Response

Rob-M, Thank you so much for your letter and your good words. I will forward your letter to my publishers.  We are hoping to get Sanna and the Dragons into e-format by  September.

In the meantime, I do have paperback copies of the second and third volumes of the SannaChronicles, and the fourth is in final re-write.  If you give me your snail mail address, I'll be happy to ship them to you.

Blogger isn't allowing me to respond directly to you, so this is the means I'm using. Hope we can make the connection.  My e-mail is flyingfish3@comcast.net.

Style has fashion

Tarzan.

 Marvelous, iconic character, right?  A part of our cultural mythos.  Created by Edgar Rice Burroughs who also created the John Carter of Mars novels that were seminal in the development of most swords and adventure stories of today.  As a pre-teen, I read everything by Burroughs that I could get my hands on. I devoured his extensive collection of exciting, colorful, tales.  He was a contemporary of Rider Haggard, Connon Doyle and Jules Vern.

I have been re-reading Burroughs lately and am astounded to realize that he couldn't get published today, nor could any of those other guys.  Their writing style is out of fashion.  They wrote for a time when a book was all the entertainment you had, and you wanted to make it last as long as you could.  They never used one adjective when three could be fitted in.  The villain's cold, steely, implacable menace nearly overwhelmed the hero, sapping the strength from his mighty thews. But at the last moment his eye fell upon the delicate, noble, exquisite face of the woman he loved, and the unquenchable flame of his love surged forth, melting his terror-stricken immobility and freeing his unconquerable courage, determined to save her should it cost his very life.

And if I had refused to read anything so overblown, I would have missed out on some of the best stories in the world.

I am thinking that if my style isn't getting snapped up by editors at this very moment, it may just be out of fashion and they're missing out on some of the best stories in the world. Stories that were inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

My grandma was camp cook in a logging camp and was deservedly famous for her pies.  She always asserted that bear lard made the best pie crust. Not just any bear, though. Not one that had been hanging around down by the river and eating fish all summer.  It had to be a bear that lived high in the mountains and got fat on berries and roots.

One winter day, a young Indian showed up with a 5 gallon bucket of beautiful white bear fat, suitable to be  rendered for lard.  Grandma traded a cake, four loaves of bread, and a pan of cinnamon rolls, gave the young man a good dinner and let him spend the night in the kitchen by the wood stove.

This was back when it was against the law to sell alcohol to Indians, because it was believed that it drove them crazy.

 No good deed goes unpunished, and Grandma got up the next morning to find that the young man  had drunk all her cooking wine, then moved on to the vanilla, almond, and lemon extracts, and passed out sick in her pantry.

I was thinking about telling this story,and wondered about the ethics of it.  It's not politically correct as it portrays the Indian as an apparently ungrateful, alcoholic thief.  He wasn't.  He was grateful, young, and stupid.  Teenaged boys do dumb things.  Would it change the story markedly to say he was just a young hunter passing through?  (Imagine being desperate enough for alcohol to drink lemon extract.)

Stereotypes evolve because we decide that the actions of one person are representative of all the people we  file under a particular label.  When I was growing up, Mexicans were considered lazy.  Now, they are considered the hardest-working laborers you can hire.  Neither generalization fits all people with Mexican citizenship or parentage.

So what are the ethics of telling stories?  When is the truth unnecessary and pejorative? Part of the reason this story has lasted in the family repertoire is because it perpetuates a stereotype, and my family was bigoted.  I was raised to be a bigot and I have to be aware of this when I write.  Stereotypes are a useful shorthand to establish character, but is this a shortcut I want to take?  Not every character needs to be fully developed. Sometimes, all you needs a sketch, a spear holder, a paunchy southern sheriff in mirrored sunglasses, or a gum snapping bleached-blonde mall-rat in lace mitts and three pounds of makeup.  As writers, is it ethical to perpetuate these stereotypes?  And if not, how are we going to color our stories'  backgrounds?

April already?

 We have survived the  wettest March on record.  April shows signs of being equally damp, but there is a break in the deluge and I have run out with my latest knitting and the cell phone.  Photo Op!  Still using up the odds and ends of the bulky yarn.  This hat is child sized.

This hood used up the very last bits.  Random stripes in garter stitch incorporating short rows.  

This cowl was cast on to provide knitting for movies. The 2/2 rib was knitted on size 5s.  The seed stitch was knitted on size 10s.  This means the neck is snug, and the skirt of the cowl spreads and drapes loosely and gracefully.

And finally, white worsted weight yarn, with a thread of Dave Daniels' handspun, hand-dyed yarn to add interest.  This is another hat started from the top and knitted down so I could use every teensy bit of the yarn.

Lately, DH and I have been having back troubles.  I suggested that we swap sides of the couch, because my side certainly had a list to it, and I figured that his side was similarly broken down.  We've had this sofa for ten years, and I figured it should be good for another 30 or so.  Ha, ha! He sat down on my side of the sofa, stood up and said, "We're going shopping.  I'm getting a quarterly bonus check and WE are getting a new couch.  How could you sit on this?"

So we spent most of Saturday putting our butt prints on various styles and brands of furniture and eventually decided to get two Lazy Boy recliners.  It will be ten weeks before we get them, so in the meantime, we spent Sunday re-arranging our living room furniture.  DH is really good at this.  We now have a cozy tv nook separated from a social seating area, and we no longer sit on the broken down sofa.

My worst date.

Back when I was single and willing to give it a go, a fellow asked me if I would like to go for a walk on a trail on Larch Mountain.  Larch Mountain is a bit of wilderness a scant 40  minute drive from the city.  It is steep and brushy, and at least one hunter or hiker dies there each year, through lack of attention.  But hey -it was a date.  And he waxed lyrical about this well-marked and maintained trail, so I decided to give it a go.  First, I dressed for the weather with multiple layers, a crackly sounding rain slicker, a good wool scarf and mittens stuffed in my pockets, sturdy hiking boots, and two pairs of socks.  Second, we took my car.  I'm not going into the woods with a stranger unless I know I can get myself out.  I picked him up, and he looked quite handsome and rugged in a polo shirt, jeans, windbreaker and sneakers.  I assumed, since he had gone on about the wonderful hikes he had taken, that he had expensive high-tech layers and one of those hooded raincoats that folds into a two-inch square pouch and fits in your hip pocket.  The ride up was quite delightful, as he was witty and charming.  He directed me to a parking lot, I locked the car, and he led off,  down hill through the undergrowth on a short-cut to the path.  I stopped, took a careful look around, oriented myself, mentally reviewed what I knew of the terrain, and followed him.  He continued to be witty and charming as we bushwhacked down toward this wonderful trail that he was sure was just a little further along.  Clouds built up.  The temperature dropped.  He chattered even more charmingly.  Finally I planted my feet and declared, "We've been walking for an hour, and we haven't found that trail.  Are you sure you know where it is?"  

He got very silent.  Finally he admitted, "We might be lost."

I replied, "You might be lost, but I know that if we just go back uphill, we'll hit the road."

"But that could be miles away!" 

"You wanted a good hike."

"Let's just sit down and wait.  Someone will come to look for us."

Then the sleet started to fall.  He did not in fact have high-tech layers or a rain slicker.  He didn't even have a baggie of trail mix.  I was lost on a mountain that eats stupid people, with a totally useless, if charming, idiot.  I gave him my wool scarf to tie around his head (Not even a hat - the moron!) and said, "I'm going home.  You can come with me, or sit here and freeze."  Then I headed uphill.  Rather than try to retrace our wandering path through the woods, I surged in a direct line toward safety, which led through a couple of rhododendron thickets already becoming ice-encrusted with the steady sleet.  The waste of skin trailing behind me began whining that his feet were cold and wet.  It rains around here.  What did he expect?  We came up against the foot of a cliff and paused for a breather. He turned east.  He had been drifting east all along.  If you go east DOWN the hill, you need to go west back UP the hill.  I snarled at him.  He snapped back.  I turned west and a few minutes later heard him thrashing along in my wake.  Pouting, he trailed behind me for another half an hour when the ridge we were climbing met up with the top of the cliff, and we emerged into a paved parking lot.  I set off briskly to the west, knowing the car would be about half a mile down the road.  At the far east end of the parking lot  I could see a lovely graveled, well-maintained path.  "Oh look!" the dumb bunny remarked.  "That's the path I wanted.  I must have gone to the wrong parking lot! Oh, dopey me!"

Fuming in silence, I strode down the road, found the parking lot with my car, got in and set the heater on high.  He opened the passenger door, settled his wet, shivering, blue-lipped self into the seat, And chirruped brightly, "That was kind of fun, wasn't it?"

I glared at him, and in my best thunderous roar, named him an anal orifice and told him to shut the fornication up or I would kick him out of the car.  I took him home, and warned him not to ever call me again because he was clearly too stupid to breathe.  He was at least bright enough to take my warning.

What was your worst date?

My friend is dying

You learn to write by writing.  I'm writing a eulogy here.  If you don't care for this stuff, come back when I'm in a cheery mood.

One of the prices you pay for having friends is losing them.  A college friend, some one I have known for fourty years, is dying.  I sat with him for a while yesterday.  Consciousness seems to be a place he just visits occasionally, not somewhere he spends much time.  I don't know if he will even remember that I was there, yet, the hours I sat quietly beside his bed don't seem a waste.  I don't want to go all woo-woo mystic, but he has the same shadow on him that my husband's dad had just before he passed.

 It helps a lot to have a firm conviction that the end of this life is not the end of everything, and that I will see him again on the other side.  He will be out of pain and free from fear.  He will be just as young and strong and full of energy as he was when we first met. And oh, what a supercharged dynamo of energy he was!  If there's anything to astrology, he would prove it, because he was Leo to the tonails.  His personality filled a room, and he was the life of any party.  He was charming, sexy, witty, and fiercely intelligent. And like any male lion, he was a bit lazy and ego-centric.  At times he could even be an asshole, but for those of us who love him, he is OUR asshole and we love him still.  The earth will spin slower without his long stride to kick it on.

punctuation

http://i.imgur.com/5LdZT.jpg

(With the Oxford comma) We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin.  (Quite a lively party)
(Without the Oxford comma) We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin. (I didn't know JFK was a stripper)