Muse

A Twitter buddy, @noveldoctor, asked for a first sentence to inspire a short story. I'm honored he chose mine. Here 'tis.
http://web.me.com/spwriter1/countingonrain/home/Entries/2009/10/9_Worms_Matter.html

True Story

She steps into the bookstore. It's the old-fashioned kind, the kind filled with books rather than magazines, tchotchkes and coffee shops. There are no bar scanners, no titles ending in "for Dummies." It's just stacks and stacks of used books. The stacks are somewhat labeled, "Mysteries","Non-fiction","Fiction", and there is a random jumble above each and every bookshelf labeled simply "Overstocks." Any sound is immediately dampened.

Which is why she came. Just a quick way, she thought, to decompress, to take me away, as the old commercial said. I'll just hang out here a minute to peace out, and then I'll go back refreshed. What she really wanted was a week in a tent in the woods, but the bookstore also had that faintly organic smell that stimulated that particular sense memory for her.

She finds archaic hardbound reference books, books in languages other than English (imagine that, she thought, an acknowledgment that all is not "middle America") but then something shifts. She heads over to fiction. To the U's. She met the author, at a talk, and found him charming and funny. And married, it wasn't like that at all, but she'd had so little opportunity for fandom, she reveled in it.

Sure enough, there it was, an early collection of short stories, half price. She thought that this was a terrific idea, to support the author, read some more of his work, everybody wins. She immediately lost the equanimity she had gained, for she tended to get caught up in things. That's okay, she thought, a joyful passion is far better than a general contentment.

She had work, so she had to wait until she got home to begin to read. She sat in the rocker she hardly ever uses, and devoured the first short story; it was about youth, and magic, and credulity. It was very funny. The second was about loss, and revenge, and danger, and kindness.

But then something happened. She read a page she had already read before. Not like when one is falling asleep, and reads the same page again, but it was an earlier page. Much earlier. She flips back. Sure enough, a whole section of text was repeated! After page 62, it goes back to 21! Then 22! and on and on.

How fascinating! A binding problem of this magnitude hardly ever happens. Of all the thousands and thousands of books one reads, one generally has faith that the pages will proceed as intended. Yes, there's the occasional uncut page (particularly humorous in a used textbook, "You didn't read the whole thing!") but hardly ever does one find extra pages.

Oh, but wait. Her stomach fell. What if, she thought, she began to flip forward in the book. 61, 62, 117. Sure enough. Another section of text was missing. Gone, completely. Not there. The missing text was replaced by the duplicated text from the beginning. A story and a half, replaced by a story and a half that was already told.

She felt strangely unmoored. Of all things to be defective. You expect your laptop to crash periodically, but not your book. "My book is broken," she thought, turning that phrase over and over for its ridiculousness.

Laughing Out Loud in Public

Two passages in Luis Urrea's "Into the Beautiful North" have made me laugh out loud in public.
#1
She liked to think of Matt's mouth as having American lips--labios Americans. It could be a power ballad by Mana'.

#2
The girlfriends had all seen "Los Hermanos Blues" at the Pedro Infante a few months earlier.
"We're on a mission from God," Nayeli intoned.

There's many more that got close to the out loud threshold. I haven't even finished this book but I say go get it!

Connections

So I'm reading Lady Chatterly's Lover on my Stanza for iphone while I ride the bus, and I'm reading Hot, Flat and Crowded at home.

Yeah, I know, that's how I roll.

Anyway, who would have thought there was an overlap between the two:

From Lady Chatterly:

It was not woman's fault, nor even love's fault, nor the fault of sex. The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanized greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon, it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron.

For those who have not yet gotten to Hot, Flat and Crowded, Friedman argues for finding (truly) clean energy while conserving biodiversity, and how to do it.

The Palmyra Impact, by Boyd Morrison (Retitled Rogue Wave)

What is it about disaster stories? The summer wildfires, tornado season, these hold our attention, certainly, but it's the biggies that really fascinate--Hurricane Katrina, the Mississippi flood a while back. Boyd Morrison's Palmyra Impact is the classic disaster story, in tsunami form.

Part of what is so interesting about disasters is that it (unfortunately) is the chance for ordinary people to do something extraordinary. Sully was just doing his job when he landed in the Hudson, but it was so much more than that. In the book, Kai Tanaka works in the tsunami warning system, but when his family is in danger, he certainly does more than just issue news briefs.

Morrison has done the research on the science, and it shows. Part of the tension of the story is the fact that although unlikely, it COULD happen this way. And Morrison points out that people will not always do the right thing, and that can have disastrous consequences.

Morrison's writing has settled down since "Adamas Blueprint"; he unspools his yarn with more confidence. I did miss the "Nick and Nora Charles" vibe of Adamas, but this is a different animal, anyway. The downside is that I felt I could see the chess pieces moving a little bit. Cell phones have a tendency to run out of battery life or get destroyed. I also got to the point of wondering how much more our merry band was going to have to take. But Morrison does have finesse; he shows how much the exertion and stress costs these folks. You can't run fast through a debris field when you're exhausted. Morrison acknowledges this.

The Palmyra Impact is a ripping read and a fascinating answer to that "what if?" question.

One Sentence: True stories, told in one sentence

These are amazing!
http://www.onesentence.org/

The Adamas Blueprint, by Boyd Morrison

I wish that I had studied journalism, or art criticism of some sort, because I'm engaging in some really great works that I wish I could do justice. I've been fortunate enough to get a freelance gig doing reviews, usually theater reviews. I try to keep my hand in by writing about movies I've seen too. I've jotted down a few notes about some books, too. (Separate from the ones I'm required to do for class.)

So although I'm not a critic, I hope that my words may be helpful for two or three of you out there.

The latest book I've devoured is The Adamas Blueprint, by Boyd Morrison. I know Boyd by association through the local theater scene. He's very watchable as an actor, and I keep learning more about him through snippets, that he studied engineering, for example. Then I heard him talking about his writing, and that he had a number of novels (!) completed. When he posted some links on Facebook, that was my chance.

Adamas is about Kevin, a grad student who gets a postmortem email from a former professor/employer. Kevin quickly gets embroiled in a cat-and-mouse game with a powerful industrialist who is interested in a process that Kevin unwittingly helped discover. Kevin is forced to run for his life while simultaneously trying to figure out why the hell why they're chasing him.

Boyd does a great job of keeping the action cranked up to 11. It's a true page turner in that our heroes are never really "safe", so you have to keep seeing what's happening next. There are twists upon twists, never blatantly advertised. I love this quality, because there's not much more of a downer than seeing what's coming a mile away. Not to mention, any author who can use a grad student's unwashed pile of laundry in a thriller gets props from me.

Indeed the whole academic way of life is its own animal, opaque to anyone who's never been through it, and Boyd knows the details. Because I work at a university, I love it when writers get it right. Two minor quibbles: student workers get trained on the FERPA privacy law and how important it is. Would a character risk that much trouble for $100 or $200 bucks? Same thing with access to a lab, would someone really risk the trouble to give a friend (even a good friend) access to a multimillon dollar lab? I'm not sure.

Perhaps its a function of age. Maybe $100 back in the day would have done it. I think it could be updated to $1000 in today's dollars. There are some other cues that the story may not be aging well. The idea that the crucial email didn't land in a sent items folder seems off, as well as Kevin's statement that he'd never used a cell phone before.

The writing itself reads much like an homage to Hammett and the hardboiled noir writing of the 40s-50s, with modern updates like, "Hello, McFly!" But indeed, that's the point; that style of writing emphasized the way real people actually talk.

I do recommend this book for those looking for a page-turner; definitely good airplane or beach reading. Not as erudite as say, a Neal Stephenson, but that can be a good thing, as anyone who has slogged through thousands of (entertaining but challenging) pages of his work can attest.

Boyd has The Adamas Blueprint available for free on his web site, www.boydmorrison.com
but I purchased mine for .99 for my iphone at Amazon.com. Also available for Kindle. Let me put a plug in for supporting the arts by purchasing the work. It's definitely worth more than .99!

One last thing. Boyd, can I write the screenplay? :o)

New Link

I don't manage my links very often, so I thought I'd point it out when I added a new one. An actor I know here in the area is also a novelist. (And an incredible karaoke artist. Biz Markie, who knew?) Well, I didn't realize how fully realized his writing was. I heard him mention that he wrote, but I didn't pay a whole lot of attention, to be honest, until he posted information on Facebook, and lordy, he's finished 3 books already and working on more! I also found from his web site he's a Jeopardy champion! Major geek crushing goin' on! Anyway, I've started reading one of his books, and while I won't review it until finished (duh) I like it well enough to link to Boyd. So take a look and throw him some love. Or at least page views.

Just kinda getsya right there...

Maybe it's because I'm going through a kinda low energy time right now, but this really moved me. It's from a Slate reader, not name-credited, but at least you know where it came from...
This is the reader's grandmother's morning routine...
Rising at a leisurely 8 or 9, she puts on her dressing gown and pads into the kitchen. Sets to brew her little 2 cup Krups and gets a grapefruit out of the fridge. Puts half a muffin in the oven to warm and goes and gets the paper from the driveway. Sets up the paper on the wooden paper racks made by her now deceased husband and brings her half a grapefruit with her half a banana to the table with her always black coffee. Begins perusing the headlines and at some point remembers the half a muffin or scone or cinnamon roll in the oven. Half a grapefruit, half a banana, half a muffin, half a pot of coffee. One-side of a conversation. Evidence of over 50 years of shared life with someone.

How true

On love, on grief, on every human thing,
Time sprinkles Lethe's water with his wing.

.................................................—Walter Savage Landor