Hûw Steer's Blog, page 11

Resolutions: 2024 Edition

It’s that time of year again – let’s look at what I did this year, what I didn’t do, and what I want to achieve next year. In writing, I mean. Not just life. You don’t need me to ramble about that.

It’s been a pretty good year, all things considered. After an empty 2022, I had four short stories published this year, and two more picked up for publication next year into the bargain. In particular, A Vintage Atmosphere is a big feather in my cap. I’m in Analog – a magazine approaching 100 years old, one of the biggest in the SF&F industry. I’m not resting on my laurels by any means but it shows that I’ve come a lot further in the last year and a bit – my time as a ‘proper’ author, as I’ve been thinking of it – than I first thought. So that’s good.

In the long-form arena… yeah. Writing – well, concluding – a trilogy is a lot harder than I thought it would be. Boiling Seas 3 is not, as I had hoped, published.

But I have finished… the first draft.

Spoilers.

I got to the end. And it’s a long, messy manuscript, meandering, mad, but it’s done. It feels very strange. Even though I know I’ve got a lot more work to do, even though it’ll look very different when it’s really done… I’ve finished the story. I’ve been working with Tal, Max and Lily for about 7 years, all told. It’s weird, knowing that this huge story of theirs is finished.

But it’s a good ending. That, I can promise.

And, of course, there’s The Singer, which I did publish, and seems to be going down well. So that’s alright. In terms of actually selling books, I did well! More than 600 people bought one of my books, and some of those weren’t even for free! It’s my best-selling year so far, so onwards and upwards, with a bit of luck.

Number Go Up.

A pretty good year, on the face of it. But this time last year I made 4 resolutions, so let’s see how I did at those.

1 – Do Another Book

Well. I did publish another book, it just wasn’t the one I planned to publish. The Singer is doing fairly well in its first month or so of existence, and while I didn’t publish Boiling Seas 3, I did at least finish the first draft. So half a point, I’d say.

2 – Write Reviews

I didn’t do as many of these as I’d like, outside the big Riftwar Re-Read, but I did do a few indie reviews – I just did shorter ones than I’d post on here for Goodreads and Amazon. Those are the places they need to go, after all!

3 – Write Short Stories – and Edit Them. And Submit Them.

Editing? Yes, I think so, if I’m remembering which stories I had in the pipeline a year ago correctly. Submitting? Always. Writing? Less productive – I was quite busy with Boiling Seas 3, in fairness. But I reworked The Scar for its publication in The Pinch, I got one of those unedited stories polished and accepted for future publication, and there’s another one out in the world under consideration. But the submission tracker is looking a little empty lately (though that’s because I had to remove the published stories from the ‘Accepted’ column to make space, which is a very nice problem to have).

Dash Justice is also here now. Yes, that really is his name.4 – Agents

Yep, still plugging away at manuscript submissions, and chasing the various people to whom I submitted many months ago and still haven’t gotten back to me. Such is the querying life, unfortunately.

So what about this year’s resolutions? Well, they may be predictable, but here they are:

1 – Boiling Seas 3

Not allowing myself any leeway here. Boiling Seas 3 comes out next year. I’m going to let the finished draft sit for a couple of months just to cleanse my creative palate, and then I’m right into editing. I will try to ignore the voice in my head that’s been saying ‘but the draft is so long, you might as well release it as 2 parts’, and actually cut the damn book down. I suspect that even so it’ll be a much beefier volume than I’d originally intended. But it’ll come out.

2 – Write More Shorts

As part of that creative palate-cleansing, I’ll get some more short pieces down. My quiver is almost empty, and the challenge of writing good, concise stories is always a welcome one. I have various ideas – let’s see how we go.

3 – Marketing

I am not very good at marketing my own work. I post, I share stuff… that’s about it. I need to get better, if I’m actually going to make any kind of name for myself. There are indie authors much better at publicity than me – it’s time to properly take a leaf out of their books.

4 – Agents

Can’t give up now. I will keep plugging away.

5 – Something New

I’ve been writing the Boiling Seas for a while. It’s time to dive into a new world for the next novel after BS3. Again, I have ideas. Let’s see where they take me.

There we are, then. Nothing too excessive. Just writing short stories, starting another novel, actually getting good at publicity, and editing down a 150k+ manuscript and actually publishing it, and all the associated formatting, cover art and title…

It’d be really handy if I’d done some of that already, wouldn’t it?

More spoilers.

Well, I never said I was going to show you yet.

Happy New Year.

Festive Sale

I’m back home with the family for a few days now, and have immediately become so Festive and full of food that I completely forgot it was Sunday.

I won’t keep you long – it’s Christmas Eve after all (or hopefully an equivalently relaxing time for those who don’t celebrate Christmas), but some of you might like to know that ALL of my ebooks are now either free or cheap for the next few days.

The Blackbird and the Ghost is FREE, and sequel Nightingale’s Sword is just £0.99 (while I try and finish the third manuscript before the new year…)

Fancy some SF instead? Ad Luna is £0.99 too.

Children? The Fire Within is £0.99 as well.

And my new release The Singer? FREE!

All these discounts are in place until the 27th, so if you want to fill up any new e-readers or use some gift cards, take a look!

I’ll be back next week with my usual end-of-year reflection – until then, have a lovely Winter Festive Time, one and all.

New Story – A Vintage Atmosphere

To my genuine surprise, I’ve got one more story out this year – and in the venerable Analog magazine to boot!

(Silly me assumed that the January/February 2024 issue would in fact come out in January or February 2024, but it’s available now!)

This is a long story, the result of an idle idea that bloomed into something much heftier: what if, in the future, we farmed oxygen?

A Vintage Atmosphere covers just that. If you’ve got yourself a starship or and space station or habitat, you’ll need breathable air to fill them with. And where there’s a need, there’s a business; and where there’s a business, there are producers. Enter the farmers of the future – growing oxygen, not crops.

I go into much more detail about the story in a Q&A over on Analog’s own blog. It was a very fun story to write, because I got much more into the nitty-gritty of scientific detail than normal and had a great time doing it.

If you fancy reading the story for yourself, it’s available here in the latest issue of Analog.

(I’m quite chuffed with myself for this: Analog‘s been around since 1937 and it’s got serious pedigree as a result. This is probably the biggest break as an author I’ve had so far. Here’s to some more.)

The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of (gets very weird very quickly)

You know when you wake up in the middle of a dream, and it’s still very much vivid in your mind? And you think, ‘right, I’ll commit that to memory right now so I can think about it in the morning’, and then just fall asleep again and forget the whole thing when you wake up again?

Well, that’s why I keep a notes document on my iPad, right next to my bed. (Not a notebook, as it’s got a screen-light and it spares me fumbling with more buttons and a pencil.) Because sometimes I wake up from a dream and thing ‘hang on, there might be a story in this one’. So I flail my way over to the iPad and blearily write whatever it was down for reference, and very occasionally one of those ideas might actually turn out to be alright when I wake up.

So far… no, consulting the list I’ve not actually written any of the dreams up. There are some decent seeds of ideas but obviously they’re all distorted by being dreams, and thus bounded by no internal logic whatsoever. But there are ok bits there sometimes, and I might actually work on some these days. Here, then, are some highlights – not all good ones…

The Doctor Who episodes

I’ve had several Doctor Who stories come to me while asleep and they are almost all rubbish. We’ve had the ‘planet of 12 sunsets’, which is a nice image but doesn’t have much else to work with; there’s the one starring Daniel Kaluuya with a very generic ‘evil humanoid alien’ plot; and there’s the most recent one, which is also the most recent dream I had… which actually might work, I reckon. I just need to wait until Ncuti Gatwa’s been the Doctor for a little while so I can see how the character works. Or maybe I’ll just write it for Paul McGann.

And then there’s the best episode of all, which is simply titled: ‘Ood Cop, Bad Cop’.

The Two Kings

There’s no proper chronology to this notes doc but I’m pretty sure I must have been at university for this dream, because I’ve written ‘Nero regent vs Hadrian warlord on campaign’ and then plotted out a story of inter-imperial rivalry between two brother rulers. One gets the political intrigue, the other gets the Big War, and they jockey for position at the top of Not-Rome for a few hundred pages.

It’s got potential, I think, though I’d need to either fully lean into Roman history and try and find a proper pair of rulers to write about (daunting), or distance it from just being ‘Rome in Space’ with some different cultural influences. Which is again difficult for me, because if in doubt I always throw some Roman references in to build up a world’s history.

The Deeps

Submarines? In my science fiction? It’s more likely than you think. But this is not that submarine story, or the other submarine story that I may or may not be working on right now: this one’s a bit more grounded. Or watered, I guess. Anyway: some sort of war on within and underneath a world’s oceans, featuring experiments in weaponizing sea creatures, like in Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic and, uh, real life. But the big twist of course is that the sea creatures are also at war and looking for human allies, against something suitably large and Cthulhu-like at the bottom of the sea…

Again this one might have legs, or flippers. It’d be a lot of submarining research, but there could be potential here – there are just a lot of coincidental similarities between this and current/recent projects, so if I do ever get stuck into this one it won’t be for a while. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

Then there are all the other weird ones: two planets near the heat death of the universe, alien bounty hunters, the prison break comedy and the spy film with Hugh Dennis and Adam Driver and a… robot bee.

Yeah, some of these might need a little more work.

Breaking News

There are many, many things I like about Doctor Who. But one of my absolute favourite things is the BBC’s willingness to use itself in its own show.

I’m talking largely about the modern, revived Doctor Who here, as to my shame I’ve not watched a lot of the classic series – but to my happy surprise this is not exclusively a NuWho phenomenon. The BBC has been merrily doing this since 1966, though under Russell T. Davies they started committing to the bit more.

For me, it started in 2005, in Aliens of London. Never mind the constantly farting Slitheen, never mind the actually quite good satire of the British government – the scene that has always made me smile is when Rose and the Doctor turn on the TV… and see the story of the crashing spaceship being reported on BBC News. With all the branding, all the SFX, and the real BBC presenters.   

From ‘Aliens of London’ (2005)

I mean look at it! That’s a full-on fake BBC News report! They had actors filling in for several of the reporters, but that’s actual Andrew Marr at Downing Street! And for me, of course, the cherry on top was Matt Baker – then-current Blue Peter presenter – bringing out an alien spaceship cake that he’d made earlier.

‘Aliens of London’ (2005)

And this was just the start. Almost every contemporary Earth-based story for years would toss in a few BBC News cameos – here’s Lizo Mzimba (who will always be Lizo from Newsround to me) in The Sarah Jane Adventures. The Titanic II is about to crash into Buckingham Palace? Better get the BBC’s actual Royal Correspondent Nicholas Witchell in to report it. Need a fake Newsnight? Just stick some actors on the real set with Emily Maitlis. The list goes on and on.

Lizo in ‘Mona Lisa’s Revenge’ (2009), and Witchell in ‘Voyage of the Damned’ (2007)

It’s such a simple thing, but it’s a fantastic bit of worldbuilding. Using the actual BBC to ‘report’ on these ridiculous stories instantly makes them feel far less ridiculous, grounding them firmly in reality, especially when you’re 10, and especially when Blue Peter is in on the joke. It would have been so easy to whip up a fake news channel and just have a few actors on a set – probably far easier to manage with scheduling for these real, busy newsreaders. It might not even had detracted from the story – but it certainly wouldn’t have added that extra veneer of credibility that makes these stories feel so ‘real’.

And it’s not just a modern thing. In 1966, BBC newsreader Kenneth Kendall – the first newsreader ever to appear on camera – reported on the invasion of the deadly War Machines; in 1970, Alex Macintosh came out of retirement to cameo in Day of the Daleks as himself. The BBC have been doing this for decades, making the best use of their resources to make Doctor Who feel that little bit more real.

Kendall in ‘The War Machines, Part 4’ (1966). Tried very hard to find a clip of this online, but the episode is of course now available on iPlayer and Disney+

But what about when they’re not showing the BBC? What about international news? Well, that’s when actors and fake news channels come in, and for the British viewer there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact I always liked the continuity in some of those actors, particularly the default ‘American newsreader’ character later dubbed Trinity Wells, played by Lachele Carl in 8 episodes of the first RTD run, as well as an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures and 2 of Torchwood. (In fact she’s one of only 2 characters to appear in all 3 of those shows, with the other being Anthony Debaeck’s ‘French Newsreader’.)

‘Aliens of London’ (2005)

Trinity was a constant presence whenever something was going sufficiently wrong with the world that – gasp – it was going wrong somewhere other than Britain! But then as the show changed hands to Steven Moffat and then Chris Chibnall, about whom I will not speak here, she fell by the wayside. And that was fine: things change, even background characters.

And then last night, in The Giggle, guess who showed up with their own US talk show?

‘The Giggle’ (2023)

Continuity! It’s been over a decade since Trinity’s last appearance – of course she’s moved onto a new gig outside the news. And of course, this being America, she’s managed to get herself a talk show. The return of pretend BBC reports in The Star Beast was great, but bringing back this random background character was just the perfect bit of unnecessary but brilliant continuity.

I’m not going to spoil anything else about these last 3 episodes of Doctor Who, of course. (Go and watch them. Go and watch them now.) But this was just one little touch that really made it feel like proper Doctor Who to me. Never mind the Daleks, never mind the Doctor. Give me my realistic fake news reports and I’m a happy man.

The Singer Review – The Wood Between The Worlds

I am once again honoured by some extremely kind words on The Singer by Erin over at The Wood Between The Worlds!

As she notes in the review, Erin has read pretty much all my books at this point (and given them good reviews:

“While The Blackbird and the Ghost was probably my favorite thus far, I believe he’s reached a new high with this book: The Singer just feels perfect from beginning to end. The writing is simple yet masterful, and it feels effortless.”

Don’t think I’m going to get much better than that, honestly. Thanks, Erin.

Writing Up Warm

I have, to my memory, only written one story where the weather is actually cold. (Not counting space; space weather is an entirely different beast, though I do also want to write about that some day…) That’s ‘The Man on the Mountain’, which is, as the name suggests, set on a mountaintop where it is of course bloody freezing all the time.

But apart from that – which is a good few years old now – all my published works have either been set in ‘average’ climes (well, as ‘average’ as the weather on the Moon can be), or places that are, in one way or another, extremely hot.

The Boiling Seas series is self-explanatory: the seas are boiling hot in this world, and so pretty much everywhere else is too. Steam rolls off the waves and makes all the islands of the Seas humid and damp – I had to come up with a specific magic trick for Tal Wenlock to avoid being a constant sweaty mess. There are cold places on the planet: there’s a mainland with mountains and such, much further from the ocean on both axes, and I did write a prologue for Boiling Seas 3 set up those mountains that I’m now not using (but will definitely put out some day…).

Then there’s my most recent short story, ‘The Scar’, which is set on a desert planet where life can only exist in one enormous valley next to the one river – the only water source in the world – as far from the burning sun as possible. The actual surface of the world is basically inhospitable from the heat and the dust and the radiation. It’s quite hot, is what I’m getting at.

The Scar being based on this bit of Morocco, of course.

This overall thought of course springs to mind because it’s currently very cold (finally), and as I like to record all my environmental bits and pieces for future reference I’ve been writing a few things down. And then I’ve been looking back at my environments notebook and seeing how many thoughts I’ve noted on cold days, and how absolutely none of them I’ve used. I just haven’t done cold weather, not in ages – not even in things I haven’t published or submitted yet. Hell, there’s an unfinished rambling story in the works that’s set in another desert. It’s a gap in my weather-telling, which is, as I’ve previously discussed, actually quite important for good worldbuilding even if it seems boring at a glance.

So I need to sit down soon and write something cold. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a lynchpin of the worldbuilding, though knowing me I’ll end up hundreds of thousands of words into The Freezing Seas before I know it. But it needs to be cold. My characters need to watch their breath plume in the air, feel their fingers numb. They need to step from a warm doorway into that crisp, fragile cold that is a winter’s morning. If nothing else it’ll let me do some direct drawing on my current environment, rather than wistfully writing about humid jungles and hot water as I finish off Boiling Seas 3.

I don’t even like warm weather. What’s made me focus so much on deserts and jungles? I’m 5 and a bit feet of Celt; I’m built for 12 degrees C and a light drizzle.

Imagination is a weird thing sometimes.

The Singer – How I Wrote It

Sometimes I like to write just for the joy of it. I’ll go in with no plan, not even an idea beyond a single sentence, and just see what happens for a while. Usually this is between bigger projects, or at least projects with more direction – I am notorious for not properly planning my writing, but even I normally scrawl down a few bulletpoints to get the general shape of a story, or at least the core concept, set out before me.

But sometimes I go in with nothing whatsoever. I find a vibe and I run with it. It’s creative relaxation, essentially; I’m still writing, but not pursuing any particular ending or story. Often – well, pretty much every time – this leads to a nice rambling tale that is unlikely to see the light of day without some serious cutting and pasting. I get lost in the atmosphere and just breathe. Normally these are stories with one key character, who I often don’t even bother naming: one person, from whose perspective I can slowly explore a slightly weird world. It’s almost first-person from my perspective, though these characters always end up people in their own right.

The Man on the Mountain is one of these tales, as is another upcoming story that you should find out about early next year – as was The Scar, too, to some extent when I first started the long version. As are several stories sitting on my hard drive, some waiting to be finished, others waiting to be beaten into shape.

And as is The Singer. Which is out now, in digital and physical form. A story in which I set out to just breathe in some fresh air, literally, by exploring an idealised countryside with many hefty injections of childhood nostalgia.

I set out with no plan whatsoever – the only thing I had nailed down was what the titular character, Tom the farmer, could do. (He wasn’t even Tom back then; I only named him when other people started inconveniently showing up and tracking conversations got confusing.) And his dog; he always had a dog. The first chunk of the story is literally me exploring it for myself: we see Tom’s fields, his home, his life, explored slowly and in detail. We see the village where he lives, and meet the other people there, most of whom are inspired by or at least named after the real people of my childhood. The Singer builds slowly because I was building it deliberately slowly. If you read it (and please do), you can probably tell that I’m walking these paths, watching the same sunsets, right alongside Tom and the others.

And then as I kept on, a plot started to form. This was the point at which things got ‘serious’; when I realised that there could be more to this story than just vibes and atmosphere. I didn’t really intend it. It just happened one morning: I sat down to write, picked up with Tom sitting in the Grandfather’s Axe, and found conflict walking through the pub door. And I ran with it. I was so immersed in this world, in how it would react, that Tom walking around the village and slowly gathering opinions and reactions is me doing the same. I didn’t know what anyone was going to do until they did it. It was a very refreshing way to write.

By this point, of course, instincts had kicked in, and I guided things towards the end of the story with a little more conscious involvement as the satisfying conclusion became obvious. But there are still moments, even there, where things grew out of nothing and blossomed into scenes and events all by themselves. The very end of the book, in particular, in the village square: that bloomed full-formed, and I’m grateful for it. It was one of those days where things just flow, and I sat back from the keyboard with those last lines written feeling not empty – as is sometimes the case when a story finally claws its way out of me to its bitter end – but full. Satisfied. I hadn’t set out to tell this story, but it had told itself, and it had, I thought, told itself pretty well.

So if you’d like to understand what I mean by any of this rambling, pick up a copy of The Singer. It’s only short. But of all the things I’ve published it has the most… reality to it. Maybe that’s just because I immersed myself in it so much. Maybe it’s all the things I drew on. But it’s a world that lives and breathes, at least to me. Maybe it will to you too.

Coming To You Live…

First things first: you can now pre-order The Singer in digital form! So if you want to buy the book now and not get it until the 23rd, please do. Full release, including paperbacks, on Thursday.

For about a year and a half now, I have been an enthusiastic convert to the ways of the tabletop RPG – Dungeons and Dragons for fantasy adventures, Call of Cthulhu for terrifying Lovecraftian nightmares, and Star Trek Adventures for Space Shenanigans. I’ve played all these games quite a bit and thoroughly enjoyed them – from a storytelling perspective they’re all brilliant fun to get stuck into, and from a game design standpoint they all have their entertaining quirks. Sometimes you roll 20-sided dice, sometimes 100-sided; sometimes you want to roll high, sometimes low. But they’re all polished, tested systems that are popular because they’re proven to work.

So of course, when I decided to finally take the leap from player to games master and host my own session, I ignored all these existing systems completely and made one up myself.

I say ‘made up’; what I did was take three completely separate game systems, file off some serial numbers, mash them together, stick them in the Warhammer 40,000 universe and then attempt to run the result with a group of friends. Yes: I am aware that there are several actual 40k RPGs already written and existing; yes, they are as unnecessarily complicated as pretty much every Warhammer game and derivative, so I ignored them. (For anyone interested, I essentially used Kill-Team for the combat encounters and the stat system from the World Wrestling RPG for everything else).

And so the scene was set. In a grimy, futuristic undercity on a world where it rains oil on the ever-shifting ground, four (relatively) innocent people were very much in the wrong place at the wrong time. A little innocent sneaking about and light gang warfare ended up (of course) on the floor of a vast arena, and from there to the edges of a criminal conspiracy of vast proportions. Fights were had, bugs were planted, truly stunning rude graffiti was painted.

About to get to work.

I’d never run a game like this before. I spent ages writing ‘cutscenes’ and characters, developing the plot – I even made a few props. I’ve been part of these games, so I know how to contribute to someone else’s overarching story, but it’s never been my story – at least not like this. People have read my books, yes, but they’ve never been in the story itself.

But I have now. And ye gods, it was fun. I owe a great debt to my friend Mike for his amazing light and SFX setup which added a lot to the atmosphere, but sitting around that table I could see that my friends were totally immersed. I span my web of plots to guide them through the little world I’d created; they promptly went off in completely unexpected directions and made me improvise even more than I already was. We went through the world I’d created together, expanding it as we went, and it was genuinely exhilarating. I was essentially storytelling live, writing on the fly – which for someone who has always preferred a scripted performance, or at least to be reacting to other people while improvising, is something that I’d normally hate. But it was honestly some of the best work I’ve done in ages.

It certainly went down well enough that we’re planning another session. I’m already brimming with ideas on how to continue this thing, which is wonderfully distracting. For any RPG players out there umming and aahing over being a GM – do it. It’s fantastic fun.

Never has something I’ve written felt quite so alive as this. I suppose that’s because it was, and is. This story’s not over yet, after all.

The Dream of Flight

I’ll warn you now, this is a rambling one.

It’s nice and horrible and grey here in London, as it has been for some weeks. But there has been a clear blue sky in my mind for days, now, and I don’t think it’ll ever quite go away.

It’s a little because of a quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci (he did not, alas, actually say it):

“For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.”

But it’s mostly because of the song that said quote inspired, the song that has been in my head all week, since we started singing it and is most definitely going to stay there: Sogno di Volare by Christopher Tin.

As I’ve occasionally mentioned on this blog, when I’m not writing or doing LEGO, I’m singing with a big bunch of nerds called Ready Singer One, who make tuneful noises from video games and SF/fantasy shows. (The whole venture has grown a lot of late – in-between performing in various churches and crypts around London we’ve started doing convention gigs and the like, and we were actually on the BBC the other week, both as a feature for their website and on the telly later that day too. One of those faces looks familiar…)

Sometimes those songs need to be heavily adapted to actually be performed by a full choir (looking at you, Pokemon). Sometimes those songs are written by Christopher Tin, and are also the themes to the various Civilization games. We’ve already done Baba Yetu, which is likewise a fantastic piece of music, and Sogno di Volare joined our repertoire last week.

And it’s been lodged in my head ever since. It is achingly beautiful to listen to and even more wonderful to perform. Singing a great song is one thing; singing a great song while surrounded by forty other people is another. There’s no feeling quite like being in the middle of a four-part harmony (or six, in this case). It being in another language somehow enhances that soaring feeling (Italian brings the choir’s language total up to 9) – maybe it’s just that it adds an otherworldly flavour to the whole thing.

The recording I embedded above is wonderful. It’s more complex and more polished than our version, of course – we don’t have the luxury of an orchestra to accompany us, just an extremely talented pianist and percussion. But the sound of voices, and only voices, is somehow better. Sogno di Volare is an exultation; it’s a gifted mind telling us all that yes, this dream is achievable, yes, it’s as wonderful as you think it is. Even though da Vinci never cracked flight himself, the quote (even if he never said it) and the song speak of an absolute confidence that it would be done – of an imagination and a dream as sharp and clear as reality.

And obviously real, modern human flight isn’t quite the same. We’re not birds. We strap ourselves into successively more complex machines and throw ourselves through the sky, mostly in a manner that’s actually quite boring. Flight is a means to get from A to B, now, for most people.

And yet. We still throw paper aeroplanes around, even those little foam gliders of my youth. We still look up at birds and marvel. Listening to this song, I can picture with perfect clarity the clear sky, the bright sun, the shadow of wings high above. Listening to this song, I can see the dream.

Singing it feels like flying.