2016 NaNovel: Patience of Snakes
Last night as I prepared for bed, I considered setting an alarm for 11:30 PM, to get up, ready myself to write, and be poised, fingers over keyboard, when 12:01 AM and NaNoWriMo arrived. In previous years, I have done that, then been unable to go to sleep for even the short hours between bedtime and nearly midnight. Novel churning in my seriously-deprived-of-sleep brain, I advanced into the NaNo fray.
This year I decided not to start at midnight, even if it does take me extra hours to fall asleep. I will keep my normal writing schedule, simply extending the hours as needed. And I will add Sundays, because November.
A midnight launch shouldn't be needed. Patience's protagonist, Carole Marling, is headed to a territory I've already visited in previous NaNovels. Her hometown, as yet unnamed, lies somewhere in the western prairies near Indigo, the site of three previous Pat Cummings novels begun in November. Her nemesis, though, is a new terror, different from the Fateful Weather of my Indigo novels.
And no, it is not snakes.
Buddies Wanted
You can join me in writing a novel this November. Head over to the NaNoWriMo website, create your writer profile, and make a commitment to put however many words on paper. Because the truth is, you can write. The only question is, will you?
If you do join in, please go to the Buddy function and consider adding me as a writing buddy. My writing buddy philosophy is simple: if you write to me, I will reply. I will occasionally (maybe once a week) write to my whole buddy list. And I will send you encouraging words or congratulations based on your productivity.
That's all. My assumption is that buddies want to be writing their NaNovels, not messages.
Every so often, I am astounded by the hidden talent of the folks who work at the local Chick-fil-A where we eat breakfast. Abby's brilliant voice, for example, would soar above the clatter of dishes in the kitchen. The entreprenurial Don Mallory greeted patrons while contemplating how to market his manual trash-compactor invention.
The latest is Dustin Garza, who paused in his task of delivering food to tables to show me the lovely pendant pictured here. This is his work, a milky-rose cabochon and several Herkimer Diamonds (doubly-terminated quartz crystals) enclosed in a complex macramé of silver wire. The pendant is posed on the palm-plate of my Chromebook for scale.
I was particularly taken by the braided wire to the left of the cabochon enclosure, and the subtle wave in the herringbone wire that wraps the curve of the pendant on the left. The flip side of the pendant shows a bone plate with a texture that is seldom encountered in siver jewelry, but it provides the perfect balance in this work.
For the weight and material, not to mention the brilliant composition, I would not have been surprised to learn that the price was north of $1000. Instead, it is less than $100. Dustin invests his jewelry with a philosophic weight it hardly needs for beauty, but if you are into "crystal healing," that has gone into its composition as well.
Since this, I have seen another piece Dustin calls an "Eye of Horus" which also features the braiding and balance seen in this pendant. Keep your eye on him, folks. I suspect we'll see his work on the wider stage one day.
I learned to love the fruit-laden aroma and creme-soda flavor of South African rooibos tea when I lived for three years in the country. On returning to the US in the late 1970s, I resigned myself to life devoid of this herbal tisane (tea, to all but the purists).
Rooibos tea contains no caffeine, and much lower tannic fractions than Chinese tea. The problem is that unlike "real" Camellia sinensis tea, the Aspalathus linearis plant apparently requires a specific soil and climate ecosystem found only in South Africa's fynbos region in order to thrive.
Cuttings from Oriental tea plants transplanted well to plantations in Indonesia and India, equatorial Africa and the New World tropics. The red bushes of rooibos tea, on the other hand, fail to thrive when planted where the Cape-native soil bacteria and mycorrhizae do not exist. So when apartheid, and the reason for the boycott against South African product exports, finally ended, one of the first things I searched for in US markets was rooibos tea.
Several brands had appeared by the middle 90s, under corporate labels like Twinings and Celestial Seasonings. I had purchased these, and also a South African brand from an import store, in my attempts to recreate that wonderful flavor in my cup. Alas, only the expensive 'native' brand was true to my memory. The 'international' brands sometimes added spices (unnecessary to appeal to my palate) or blended rooibos with other herbs—even Camellia sinensis leaves—to bring down the price point.
When I saw this tea advertised in Amazon's Prime Pantry, I thought it was time to try again. Hurrah! Here it is, the sublime taste I recall from morning breakfast in Johannesburg. These tea bags are a little over $1 apiece, each yielding a full "company teapot" of 5-8 cups, depending on the size of the service. For my generic porcelain mug from Safeway, I pour 6 full cups.
Served alongside wheat toast spread with honey, or Milton's crackers with fresh mozzarella and a tiny spoonful of black lumpfish caviar, it makes an elegant late supper on a cold winter evening. So civilized!
And with no caffeine, I can indulge right before bedtime.
Review: Science, Sex, and Sacred Cows, from Worm-Runner's Digest, James V. McConnell, Editor
The Ig Nobel Prizes, parodies of the Nobel Prizes, can be veiled criticism or satire, but also point out that even absurd-sounding research can yield useful knowledge.
For example, in the early days of exploration into DNA and RNA, the experimental “tool” of choice was the lowly flatworm, Dughesia tigrina. Hardy specimens were easy to obtain, easy to analyze (behaving like organic NOT gates), and capable of regenerating from axial or longitudinal cuts. Even partial cuts would stimulate regeneration, giving rise to worms with two, three, even ten heads.
The excitement in using flatworms was that they could be “taught” to run a maze, then shown (by Digest editor Dr. James V. McConnell in a disputed experiment) to transmit their knowledge to untrained planaria who consumed their chopped-up bodies. Something in the trained worms acted as a knowledge store. This stuff, named “Memory RNA” by its discoverer, prompted hopes of a “Ph.D. pill” in the future.
The maze-running of such animals to create a trained food-source for investigation was so widespread, it gave rise to the quasi-satiric Worm-Runner’s Digest, published at first as humorous entries in the staid Journal of Biological Psychology. When the satirical pieces began to diminish the reputation of his peer-reviewed items, Digest editor James V. McConnell first printed the humor pieces upside down at the end of each volume, then separated the two entirely.
Freed from proximity to the now-waning furor over college-bound planaria, Digest articles eventually covered a multitude of topics, from archaeology to zoophyly. This particular collection is “more than 50 percent planaria by volume.” I hope we can all learn something from its consumption.
From the initial Questions and answers with Grant Swinger (in which the operations of the “Center for Absorption of Federal Funds” are described) to the final Neil Illusions (showing the panicked urge for new optical illusions to which the researcher’s name might be appended), these are iconoclastic articles. Their primary aim is to amuse, but the secondary purpose is to let hot air out of the pompous image of the scientist.
So we have a Handbook of common laboratory diseases, including 'Apparatophilia' and 'Disbursitis'. The professional patient illustrates the arrogance and impatience of some researchers by casting these qualities onto their human subjects. And F.E. Warburton’s classic, The lab coat as status symbol is reproduced here.
Some pieces require a faint familiarity with other classics of literature and science. A singluar case of extreme electrolyte balance associated with folie a deux uses the style of a clinical report to describe why Lot’s wife became a pillar of salt. The fall of the house of Oozer is a wonderful retelling of the Poe story (complete with an inset spoof of The Raven) with flatworms as the main characters. And in three ends to the tale of The blind men and the elephant, we get a capsule description of the errors that rise from all three modes of resolving committee disputes over scientific fact.
I suspect only worm-runners would find sufficient humor in the radio play by 'Tollan Dymas' titled, Under worm wood: a romp for wrigglers. Perhaps my own deficient knowledge of Dylan Thomas’ works was more to blame. But juxtaposed with this is a charming collection of doodle-quality sperm cartoons, showing, for example, the Ph.D. sperm with a tiny mortar-board and the Jester sperm with a minute belled cap.
Smorr Chen tells of a University of Chicago student’s encounter with the pervasive nature of a charming accent, and what happens when he encounters the antidote. How to teach a cow a damn good lesson details the way a new milker is taught which position to take in the milking barn. (Not for PETA or pet-cow proponents, by the way, although the methods described should be understood as outmoded and no longer in general use.)
There’s more here, most very funny. Like A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown, this collection shows that, whatever else research writers may be, they are certainly not devoid of a sense of humor.
Varley's Hollywood-mega-disaster novel begins, appropriately, with a Hollywood screenwriter looking for a good storyline to fuel his comeback. Dave Marshall and his crew of writers had been responsible for a sit-com called Ants, which lasted just long enough to give the Marshall family a taste for the luxurious life in the Hollywood Hills.
When he learns of an impending disaster (a bacteria spreading through the world distills the explosive fractions from crude oil deposits underground, making it both explosive and unpumpable), Marshall warns his Ants posse and his daughter, but conceals his expensive survival-prep from his wife.
That in itself could trigger a disaster, but the reality of the crisis intervenes in the family drama when LA's Doheny oil field (sometimes called the Beverley Hills Oil Field) explodes. This is followed by widespread, catastrophic fires. Gasoline rationing. Earthquakes. Gang violence. And the hits just keep coming...
My spouse usually loves John Varley, but has an engineer's distaste for continually-pyramiding disaster, so I was reluctant to offer Slow Apocalypse. We had divided reactions just over a year before to The Martian—you can see my opinion in my review The Needs of the One. My spouse, on the other hand, put the novel down about halfway through, saying, "Too many problems. Every time Mark Watney solved one, another cropped up."
There is a similar compounding of complications in Varley's novel—so much so that I had trouble staying absorbed in the story; I began watching for the next calamity whenever the Marshall family seemed to be about to escape the current one. On the other hand, the characters have a sincere reality that carries the tale. There are no supermen here, and most of the folks Marshall meets as he tries to get his friends and family to safety are true-to-life, neither all evil nor shining pure.
I was encouraged by Varley's resisting the impulse to give in to the pull of political consiracy. There are suggestions of it, but nothing that could not equally be explained as spin or stupidity. In the isolating havoc of the post-apocalypse bubble around the Marshall group, it becomes increasingly obvious that "all politics is local."
The undercurrent of meaning (material wealth is ashes in the wind, but love and friendship prevails despite disaster) is lightly maintained, sometimes overwhelmed by the narrative of collapse and social cataclysm. Yet the message persists.
Cling to what is real, Varley tells us. Survival and happiness both lie there.
Liner Notes
- Many readers were surprised by the fact of the oil-fields under the LA Basin. With a little more connection to these reserves and awareness of their extent, I kept waiting for the off-shore deposits to contribute to the catastrophes in the story, or perhaps for the Port of LA or Long Beach/Signal Hill to erupt in the same way the Doheny field had.
- California Department of Conservation's interactive map of active oil wells—over 3,000 of them in the LA Basin—bears a suspicious similarity to an earthquake-fault map of the same area. The resemblance is superficial. I hope.
Brief Review: The Rage of Plum Blossoms by Christina Whitehead
The only reviewers making fun of this Kindle-Scout-selected novel's title will be either cold-hearted anti-romantics, or those who have not read it.
Rage is a normal response when your world has been irretrievably upset, and Quinn Jones Chang has lost not only her husband, but her best friend, her true love, and her sense of place in the community, all at the same time. It does not help that her husband's family and his best friend "from the womb" Harry Chin all believe, like the police, that Jordan Chang committed suicide by diving head-first from their second-floor balcony.
Like the plum, Quinn will persist through the chill of this emotional winter. She will find support from a strange variety of new friends and continue—despite threatenting emails and near-fatal "accidents"—to seek the real reason her husband died, to find his murderers, to blossom in the midst of this icy disaster.
By the way, guys, I offer a warning. This is a novel that drove me to tears, not once, but several times. If you are in a deep relationship, the evocative way Whitehead describes Quinn's loss may overturn your emotions as well. Fathers (and mothers) will also find tear-jerking moments in the story.
There is power in evoking tears, and power in the persistence of Quinn and her posse. It is the power of plum blossoms to promise the triumph of spring in late winter. It is the power of love that transcends death.
The arc of any man's life must always include some courage, some fear, some pettiness and some generosity, some defeat and some triumph. In an exceptional man's life, these arcs are world- or even universe-spanning.
The seven novels of the Seafort Saga by David Feintuch (Midshipman's Hope, Challenger's Hope, Prisoner's Hope, Fisherman's Hope, Voices of Hope, Patriarch's Hope, and Children of Hope) detail these arcs of life for a very exceptional man indeed. I re-read the saga every few years, often just the first two novels. It is enough to recall the entire heroic arc of Nikky, raw young officer, cocky and confident, to aging colonial leader Seafort, full of self-doubt, yet still compelled to be the hero.
Nicholas Ewing Seafort's arc begins when he is the first midshipman, a minor officer in the heirarchical line of command on a starship whose society is patterned after 18th-century naval life. He struggles with his position in that heirarchy, with the skills he needs to acquire to do his job, and especially with his own conscience. Nikky Seafort is a man by decree and by burden, but a lonely adolescent by age.
In a single disaster, Midshipman Seafort becomes the senior officer aboard UNNS Hibernia. Seafort is a teenager in command of a ship that includes passengers, ordinary sailors and other officers, one of whom is older than Seafort, but not senior in the line of command.
To add to his troubles, the passengers don't understand why the Chief Engineer, an older, much more experienced sailor, or the Pilot, another more-experienced man, cannot take command - especially when there is an alien life form outside the ship, one that appears to have "killed" another vessel, and may have also killed the senior officers of Hibernia.
Seafort must determine where his duty lies, resolve to do that duty, and contend with a host of others - including the ship's "glitched" computer - to see it done.
The action is well-laid out and the aliens are truly strange (something one cannot always say about science fiction aliens). Seafort's internal dialog contributes immensely to the tale; many of his burdens are self-imposed, and that dialog is the only way we know how heavy those burdens are for the youngster.
The novel can stand on its own, but read as the opening to the entire saga, it is outstanding.
Too young to be confirmed as Captain in his own right, the still-teenaged Nicholas Ewing Seafort is given Commander rank, and placed in command of the UNNS Challenger, which is part of a fleet of ships under the command of Admiral Tremaine. Their goal is to find and confront the aliens Seafort's former ship, UNNS Hibernia, confronted in the space around Hope Nation.
At the outset, Admiral Tremaine is opposed to the young commander: he starts by moving his flag (and flag captain) to Seafort's ship, transferring Commander Seafort to the smaller UNNS Portia. Then he organizes the fleet to make short hops - seven or more - between Earth and Hope Nation, with Seafort's somewhat faster ship preceding the rest of the fleet and then remaining in place until all the others have passed.
What none of them know is that the Fuse drive they use is calling the alien "fish"; Seafort's ship will be exposed more than any of the others.
Further complicating the command he has been given is the crowd of "trannies"; transient street people or transpops, that have been loaded on to his ship. These ill-educated children, none of them out of their teens, are expected to bunk six to a cabin. Even worse, the regular passengers object to sharing a dining room with them.
Seafort's wife and infant son are along. He also has the entire chain of command in which he has been placed in loco parentis. Seafort, whose own childhood was disturbingly lonely and without demonstrations of paternal love, must find a way to be father, commander and pastor to his entire crew - especially after they are all transferred back to the hopelessly damaged UNNS Challenger and abandoned to the fish.
Book 2 of the Seafort Saga is a thrilling blend of action and internal struggle, triumph over despair, and refusal to surrender even in the face of overwhelming odds. Its ending, which leaves Commander Seafort further burdened with his own grief and self-recrimination, sets the reader up for the next novel, but read with Midshipman's Hope, the two are complete on their own.
