Jane Lindskold's Blog, page 111

Imaginary Friends

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tee-shirt that said something like “I Mourn the Deaths of Fictional Characters.”   Even at the time I saw it, it made an impression.  Now, a week and a bit after the death of David Bowie, after reading numerous thoughtful and emotionally charged pieces that included some variation of “I never met him but…,” I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact that fictional characters – whether in print, or on film, or even celebrities with whom we feel a genuine connection – can have on a person.

Old Friends

Maybe because I was really shy as a kid and because I didn’t have many “real” friends until high school, some of the people who made the biggest impact on me didn’t exist.  My role models weren’t older kids or adults or teachers, but were fictional characters.

The first place I found these imaginary friends was in books.  While I read some of the standards of my day – I quite liked Nancy Drew, for example – my favorites were a little on the fringe.  It won’t surprise anyone who knows my work that both Mowgli and Tarzan were hugely appealing – not so much for themselves, as for the worlds in which they lived, where animals and humans lived side-by-side.  Tarzan may have been the Lord of the Beasts, but it was Mowgli, whose title “Master of the Jungle” was often used ironically, who was my favorite.

I also loved many of the “classics,” The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, The Princess and the Goblins and The Princess and Curdie, the Mary Poppins books, some of the Walter Farley “horse” books – although I preferred Flame, the Island Stallion, to the Black.

I read both adult mysteries and westerns fairly young as well, and I factored characters like Louis L’Amour’s Sacketts and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple (and to a less extent Poiroit), into the group of fictional people who became friends, mentors, and role models.

Oh… And, of course, I was reading SF/F as well, this built up from a foundation of mythology.

I could keep on listing titles, but I’ll stop here because a list of titles does little to say why these books meant so much to me.

So why did they?  Well, especially for a kid without many friends, books showed me the “insides” of people: thoughts and dreams, ways of working through problems, values that both differed from the ones I encountered in my home and school, and that reinforced those values.

Going back to that tee-shirt, I think mourning for fictional characters is completely genuine, because you get to know them far more intimately than you do most of the people in your lives.   The story lets you in, past the façade, past the defenses, past the fictional versions of themselves that are all most people let you know about them anyhow.

That’s a creepy thought, isn’t it?  That most of our relationships are, in fact, with fictional characters?  It’s just that some of these fictional characters think they’re “real.”

But going back to actual fictional characters, in my tweens and teens, I found some more new friends via television.  (My parents didn’t forbid TV; we just didn’t watch a lot of it when I was small.)  Movies didn’t play a big role in my imaginative life, because I saw very few during those years when I was hungry for company.  However, especially once I was babysitting, late night re-runs introduced me to the Mission Impossible team, various cop shows, and, permitted me to fill in episodes of Star Trek.  From there, it was a quick jump to some of the popular shows of the day, especially those with an SF vibe like The Six Million Dollar Man.

I think a lot of the appeal of media tie-in fiction is that, like print media in general, it can let you further inside a character.  You’re not left guessing at what they think or what motivated an action.  You know, because you’re inside their head and they’re telling you.  Very early Star Trek tie-in fiction, including Alan Dean Foster’s adaptations of the animated episodes and James Blish’s adaptations of the main series episodes, fleshed out why the characters did what they did.  The occasional bits of backstory were an added bonus.

Stories remain important to me, even though these days it’s more rare for me to find a new “friend” on the pages or the screen.  Nonetheless, it happens.  An added pleasure has been sharing some of my old friends with Jim, and meeting some of his.

So what fictional characters have become your friends, mentors, or exemplars?  Who would you want to introduce to your “real” friends?  Do you mourn the deaths of fictional characters?

FF: Not Much Finished

This week two things really cut into my novel-reading time: research for a short story and reading a bunch of material related to the death of David Bowie.  (See my Wednesday Wandering for this week if you don’t understand why the latter should make a difference.)

Silver Considers Becoming a Super Model

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Kitty Raises Hell by Carrie Vaughn. (Audiobook.) A very direct sequel to Kitty and the Deadman’s Hand.  Pretty good, although I thought the title was deceptive.  New antagonist introduced in a very creative fashion.

In Progress:

Summerland by Michael Chabon.  A baseball fantasy seems the right thing to counter winter.  I’m very much enjoying this.

Kitty’s House of Horrors by Carrie Vaughn.  (Audiobook.).  Just started.

Also:

A Guinea Pig Pride and Prejudice by Alex Goodwin.  This Christmas gift from Steve (S.M.) and Jan Stirling completely enchanted both me and Jim so we shared it with our guinea pig co-residents.

TT: Troubled By A Trend

JANE: Last time you mentioned that there is a trend in recent lit crit that bothers you. Since you’re a reviewer and presumably keep up on such trends more than I do, I may be unaware of this trend. What’s going on that has you so hot under the collar?

Turtle Pond (just because)

ALAN: Well, I’ve started to notice that some reviewers are judging the books they mention by modern day standards. This causes them to dismiss older works as flawed because of sexism or racism or some-other-ism. This strikes me as short sighted. All works of art are products of their time and judging them by the standards of a different generation is, in my opinion, a sterile exercise.

JANE: It certainly isn’t very useful.  I find the entire the subject of how one should look at stories quite complex.

The first thing anyone should remember – in my opinion – is that fiction is not a gateway into understanding what a time period was like because what is “normal” does not get explained.

It’s like our discussion of coal.  Since I’ve never seen coal being burned, if I read the word “fireplace,” I automatically think of a wood-burning fireplace.

Nor, unless the author includes a bit of business like “To give herself a moment to think, Margaret added a few lumps of coal to the already burning fire,” would there be anything to correct my misapprehension.

ALAN: Quite right! And that assumption of what the world described by the novel considers to be normal can sometimes give a completely erroneous impression of the writer’s intentions or attitudes if the reader approaches a work with information and opinions of their own that the writer could never possibly have shared.

In other words, your own preconceptions may not be applicable when you try to define normality.

JANE: The same can be true of words.  Words that today we find offensive were once normal and not in the least insulting – and this doesn’t only apply to words related to race or gender.

As I think I’ve told you, my dad died slowly and with all too full awareness of what was going to happen to him of ALS – commonly called, until just a few years ago, “Lou Gehrig’s disease,” because most people hadn’t heard of if except in the context of one of the most famous people to suffer from it.

I’m curious…  What do “they” call ALS there?

ALAN: Over here it’s known as “motor neurone disease.”

JANE: Thanks!  I think the shift of terms here was from a desire to make clear that a lot more people suffer from ALS than Lou Gehrig (and physicist Stephen Hawking).  Once again, see the power of words…

Anyhow, back to my dad.  Dad was a good guy, but he definitely liked being provocative.  One day, he deliberately referred to himself as a “cripple,” knowing that this was no long an acceptable term.  “Handicapped” or “disabled” – or words less oriented to classifying people as a group, and instead looking at individual conditions –  had taken its place.

Dad was clearly hoping to get a rise out of me, so I replied: “My mom and dad, both of whom were rather liberal, always told us that labeling people in a reductive fashion was not a good thing to do.”

ALAN: And how did he react?

JANE: He grinned.  Dad liked jerking people’s chains (that’s American slang for “being negatively provocative”), but he loved nothing better than having it turned right back at him.

ALAN: Round about the time that my grandfather retired, people of his age were being euphemistically referred to as “senior citizens”. My grandfather hated that phrase. “I’m an old man,” he would say. “I’m an old age pensioner, damnit!”

That’s a much more trivial example of the same thing.

JANE: Actually, I suspect that if my dad had lived long enough, he would have enjoyed making similar comments, although we don’t use the phrase “old age pensioner” here.

Going back to your original statement, can you offer an example of reviewers finding fault with older works for the wrong reasons?

ALAN: Yes, I recently read a review of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. It was posted on a Reddit discussion group. I don’t know who the reviewer was because real names tend not to be used on Reddit. It was quite a lengthy review and, although I disagreed with its conclusions, there is no doubt that it was very well-written

One thing that made the reviewer condemn the novel was the way that the female characters were portrayed:

The women themselves are almost unbelievably stupid, the living embodiment of the shrewish wife stereotype, who is also stupid and credulous. The nurse protagonist becomes an effective character almost entirely through an unlikely accident. The professions of onscreen female characters so far encountered are secretary, nurse, astrologer.

That statement is demonstrably untrue. Ann, for example, is a Fair Witness and in that role she is vital to the development of the story. Certainly the story does contain elements of gender stereotyping that might not have been present if the novel was being written today. So to that extent the reviewer has a valid point. But by concentrating on such superficialities to the exclusion of what the novel is really about, the reviewer seems not to have even noticed the (often clever and sometimes subtle) satire that makes up the bulk of the book.

JANE: I’m a great person to respond to that reviewer since I am female, and I read that book when I was fifteen.  Therefore, I was a teenager who should have been susceptible to negative stereotyping and had my horizons limited by these negative portrayals of the feminine.

Frankly, none of what the reviewer complains about bothered me at all.   At the time I read the book – which was quite a bit later than its 1961 publication date – most professional women still were secretaries, nurses, teachers, and the like.

Oh, and I should note that Stranger in a Strange Land was a book I read and re-read so many times that there was a point where if you opened the book at any point and read me part of a sentence, I could tell you exactly where in the story it was and often finish the line.

Despite my addiction to the book, I certainly wasn’t crippled in my ambitions as to what a female could do by how Gillian, Dorcas, Ann, and the other women were portrayed.

I might feel differently about the female characters if the book was written today – especially if it was written as if occurring today – but as a period piece, I was fine with it.  As I noted above, it still reflected the world in which I was growing up.  Although I knew some really exceptional women – including my mom, who raised four kids, then went to law school – most professional women were still teachers, nurses, secretaries…

ALAN: My thoughts exactly. I’m so glad we agree.

JANE: One more comment….  This bit of the review makes me crazy: “The nurse protagonist becomes an effective character almost entirely through an unlikely accident.”

How many books have started exactly that way?  Sheesh!  One could argue that Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum is an “unlikely accident,” yet I don’t see anyone trashing either The Hobbit or “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, both of which depend on that “unlikely accident” for that reason.

Growl…

I’m almost afraid to ask you to continue, but I suspect that one review alone would not have been enough to get you hot under the collar.

ALAN: Oh indeed. I’ll have some more examples for you next time.

Iron, Candy, (and David Bowie)

This week I fully intended to talk about the sixth anniversary of the Wednesday Wanderings.  I’d been looking forward to it, had checked and found out that the “traditional” gifts for the sixth anniversary are iron and candy, with wood as a “modern” alternative.  Then on Monday morning, as Jim and I were settling into work, Jim (who was reading the morning news highlights) said, “Oh!  David Bowie died.  I’m sorry.”  He got up from his desk and came over to give me a hug.

Some Bowie Stuff

The fact that Jim offered condolences as if Bowie was a personal friend probably says something right there.  I never met the man, although I always hoped that I might someday – and I’m still feeling poleaxed that this is now impossible.  One thing I love about doing these Wanderings is that I can wander if I want to, and I plan to do so…  but first, let me give the anniversary date its deserved acknowledgement.

Six years is a long time, especially for a blog that appears faithfully every Wednesday, rather than being just a newsletter highlighting projects.  Over the years, the Wednesday Wanderings has spawned two children: the Thursday Tangents (with Alan Robson of New Zealand) and the Friday Fragments (with me and lots of books).   It’s also the parent of a book on writing – Wanderings on Writing – which is available both in paper and as an e-book.

To my delight, the Wednesday Wanderings have also picked up a suite of regular Commenters.  (Is that a word?)  Having exchanged e-mails with many of these, I know that there are a lot of people with strong opinions and thoughtful minds participating.  I want to thank you all for remaining courteous to each other and to me.  It’s nice to have an unofficial “no flame wars” zone.  I hope more of you will feel welcome to join the conversation.

I also encourage you – whether in the Comments or (if you’re shy) directly to me via e-mail at jane2@janelindskold.com – to ask questions and suggest topics you would be interested in me addressing.  I can’t promise – unlike some people who write blogs, I don’t pretend to be the last word on everything – but if I can, I’ll give your topic a shot.

And now…

David Bowie…  I’m not going to talk about the man and his works, because there are a lot of people out there more qualified to write about him, although to this point I’ve yet to read a book that I felt did him justice.  Maybe that’s because it’s impossible to produce a definitive picture of a chameleon in action.

Well, that’s fine, because part of what appealed to me was that very chameleon element.  So, instead of trying to talk about David Bowie or even “What David Bowie Meant to Me,” I’ll offer you a few snapshots (or, perhaps as a nod to one of his albums, I should say “Pinups”) of David Bowie’s work (in which I include more than his music) as it ambled through my life.

1975: My brother wins a copy of Young Americans by being the right caller to a local radio show.  As my sister reminded me, this was the first contemporary album to enter our household.  I remember sitting staring at the picture on the cover, trying to figure out if it was a guy or a gal.  At that point, I didn’t know the lyric from “Rebel, Rebel” “Is that a boy or a girl?”  I just knew I was being offered a puzzle.

1983: Let’s Dance is released and becomes wildly popular.  At the same time, DJs make numerous nasty comments about how Bowie has “sold out.”  I’m puzzled.  Even by then, even with my limited resources (I didn’t have money for albums, much less a stereo), I’m aware that if there is one constant in the work of David Bowie it is – as anyone who bothered to pay attention should know – “Changes.”

1986: I’m walking down a street in the “Arthur Avenue” Little Italy in the Bronx where I live when a poster on a video rental store pulls me up short.  It depicts a roughly triangular montage of weird fantasy creatures, topped by somebody who looks like David Bowie.  It is.  He’s the Goblin King.   I see the movie and – after nearly dying from shock during an opening that seems to be for the most horrible Fantasy film ever – I fall head over heels.  I still love that film.

Mid-late eighties.  I’m done with my undergrad work, in grad school.  CD’s have come out and LP’s are being sold cheap.  I start building a vinyl collection.  Now I can finally listen to the music without relying on radio play.  I discover that a lot of the best pieces never made it to Top 40.  One particular treasure: David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht’s Baal from 1982.

1987: David Bowie has a new album out, Never Let Me Down.  Lots of critics think it’s terrible because, once again, he’s not living up to their expectations.  I love it.  I also fall head over heels for the video of the “Glass Spiders” concert tour.  Again, this is something the critics hate and even Bowie himself is quoted as saying was a huge mistake.  I think they’re wrong.  It’s not a rock concert, it’s surrealistic drama.  I understand that the critics are finally coming around to my point of view.  I hope Bowie realized that he’d done something very fine there.

My sister, Susan, actually went to the concert.  Later, she gave me her copy of the program.  I have it.  It’s a treasure.

1990: I’m done with grad school, living in Lynchburg, Virginia, where I teach college.  My youngest sister sends me a poster of Bowie for my birthday.  It’s a head and shoulders depiction, “Serious Moonlight” vintage, not a photo, but a drawing or watercolor.  I frame the poster, hang it on my office wall.  To this day, I remember fondly the number of students who came to see Dr. Lindskold during office hours, only to get distracted by the poster and finally blurt out: “Is that David Bowie?”

Mid-nineties to present.  I continue following Bowie’s work, both filling in older stuff I missed and sampling more recent.   I see several films (even though I’m not a film buff).  Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence blows me away.  I read several biographies and critical assessments (and avidly disagree with a lot of them).  I learn more about his work – older and newer — and I find a lot I don’t like.

Perversely – especially as I move into writing professionally and discover how even the best fans and critics want you to do more of the same but different – I respect Bowie for trying new things, trying to stay fresh.  Changes.

2013: Bowie releases The Next Day, his first album in quite a while.  I get it and at first am very unsure.  For one, I miss the strong vocals.  For another, the cover art is really disturbing – even for Bowie.  Over time, I decide I like The Next Day, that it’s my favorite of his albums since Heathen, which I loved.   It seems to me that Bowie’s moving into a new creative vibe.  I’m happy to hear another album is in the works.

Now.  David Bowie is dead.  Blackstar is released.  I haven’t heard it yet, but I will.  My friend, Yvonne, gave me a Man Who Fell to Earth tee-shirt for Christmas, but it’s too cold to wear it.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Jones.  Thanks for all the changes.  Thanks for always being a reminder that while some artists thrive refining the same thing into perfection, for some change is the only way to grow.

FF: A Veritable Vortex

News Flash! I took part in a segment of writer Dave Gross’s “Creative Colleagues” roundtable.  The subject this time was heroic fantasy.  Go here to read what I say, compare it to what some other writers think on the same topic, and, if you comment, be entered to win a chance at audio downloads of some of Dave’s Pathfinder novels.

Persephone and the Troll Cat

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

X by Sue Grafton.  (Audiobook)  A bit all over the place, but interesting.

The Orpheus Descent by Tom Harper.  Two plot lines, one contemporary, one from the POV of a fortyish Plato.  Protagonists are moved by events, rather than instigating them.  However, I think the author intended this to create a sense of Fate in operation.

The Hotel Cat by Esther Averill.  A fun children’s book.  I plan to read, re-read, others in the series.

D’Aulaires’ Book of Trolls by Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Auliare.  Their books on Greek/Roman and Norse myths were old favorites, but I had never seen this collection of material on Trolls.  I quite enjoyed.

In Progress:

Kitty Goes to Hell.  (Audiobook)  A very direct sequel to Kitty and the Deadman’s Hand.  Just started.

Summerland by Michael Chabon.  A baseball fantasy seems the right thing to counter winter.  Just started.

Also:

Research for a short story whose deadline is creeping up faster than I thought possible!

TT: Burning Choices

JANE: So, Alan, last week I promised you a story tie-in to our discussion on coal.  Here it is…

Antique Dollhouse Coal Scuttle and Other Inspirations

Some years ago, my friend Paul gave me a set of cassette tapes featuring The Shadow radio dramas, starring Orson Welles in the title role.  The company that produced these tapes included the commercials for the show’s sponsor as well.

This was a good choice.  Somehow, hearing a deep-voiced male enthusiastically touting “Blue Coal, the finest Pennsylvania anthracite,” placed the stories in a historical context and added verisimilitude to the experience.

ALAN: Was it really blue? I always think of coal as being black.

JANE: Apparently, it was tinted somehow, because the commercials stress this, saying things like (I paraphrase) “You’ll know it by its distinctive blue color.”

Did the English get into coloring coal or stressing specific brands?

ALAN: We didn’t colour it, but there were certainly specific types of coal that you could buy. Anthracite was the best and the most expensive. It burned well and gave off a lot of heat. The cheapest, right at the bottom of the scale, was nutty slack, which was really just coal dust with small lumps of rubbishy coal in it.

JANE: “Nutty slack” is a great term…  I like it.

ALAN: But coal has another literary connection – have you ever read The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley?

JANE: I have, indeed.  In my opinion, it’s a rather brutal book.

ALAN: In retrospect, I think that’s true. But as a small child, I rather enjoyed it. The story concerns a boy called Tom who works for a chimney sweep. One day the sweep sends him up the chimney and he somehow falls out into a river where he is transformed into a water baby and has lots of adventures. I was mightily impressed by the story and next time we had our chimney swept I volunteered to be sent up it to clean out the hard-to-reach nooks and crannies. The chimney sweep looked puzzled and rejected my offer. I was very disappointed.

JANE: I’m sure you were.  I remember how Michael Banks was very eager to assist the chimney sweep in one of the Mary Poppins novels.  Hmm…  That’s another literary connection.  I bet they were using coal fires, too.  If it was mentioned, I probably glossed over it an assumed a wood fire.  We do bring our own lives to the books we read.

I’ve had the chimney at my house swept a time or two, but I admit, I felt no desire to participate.

ALAN: I always found it quite exciting. The chimney sweep would come round every six months or so. I would watch him in total fascination. He would wedge his brush a short way up the chimney. Then he’d drape sheets around the fireplace to stop the soot covering everything in the room. The handle of the brush poked out through the sheet and he would start to push it up the chimney. Every so often, as the handle began to disappear from view, he’d attach a flexible rod to lengthen the handle so that he could push it further. Eventually the brush would be poking out of the top of the chimney. The sweep would then reverse the process, pulling the brush down and removing the extension rods one by one. Great clouds of soot would billow down from the chimney and (hopefully) be caught in the sheets.

JANE: I don’t recall anything nearly that elaborate when I had my chimney attended to.  Goodness!

ALAN: Oh believe me, the elaborate precautions were very necessary. An unbelievably huge amount of soot would come down from the chimney. I shudder to think what the room might have looked like if the sheets weren’t there to catch the soot.

When the chimney sweep was finished, he’d clean up the soot as best he could, refold his sheets and take his brush off to the next job. The sheets were never completely effective and my mother would always have to spend quite some time restoring the room to its pristine glory after the chimney sweep left.

JANE: Ah!  That reminds me of another bit of coal-related trivia.  Did you know that spring cleaning was directly related to the use of coal (and to a lesser extent, wood) as fuel?  By the end of a heating season, the house would be distinctly sooty, so as soon as the weather warmed sufficiently for fires not to be needed, out would come the heavy-cleaning materials.

Now that coal and fires are no longer the primary sources of heat – at least here – spring cleaning is a ritual carried on out of habit, rather than from need.  Do you want to guess when – according to statistics based on sales of cleaning products – is now the time of year when most serious housecleaning is done?

ALAN: I don’t know. I’m very lazy and I tend not to do spring cleaning. So tell me, when am I supposed to do it now?

JANE: In late autumn, early winter, in preparation for the holiday season!  In other words, a complete reverse from the days of coal.

Given the popularity of steampunk these days, I think it would be useful for me to know more about the practical details of coal use.  How does one light a coal fire anyhow?  I’d think it would be really hard to get a rock to start burning.

ALAN: Yes, it is. You need quite a high temperature. You have to sneak up on the coal when it’s not looking and take it by surprise. My father had a daily ritual for lighting the fire. He’d begin with single sheets of newspaper. He’d roll each one up into a cylinder then he’d curl it around itself and loop the ends over in a knot to stop it unravelling. He called these paper bundles “firelighters.” He’d put a layer of firelighters in the bottom of the fireplace and lay some sticks of wood over them. Then finally he’d pile a layer of coal on top of the wood.

Once the fireplace was prepared, he’d light a spill – that’s a thin splinter of wood about eight inches long. He’d push the spill into the heart of the fire to start the paper burning. The paper would act like tinder and ignite the wood which in turn would set fire to the coal.

JANE: Did your dad make his own spills, too?

ALAN: No, he didn’t. He just bought them from the shops. They were dyed in multiple colours – blue, green, red and purple. I used to enjoy weaving them together into multicoloured sheets, much to my father’s annoyance. We kept our spills on the mantelpiece in a small wooden barrel with an open top. There was a plaque inset into the barrel which claimed that it was made of wood taken from HMS Warspite.

JANE: That’s cool!  Was it an antique?

ALAN: It must have been quite old – I’ve just checked, and the last wooden ship to bear that name was built in 1807 and was finally decommissioned in 1846. My grandparents had an identical barrel, so I suspect that they were probably bought as a pair.

JANE:  Seems quite logical.  So, did the different color spills burn differently, or were the colors simply ornamental?

ALAN: No, the colours were just there to make them look pretty. Once the fire was well alight, it would burn away merrily all day as long as you remembered to keep feeding it coal.

JANE: Did you keep running out to the shed all day to get more coal?

ALAN: No – spare coal was kept by the fire in a coal scuttle. Ours was a pot-bellied bucket which had three small legs that it sat on. The scuttle would be filled up last thing at night, just before my father went to bed, so that it was ready for the morning.

We used a pair of tongs to pick up pieces of coal from the scuttle and feed them to the fire. We also had a poker which we used to push the coal around in the fireplace so as to make sure that the air could get at it and keep the fire going.

If the coal got too tightly packed or too full of ash, the fire would be starved of oxygen and go out. We also had a dust pan and brush to sweep up any mess we made. We kept all these implements in a huge brass casing from an artillery shell. It was my mother’s pride and joy and she polished it until it gleamed like gold.

JANE: Between the spill container made from a warship and the artillery shell, your fireplace had a distinctly military flare.

Jim and I have a similar set of tools by our wood-burning fireplace.  However, they’re on a rack, not in a nifty container like your mom’s.  Since we haven’t made a fire for quite a while, most of the time the fireplace tools simply serve as something for the cats to play slap-paw around.

ALAN: Well, now that we’ve got a good fire going, there’s a trend I’ve noticed in modern literary criticism/reviewing that is starting to burn me up. Would you like to talk about it next time?

JANE: You bet…  Though I wonder if we can somehow tie it to coal?

Text vs Expectations

When is reading like winter weather?

I’m not sure I’m putting that right, but let me muddle my way in…

Lobo of Light, from River of Lights display

It’s always neat when someone contacts me to let me know they’re reading one of my works.  Whether it’s a newly released book or one of my older ones that this person has just discovered (thus “new” in the sense that the New World was “new” to the Europeans), something about the opening  segments of the work has stirred enough enthusiasm that the reader has gone to the trouble of letting me know.

While I enjoy knowing that something I’ve written has stirred up that level of excitement and anticipation, I often wonder what the end reaction will be.  As those of you who read my works know, I rarely write the “usual” story.  What do I mean by this?  Well, let me give an example.

Many years ago, I was doing a signing for one of the Firekeeper books.  I don’t think it was as early as Through Wolf’s Eyes, but it might have been.  In any case, a couple – I’d guess they were in their twenties – chanced by.  The young woman was interested in the books, and asked me what they were about.

I gave a thumbnail sketch, mentioning the competition for the position of King Tedric’s official heir, and how Earl Kestrel, who was the only major noble without a candidate to back, went looking for King Tedric’s youngest son, Barden, only to find a settlement destroyed by fire.  Soon after confirming that many of the settlers had died, Earl Kestrel and his group encounter a young woman who claimed to have been raised by wolves.

At this point, the young man cut in and, with an evident sneer in his voice, said, “And, of course, she turns out to be the missing princess.”   I replied with deceptive mildness (I was actually pretty peeved), “You might be surprised.”

I can’t recall if the young woman actually purchased a copy or if she let her boyfriend’s sneer divert her.  I hope she did end up reading the book.  She (and especially he) would have come in for a surprise or two.

So, whenever someone picks up one of my books and lets me know how excited they are when they’ve only read a few chapters, I always feel strange.  Unless the reader is familiar with my tendency to turn tropes sideways, he or she is probably going to not have those expectations met.  Whether this is enjoyable or not has more to do with what that reader wants than with what I’ve written.

What does this have to do with winter weather?  I don’t know how it is where you live, but in the part of New Mexico where I reside, winter weather is very unpredictable.  The worst snowstorm we’ve had in the years I’ve been here (at a conservative measurement, we had fifteen inches) was on a day where light flurries were predicted.

I think that reading one of my books is a lot like New Mexico weather.  You can definitely count on a few things, but don’t expect the plot to follow neatly along the usual tropes.  The young man and young woman who meet in chapter one may or may not (but probably not) end up in love.  The action will not be interrupted for a routine sex scene.  Fight scenes will only be detailed if something in the course of the action will add to your understanding of the characters or provide some other crucial detail.

Honestly, is anything more empty than a fight scene where you know the protagonist will be victorious?  Oh, yeah, I know what.  A car chase.  That’s pretty vapid, too.

Funny thing is, a lot of that empty action does a great job (at least for some readers and a surprising number of reviewers) of masquerading as thrilling content.  For me, it’s the equivalent to the TV weather announcer getting all excited about snow that hasn’t fallen, that may not fall, and that, in fact, isn’t really an issue until it has fallen.

I don’t mind a plot I can predict as long as I enjoy the journey.  I had the basic plots of Libba Bray’s first two “Diviners” novels accurately predicted relatively early on.  That didn’t matter, since she did some great things with characters and setting.  I enjoy a good classic mystery novel, even though the expectation is that the detective (professional or amateur) will solve the crime.  Why?  The details of the investigation, how the pieces fall together, are interesting in themselves.

However, when – as is too often the case in epic fantasy, the new urban fantasy, much military SF, and increasingly some sorts of YA Fantasy – the story is nothing more than a recombining of usual tropes, I’m not likely to stick with it beyond the first book.  In the end, I feel as if I’ve listened to the weather forecast, cancelled my plans, bundled up, and been met with heavy clouds but nothing to get excited about.

What’s sad for me is when readers are disappointed in one of my books because they had their expectations set and didn’t find them met in the text.

I guess my books are more like wolves made from light, chanced upon on a winter’s night, unexpected, but clearly recognizable for what they are.

FF: Happy New Year!

I didn’t post what books I’d been reading last week in order to wish you happy holidays, but now I’m back among the pages with a pretty varied collection at hand.

Ogapoge Between Verne and McDevitt

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Midnight Thief, by Livia Blackburne.  Street urchin thieves, corruption everywhere, mysterious orphan with magical heritage, knights, a splash of romance…

Thunderbird by Jack McDevitt.  This sequel to 1996’s Ancient Shores takes you beyond the gates.

In Progress:

X by Sue Grafton.  (Audiobook)  Haven’t had as much time to listen as I’d like!

The Orpheus Descent by Tom Harper.  Two plot lines, one contemporary, one from the POV of a fortyish Plato relieve this from being a typical conspiracy theory thriller.

The Hotel Cat by Esther Averill.  I loved her tales of Jenny, the little black cat with the red scarf, and her friends.  Jim found me this reprint of one of the books in the series for Christmas.

Also:

I’ve known Jim Zimmerman, who provided the illustrations for this reprint of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, for well over twenty years.  His black and white interior illustrations evoke old woodcuts and are perfect for this book!  (The cover is neat, too!)

TT: From the Coal Face

JANE: Well, Alan, it’s New Year’s Eve.  Christmas is now over, so I can now safely ask you about something you mentioned last time.  Coal…  I thought about asking last week, but I didn’t want to give Santa any ideas about what to put in my stocking.

Jet Mountain Lion, Coal Wolf

ALAN: But how will you go first footing tonight if Santa doesn’t bring you any coal?

JANE: Oh, boy…  You’re going to need to remind me what “first footing” is.  Over here, coal is what bad little boys and girls get in their stockings…  No one wants to invite that!

ALAN: First footing is the tradition of being the first visitor to the house in the New Year. The visitors often bring a lump of coal with them. We discussed the tradition way back in 2011.

JANE: 2011, huh?  I guess I have a good excuse for not remembering the details!  Thanks!

When you mentioned your grandmother’s “huge and ancient fireplace,” I envisioned one that burned wood.  But then you went on and said: “the fire would be carefully lit and fed regularly with the best of all possible coal.”

That really seemed exotic and old-fashioned to me.  I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a coal fire.  I have some questions for you.

ALAN: I find that astonishing. When I was a boy, everybody had coal fires in their houses.

JANE: Well, I am somewhat younger than you.  However, Jim is a bit older than I am, so I asked him if he remembered coal fires.  He said that when he was a boy, his grandparents had a coal-fired furnace, but all he remembered about that was how it was apparently finicky.

Jim’s own home, which was somewhat more modern, didn’t use coal.  The house I remembered best used oil for heat, though I seem to recall my dad talking about the oil furnace being a relatively new element in the house, so the house was probably originally heated by coal, but that would have been before my time.

ALAN: I suspect I might have been part of the very last coal generation. Certainly by the time I left home, coal fires had largely disappeared.

JANE:  Well, I’m hoping you can clarify a point that puzzled me.

You talked about a “hot water cylinder.”  I’m assuming that’s what we here call a “hot water heater.”  If it depended on the coal fire being lit, what did your grandparents do for hot water in the warmer months?  Did they need to have a fire burning even in summer?

ALAN: The “hot water cylinder” is the tank full of hot water that feeds the taps (you’d say faucets). The pipes that feed water into the cylinder pass behind the fireplace and transfer the heat from the fire. The whole system is known as a “wetback,” though I gather that word has a slightly different meaning where you come from…

JANE: Yes, that it does…

ALAN: And to answer your original question, yes – if you wanted hot water all year round, you needed a fire all year round. However, my father bit the bullet and  bought an electrical immersion heater when I was about eight years old, so we could do without fires in summer, if we had to.

JANE: That sounds like an excellent investment on your father’s part.  I hope your grandparents made a similar choice!

ALAN: No – they were far too set in their ways for that.

When you depend so much on coal, you need to make sure that you never run out of it. Every house had coal delivered to it every few weeks. Naturally, the coal had to be stored somewhere dry – wet coal doesn’t burn very well. Posh people had a coal cellar with a convenient chute down which the coalman could empty the contents of his sacks. We didn’t have a cellar, so our coal was stored in a shed. After WWII, a lot of air raid shelters had a second life as a convenient place to store coal.

Robin moved from Australia to England in the 1980s. Coal fires were long gone by then, but the house she lived in had a shed which still had some lumps of coal in it. She’d never seen coal before and she found it quite fascinating. That winter, when it snowed, she took the lumps of coal out and put them in the snow because she thought the contrast between the black coal and the white snow was really pretty. I think that’s a lovely story…

JANE: Indeed it is!  It’s fascinating that to this day snowmen are usually depicted with black eyes.  Originally, these were lumps of coal.  I wonder what people use today?

ALAN: That’s an interesting question. I wonder if we have any snowmen among our readers who could enlighten us?

In Yorkshire, the place where the coal was stored was known as the coal hole (or, more accurately, the coal ‘ole). There was a song we sang as children:

We’re reet down in’t coal ‘ole

Where t’muck slarts on’t winders.

We’ve used all our coal up

And we’re reet down t’ cinders.

When t’ bum bailiff calls

He won’t know where to find us

‘Cos we’re reet down in’t coal ‘ole

Where t’muck slarts on’t winders

Do you need a translation?

JANE:  Actually, I don’t.   The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett educated me quite nicely in Yorkshire dialect.

ALAN: Perhaps one or two of our readers aren’t Secret Garden fans. So, just in case:

We are right down in the coal hole

Where the dirt covers the windows.

We’ve used all our coal up

And we’re right down to cinders. (ie: We’ve only got cinders left)

When the rent man calls

He won’t know where to find us

Because we’re right down in the coal hole

Where the dirt covers the windows.

JANE: Lovely!  I wonder if the hearth Martha is always tending in The Secret Garden burned coal or wood.  I’ll need to go check.

Your song got me thinking about “clinkers.”  These days, I’m betting many people don’t even know what those are or why something that doesn’t work out is a “clinker”?  Do you know what a clinker is?

ALAN: Yes – it’s the stony residue left behind after burning coal in a furnace. I got very confused when I first heard of “clinker built boats.” For a long time I was absolutely convinced that boat builders collected clinker from fires and furnaces and then welded it together into boats. I remember being quite disappointed when I finally found out what the phrase really meant…

JANE:  I was similarly puzzled, though I didn’t get so creative in figuring out how clinkers could be used.  This reminds me…

Some years back, when Jim was digging a historic archeological site, some younger members of the crew came across some clinkers.  They didn’t have any idea what they were.  Happily, they brought them to Jim (since he’s the go-to guy for rocks) and he did know what they were.

ALAN: And, to clarify what you said earlier, I presume, that because clinkers can’t burn any more, anything that doesn’t work anymore can legitimately be described as a clinker?

JANE: That used to be fairly common slang here in America.  However, I think it’s fallen out of use along with home burning of coal.

That reminds me of an interesting story about coal and fiction…  However, it’s New Year’s Eve and I’m going to go make some preparations for seeing in the New Year.  I hope that you and Robin (who are probably already into the New Year, as people read this) have/had a lovely one and I look forward to talking more in 2016!

Travel, Tribulation, Tales?

Over Christmas, Jim and I flew to the Dallas/Fort Worth area to celebrate Christmas with his parents, his younger sister, and her family.

Can I Get Inside?

(No, Jim isn’t from Texas.  Much of his family just ended up there.)

The trip out wasn’t bad, but the trip home wasn’t much fun.  Weather delayed our flight, so we left the gate an hour and a half late.  Then we spent way too much time on the tarmac, hoping we’d depart before the flight crew “timed out” and we had to return to base.

This gave me a lot of time to think about travel, especially as related to writing.  (I would have preferred actually writing to thinking about writing, but the airport was too chaotic, even for me, and I can write just about anywhere.)

Adventure fiction, whether of the completely speculative variation, like SF/F, or of the more reality-based types, such as historical fiction or thrillers, often includes considerable travel.  I can’t remember the quote exactly (or who said it), but isn’t that pretty much the definition of adventure?  Someone else in trouble a long way off?

To get a long way off, travel is necessary!

With this in mind, I started considering whether Jim and my travel last Sunday qualified as “adventure” or not.  My first thought was definitely “not.”  We were in a relatively safe environment.  Even if our flight didn’t depart, we’d have shelter and access to food.   We’d definitely be inconvenienced but, while inconvenience can be an element in adventure, it isn’t adventure as such.

Now, if circumstances changed and we were trapped in the airport – perhaps by a huge amount of snow – and the power went out, and we were in danger of freezing, then that would come closer to adventure.  Add in attacking zombies, or a dimensional portal opening and invading aliens spilling through…  That would be the stuff of many an SF/Horror film!

External circumstances aren’t the only thing that could turn being delayed at the airport into, if not an adventure, then material for a story.  Let’s play with some possibilities.  We’ll call our protagonists Tom and Lily.

Perhaps Tom and Lily must arrive at their destination by a certain time.  In that case, every ten-minute delay posted to the board becomes an element for building tension.  Maybe their need for a timely arrival is purely personal: perhaps Lily is in line for a job that will go to a rival or perhaps Tom is in need of medical care.

Maybe the reason Tom and Lily are desperate to get to their destination is something more dramatic and less personal.  Maybe they’re spies smuggling key documents.  Maybe they need to deliver crucial information before a certain time, information that can’t be trusted to any conduit less secure than word-of-mouth delivery.

What if you’re more interested in stories with a personal slant?   Perhaps Tom and Lily have some personal issues.  Will being bottled up at the airport intensify their conflict, or will it provide an opportunity to pull together in the face of shared adversity?  Perhaps Tom will discover a secret depth in Lily that will show her in a new light.  Maybe Lily will see Tom helping an old lady with her luggage during a gate change and remember how kind he can be.

Or maybe delving into Tom’s overnight bag in search of aspirin, Lily will discover something better not known: a letter from an old flame or a compromising picture.   Or Tom will find that Lily’s been writing her former husband’s name with her own intertwined in hearts inside the back cover of the novel she’s been reading.

Then there’s that oldie but goodie – the accidental exchange of luggage.  These days, that could be updated to swapped phones or computers…  Either way, Tom and Lily might be drawn into someone else’s crisis.

As I thought about this, I realized there are many reasons why travel makes for good stories.

One is that characters are out of their usual element.   They lack resources they otherwise take for granted.  They may need skills (maybe first aid, maybe riding a horse, maybe fixing a warp drive) that their daily lives never demand.

Another good story element is that people who might otherwise not meet are thrown together in intimate circumstances.  Chaucer used this to good effect with the Canterbury Tales.  Centuries later, it still works.  Where else than in a plane or in a waiting room do you find yourself sitting shoulder to shoulder with a perfect stranger for hours on end?

However, no matter how much travel seems like a great way to frame a story, readers will quickly sense if the material is simply filler.  If, at the end of the journey, all that’s going to be different is that the characters are now at Point B, rather than Point A, then it’s enough to write “Two weeks later, the ship docked safely in New York.”  Don’t make the reader live through all the days of travel unless there’s a reason, either in incident, character development, relationship development, or, preferably, more than one of these.

Have doubts how to judge?  Recast your story in another format.  Take your heroic quest and think of it as if it was a contemporary mystery novel.  If it would seem stupid to outline every detail in the mystery novel (because, after all, all the person did was drive from Phoenix to San Diego to interview someone), then skip it and move to the real action – that interview.  But if something key happens during the drive, then take the reader on the trip with your characters.  Both the reader and your story will be richer for it.

Now…  What to do with Tom and Lily?