Zephyr 98

I haven’t written for a week till now. Nothing came to mind worth writing: no story to tell or coerce. I spent two days hiding out in a borrowed copy of the computer game, Dragon Age (not an entirely terrible place to hide). I mowed the lawn (usually, a satisfying task–we have terrain and, in the spring, daffodils that I carefully cut round but not down). At work I wrote confusing e-mail and gave directions I’d rather forget. I scowled–I have a magnificent scowl–if scowls were charming, my scowl would be Cary Grant or William Powell. It was a depressing week–except for the daffodils (and perhaps the animated slaying). I was edgy, hard on people, chalking it up to allergies and minor intestinal crud.

I woke around 4 this morning and thought, that’s it, I’m done before I’ve done it. Might as well die right now, posterity’s already putting double quotes around, “He mowed a nice lawn.” I don’t pray, but in my head I started reaching out for advice. And in the unreal clarity of pre-dawn, a pragmatic voice answered right back: You can write. It didn’t shrug and it didn’t rub my nose in anything. It just said, between the lines, You couldn’t for a bit, and now you can. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Just write. You want permission, call it permission. Just don’t call it late for dinner.

This isn’t about mojo* (which is more of a filterless cigarette or a chic manly body spray than a creative groove). It’s simpler, more like a light switch flicking on. Or a circuit breaker reset. Or a great ZOT! followed by bell chimes. Or a simple gift I’ll finish unwrapping later tonight.

* Also the simian nemesis of Bubbles, Blossom, and Buttercup, the Powerpuff Girls

Sometimes solutions to writing problems show up unexpectedly. I was reading a chapter in Half The Sky (unless you’re a caveman, read Half The Sky–now–or especially if you’re a caveman, first world or otherwise) about sex trafficking in the slums of Nagpur, where members of the Dalit (Untouchable) class, especially women, have almost no social or legal rights or protection, other than those they create with the support or leadership of social activists. (I won’t go into details–read the book: it’s smart, easy to read, hard to take–even when you’re already aware of its subject matter–and almost impossible to put down.)

I have henchmen characters, the shamblers, in Sea of Tigers whose origin has always been a little vague–one of those problems I knew I’d eventually resolve, although hopefully not with clichés. As I read the chapter described above, a voice–you know the voice–whispered, “The shamblers are Untouchables.” I don’t always trust that voice, even if it’s right–it’s also impetuous, a trait it shares with me. But the whisperer is right. They are Untouchables, although not from a single culture, and their leader organizes and runs them according to her complex (but not opaque) moral agenda. They’re not role models, they’re more privateer than criminal, but they are sympathetic and, in their ragged way, are working for a better world.

The shamblers’ origin wasn’t nagging at me when I read Half The Sky–I hadn’t thought about their origin in months–but it was clear that deeper parts of my creative conscious–that black hole where most of the real work happens and from which things can escape–had not forgotten about them and was actively seeking solutions.

That’s the beauty of eureka–it never gets old, it never stops being a surprise, it’s almost always a gift. Even when it’s a curse.

Dear Western Writers of My Generation,

I’ve been reading Anil Menon’s The Beast with Nine Billion Feet (see here and here). It’s the intellectual SF adventure novel I would write if I had an encyclopedic brain and no day job, and an IQ that was at least 20 points higher. It’s both deliriously engaging and an exercise in sadomasochism (for the writer as reader). I don’t have enough years left to gather that much knowledge and synthesize it on the page and entertain readers at the same time. So I’m giving up–Anil has defeated me and, probably, a whole generation of writers. We need to stop his book from being published in the US now. Join me in my efforts at www.corralmenon.org. If we can keep him locked down on the subcontinent then generations of weaker minded western writers like me will have a chance.

Your’s in defeat,

~ Kurt

P.S. Seriously, if you think there’s no market for jam packed smarty pants SF for young and adult readers, get your hands on a copy. Publishers will have a hell of a time categorizing it (they already have in India, where it’s tagged “young reader”–but it’s no more young reader than LeGuin’s “YA” work. It’ll either wither in obscurity or, my bet, grow a long spidery set of legs.) I read Vandana Singh (her speculative fiction and other stories) and she shows me unique paths to tread. Then I add Anil Menon to the mix and the paths fork. We really need more SF writers of non-western origin who can write for multicultural audiences to provoke our expectations as readers and show us new ways to grow as writers (and, in my case, remove self-imposed limits). In the past, I’ve said a lot of nice things about Vandana’s work–partially out of encouragement, but mostly out of admiration born from exposure to new insights (or remembrance of insights I’d buried to properly mold my thinking). But never out of reverence. Not till she’s at least 90 and still churning out short stories, novellas, and someday the novel.

These have been developed spuriously and sometimes out of desperation at my daughter’s bedtime since last Thanksgiving. I usually tell the stories in mad lib style, leaving blanks for her to fill in and guide the plot or character actions. She’s five and is not short of ideas or decisions.

Main characters:
Four quadruplet (but not identical) late teen Princesses opening a chain of teashops in usual and unusual locations

Recurring or single appearance characters:
A King, who builds transdimensional zoos and swings through trees at night (thanks to night vision goggles)
A Queen, admiral of the fleet
A ne’er do well enchanted Prince, asleep in a tower
A guardian tiger spirit fond of disguises (and comfortable in forest and urban jungles)
A temple dragon named Tien Lung fond of tea and conversation
A Chinese emperor worried about dragons
Madame Minus-One Pound, worried about gravity, and an expert in tea
A reformed Ogre, now tea shop manager
A leprechaun constable securing against illegal fairy ring gateway use
A quirky scientist, Professor Adams, and his submarine-based lab
Professor Adams’ alternate (bizarro) personality
A polar bear and grey whale in an interspecies romance on the ice pack
Dread Pirate Bawb and, following a devastating battle with the Queen’s fleet, Former Pirate Fred

This is a longish response to a post on the blog, Round Dice, on Evolution of the Obvious. Read it first, then come back here if you like. Or stay there and soak up more of Mr. Menon’s encyclopedic mind.

The Day Before Yesterday (also the title of my upcoming disaster novel) my sister-in-law’s chimney caught fire, causing some smoke damage and sending them to a friend’s house for the night. My mother-in-law called my wife and I yesterday to tell us what happened and then, unable to keep herself off the stage, intimated that she had went to bed that night unable to stop thinking about my sister-in-law and, in hindsight, sure that dark clouds were gathering over her daughter’s home.

I have a not entirely irrational habit of taking words and plugging them into Inigo Montoya’s retort, “I don’t think [term] means what you think it means.” In this case, coincidence or mother’s intuition–when your habit is to worry about any one of your children as you wait for sleep, weighting your worry toward those struggling the most, odds are good that you’ll hit jackpot when disaster strikes. The statistics of coincidence aside (coincidence not being all that coincidental), my mother-in-law created an event, then assigned an adaptive value to it (mom still needs to be needed). Societies could (and have) built rules of behavior around such intuition (placing them in the murky realm of the unquestionable–not the inexplicable, because the explanation is the unexplainable intuition, which some people reduce to a lifetime of perceptions creating a complex web of awareness that exceeds the bounds of what most of us can comprehend on an average day, leading to notions of intelligent design–but I digress.)

A nice thing about superstition is that it jumps right to the results–no boring search and sift through data (a word as dry and, to some, as nefarious in meaning as “corpse powder”) to help explain the system–so superstition is an adaption to prevent boredom. (Or weevils.) And it gets us back to work, to surviving the day. BUT (sorry for the big but), ironically, it also causes boredom–as in, sheesh, is that all there is? Or, maybe, as it turns out, there’s this fascinating system of behaviors and cultural transmission tied to genetics that makes it possible to view a node (person) or a group of nodes (crowd, congregation, etc.) as almost impossibly but not inconceivably (that word does mean what I think it means) rich systems that should occasionally make us giddy with delight (or, optionally, disgust) when we look at each other. Like looking at clouds–what do you see, a kitty chasing a bunny, two gods butting thunderheads, a chimney fire, or….

P.S. This doesn’t mean I don’t love my mother-in-law. Or worry about her at night.

right here: SOFIA Seeks Secrets of Planetary Birth

I know it’s silly to see an alternate spelling of my daughter’s name in this context and imagine her becoming a groundbreaking astronomer when she grows up. Or building a massive intelligent telescope for which she is the namesake. Romantic parents imagine their children as pioneers. Pragmatic parents know the lives of pioneers are anything but romantic and too often have the hero’s share of tragedy. There’s also a post-singularity angle I could work here, but not with my own kid.

It’s romantic enough to think of a giant jet in our stratosphere aiming its telescope into the hearts of planetary accretion disks.

Now to find cool science with the acronyms NOAH, JORDAN, ADAM, and TRAVIS.

Here’s an excerpt from the article linked above.

You don’t always have to have a rocket to do rocket science. Sometimes a mere airplane will do – that is, a mere Boeing 747 toting a 17-ton, 9-foot wide telescope named SOFIA.

Short for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA will observe the universe while gliding through the stratosphere at 45,000 feet. When it begins operations next year, it will be the world’s biggest, most advanced airborne observatory.

“SOFIA will be able to locate the ‘planetary snowline,’ where water vapor turns to ice in the disk of dust and gas around young stars,” says Marcum. “That’s important because we think that’s where gas giants are born. The most massive planetary cores are fashioned [around the snowline] because conditions are best for rock and ice to build up.” (Sticky ice particles help form planets just as they help you make a snowball to hurl at an unsuspecting friend.)

“Once a large enough core forms, its gravity becomes strong enough to hold on to gas so more hydrogen and helium molecules can ‘stick.’ Then these large cores can grow into gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Otherwise, they remain as smaller rock-ice planets.”

“SOFIA will also be able to pinpoint where basic building blocks like oxygen, methane, and carbon dioxide2 are located within the protoplanetary disk.” Knowing where various substances are located in the disk will cast light on how they come together, from the “ground” up, to form planets.

In the mornings, as I walk from the train to the office, I watch other people in transition: stepping into or out of buildings or the streetcar, squatting with their possessions in doorways, warming their hands with coffee or asking for change or public solitude. I wonder what they looked like when they were younger, whether this life is a surprise or inevitable; what they’ll look like and how they’ll feel when they’re old, if they live to be old; what old might mean; all in swift imaginary scenes like a catalog of sights captured from the corners of my eyes. Sometimes, I try to plant myself in someone’s head to watch me walking by and run the thought experiment in reverse. I get distracted, though, imagining what it’s like to be them and never really see myself.

This morning as I passed the corner diner three blocks from the office, I watched a women, probably in her early 50′s, salty short hair, medium build and wearing a thick wool coat,* step briskly inside and settle alone at the big U-shaped Formica counter. What, outside of hunger, brought her there? She’d moved too decisively for the visit to be random. The food’s pure diner–attentive service, large (formerly “healthy”) portions, but expensive. Maybe for the sexy no-nonsense waitresses? For the two cooks sweating over the grill and talking in rapid-fire Spanish, slinging hot dishes almost as fast as they speak? For the easygoing elbow-to-elbow contact with the other diners hunched over eggs and cakes, eavesdropping or chatting with their neighbors, construction workers and execs finding common ground, couples eating off each other’s plates, a little old scarecrow of a man settling in with his paper and receiving his breakfast without ordering. And suddenly I’ve slipped from one head into the next, sipping my always hot coffee, winking at the waitress who doesn’t acknowledge but accepts the flattery, clearing my sinuses with tobasco steaming off my huevos rancheros. The closer I get to work, the thinner my imaginary connection grows until it snaps at the office door and I’m me again, waving to our friendly receptionist and trying not to stumble down the curving stair to the “lower atrium” and the double-wide I share with a project manager who commutes two days a week from Boise. I try to get to know my coworkers through conversation, but avoid getting into their heads, reserving that kind of intimacy for people I’ll never see again. I don’t want to think, much less say to a coworker, even sympathetically, “Man, I’ve been inside your head and I get you.”

*I had mistyped “wearing a thick wool cat” and almost left it.

Keeping with the oldies pop theme, this made me so very happy:

Setting Sail Into Space, Propelled by Sunshine

Lately, when I want writing inspiration, I find Sherman Alexie.

When I need grounding, I read anything Molly Gloss.

When I want to know whether I’ll be writing when I’m in my 70′s, I read my friend Tony Wolk. I also read his friend, Ursula, who is now 80, but daunting with her bold silver litcrit yin yang rodeo buckle.

***

The other day when the wind was blowing in 40 MPH gusts, I went for a run. Just to see. I live in an established suburban neighborhood anchored with trees that had danced with storms since my grandparents ran wild: mighty oaks, old growth fir, and two jolly green poplar that on clear nights bookend the moons of Jupiter; towering over a younger wiry crop of developer-planted dogwood, cherry, and maple. The wind frantically dipped the tree tops, whipped up leaf demons, and bullied small branches to the ground. It tried to push me around, but I’m skinny and, without leaves or needles or webbing, don’t have much lift. One big gust tossed a cat–a fluffy little tabby with ears like lateen sails–out of the skirts of a big fir and into my arms (really, onto my shoulders) as I jogged past. I whooped and she howled and dug in, burying her nose in my armpit. The tree stood on the lawn of a white neo-colonial with a red front door–red for good fortune in finance–so I carried her there and rang the bell. A friendly older gentleman answered, a lawyer or professor or other professional orator from his demeanor, he swept me in and thanked me profusely while scolding and cooing over the cat–who rumbled in response to “Oh now now you are now now puss puss.” His wife–younger and lovely in her own feline sort of way–exclaimed and rubbed noses with little Onnyannpp, offered me a cold cloth for the blood, and insisted I stay for tea. Three cups and one photo album of adventure vacations and graduations later, the cat twining round my ankles, they conferred briefly nose-to-nose then suddenly offered one of their daughter’s hands in marriage. I smiled apologetically at my new dear friends and held up my left ring finger. Then I told them about my three sons of marriageble age: one a budding economist in the blossoming field of online publishing, one an athlete developing a method for knitting bones with sound, one a musician who speaks three Eastern languages and laughs at jokes in six. And so you find me here in the first row of pews on the groom’s side, with my own beautiful wife, holding kleenex in one hand and my little daughter’s hand tight in the other, waiting for the bride, hoping that the wind howling outside has not blown her away, and wondering if there are two feet sticking out from under this little church, rapidly curling and ready to drop a pair of sparkling red shoes.

[This odd little piece started out as a handful of sentences about how it was windy, I went for a run, caught a cat blown from a tree, returned the cat to her owner, was rewarded with an offer of marriage, countered with an offer of my son's hand, and ended up in church for the ceremony--a sketch of of initial conditions and unpredictable outcome (leaving out the background info for all parties that would make the outcome far less random). Then I started dropping in more language, and shaving; dropping in and shaving (like a homeless guy in a public restroom on the mornings of successive job interviews). I stopped after I'd seriously exceeded the time I'd given myself to work on the piece, thought it was either droll and wacky or flat and wacky with a few sparks, but "good enough for blog (vanity press?) work," and not good enough to send out. I'm focusing more on productivity instead of my usual practice--smothering a piece with love that I only mean to flirt with. But I can use pieces like this as phrase and idea banks I might draw from later, and I'll continue to play with the theme of apparently random outcomes.]

***

My heart thuds and whooshes in my ears all day long. I notice it more at night, when the world is quiet. The doctor says my EKG is normal and my blood pressure is par excellence. Extracurricular reading says it might be anxiety. I’ve been anxious all my life and maybe it’s just catching up with me. Dry observations aside, it annoys the hell out of me. Time to dust off the old tai chi again, I think–long form, Yang style, the way I learned it back in another century.

I often see tweets from an outstanding local writer on how slow she is–her average daily output being about 300 words. I suspect that those are 300 carefully chosen words resulting in fairly polished text, not 300 words blurted onto a page (or e-mail or blog, etc.). But even 300 words ill chosen are better than nothing, especially if we write them when we really don’t want to be writing. (There’s a nice guest post on Jeff Vandemeer’s blog about this.)

It helps me that my tools for personal writing (either offline or online) are very different from my workaday computer tools (the MS Office Suite, a fancy text editor, and CMS and web dev tools). When I open PageFour or my intentionally simple blog env (or my little red spiral bound notebook), I know why I’m there, I’m not distracted by the tools or thinking about other projects for which I use them and should probably check up or work on. If I’m not connected to the blog, I intentionally go offline.

Cory Doctorow has written that he drafts everything in a text editor to minimize computer-related distractions. I can’t do that easily–only because my thinking is still shaped by some visual presentation and sense of organization of the parts. But it’s worthwhile to have that separation–the virtual desk or “room of one’s own.”