling by train, backpacking, and living in a dome tent. The tent cost twenty-nine dollars at K-mart. It kept the rain out until it rained; then it kept some of the rain out. All the summer of 1987 the fiberglass tent poles kept eroding at the ends, and the tent got progressively lower to the ground. Finally we started patching it with branches harvested from bushes at the campgrounds. When we got home, we took the ragged remnants back and they gave us a replacement. That one got us through 1988.

It was a vacation, and a cultural and historic tour, but I also had the rough outline of a novel in my head, and I was looking for places to let it happen. I visited the American consulate in Marseilles because I intended to have my protagonist make connections there. At the American embassy in Paris I mentioned that I was planning to write a novel about an American in Europe on the run from gangsters. The information clerk sighed wearily and said, “We wish you wouldn’t.”

We left looking like Americans. We came back looking like very fit Americans. Walking every day and eating very little will do that to you.

During those two summers we went all the way to the northernmost point in the Orkneys and as far north as the Arctic Circle in Norway. Looking out from the train from Myrdal to Flam, I saw a grassy cliff and knew that it would become the scene of the climax of the novel. We went northeast to Finland, southeast to Budapest and Greece, south as far as Pompeii, west as far as Portugal, and ten thousand places in between. We did not go to Berlin, because that was still East Germany and Eurail didn’t go there. Germany was a fairly tense place, those summers.

We took the train everywhere. Without Eurail passes, none of this would have been possible. We also walked, probably more than a thousand miles, around towns, on Alpine trails, and daily to and from the campgrounds which were always far out on the edge of the cities we visited. Those campground trips took us through back alley parts of cities normal tourists never see – seldom scenic, but always interesting. We only ate in restaurants where the exchange rate made them cheap; in Switzerland, we at a lot of bread and apples.

Being poor, or something like poor, can be an advantage to a writer. It’s hard to imagine Steinbeck writing Cannery Row or The Grapes of Wrath while living in a penthouse. Poverty, or something like, can seem exotic to those who have a little money.

Of course, most people want to read about the rich. After all, the James Bond novels wouldn’t work if he wore ragged clothes and drove a ten year old car.

I find life close to the ground interesting, and all those experiences allowed me to build a story in which my protagonist, Ian Gunn, has reason to live like I did, at least for a part of the book, and draw on those experiences for the rest of it. It is called Raven’s Run and it begins in Serial tomorrow.

At one point, he and his girlfriend meet a street musician, and Ian thinks:

On the ladder of affluence, we were near the bottom. Eric was one critical step lower. We knew that we could not eat in a restaurant; Eric did not know where his next meal was coming from.

Ian Gunn is about thirty, as we were, and on the verge of moving into better circumstances, but not quite there yet. He finds himself traveling on the cheap, like a teenager, but his age makes him a misfit in that crowd. I could tell you more, but check out Serial tomorrow and read it for yourself. 

209. Travel

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When I was a child, my family took only one vacation. We drove a hundred miles south to see the reconstructed fort at Fort Gibson, Oklahoma. We left at seven in the morning, right after milking, and got back by five in the afternoon.

That’s how it is on a dairy farm. I left Oklahoma for Michigan when I went to college, but that wasn’t a vacation. That was an escape. By the time I got married, I was ready to do some traveling.

Travel was cheap in the U.S. in the seventies. Gas was seventeen cents a gallon and the old car usually ran. We slept in a pup tent and cooked on a camp stove. We crisscrossed the western two-thirds of America and visited nearly every National Park. Eventually however, as I continued doing more writing than selling, the car got old and times got lean. Then I started teaching and a few years later, with a mostly healed up bank account, we toured the Atlantic states. That trip gave me the start on a new novel (see 55. Voices in the Wall and Serial for February and March of 2016).

By 1987 we had saved enough money to tour Europe. Perhaps tour is not the right word. In those days you could get cheap air fares if you paid months in advance. Eurail passes cost quite a bit, but they took care of all your travel costs once you were in Europe. That left just food and lodging.

We were following the advice of Rick Steves but planned to outdo him on cheapness. We bought a tent and a pair of rucksacks. A set of clothing on our backs and another pair of jeans and shirt in the backpack, and we were ready to go.

We were 30 years old that year and planning to travel like teenagers – minus the hitchhiking. We had very little money, but we had lots of time. Seventy days, in fact. Being a school teacher is a real pain sometimes, but it gives you summers off.

As we waited for our flight out of San Francisco that spring, the gate attendant announced that they were overbooked, and offered a pass for future flights to anyone who would volunteer to wait for a later departure. We volunteered, and then watched our flight leave without us. It was logical; the pass was worth almost as much as we had paid months earlier, and it would only mean a short delay. Still, after waiting a lifetime to see Europe, it hurt to see our plane go on without us.

It felt good when it returned twenty minutes later. They had had engine trouble, but the problem was quickly resolved. Meanwhile, we found out that the flight had not actually been overbooked. It was a computer error. We took off about forty minutes later, on the same plane, with passes in our pockets to cover a future plane flight. All the way to Europe in 1987, we planned for our second trip in 1988. more tomorrow

208. The Cost of Research

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I grew up on science fiction, but that wasn’t all I read. I read about the westward movement, pioneer days, cowboys, and Indians (as opposed to cowboys and Indians). When I discovered adult books, I read a lot of Costain. He was about all we had in the closet sized abandoned library in our elementary school.

I found a set of cheaply bound classics in a stationary store in a nearby town. They were two-ups, with Moby Dick and Two Years Before the Mast in one volume. I loved them both, along with Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, and a half dozen others. I eventually learned that my Moby Dick was an abridged version. When I tried to tackle the original as an adult, I figured out why they abridged it. Damn, that book is long; maybe I’ll finish it next year, when I’m not so busy.

Everything I read, outside of The Scarlet Letter, was an adventure of some sort. Navel gazing literature never crossed my path until I was an adult. I still like my fiction to be doing something, even while the protagonist reflects on life and its meaning. After all, we mix up action and reflection in real life.

That was the way I approached my writing from the beginning. Plenty of action; plenty of things to consider along the way and, hopefully to consider again after closing the book for the last time.

By the time I was ready to write, I could have written in any of a number of genres. I chose science fiction and fantasy for two reasons. First, they are my favorites. I had been reading both for decades and I knew their possibilities and the readers’ expectations. They weren’t all I wanted to write, but they were a place to start.

The other reason was money. Re$earch co$ts dollar$ – and time, which is a form of money. I could create whole worlds out of my imagination, but if I wanted to write about the area west of Philadelphia in 1789, or West Virginia in 1865, or the Mississippi River in 1845 – to name the settings of three novels on my to-write list – it would have taken years of library research and trips to those places. I couldn’t afford that, so half of the things I was ready to write were out of reach.

I was a pleasure to write what I could afford to write, but still frustrating not to be able to crawl out of that box.

Eventually I started teaching, made a few bucks, and had the chance to travel. That opened things up. I‘ll tell you a bit about that over the next two posts, then acquaint you with one of the novels that came out of those travels. more tomorrow

207. I Have a Dream

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I’ve told my personal story regarding justice for black citizens several times, and I fleshed it out over a month and a half in February and March of this year. Here is a brief reprise for those who weren’t following yet.

I was born and raised in a small Oklahoma town with no blacks in sight. My father was a Baptist deacon and lay minister, and a dominating man. I never disagreed with him – out loud. He did not hate blacks – really, he didn’t. He expected to see many of them in heaven. He did think they had their place, ordained by God, and they would be happy if they only kept to it. He considered Martin Luther King an agitator and an evil man.

I agreed with his views of God and man when I was very young, but by my teen years I was beginning to question both. Silently question, that is. There was no discussion in our house, only my father’s statements ex cathedra and our silent nods. My final conversion away from his thinking on race came when black marchers were washed down the street by fire hoses in Selma and elsewhere.

This Sunday is the anniversary of the March on Washington, and Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. When it happened, it passed me by. At the time, I was wrestling with my father’s views on God. My change of view on race was a couple of years in my future.

In our house, it was just another speech by that self-serving agitator King.

When I was doing research for posts earlier this year, I became aware of Philip Randolph, who orchestrated the March on Washington. Shamefully, I had never heard of him. At that time I said that I would find out more about him, and I did. His story is worth telling, but it isn’t mine to tell. I had planned a post detailing the March, but that isn’t my story, either. I’ve decided to leave both to those who fought the battles while I was still coming to realize that there was a war.

The story of the March on Washington isn’t mine to tell, but it changed my life, as it changed all of our lives, even if I didn’t know it at the time.

205. Detroit Riots

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This won’t take long.

People thirty to forty years younger than I am may see the Civil Rights movement as history – possibly even ancient history. Unless you are black, or very liberal, chances are you really only know one civil right leader – Martin Luther King.

Martin Luther King was an advocate of non-violence and his commitment to that position helped keep the civil rights movement from becoming bloodier than it was. Nevertheless, he was not loved in my home when I was growing up. My father didn’t hate him – as a Christian, he wasn’t allowed to hate anybody – but his eyes narrowed and his face grew grim whenever he read in the Tulsa World about whatever latest thing Martin Luther King had done.

Martin Luther King was the white man’s friend, but my father couldn’t see that.

When the Detroit Riots occurred 1967, I was a thousand mile away from Oklahoma, spending my college sophomore summer working as an archaeologist in Bay City, Michigan. We were about a hundred miles away from Detroit, and saw nothing of the riots except what was on television, but we were scared. I was pro-Black, pro-Civil Rights, pro-Martin Luther King, and I was scared.

Martin Luther King surely hated the violence that summer, but it was a wake-up call to complacent white America. I’m glad I wasn’t home to see my father’s reaction to the event. Both men hated the violence, but from polar opposite perspectives.

And yet . . .

Recently, I saw a bumper sticker or a passing car. I can’t  quote it, but here is what I remember:

Violence never solved anything – except for ending slavery, ending Fascism, saving the remaining Jews, and keeping America safe at home.

Hmmm?

Now blacks are being killed with depressing frequency by police (Or were they always being killed, and we are just now becoming properly aware of it?), and police are being gunned down in turn. Do I approve? Of course not, not in either case. But I am not surprised.

Do I want to see black violence against whites? Good God, no. Violence brings reprisals, which hurts everybody. Besides, to be personal and selfish, I would be a big white target.

Still, I remember Detroit, and I remember my father’s willingness to turn his back on events and let them pass him by, as long as they didn’t disturb his little world.

I hate that this is true, but fear motivates.

202. Planetary Scale

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     Everything in a writer’s life is grist for the mill. For a science fiction writer that includes science itself and, in my case, the teaching of science.
     Here is some more teacher geek. In a book on teaching middle school astronomy, this would be an appendix.

When I was in my early teens and discovered the local library, it not only gave me science fiction, but science as well. I remember the dozen or so books on popular astronomy. I particularly remember How to Build a Telescope, which aroused my lust then dumped me when I found out I didn’t have enough money to but the mirror blanks.

The single issue that most challenged the writers of those books was how to convey the scale of things. Now, if you are under forty, you will have to project your mind back to the days when print technology did not include glossy paper and color photography. Visualize a few grainy black and white photos, a few drawings, and lots and lots of words. Like, “If the distance from the Sun to the Earth were equal to the thickness of a sheet of paper, then the distance to Alpha Centauri . . . “

I grew up figuring out that kind of analogy, but if I gave such a book to one of my modern students, their eyes would glaze over and the wheels would stop turning. The children of Sesame Street have to be shown.

Would you like a simple example? Did you know that a softball is moon-size in comparison to a 12 inch classroom globe of the Earth? And if you hold the softball 30 feet away from the globe, it will be proportional in distance as well as size.

For the rest of the solar system, you can’t show both proportional size and proportional distance in a classroom. You can buy a poster with the proportional sizes, but the planets are all on top of each other. If you make a chart of proportional distances, the individual planets will be too small to see.

You can do both, however, if you are willing to take the exercise outside.

We are about to make a model of the solar system. If you want to get out your calculator, be my guest, but I’ve already done the math and I’m willing to share. The scale I used was one to one billion. It would be easier in metrics, but we will eventually be using a local road map for this, so the good ole American system will have to do.

The chart below is in miles and double-steps. That’s because we want your students to get into the act and count the distance to the planets. A double step is normal walking, counting every time your left foot hits the ground, one-and-two-and-three-and . . .

Your sun will be about five feet in diameter. I looked for years for a balloon that size and never found one, so each year I made a new five foot diameter circle of paper and taped it to the outside wall of my classroom. The distances you need are:

Mercury        38 double steps
Venus            71 double steps
Earth             99 double steps
Mars            150 double steps
Jupiter         513 double steps or 0.5 miles
Saturn                                           0.9 miles
Uranus                                         1.7 miles
Neptune                                       2.7 miles
Pluto                                            3.5 miles

You can skip Pluto if you want, but when I first started doing this, it was still a planet.

Give some of your students models of the planets (we’ll talk about sizes below) and take off with the whole class, counting double steps. At 38, leave the student with the Mercury model and continue with the rest of the class. Et cetera.

My double steps go through Jupiter because our playground allowed us to get almost that far. When we reached the boundary fence, I would tell them, “Jupiter is just beyond that house.” Then I would reel off where Saturn through Pluto would be found. My recital would mean nothing to you; you need to make up your own. Find a large scale local map, measure out distances from your classroom, and memorize them. (For us, Pluto was in the next village.)

None of this would be worthwhile without models to show how small our planets are in comparison to the space they inhabit. I made Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Pluto out of  beads or glass headed pins, stuck into dowels. Be sure to paint the dowels orange for when Johnny loses one in the long grass. The rest of the planets were made of rubber balls found after multiple trips to toy stores, and painted with artists’ acrylics.

You need these sizes, and this time I’m going metric because it’s way easier.

Mercury       5 mm
Venus        12 mm
Earth         13 mm
Mars           7 mm
Jupiter     143 mm
Saturn     121 mm
Uranus      52 mm
Neptune    50 mm
Pluto            3 mm

Feel free to pass this on to anyone who might want to make this model.

201. Teaching by Feel

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I taught science for 27 years in a small school in California. At first it was science and everything else, but each year I had more science classes until I retired teaching science full time. A few years before that, while I was teaching five science classes and one class of perspective drawing, our shop teacher left. I volunteered to keep his class open, so for two semesters, I taught shop. That is when I instituted Pounding Day.

Pounding Day came from my firm belief that kids learn best with their minds when they are also learning with their bodies. This is not the same thing as “hands on”, which is a good idea that too often deteriorates into doing arts and crafts instead of science.

Pounding Day is practice. If you want to learn to add, you practice your addition tables. If you want to be LeBron James, you practice basketball. Driving nails is no different. It makes no sense to drive your first nail into a project you have just spent a week measuring and cutting. Your first nail should be into something disposable, because is it will kink and flatten.

During the first week of class, I gave each student a hammer, two dozen 16 penny nails, and a chunk of 2 x 4. After minimal instruction, I turned them loose.

You’ve never heard such noise. OSHA would not have approved. My friend Adrianna did, however. Every Pounding Day she waved encouragement as she drove her herd from the exercise yard to the playing fields. Adrianna taught PE; she understood kinesthetic learning.

Kinesthetic learning also works for science.

Old science texts used to have kids making up pulleys from sewing thread spools. Modern technique uses prepackaged kits with flimsy plastic pulleys and underweight weights. You tell a kid that he has doubled his mechanical advantage, but he can’t tell because the whole setup is so lightweight he could easily pick it up and hurl it at his buddy in the next row.

Not good enough. Not at all good enough. When I was a new teacher, I built 2 x 4 frames, bought sash weigh pulleys and down-rigger cannonballs. Cannonballs are two and a half pound lead weights used for summer deep lake fishing. When one of my students doubled his mechanical advantage, he could feel the difference.

(Yes, I painted the cannonballs so my students would not be handling lead.)

I also built a leverage demonstrator, consisting of a 2 x 4 base with a moveable fulcrum, heavy spring load, and a mattock handle lever. I only built one because there was a dangerous amount of force involved, so I never let students use it unless it was braced by my adult strength.

fulcrum demo

With the fulcrum in the middle of the handle, the downward force is equal to the force of the spring. With the fulcrum near the end of the handle, I couldn’t budge the thing myself. With the fulcrum near the spring, the smallest girl in the class could move the handle with one finger.

If you have earned your students’ trust, and if you are careful not to bruise fragile egos, you can have a lot of fun pitting big boys against little girls in contests of strength rigged to let the little girls win.

[Safety notes: If the fulcrum is next to the spring and a student pushes down, then lets go, the handle will fly 180 degrees to the left and conk whoever is sitting there. Beware. If the fulcrum is far from the spring and your heaviest student jumps up and throws himself on the end of the handle – and they will – you had better be strong enough to keep the whole mechanism from tipping sideways and crunching you both. If you aren’t strong enough, don’t let them do it.]

Our final pulley experiment moved outdoors where I had suspended a bosun’s chair from a basketball goal. Students sat in the chair with the arrangement of pulleys over their heads and lifted their own weight off the ground.

When we did inclined planes, I brought a wheelbarrow, 2 x 12, and concrete blocks from home for the day. I let a student sit in the wheelbarrow while another ran him up increasingly steep ramps. Change students and repeat.

If the subject is force, middle schoolers need to feel that force in their hands and arms, not just calculate forces and imagine how they would feel.

194. Boys at Work: Lee Correy

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By at Wk atwIf you didn’t read Monday’s post, you might want to do so before you proceed. This week is on the subject apprenticeship literature.

Lee Correy had a considerable effect on my life. L. C. was a pen name of G. Harry Stine, an author with a long bibliography, but I don’t think of it like that. I have read some of G. Harry’s work without enthusiasm, and I haven’t read Lee Correy’s two seminal novels since high school. I still think of Lee Correy as a real person, separate from G. Harry Stine. It’s an artifact of my nostalgia.

I am referring to Rocket Man and Starship Through Space, both of which were in my high school library. They would be in my personal library right now, but they are rare, and copies are now out of my price range.

Of the two, Starship Through Space is clearer in my memory, probably because of its lame ending. Two young men travel back from Mars where they are attending a space academy, to find that they have been chosen to participate in the building of the first interstellar ship. They participate fully in the building of the Vittoria, are on the crew which flies her to Pluto and back, are deeply involved in the upgrade and rebuilding that follows, and continue on the Alpha Centauri. That is where it all fell apart for me, as the natives of New Terra resemble Native Americans and turn out to be displaced humans, part of the scattering that followed the Tower of Babel.

The two young protagonists participate fully in the work of building and flying the starship, but they are not running the show. They don’t invent a stardrive or save the universe. They are junior members of the crew, in training, and under the command of competent adults whom they respect.

This is the key to apprenticeship literature. The young protagonists are intelligent, well trained, diligent, hard working, and extremely competent. They aren’t the boss, but they will be someday. They have ambition and confidence, but typically don’t have a lot of arrogance.

The novel Rocket Man meant more to me, but is harder to portray. I don’t remember much, just the overwhelming feeling of lust and envy at what the protagonist was getting to do. The novel has all but disappeared, even from the internet. Goodreads list it without reviews or ratings. The only thing I found to jog my memory was a 1955 Kirkus review.

             Update, November 2019: As of today, there is a review on Amazon and the Kirkus review has disappeared.

Here is what I do remember. A young man wants to be a rocket man; to this end he enrolls in the international engineering school in New Mexico. The school is a co-op; students attend classes six months, then work on rockets for six months as apprentice engineers, earning money to cover tuition. I don’t remember too much of the story but I will never forget how badly I wanted to be on that campus.

Four years later I was at Michigan State, on a scholarship but short of cash. One option for my sophomore year was to move into Hedrick House, a student owned co-op. I lived that year in a closet sized room, attended meetings to decide house business, and cooked dinner for the fifty guys who shared the place with me. Every night I went to bed with a smile on my face knowing that I was on my way, and paying my own way. And every night I remembered Rocket Man. Thanks, Mr. Stine, known to me as Lee Correy.