Announcing The Long Frame

  

M novella, The Long Frame, will be on sale here at BVC today. Here it is. It's sort of my answer to consciousness upload fiction. 

As I think about it, there's a substantial subgroup of my work that is, in part, a response to existing tropes and genres. Another example of this is The Secret Life of Fairy Tales. What happens is I get dissatisfied with standard treatments of a given idea and it festers until I know what it is that bothers me. At some point, I get a take on the idea that is congenial and I blend the take and the irritation into a story. Hopefully, I get something new.

The Long Frame Announcement and the State of the Farm, Fall 2020

As far as we were concerned, summer 2020 pretty much sucked.

We had a pretty severe drought. That was problem enough in the best of years. It put an enormous stress on our fruit trees as well as on the animals living in the surrounding forest. We've had a cherry tree on the corner of one of the espaliers since we built it. This year it bloomed and looked very nice and then promptly died in July. I haven't had the heart to cut it out yet. I will, of course. And seal it so that it doesn't crack. Then, maybe I'll make something of it. But I'll miss that tree.

We had one final plum of the original five plums we planted back when we started this project. The others all succumbed to black know. But this one was far enough away that I had hopes that it would escape that fate. It didn't. We had to cut it down, too. 

We did get more apples this year than any previous year. That has been the gift that keeps on giving. I plan on harvesting the apples on one corner tree today. The Granny Smith apples aren't ready yet-- that tree has been trying my patience for a decade. This last winter I trimmed it severely. I'd think that paid off but the other apples also did well. Go figure.

We had a good peach harvest-- a couple of the young trees produced a few tasty fruit. The old standard produced its yearly bushel. Peach trees are supposed to last only a few years but that one has been going strong since 1994. 

Good yield on the Cornelian Cherries. 

This is all of the stuff that we'd have to discuss in normal times.

But these aren't normal times.

Wendy figured out this might be coming back in mid-January. (A tip to people out there. Marry smarter than you are. I did and it has never been anything but a blessing.) She had been following the news out of Wuhan for a few weeks. Her Ph.D. in biochemistry and microbiology didn't hurt, of course. When we went to Arisia, we attended a panel with the head epidemiologist for the State of Massachusetts and other like-qualified individuals. They talked about various things. In the Q&A, Wendy asked about the Wuhan corona virus. They all had this deer-in-the-headlights look. 

She took this as a sign of Things to Come and we were apocalypti-shopping before February. We started our lock down with 150 pounds of flour in the basement and the freezer filled with meat and other things.

Which brings us to the problem of harvest. Usually, we freeze most of the harvest. This year we don't have the room. Instead, we canned the Cornelian Cherries and dried most everything else. But now it's time for the grapes. I've held off as long as I can and they have to be harvested today. My standard plan is to take the grapes, bag them up and freeze them. Then, later in the fall when it's cooler, I thaw the grapes and make the wine. The freezing frees up (IMHO) more flavor. Also, since I have to heat the grapes to thaw them, I can use any grapes that dried out. The water fills them out and they have more flavor. Otherwise, it's like putting grape-nuts into the wind.

Not this year. This year I have to process this directly. Which is an incredible pain.

It helps a little bit that the Concord grapes were severely overgrown and I cut them back, hard. Which means I don't have much in the way of harvest this year. Most times this would be bad. This year it's good.

It also doesn't help that the whole world is in the crapper. It seems like I'm walking around with a constant base level of depression. Wendy agrees. That slows us down. I'm working but it sometimes seems that's all I'm doing. Other things don't get finished, get done slowly or don't get started. 

The garden properly got a little out of our control this  year because of this. We got some basil and tomatoes and the squash harvest was good. Excellent beans. But the gem corn didn't work out. Nor did the cucumbers and other things. 

As I said: 2020 sucked.

That said, there was a bit of brightness. 

Back in the 80s I built a little cabin in Vermont. We've been going up there ever since. But in the last few years, between troubles at home, health issues and work, it got away from me. I pretty much gave up on it and we were looking to sell it. 

Ben, my son, really likes the place. He has gone up several times this year both to quarantine himself when necessary and to get away from his folks. Lock down has its cost. 

While he was up there he did some clearing. He returned and urged me and Wendy to go up and clear the place. The field that immediately surrounded the cabin had become forest. 

So we went up there with chain saw and shears and cleared off the trees in the acre or so immediately surrounding the cabin. A neighbor of our (big shout out to Fred for this) came over with his tractor and mowed down the remainder. Where before there had been close forest, now there was an open field. Where before the air did not move through the close trees, now the wind blew over us.

It was like a load lifting from my heart. Suddenly, I could see the sky again. And the northern Vermont night sky is something to see. 

2020 hasn't been all bad.

God's Country and the making of a knife

First, an announcement.

On July 7, 2020, my novel God's Country will be released. You'll find it on Book View Café, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

If you have ever asked the question what does sex, prostitution, crooked cops, televangelists, psychopaths, an eclipse and illicit neurochemistry have in common? The answer would be my novel, God's Country.

This is the beginning of a trend.

Welcome to Witchlandia came out in 2016. Simple Things came out December, 2019. Summer, 2020, it's God's Country. September, 2020, my novella The Long Frame will be released and next December comes my novel Jackie's Boy. 2021 isn't yet planned though I have some ideas.

So: stay tuned.

Now, on to Doing 2: The Making of a Knife.

I have been collecting old metal for a while. By "collecting" I mean not throwing away stuff or grabbing thrown away metal when it comes my way. This includes rusty shears, old files, broken lawn mower blades, etc. Part of it is my incredible reluctance to throw things in landfills-- especially things that show embody significant effort.

Think of it. A file is a chunk of hardened steel. It was pulled out of the earth as stone, smelted into steel, drawn and stamped into shape and ground (I think) into its final form. Can't I think of something to do with it other than throwing it into a whole?

I have a lot of stuff like this. I dread what my descendants will have to do when I pass on. I remember what my sister and I had to go through after my mother died.

I'm not a hoarder. I'm a deep recycler.

At any rate, I've been thinking about the classic "turn a file into a knife" for a bit. If you enter that into google you will get a million and one websites and videos on how to do just that. Most of them involve heat treating and I've been reluctant to build a forge.

Then I ran into Alex's Outdoors55 youtube channel and this particular video.

To summarize the video for the purposes of this blog (but not to deny the video. It's good. Go watch it.) file steel is intended to be hard. It's purpose is, after all, to grind steel. So it has to be harder than that which it is grinding. Makes sense, right?

But there are dimensions to the nature of steel. Steel can be soft, hard or tough. Pick one.

Soft steel is ductile and useful for twisting into shape-- a garden fence. Cheap steel railing. Wire. Good for some things but not for a knife. Steel can be hard-- good for ball bearings and files.But hard steel is also brittle steel. A knife has to be tough, hard enough to take and edge but soft enough that a sudden impact won't shatter it.

All of this is done by handling the knife with temperature and quenching.

Most of the knife making videos and website (especially those that start with something hard like a file) first make the metal soft with heat. Alex pointed out that this might be unnecessary since we're starting with something hard.

So, following his procedure, where's what I did.

First, I took an old file and ground it down to the rough shape as you can see here. The important thing here, according to Alex and my own observation, is to make sure you don't get the pesky thing too hot. If you do, you lose all that wonderful temper.

It's pretty ugly here. There's no bevel on the knife-- what separates a knife from a slab of iron.

The knife shined up pretty well here on the sander. Here's an example of a lack of decisiveness on my part. I never made a clear decision what to do with the grooves on the handle. I started to sand them away then changed my mind.

This had knock on effects in that the handle was no longer exactly flat. Something I'd have to handle later.






Once I had the knife about where I wanted it, I had to change the temper. Remember, the steel from which the file is made is hard. I wanted it tough.

My understanding is very basic but here's what I gleaned in my reading.

• Soft iron: take the iron, heat it up to where it's no longer magnetic and let it cool slowly-- some people bury it in vermiculite as a non-burnable insulator.
• Hard iron: take the iron, heat it up to the same point and quench it in oil or water. The sudden heat shock makes the iron hard.
• Tough iron: take the hard iron, after it's cold, and heat it to 400 degrees and hold it there fore two hours. (Some say 3 hours. Some say break it for 10 minutes or so in between.)

The result is stained yellow. This is desirable. Sand or buff off the stain gently so as not to take out the temper you just achieved.

Now, I had to put a handle on it.

I've been keeping wood scraps around for a while. If we cut down a tree, I look at the wood to see if I can use it for something. (See above about saving metal. Maybe I am a hoarder.)

In this case, I had some apple wood from a tree we had to cut down. The two halves (called "scales" in this case) were cut more or less to fit.

Here I ran again into a problem. I've been building my shop for decades using the cheapest level of tools available to me. If it weren't for bad tools I'd have no tools at all.

Mostly, this has been fine. But here they failed me. My bandsaw wouldn't bandsaw. My drill press wouldn't drill the steel handle to put in the pegs.

I did what all brute force carpenters do: I reached for the expoxy. This had the nice side effect of making up for the lack of flatness in the steel handle-- see indecisiveness above.

Once I had the above mostrosity, I had to pare it down to something usable.

I tried sanding. I tried the bandsaw again-- it didn't.

Then, I found a lovely little tool I had purchased years ago. That odd, little cylinder is filled with holes and cutting surfaces. I think it was made by micro-mesh but I don't know where to get it now.

It tore through the wood. I shaped it in about 45 seconds.





All that was left was sanding and polishing. The result is at left.

I am not a production knife maker. I can see about forty different things I'd do differently. This was a proof of concept to me to see if I liked it.

I did. I'd like to make more knives.

But I have been made humble by the inadequacy of my tools.

It's said a poor workman blames his tools. But a good workman should have good tools-- since I'm a poor workman, I need good tools to make up for my shortcomings.

Hm. A bandsaw that bandsaws? A drill press that drill presses? What could I be thinking.

I've been saving my pennies...

Novel Coronavirus 19

These are pictures of the station and parking lot where I catch the train into work every day. It is sparse-- I'm guessing less than 10% of normal use. I have never seen so few people on a weekday.

And it's certainly because of COVID-19.

Massachusetts declared a state of emergency on Tuesday, 3/10.

I'm not going to talk about how the coronavirus works. That is better discussed here. Or how it produces symptoms. Go here for that.

What I am interested in is why we have to take this bug seriously and why preventing spread is a good idea.

People who should know better have spouted a lot of nonsense how this is no more than a bad flu. It's just a cold. How back could it be? All that sort of thing.

It's not terribly surprising that a virus comes along that is related to (but with radically more serious symptoms than) the common cold we don't take it seriously. It doesn't help that figures of authority who should know better are also not taking it seriously.

We need to.

Let's start with the demographics. For the record, I'm pulling a lot of data from here.

Unsurprisingly, COVID-19 attacks the elderly, immune compromised and those with co-morbidities harder than young healthy people.

The lethality of the virus ticks up beginning at age 50.














In part this is science's fault: we've gotten too good at handling diseases.

The big epidemics were still in evidence in the fifties when I grew up. Immediate relatives had died from Spanish Flu. If you didn't actually know someone who'd had polio, you knew someone who knew someone who'd had polio. FDR was still on everyone's minds and he'd had polio. There were people in my family who'd died of diphtheria in the thirties. One aging cousin of mine had lived through a case of lockjaw (tetanus).

When vaccines for measles, polio, and others came out people stood in long lines to get them. Sure, there was a risk. But they'd seen first hand the consequences of the disease and the risk was worth it. Most of those diseases were wiped from everyday life and, unfortunately, apparently from American consciousness.

We've never successfully developed a general vaccine for influenza. It comes every year. Some fairly small population dies of it. We get sick and we go on.

I am not saying influenza is trivial. It is most certainly not. Thousands of people die from it. Tens of thousands get sick from it to the point of hospitalization. Hundreds of thousands to millions get sick enough to stay home. It has high personal and economic costs.

But we're like the proverbial frog in boiling water: it happens every year and we're used to it.

So, it's not terribly surprising that a virus comes along that is related to (but with radically more serious symptoms than) the common cold we don't take it seriously. It doesn't help that figures of authority who should know better are also not taking it seriously.

Upcoming Zoom Event vs Writing on Writing

First things first.

I'll be doing a zoom event with Jeff Carver over at Annie's Book Stop in Worcester @2pm on Saturday, 5/9. The link is in there blog. (See here.)

Unfortunately, I was unable to get material to them in time so only Jeff is represented there. But the Facebook link is there to RSVP. If you want to join us on Saturday.

They asked several questions. Since these aren't going up on their blog, I thought I'd put them here.

• Can you please tell us briefly a little about yourself and your writing? How would you like us to introduce you.

My father was an engineer with the heart of a poet. My mother was a writer with the heart of an engineer. So I became a science fiction writer. My day job is as a software engineer in aerospace. Right now I’m working on the Dream Chaser vehicle intended to supply the ISS.

• Where can people find your work? (Besides Annie’s Book Stop of Worcester--though they should totally check here first!)

Annie’s first, of course. For the ebooks, first would be bookviewcafe.com and second, Amazon. The print versions are available at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Annie’s is clearly the first choice.

• How can we follow your work and share your awesomeness

I have a blog I keep up regularly. In addition, since I do most of my publishing with bookviewcafe.com, that’s a good place to go. They also have a newsletter.

• For readers unfamiliar with your work, how would you describe what you write?  What can readers expect from [newest release/spotlighted release]?

I’m interested in how human beings navigate novel situations. Simple Things is a story collection so there is a broad swath of things that happen to people and how they deal with them. Welcome to Witchlandia looks at what is now called “paranormal” and back in the seventies was called “psionics” in the context of athletic or cognitive ability. It’s a crime novel. Crime novels are interesting in the way they allow you to take characters out of their comfort zone.

• What kind of research went into writing this book?  What is your favorite research story? What cool facts and findings didn’t make it into the book, but you loved discovering?

Welcome to Witchlandia is deeply embedded in both Boston, Massachusetts and Columbia, Missouri. (Part 1 is in Columbia. Parts 2 and 3 are in Boston.) Since the main character has the ability to fly, her ability comes under FAA rules. I’m a pilot and this was very interesting to me. However, I could only reference a few aspects of flight in the book. Simple Things is a story collection and covers a lot of ground. One story, Jackie’s Boy, involves a young boy and an intelligent elephant navigating a post-apocalyptic landscape. They end up at (or near) the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. Given their environment, I couldn’t explore the sanctuary there. However, it is a wonderful place and I happily shout out to them now: www.elephants.com

• What else can we expect from you in the near future?

I have a new novel, God’s Country, coming out in July. If you were to ask the question what do recreational drugs, the discovery of a higher beings, prostitution, cults and biochemistry have in common, the answer would be God’s Country.

• What is/are your passions when you're not writing? How do you make time for your non-writing hobbies/things you love?

I do a lot of woodworking and gardening. Like anything else, you have to make time for that which (or who) you love.

• While you're writing, do you prefer music, silence, other? Please elaborate!

Music without words or words in a language I don’t know. I listen to a lot of Japanese pop music.

They asked several other questions that I was uncomfortable in answering in this format. I had no snap answers. (Jeff, as you'll see from the blog entry, is far better at this than I am.) They involved the process of writing, something I've not talked about very much here.

Why not?

Well, that's a good question and I'm not entirely sure of the answer. For one thing, writing isn't really optional for me. To paraphrase Rorschach said in Alan Moore's Watchment: I don't do it because I choose to. I do it because I am compelled. It took a long time for me to come to terms with that.

Given that-- and given that it's important to me-- the actual process is a strange alchemical process that seems driven by its own opaque rules. I don't mean creativity is a mystery too arcane to be within the ken of mortal man. I mean I don't understand how my mind works with this. It is a compulsion-- if I don't do it for a bit I get itchy and irritable. I also get worried I'll never get back to it-- it's not like the world cares.

But it's even stranger than that. I underwent therapy a number of years ago (I'll talk about that someday but not right now.) and one thought I had was if I got better, would I stop writing? This, apparently, is a common idea. As if the writing was a symptom of some kind of sickness.

As an aside, in Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith, the drug, stroon, grants immortality. It is distilled from the exudates of sick ship on the planet Norstrilia. I wonder if stroon was, to Smith, a metaphorical equivalent to writing.

I got better and the writing improved. But it did not become any less mysterious. I sit down and conversations, scenes and characters come. I do work at breaking them down, lining them up and figuring out as much as I can ahead of time so that when I do sit seat of pants to seat of chair, the material is there to be put down.

That said, I've also found there's a delicate balance. I know writers that outline within an inch of their life. (An apocryphal story about Faulkner is he outline meticulously and then wrote while drunk. I have no idea if this is true.) I know others that don't. E. L. Doctorow said that writing is like driving in a fog where you can't see past the hood ornament. But Doctorow is clearly an uncommonly thorough researcher.

For me, if I know too much about what is going to happen, the work stop. If I know too little, the work stops until I know more. Sometimes I'll restart a section or work several times until I get the right take on the stuff and then it writes itself. I go from struggling creator to transcriber.

It feels like there's another entity at work here beyond my conscious mind. I'm not a particularly spiritual person so I don't think this is an intangible being. But I also can't tell whether it's my subconscious or the other half of my brain yelling across the corpus callosum. "Muse" might be a good word for this. "Harry" might be another.

The rest is finding time.

I get about 90 minutes a day, five days a week. Weekends are taken up managing the garden and the household. 9-10 hours a day are taken up during the week by my job. The remaining time is family  time, reading and all the other stuff. In that 90 minutes I have to write my own material, critique other people's material, format books and write this blog.

And that's pretty much all I have to say on writing. Time's up.

Consideration of Works Past: The Revolving Boy

(Picture from here.)

By now it cannot be a secret that I like small stories.

These are stories where there might be a major cataclysm, catastrophe, war or other great event but that is backdrop. It might impact the story and the characters. It might not.

But the story of the characters is what interests me.

I read The Revolving Boy when I was a boy. It had resonance with me then. It has resonance with me now.

The author of TRB is Gertrude Friedberg. That's about as much as I can say. The wiki article says she wrote two plays that were well received-- one, Three Cornered Moon, had Ruth Gordon in it and was almost immediately made into a film. She wrote three SF stories and one novel. She was admired but, as far as I can tell, doesn't have much impression on the internet as a person.

This is a shame. I would love to know more about her.

I do know a lot about The Revolving Boy in that I've read it more than once recently.

First, like any SF book of that era, it has a lot of SF tropes like flying cars, fancy home machines and the like. I think the problem with a lot of those works is people didn't expect to actually reach the future. One of the interesting things about current near future fiction is its conservatism: people have read those dated works and don't want to have their own works suffer the same fate.

But Friedberg wrote TRB in 1966 and she was fifty-two. She'd already seen how works dated. Much of the future stuff is a bit over the top. I suspect Friedberg was having fun.

That said, it's a minor criticism and can be easily overlooked.

The book is the story of Derv Nagy from his early childhood until his late middle age. As I said, this is a small book. The big things happen around in his life and don't necessarily affect him all that much. The book is tightly focused on Derv.

Derv is born (and expresses at an early age) a marvelous sense of absolute direction.  He can tell north without thinking about it. He feels twisted over the course of daily life relative to his sense of direction-- to the point of unwinding over the day.

Later in his life (early in the book so I'm not giving much away) he determines that his sense of direction is relative to something absolute. He doesn't know what it is. He only knows where it is and he must bend his life around that direction.

Friedberg has done something remarkable here. She takes something as simple as a sense of direction and pins it down as a pivot around which someone orients his life in a very real, physical way. By doing this, she shows us how people are bent by simple things. It's easy to extrapolate from this to higher moral conundrums but she does not. She stays with this simple, fundamental thing Derv must accommodate. Derv revolves.

Derv is a true character. He has a sense of humor. Like anyone, he tries to find his place (and a place for his uniqueness) in the world. He does not become a hero or a captain of industry. He finds love. He finds a life. He finds a job. There is nothing dramatic in what he does except where those things are dramatic to him.

There were a couple of things I pulled from this book-- reinforced by other books I was reading at the same time. Derv reminds me of Huckleberry Finn. Huck also makes his way through his life. He does not accomplish great things. The world is not greatly changed by his passing through it any more (or any less) than Derv's world is changed. Raintree County is another book I read at the same time.

What these books have in common is the placement character in the context of the larger world. The world is unchanged by their movement through it-- and that is just fine. Most of us don't change the world much. We change our little piece of it in our friends, our family, our children.

I have no illusion that my writing will change the world-- it won't. The wheel of the world will go on pretty much unswerved by anything I do. But I do like to thing I have made some things, some people, some situations, a little better for me having passed through by. No doubt those changes will be swallowed up by time. I don't have a problem with that.

I never knew Gertrude Friedberg. I wish I had so I could tell her that her book made a difference to me. And I hope that difference will shine through my own work and further its effect, as little as any effect I have might be.

While the differences she made will likely outlive my own, they won't last a thousand years.

So what? What does?

Doing

Okay. I've been home a month now.

Things have settled out some. There's no longer the issue of feeling anxious until I start to work. My desk had three monitors on it but I can only use one at home. That took more accommodation than I expected.

Being home with my wife is nice. But I find I miss the commute.

I took the train in and out every day. 90 minutes, one way. About 50 minutes on the actual rail plus 30 minutes, plus or minus, on the subway, walking or biking. I didn't much care for the subway but getting a good half hour workout by getting to work was worth the deal.

The 50 minutes was where I did most of my writing.

Now, at home, I have no defined time for that and my writing has suffered. I've managed to get an hour in just before work but it's been hard to increase it.

But there have been other issues. One is what I call the Urge to be Doing.

For me, there are a number of itches that need to be scratched in my life. Time with people. Writing. Work. And, doing things. By this I mean doing something beyond what needs to be done just to keep going. Work, writing, time with people-- these are necessary actions of living. Doing things is one step beyond that. It could be as simple as making a new base for a lamp. Or making something out of a worn out pair of shoes. Or going fishing. Or taking a walk in a new place. Or seeing an art exhibit. Sometimes, it's this blog.

The instant something moves into the has to be done category, it falls out of the category of doing things.

A couple of weeks I found myself itching to do something. Go for a walk or a bike ride? Weather was awful. Can't go out to see something-- social distancing.

So I went into the shop and made the pen and tiny bowl above.

These are not great works of art. The pen is made from some black birch I had lying around. Birch is soft in general and this wood seems especially porous. I probably should have stabilized the wood, first. But I've been having a little trouble with my lathe tools and stabilized wood feels like turning a rock. So I was lazy and didn't do it. The pen came out okay but not great.

The bowl was nicer. It was from a piece of plum wood I had saved when we had to cut down some fruit trees. (See here.) The wood is multicolored and has a slight tinge of pink. Unfortunately, the wood developed a crack as I was turning it. I finished it and it is usable as a little pill bowl but it's, again, not great.

That said, I felt great afterwards.

I had done something.

I think it's important these days that we remember it's not enough to do what we must do to survive. To make sure we and our loved ones are safe. We must also live. We must satisfy those itches and needs.

I've been doing a lot of teleconferencing at work and over time people have quit using their cameras. It's not surprising as video taxes the network and servers of most of the teleconferencing applications.

But I hate it.

I've been home for a month. I've seen my wife, dog and cat regularly. A couple of times I've seen my son. The only other human visual contact I've had is via these teleconferences. To see a blank screen with someone's initials just doesn't satisfy that need.

Humans are not solitary creatures. We need other human beings like we need oxygen to breathe.

So talk to each other.