Off the road again

So these last few weeks have been remarkably like being run over by a car. And please remember, when I say something’s like being run over by a car—I’ve been run over by a car. I am being precise.

So where have I been? Lots of places, but most importantly—Canada!

This is the only flag photo I'll post, I promise.

You have been warned: travel photos follow. Go pop some popcorn or something. I’ll wait until you get back. If you don’t want to look at somebody else’s travel photos, scroll down to the bottom of this entry and stop when you see a photo of a blue three-ring binder; there’s some news about writing stuff down there.

This nine-day trip came about because three factors came together. First, I needed to do some traveling to take care of a provision of my late grandfather’s will (I was quite surprised to find out I was in it at all, but that’s another, much longer story). Second, I had a passport, but had never actually used it to cross an international border (or in this case boundary—apparently those things are very different, but the U.S.-Canada divide is a boundary, not a border, and people get upset when you get that wrong). Third, my flatmate had always wanted to see a live stage performance of a Shakespeare play in the company of someone who understood what the actors were saying.

So naturally, because we’re us, we Googled “Shakespeare festival, Vancouver BC” and planned the trip from there.

The journey started off with a daylong train ride from Los Angeles to Oakland, California. Here’s a nice view from the observation car, somewhere a bit south of Point Concepcion:

Tough life, huh? I must point out that the Oakland part was … less fun. I spent my early childhood in Crip territory in the middle of the Crips-Bloods war, and I got some uncomfortable flashbacks to those years as I dragged my suitcase (minus the wheel Amtrak had all but melted off it) through the Oakland streets by night. To their credit, though, everyone Flatmate and I actually spoke to on the streets of Oakland was civil, if not cordial. It was mostly the graffiti, garbage, and piercing stares from people who didn’t talk to us that had me feeling seven again.

The next morning, we rented a car at the Oakland airport and started driving up the coast toward the first two major goals of the trip: a stop in the California redwoods for Flatmate and a visit to my great-aunt in Oregon for me. Flatmate, as an experienced long-distance driver and a lifelong scenery junkie, drove while ordering me to photograph vineyards. So here are some vineyards, photographed at high speed from a moving car:

Not pictured: My white-knuckle grip on the camera.

That first evening, we had one of those moments that’s going into a story someday. We stopped in Fort Bragg for dinner, and took our pizza to a little seaside cliff to enjoy the sunset. Flatmate, who seems to have a special relationship with gravity, insisted on sitting as close to the edge as we could reasonably get, which was okay since I got some amazing photos.

The actual view. Be glad this photo isn't looking straight down.

Then we noticed we weren’t alone on the cliff. About twenty feet below us, on an even more precarious rocky outcrop, was a man with what looked like a wooden flute. As we watched, he fiddled with it for a while, and then began to play a series of long, mournful notes. He was obviously very focused on what he was doing, and I’m not quite sure he knew we were there as he made his instrument sing to a foghorn far out on the ocean. The audio isn’t great, but here’s a snippet:

Yeah, in about five years I might have the words to describe that.

Our next stop was a tiny roadside motel in redwood country (well, southern Humboldt County, so I guess that would be pot country, too). The redwoods were pretty, but because my cat-obsessed sister-in-law reads this blog, I’m going to post pictures of the lanky black kitten-cat who owned the motel. After all, the internet is made entirely of cats:

He was coming to inspect our room. And collect ear-scratchies.

And okay, here’s some redwoods, too.

The next day, we pulled off the road to have lunch in a redwood grove. Flatmate and I went for a hike. Somehow our half-mile loop trail turned into a three-mile lost-in-the-woods adventure. And now you know why I’m not an outdoors person.

"I'm glad we found water, but there wasn't a river on the map ..."

"That tree has a skull growing out of it.
WE ARE SO DOOMED."

The next major stop was my great-aunt’s place. Of my great-aunt, I can say only that I hope I’m that awesome when I’m 80-mumble years old. Seriously, I hope I’m still running a small farm (including a stand of trees that she describes as, “We were going to have a Christmas-tree farm but then we decided we’d rather have a forest”) and welcoming random relatives and their even more random flatmates when they scare my neighbors, barge in at an ungodly hour of the night, and then immediately run outside again to go stargazing. She went out stargazing with us, you guys. And the next morning she took me out picking blackberries and told me all about her older sister, who happened to be the grandmother I’d never met. That was … that was good. Pretty much the highlight of the trip for me, and we hadn’t even gotten to Canada yet.

My great-aunt's cat, emperor of all Oregon. At least.

I’m going to fast-forward through the next bit, including way too many conifers, the traffic hells of Portland and Seattle (useful travel tip—any city that bills itself as a coffee mecca generally can’t make a cup of tea to save its life), and the line at the Canadian border (whoops, boundary!) that was all of three cars long. Highlight of the border crossing: a somewhat cross Canadian border guard telling me sternly that my camera had better be turned off for the actual crossing part. Apparently there are dangerous terrorists who might be using random American tourists to find out what’s involved in crossing into Canada.

… I’m just gonna let you insert your own jokes.

In any case, we made it into British Columbia, managed not to get lost, and found our hotel in downtown Vancouver, which gave me a whole new set of flashbacks to my early childhood. Vancouver, that is, not the hotel, which was a charming century-old building that was extraordinarily well-maintained. Of the neighborhood, I’ll say only that we quickly abandoned our plan to walk from the hotel to the Shakespeare festival on the grounds that we weren’t completely insane.

View from the always-open window of our hotel room.
It was like living in our own private noir movie ...

But there was a Shakespeare festival! We saw two performances at Bard on the Beach during our stay—Twelfth Night and Hamlet, performed by the same cast and magnificently staged. I don’t have any of the really juicy photos because they were quite strict about cameras during the performance, but the lead in Hamlet was stretched out on the stage, in character and listening to an iPod, as the audience filed in, so I snapped a quick picture of him before anyone would warn us not to take any pictures. So there’s Hamlet, y’all.

I believe the track was a metal song called "Rogue and Peasant Slave".

Our second full day in Canada featured the other highlight of the trip, at least for me. Early in the planning process, when Flatmate asked me what I’d want to do during our downtime in Canada, I idly mentioned a desire to visit Bowen Island, the home of the humorous SF author Spider Robinson and the model for Heron Island in his Russell Walker novels, Very Bad Deaths and Very Hard Choices. Flatmate, being the nature fiend she is, was all for it once I mentioned the magic word “hiking”.

The word "trees" may also have figured prominently.

Now, before I start sounding fangirl-stalkerish, let me say that I didn’t want to visit the island in order to find the author. In fact, I made no attempt to find out where he lived, and as far as I know, he’s been in the U.S. for the past several months, helping his daughter, Terri, take care of her daughter, Miss M. I did not go looking for him, and I did not find him, nor did I expect to do so (though of course I would have been delighted to run into anyone who writes such wonderful books and sings such wonderful songs). No, I was just along for the ferry ride.

The ferry ride, you ask?

Do yourself a favor. Go read Very Bad Deaths, and pay particular attention to the bit where Russell is on the ferry to Vancouver. That part where he says that the tourists all get out of their cars and gawk in eerie, total silence because the scenery literally makes it hard to breathe?

...

… Totally accurate.

Library. With totem pole. Because ... yeah.

Once we were ashore, of course, I had to go take touristy photos of the island’s small library because—library! And we hiked and ate lunch and visited the World’s Smallest Candy Store (which may not have been the smallest candy store on Earth but was definitely very small and sold very good black licorice). And then we got back on the ferry and went and watched some more Shakespeare.

All right, one more Bowen photo.

Back across the border we went, and then it was a night in a Seattle motel that pretty much didn’t have indoor plumbing (the lousy tea should have been a clue) and two days on the train to get home. For the record, I still prefer train travel to plane travel, but two days is a long time for an introvert to be surrounded by people and mostly unable to sleep. That’s pretty much where I got to feeling like I’d been run over … a feeling that lasted most of the following week, which is why this blog has been looking like an abandoned shopping mall.

Almost home. Moon over random rocks and subdivisions.

And now the writing stuff:

See that binder? That’s Teh Novel a.k.a. The Resurrectionist’s Song (unless I change the title again). I am working on rewriting it, chapter by chapter, and getting it ready to send to agents and publishers and everybody. I told some very nice people that I’d have it done by the end of the summer, and I’m busting my butt to make that deadline. Masks will have to happen where it can.

Note the sheaf of random notebook paper at the back of the binder
(the shorter pages). Not part of the manuscript, so there's not THAT much to go ...

But for those weeks where I may or may not have a Masks chapter, I will be posting photos of Teh Novel. See that folder sticking out of the stack of pages? That marks the division between the early chapters that I’ve rewritten and the later chapters I haven’t gotten to yet. You will be seeing that divider move rapidly toward the bottom of the stack over the next few weeks … I hope.

I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do for you lot for my birthday. But it should be awesome.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a few run-over-by-a-road-trip bruises that could probably do with a little ice …

A blog for Mrs. Neese

I’m neck-deep in two books right now, so here’s a blog entry inspired by my eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Neese.

If you knew Mrs. Neese, you’d be really excited by that sentence. From second through eighth grade, I attended a school that I’m still convinced was actually an outer ring of hell. I was miserable. Mrs. Neese was one of only two teachers I had during that time who had the good sense to take a highly self-motivated low-level genius and, rather than making her sit still and do what everybody else was doing, just let her run. One of those teachers put me in the school spelling bee so I got my longed-for chance to show everyone that I really was good for something (albeit not sports or being pretty or having rich parents). Mrs. Neese just let me write. 

I was in middle school by then, and she made clear early on that she was totally fine with my writing stories in her class as long as I also did the homework. And she was surprisingly flexible about the homework part. She let me write weird takes on her in-class assignments, like a love story with only one onstage character in it (he dropped dead at the end) and a legend in which the god of dreams was really a frustrated actor. The very first sentence of the very first story about Rae—which happened to be the very first story in what became the Masks universe—was written in her class. I even remember the seat I was in that January day: in the back row, the seat on the far left as I faced the chalkboard, the northeast corner of the room. I remember looking up and seeing her glance my way as I scribbled frantically in the notebook I’d stolen from the supply cupboard at home. There’s no way she believed I was doing eighth-grade homework in a 300-sheet three-subject spiral notebook. But she didn’t stop me. 

So when Mrs. Neese (a fan of Masks on Facebook, because she’s awesome like that) suggested recently that I blog about writers who have inspired me, I couldn’t exactly say no, could I? Here, then, is a by-no-means complete list of five authors who have something to do with who I am and what I do today …

1. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis – All right, nobody’s ever going to accuse me of writing fantasy in the style of either of these two men. My writing is about as far as you can get from the plummy Oxfordian tone of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia or the lyrical high fantasy of The Lord of the Rings. These two make the list, and make the list together, because their books are some of my earliest memories. My dad read me The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham when I was four years old, and the Narnia books followed soon after—in their published order, beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, not the stupid retcon order beginning with The Magician’s Nephew. And say what you will about Lewis’s many shortcomings as a novelist or Tolkien’s bouts of academic logorrhea, they didn’t matter to me when I was too little to be reading tiny print by myself. Those stories showed me what was possible—that kids could wander into alternate worlds through mysterious objects called wardrobes, that animals could talk, that a creature called a hobbit could find himself on an adventure with dwarves and a wizard but keep worrying about his kettle and his pocket-handkerchiefs. Even though I didn’t go into fantasy writing as an adult, and I don’t even read much fantasy now (I joke that Tolkien set the bar so high that no one else will do), that baseline informs much of what I write now. If you ever wonder why Rae talks to figures of legend and why I think it’s totally okay to have a zombie arrow sitting next to the death ray at a supervillain auction, it’s because somewhere in the back of my brain is a five-year-old who knows that dragons exist, and that their scales can be pierced by arrows and by lion claws …

Best jacket photo EVER.

2. Timothy Zahn – This author made the list because where Tolkien and Lewis were the foundation of my childhood reading, he formed the basis of my “grown-up” reading life. I got into Zahn the same way most of his fans probably did—I read his first Star Wars tie-in novel, Heir to the Empire. I was ten years old and had just seen the original Star Wars trilogy, and I was starving for more Luke/Han/Leia action. But two things stuck out to me in that first book and never really went away. 

The first was that Zahn wrote one-sentence paragraphs. Heck, some of his paragraphs were sentence fragments. And it worked for him! I’d never seen anyone do that before, but for him it worked perfectly. He’s to blame for every one of my sentence-fragment paragraphs since then. The second standout point was the way he ran multiple plotlines simultaneously—something I hadn’t seen done much up to that point—and more importantly, several of those plotlines were intensely emotional. I was used to stories that painted human emotions in broad, melodramatic strokes; things like rage and grief and joy all served to advance the plot. Zahn used subtler emotions to color his scenes, to move his story along without requiring those emotions to spur an action, and occasionally to gut-punch his readers. For example, after a plot-heavy scene where a ghostly Obi-wan Kenobi tells Luke some plotty stuff and then says his final goodbyes, Luke’s reaction really stuck with me: “For the third time, he’d been orphaned.”

I admit, my ten-year-old self hadn’t thought about the situation that way; that sentence hit me like a wave. Suddenly the story wasn’t about space battles and laser swords anymore; it was about a kid who’d lost his family three times over. Lightsabers, hell; I read the next three books looking for more of that feeling. As soon as I finished that trilogy of novels, I tracked down every other Zahn book I could find, hunting for that thread of human emotion tangled up in his knotty sci-fi plots. And more fragmentary sentences, of course. (I also listened to several of his more action-oriented books over and over on audiotape, so he’s probably had a bigger influence than anyone else on how I write fight scenes. I even hear his readers narrating them in my head.)

Also the best author photo ever.
"What duck?"

3. Terry Pratchett – Good Sir Terry is a more recent addition to my list of influences, but he’s an important one thanks to my years-long battle with insomnia. Not long after I discovered Pratchett’s brilliantly satirical Discworld books, I began to have trouble sleeping at night, and my doctor advised me to set a rigid bedtime routine—the same actions repeated at the same time, every night, to cue my body and brain that it was time to power down for a while. The doctor recommended that I include reading in the regimen, as most people find that a relaxing activity. However, I tend to get really intensely excited while reading, so perhaps in hindsight it wasn’t such a great bit of advice. For several nights, I lay awake thinking anxiously about whatever I’d been reading before bed, wondering how the story would turn out. I finally decided that I’d have to read something so familiar, so utterly predictable, that I could go to sleep without thinking about it. I grabbed the nearest Discworld book, which I’d recently read two or three times, and started reading a few pages a night.

I want to emphasize that the works of Terry Pratchett, lyrical and innovative and side-splittingly funny as they are, don’t actually make a very good soporific for most people. But when you’ve read them enough times to know most of the jokes by heart, they at least won’t keep you up at night. Over the next several years, I read almost every book in the Discworld series, except for a few of the earliest volumes that I didn’t like so much, over and over and over again. There are about 20 Pratchett books on my shelf that just rotate across my bedside table. Right now I’m probably on my tenth reading of Monstrous Regiment, averaging 20 to 30 pages per night. That much exposure has to seep in somewhere, and I’m beginning to notice little signs: more absurd situations creeping into my stories, a certain renewed interest in wordplay, and an awful lot of British slang that I have to delete on the rewrites … 

4. Spider Robinson – Where I grew up, “hippie” was a dirty word. All that peace-love-dope stuff was for cowards and sissies. In my town, the most important social events were all held at the local shrine to Richard Nixon (it had a topiary effigy of Checkers in the garden and, at least when I was a kid, no mention of Watergate anywhere). Consider, then, the effect of Spider Robinson, a proud self-identified hippie best known for a series of witty and unexpectedly touching humorous SF stories set in a Long Island bar. The short stories in his Callahan series made me giggle, and then immediately made me think. While I won’t claim to agree precisely with Robinson’s views on everything (we will always differ in our opinions of the Beatles), he never stopped impressing me with a) the speed and subtlety of his wit and b) the breathtakingly human heart that beats in every sentence he writes. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more human writer, and I mean that in the best possible way. When he’s not writing about drinking games, punning contests, and intergalactic insanity, Robinson likes to wrestle with Big Ideas. He doesn’t always win, but how can I not love a man who defines what it means to be human as “to live forever or die trying … to strive in the face of the certainty of failure … to persist”?

I freely admit that I stole his definition of personhood—that a person is anyone who voluntarily says or otherwise communicates, “Excuse me”. (Thus, several dogs of my acquaintance are people, and a great many humans are not.) Robinson taught me not to shy away from the big stuff.

He also taught me that talking dogs are always funny if you write them right. (You’ll see what I mean by the end of Volume 2, if I can keep that bit about eggs from getting cut …)

5. Peter S. Beagle – This is the most recent addition to the list, but he has to make it just because I’ve spent the last couple of years tracking down every book of his available in every local public library. He got me into fantasy again, pretty much, because he wasn’t writing Tolkien wannabe material. Instead, Beagle’s stories focus on the liminal spaces where ordinary life interacts with the extraordinary bits of fantasy. His most famous book, The Last Unicorn, combines the familiar tropes of fairy tales with a very modern schlemiel of a wizard and a breathtakingly alien force in the unicorn herself. For my money, though, it’s his short stories that are best—like “The Rabbi’s Hobby”, in which a rabbi and a 12-year-old would-be bar mitzvah take on the case of a mysterious young woman appearing in old photographs, and end up unwrapping a tale of ghosts, and regrets, and unexpected uses for antique keys. Or there’s “Oakland Dragon Blues,” in which a dragon (loosely based on the dragon cut from early drafts of The Last Unicorn) comes to life in Oakland, California and goes looking for the author who stopped telling his story before it was done. And for my money, “Mr. Sigerson” is one of the best Sherlock Holmes pastiches I’ve ever read, focusing as it does on the exiled Holmes, now a violinist in a tiny backwater orchestra, becoming involved in a tricky local mystery and learning an unexpected thing or two about his own long-denied humanity. 

 

While I’d like to cite Beagle’s glittering, lyrical prose as an influence on my own, I’m not that good (yet—I hope!) and he’s really on this list for two other reasons. First, his stories gave me the guts to write poetry for the first time since high school, and that’s something I desperately needed for Teh Novel. And second, the very fact of those stories’ existence—the way they shine like perfectly cut jewels—makes me want to write, and write better, and finish things well. I’ve met Mr. Beagle twice at conventions, and both times he has been a faultless gentleman and a warm, wonderful human being. For all I know it’s a clever act and he’s really a total jerk, but at least when I talk to him, he makes me want to be a better person and a much better writer. He’s over 70 years old, though, and you never know with older authors and their health, so I’m hammering away at my current projects, hoping to finish something worthy of being presented to him someday, before I run out of opportunities. I want to thank him for the lessons he’s taught me with his stories, and for the encouragement he’s given me when he didn’t have to do any such thing. Peter S. Beagle and his writing make me want to create something worthy of them both; I hope someday to hand him a copy of a published novel with his name in the acknowledgments, or even the dedication. Even if he never reads it. Even if he never opens it. I just want to thank him properly. Some people are like that.

There are more than a few authors who didn’t make the cut—Jim Butcher, for example, whose joke about his writing motto being “Suffer, Harry, suffer!” inspired my own joking mantra Suffer, characters, suffer. And I can’t go too long without mentioning Homer’s Odyssey, my favorite work of Greek literature, or the original Sherlock Holmes stories, or Neil Gaiman’s Neil Gaiman-ness, or the glorious pulp adventures of Johnston McCulley and Edgar Rice Burroughs, or Michael A. Stackpole’s short story “Peer Review,” which taught me that prose stories about superheroes were a thing. And Stan Lee? Oh, yes.

 

But for now, these five will do. And I hope I’ve done Mrs. Neese proud, sentence fragments and all.

Lessons from a fever

This picture has nothing to do with anything. It's just a favorite image of my friend and favorite opera singer, Amber Peters.

If this blog is a little strange, blame the cold medicine.

I woke up on Thanksgiving Day and, as usual, got to work helping my mom with the preparations. I didn’t drop the turkey this year or commit any of my usual holiday atrocities, but that’s mostly because I noticed, around midday, that I had an ache high in my throat that two mugs of  my favorite ginger tea couldn’t banish. Shortly after that, the dizziness and the aches arrived, followed by something that felt a lot like fever, though I’ve always been bad at noticing when I have one of those. By evening, I had what looked like white colonies on the inside of my throat, but a rapid strep test found no actual bacteria—it’s just one hell of a flu infection. Further evidence that God is an iron.

I should explain that last bit, shouldn’t I?

It’s stolen from a Spider Robinson book—from a short story, in fact, called “God is an Iron.” The reasoning goes like this: if someone who commits gluttony is a glutton, and someone who commits a felony is a felon, then someone who commits irony is …? Ah, I hear the groans of understanding.

The irony here is that I just put in my two weeks’ notice at a job I don’t particularly like, and ordinarily I wouldn’t feel too bad about calling in sick. But I did just submit my resignation, and now my sense of honor refuses to let me sit back and be sick. I don’t want to be one of those lazy people who puts in their two weeks and then stops caring about the job. This employer has treated me quite shabbily, and in some ways getting sick makes me feel like they were right about me. I am lazy.

Except I know I only get sick when I’m massively stressed and running myself into the ground. If I’m sick, I know the one thing I haven’t been lately is lazy.

Anyway, what’s sticking in my head this week—and what may interest you writers, and perhaps even me when my brain clears—is music. I’ve  never been a terribly musical person, mind you; I took voice lessons in college, and when I filled out the form explaining why a non-music major wanted to study singing, I remember writing in the blank, “So I will no longer be shushed in church.” You know your singing’s bad when little old ladies turn around to shush you during “Amazing Grace.”

But I do enjoy singing, at least when I’m by myself, and after two years of vocal instruction I can carry a tune, at least if I have a bucket. Among other things, I can harmonize pretty well; I have a relatively low mezzo-soprano voice that makes a good backup to a higher mezzo or a full-blown soprano. I’m sort of a natural bass line.

But with a sore throat, I can’t sing. I can barely talk, and breathing and swallowing become a chore, too. So I find myself listening to my favorite bands, especially the ones with distinctive lead singers and lots of harmony in the vocals, and wishing desperately that I could sing with them. Even though I normally don’t sing along with recordings unless I’m trying to write a story to their lyrics, something about not being able to sing makes me want to sing more than anything.

So there’s your story idea. Have you ever noticed that suddenly losing an ability makes you want to use that ability like crazy? You break your leg, and all you want to do is run, even if you’re a couch potato. You lose your command of a language, and suddenly the world is full of people speaking and writing in that language that you never noticed before, and it’s driving you crazy that you can’t understand them.

So what would happen, I wonder, if a character in such a situation suddenly regained that ability—but in a completely new and different way? Suppose I got my voice back, but it was someone else’s voice. Would I still want to sing? Would I sing the same songs? Or would I quit singing altogether because it wasn’t my voice anymore?

Something to think about. Perhaps when the fever subsides. 

And if you're weirded out by all this, then here's a sneak preview of the art for Wednesday's chapter. Now who could this be?