An Undiscovered Country

They once called him "Cat" because he was a sprinter of Olympic standard.

But like the cat of the proverb, his limit was nine.

My husband died yesterday morning.

And I must leave you again for a time.

The Next Generation

This is Katherine, aka Katie Kat, at 2 -3 months.

She is the sort of infant who surveys a new face with a level, assessing, judicial stare before breaking into a delighted smile.

And her babbles are soft and sweet on the ear -- like her mother's were.

However, she has recently discovered how to shriek -- without any household model to imitate!

She is very cuddly.

She turns my heart to mush.

Where the Heart Is

Home. He's HOME.

As of Monday.

Though very frail, very shaky, tired and terribly weak, He. Is. Home.

After cancer surgery, a cardiac incident, MRSA, pneumonia and another bug, in the last of these four months he contracted C difficile.

We were beginning to wonder if items like yaws and beri-beri were next.

Even though he needs assiduous attention, I hope to resume blogging more regularly soon.

I am so sorry I was unable to respond to (and often even read) your many kind emails and comments. However, this machine seems to have recovered from most of its sulky fits. I will try to catch up.

I have missed you.

Only In My Dreams

He won't be home for Christmas.
But!
!! and !!!
He is out of Intensive Care. He is out of Extended Care as of yesterday. The isolation protocols have been relaxed.
He is off the ventilator. AND they are in the process of reducing the size of the trach valve!
He is still very weak and shaky but we are looking at weeks - not months or not at all.
Hellacious weather notwithstanding, there is light in the darkness amid the storm drifts.
Thank you for your comfort on this lonely road. You have sustained me.
A bright and blessed Christmas to you all.

Update IV

At last I can read emails without this machine shutting down.
First caused by my ancient router, then a dying fan and finally some unknown perversity announcing every two minutes that "Microsoft has encountered a problem and must close." At times, the primitive part of my brain gibbered at that statement as representing a prophecy, paralled.
He is still in intensive care, still in isolation, still tied to a ventilator, but he is stronger. I believe that out of the miasma of pain, drugged dreams and debility he has found himself again and with that identity, the will to fight.
I begin to hope that I may bring him home.
I come home from the hospital each day exhausted. Many of you will understand that, for many of you also have stood by a hospital bed holding some dear one's feeble hand and tried to pour through it every bit of energy and life force that you could.
It's a good thing that I have no deadlines at present. They would be met but the product would be abysmal.
I have missed you. Have missed the daily visits to your blogs, the companionship and exhilaration of your thoughts and ideas, and the warmth of your personalities.
Thank you again and again for your kind thoughts, good wishes. and prayers. They are as hearthfire on a bitter night.

Update III

Since my last update, he managed to contract two types of MRSA , had a trackeostomy (sp!) and has developed the lamentable tendency to wrench out his feeding and breathing tubes, but improvement is there - if painfully slow.
Meanwhile, I have been electronically trackeostomized and unable to communicate. My router suddenly realized it had been created about the time the first flint knife was chipped, then the tower fan failed and now this machine tends to shut itself off frequently and inconveniently - which is why I have not been able to successfuly update or respond to the kindness of your messages.
My Dears, your thoughts and prayers mean so much to me, nevertheless, because one's world becomes a dark and narrow tunnel traversed between home and a tired, fragile man tied to machines in a hospital bed.

Update II

Thank you - each one of you - for your warm messages and wishes.You can have no idea how much they mean to me.
I'm sorry I haven't had the time to viasit and thank you personally.
He came through surgery without significant issues; however, third day after his heart stopped suddenly. He was resuitated and has been on a ventilator and under sedation since.
We wait and hope.
For, by our calculations, he should have two or three lives left.

Update

The bad news is cancer.
The good news is (1) that it's not the sort that is inclined to metastasize and -- according to a CAT scan -- hasn't; and (2) in spite of his other severe conditions ( heart/diabetes/asthma) they considered surgery an acceptable risk. Is being/will be done immediately.
All your good wishes, kind thoughts and prayers have warmed my shivering heart.
Thank you.

Apologies

My husband is in hospital.
Posts will be erratic for a time.

Digging Up the Dead

Genealogy is a sporadic interest/hobby of mine.
One might call it merely a different kind of ghost hunting, involving as it does a search through graveyards and vanished settlements and the residue of old battles for some lingering trace of the ink stained and stone carved molecules that once comprised a living soul.
Last week I was on the hunt for the ancestry of one Prudence Rickers/Ricker/Reicker -- one must deal with phonetic spelling among many other difficulties -- who married into my husband's family in 1859.
Part of research involves elimination of others of similar names -- and that's where diversions similar to plot bunnies arise.
One finds, in a collection of vital statistics from newspapers from 1800 on, seamen Rickers dying of fever aboard the scooner "Ocean" in Annatto Bay, Jamaca in 1823; a character who married a Miss Ricker arrested for bigamy by a special detective from Boston; a report of a young man, after having his attentions refused by a Deliah Rickers, tried to shoot her, then cut his throat and shot himself; and one who drowned with his friends when their canoe upset because "they drank freely of liquor on their way."
I eventually found my Prudence and her parents (she was entered as Mary Prudence.) Their names were Samuel and Charity and they were, apparently, very sober, respectable, unexciting people who lived and died without drama.
Now I'm one the hunt for one of my own, Elizabeth Bridget Wright, born c. 1785, to see if she's connected with the William Wright who was a tavern keeper and spy in New York.

Personal Ghosts

art/Lisa Semerad.

One paranormal researcher is of the opinion that " a vast porportion of reports, possibly as many as 98%, can be solved by identifying the 'haunting' as something quite mundane."

Then he goes on to say "Of course, the other two percent can be absolutely fascinating."

Fascinating because the facts as presented are resistant to the usual grounds for dismissal -- illusion, delusion, confusion or deliberate fraud.

Researchers classify ghostly phenonema according to various criteria. One type is referred to as a crisis apparition -- ghosts of the dying.

Several famous cases of a clear, substantial apparition visiting a close friend or relative with the news -- before that relative could have received the confirmation from a conventional source (because of distance) -- resist explanation by the laws of physics as we know them.

Further, a number of the more seriously regarded cases were not based on the testimony of a single individual. Apparations were observed and recognized by several people.

Attemps to elucidate the mechanism for this type of appparition often involve unstable and complex theoretical extensions such as telepathy, bi-location, out-of-body experience, or survival of the spirit, ie. illustrating an unknown by an unknown.

Probity rests largely on the fact that the recipient of such visions could not have known of the precipitating event because normal communication was either absent or unavailable -- how could a mother see her son in England if he's presently on a ship going down in the south Atlantic. So one wonders if -- in this age where contact is available 27/7 -- claims of such visitations will substantially diminish.

Haunted Houses I

photo by Robert Estall.

England, I assume.

In spirit pathology, one explanation for flitting ghostly figures revolves around the theory that specters appear at, and are tied to, a specific location, such as scenes of violent death -- battlefields, brigand ambushes, horrific accidents and trysting sites for lovers being the most popular.

One of the reasons, I suppose, why I am not impressed with the idea of graveyard ghosts. Not too many people die in graveyards. One is as apt to suspect a wandering sheep.

Premises of some sort, however, are really the historical favourite -- particularly such interesting piles as ruined abbeys and ancient mansions, all that crumbling stone and creeping vine -- probably because we know that such places over time have accumulated the sort of high emotional content likely to precipitate violent acts. Wayside inns are another approved haunting site, simply on the odds: the sheer aggregate of people passing through increase probability.

Some claim that strong emotions: fear, hoplessness, anger or hate, generated at or before death by either the victim or the victimizer, imprint the scene on the surroundings and are the explanation of many apparitions, often classified as recorder ghosts. (Recorder ghosts are the spooks observed repeating the same movements or actions over and over.)

Reasonably, trees and brush which may be cut down or die off are not the best material to receive a lasting imprint for spectral purposes, hence the popularity and longevity of ghosts among the more inert and receptive stuff found in buildings.

And, of courses, houses are where we sleep, and where we are therefore subject to certain hallucinatory phenonema arising from the semi-wakeful mind.

The Guy Who Was A Ghost

A section of the backcover of Ghosts, Spooks and Spirits.

Long ago and far away, back in the days when cows were milked by hand and by yellow lantern light before they were released from their staunchions to graze in the pastures in the gray dawn, a young woman arrived to teach in the one room school that served a lonely farming settlement along a river in the deep woods.

As was the custom, she "boarded" in one of the sprawling farmsteads close to the school.

As was also the inevitable custom, the young swains of the community, after their chores were done, scraped the cowdung off their boots and slicked themselves up to visit the new "teecher."

I don't know if she was comely. She was young and she was unmarried and she was new -- and that was enough.

And so, one fine autumn evening, one strapping young fellow -- I'll call him "Jack" -- arrived to find his cousin "Elmer" sitting solidly in the farmhouse parlour, regaling the young woman, in his slow way, with an account of the time he'd found a skunk in the school's outhouse.

Jack realized that Elmer, rather than take his leave after the normal decent interval, would be determined to wait Jack out and be the last to depart. Possession of the field, so to speak. Elmer was like that.

After twenty minutes or so, Jack made his excuses and left, walked in the fitful moonlight down the narrow, tree-hung highway, past the the dim gleam of the white-painted church, creaked open the iron gate to the graveyard beyond, and waited. He knew Elmer, satisfied he'd one-upped Jack, wouldn't be long behind him.

As soon as he heard Elmer's shuffling footsteps among the leaves on the hard-packed dirt of the road, Jack took off all his clothes and crouched among the tombstones.

When Elmer arrived opposite, Jack moaned. A slow, ululating moan that grew in the still night.

When Elmer hesitated, Jack rose, his naked body glimmering pale, flung up his arms and advanced with a shriek.

Elmer fled, yowling.

Then Jack dressed himself and walked whistling back to the young teacher in the parlour.

Elmer always resented his scapegrace cousin's grin every time Elmer told his chilling tale at family gatherings about the time he'd encountered a frightful ghost. No respect for serious things, Elmer considered. But Jack was like that.

A true story, by the way.

Graveyards, Boneyards and Cemeteries

Orphan at the Cemetery,

Eugene Delacroix,

Loure, Paris.

Students of the supernatural try to classify their anecdotal collections of spectral encounters based on standard criteria, one being, like real estate agents, location, location, location.

Because one theory about ghosts is centered in the idea that some essence of a once-living spirit is tethered to its bones, may haunt its final resting place, and may, on occasion, rise up to clutch at the unwary in morbid, resentful vengeance, a graveyard (the modest form of the term necropolis, city of the dead) is, therefore, the subject of a high degree of superstitious fear.

Crowded cemeteries comprised of tombs, mausoleums, and crypts -- and rumours of strange lights and eerie sounds and necromantic conjurgation among the stones and sepulchers -- enhance this theory of the restless dead rising from their houses. Or uncoiling from catacombs, from those ways beneath the marble.

The fact that cemeteries of that sort were often the abode of refugees, bandits and excavators -- since tomb raiding is also among the oldest professions -- serve to supplement the legends and contribute to the sense that such places are to be avoided, at least in darkness. At midnight when the dead walk, by their choice or another's, when the solitary wayfarer cannot discern, by his lantern-cast shadows, between the real and the unreal -- and fears both.

And I have a true tale to tell about a fiendish twig on the family tree, if you stroll by Friday.

Ghosts, Spooks and Spectres

A portion of the cover of a old and very battered Puffin/Penguin paperback (of the same title as this post) edited by Charles Molin, containing ghost stories by such familiar names as Dickens, Doyle, Wells, Thurber and Saki.

And Oscar Wilde, whose tale The Canterville Ghost is my favourite. It takes particular skill to meld a satire of stereotypes (both national and spectral) with sweetness.

The cover, however attractive, expresses several false conventions about apparitions and other goosebumpy things.

Apparitions of the non-literary kind -- those diligently recorded by folklorists and avid paranaturalists -- seldom show themselves in such wavery, misty, insubstantial shapes. Apparitions have usually proved to be quite apparent. That is, they appear real and totally visible. And just as frequently, they seem to prefer the light of day -- not midnight hours-- to trot about their business. Neither do the majority of them seem to prefer graveyards and similar lurky places. (Certainly, none ever hospitably showed up the last time I visited a graveyard at midnight.)

I have to wonder when the spook in a diaphanous sheet first became the automatic standard for phantoms.

Though the idea of "branding" makes the double moons of my wee behind clench reflexively and I have been known to emit an involuntary bovine bawl at the thought, I probably should begin to commit a portion of my posts to spectral things -- because of A Malignity of Ghosts and because we creep toward that otherworldly season of veils and mists and thin dimensions.

Three on Point

Three on Point,

Edmund H. Osthaus (1858-1928)

watercolor.

Their names are Scott from Oregon, Whirlochre and mine. Writtenwyrdd held a contest t'other week to celebrate two years of blogging. A copy of her "Calfornia Poppies" original provided irrestible inducement. I have coveted that print ~beams~. It will warm the walls of my office this winter.

Written wanted a world-building "scenic opening" with characters and action.

Here's my lucky entry:

She passed through the barricade of trees, bare as old bones, flensed and frozen under the low, clouded cover of the sky bowl that enclosed the day. Brittle grass rasped against her leather leggings like blades on a grindstone and spoke their resentment at her passing in harsh whispers.

Even so, she liked walking here among the mysteries on this cold, still day at the turning of the year, when the crystal-bound earth crunched under her boots like broken teeth, when the feeble light bled all colour to sepia and gray, when the shape of things was not camouflaged by leaves or colour or movement.

The land gave up its secrets at times like these.

She eye-traced the foundation lines of old habitations, the dim, faded rectangles of hearth and wall and portal melted into the dun earth.

Too insignificant for crabbed footnotes in miniscule, the brass-bound chronicles of the Bitter Times ignored the place.

Memory rites at evening in the low-timbered hall spoke only of plague and famine, vague and long ago. A burning, the elders said, to stop the contagion. A hamlet gone like a sparrow glimpsed in firelight.

She move past the ripple of indentations to the hollow, the pit.

None of the tales explained it.

Rotted like a willow from the heart out, a giant oak sprawled like a dead sentry down the bank to the river below. Black water flowed free and sullen around the branches of its crown.

She almost stepped on it.

Ejected, spit out when the great trunk shattered and fell, it lay there like an egg, a dark oval, its surface ridged and wrinkled like a sear leaf, like a brain.

She knew what it was.

She knew these things, though she never knew how.

A soul stone.

Not a thunderstone -- but agate-hearted just the same.

She stared down at it a long time.

She knew now what lay beneath the centuries' accumulation, under the overburden of the pit.

She knew why.

However, this short piece has at least two obvious, face-slapping, technical faults that can't be excused by the brevity of it. Do you recognize them?

Along the Idle Aisle

Fort Putnam on the Hudson,

Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900)

o/c.

A suitably civilized, innocuous, autumnal landscape.

Update:

Yesterday morning around eight o'clock, I cried Huzzah! and ran to my window.

The giant Jurassic Cat that had been pawing at the roadbed down by the Golden Apple clanked its treads up the King's highway -- sounding like the invasion of Buda and Pest -- and swung into Princess St. Then after some deliberation by its outriders, the machine swung ponderous about and clanked back.

I was so disappointed.

Forwarded:

A Short Love Story...

A man and a woman who had never met before but were both married to other people found themselves assigned to the same sleeping compartment on a Trans-continental train.

Though initially embarrassed and uneasy over sharing a room, they were both very tired and fell asleep quickly -- he in the upper bunk and she in the lower.

At 1 a.m., the man leaned down and gently woke the woman saying, "Ma'am, I'm sorry to bother you, but would you be willing to reach into the closet and get me a second blanket? I'm awfully cold."

"I have a better idea," she replied. "Just for tonight, let's pretend that we're married."

"Wow! That's a great idea!" he exclaimed.

"Good," she replied. "Get your own fuckin' blanket."

After a moment of silence, he farted.

And a Question:

Do men in general still possess the protective instinct?

Realism and Fantasy

When the Leaves start to turn,

Pauline Palmer (1865-1938)

oil on art board.

Call it an innate distrust of the crowd/mob/herd instinct, a remnant of childish disobedience, or simply sheer, stubborn, contrary cussedness, but whenever I see excessive ooh ahhh luuurve about a particular author I react by avoiding that writer.

And so it was with Janet Evanovich.

Until I came recently across a used copy of an Alexandra Barnaby adventure, Metro Girl.

What a hoot! What a deliberate, delicious use of improbable coincidence in both plot and character! What an absence of angsty monologue! What fun!... !! and !!!

I must say though, that secondary characters and aids to action, Rosa Louisa Francesca Florez, who rolls and smokes cigars, and an old school friend Jude (Judey) -- the most perfectly priceless, insouciant gay guy I've ever read -- nearly upstage the heroine and her NASCAR accomplice.

In a sense, the story is an urban fantasy sans anything paranormal and what anchors it is Evaovich's choice of realism.

First is the setting. Though I've never been there and must rely largely on photos and CSI, the Miami of the story -- its slips, beaches and clubs -- reads real. Am not really sure how to classify the other thing, but when cars or boats, driving or diving appear, however casually, one has an impression, an assurance, she knows what she's writing about. This sense of authenticity didn't cause me to suspend disbelief exactly but it did allow me to thoroughly enjoy the comedy of wacky characters and the total impossibility of the plot.

And so I wonder if this is a key technique in all successful stories. We need a few specific anchors to the real in all fantasies and adventures; and, conversely, we like a touch of fantasy in the most gritty and grimly realistic tale.

Oh, and Book Roast has editors and agents on the grill this week.

Hunting Season

Ruffed Grouse and Buck,

Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait,

o/c, 1866.

Frankly, there's nothing more heart-stopping when you saunter through the woods than to have a partridge explode out from under your feet. I can well see why in some countries hunters employ beaters to drive the game.

Some say that the Fall is a good season to approach agents and editors, because, presumeably, editors are looking to fire off the shells in their cartridge bag, while agents are ready to salt down more venison. Others say this calendar no longer applies and that deals during off-times are no longer the exception.

One has the impression that in lean times, the industry reacts in two diametrically opposed ways: retreat and advance. Some rely on the supplies already in their storerooms (the proved and successful best or steady-sellers), while others stride out hunting for fresh meat (new voices.)

While creeping through deep thickets and crawling through underbrush, looking for pug marks and game trails, I discovered a couple of interesting things. First: the forums on Absolute Write often have the most up-to-date information on who has moved where/quit the business/begun a new agency/takes months to reply/changed their focus, etc.

The second doesn't affect me personally -- since I'm a TechIdiot without bells, whistles and beaters -- but I thought it deserved mention. Seems one of the ways to get shot while hunting and left to rot in the forest is to have imbedded signatures and virtual business card widgets and similar stuff attached to your query. They can send your inquiry to spam hell. See agent Colleen Lindsay's (Fine Print Literary Management) Sept 1 blogpost for details.

Her post may explain why all you hear are crickets.

My apologies for the mangled metaphor. Memory turns with the seasons, and once my family held a farm called Hunter's Home.

Construction Update: The little toy back-hoe is gone, replaced by a groaning yellow Jurassic monster that claws and gulps up pavement at the foot of our street. Arcane symbols in orange and yellow, graffiti red and blue have been sprayed on our sidewalk. I twitter at my window in anticipation.

Embertides

Autumn Foliage,

Thomas Hicks (1823-1890)

o/c.

The subtle signs are here already for those of us who fear the cold.

In the morning the white ghosts of drowned summer heat rise like smoke above the river.

A flutter of suicidal leaves lays as litter on the lawn, brown in their brittle impatience, foresworn by haste from the bright banners of the final battle.

Light fades too early. Uncertain shadows, once sharp-edged as a polished sword, crouch and quiver, before and behind us, in the amber gold of afternoon.

And the wind moves like a furtive beast, without scent, without voice,

a silent sentinel of summer's end.

I sit amid the mocking green,

waiting for the leaves to turn and fall.

A lament for sweet summer gone.

The More We Know...

Church at Marissel,

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot,

Louvre.

The more we know, the more we don't.

Adjectives are bad; adverbs are horrible; description is disgustingly amateur; figures of speech are untimely and ruthlessly ripped -- a hammer-blow cacophony telling us how we should write.

And yet. And yet I read of more than one agent professing paroxysms of delight over receiving samples of lyrical prose.

Yes, I know. It's all about the degree, the balance, the appropriate choice and place and use.

What brought this on was Tannith Lee, known for her lush visuals of lyric horror. While rooting through the bookstore in search of appropriate material to parcel up for outremer, I came across a couple of her novels. She reminds me of George R.R. Martin: the close embrace of sex and death, and the human capacity for corruption, treachery and betrayal.

The river flexed its gleaming muscles.

And as a reader/co-traveller in her world, in torch light glancing from the stone bridge above, I see it thus/remember it so from some former life.

A number of you have this same rich resonance of style. Please don't lose it.

And by sweet synchronicity, Writtenwyrdd -- who is one of those -- is holding a contest to celebrate her bloggaversary and invites entries in inner purple and luxuriant, lapidary language.

Playing with Blocks

The Waln House ( completed by 1808, demolished in the 1850's)

A. Kern of Philadelphia,

watercolor and ink wash on paper, 1847.

So far the cheerful crew on our street have contented themselves with cement-sawing neat rectangles in the middle of the roadway, digging up hunks of asphalt and dirt, then filling the holes back in -- after the requisite rest period with shovels. In attendance was a tiny and excessively cute backhoe on treads that looked more like a die-cast miniature than a working machine.

Trade and commerce is/are essential to most societies. World building usually requires some sort of reference to a monetary system, unless goods and services are exchanged on the basis of barter.

The simplest system I've read in fantasy used golds, silvers, coppers in a rising ratio by tens, acceptable across political boundaries no matter what face or design decorated the obverse.

In SF, creds or credits often seem to cover the interstellar necessities nicely.

It's amazing though, the number of characters who seem to swan pro bono through the inns and taverns of various fantasy worlds or never have to pay docking fees for their space ships.

I found a penny yestermorn while walking the dogs. Supposed to mean good luck for the day. Various superstitions surround money -- and just about everything else. Something else to consider while constructing an alternative society.

My silver dollars rattle on dry stalks,

While the calendar creeps toward the cold.

Construction Paper

Philadelphia Street Scene,

Paul Martel ( 1879-1944)

o/c.

They may blow up the street in front of my house.

Naturally, I am intensely interested. I haven't handled dynamite since I was twelve or so. The inspector who came by to check for pre-existing cracked windows and plaster appeared disconcerted by my feral interest and ill-concealed anticipation.

Since I'm not much for personal shock 'n awe, I have to wonder if my laconic attitude towards uncivilized situations -- which is reflected in my narrative "voice" and which my Lillie shares to some degree -- will likewise discomfit agents. Nice girls and all that.

I have just finished Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Tiger ( the Seige of Seringapatam 1799) -- where, by synchronosity, a giant mine trap serves as a hidden horror awaiting the British assault.

One sees plainly why the series is so popular: the detail rings with authenticity and deviations from actual historical record are clearly covered in Cornwell's historical notes.

My only technical objection is based on personal taste and applies, mostly, to stories in third person.

I really dislike reading a helpless hero faced with an implacable, eternal and powerful enemy too early in a narrative (even though Cornwell does it in brilliant fashion with Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill.)

While high stakes create drama and suspense, I don't like to invest emotional attachment on a character who may not survive (which is why I'm one of those who always checks the last pages of a novel just to make sure.)

A writer risks reader withdrawal when using an impossible stituation too soon. The more hand-wringing realistic the situation for the hero, the more I defensively detach from him and his seemingly inescapable fate.

I don't like that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

The Garden Path, the Road to Hell, etc.

The Path Strewn with Flowers,
Martin Gwilt-Jolley (1859-c.1914)
o/c.

As always, our English language provides pitfalls for the inattentive and the unwary.
The following examples -- supposedly ripped from newspaper headlines -- illustrate how easy it is for even perfectly competent writers to blow it bigtime. After all, there's only one letter between idiom and idiot.

Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers.
Perhaps apprehend -- though not as succinct and simple -- might have been a better choice after all.

Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant.
Another case of extreme prejudice?

Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges.
New uses for duct tape. It does come in attractive colours, but wouldn't the standard gray be more appropriate?

Miners Refuse to Work After Death.
Zombies are also unionized, apparently.

Kids Make Nutritious Snacks.
According to Long Pig Productions, LLC., a division of Cannibal Kingdom.

Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half.
In Texas, with chainsaws, I assume.

Panda Mating Fails: Veterinarian Takes Over.
A perv in black and white.

Hospitals Sued by 7 Foot Doctors.
I wonder if they all play basketball.

Man Struck by Lightning: Faces Battery Charge.
He probably IS the battery charge.

If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last A While.
Duh 1.
Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures.
Duh 2.
Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says.
Duh 3. Ya think?

And there's the familiar classic:
Typhoon rips through Cemetery: Hundreds Dead.

Just one more thing we can screw up in our writing. I hope you've caught all yours. I'm afraid to look at mine.

Oh, and this is Book Roast Week.

The Garlic Pizza

Sunlight on the Lake,

Herman Herzog,

o/c, 1871.

Summer fades like a flower.

Sparrows flock in preparation,

and shadows lengthen early

in the soft gold of our afternoons.

Ides of August past.

A few days ago, Writtenwyrdd posted an irritation on the convenience of weapons in fiction and the impossibility of some of them, like a cross-bow and pistol combo.

Which reminded me of a problem (as I see it) in many paranormals -- the reliance on legendary (either folk or literary) methods of offing and discouraging various obnoxious entities.

Wooden stakes, crosses, silver bullets, garlic as an avaunt. Ho. Hum.

There is, of course, something to be said (a lot, in fact) on several counts for reader recognition, familiarity and belief in the popular methods, like the Buffy stick means of dissuasion and dissolution.

But it becomes repetitious. To the point of cliche.

Even the standard writerly response to an over-used trope, that of reversing and/or fiddling with it -- the vamp who loves garlic, the blood-sucker who is allergic to copper rather than silver -- is in danger of becoming worn.

In fact, research into folklore provides other systems of protection against the revenants, zombies, draugrs, and the un-dead.

But we like the straight and simple.

I suppose part of the reason for the popularity of various versions of bell, book and candle is our natural human bigotry.

These entities are the Other, the Enemy, and it is easier by far to think of Them as all of a kind.

Sometimes I come up with a title but no story. Will someone please write The Goblin's Whore?

Am Fear

Art by Alfred T. Kamijian,

from Mysteries of the Unknown.

Warning: loose thought threads.

I approve, most highly, of the go-and-look approach to mysteries, to experimental archaeology in the Heyerdahl/Brendan Voyage tradition, and therefore to the underlying theory of cryptozoology.

However, cryptozoology as a study would acquire a lot more respect if the field wasn't beset by so many blatant frauds like the phony Bigfoot carcass debunked earlier this week.

In the first St. Claire chronicle, Stone Child, Lillie makes reference to the Am Fear, the Gray Man, the Scottish yeti, sometimes encountered by a lonely highland traveller, when the mist spreads down from the crags to shroud all sight except the rock-strewn path beneath his feet and the hunched boulders on either side.

The Wild Man, like many legends, has cousins among other cultures and other parts of the world.

And so we ask, as we should, if this collection of folk tales represents testimony of a physical reality -- that under the layers of legend a truth is buried -- or merely proof of a universal expression of collective fear. A primeval human fear of all the unknowns that may inhabit remote and isolate places and leap upon the unwary.

One's belief, or one's disbelief, about things paranormal -- and I suppose Bigfoot could be classified as both a scientific errata and a fable -- may depend on which branch of anthropological psychology one chooses to place the most credence. And we stubbornly insist that unknown doesn't mean unknowable.

Still, we like our mysteries. At times, we even like our fear.

Fear, however, is a vital motivator for our fictional people. We are often told to identify what our characters want. To that I would add we should consider what our characters fear. They do so often go together after all.

It's easy to provide the heart-stopping, chest-constricting sudden fear a character encounters during the machinations of our plots: when the knife-wielder lunges from an alley, when the car goes out of control, when someting blows up.

But we should remember the other kind, the ever-present, silent grade of fear that follows our footsteps like our shadows in the sun. The fear of possibles. Possibles that no application of odds and logic will alleviate.

I have a child in Afghanistan and so I think on it.

Mark - 3

photo credit: J.A. Kraulis - Masterfile.

From my theme calendar for the month named Initiative and a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

A thought which describes, quite accurately, the genesis of An Innocent A-Blog, set up and encouraged by one of my Infants who paraphrased that advice to overcome my trepidation.

O brave new world...

Tomorrow marks three years for this blog and about 900 posts.

Those numbers astound me -- for I am not, by nature, a particularly talkative person and am somewhat tentative and even timid in certain situations.

I do know that without the bright silver of your comments, without your golden voices, this blog would have faded like a blundering firefly in the void.

Instead you have made the blog a diffident dragon's shining bed and I am enriched beyond measure by your visits.

That hath such people in't...

Thank you.

The Naked Emperor Question

Portrait of Luigi Cherubini,

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres,

o/c, 1841,

Cincinnati Art Museum.

We've all bitched about it, either in private or in public.

We've sniffed over the fact that the narrative skill of some best-selling authors, after they have attained that status, seems to dive down hill with speeds in excess of 32 feet per second per second.

We point rigid, raging fingers at passive verbs, tell-not-show, cliched characters, aliens in chapter twelve, and numerous other technical faults that if we, the unwashed, are not allowed to perform on pain of Publish America.

And as we snuff over how this crap ever passed an editor and got published, someone will point to -- with an irritating degree of reasonableness -- to an equally instructive parable, the one about geese and golden eggs; and how, if hassled, a successful writer might take his splendid behind and little basket and move to another coop.

They also allude to the pressure to produce from the system as a reason for a decline in quality. To which we respond that the level of skill that supposedly launched the success, once attained and internalized, should remain automatic and not degrade under time constraints.

And then we snivel over why readers, the ultimate authority, continue to buy, read and enjoy what we judiciously consider slop. We wonder about perception and reputation and marketing sans substance and reader obedience to popular trends.

But in all this criticism, we've forgotten something simple: the story.

Some writers create -- by means of voice or character or world -- a story that charms and beguiles and enchants; and sometimes we forget, in spite of all the technical flaws we are so happy to ennumerate, for the reader that's all they want.

Baubles and Bright Shiny Beads:
Both Laughingwolf and Gabriele have awarded me the Brilliante Weblog , premio - 2008 trinket. TechIdiot that I am I don't know how to reproduce it here, but I am honoured that they included me.

On Professionalism

Breakfast in Bed,

Mary Cassatt,

o/c, 1897.

Like everyone else, I follow agent blogs to educate myself about professional perspectives on the industry.

Lately, several agents -- particularly those who have faced the writerly hordes at the recent spate of conventions -- have voiced some rather pointed complaints.

1. Unprofessional dress: Should a writer show up for a pitch appointment in sweats, agents are not impressed. While they do not suggest one needs to dig out the girdle and pearls, business casual makes a better impression.

Slob is not the new black.

2. Unprofessional approach: Agents are not impressed -- no matter how laid-back their blogging style -- when they receive a query letter beginning Yo, Dude. Ranks the writer right down there with To Whom It May Concern, queries copied to 45 other agents, and pictures of nudes or the family dog. Neither are they titivated to receive queries text style: thnx and LOL.

Chummy is not the new black either.

3. Unprofessional behaviour: According to Dear Author, a few writers continue to be convinced that they can threaten and abuse readers should any fail to provide less than OMG, best EVAH reviews -- and some publishers have resorted to a CYA clause as a result.

Publishing is business, and these are not the best ways to take care of it.

But since this is my blog, I am relieved and delighted to announce the MacDuffian arrival -- and latest addition to the Clan -- of Baby Katherine.

A Summer's Day

The Conversation,

Eastman Johnson,

oil on board, c. 1879.

A St. Helen's summer -- all sucking heat and stunted corn and grass that crunched like moss, and the sky never blue, day after day -- the sky always a bowl of surly yellow like an old bruise and the sun a smear in the yellow haze.

And we watched the sky, westerly, from where the dry winds came, day after day, hoping, as the clay in the fields cracked wide and deep and the river shrank like it hurt from the stones along its bed.

Until one afternoon, the sky rumbled dark and gray and the rain fell, finally, like a great bucket overturned.

I sent the children out to the nearest broad puddle and told them to dance in the mud and the rain.

Children need to laugh and splash and stomp in mud puddles -- to learn the physics of the world.

Pantywadifuss ...* * and *

Mt. Washington from the Saco River, NH,

Sanford R. Gifford,

o/c, circa 1854.

* * and *

A variation on a term for some internet drama I skidded by in the last week or so. Sometimes I follow them assiduously when I'm in cat-fight voyeur mode; other times I twitch a shoulder and click onward. Sometimes I am entranced by the clarity and precision of opinions and viewpoints, and my mind and eyes open wider ; other times I don't have a panty in the raid and do a finger pass.

Where Memes Go to Die:

Gabriele -- with malice aforethought, I've no doubt, tagged me for -- the Night Table Meme. See her for the full and rampant details ( 'cause you won't get there here.)

The Table:

A varnished oak, two-drawer chest.

On it is a phone, my remote, a pen or two and a note pad, a coaster for whatever liquid I'm imbibing in the evening hours, a tube of hand cream , and a pile of books that I'm going to get around to finishing someday.

Also, a box of facial tissue concealed in a dark green replica of an Easter Island statue. The declasse snotcatcher emerges from under the austere and dignified nose.

Reading in situ:

The books I'm reading at the moment tend to sprawl on the bed itself -- when they don't slide off on the other side, that is, and clunk off the base of the blue-shaded floor lamp and make the dogs bark in the night.

What I'm (re-) reading for leisure at the moment is L.E Modesitt, Jr.'s The Order War -- one of the Saga of Recluse series.

Gathering dust ( literally -- excuse me, I sneezed):

Tom Harpur's The Pagan Christ, Nicholas A. Basbanes's A Splendour of Letters, and Wordscape 6: Mystery & Suspense, an anthology of short stories and poems compiled by the Canadian Authors Association. I'm on page 103 with the last, because I get irritated when I can too easily see the furious paddling feet below the prose.

These three are best taken in small bites anyway, with a pause for digestion and cellular absorption in between.

Looking Forward To:

Going to the book store to fill in the gaps in my Modesitt collection.

And speaking of short stories, I discovered that yet another extended scene in A Malignity could , with appropriate amendment, operate as a short story.

I am not sure this is a good thing or a bad thing. It probably depends -- as my mother used to say -- on how you hold your mouth.

Oh, and Weirdly II: Eldritch received another very nice review.