Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 10

Shore Leave followup post

Okay, I’m back home after Shore Leave. The car worked fine both ways, with no problems. There were moments when I heard a repetitive noise from the tires that made me worry after my blowout last year, but when I stopped at a gas station to check, the tires were fine. It must’ve just been something in the texture of the road making that sound and making me paranoid.

I had a nice uneventful trip, avoiding nearly all the rain that had been predicted. Baked a frozen pizza the night before, so I had leftover pizza for lunch and dinner on the road. (Cold pizza is surprisingly good.) Spent the night at my cousin’s place as usual, left for the hotel after lunch on Friday. My weather app showed clear skies for another hour or two… but once I got onto the road, I saw I was heading straight toward a scary-looking cloudbank with multiple lightning strikes appearing directly ahead of me within a couple of minutes. The app must simply have been missing data for that hour. I was soon in the middle of a torrent.

Luckily I spotted a donut place just before the highway and had a muffin and iced tea while I waited out the worst of the storm. Still, it was a fairly rainy drive to the hotel, and my GPS kept rerouting me due to traffic slowdowns. I ended up taking some quiet, one-lane back roads that eventually connected to the big road past the hotel.

Then I discovered I arrived too early and my room wasn’t ready, so I just sat around on a bench outside and thought about my writing plans. I was reluctant to spend too much time in the hotel’s public areas, since they no longer require proof of COVID-free status, and nobody told me. I was one of the few people still masked, even including fellow writers who’ve been pretty conscientious about it in the past. Maybe we’re at the point where the risk is low enough for that, but I still wasn’t ready to risk it, given that my last booster is 6 months old and, well, I was a germophobe to begin with.

Once I did get to go to my room, I learned how foolish I’d been not to replace my suitcase after the zipper broke last year. I thought I could get by with multiple little bags — even had the clever idea to use one of my bike panniers, which have shoulder straps — but when you’re exhausted and your hotel room is two stories up and several long corridors away from your car, suitcase wheels are extremely worth having.

At this point, I barely had time to shower and change and was half an hour late to my first panel, talking about Star Trek Discovery. I didn’t really contribute much, and mainly just listened to my friend Kirsten Beyer, whom I haven’t seen since she became a writing staffer on Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds, as she talked about the show. I did field a question from an audience member asking if I felt a “burden” to maintain the continuity of the Trek timeline in my novels, and I said, no, there’s no burden. This is all make-believe for entertainment, not a real history that needs to be chronicled and gotten right. Using continuity in my fiction isn’t a matter of obligation, just a creative choice in service to telling stories. And changing continuity can also serve stories in some cases, like when I replaced “Aggravated Vehicular Genocide” with Arachne’s Crime, the updated and reworked version of the same event in the continuity of my Arachne-Troubleshooter Universe.

This was immediately followed by a panel discussing why there have been so few new Star Trek novels in the past year or two, in which other panelists like Dayton Ward and David Mack had far more to offer than I did; I was mainly there in hopes of getting an answer to the question. Apparently it came down to a perfect storm of factors including the COVID disruptions in publishing supply chains and the legal problems with the abortive attempt to sell Simon & Schuster, which postponed the license renewal process until it was sorted out. It seems things are expected to begin moving again by 2024, I think, but there’s nothing more definite yet.

Because of my fatigue and COVID concerns, I just holed up in my room until the Meet the Pros signing event. It was pretty slow in terms of selling books, as it usually is in recent years. But I did sell four books, which isn’t bad. My credit card scanner seems to be on the fritz, but the app lets you pay by showing one of those QR code thingies you can scan with your phone. The next day, I did my requisite hour at the book dealers’ table — getting to sit outside the “Author Chimney,” the infamous narrow space between brick columns where we’re usually boxed in. I sold another four books there, all cash sales this time, though one person had to go to the ATM and come back.

The weird thing is, I thought I’d only brought two copies each of the Arachne novels and sold one of each, yet when I got home I had two copies of each. I was afraid maybe I’d somehow forgotten to give the customer his books, but I remember signing them for him, I don’t have the Trek book he also bought, none of the copies I had were signed, and my total inventory for each Arachne novel is one less than it was. So I guess I actually brought three copies of each and got confused.

Anyway, during downtime in my room, I found out the hotel TV lets you stream YouTube, so I was able to watch the premiere of Ultraman Blazar, the newest season of the franchise and something of a reboot, which is quite impressive so far, enough that I watched it twice. (Tsuburaya simulcasts new episodes of Ultraman live on YouTube with English subtitles, and even with a simultaneously English dub for this series, which YouTube defaulted to. It took a while to figure out how to adjust the language settings with a remote control.) The hotel also offered its patrons free (The Streamer Formerly Known as HBO) Max, so I was able to watch the 2-part premiere of My Adventures with Superman as well. That’s also a very impressive start, and it was cool to see both shows on a big screen. (I rewatched that one too, but just now at home, so they’d be logged as watched on my own Max account.)

Otherwise I didn’t do much but hang around and chat with other writers. I did sit in on a workshop panel that Kirsten Beyer ran with Dave Mack, Dayton Ward, and my fellow Star Trek Adventures writers Derek Tyler Attico and Kelly Fitzpatrick, where they ran a mock writers’ room session breaking (i.e. brainstorming and outlining) a nonexistent Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode to illustrate how the story break process works — complete with Michael Jan Friedman & Bob Greenberger getting into character as the network suits they pitched the story to after they broke it. Kirsten made a pretty natural showrunner, and I’m sure she’ll be doing it for real in time. She said they weren’t bothering to come up with a good episode, since they didn’t want the mock episode to be anything like a real one, but they actually came up with some some cool character beats on top of a deliberately cliche plot.

Then there was the annual writers’ barbecue dinner. We used to go over to Andy Nelson’s BBQ a couple of miles from the hotel, but for the past three cons, Keith R.A. DeCandido and Wrenn Simms have organized a catered Andy Nelson’s dinner in the hotel’s meeting lounge. Which is convenient and all, but it got really noisy. Still, I had some nice chats and a nice meal, and I got to make a second pulled-turkey sandwich to keep in my room fridge and have for lunch on Sunday.

I’d been thinking of leaving early on Sunday in hopes of getting home in one day, but there was heavy rain forecast along my route, so I decided to wait until it passed. When the time came to check out of my room, I had the belated good idea to call for a luggage cart so I could take all my little bags out to the car in one go (though I kept my laptop with me in my backpack rather than leave it in the hot trunk). Afterward, I mostly just hung out with Danielle & Mike McPhail at the eSpec Books table, where we discussed my progress on Arachne’s Legacy and the prospects of a second collection of my published stories (including some Patreon exclusives).

The rain didn’t let up until after 4 PM, so I went back to the grocery store to get another sandwich and some bottled iced tea for the road, then ate half of the sandwich (well, wrap) in the parking lot before setting out. I knew I’d have to stop at a motel for the night, so I decided to head up for the Pennsylvania Turnpike, where there would probably be more motels than on the route Google Maps usually sends me on. To achieve this, I had to tell the Maps app that I wanted to go to Pittsburgh. So I made it to the Turnpike just before more rain started to come in, and stopped at the first convenient motel. I chose one I think I’ve stayed at before (or at least one of a chain I remembered finding decent), which meant not settling for the cheapest option. And I didn’t manage to find any Pennsylvania motel coupons at the rest stops, so I had to pay full price. Which means I spent more on this trip than I earned. Still, at least I came close to breaking even, not counting the pricey car repairs.

But staying in for the night was worth it, since I had a manageable drive home and wasn’t too worn out when I arrived; indeed, I was even kind of chipper from all the iced tea and coffee drinks I had along the way. So it all worked out okay.

At least, during the trip. This morning, I decided to go get gas and run an errand, and the car wouldn’t start. I couldn’t get my jumpstarter battery pack to work right at first, but I finally did, and I figured I just needed to drive around for a while to recharge it, like before. My errand was about 20 minutes away, which seemed enough, but when I stopped at the gas station, the battery was still empty, and apparently the jumper pack didn’t have enough juice and wouldn’t work, so I needed to ask another customer to give me a jump start. Which meant I had to cancel my errand and drive back home, after calling the garage and being told they couldn’t see me until tomorrow. I drove a full half-hour this time, taking a roundabout route, and still there was barely enough charge left to lock the doors. It does seem like the battery finally died, but it’s wild that it held out until just after I got home.

And that’s what I did on my summer vacation. Now I just have to hope I didn’t catch COVID.

My Shore Leave 43 schedule

The Shore Leave folks have posted the schedule for next weekend’s convention here:

Schedule

Since I don’t have much coming out this year to talk about, my own participation in the panels will be slight, entirely on Friday, July 7:

4pm

Star Trek Discovery, a New Era of Trek

Salon B

Rigel Ailur (moderator), Derek Tyler Attico , Christopher L. Bennett , Kirsten Beyer , Kelli Fitzpatrick , Dayton Ward

The panel will discuss how DSC has broken new ground, its legacy, and the other shows it launched, like Star Trek Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds.

5pm

What Happened to the Star Trek novels?

Salon E&F

Christopher L. Bennett , Glenn Hauman , David Mack , James Swallow , Dayton Ward

The annual output of Star Trek’s once prolific tie-in program has diminished even as new series have launched on streaming channel Paramount+. Why are there so few new Star Trek novels these days? And how do Trek authors feel about this?

10pm

Meet The Pros

Hallway Outside Hunt Valley

On Saturday, I’ll just be generally around the convention, and will try to find time to sign autographs at the traditional Author Chimney by the book dealers’ table on the bottom floor near the escalators. As for Sunday, I might leave early, but we’ll see.

I plan to bring a few copies of each of my more recent books to sell. This should include all my original print books — Only Superhuman, Arachne’s Crime, Arachne’s Exile, The Arachne Omnibus, Among the Wild Cybers, Footprints in the Stars, Hub Space, and Crimes of the Hub, plus my last three Star Trek novels, The Captain’s Oath, The Higher Frontier, and Living Memory. I probably won’t bring more than 4 of each, since I didn’t sell many last year and brought more than I needed. But it would be nice if I sold out of a few!

Car Crisis: The Costly Conclusion

Well, my car is now back from the garage. The fuel leak turned out to be “severe,” and according to the receipt, they had to replace the fuel filler neck, fuel tank straps and lock ring, and fuel pump, which was rather expensive. (They also used up a fair amount of the fuel in my tank in the process, though they don’t seem to have added many miles to the odometer.) They also found my rear shocks were blown out and leaking and replaced the rear strut assembly. The mechanic belived this to be the cause of the loud vibration I’d noticed from the rear left quadrant of the car when I was idled at a traffic light; at least, I noted no vibration during my brief drive home.

Otherwise, the mechanic thought the frame repair looked nice and solid, and he no longer has any objections to driving the car to Baltimore for Shore Leave next week. He could not, however, offer any explanation for why my battery ran out of charge twice over the past month or so. As far as he could tell, the battery is good and there are no parasitic drains. The lack of an answer there is a matter for concern, but at least I have my jump-starter battery pack in case it runs down again.

Anyway, this was all pretty costly, though he did give me a 50% discount on the rear struts. All told, between this and the frame repair, I’m out more than $3,000. It’s very fortunate that I got my inheritance from my uncle this year. Without it, and with not much writing work coming my way lately, I would never have been able to afford these repairs (or much of anything else). I suppose I would’ve had to take the frame guy’s offer to buy the car, and just gone without one going forward.

Sometimes I almost feel like I have a very stingy or very lazy guardian angel, repeatedly letting me get very close to a major crisis but grudgingly delivering the bare minimum of good luck to let me avoid disaster in the nick of time. I mean, I’m certainly in a much better place financially than I was eight months ago, but my car’s frame and shocks were in increasingly dire shape that whole time without my knowledge, and I was lucky that they held out long enough for me to a) not get in an accident and b) afford to get them fixed.

Now, ideally, I really would have liked a newer car — a hybrid with modern safety features, great mileage, built-in GPS and USB ports, a sound system I could listen to without the speakers rattling from age, etc. But I just don’t drive enough for it to make sense to buy one. I guess I should take comfort in what the frame guy said about my Saturn being a solid, reliable car that’s worth keeping, and what my brother-in-law told me on Facebook about how a new car would depreciate much more quickly.

GUARDIAN ANGEL Chapter 4 is now up on Patreon!

I neglected to post here about the publication of Guardian Angel Chapter 3 on my Patreon last month, though I announced it on social media. Anyway, Chapter 4 went up today on the Original Fiction tier, along with its annotations on the Behind the Scenes tier. Here’s the index of everything so far:

Chapter 1: “The Angel and the Panther”: Available to all Patreon subscribers from $1 up. (Annotations)Chapter 2: “The Innocent Assassin”: Ch. 2-5 available at the $10 Fiction tier (Annotations)Chapter 3: “No Other Colors Without the Blues” (Annotations)Chapter 4: “How Do You Live?” (Annotations)

This month, both Kari and Bast have unhappy reunions that set them on the path toward a climactic confrontation. Plus, learn how Kari and Emerald Blair first met!

This serial hasn’t sparked the boost in Patreon subscriptions that I’d hoped it would. I imagine some of you might be waiting for the final chapter next month before you subscribe and binge-read the whole thing at once. I don’t mind that much; at this point, with my money situation no longer desperate, what I want most is just for people to read my fiction, even if you only join for a month. The final chapter will be released on July 21, so if you join anytime from now onward, you’ll still get the complete serial.

But I’ve just learned that the repairs for my car’s fuel leak and so forth will probably cost more than the frame repair I just got, so the total will be more than two grand. Getting my car back into shape is cheaper than replacing it, but it’s still turning out to be a pretty big investment. So if anyone is willing to help out by joining my Patreon, even for a little while, I’d really be grateful.

A second look at Zack Snyder’s BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE & JUSTICE LEAGUE (spoilers)

Seven years ago, I posted a scathing review of Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice on this blog, which you can read here. In short, I found it an utterly incoherent piece of filmmaking, “a clutter of disparate pieces pretending to be a narrative.” But recently, I saw an online discussion of The Ultimate Edition, as the extended director’s cut is known, asserting that it was a far better, more effective movie. I’d heard that claim before, but hadn’t bothered to follow up on it. Now, though, I have a subscription to Max (formerly HBO Max, the Warner Bros. streaming service), and since I could watch the director’s cut with a click, I decided to give it a shot and see if it was really any better. I posted about it today on the DC Movies thread on The TrekBBS, and I figured I should reprint my comments here, as a followup on my initial review.

The Ultimate Edition is definitely a more coherent and better film, feeling like an actual narrative instead of just a bunch of pieces stapled together in the vague shape of a narrative, and it is effectively directed. It makes Clark Kent feel like less of a MacGuffin and more of a character; the flow of Anatoly Knyazev’s machinations on Lex Luthor’s behalf and Lois Lane’s investigation unearthing them are clearer; and the focus on the civilians that Luthor manipulates into his tools is effective.

But it still has a lot of the same problems, like the pointless intrusion of the future-vision sequence; it would’ve been a better movie overall without the need to set up a Cinematic Universe. And I feel the improvement was mainly to the first half; the second half was still too cluttered, with the gratuitous inclusion of Doomsday. And I feel that there should’ve been at least one more movie before they killed Superman.

So I can understand now why people like the film, at least the expanded version of it, and I certainly have a higher opinion of it now, up to a point. But while it told a reasonably coherent story about Snyder’s versions of the characters, they’re far from my favorite versions. In particular, it seemed to me that many of the problems could have been avoided if Superman had just talked to people, if he’d let himself be a public presence from the start like many other versions of Superman have done, instead of remaining this mysterious, aloof, Dr. Manhattan-ish figure that created so many doubts about his intentions even nearly two years after his debut. Okay, maybe this Clark is just really uncomfortable with publicity, but he seemed to make things much harder on himself by staying silent and letting the media and Lex shape the narrative (and failing to explain himself to Batman during the fight even though he had plenty of chances after his brief token effort at the start). I mean, he lives with a world-famous reporter. How hard can it be to get his side of the story out there?

Basically, this is a story about flawed people whose character flaws exacerbate a situation that could be resolved more easily. That’s a valid way of telling a story, but it’s a pessimistic one, more so than the usual approach to Superman. Snyder’s Clark is a relatable character in his way, but he’s very unsure of himself and not very good at being Superman compared to most of his multiversal counterparts.

Still, I used to think BvS was a fundamentally incompetent piece of filmmaking, but now I see that the director’s cut is actually a reasonably well-made story (with some notable flaws), taking a different approach than I prefer but at least doing it in a coherent and effective way. So that just makes it a question of preference rather than a question of quality. I’m glad I decided to give it a chance. It’s improved my opinion of Snyder’s capabilities as a filmmaker, though his work is still prone to excesses I dislike.

Meanwhile, realizing how badly the theatrical BvS was sabotaged by hamfisted editing makes me more curious to see the Ayer cut of Suicide Squad. I wonder if it will ever be released.

–

As for the Snyder Cut of Justice League, I gave in and borrowed that from the library a couple of years ago, but didn’t post about it here at the time. So I might as well add my BBS comments, to supplement my review of the theatrical version.

I liked a lot of the Snyder Cut considerably better than I expected, but it’s still very flawed. Basically it’s 2 hours of reasonably good superhero movie bracketed by 2 hours of bloated, annoying self-indulgence. It’s truly astonishing how little happens in the first hour or so. There are only three words spoken, “Alert the queen,” in the first nine minutes of the film. As for the rest, it has its decent character moments, but they’re so far apart, and there’s so much unnecessary stuff in between them. For instance, the start of the terrorist raid in the Wonder Woman sequence wasn’t needed. They could’ve started with the phone call to the police and it would’ve told us everything we needed; in fact, I think maybe the Joss Whedon version actually did that.

It’s a pretty good Flash movie; the Iris rescue sequence was a really cool set piece, and Barry is a lot of fun throughout. It’s also a fairly good Cyborg movie, although the early part of the Cyborg stuff is too slow and too much about setup (plus the ridiculous montage saying that Cyborg’s computer powers are so great that he literally controls the world now, which is way too much power to give a protagonist, and he never bloody does anything with it anyway). But the later stuff with Victor and Silas is fairly good.

The Aquaman and Wonder Woman stuff are less impressive, though Diana’s tea scene with Alfred is terrific, and Irons’s Alfred is a highlight of the film. Bruce is mainly just there to give speeches about unity and faith, so he doesn’t have much of an arc. I miss the part from the Whedon cut where he taught Barry about how to be a hero — “Just help one person.” Although at least this version actually had them rescuing people (Silas and the other captives), which is vanishingly rare in a Snyder film.

Oh yeah, and there were a few bits here and there about Lois and Clark. It’s pretty ridiculous that they went to all this trouble and risk because they needed to revive Superman to have any chance of saving the world… and then they just went ahead with their plan without waiting for Superman, and he barely contributed anything to it when he did show up. Even saving Victor was irrelevant, because they all got blowed up anyway until Barry warped back time. So they didn’t even really need Superman after all.

The bits that worked with Clark were just little moments of performance by Cavill showing Clark’s gentler, kinder side as his memories returned. Again, Cavill feels right in the role even though Snyder’s take on Superman does not work for me.

Steppenwolf was a better character this time around, and it helped having Darkseid be an actual presence. But I would’ve preferred seeing actors play the roles rather than CGI characters. The facial animation on Steppenwolf was pretty good, but I don’t think the character needed to be animated at all.

The epilogue — from the Luthor scene onward — was utterly pointless, incoherent, and obnoxious. What a stupid thing to put after the movie’s already ended. They should’ve closed out with the scene of the team deciding to build a headquarters.

I think I still prefer the theatrical cut of JL overall. It’s certainly a mess, but an enjoyable one, missing the best parts of the Snyder version but losing its worst parts. I would like to see a fan edit combining the best parts of both versions, if feasible.

Car crisis, Part 3: Return of the Saturn

Talking through my decision about car repairs in my previous post helped convince me to go ahead and pay for the repairs rather than commit to buying a newer car, which I realized would cost more than my need for it would justify. So the morning after that, I called the frame repair guy and gave him the go-ahead for the repair. Yesterday (Monday) afternoon, he told me it was ready, but I was in the middle of writing a scene and it was raining, so I waited until this morning to go pick it up.

I had to take the bus, of course, and I hope it was well-ventilated, since the ride was nearly half an hour (I wore a cloth mask, but the windows wouldn’t open). The shop was way up Vine Street, and as the bus was going through parts of town I rarely visited, I wondered if the shop was in an area I’d ever been to. But then, suddenly I recognized the corner of Paddock & Vine and realized I was in the area of the retirement home where my father lived for a time at the end of his life. The frame shop was literally right next door to the Kroger supermarket and fuel center that I’d frequently visited during that period. Odd that I missed that when I checked Google Street View this morning. I hadn’t realized it because I usually got up there and back via Paddock & Reading Road instead of Vine (and I used that more familiar route to drive home today). It’s a slightly longer route, but if I recall right, it’s a bit faster due to higher speed limits and a wider road.

At my request, the frame mechanic drove the car onto the lift so I could see the repairs, and they look pretty solid. He told me that he inserted a metal tube vertically around the bolt whose connection to the subframe was weakened by the rust, welding it to the bolt and the frame to reinforce the connection. He also welded plates over the rusted parts, then sprayed the whole thing with a black rust-inhibitor coating. It looks pretty solid, and the mechanic was confident that my car would last indefinitely, saying it was an excellent car that was in good shape and worth keeping forever. It’s encouraging that he’d say that even after he offered to buy the car from me last week; that implies a lack of an ulterior motive.

The car handled okay on the drive back, though mechanics always move the driver’s seat back and it’s hard to remember where I had it; as usual, I put it one slot too far back, then realized it mid-drive and had to wait for a stop light to scoot forward one more notch (and I got a lot of green lights along the way). There was a moment on a curve where I went over a sewer grate or something and there was a worrying clang of impact from the front passenger side where the repairs were done, but when I got home, I took a phone video of the subframe to check, and it looked as intact as it had in the shop. I guess the clang was just from the grate I drove over. I figured it was, but of course I’m paranoid enough that I had to check.

I still need to take the car back to my main garage for the fuel leak and other repairs, and they don’t have an opening until Friday. But it’s a chance to get a second opinion about the frame repair. I hope my regular mechanic is as sanguine about the quality of the repair, and the continued viability of my Saturn, as the frame guy was. If he is, then I won’t have to worry about renting a car for Shore Leave.

That’s a bit disappointing, actually, since it would’ve been nice to try out a more modern, computerized car. But on the other hand, I’ve never driven another car since high school, so I wonder about the safety of driving an unfamiliar car whose performance I’m not used to. Anyway, it now looks like I won’t have to.

Car crisis, Part 2: A choice to make

I just got off the phone with the person at the frame repair shop. He offered a somewhat more optimistic assessment of the damage than the guy at my regular garage, saying he didn’t see a reason why the car wouldn’t be safe to drive to Shore Leave after his repairs, which he estimates to cost about $1100. That’s not counting the cost of the fuel leak and other repairs my garage would then have to do. It’s not an insanely bad price, but that’s kind of the problem — it’s exactly in the range that makes it hard to decide, because it’s not cheap enough to be easily affordable and not pricey enough to be obviously not worth it.

He also said that he would be willing to buy the car from me so he could repair and resell it, though he didn’t specify how much he might offer. I doubt it would be worth very much in its condition.

So I have a difficult decision. On the one hand, I have wanted to get a newer, better car, and this is a chance to do that. On the other hand, it would be awkward to be left without a car when I haven’t had time to prepare for that situation, especially with Shore Leave just three weeks away. It might be worth paying for the repairs just for the convenience of still having a car in the near term, and for the sake of being able to take my time shopping for a new car rather than being forced into a hasty decision. If I have more time to look, maybe I can even find a better deal and thereby balance out the cost of the repairs. It would also give me more time to refocus on my novel in progress instead of having to delay it further.

But there’s another consideration that came to me overnight. Is it really worth buying a car at all? Could I get by without one, like I did in the years before my father’s deteriorating health required me to take over driving for him? Aside from Shore Leave, I really don’t use the car much, mostly just for trips to the grocery store and the library, which are within walking distance (well, borderline for the library, until my local branch completes its renovations). The main reason I prefer having a car is because of the COVID risk of taking the bus or an Uber, or of grocery shopping in-store instead of using curbside pickup.

And though I currently have enough money to buy a car thanks to my inheritance, I don’t yet know what kind of writing contracts I may get this year, if any. If the current slowdown doesn’t improve soon, I may have to live off my inherited savings for a while longer until I can find other work. So this is a bad time to make a major purchase like a car. Glancing around, it looks like I could get a used car for as low as a few thousand dollars, but I figure anything sufficiently newer and better than my current car might cost as much as I typically spend in a year or more. I’m not sure my need for a new car is great enough to justify that big a reduction of my safety net — at least not until I’ve lined up new contract work.

So I’d been thinking that maybe I could get by without a car, just renting one for Shore Leave. But now that I’m told my repaired car may be more viable than I was led to believe, and that the cost of repairs wouldn’t be too exorbitant, it seems like it might be a good idea to keep it around for the limited use I generally have for it. It might cost me more in the long term if and when I replace the car, but I’m no longer certain it’s a good idea to buy a new car. In the near term, it seems like repairing it is the easiest and most practical route to take, for a number of reasons.

The frame guy told me there’s no rush, so I have time to think it through. As before, I welcome opinions and suggestions.

Car crisis

This morning, I took my car into the garage for the usual maintenance and safety check in advance of the upcoming Shore Leave convention on July 7-9. The battery has run down a couple of times in the past couple of months, so I asked them to check that out. This afternoon, I got a call from the garage telling me that they couldn’t find a problem with the battery, but the frame was seriously rusted, there was a fuel leak, and the guy didn’t think it was safe to drive at all without major repairs.

Now, I was naturally wary of a scam. Some years back, I took the car in to its dealership for maintenance, and they told me something similar about the state of the frame, but when I then took it to my usual garage, they couldn’t find any problems, so I think the dealer was trying to scam me into buying a new car. (I haven’t been back there since.) But this time, the garage guy was recommending I get the car towed to a different business for the repair. And he didn’t object when I said I wanted to come in and see for myself, or to my taking photos when I arrived:

According to him, these rust holes are in the weight-bearing frame holding up the engine, and he doesn’t think it’s safe to drive in this condition. He didn’t object to my suggestion that I might show the photos to the insurance company. So it doesn’t seem like a scam. It does look pretty bad, and it does look like the genuine subframe of the car, which Google tells me is a pretty vital component and unsafe to drive on if it’s structurally compromised.

I asked him why the garage people who looked at the car just under a year ago didn’t call my attention to the problem, and he said that if a car isn’t driven frequently (like mine), moisture could accumulate and accelerate rusting, so the decay might not have been as bad a year ago. So it’s possible they didn’t think it was bad enough to warn me about. Does that sound plausible?

And that’s just part of it. I’d been noticing a gasoline smell around the car since my last fill-up, and the mileage I calculated then was terrible. The garage guys found a fuel leak that they’ll have to fix once the frame shop handles the subframe. And another issue with some other part of the car… I don’t even remember what he said it was, but I took a picture.

This is the one I don’t remember. This is the fuel lines that apparently need replacing.

Now, here’s the thing. Because I have a comfortable amount of money in the bank thanks to my inheritance from my uncle, I’d already been thinking about getting a new car (well, a newer used car) sometime soon. And the garage guy thinks that even with the frame repair, he wouldn’t recommend driving to Baltimore in this car. So I probably won’t get much more use out of this car before I replace it. So is it even worth spending a probable four figures on the repairs I’m told are necessary to make it driveable again? That would be a sizeable percentage of what little trade-in value it has left. But it would have even less trade-in value if it isn’t driveable.

But if I don’t get it repaired, what are my options? I’d have to get started shopping for a new(er) car right away. I probably don’t have time in the three and a half weeks left before Shore Leave, so I’d have to get a rental car for that trip. (Or fly, but I don’t want to do that in the COVID era, and it might be too late to get a decent ticket price.) I’ve never bought a car before (I inherited my Saturn) and have no idea how to go about it. My insurance company recently sent me an e-mail promoting their service that helps people shop for cars, which I may have to take them up on.

What I’ve decided for the moment is to take the garage guy’s suggestion to have it towed to the recommended frame shop tomorrow (at my expense), then get their assessment before I decide whether to approve the repairs, or just have it towed back home to sit in the parking lot while I go car-shopping. But I’m open to advice from my readers. I’m out of my depth with all this, and the timing stinks.

And it’s fixed again

Well, when my phone went out on April 22nd, I couldn’t get a technician to come for 2 weeks, reportedly because they didn’t have enough remaining techs trained in the old copper wiring. But when I contacted them again this Saturday, I got a tech on Monday morning. He couldn’t find anything wrong with the jack; he just replaced the connectors on the cord, and it was all fixed. Weird — the original cord lasted nearly two decades, but the replacement lasted 7 months.

I think if this happens again, I’ll try to find a really long phone cord I can buy, rather than going through all this rigmarole to get a technician. (I thought of moving the phone closer to the jack, but there’s no good outlet available near there.)

And… it’s out again

Well, reports of my phone line being back from the dead were greatly exaggerated. The first time someone tried to call me, I heard a split-second ring and then silence, which was the same thing that happened when the line went dead back in September. Indeed, the line was out again. I jiggled the cord in the jack — somehow it’s in so tight I can’t remove it, just move it around — with the speakerphone turned on so I could hear when I restored a dial tone. But when I tried calling my landline from my cell, the line instantly went dead again the moment the incoming call started to ring on my cell. I tried again, same result.

So I e-mailed the phone company, and we’ll see what happens. Evidently the problem is the same thing that happened in September. The technician at the time diagnosed it as a problem with the cord and provided a replacement, but it now seems the problem may be with the jack.

I think this must be what caused the outage for the past week and a half, and when I got that automatic call to tell me the problem had somehow been fixed remotely, I’m betting that they didn’t do anything at all; it was my fiddling with the cord just afterward that restored a dial tone, but only temporarily. Maybe that auto-call was some kind of glitch. Or maybe it was about the temporary internet outage I reported to them. (Oh, and that speed increase in loading a couple of generally slow websites turned out to be temporary.)

So now I’ll have to see if I have to wait a similarly long time for a technician. Now that I’ve narrowed it down to the same problem I had in September, some issue with the jack, maybe it’ll be quicker to get service. Or maybe not, given how few techs they have who are still trained in the old technology. (I don’t think fiber-optic phone lines use the same jacks, from my quick web search just now.)

I sometimes wonder if I should just abandon the landline, given that I rarely use it and it goes out so often. But the cellular signal is spotty in my apartment, and my landline is the main contact number I’ve used over the years, so I don’t even know how many people/agencies/etc. I’d have to notify of a change.