Category Archives: Writing Opinion

Robert Heinlein

01 Saturday Oct 2016

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Originally posted on on November 5, 2014 at 11:50 PM

I’m currently reading the second volume of a biography Robert A. Heinlein in Dialogue with his Century by William Patterson.

It’s interesting how hard he had to fight to keep any semblance of works he originally conceived and most of his juvenile novels were evidently changed a good deal due to editorial intervention. Though always patriotic and essentially pro-military, Heinlein actually saw himself as a traditional liberal until the mid 1950s or so when he began to feel the U.S. government was drifting away from liberal values and going increasingly to the left and even enabling communism. At that point he resigned from the Democratic Party and voted for candidates whom he considered less odeous than others which is essentially what I do.

Also though he participated in some meetings and correspondence around the formation of the John Birch Society, he requested his name be struck from the membership roll quite early on because he considered the organization to be misguided and it’s leadership to be unacceptably controlling. One of many valuable takeaways for me from the book was the notion that traditional American Liberalism is really quite a bit different for what passes as liberalism today.

Most of us I think, believe more or less in womens’ rights, that people shouldn’t be enslaved, that there should be help for persons less fortunate and a lot of other essentially altruistic notionsbut there are so many radical agendas today masquerading as liberal that I’ve always been suspicious of the L-word.

Right now I’m to about 1959 in the biography and he’s written most of his juveniles by this time. One of his last, Have Space Suit Will Travel, was the first RAH book I ever red and in some ways, one of my favorites, mostly because of the discussion of space suit operation which I’ve used with other sources to design life support gear for my own stories and practical designs.

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They keep coming back

01 Saturday Oct 2016

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Originally posted n October 2, 2014 at 5:05 AM

Are there books you read when you were very young to which you keep returning whether by reading the books themselves or revisting them in thought and daydream?  If so, do you know what it is about the books that keep them resurfacing after so many years?  One of my favorite pastimes is discussing old favorites and interesting oddities with friends and acquaintances.  Having done this for many years I have rather come to the conclusion that it’s the images in the books which are so powerful to me; Whether it is six children summering on a private island (Swallows and Amazons—Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome) or a lone Native girl builds a pole hut surrounding it with a palisade of outward-curving whale bones (Island orf the Blue Dolphin Scott O’Dell) or Anna Lavinia seeing the sky within her aunt’s house which looks quite ordinary from without (Beyond the Paw Paw Trees Palmer Brown) there is something in these stories which creeps right into my dreams.

Before I’d read the Narnian stories I had a night dream about a talking horse with whom I was travelling across the desert.  Though I knew that a mirage was a thing insubstantial and uncatchable, we glimpsed a wonderful sight of water and trees up ahead and managed to overtake it.  Somehow I got a licorice ice cream cone and was happily eating that.  My horse told me he wanted us to go on and I said as soon as I was done with my cone we’d be off but as with most good dreams, it ended before we could have further adventures. This was a mixture of imageries from Beyond the Paw Paw trees, a largely forgotten story about the conflict between dreams and practicality, and possibly a dream long had even at age 6 or so, to talk with animals.

Certain authors have stood the test of time, Beverly Cleary, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Robert Newton Peck. Some are perhaps less well-known, Carolyn Sherwin Bailey author of Miss Hickory about the twig doll who lived in a corn cob house, Lucy Boston of the Green Knowe books and Carolyn Haywood of the Little Eddie stories.  Though less well known, these and many others, were at one time, household names and fillers of much leisure time fantasy. I recently remarked to a friend that in researching a number of the writers of old favorite or well-remembered tales, I found that many of them appear to have lived quite lengthy lives and we hypothesized that to live a long time one should write children’s novels.

In a writers’ group I attended back in the ‘90s I was told by one woman that whenever I wrote dialogue for children or described children’s play, AI always got it just about perfect.  I said I supposed that was because I’d never really grown up.  Some of us pass at some time through a door, leaving childhood things behind.  Once I started to do so but somehow got stuck or came back the other way and still love a great many of the things that attracted me when I was preliterate. I’ve not forgotten the images nor ceased to dream.

Insulting Emails

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on February 8, 2013 at 1:35 PM

Yesterday at work I got three versions of basically the same E-mail entitled “Lean For Dummies.” A very brief inspection I gave the first iteration indicated that employees in our agency were invited to join an online chat group centered around a book by the same name which presumably deals with issues such as diet and exercise. I didn’t check further versions since in my opinion the first one should have been deleted prior to sending.

No, I don’t have anything particularly against either dieting or exercise. I try to indulge in both from time to time. The thing that angers me is this use and overuse in contemporary culture of book titles of the form …For Dummies. I never read such books and don’t believe anyone else should, in fact I think those who do read such books are probably the audience the authors are seeking. No, that’s not really fair. I am afraid that a lot of people allow themselves to be called condescending names and allow themselves to think of themselves in diminishing terms because they don’t possess much self esteem which is certainly unfortunate but does not mean the persons in question are stupid, unable to speak or clothes mannequins which so far as I know are the three common definition for the term dummy.
Glynda

Those who teach us

18 Sunday Sep 2016

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Originaly posted on November 30, 2012 at 12:25 PM

I’m presently at work on a novel which starts with the viewpoint character Mardi Lamonte checking his Master’s Thesis in the University library and finding instead of the $20 bill he’d left in it, a message from his Third Grade teacher Sue Randall, which soon sends him on a mission which has life or death significance not only for him but for a significant portion of the Human Race. (By the way Sue Randall played the part of Miss Landers on the ‘50s/’60s TV show Leave it to Beaver.) Having so begun therefore it was incumbent on me to show what there was about this grade school teacher that would make anything she might have to say to a man who is five or more years out of graduate school; so crucial. This in turn brings up the question of what is outstanding teaching and who are outstanding teachers?

Mrs. Hazel Barns (6th/7th Grades) scared the living hell out of me but I always liked her. She was strict, exacting, would joke a certain amount but took crap-zero. She also let us know she loved us. She also made us staple in the back of our English books the various parts of speech (I still don’t remember them all but knew them then) and she taught us how to do bibleographies and to write formal reports. Beyond this she was just Mrs. Barns. She was an excellent teacher for me and I believe, most others at that time and place.

Genevieve Gorder 2nd Grade didn’t really teach me all that much but gave me opportunity to learn. She’d talked to me about subjects of interest to me and she shared with us things fun and significant to her. She was sweet and gentle spirited and when she irritated me it was generally that she insisted that certain kids were friends of mine who really weren’t at that place and that time. I called Miss Gorder up when I was 35 years old to tell her I still loved her.

Tom Hall with whom I studied first Physical Science, then Physics, then advanced Physics in high school, had many endearing quirks and in some ways was somewhat inept as a mentor. His organization was poor. His memory was poor especially for things that weren’t in his normal routine. Still he had a way of inspiring students to wonder and to search. He validated the inspiration we drew from elsewhere. He had a sort of “Wow that’s pretty neat!” way about him that might show as much appreciation for a novel toy as for a well-reasoned term paper. I did some of my most interesting speculating and reading while doing assignments for Mr. Hall.

Though I’ve heard of teachers who lead Outward Bound expeditions, found building projects for shop students, lead marches for social/political issues, take kids to Greece or Russia or someplace, none of the most significant teachers in my life did any of those things but still they made impressions which are still very much with me today. Miss Gorder was the first person to suggest that I might be a scientist some day and I did take a degree in engineering. Mrs. Barns told me once during a time when I was in trouble at school for reasons not entirely my fault; that when people said things about me that weren’t true this was hard but I couldn’t let it keep me from doing my class assignments. Mr. Hall wrote in my annual that “This student is able to take anything that someone says and pick out the profundity in it and if there isn’t any profundity this student takes what is said and somehow makes a profundity out of it.” Minor things? Perhaps but guideposts to live by as valid as any others I’ve seen.

It’s hard to convey in mere print that element that makes a good teacher good and a great teacher great because it’s not just a book sort of thing so Poor Sue Randall will be doing unusual, even outlandish things in my novel “The Void Between” but hopefully it will be more exciting to read than the things which really matter.  If anyone is reading this blog, please check in and let us know what your favorite teachers were like and why they were you favorites. Help us learn.

Glynda

Publishing

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on November 19, 2012 at 12:30 PM

The other day a friend of mine told me that a guy at work had come running out of his office saying “I’ve been published!” my friend added that this guy is a real doofus and he is a chemical engineer. I found this quite surprising as all engineers are cool in one way or another though obviously, some engineers are cooler than others. My friend confirmed that this guy was both an engineer and a doofus. When asked what he meant when claiming to be published this individual said “I’ve written a blog and people are responding to it. I’ve been published!”

I guess most of us wouldn’t count ourselves as published authors on the mere basis of having a blog but think how amazing the whole process of E-mailing itself let alone websites and blogging would have been to Ben Franklin, Will Caxton or even Ernest Hemingway. When I was in college way back there in the Dark Ages, a Communications History prof I had asked us to try to define what constituted publication. Did handing out Xeroxed copies of ones work on the street corner constitute publishing? Certainly many well-known ballads still sung to day were originally handed out as broadsheets in London, Dublin or elsewhere, sold for a penny or a mug of ale. How much greater is the potential circulation of a piece of writing when submitted to electronic channels such as this one?

In a never published (never edited actually) science fiction novel I wrote in high school I predicted that sometime in the 21st Century publishing as we had known it would cease to exist. People would submit articles, stories, books to a “Computer bank” Readers would search the bank using robotic programs which would match reader’s interest with selections available and would pay a modest price for items received. Editting would largely be a thing of the past in the sense that nobody would gate-keep anyone else’s access to publication. Anyone could do it.

Contrast this with the process still very much alive today, of submission, acceptance or rejection, agent contracts and all the rest that discourages so many people who might at some other time made reasonably good writers. And yes I have published a fair amount under that paradigm, not so much as I would have liked surely but a respectable smattering. The problem I have with the editor/agent/publication company conspiracy is while the outcome of these processes should offer some confidence of quality output to the bookstore, much of what gets published is rubbish. Other things are going on besides critiquing and wordsmithing. In general though, the process tends to reach more people than those of us with blogs or Xerox machines tend to reach on our own.

When I was growing up if one claimed to be published someone would pretty quickly ask if we were paid for the publication and as before, yes I have been. I’ve also sold an article that so far as I know, was never printed so being paid isn’t the only condition necessary for publication. Is it then the number of people reached which makes the difference between being published or not? A single copy of the Fax or laser printer wouldn’t qualify as publication otherwise anyone who writes a letter is publishing.

Perhaps we can take an analogy from the world of insurance sales. During a brief stint I did as an life insurance agent I was told that I could only sell a certain percentage of policies to friends and relatives, meaning I was expected to make contacts I didn’t previously possess in order to close sales. I think this perhaps is the key to publication. Are we reaching readers who are not included among our day to day circle of friends and relations, people we might engage with some frequency in conversation oral, written or electronic? Are people we’ve never met likely to see our work.

Under this definition our Doofus friend (remember him?) might very well have been published. If he could find a way to get someone to buy some of his material as an electronic download then so much to better but I don’t think being paid for one’s work is necessary for publication I think it is that process of striking out and creating new subscribers that is the key. When I give a copy of a bound book or an article to a friend or chance acquaintance I like to tell them “It you don’t want to read it, pass it along to someone else. If you don’t like it then give it to someone you don’t like. Publish it for me.”

In Search of Suspense

12 Monday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on November 15, 2012 at 12:45 AM

 

Just like our taste in food our taste in reading material is apt to change over the decades and I at least, find myself reading stuff which I’d not have approached as a teenager or in my twenties. I grew up an avid science fiction reader but now spend a great deal of my recreational reading time with medical and detective fiction and if they’re combined so much the better. Currently my favorite authors appear to be Patricia Cornwell, Greg Iles, Tess Gerritsen, John Sandford, Jodi Piccoult, James Lee Burke, Karin Slaughter, Archer Mayor and pretty much anyone else male or female who write in a similar fashion to some of all of the above. I never started out to be interested in detective fiction nor did I ever particularly want to be a Dr. Why then has my reading focus shifted from spaceships and exo-sociology to crime labs and autopsy rooms?

A couple of reasons I suppose. For one thing pretty much all of the authors I’ve mentioned tend to set their novels in specific areas of the country and in most cases they are areas I like or in which I’m interested. Jodi the News Hampshire area, John Minnesota, James Lee Louisiana, Archer Vermont etc. etc. But the big draw I think is the adrenaline rush of reading about folks in extreme danger and how they overcome it, are rescued from it or how their own unfortunate demise contributes eventually to someone else’s rescue.

Much (very much) of the suspense literature I read is disproportionately devoted to the misfortune of women; women being killed, stabbed, strangled, bludgeoned and so on, women being raped or subjected to sexual slavery, women being imprisoned for long periods of time, sometimes perpetually in cellars, attics, boxes, holes in the ground, women being tortured and mutilated in the most unspeakable ways. I must confess I don’t like this much in myself, my propensity to read this stuff. Of course I’m always cheering for the investigators, forensic scientists, cops on the beat and of course the victim herself but do I really need to spend so much time among entrails and torture chambers?

I think a problem we face as writers and readers is we appear to be losing our ability to build suspense without murder or sexual mayhem. Another way to say that is inflicted misfortune is an easy base on which to build a scary book. I don’t believe that I’d be able to write the sort of sadistic murder stuff I frequently read even if I want to. I think the reason I tend to write a lot about gender issues and various trans varieties in particular is because I can build tension through risking my protagonist’s discovery or dealing with the consequences of flouting perceived social norms.

Obviously not everyone wants to read books on gender issues but aren’t there some other ways to build suspense without cutting up people? Ghosts are a faithful standby and needn’t always be deadly but haven’t most of the changes on ghostly appearances been wrong? The feeling of being pursued can certainly excite the nape Follicles and chill the spine. Journeys of extreme difficulty or explorations through strange or weird environments can likewise excite. In what other ways may we employ our Drs Isles and Linton and Scarpetta? How use our Lucas Davenports, Greg Flowers’s or Dave Robicheaus?

What other things can scare, excite, grip us to the point that the book sticks to the hand till the back cover is reached? What do you think? Am I alone out here and is there a problem? Are there alternatives you’d choose if only they were available? Let me know.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Glynda