Ray Foy's Blog, page 18

Review of "The Windup Girl"

In our near future, fossil fuels are in short supply and their use strictly rationed by totalitarian governments. Electronic technology is mostly used by government and corporate elites, when it's used at all. Even then, it's powered by humans pumping stationary bicycles (treadle computers) or animals turning huge spindles connected to generators. The common people live at a more-or-less nineteenth century level and must deal with the consequences of the genetic tampering with the food supply that began in the twentieth century. Those consequences are the extinction of some foods, except for their genetically modified descendants, the rise of blights on the new forms that lead to mass starvations, and pandemics of food-borne diseases. Nations and corporations fight over banks of seed, both original and modifed, and compete violently for the plans of how to create viable food stocks. This tampering with biology even extends to humans and has created a class of slaves hatefully referred to as "windups."

This is the world portrayed in the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel by Paolo Bacigalupi entitled, The Windup Girl. I bought this book at the airport in Minneapolis last August when Donna and I were making our little trip to Rhode Island. I wanted something to read during the long flights and Donna found this book for me. I quickly became engrossed in it, though it has taken me some three months to finish. That's just because I've been busy with the day job and my work on A Single Step and this website. Otherwise, I would have finished it quickly. It's actually easy reading and thought-provoking.

It's most interesting aspect, and greatest strength, is the future world it describes. Bacigalupi doesn't specify a date for his story, but it's obviously not too far into the future. Most of the action is set in the city of Bangkok, Thailand. Bangkok is a city of human masses huddling in the shadows of crumbling high-rises. Crumbling, because there's not enough power to maintain the climate controls for the upper stories, so they tend to fill with squatters who tolerate the heat and lack of facilities. The book is like that--showing familiar places and things, but twisted from familiar uses because of the world's loss of cheap energy. Bacigalupi describes devices and vehicles in ways that indicate a workable, but degraded technology: kink-spring scooters, "the whine of high-capacity springs unleashing," coal-fired tanks, methane cooking fires, and spring-guns that shoot spinning razor blades. Bacigalupi's depictions are skillfully done and I suspect will be close to the way technology devolves.

The story's other strength is its characterizations. The characters are struggling to survive in a hard world dominated by greed and sociopathy. People do that today, but in Bacigalupi's world, they don't have the delusions so much. They know they are ruled by greed and their only hope is to just survive. The elites are struggling as well to hang on to their power. It's harder for them to do that in a world of dwindling energy, and that struggle is typified in the western corporations' struggle to keep their monopoly on the food supply in Bangkok. The local government fights them by stealing their formulas for producing genetically modified food so that they can produce their own. The locations of their seed banks are state secrets that the corporations want to find and destroy or control.

The characters involved in these conflicts are jaded and unsympathetic. In fact, there's not really a sympathetic character in the whole story. All of them are either driven by their greed or weighed down by forces of greed above them that they cannot control. Little compassion is evidenced in anyone's interactions. The closest to a sympathetic character is Jaidee (Bacigalupi had to have been thinking of Jackie Chan), the captain of the security force known as "white shirts." He maintains a good humor in spite of all the politics he must deal with and even has a sense of transcendance over the miseries of life in his relationship with his family. His love for his wife is the one instance of real love in the story, buried beneath the dark characters and machinations of the rest of it. This spark of love doesn't prevail, though, and that's a major theme in the story. People's hopes are trashed by a reality run by sociopaths. Jaidee sums it up when he says, "Clinging to the past, worrying about the future...It's all suffering."

While the story is rich in its depiction of place and characterization, it's weak in plot. The plotline that begins the book sort of evaporates, and the contentions between the various government and corporate groups don't quite reach the point of a driving plot. It's more like snippets of plots that form a snapshot of a space of time in a future world. While there's value in that, I'm not sure it would translate well into a movie or TV drama without some major revision.

Overall, Mr. Bacigalupi has written a very good story that masterfully extrapolates current trends, especially regarding genetic manipulations, and shows us the kind of world they can lead to. Having read it all, I would give it three out of five stars. My earlier judgement of it as excellent was based on the beginning plotline and my enthusiasm for the author's depiction of the future world. If the plot was stronger, I would have given it a fourth star.

The Windup Girl is a good read, especially if you enjoy viable depictions of the future state of humanity with a dark and cynical edge.

A Spark of Christmas

The companion newsletter for The Spark is finally available for download for members of the Arbordin Literary Society (membership is FREE; see the ALS tab). It's hard to believe that it's been about a year now since I made The Spark available in its novella form on the Smashwords website.

In September, I put out a revised version in a volume that included the short story, My Christmas Carol, and I'm hoping it will get a lot of downloads in the coming Christmastime. Please tell your friends. It's FREE, and it's also available on Barnes and Noble (and the Sony Store, and iTunes). There, it's averaged 4 out of 5 stars in reviews. That comes from several 5-star ratings overshadowing a few 2-stars. I guess you either love The Spark or hate it.

I've mentioned The Spark a few times in previous journal entries, especially the one for 09/18/2011 ("Change"). In my first journal entry (now deleted), I said that it was an expansion of a short story that I had wanted to publish in short segments (200 words each) for some local publication in the week before Christmas of 2009. Nobody was interested so I expanded it to novella length and put it on Smashwords. I was shocked when it began being downloaded immediately. It's been downloaded ever since, slowing down after the Christmas season, but never stopping completely.

Now, a year later, I'm putting out a newsletter that features The Spark. That's appropriate since my newsletter was inspired by the tent city of homeless people featured in the story. I talk about that in the newsletter. I also offer an author's review of The Spark, and articles that illuminate some of the story's influences and themes. The articles include:

Christmas History
Story Influences: Rudolph and Miracle
Climate Change: Losing the North Pole
The Homeless (Tent City)
Gina's Poem (A Christmas Hope for the Earth)
Reflections on My Christmas Carol

And even questions for the Reading Group.

I hope that whets your interest and that you'll want to get the newsletter by joining the Arbordin Literary Society.

I'm looking forward to enjoying the coming holiday season with my family. If the cold weather that's just moved in persists, it may even feel like Christmas. Sometime in December, I'll make a journal entry that will be my "Christmas Message."

Until then, here's wishing you a Spark of real Christmas spirit.

Project Statuses and winding up The Windup Girl

I've been pretty busy the last few weeks and so I haven't kept up this journal. Sorry. One thing that's occupied me has been work on a short story, Fire Dance. I finished it and submitted it, and it's already earned a rejection. Yes, publication is a process and it can be a long one, but I'll keep submitting and when the story's picked up, I'll talk at some length about it.

I began work on the novelization of Madam President, my short story currently available on Smashwords. While it's not my most popular work, I feel like there's much potential in it. It's a retelling of the Faust story with the protagonist being a presidential candidate. So there's the opportunity for me to talk about religion and politics--the two subjects that cause arguments at dinner parties, but often gets authors noticed. Anyway, I've immersed myself in some pre-reading.

My revision of The Spark has been on Smashwords since September, but without the accompanying newsletter. I've been working on that, too, and finally finished it this week. I'm not going to release it yet, though, because I want to focus on promotion for A Single Step through November. After Thanksgiving, downloads of Christmas stories should take off on Smashwords and then I'll release The Spark newsletter to ALSN subscribers.

I've been pondering over means for getting publicity for my website and my books. The best way, I believe, is simply to get my stories into ezines and magazines and I've begun that process with Fire Dance. It's a slow process, however, and I also want to let people know about what I already have out there. So I thought I'd try some advertising.

I put a small classified ad for A Single Step in the Jackson Free Press. It's been running about a week and it's generated some clicks to the book's Smashwords page, but no takers. So I decided to try a "blog ad" on the JFP website for a week. I put one together and submitted it over the web. It's running now.

The Blogads website looked like it might be a relatively iinexpensive means for advertising, so I'm trying a couple of more ads on The Story Siren and Literary Kicks websites (see the NEWS tab).

Regarding current reading, I'm still working on The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. It's hard to fit reading into my daily routine because I'm busy with the day job and with writing at night. Reading is an important discipline for a writer, though, and I must set a higher priority on it. But the book is very good--it's a Hugo and Nebula award-winner. I'm down to the last quarter and I'll give you a little review of it when I'm finished.

Spartacus

Andy Whitfield died about a month ago. He was a British actor who moved to Australia and held the starring role in the Starz series of Spartacus: Blood and Sand (see www.starz.com/originals/spartacus). He died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma after completing the 13 episodes of the series' first season and was prepared to do the second season, when his condition grew worse.

Donna and I discovered this series when the first year of it was nearly over. We caught up on the first episodes with Netflix and then finished it out on Starz. We liked it so much, we watched it a second time. I had seen the 1960 Stanley Kubrick film of Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, many times on TV, so the Starz series caught my attention. I was slow becoming a fan, however. The first episodes were an obvious rip-off of the 2006 movie, 300 (which sucked; friends, if you want an excellent historical-fiction retelling the battle of Thermopylae, read the Steven Pressfield novel, Gates of Fire; see www.barnesandnoble.com/w/gates-of-fire-steven-pressfield/1103272308?ean=9780553580532&itm=1&usri=gates%2bof%2bfire).

In the first episodes of the first season, Andy and his fellow actors cavort across the screen in tight shorts and capes that were totally unknown in the ancient world. That and the gratutious nudity and sex almost lost me right off. But there was something else that grabbed my attention. The dialogue. It was Shakespearean. In tone, cadence, and metaphorical allusion, it was obviously written by someone who knows Shakespeare. And I love Shakespeare, so this made me overlook the cheesy part. And as the series progressed, the cheesy part lessened a lot. The writers became more confident and their story-telling surpassed even the explicit sex scenes. It was like the writers and film-makers were telling two different stories at first, but they eventually came together.

The writers were also knowledgable of Plutarch's acount of Spartacus. They included among their characters, figures associated with the historical story: Spartacus' fellow slaves and later generals, Crixus and Oenomaus, his first Roman persecutor, Gaius Claudius Glaber, and the owner of the gladiatorial school in Capua, Lentulus Batiatus. They also included a character called, Varro, as a fellow gladiator and friend of Spartacus. This was appropriate since the historical Marcus Terentius Varro was the first classical writer to speak of Sparatacus as a hero rather than a criminal.

And Spartacus was written of as a criminal for many years after the events of his life. History is written by the victors, and the victor in this case was Imperial Rome. Anyone who opposed it was a criminal and brigand. Only slowly did an opposing view emerge--that of Spartacus as the slave who led a rebellion against an empire of slave-owners. So he became the "working man's" hero, and icon of later socialist-leaning viewpoints. This is not lost on the writers of the Starz series.

Cirxus is the gladiatorial school's champion when Spartacus arrives there and a rivalry quickly develops between them. In it, we see Crixus as the proud champion and Spartacus as the talented, but unwilling fighter rising in the ranks. When Crixus demeans Spartacus for not being "engaged" in the work of the ludus (gladiatorial school), Spartacus makes the point that the only reason either of them fight, champion or not, is that they are slaves.

And so a tremendous moral point is made. Why do any of us do the work that we do, 8 hours a day, 365 (mostly) days a year? Because we're good at what we do? Because we love what we do? Or is it because we'll have to take a lesser job if we don't? We'll live more lowly, and maybe starve. Are we any less slaves than the gladiators?

Another good man who died recently was Joe Bageant. He wrote about current events from the working class view. This is what he had to say about working life in the United States:

Yet, I dare say that comfort is not the most important thing in most American lives. It is just the only thing we are offered in exchange for our toil and the pain of ordinary existence in such an age. Consequently, it is all we know. Meaningless work, then meaningless comfort and distraction in the too-few hours between sleep and labor. But we settled for that and continue to do so. The day will never come when we stand around the office water cooler and ask one another: "Why in the hell are we even here today?" It's the most dangerous question in America and the Western world.  (The Ants of Gaia -- it's only the end of the world, so quit bitching By Joe Bageant)

Which brings me to another point. However inspiring, the story of Spartacus is tragic. It ends with Spartacus, however notable his exploits, being crucified. Could it end any other way? The Starz series first season ends with the start of the slave rebellion and the admonition by Spartacus to "kill them all; there's no other way." The slave-owners place no value on human life. If they did, they wouldn't be slave-owners. They will not give up their power or the slaves that afford them that power. They will fight to the death, so a slave rebellion can only be a fight to the death. There will be no imprisonment upon capture--only execution.

I believe this accounts for much of Spartacus' military success. He was an able tactician, apparently with military experience, but he also had a highly motivated army. The former slaves knew there would be no mercy for them. They either won their battles, or they died. There was no middle ground.

This is why I feel such sympathy for modern "slave rebellions," like the occupiers of the State Capitol in Wisconsin, and the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. The participants are brave, but they may be fighting a battle that cannot be won, because they are fighting a system that hasn't changed since humans stopped living by hunting and gathering.

So maybe Crixus has a point. Although he is a slave, he creates meaning for himself by making the most of where he's at. He becomes the best at what he's forced to do. He becomes the champion gladiator. This is not delusion ONLY IF he is always aware that he is a slave.

I loved the Starz series of Spartacus. It is notable because it became something greater than it started out. I don't know whose vision is responsible for that, but the writing quickly surpassed the production and created an epic. The epic will continue in January 2012 with season three, which will be called, Spartacus: Vengeance. It appears the story will continue to be based on Plutarch with the action revolving around the budding slave army's first battles with Romans soldiers led by Gaius Glaber.

It is a shame that Andy Whitfield couldn't star in the third season as well. He was a fine actor who probably could have handled Shakespearean roles for real. The actor who will play the third season lead, Liam McIntyre, is Australian and bears a strong resemblance to Andy Whitfield. In fact, they discussed the role at some length before Andy's death.

The story of Spartacus has survived the centuries because it speaks of a desire we all live with. That of throwing off the chains of our oppressors and living as free and worthy human beings. I think the physical facts of the story have been repeated many times and always with tragic ends. I think that's because absolute freedom is not the point of this physical life. Here, we are meant to struggle on the outside, so that the real growth and development can occur on the inside.

It is in our minds and spirits where the chains really need to be loosed. If we can do that, then physical chains are less constraining, and the power of the oppressor is broken.

Losing Rebels

I did pretty well, this last week, at establishing a routine of nighttime writing work, especially in the construction of plot and characters for my next short story. I hope that I can work on the draft this week and have it ready for submission in a couple of weeks. When I do, I'll talk about it in a journal entry.

Actually, I have quite a bit of writing work to do over the last quarter of the year. And this this is the best time of the year to me. The slowly gathering cool of September and Early October reach cold nights by the time we reach Halloween, and we enjoy pumpkin-spiced coffee and cake, incense and bonfires while children play at fears of intrusions from the numinous world passed down from a time when adults believed in spirits, and the celebration was called, Sawhaim.

Or maybe it's just that any cool night in the South is a cause for celebration.

Yesterday was not so cool. In fact, it was quite warm as Donna and I sat beneath the hot sun in Oxford, watching Ole Miss lose to Georgia. While I hate the continuing of the Rebels losing streak, it was an interesting experience. Our sons had warned us that traffic on game days was intense and it was. All the Oxford police were out directing game traffic and the University campus was filled with tailgating tents, grills, tables of food, flat-screen TV's, and congregating fans and alumni relieving glory years and socializing to forget current football ills (the Mannings are long gone!).

Anyway, I could see why "the Grove" experience is a big part of going to school there and why my sons never want to come home on the weekends of home games.

Back at home, I have continued reading The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi that I mentioned in my Aug 28 journal entry, and I'm still finding it a read that I highly recommend. The story centers around the concept of the fallout from the current trend of companies (like Monsanto) trying to obtain a monopoly on the world's food supply by supplanting natural crops with gentically modified replacements. Mr. Bacigalupi postulates the hell unleashed by mutations of these Frankencrops and extrapolates that the genetic modifications performed on plants is carried on to humans.

I think he's not far from the truth, at least in terms of what these corporations would like to do. For the risk of profit, they would risk destroying all human life. That's about as good a definition of sheer evil as I can think of.

Along those lines, I'm thinking of broaching the subject of attempted coporate dominion over nature in a short story with a working title of "Futility." The story impetus, however, will be from chemtrails.

Donna's been struggling with her book, Empress. She probably won't finish it. I've tried to read books like that too, and it's the kind I'm trying hard not to write. Boring, that is. I'm trying to heed the writer's golden rule: write for others what you would like to read yourself.

Donna did read The Help, however, and enjoyed it immensely. We saw the movie soon after she finished the book. We both liked the move, although Donna says the book is better. Well, that's often the case, and maybe a good theme for next week's journal.

Change

Change can be good. Even the change of replacing one routine with another. Routines, if carefully administered, can work for us. I have a routine of a day job that keeps a paycheck coming in, even though the work is not fulfilling. I want now to establish a routine of nighttime writing that is fulfilling and will allow me to produce as I need to produce.

Such change should result in improvement. Like the revision change I just put out for my novella: The Spark. I was going to wait until the first of October to upload it to Smashwords, but Donna convinced me to go ahead and put it out there. I agreed that would be best since the new version reads so much better, corrects some typos and awkward phrasings, and contains a link to my website at the end. It will also give ample time for the revision to reach the Premium channels (Barnes and Nobles, Sony, Borders, etc) well before the Christmas season. It's out there now at www.smashwords.com/books/view/32180 so check it out.

I've also included My Christmas Carol in the volume, which is a short story about a man who, confronted by the "ghost" of Ebeneezer Scrooge, must face his own materialism and the challenge to change his ways. Yes, it's modern retelling of A Christmas Carol that I hope you'll find some fun in. It's not as dark as my usual storytelling.

I guess that's a lot of talk about Christmas for September. Maybe it's prompted by the cooler air that's dropped over the south the last couple of weeks. Temperatures here have changed to an average ten degrees cooler since tropical storm Lee(?) passed through. That came from out of the blue. Usually such storms bring up a lot of warm gulf air and leave it hot and muggy, and September is usually pretty hot around here, anyway. And I've noticed that the five-day forecast has only been good for a couple of days. Climate change, I think.

Which brings me back to The Spark. The story has a strong ecological theme and it speaks of a thin polar ice cap:

    It was all gone–his workshop, house, the reindeer stables, the elves. Only the thin polar cap remained, collecting snow beneath a winter storm.

It seems the polar ice cap is actually at a record, or near-record, low for area-coverage according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, and the University of Bremen. See www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/14-0.

I've been following news of climate change for a number of years now, and I suspect it will eventually trump all the other problems that beset humankind.

But for now, I'll just enjoy the temperate weather and carry on.

I mentioned "next projects" in my last journal entry. I've decided since then that I'd like to do another short story or two and try to get them published in some ezines or magazines with enough circulation to gain some exposure for me. I'm working on one with the working title of My Stolen Child, playing off Yeat's poem, The Stolen Child (www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19415), and the changling folk tale. It's really more about the deception of appearances, though, and I may change the title. If it is published I'll, of course, provide the link here.

I do love Yeats (William Butler Yeats: www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/117). Especially his poem, The Second Coming (www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15527), that so eloquently captures the feeling of imminent and apocalyptic change. It's quoted a lot these days and I referred to it myself in A Single Step (www.smashwords.com/books/view/81356).

So I'll continue writing my new story this week, along with the articles that will make up the ALS newsletter for The Spark. Watch my website for news of both--and other changes.

Revisions and New Projects

One of the friends that Donna and I visited last week in Rhode Island did a proof-reading job on A Single Step. She did this out of the goodness of her heart and probably out of reflex since she had been employed in such work years ago. She emailed her results to me this week and I have to say I was greatly impressed and greatly chagrined.

I thought Donna and I had edited the manuscript thoroughly, but our friend found a lot of errors. They were mostly typo mistakes and word omissions. I'm really bad about the latter because I'll read a manuscript so many times that my mind fills in the missing words. So I'm greatful to Stephanie for her work (and to her husband, Rocko, for his moral support) and I've incorporated her corrections into a revised manuscript that I've uploaded to Smashwords. In a couple of weeks, that "clean" revision should make it to Barnes and Nobles, Amazon, Apple, and Sony. This shows me that a good editor is worth his (or her) pay.

So with A Single Step out there, I've turned my thoughts to promotion and my next projects.

Regarding promotion, I've been using Google Adwords for the last month to promote my website as well as A Single Step. While it seems to have brought some traffic to the site, it hasn't help much with the book. I've let Adwords drop and probably won't try it again for a while. My friend, Rocko, has passed the book along to a friend of his that I hope will like it and write a review. I'm also approaching another venue trying to get readers and reviews. I'll talk about that in a future journal entry if it works out.

Regarding next projects, I'm working on something for the Christmas season. This will be a revision of The Spark, which is currently on Smashwords. The story's been downloaded a lot since I put it out last December. The downloads have been pretty steady, even through the summer (though at a much slower rate than during Christmas, of course). But there are a number of wording errors in the current version that pain me, and sections of prose need to be smoothed out. I've worked on that over the last week and the result is a much better-reading manuscript.

I wanted this revision to be more than just prose corrections, however, so I decided to upgrade another Christmas short story that I wrote several years ago. It's called, My Christmas Carol, and I wrote it for a short story "competition" at my workplace. It was never published anywhere, just read at the office Christmas party. It won a free lunch for Donna and I at a local restuarant. Then I forgot about it until now.

I'll combine The Spark and My Christmas Carol into one volume that I'll put out on Smashwords as a revision to the current, The Spark. I'll time it to come out around Thanksgiving and feature it in a ALS newsletter.

Beyond The Spark project, I'm thinking of expanding Madam President into a novel, which would be a very large expansion indeed. I'll talk more about that in later journal entries.

Quick notes:

Yes, Ole Miss has lost their season-opening game to BYU by one point. They really needed a win to garner some positive momentum to carry them into a tough schedule, especially after last year's dismal performance. Still, Coach Nutt has revamped his staff and his teamed showed some promise. The young quaterback, Stoudt, seems to have some potential.

And I finally saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I went in with no expectations but it turned out to be the best of the Ape pictures, in my opinion.

Time In New England

    I had never been to the Eastern seaboard until this last week, when Donna and I took a week off and visited friends in Rhode Island. I have to say, I was impressed with the city environments, the people, and the weather.

    First, I had not flown anywhere in ten years and was a bit concerned about the security hassles. Now my sons had recently flown to China and back and reported only mild irritations with the TSA, so that made me feel a little better. And as it turned out, my flights were better than many I had experienced in the past and the TSA were, indeed, a mild irritant at the worst. I got the impression of the TSA agents as people just doing their jobs, and the ones we dealt with at least tried to be helpful in getting us through their checkpoints.

    I say all that not to condone the job they do, which is an affront to a (supposedly) free people and meant only to harass travelers. In my sons' China trip, they confiscated a bottle of body wash from them and I lost a Swiss Army knife on one of my flights. No one flies any safer because of such actions, and the full body scanner is just a profit-maker for the already-rich. So those helpful TSA agents were just doing their job to abridge the freedoms that the historic sites of New England attest much sacrifice for.

    Even so, in Minneapolis we bought books for the long flights ahead. I bought The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. I've read four chapters so far and my opinion at this point is that it is an EXCELLENT book. This guy writes like I do, at least in terms of themes and plot. Even not having finished it, I highly recommend this book and may feature it in a future newsletter ("The Arbordin Literary Society Newsletter").

    Donna bought Empress by Karen Miller and is, so far, not pleased with it, though she's determined to finish it.

    So we spent a week in Providence, Rhode Island, staying at the Best Western Airport Inn hotel. Don't laugh. This was a fine, clean, reasonably priced hotel with a great, and free, breakfast. When you're traveling, it's best not to spend your money on accommodations if your interests are elsewhere. That was our case and BW worked out great.

    We spent time in Providence and toured Boston, MA. Both struck me as clean, well-managed cities that I felt I could work and live in. Though people drove like rollerball competitors, they were otherwise friendly with an overriding ambiance of tolerance. They provided much food for thought for this southern writer.

    In Providence, we visited a Catholic fund-raising event. There was lots of food, music, and beer. The latter amazed me, having been raised a Southern Baptist where liquor was only partaken in private and condemned in public.

    Then we spent three days on Block Island, a resort island, with our friends. Block Island is an island indeed, off the coast of Rhode Island in the Atlantic. It is beautiful, with lots of historic buildings of old New England architecture. It all had a Moby Dick feel to me. We stayed at the Waterstreet Inn in a room on the top floor with no air conditioning. We just opened the windows to the cool Atlantic breezes and salt air. It was a marvelous change from the sticky, humid south that invigorated our spirits and moved me to dreams of Longfellow, Hawthorne, and J. F. Cooper.

    After our time on Block Island, we toured Boston. We rode a train to get there and at the train station (an omnibus of food stands, tour booths, and bookstores) we bought tickets for a city tour. The tour was in a green-and-yellow bus that took us through the city and to the harbor docks where we took a boat tour through Boston harbor. This was fun, swilling cans of Guiness Draught and vodka on ice as I took pictures of the Boston skyline, the old North Church, and the USS Constitution.

    After the boat ride, we lunched in Boston's China Town. I thought it was great, but had to wonder what my sons would think of it, having seen the real thing in China. Well, they're back at Ole Miss and will have to experience it through my photographs.

    We left Providence just ahead of hurricane Irene. The synchronicity wasn't lost on us in considering that our sons left Shanghai just ahead of Typhoon Muifa. We made it back home at about 3:00am. After a day's recuperation, we did laundry and prepared for the week, though after a week of new experiences, fellowship with old friends, and a flicker of the possibility of life-lived-better, there can really be no preparation for a return to hopeless drudgery.

    But I'm here, at home, writing this journal entry. I picked up a new subscriber to my newsletter (ALSN) during my absence and am grateful for that. I will try to reward my subscribers faith in me with some stimulating newsletters. I expect that my time in New England will provide that effort with some intellectual fodder.

A Single Step

I thought A Single Step would be a short story that would serve as a segue to bigger works, but it demanded to be told as a novel and that's how it ended up. I finished it and published it on Smashwords this weekend. A Single Step is my statement of how life is--how I've discovered it--that I leave as a record for my family, and for you, my readers. This story is based on my journey from fundamentalist religion to accepting spirituality as I encounter it. I mean it to be an expression of what I've experienced and what I've learned for my family and for you.

So after many months of hard work, with tremendous help and support from my wife, I've finished the tale-telling and the manuscript formatting, and published the results on Smashwords. Please check it out, and if you like what you see in the free first third of the story, I hope you'll purchase the remainder to experience the totality of the tale. And I would love to hear your thoughts on the story in comments to my journal, or in an email to my newsletter (see the ALSN tabe of my website).

A Single Step is the tale of a journey, and that may be the most fundamental of humanity's story-telling. Our life is a journey, and it's our desire that the journey be for a purpose and that we'll end it better than we started. In Western  culture, this idea of growth through journeying is brilliantly expressed in the the Odyssey. Many stories since have been built on that format. In modern times, it's best expression may be in The Lord of the Rings. Both stories were an inspiration to me and contributed to A Single Step.

The idea behind A Single Step is one of hope. Bobby Lorman begins his journey with tremendous obstacles. From the burden of the religious expectations of this family, to the practical consequences of having committed a crime, he must work his way through guilt and intimidations to find a way of living that works for him. Dogmas and doctrines won't help; he needs an experience with spiritual reality.

It is my own experience with spiritual reality that I want to share with you through my stories. In doing so, I hope we'll all discover that experience--that communion with the transcendent that enriches our lives and makes us believe that we can be more than what we are. For whatever reason, it seems that we find our inspiration and our best expression of ourselves through storytelling.

I hope my stories can do that for you, and that it all begins with A Single Step.

Typhoons and Morning Stars

 This has been a week of intense editing on A Single Step. My wife, Donna, started it and I'm following up on her efforts so the manuscript gets a double-edit in a short time. So far, we're pleased with the result and I'll try hard to meet my goal of getting the ebook on Smashwords before the end of August.

I was also pleased with the release of my short story, Davis and the Goth, as part of the Print-On-Demand anthology, While the Morning Stars Sing, published by Lyndon Perry. Lyn also publishes the Residential Aliens website, where he published my short story, Supernal, way back in 2009. Now he's put together an impressive anthology and I'm honored to have been able to contribute to it along with a lot of fine writers. If you like speculative fiction that honestly expresses spirituality (my forte), you'll really like this collection of stories.

I'm also very happy to have my sons home from China.  They've spent the last two months studying the Chinese language in Qingdao, China as part of the University of Mississippi's Chinese Flagship program. They flew out of Shanghai early Saturday morning in the midst of thunderstorms that heralded the approach of Typhoon Muifa. Over 300,000 people were evacuated from Shanghai and over 200 flights were cancelled. The boys' flight actually left a few minutes early and skirted the leading edge of the storm to get out. They're home now, after traveling more than a day from the far side of the world. We welcomed them home with hamburgers, Dr. Peppers, and a triple-chocolate cake.

While the boys recover from jet-lag, we'll put in a big effort his week to finish the editing of A Single Step. I've written four articles and a review to be published in the Arbordin Literary Society Newsletter that will accompany the ebook. The newsletter will be sent to subscribers, but I've published my Author's Review of A Single Step on my website. I hope it will entice readers to sign-up to the FREE newsletter.

I think the review provides a good overview of what the book is about, more so than the teasers and taglines I've published so far. Anyone really intrigued by it can subscribe to the ALSN and read articles where I talk about the story's themes and influences.

These articles are:

"The Problem of Bullies" describes my view of the bullying problem, so common among school-age children and one that I struggled with growing up. I pull material from the "Stop Bullying Now" website to illustrate the current thinking of behavioral professionals on bullying. I compare this material to my own experience and the way Bobby Lorman deals with his bullies in A Single Step.

"Finding the Wise Path" reveals the philosophical influences behind A Single Step. These are Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, and The Fourth Way. I describe how these strains of thought are pulled together into a philosophy of the common people that I call, Ming lu.

"Kung fu--A Personal Essay" is just that. It's my account of how kung fu, the Chinese martial art as well as the 70's TV series, has influenced my life and my thinking and found expression in A Single Step.

"B&Bs I Have Known" describes my experiences with bed-and-breakfast inns over the years. Elements from most of them appear in A Single Step.

I hope all this will prompt you to watch for the publication of A Single Step, or better yet, subscribe to the ALSN so you'll receive a notification when the story is released, and also get the free newsletter.