As usual, there will be no post this Friday. There will also be no post on Monday, Dec 21, so that my four posts for Christmas week can include Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
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Tag Archives: writing
61. Christmas Potpourri
Welcome to my favorite season.
But first, a word from our sponsor. My upcoming novel Cyan has been delayed. It will be out in April or May, not in January as originally announced. Because of this, about a dozen Cyan related posts had to be replaced with new, season appropriate material. All that is done now, and things are back to calm.
*****
When I was a child, I enjoyed Christmas without having the full joy of it. That came later, with marriage to the right person. On our first Christmas together, we decorated the tree on my early December birthday, and that tradition has continued unbroken since.
The season of our second Christmas the musical Scrooge came to theaters. Even though I had no VCR, I bought the tape while I had the chance. Who knew it would be around forever.
Seeing Scrooge led to reading A Christmas Carol, and that led to reading the four other Christmas stories Dickens wrote in subsequent years.
I was vaguely aware that our Christmas was an amalgam of Christian and pagan practices and, being historically minded, I sought out the details. That led me through a forest of books, which I will share tomorrow.
*****
One of the difficulties of being an underpubished writer is all the novels bubbling in your head that you fear will never come to be written. One of these is a novel of lives lost and reclaimed in and around Philadelphia in 1789, set during the Christmas season and giving a picture of Christmas before Santa was invented. As an early Christmas present this year I gave myself permission to write the Christmas Eve chapter of that unwritten novel and present it here. Unfortunately, time came too short. Maybe next year.
Instead I am presenting the Christmas section of a completed novel Symphony in a Minor Key. It tells the story of Neil McCrae, a teacher, during the Christmas season of 1989. Symphony in a complex novel, and the excerpt given only touches on surface events. Nevertheless, Neil and his girlfriend Carmen are nice people, and I think you will enjoy spending the holidays with them. Pop on over to Serial where the story starts today and runs through Christmas day.
Symphony Christmas, 1 of 10
This is from the novel Symphony in a Minor Key, a complex book with a number of intertwined story strands. This excerpt describes the experiences of Neil McCrae, a teacher, during Christmas 1989, leaving out a good deal of material you would have to read the whole novel to follow. I particularly like this piece because it is not a story. It doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end, and everything is not wrapped up in a shiny Christmas bow at finis.
Symphony Christmas
Because I intend to publish the novel from which this excerpt comes, Symphony Christmas will not be placed in Backfile.
On the day appointed for Neil’s evaluation, the principal came earlier than Neil had expected and sat down before the tardy bell had rung. The more mature students tried to look at him without seeming to do so. The others just stared. Neil rapped the desk for attention and took roll. Then he said, “I had intended to tell you today that Mr. Campbell would be coming by for evaluations, but he has gotten here sooner than I had expected. How many of you have been through these teacher evaluations before?”
Probably all of them had; a third of them remembered it well enough to raise their hands.
“Who can tell me what their previous teacher told them at evaluation time?”
Tony Caraveli thought he could remember. Neil distrusted the devilish look in his eye, but told him to go ahead.
“Make me look good!” Tony said.
The children all laughed, but it had a nervous and restrained sound. Bill Campbell did not react, which made them more nervous. Neil said, “Whoever told you that was probably joking. Who else can tell me?”
Sabrina said, “Ms. Thompson told us to just be ourselves and act like there wasn’t anyone in the room.”
“Good. That is just what I want you to do. Ignore Mr. Campbell; it won’t hurt his feelings.”
This time the children’s laughter was more relaxed, and Bill acknowledged it with a wave of his hand.
Neil read to his class for twenty minutes from The House Without a Christmas Tree. He led a discussion about the story, and from that drew the children into talking about how their families celebrated the season. Neil made notes from their discussion on the chalkboard, then told them to write a paper on Christmas in their homes.
Neil’s lesson plan had been worthwhile but unexceptional. He had not intended for it to be earth shaking, but when he sat at home that night reading the papers, he found that he had cut close to the bone.
Casey Kruger wrote:
We don’t hav Christmas at our house. My parents say that it is a peagan rittul. Jesus was born in a stabul and din’t have any presents, so we don’t have any present either. I wish we did.
I would really like to have a real Christmas this year. continued
How to Build a Culture, moved
How to Build a Culture has been moved to Backfile.
60. Thank You, Harold Goodwin
I have a December birthday, which worked out well as a kid since books were my favorite gifts, and winter is a prime time for reading. The gifts I got were locally sourced and cheap, mostly published by Grosset and Dunlap, Whitman, or Golden. For anything by a normal publisher, I depended on libraries.
Heinlein’s juveniles were legendary, but he wasn’t the only writer of juvenile science fiction. Norton made a carreer of it before she branched into fantasy. Donald Wohlheim wrote a eight book series about a secret project of young astronauts called Quicksilver which shadowed the accomplishments of Project Mercury. Joseph Green wrote a six book series built around the character Dig Allen. All of them kept me entertained through long Oklahoma winters.
Nobody, not even Heinlein, did it better than Harold Lee Goodwin, although the comparison is apples to oranges. Heinlein’s juveniles were set in space and used future science reasonably extrapolated from the present. Goodwin’s stories, with one exception, were set in the present and built on extant science.
If you’ve never heard of Goodwin, its largely because he worked under the pseudonyms Blake Savage and John Blaine. If he gets no respect, it’s largely because he was published by Grosset and Dunlap. That meant Goodwin’s Rick Brant books shared bookstore space with Tom Swift, Jr and the Hardy Boys – series that were written to outline by anonymous hack authors.
I read all three G & D lines as a kid, and enjoyed them because they were all I had. They taught me to read and to love reading. But when I try to reread Hardy Boys books today, they come off dull and dumb. Tom Swift, Jr. – well, I can’t force myself through them, although I still try from time to time.
Rick Brant holds up. A few years ago I reread the whole series from start to finish and they were as good as I remembered them. The same was true of Goodwin’s single outer space adventure, sometimes titled Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet and sometimes Assignment in Space with Rip Foster.
Rick Brant lived the perfect life. I would have traded with him in a heartbeat. He had adventures, twenty-six eventually, which he shared with Scotty (Don Scott) who was the ideal older brother figure. They appeared to be seventeen and eighteen in the first book and were still the same age forty-three years later. That’s good work if you can get it.
Rick lived with his family on Spindrift Island where his father was the head of a diverse group of scientists. Each had a different specialty, allowing for a wide range of stories, and they formed a dozen of the best uncle figures any boy could imagine.
Rick was bright and a bit precocious, but he wasn’t a wunderkind. Elsewhere he might have seemed nerdy, but on Spindrift he simply seemed a bright young scientist among brilliant experienced older scientists. He was always learning. He often saved the day, but he never had to save the world.
In short, he seemed real.
I wish I could recommend Rick Brant to today’s audience. Certainly it would be hard to match the series’ quality, but the same timeliness that made it work on publication, makes it dated today. A kid with a smart phone is not likely to be impressed when Rick invents a miniature walkie talkie, and that’s just too bad.
Harold Goodwin was a diver, worked for Civil Defense, NASA, NOAA and other agencies, and said that his books “were often a spinoff from my technical work.” His lengthy obit is reprinted in Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3487756.Harold_Leland_Goodwin?from_search=true
58. God, if he were God
Mankind has problems, vast, complex and intractable. We pray for help from a wide variety of Gods. But God, if he were God, might well find that all of our problems stem from one excess, which we could correct ourselves, if we only recognized it.
The imagery, of course, comes from growing up with thrice weekly sermons of hellfire and Armageddon ringing in my ears.
God, if he were God
God, if he were God,
Would call up troops of angels,
Asbestos wings and swords of fire.And setting out to cleanse the Earth, would stamp
His heavy booted foot upon Jerusalem.
Where men of every race and creed
Cry out his name, while each the other rends.There God, if he were God,
Would pause and see.This crowded planet,
Multiplying sorrows,
Where every baby born,
Every ailment cured,
Every life revived,
Compounds the horror
Of numbers grown
Beyond endurance.One alone is empty.
Two may reside in love,
Three, a family make,
And a hundred make a town.But the numbers that beset this earth,
Create a taste of Hell.
56. Cinn Sings a Folksong
Sometimes I write poetry as poetry. Sometimes I write it to fill story needs. This folksong was written for Valley of the Menhir to give Tidac and Cinnabar a romantic moment early in their courtship.
She showed him how to hold the thyril and how to strike the bass strings with his thumb while his fingers touched the trebles. His left hand stopped the trebles; the bass strings rang free. He tried manfully – which is to say, clumsily – to coordinate his two hands and was becoming frustrated when she stopped him with a giggle.
“You try too hard,” she said. “You aren’t trying to overcome an armed opponent; you are trying to coax the music out.”
Next he tried to pick out the simple lullaby which she sang over and over for him. He had not heard her sing before; her voice was small but sweet. After a time the tune came, and still later it came freely. Cinnabar kissed him noisily and congratulated him.
Then Cinnabar picked up the thyril and began to play. The melody was sad, but it brightened slowly. She raised his eyes to his and they were full of promise. She began to croon very softly:
*****
I reach for her, lying in her linen bed;
My fingers draw her forth into my arms.
Her rounded hip against my belly —
Her slender neck is in my hand.
My fingers touch and stroke her strings
evoking music
the thrumming that fills my loins
the dry treble that excites the night.
Sometimes she is cold within my arms
And I must coax her voice to life.
Tonight she is fire,
Yielding to the motion of my hands.
My fingers touch and stroke her strings
evoking magic
the crying bittersweetness of the night
wraps its hands around my heart.
*****
An ambiguous song, equally applicable to the thyril or the woman who held it. Whatever I am, or have been, or wish to be, Tidac thought, is now wound up with her.
Cinnabar smiled up at him and laid aside the thyril.
*****
I wrote that scene about 1978, and it remained in every revision until about 2010 when it was cut as a part of a major push to tighten up the pacing of the early part of the story. Too bad; I always liked it.
55. Voices in the Walls
In the 1970s I was an enlisted man, a tech in the oral surgery section of a Naval Hospital in California. It was an interesting position. Like servants in a proper British household, or like house slaves on the plantation, we were seen but ignored when the officers conversed. We knew everything they talked about; they had no idea what we said about them.
Our new Captain, just back from a deployment in the far east and looking forward to retirement, said to his colleagues, “I’m really glad to be back from Japan, but now I can’t wait to get back to America.”
He was joking, but he meant it, too. He was from one of those mythical places like Vermont, and California didn’t look like home to him. I understood him completely. I was born and raised in Oklahoma, but even to me, historical America meant New England. Despite the fact that Washington, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry were all Virginians, and the fact that the Declaration of Independence was written in Pennsylvania, if you say 1776, most Americans will think of New England.
For me, that’s because of textbooks. In the mid-fifties, elementary history textbooks did not contain photographs. No doubt it was a matter of technology and economics, but what those books had instead were beautiful line drawings, frequently sepia toned, which not only showed aspects of the colonial world, but looked like they could have been drawn in 1740. I remember one in particular, representing the tobacco trade. A wagon sized barrel, lying on its side, was hitched directly behind an ox and self-rolling down to the water, where an apple cheeked ship with a single square sail was standing in to receive it. It opened up my landlocked Oklahoma heart and made me love the sea a decade before I saw the sea. I’ve been looking for a copy of that old textbook for many years, but it may be a blessing that I haven’t found it. The reality is unlikely to be as fulfilling as the memory.
As a side note, the thesis I wrote for my second masters degree, thirty years later, was on American maritime history.
I didn’t visit the northeastern part of the United States until I was pushing forty, and it was everything I had dreamed it would be – as long as we avoided the cities. My wife and I spent most of our time in the countryside, and visited cities primarily for the museums. D. C. and Philadelphia were inspiring; Valley Forge and Chadds Ford were beautiful beyond belief, at least at that season. The list could go on.
I also got a gift in New York, in Tarrytown. We were visiting the Washington Irving mansion when a tour guide told us that the house had been a station on the underground railroad, and that the family could sometimes hear noises through the walls when escaping slaves were hiding in the basement.
True, or just a good story? I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I just knew that I had been handed another novel for my to-write list. As of now, I’m 45 pages in and I’ve been stalled there for a long time. I’m not sure if I need to go from first person to third, or if there is some other problem that my subconscious has not yet rolled out into the light, but Voices in the Walls will get finished, eventually. Meanwhile, I will be using it as the centerpiece of an extended discussion of race, starting in mid-January of next year.
54. Bind Not, Be Not Bound
In Blondel of Arden, now in Backfile, and in post 56, coming Thursday, I produced song lyrics to give my characters a chance to show their attitudes. In the novel Cyan, due out in spring, I went a step further by having the characters themselves write poetry. I’ll cover that in a future post.
Keir Delacroix is the groundside leader of the explorers on Cyan. Because of events in his childhood, he has an aversion to forcing others to his will – especially women. He spells this out in a poem.
Bind Not, Be Not Bound
Speak softly, draw near,
Touch but do not cling,
Bind not!Share with me your love and laughter,
Smiles and frowns, days and nights.
As a lover, as a friend,
Mine, but free.
(As I am free.)Remain as you wish,
Depart when you will.
Be not bound.
This attitude leads him to questionable decisions late in his year of exploration. Those decisions come back to haunt him when the explorers return to Earth, massively change the early days of colonization, and ultimately lead Keir to a broader view of human relationships.
53. Irritants
Dear reader, batten down the hatches. I am going to rant.
I work very hard at appearing calm, balanced, and of “an equable disposition”. It’s all a lie. I really live at a slow simmer, ready to break into a full boil.
I hate ignorance, complacency, and sloppiness, which makes it very hard to watch TV news and all but impossible to watch commercials. I can’t drink coffee while watching TV for fear I’ll throw my mug at the screen.
Of all the irritants in daily life, probably nothing grinds my gears as much as those who torture the English language while thinking they are speaking well.
So, get ready . . .
Small means little. Little means small. What does small-little mean? Is it smaller than little, or littler than small? Despite the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever, small-little seems to have completely replaced both small and little in everyday speech.
Arrggh!
First ever — are you kidding me? First ever! First means first. Period. It is an absolute. All reasonable modifiers added to first reduce the field over which it is absolute. The first person to graduate from Harvard is absolute. The first black person to graduate from Harvard is also absolute, but from a smaller set of people. The first left handed, gay, Canadian Mormon to graduate from Harvard is absolute, from a yet smaller set.
Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space. Saying he is the first ever man is space doesn’t make the statement more absolute, it just makes the person speaking seem ignorant.
If you’re first, you’re first. Saying first ever doesn’t make you more first. It doesn’t make you any firster.
What next? Infinity-er, followed by infinity-est?
Arrggh!
The English language changes constantly. What is normal today is likely to seem quaint tomorrow. Despite this rant, I have no problem embracing change, but as users of the English language we still have one obligation.
If the change is stupid, don’t use it.
A Writing Life 