Susan Joy Clark's Blog, page 2
September 22, 2015
The Realm of Possibility
I have sometimes had some difficulty with the genre I am now writing in. For instance, many TV shows feature amateur sleuths, and it can sometimes stretch the limits of your imagination that the sleuths, who are neither police detectives nor private investigators, just happen to have murders to solve wherever they go.
Action films can also stretch your imagination this way. (In fact, I poke a little fun at this idea in Action Men with Silly Putty.)I've seen an episode of MythBusters where they proved that the bus jump in the movie Speed, where the bus jumps at high speed over an unfinished gap of highway, is physically and scientifically impossible.
So,I've been trying to avoid situations that are scientifically impossible in my own writing. Still, I like playing right at the edge of what might be possible.
I've been doing all sorts of research for future Action Men stories, discovering a plethora of helpful Youtube videos. As I do so, I sometimes think we need to rethink what we consider possible. A lot of amazing and astounding things exist in the realm of possibility.
I've been watching videos of accomplished athletes in extreme sports such as parkour (the art of avoiding obstacles,) stunt biking, extreme skateboarding, etc. If I tried any of these stunts, I would end up in the hospital and, possibly, with a video to enter into America's Funniest Home Videos. However, certain talented people can do stunts that seem to be completely impossible -- and would be for the average person -- and accomplish them safely. I've seen stunt bikers hop off of roofs and land right without harm or do flips in the air jumping over cars. The same goes with intellectual talents. I recently learned about a guy who solved four Rubik's Cubes in a matter of minutes while holding his breath underwater.
I will try not to give away any spoilers here about my latest book or future book projects, but my brain has come up with some fairly crazy plot ideas for Action Men with Silly Putty. As I was researching these ideas, as nutty as they seemed to me, I found there were some other nutty people out there in Youtube world, that experimented with these very ideas. I was glad they did, because I watched the videos and had some assurance as to plausibility and how my ideas would work out in theory.
For a future story, hopefully coming soon, I wondered today about an object that would not ordinarily be thought of as a weapon and wondered if it could be used as one. A Google search quickly brought up three articles and a video that address that very thing.
I suppose it should fill us with optimism that seemingly impossible things are sometimes possible!
September 18, 2015
Childhood Writing, Creative Play and a Caterpillar Named Dum Dum.
I don't think there was ever a particular point in time when I became a writer. It's just part of who I am and always have been. I can't remember a time before I was expressing myself in stories.
I was, perhaps, seven years old when I first started trying to write a book. I made several attempts to "write a book" throughout my childhood and teenage years. I think I only have records of one of them that survived until now. It's in a fabric-covered journal with letter-shaped stickers spelling out the title on the cover.
Most of my early writings have not survived, because, as I matured, I became quite critical of them. My biggest setback was my experiences were so limited, and I would get stuck trying to write about things outside of my experience. Now, I know how to research, and information is becoming so much more easily accessible.
I am a newspaper reporter as well, but I did not always anticipate that from my childhood. Facts did not seem nearly as interesting as invented things.
One kind of childhood play seems to foreshadow my future career. One summer, at the Cabin Colony Club at Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks, I made a friend my age. It was my friend's idea that we create a newspaper together.
We wrote about geological areas, which we gave creative names, of our vacation spot. We also wrote about several of my temporary pets during vacation, a caterpillar named Dum Dum -- I decided his name was Dum Dum when he wouldn't crawl on the stick I offered -- a frog named Freddy and a toad named Teddy.
This trip was one of the nicest memories I made with my father. Dad rowed Mom and me across the lake in a rowboat. On the other side of the lake, we explored the ruins of an old Victorian era house with interesting features like a butler's pantry. Mom was fascinated with shards of china she found. Today, I would have found that just as fascinating as she did. We may have picked up some of them, but if we did, we did not hang onto them until today. That may be too bad as I've seen wonderful crafts that can be made from broken china.
If you happen to have some, here are some crafts you can do with them. 12 Creative Crafts with Broken China
Dad found Teddy the toad on that side of the lake, scooped him up in his hands and into the boat and took him "home" with us in the rowboat. I wasn't disgusted by him and did not find him particularly warty according to the toady stereotype but found his chubby little body rather cute. Dad made a wonderful home for him in a cardboard box which we kept in the screened in porch of the cabin. Dad ripped up whole sections of moss and other plants to line the box and created a kind of natural habitat. In one corner, he included a little tuna fish can that had been washed out and filled with water for a toady bath. Teddy did not take much interest in this but his soon-to-be roommate did.
Some time later, we found Freddy the frog and added him to the box toad apartment. The trouble with this was that Freddy was much bigger, stronger and a more powerful leaper than his toady roommate. He could jump onto the edge of the box and make his escape. It's a good thing he only ever escaped into the porch and not the rest of the cabin, and it was also great that my mother was a good sport about all of this.
The weirdest pet in my collection was a clam (whose name I forget.) I kept him in a Kool-Aid can filled with water. A clam seems like a boring pet, and, indeed he was, but I think I was fascinated with the living creature and was hoping he would open his shell.
On that trip, I had packed a hand-me-down set of Peanuts stencils. With these, my friend and I had great fun creating a comic page for our newspaper. We sold our papers for, I think, a dime apiece to our family members.
There are other creative memories of my childhood play, but I'll leave those for another blog.
September 7, 2015
Labor Day Sale
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June 8, 2015
In Honor of Best Friends Day
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Jack is far from stupid. He can speak to me in great technical detail about his projects until my eyes glaze over, and I am dreaming of disco fries smothered in cheese and gravy -- I enjoy disco fries -- his words hovering somewhere in the stratosphere above my head.
Jack's brain liked to think in the abstract, but when it came to practical details, he had no sense of time management ... or time. He had tried many things to help his weakness, programming his phone to alert him with obnoxious alarms at critical times. I am a different sort, and organization is my natural state, so Jack would often rely on me for the practical things. So, between the two of us, with his ability for the abstract and mine for the concrete, we made more of a complete man.
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It was interesting to work and live with the same guy who was simultaneously my boss, my roommate and my best friend. It felt like I was constantly tuned into the same Jack channel, same Jack time. Life with Jack could definitely be interesting. The last few days had been anything but boring. Still, even your best friend in the world can sometimes annoy the dickens out of you. I'm not quite sure what a dickens is, but I'm pretty sure mine has sometimes been annoyed.
Lately, I was not sure if I knew the difference anymore between work life and amateur sleuthing or if I had a life outside of Jack Donegal. I was beginning to wonder how Siamese twins got peace from each other when Jack disturbed my daydreaming.
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What a strange yet interesting world it is where you work with an engineer who's your best friend. One robot had served us drinks at dinner, and, now, another robotic device was playing fetch with the dog. Jack and I had better run around in airports (or elsewhere) some more or get lazy and too fat to sit in the bubble chair.
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In a scene where Jack is driving ...
As the music started, with its odd squeaky cuica rhythm like a person with a bad case of hiccups, Jack alternated popping his shoulders up and down to a cha cha beat. Teenagers on the street were eying us strangely.
“You’re embarrassing yourself,” I told Jack. Actually, I was not sure it was possible for Jack to feel embarrassment. It was me who was embarrassed and hiding my face beneath my hand.
Jack was not easily discouraged. He then began to alternate lifting his hands off the wheel to do a little hand jive.
“Would you just drive?” I told him. “Friends don’t let friends dance and drive.”
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“We banter like this all the time,” Jack told Addicott, “but, really, we’re the best of friends.”
“You should hear the way I talk to some of my friends,” said Addicott, laughing.
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On DROOG, the robot, one of the sophisticated products in their toy business...
Jack had named the robot DROOG knowing that, in the Russian language, droog, ДРУГ, means “friend,” and Jack wanted children to feel like his robot toy was a friend. He also hoped that to American children, who don’t speak Russian, the name would seem exotic and Space Age.
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Another excerpt on the DROOG robot ...
Maybe DROOG wasn’t sentient or emotional like a human being, but when he rotated his head and turned his eyes, those blue orbs of light, on someone, a person tended to think of him as a personality and a friend indeed, remembering R2D2 and WALL-E and other lovable robots from fiction.
