Domestic – Page 18 – The Daily Brief

My Current Project

26. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, Site News, Working In A Salt Mine...

Without further ado, may I present the project that I have been working on, all this week, courtesy of my friend, Dave the Computer Guy; the website to market my books.

Well, the one that I did a couple of years ago, the one that I finished and which will be published (one way or another!) by September… and the three-part saga which I am currently working on. I am doing all this under the pen name that I began with… just to keep things tidy, and maintain my families’ assorted and respective privacy.

www.celiahayes.com

I am still working on some of the bits… like closing each page when you go to another one. And the “interview” page is still under construction… and my brother has promised some original art for some of the elements, rather than the bits supplied with the template.

This site is currently piggy-backed on Dave the Computer Guy’s site, so my next expense will be paying for a year of hosting, and for Dave to do some additional marketing. Feedback and suggestions are invited.

So are donations- (Paypal button over on the left, under the link for the first book.)

No Such Thing

24. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, World

…As too many books.

There is however, such a thing as not enough bookshelves.

When Blondie and I PCSed out of Spain over fifteen years ago, the packing crew had a pool going on how many boxes of books they would eventually pack. The grand total topped out at 64 boxes at that point. Since we returned to the land of the Big PX, replete with establishments such as Half-Price Books, the sales tables at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and various library and book-club events, the increase on the 1991 book census has been geometric. At a certain point, accommodating all the books in free-standing bookcases would have reduced the house to a kind of solidly-packed, book-lined burrow, dark and fusty, with barely enough space for a reading light, and a stove.

Beginning bout five years ago, I took the situation in hand, and began buying lengths of shelving and brackets of the ornamental sort— for the ends that showed— and utility brackets for the interior of the shelves which wouldn’t show when properly packed full of books. The first efforts at securing order among the books involved a narrow stretch of wall where the kitchen merged into the dining area, to one side of a large window looking out into the back yard. Three small white-painted shelves advanced up the wall towards the ceiling, for the cookbooks that I used most frequently, and the jar of pencils and notepads best kept close to the telephone. The rag-tag collection of shelves that had served us until then were banished to the garage. Most of them were heavy, ugly dark-wood things that took up a lot of space, bought at the PX because I had an urgent need for storage at the moment, and they were cheap. A couple of weekends later, another set of shelves went up on the other side of the window, for the not-so often used cookbooks, and the gardening and home-improvement porn. I put up a long shelf over the window for the blue-flowering Danish china, and there was that whole end of the house rendered light, and bright, and all the books in order. So, I looked around and said, hmmmm.

The wall opposite the big window was next. This had a double-doorway from the living room into a little room that we used as a TV den, more or less in the center. Four-foot-long shelves went up on either side, all the way to the top of the door… and then five more shelves above those which ran the width of the wall, but shortened to follow the angle of the ceiling. I need a very tall ladder to get to the top three shelves… in fact; the stuff that I never use is all parked up there. Everything was ordered by subject or genre, and a couple of nice vases and knick-knacks interspersed between the books. Last of all, I fitted six shelves on either side of the fireplace, and all but one of the old bookcases were banished to the garage. Now the living room was lined with books on three walls, and all the space between freed up. The three wooden shelves I kept in the house still, were squeezed into the TV den, as they were oak and matched the stereo/media center.

The only place where chaos, clutter and disorganization still reigned was among the oldest collection of books… the paperbacks, banished to a set of tall walnut-veneer bookcases in the hallway, and shelved two ranks deep. I had made a stab at alphabetizing them by author, but locating a particular book was a particularly frustrating crap-shoot. But this last weekend, Blondie had prevailed upon me… since she had a shelf of her own books, overflowing in a most untidy way… to bring order, discipline and installed shelves to that last holdout.

We took ourselves away to Home Depot for brackets and five lengths of 5-inch wide shelving, and ran a series of shelves from the end of the hall to the washer and dryer closet. We’ll need to put in another three shelves, actually, but at least everything is now only single-deep. Heck, I can now find stuff that I didn’t lay eyes on since the last time I unpacked it.

Hey, I knew I had a copy of “That Darn Cat”… Granny Jessie took us to see that movie, and my copy was a tie-in, bought at Vromans for 35 cents! And I do have all of Dorothy Dunnets’ Francis Lymond books… read the first of them when I was sick with the flu in a youth hostel in Lincoln. And there was the episode guide to “Blakes’ 7”, and every damn one of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Darkover” books. Wow, that’s kind of an embarrassment. So is the R.F. Delafield “The Dreaming Suburb”. Not too many Agatha Christie mysteries, though. They always seemed a little formulaic to me; I preferred Josephine Tey. And one of the most uproarious novels about the Restoration ever written, John Dickson Carr’s “Most Secret”… So what if they are all stacked sideways on the shelf? At least they are not all hiding behind each other! In not a few cases, I despaired of finding a book that I thought I had, and bought another copy. (Half-Price Books buy-back desk, here we come!)
At least now, we can find what we are looking for. And the hallway seems a great deal wider, too.

Anyone Want to Bet

24. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, General Nonsense, Rant

…That in about twenty-five years, Cheryl Crow will star in an advert for toilet paper?
About a third of the audience will laugh, once they are reminded by someone else who Cheryl Crow is. Another third will ask themselves: You mean the old broad isn’t an actress? She was …what? Really? And the remaining third will not care. At all.

So, anyone else besides me getting tired of being lectured by well-heeled celebrities with lavish personal life-styles about how many pieces of TP we ought to use, and chided about leaving the lights on?

This is what we had grandparents for, people. Shut up and go get another $400.00 hair cut, or a dozen Priuses for your entourage. That or build another 20,000 square foot mansion. Just spare us the damned lecture about our carbon footprint.

Beyond Words

17. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic

I’m just all choked up.

Professor Liviu Librescu, 76, threw himself in front of the shooter, who had attempted to enter his classroom. The Israeli mechanics and engineering lecturer was shot to death, “but all the students lived – because of him,” Virginia Tech student Asael Arad – also an Israeli – told Army Radio.

Several of Librescu’s other students sent e-mails to his wife, Marlena, telling of how he blocked the gunman’s way and saved their lives, said the son, Joe.

Snipped from Blackfive.

Overheard in the Hallway

16. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, Good God

“Why can’t these whack jobs just skip everyone else and just go straight to killing themselves?”

Indeed.

Our hearts and prayers to the families of the victims and to the family of the shooter. I’m sure they never thought they’d raise a mass murderer.

UPDATE: I’ve deleted all comments and have closed them. I’m sorry. I will not have a discussion about “more guns” or “less guns” or video games or movies or any of that other shite. I’m sorry. I can’t do it. The politicalization of every event must stop somewhere. I won’t be part of hijacking this horror show for any cause.

The Writers Life Waltz: Lento

12. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, Home Front, Site News, Working In A Salt Mine...

A little slow this week; working on revisions and rewrites to “Adelsverein Part One”, or as one of the regular readers calls it “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees”. I have begun sending out query letters on it, reasoning that by the time I hear from an agent who wants to hear more, I will have finished the revisions and polished it all to a high gleaming shine.

I also put together all the materiel necessary— basically, the first fifty pages and an expanded outline— for “Adelsverein” and “To Truckee’s Trail” both, and submitted them to Tor Books, which is just about the only one of the big publishers who condescend to review un-agented submissions. They take four to six months to make any sort of decision, by which time I’ll be well along in finishing “Adelsverein Part Two”. Part Three, maybe… depends on how fast I can research and write. (links here, here, here, and here, for those who are new to the site.)

At this point, three separate agencies have looked at “Truckee” and have turned it down. They all liked it, said nice things about it, but… and this is the Big But… sorry, no. Either it is too hard a sell, defies easy categorization, or there is no place for it in their current collection of offerings . But they all wished me luck in getting it published, and threw in some blah-blah-blah about it being a subjective business and perhaps another agency blah-blah-blah.

This is the book that just about every who has read it in full has loved, and at least three-quarters of those people are not related to me at all. Sooo… the fallback position is that if Tor turns it down, I’ll do POD, and hire my friend Dave The Marketing & Computer Genius to set up a website specifically for my books, AND do some serious marketing. Even if Tor does think it worthy (and you’ll be able to hear my jaw hit the floor all the way across several time zones if they do) or I do manage to get an agent, I will still do a book website of my own.

Hence, the Paypal donate button, over on the left, just under the link to my first book. The PJ ads support the site, donations will help me get the best book about the most incredible wagon-train story you have never heard about get out there in the mad world of books.

Rites of Spring

12. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, Home Front, World

We are having a very pleasant spring here in South Texas…of course, being that it is South Texas, where is saying is “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes…” These conditions are apt to change with practically the speed of light. But this spring, all the climate u-turns have been favorable. Well, all but the overnight freeze over Easter Weekend which has probably trashed the Hill Country peach harvest for this year, as it hit when all the trees were blossoming. (As far as I know, Al Gore was not in town that weekend.) The next spectacular thunderstorm may yet favor us with golf-ball-sized hail… but so far all that has resulted is to make everything spectacularly green. Richly and lushly emerald green, as green as Ireland ever was, all the fields and the trees and the hedges that people have planted along the roads. And the flowers this year are splendid, not just the bluebonnets, but this year there are fields of purple wild verbena, and bright yellow daisies, drifts of pink primrose, more of them than I have ever seen before. And butterflies… we have had butterflies all this winter, for some strange reason. They are supposed to be especially sensitive to environmental pollution; guess we are not getting as much of it these days.

In my own garden, all the things that were blasted back to ground level by winter frost are practically exploding out of the ground. In a fit of boredom last fall, I had poured out some patented fertilizer goop on the ground under the rosebushes, and over the winter another fit of boredom led me to prune them all. Oddly enough, they have responded to this abuse by covering themselves entirely with bloom; red, white, pink and apricot. The sage and lavender plants that I scored from the severely-marked-down-get-em-outta-here-before-they-croak shelves at Lowe’s last fall are also blooming madly. The front garden actually looks, if you squint a little and back off to view it from a certain angle, like one of those spectacular pictures of a border at some stately English home; a mass of red, lavender and sulfur-yellow, on grey-green foliage.

Round in back, the wisteria came and went as it always does, in a week flat, but the jasmine is going strong, and the various potted limes and lemon, and the sweet-olive held out bravely… well, they did, once we banished the faint odor of dog-poop. The next rain shower took care of the lingering bits, and we finally moved around one of our junking finds to the back yard.

The last time the city came around for the bulk-trash pickup, where they will take everything but building debris and wrecked automobiles, Blondie and I spotted a wooden chaise-lounge put out in a pile of other trash. It was one of those sturdy home-made things, made out of 2x4s… very well made, actually, with metal slats on springs to support the cushions. The only thing the matter with it was one of the legs was a little rotted at the bottom, where it must have been sitting on wet ground for a while. And there were no cushions, of course. Until I made a set a couple of weeks ago, out of oilcloth, and we put it out where we have paved a large space with ornamental pavers set in gravel.

It is now nearly our favorite place to sit outdoors. I sat there for an hour yesterday evening, reading “The Worst Hard Time”… which seemed a terribly incongruous choice, given the garden and green trees all around me.

Why I Write

01. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, Memoir, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Because I breath, and I can tell stories, and stories are important. They connect us to our history. Those stories are a shining path in the tangle of that amorphous mass loosely known as popular culture. Stories are a guide and inspiration for those of us who must find our way through the tangled jungle, for those of us who would rather not sleep-walk along a perilous knife-edge… and certain stories are also a warning of danger

“The story of the Fall of Singapore has exercised a powerful influence over my imagination, because it was in its way a dramatic re-enactment of the tragedy of the Titanic on a much vaster scale. Singapore was a place where the assumption of the British hereditary right to rule was so strong that even the obvious advance of the Japanese Army down the peninsula could not waken social circles which had known nothing other than ineffable superiority to the new reality.

The British governor told his army commander, “oh I suppose you’ll see the little men off.” Only after the Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk in an afternoon did it begin to dawn on them that they were all of them doomed. Doomed.

They simply couldn’t imagine what doomed meant. People accustomed to teas and dances, deference from the natives; accustomed to snapping their fingers and parting crowds at the bazaar simply couldn’t come to terms with the idea that in a little while they would beaten, raped, and starved. If they were lucky. This effervescent bubble of oh so clever people even organized something called a Surrender Lunch, during which they were supposed to gorge themselves in preparation for the privations ahead. It was beyond sad. It was pathetic.

And as I said, Singapore has exercised a powerful influence on my imagination because this forgotten incident is the nearest we can come to past as prologue. That is what awaits the liberals when Islam takes over. They will still be yelling for their rights as they are led away to be flogged.”

Comment, Wretchard, at The Belmont Club

Wretchard’s example of the fall of Singapore is an example of an historical event that I also circle back to, along with a handful of others. Writers have our favorites, apparently. Certain events, times and places force a recognition that all things are transient, that all flesh is grass, that these things shall pass, as immutable as they might seem to the casual glance. The apparently unsinkable ship can sink out from under you. We aren’t at the end of history, after all. Maybe this might be a good time to retrieve into active consideration certain of our historical memes.

I started writing on this blog when it was still Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief, when the original creator of it put out a call for more writers, active duty and veterans both, round and about July or August of 2002. A lot of things changed in five years. My first post here is now three jobs (not counting temp assignments), and three posts weekly times 52 times 5 years more or less, plus a whole change in professional focus ago. When I started, I thought of myself as an office-manager/administrative assistant who wrote on the side, but as of last July I began to think of myself as a writer who did a little office managing/administrating on the side. So, for a few years, I wrote about mil-bloggy matters, interspersed with entries about my admittedly eccentric family and non-conformist childhood, about living in Japan and Europe as a military member, and about my daughter’s doings as she was deployed with her Marine Corps unit to Kuwait and Iraq, early in 2003.

I looked at writing for this blog as a means to educate and entertain the general reader about the wonderful, wacky world of the military. But on the way to that end, a lot of other stuff happened. First, there are other military blogs now, veteran’s blogs, family-of-military blogs. We stopped being unique in that respect quite some time ago, in blog years. (Which must be somewhat like dog years) Writing for the blog was always supposed to be about the writer wanted to write about. Current events, politics, war, military trivia, and popular culture. Whatever… just make it good writing, sparkle a bit; and someone will find it interesting. Which is good, but nothing stays the same for long.

I pretty much milked the family stuff pretty well dry. (It’s all in the book, mostly, be a sport and order a copy if you want all the scandalous details). The same for my various cross-Europe junkets; I wrote all about that, don’t want to repeat myself. I can only extract so much amusement out of the menagerie of dogs and cats, and the maintenance of my house. So… I moved on.

Everyone does. A lot of the bloggers that I used to read regularly in 2002-2003 have done exactly that. Other interests, other lives, they had said all they wanted to say on a particular subject, they wanted to write a book, they had health issues, family issues, other interests, another job. Some of them turned to writing seriously about things that they felt were important to them. And so have I.

(More to follow. Of course. Would I leave the regular readers hanging?)

Log Cabin Days

25. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Old West, Pajama Game, Technology

Among the books in my tall stack to read, in preparation to revise and polish the current epic is one with the very dry title of “Texas Log Buildings; A Folk Architecture” – which has actually proved to be a bit more interesting and informative than it looked at first glance. I am a sucker for knowing how things are constructed or put together- which is good, especially since I need to write a description of building such a thing as a log building. Little details like how many days it would take to build one, what size it would generally be, and the layout – these little details count.

Previously, the one description of the process that I could bring readily to mind was “Little House on the Prairie” – and it turns out that Pa Ingalls was not building that cabin to much of a standard. He may not even have been all that skilled as a carpenter, but since he was working on it mostly by himself, and in a place where the swiftness of getting a roof of some sort over his family counted for everything – allowances were made.

That was almost everyone’s first and most urgent need, upon settling on a new grant or homestead, that and planting some kind of crop in the ground; building a cabin, to meet immediate shelter needs. This book differentiates very clearly the difference between a log cabin, and a log house. A log cabin was small, twelve to fourteen foot square, windowless, with a dirt floor. They were scratch and hastily put up to use as a temporary dwelling place, whereas a log house was larger, permanent, and much more carefully constructed; even quite elaborate as to comforts. For much of the 19th century, at least in Texas it was a matter of some embarrassment to still be living in a log cabin after a couple of years; rather like living in a trailer would be. In fact, many log houses were covered with siding and paint as soon as their owners could afford to do so. If they had lived in a little cabin before building the permanent house, the cabin was frequently reused as a smoke-house, or a stable.

Pace “Little House” and a whole raft of western movies, I’d always visualized such houses and cabins built out of the whole, rounded logs, with simple interlocking half-round notches (called a saddle notch) cut close to the ends, and about a foot or so of the log hanging out beyond at the corners, rather like a “Lincoln-log” house. This method of construction turns out have been employed by the relatively unskilled and/or those in a tearing hurry. The majority of Texas log structures were built of timbers which had been at least roughly shaped on two sides, and carefully notched at the ends to make a square corner. With the exception of part log, part dugout shelters built in far western Texas, where trees were scarce, most log structures were also raised off the ground on corner piers, to prevent rot and termite infestation, and to take advantage of air circulation.
More »

The Writers Life Waltz: Con Brio

21. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General

I’ve come up for air this week, because I need to sit down and read a stack of books as tall as my bedside lamp table, and take copious notes in preparation for revising and expanding my first draft of “Adelsverein – Volume One”… or as a reader called it “Barsetshire with cypress trees”. Yes, I have taken everyone’s advice and broken it into a trilogy…since I was about a third of a way into my Sooper-Dooper Detailed Chapter Outline and had clocked over 105,000 words. I believe that in the mystery-writing biz that sort of happening is called “a clue”.

Otherwise it would take me the rest of the year, and result in a paperback book about the thickness of a concrete block. The first part stands alone as a ripping good yarn anyway, but I have salted it with enough foreshadowing to leave everyone hungry for Volume Two (The Civil War years). The stack of books for that part is another pile almost as tall as the bedside table, but the stack for Volume Three (the open-range cattle-ranching and Indian War years) is only about a foot tall, most of it taken up by a single book which I scored at the library sale for a mere pittance. It’s a massive compendium of first-hand accounts taken down from members of the Old Time Trail Drivers’ Association… pure gold for my purposes, but I am getting ahead of myself. (Oh, and the reason for the odd historical essays… I just find odd tidbits in all these books which I find kind of fascinating. Especially if some of them are not well-known at all. I write about stuff that interests me at the moment, ‘kay?)

I also needed to get cracking on marketing “Adelsverein” to agents and publishers, because it doesn’t look like “Truckee’s Trail” is going to go very far with them. It’s a ripping good yarn and I am not giving up on it, but I’m not holding my breath either. The feedback that I have gotten so far from the two agents who have read it is that marketing it to a publisher is a chore they don’t want to take on, for various reasons. It’s not quite a Western, not the sort of historical that really sells, the major romantic relationship is between two people happily married to each other; not an easy book to categorize, and that’s why it’s a hard sell. There is no word from the publisher who got it in January to review, but if they decline it, I’ll put it up to Tor Books… and by the end of the year I’ll go back to the POD publisher who did my memoir if they pass on it. It will be published, one way or another. I’ve put too much work into it, and the people who have read it have liked it too much to just stick it away in my desk drawer and forget about it. Frankly, I have enough stuff in that drawer already… and “Truckee” is just too damn good to drop. “Adelsverein” is more marketable, as it contains near-operatic levels of passion, murder, adventure, war, stolen children and Dire Revenge.

My friend the computer genius will set up a website especially for my books and help me market them through other means… which I will probably do anyway, even if I do manage to get somewhere with an agent and/or a mainline publisher. On the bright side, I just received an email from an agent who wants to take a look at the first couple of chapters of “Truckee”… could the third one be the charm? And I got another email from another agent who said she is intrigued by “Adelsverein” but is absolutely swamped in too much work to give it full attention… but if I haven’t found representation by July, she’ll be happy to take a look.

My writer friend on the West Coast counsels a spirit of Zen detachment and patience. Which I want now, dammit!

Against Fearful Odds: 300

11. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game, War

To all men living on this Earth, death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than by facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the Temples of his Gods?”
— Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome

So Blondie and I were intrigued by several different premises – intrigued enough to actually go and see the movie 300 on opening weekend; she because it starred Gerard Butler and several acres of well-oiled, well-built male hunkiness, and me because – well, it sounded interestingly unlike the usual Hollywood bucket o’krep poured out for the plebeians. For a start, no car chases, or machine gun fire, and most definitely not a remake of a TV show which wasn’t that good to start with, or a movie which should have been left alone. Neither one of us had ever read the wildly popular “graphic novel” it was based on. (Do I have to call them graphic novels? I always slip and call them comic books, it’s the same way I call “mobile home developments” “trailer parks” and it’s a movie, dammit, not a film.) Blondie hated the movie version of Sin City BTW, and I would like to serve notice right here and now that I would usually avoid movies which incorporate buckets of splattered gore, and collections of human grotesqueries – but the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae is one of those stories which has kept a grip on us in the West for nearly three thousand years. Every forlorn last stand, against overwhelming odds has harked back to the King of Sparta and his picked band, standing in a narrow pass. And that many of those so choosing would have known of it— like Travis at the Alamo— testifies to the enduring power of their story.

Through the rise and fall of Greece itself, and the Romes that followed it, into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and into this century, the story of Leonidas and his stalwart few resonates – as much as the righteous and politically correct would have it not so. (like this reviewer. Note to Mr. Smith; Bite me. Sincerely, Sgt. Mom). Courage, honor, duty, clear-eyed self-sacrifice in a cause, for the lives of those you hold dear, for your city or your country – those are values that hold, that define who we are and what we stand for. To have them set out unapologetically in a movie like this is as jolting as a triple-latte with a shot of brandy, after a diet of nothing but mineral water. Some years ago, I lamented that Hollywood just couldn’t bring themselves to make a movie about the war we are in. (here) Perhaps this may be the closest that they can bring themselves to do it, without running the risk of having the gentlemen from CAIR parked in the outer office.

This is not one of those movies where you go for authenticity about Greece, Sparta and the Persian empire. I can just imagine scholars of the classical world hyperventilating and gibbering incoherently for the next decade on that topic. Ancient Sparta was not anything like a democracy as we know it, Spartan women probably wore a few more clothes and took no part in public life, Greek warriors in battle wore little more than a leather Speedo and a flowing cloak, I very much doubt that anyone has ever been able to use a rhinoceros as a war-beast – and Xerxes probably wasn’t a 7-foot tall mulatto with a lot of body piercings. Some of the dialog clunks a bit, though. I can tell, because I was mentally re-writing it. All that is beside the point.

Because it is not just the story by itself; there was the look of it, the whole visual spectacle. The word that kept coming up in my mind, over and over was “painterly”. That the story of 300 was created by some who is an artist was obvious in the very first frame. Every scene was set up as if it were a painting or a classical frieze, a vase-painting; all of it harking back to something that an artistically literate person would recognize. The flow of a cloak, the jut of a bearded chin, the fall of golden sunset on a craggy mountain pass, the way a man holds a spear and shield – all of it evocative and visually rich in a way that doesn’t happen much in movies. Without having read the book, I can’t say if the movie version was true to Frank Miller vision , but it definitely made for an arresting look. We did notice some little grace notes that seem to be quotes from other movies; the fields of wheat from Gladiator, Xerxes’ monumental throne looked the one from the Elizabeth Taylor vehicle in Cleopatra and the assorted war-beasts from Lord of the Rings. (Also Blondie was bugged throughout the movie as to where she had seen the actor who played Dilius – he was in Lord of the Rings, also. She could have asked me, of course!)

All in all… ticket price and time well-spent, especially for Frank Miller fan. There are also some bonuses for the straight women and gay male demographic as well. It seems to be going over very well in flyover country, too.

I WOULD RATHER GOUGE MY EYES OUT WITH A DULL SPOON THAN TUNE INTO FOX NEWS

10. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, Politics, sarcasm

One of the things I like about the Democratic party is that when they form firing squads, which they are often wont to do, they do so in a circular fashion. In their latest move, they pulled out of a co-sponsorship arrangement with Fox News for an August debate of Democratic presidential hopefuls in Las Vegas. This was precipitated by MoveOn.org, whose members apparently cannot bring themselves to tune their TVs to Fox News, and whose leader has reportedly said that his organization “owns” the Democratic party. I hear that there is a deal with al Jazeera in the works.

Where is Zell Miller when the country and his party need him?

Once Bitten Twice Shy

07. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

Blondie’s insurance company rep confirms; her little car is totaled. Last rites will be performed by the insurance company sometime this week, and we will bury a little box with a damaged tail light in it, this weekend. The insurance rep told her that she was amazed that Blondie walked away from the crash with nothing other than bruises. Being a professional connoisseur of auto wreckage, she told Blondie that the degree to which the Mitsubishi was smashed usually meant that people in it were either injured or dead. So, Blondie is still quite shaken, and insists that quote “ It will be a nipple-y day in hell before I get behind the wheel of a compact car again!” unquote. The rental is a Jeep Cherokee; her next vehicle will be something similar in the sport-utility line. Bigger, anyway. And sitting farther off the ground

She was off to classes driving it this morning, driving the rental car; she plans to ask the rep if they will pay for another three or four days, to give her time over spring break to line up a replacement car.

The bruises are spectacular, by the way. Dark technicolor purple, with some red streaks.

One of Those Days

05. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, My Head Hurts, Veteran's Affairs

So, this is one of those calls that you don’t want to hear on the answering machine, first thing after coming back after being dragged around the neighborhood by the dogs; a kind-of-upset voice from one’s only and dearly-beloved child saying

“Mom…I’m OK… I was run into by a truck and the car is totaled… I’m at 35 and Theo Malone, can you come and get me?”

There may be crappier ways to start a Monday. Frankly, I can’t think of any of them at the moment. Cpl/Sgt. Blondie is ok, but rather interestingly bruised. She is loaded up on painkillers, and her poor little Mitsubishi is in the SAPD impound lot; the concensus from the investigating officer, the EMT, the tow-truck driver and the FD response unit is that it is indeed, totaled.

It was only a light pick-up truck that hit her, after a very complicated series of events best left to the insurance people to sort out. She had the presence of mind to gather up most valuable items from it— including her textbooks from the trunk (which the tow-truck driver had to pry open for her).

She was waiting far me by the side of the road, with everything from the car loaded into a plastic tub, and a very nice and understanding SAPD patrolman (Yay, SAPD… where gallantry is not yet dead!) waiting with her, who gave me a lecture about having a cellphone of my own, since the accident had set up the most awful slow-down of traffic. I swear, I could have walked that last mile faster.

She is OK for now, but will probably feel like heck in the morning, especially when she starts to thread the maze of claims and adjustments, never mind the bruises. We plan to hold last rites for the Mitsubishi, and bury a portion of it in the garden sometime this week.

In about 500 years, someone doing an archeological dig in my garden is going to go nuts.

Roller Skating and Internet Radio

04. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, Good God, Politics, Rant

The Copyright and Royalty Board, part of the Library of Congress, has announced copyright license fee increases that, if not struck down, will put many of the more innovative Internet music streaming (read radio) sites out of business. According to Bill Goldsmith at radioparadise.com, the royalty payments will amount to 125% of their revenue. I don’t think this is hyperbole based on what I read on the Radio and Internet Newsletter site.

Who benefits? All the usual fat cats. Who gets screwed? Well that would be all the smaller indy bands and labels, those of us who appreciate their work, and, of course those of us who are sick to their stomachs of the crap that passes for commercial radio broadcasting these days.

All of this is at the instigation of the RIAA of course – the same folks who, flummoxing around because their business model was caught totally unawares by the advent of digital music (boy, who could have seen that one coming 20 odd years ago at the introduction of CDs and then again, in the last decade, when Al Gore invented the Internet), have resorted to litigation against grandmothers because little Jimmy discovered file sharing. As a trade association I think they are doing a piss poor job. I had a conversation a while back with the third generation proprietor of a small local roller skating rink. What a resource to have. You can drop off the kiddies for good clean fun, knowing that Bonnie is watching out for them – a gem of a local institution. Bonnie told me that she didn’t know how much longer it would make economic sense to stay open – one of her single largest expenses is paying RIAA royalties.

Meanwhile, I legally downloaded some songs for my daughter, and found out that it is nearly impossible to transfer them to any other device. For this we can thank the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, otherwise know as The Act Passed By Congess, Signed Into Law By The President, But Written By The RIAA.

Hey, I’m for law and order, but I am rooting for the guys figuring out how to beat these greedy bastards. Maybe once the RIAA and their lackeys on the U.S. Congress figure out that the only alternative to an equitable fair royalty structure and a reasonable fair use doctrine is widespread free illegal underground distribution, they will get their heads out of their asses.

I encourage our Loyal Readers to bitch to their government representatives and to engage in civil disobedience in this matter (just don’t get caught and if you do, don’t call me).

Dump Sweet Dump

02. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Air Force, Domestic, General, Home Front, Military, Pajama Game

Some heartburn noted this week in some quarters about the Washington Post story about the treatment and the living conditions of outpatients at Walter Reed Army Hospital, and why the milblogosphere is not having a conniption-fit over that, with many dark hints about how we would be screeching like a cage of howler-monkeys if it had happened under another administration.

Not having a background in medical administration, or any particular knowledge of the set-up at Walter Reed, or even personal knowledge of anyone undergoing treatment there, I’d have to defer involvement in this fracas… except for a comment on the reported decrepitude of the building where many of the out-patients were living. From the description it sounds like, and most probably is, a dump.

All of these might come as a surprise to the dear little civilian writers of the WaPo and it’s ilk, who see the nice, shiny public side of the gold-plated bases, and assume that the rest of the base, post or fort is similarly bright and shiny and new. Au contraire, as they say in France, and ‘twas ever thus: George Washington lived in a house at Valley Forge, but everyone else lived in something considerably less commodious.

The reason that no one in the mil-blogosphere is hyperventilating over that aspect of the story is that most of us have lived in, or did business in worse, during our time in service. Peeling paint, leaking plumbing, sagging floors, corroding pipes, herds of rampant vermin wandering untrammeled in cheap and badly-maintained structures that are two or three decades (or more) past their best-if-used-by date? Been there, done that, got a raft of horror stories of my own.

Let’s see, there was the old high school on Misawa AB, back in the days when it was a sleepy little Security Service base; it was housed in three long sheds which had been stables when Misawa AB was a Japanese Army cavalry post in the late 1930ies. On a hot summer day the place still smelled distinctly of horses. It was slated to be replaced during the Carter Administration, except that Jimmeh passed on the defense spending bill which would have paid for it; another good reason to despise him even before bungling the Iran Embassy hostage crisis. Even the relatively newer facilities on MAB then were no prize: famously the hospital barracks was in such bad shape that a guy once walked into the upstairs shower room and crashed straight through the floor into the downstairs shower room. This was the place where I developed my life-to-date habit of storing all non-refrigerated foodstuffs in sealed jars, since the barracks I lived in then had roaches. Lots and lots of roaches.

The infrastructure on Zaragoza AB wasn’t too awful— this was an Air Force Base, where we do cling to some standards— but the water pipes were so corroded that tap-water on base came out colored orange, about the color and consistency of Tang. People living in base housing spent a lot of money on bottled water.

The infrastructure at the Yongsan Garrison, ROK was not that much better. A couple of decades of living with the expectation of relocating the mission elsewere had left the electrical grid in such shakey condition as to make power-outages a part of the expected routine. The water pipes were so corroded that I earned fame everlasting on the day I walked into the Air Force female dorm bathroom and noticed that the shower-heads emitted a bare trickle. I took out my trusty Swiss-Army knife, unscrewed the shower-head-plate and emptied about a quarter of a cup of crud out of each. This was also the place where some of the Army troops were domiciled in Korean War-era Quonset huts. In the fall, CE had to hold training classes for the dorm managers to teach them how to run the antique kerosene heaters that warmed them… the heaters were so old that the average soldier would never in his or her life laid eyes on artifacts of such antiquity.

The AFRTS station building in Greenland had mice so tame that one of the board operaters tried to train them to sit up and beg for food. A broadcaster friend of mine who was stationed at a Pacific Island Navy base was warming a pan of canned chili in a saucepan, when a huge rat jumped into the hot chili… and jumped out again, and skittered down the hallway of the dorm, leaving little rat-footprints of chili con carne.

Maintenance of facilities; it’s one of those dull, dull issues that hardly anyone ever pays attention to except those who have to deal directly with it on a daily basis. It’s not one of those sexy military spending issues; it is more of enduring headache, for there is never quite enough money approved for a tenth of local needs. What there is, winds up being spread as thin as a pat of butter on an acre of toast.

Overseas bases, and facilities that are on the verge of being closed generally get last call; and I’d note that politicians and investagative reporters are usually among the first to make a lot of hay when there is money spent on an aging military facility about to be closed.

So call me grimly amused, when they are making hay about money not being spent on an aging military facility.

Just for the heck of it though, the next time I have an appointment at BAMC, here in San Antonio, I’ll snoop around and take a look at what the outpatient troop quarters look like… but the last time I looked, six months ago, they all looked pretty good.

Any recollections of infamously awful troop billets are invited, of course. Misery loves company.

Oscar Night

25. February 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General, That's Entertainment!

So, anyone else going to stay up and watch the Oscars tonight?
Meh… I was surprised as heck to discover that I have actually seen anything nominated this year for anything like a major award. Blondie dragged me to “The Devil Wears Prada”… which made me wince uncomfortably about some of the people that I have worked for. And we watched “Pirates of the Caribbean” on video. I did actually go out and see “Flight 93” (my review here), but it’s only up for editing.
Good enough reason to watch some taped stuff… catch up in the morning. About the only thing that interests me at this point, is which actress was suckered into wearing the most hideous gown, but I’m damned if I’ll burn a couple of hours of my life trying to figure that out.

Later: Oh man, the Goracle’s global-warming screed getting an Oscar while large chunks of the US are snowed under and frozen stiff is a vein of irony as rich as a pint of Häagen-Dazs chocolate-chocolate chip. Relish it deeply!

So How Is It Going With That Book Thing You Ask

23. February 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

Aside from a big fat nothing… not bloody much. The Stephens Party book (links to various chapters here and here) is been submitted to two small publishers (respectively one month ago and two months ago) where it seems to have been received with raptures of disinterest. Or at least I assume so, as the silence has been deafeningly… er, silent. Not even the usual form letter of rejection. And I included stamped-self-addressed envelopes, too…

I’ll give it another month or so and then submit it to Tor books, which is the only one of the semi-biggies who even accept direct submissions. However, they will not look at anything which has been sent to anyone else! Nein! That is Absolutely Verboten! Violate the Rules You Vill Be Flogged! Or something dire, like that, I assume. So, I can’t send it to them until the other two places exhibit even more obvious disinterest.

The other angle of approach is to Get An Agent. There are a lot of them, which is good. Show bits and pieces and chapters to enough of them, and the odds are that someone will like it enough… and think it is an easy sell to one of the Big Publishers, and at least there is someone on your side who knows someone, who knows someone who might be persuaded to look on your scribbling with favor. But still, it is pretty exhausting, firing off queries and letters, and sample chapters, as per their various requirements. I’ve been at this since November, actually.

Thus far, I have sent out six or eight queries per week, to various agents who are supposed to have a special interest in historical fiction. Thus far, I have racked up one agent who has looked at the whole manuscript and who loved it, but didn’t think there was enough suspense, or sex in it… and that also no one had ever heard of those people, and another who read two chapters, and said it would be a hard sell… but that I could definitely write, and please let her look at my next book. She also sent me a list of what sort of historical fiction has sold recently. This is not exactly a brush-off, seeing as that was an improvement over the usual raptures of disinterest, and/or form rejection letters, but not all that much immediate help. I think I am handicapped by not having been married to, or had an affair with anyone notorious, plus zilch interest in writing about the supernatural. Or porn. The next book is also a pretty massive project.

I already have a draft of the first fifteen chapters, out of a projected 45. (75,000 words, for anyone who keeps track of this kind of thing.) This will certainly expand to more, as characters and situations take my interest, and as other elements of the story occur. My daughter, among others, has also suggested breaking it into several parts. It would fracture the story arc a little… but it would let me pitch the first segment, already revised and polished, and let me finish the rest of it in something like peace and quiet.

Sorry for the vent, but this has been a crappy week. I didn’t even much enjoy a trip to Borders, to spend the gift card that my sister sent for my birthday: I kept picking up books that were written by crappier writers than me, and thinking that they could get an agent, and a publishing deal, and I can’t even get arrested by the literary establishment. This is probably the reason that writers turn to drink.

Oh, just for grins and giggles, the first chapter of Adelsverein is below the jump. Share it with anyone who might be able to help me get somewhere with it.

More Than a River in Egypt

21. February 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General, GWOT, Home Front, Politics

Ordinarily I don’t link to stuff that Instapundit links to, as I suspect that is redundant… but in the case of this particular “shrinkish” essay, I make an exception. The good doctor touches on some very salient points… and kind of explains why the level of discourse on certain topics has sunk to the vitriolic level that it has. Read and follow the links, for extra credit.

Doing That Thing You Do

18. February 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, GWOT, Mordor, Pajama Game

So, yeah, my heart hasn’t really been in this blogging thing for a while… no, no nonono, I am not working up to pulling the plug, it’s just that I have been diverted by another mission. As I said in a post a couple of months ago, I’m just laying down to bleed a while, then up and fight again… but I know how Timmer feels. There’s a lot of stuff going on, which in days of yore I would have been perfectly at home, piling on with the rest of us. Some of it is just the usual blogger shit-fit: Marcotte who? At where? Ummm. OK… this is the blogger-face you want with your campaign? It’s always a bad sign when you piss off more than you make friends with. Didn’t anyone actually read hers and that other blog before taking them on board officially? Apparently not. Smooth move, Ex-Lax, as we used to say in junior high.

Anna Nicole Smith, news coverage of, 24-7. Umm, OK. Clear demonstration that the major legacy media are not serving us well, although the Princess Di-like coverage fairly well illustrates the adage about first time tragedy, second time farce. We’re kinda over served in the farce department here, although the astronaut Lisa whats-er-fern is probably grateful for it.

Britney Spears, bald. Sorry, I’m not stooping to the obvious here. (Although the remembrance of a cartoon entitled “Her First Masked Ball” keeps popping up in my mind. I think it was in National Lampoon in about 1979. You google for it, you pervert.) Girl, the trailer park is calling. It is your destiny!

Talk about flashbacks to the 1970s, though… watching our major political parties and politicians maneuver over the last couple of days. Tragedy and farce, tragedy and farce, people. Only this time it’s going to be a tragedy and a tragedy again. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. It’s been like watching a blindfolded person walk over a cliff; for the purposes of scoring domestic political points, just go ahead and kiss off and abandon our allies (yes, we do have some, here and there, although you wouldn’t know it from your abject flunkies in the legacy media) and pull our forces out of Iraq in 90 days or whatever other timeline you have pulled out of your ass which will look good in the polls. Yeah. Sure. Whatever.

Sell out our national credibility and commitment to a long and difficult mission for a mess of pottage and polls. Do whatever it takes to keep you in that nice little office you have scored for yourself. Just keep thinking of your short-term interest. Just keep hoping that all that jihadist narsty stuff in the woodshed will all go away, when George Bush exits the White House. Yep, just keep hoping. Get your friends and mouthpieces in the legacy media to help you out with that. Everybody will love us once again, once the Bushhitlertyrant is gone, and our betters are in control. Take a nice long drink of the Koolaid, comrade, you will feel so much better.

Me, I am trying to take the long view. With luck the blogosphere will circumvent the “flee-all-is-lost-in Iraq” meme, as best we can. No more kindly and authoritative Uncle Walty declaring without opposition after the Tet Offensive , that “all is lost in Vietnam! Flee, flee for your lives!” And also there is a means of fighting the “our troops are bloodthirsty baby-killers and war-criminals” meme. Here’s hoping we can scotch that one, right at the starting post, although given that the so-called military expert for the Washington Post is singing that little ditty like his hope of heaven depends on it doesn’t necessary ensure that that particular meme will go down without a fight. It’s going to be a bumpy ride in the next two years: fasten your metaphorical seatbelt, and prepare to weather the shitstorm

Me… I have the feeling that bad stuff is going to happen. And that I can do my best part now by going back to our stories, or recollections of who we are, and what we had to overcome. We have had hard times, bad times, times when we might have given it all up. We have to remember these stories. Our past, those stories that some of us know, and that some of us have yet to be reminded of, we will need them, very soon. Things will start happening, in the next months or years. Events will overtake the best intentions of us all, and so we need to be reminded of our history, our stories and our heroes and heroines.

They are a talisman, our hope, our light in the dark when every other light has gone out.

Now, THAT Was a Movie!

15. February 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, That's Entertainment!

I was reminded vividly last night when watching TV, of one of the classic and foolproof methods for picking out the murderer, early in a movie mystery. The method is to spot a relatively big-name or rather-better-than-average actor during the first act in what looks like a very small, walk-on part. Eventually, though, there will be the dramatic unveiling of the actual guilty party, where serious acting chops are required to chew the scenery in a properly dramatic fashion.

Lately, producers of the better sort of mystery move have gotten wise to this; they cleverly cast relative unknowns who are damn good actors, or salt the cast thoroughly with the same sort of relatively somewhat knowns… but in the instance of the movie that Blondie and I were watching… just about every part in the whole movie was played by a big-named star! Practically everyone with a part was a star, except possibly the two little pug dogs. And not only that, the dialogue was clever, the costuming was to die for, and oh, the set! Especially the Lalique frosted glass panels in the dining area; Blondie could not get enough of them, whenever they showed up in the background. For sheer period luxury, it beat the Titanic set all hollow.

We hadn’t watched this movie in a long, long time, so it was nice to see some of the very best of the lot at top form, and well as looking extraordinarily dishy… thirty years younger than we have seen them lately! It was also rather nice to be reminded that not all of the expensive, block-buster, all-star movie extravaganzas from the early 1970s sucked like a Hoover factory.

Murder on the Orient Express… reminding us of what we used to gladly pay the ticket price to watch. Rent or buy, and watch it again, especially if you haven’t seen it in a long time, and want to be reminded of what Hollywood used to be able to do.

And Blondie says that Sean Connery is gorgeous… and even now, if he didn’t remind her so much of her grandfather, she’d do him in a hot second.

The Writer’s Life Waltz Again

12. February 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General, Home Front, The Funny

Oh, the blogging has been light this last week, since I was trapped in the snares of literary endeavor. That is, pounding out chapter 12 of the new book. Some of the chapters come easily, as if they were already written down in my head, and some of them are hauled out inch by inch and word by word. Last week was one of the ï¿½hauled out inch by inchï¿½ weeks, but the week before I knocked out three chapters. Ehï¿½ go figure. I also had a couple of hours to work on Friday at the part-time secretarial-admin job, that between a weekly shift at the radio station, my retiree pension, and the very-slightly-more than paltry income from blogging allows me to stay at home and slave over a hot computer writing this centuryï¿½s answer to ï¿½Gone With the Windï¿½.

So I am completely uninterested in the hot-news-item do jour, the pitiful life and sad demise of whats-er-fern (Ok, so her and Princess Di- first time tragedy, second time farce, and all that? Are we sure that the late and extravagantly mourned Ms A.N. Smith was not actually some animatronic creation devised by the tabloid industrial complex in order to generate the maximum quantity of tawdry headlines? I mean, inerrantly choosing the maximum tackiest of life choices at every possible opportunityï¿½ that goes beyond a gift: that argues a fiendish degree of forethought and planning. Oh, well, at least there is no breath of a whisper that she got it off with anyone really, really important in politics. Yet, anyway. Where was Iï¿½ oh, yesï¿½ creation of semi-competent pop literature. Back on track, sorry for the diversion.)

I did briefly slip the shackles of duty yesterday: my sister Pippy had sent my daughter and I both gift cards for Borders Books, and so we popped down to spend a semi-blissful afternoon picking out the books that we wanted. Blondie went for an illustrated Terry Pratchett, but I had resolved to spend the gift card on some books that I could use for ï¿½the bookï¿½ï¿½ ones that I didnï¿½t have to keep returning to the library! I already possessed a good number of books that I needed for the writing of ï¿½Truckeeï¿½s Trailï¿½, but in writing ï¿½Adelsvereinï¿½ I am starting from scratch, and discovering that there exists a ton of excellent and thoroughly researched non-fiction about the German settlements. Either I can check it out from the library and keep it for about a month and a half at a stretch with renewals, or buy the stuff that I know I will need for longer.

And this book is going to be longer. Iï¿½ve already mapped out thirty chapters, and they have a wicked way of expanding, as interesting happenings and characters beg for more attention. Forty years worth of events in the Texas Hill country has an insidious way of becoming totally fascinating. Not to mention the people, of course. I write sometimes with a book open on my lap, to refresh my memory about places, descriptions, events and people. This is our history, and those who came before us; I need to get it all right. How it looked, tasted, smelled, what people in that time would have thought and felt and seen. Details count. I put myself in that place, with a book in my lap, and it all comes clear.

Oh, yes, the people: both the real ones, and the ones that I have totally justï¿½ you knowï¿½ like made up? They take on life of their own, which is exhilarating and kind of scary at the same time. Itï¿½s easy and at the same time hard to write about them. For instance: in the next couple of weeks I will have to write about the deaths of three very appealing charactersï¿½ one of whom is a fairly major hero. Sorry, it just has to be, for such sad events drive the plot, and it has always been so, from the instant that I conceived the whole story arc. (And it really was in an instant. I read something in one of the booksï¿½ and just knew instantly that that was something which had to be a part of it story. This has happened, over and over. Really.) But still, it will be hard to write about. I was in tears for one whole afternoon, writing about a character in an early chapter who was fairly dispensable and barely seen anyway.

About the only harder thing to do will be about half a chapter on the heroineï¿½s wedding night; something tender and erotic and a bit funny. Knowing that most women of the era were kept in a total state of ignorance about what the marriage bed involved, and that most men had a fairly detailed ideaï¿½ and that a lot of married women of the era adored their husbands with desperate and operatic devotion (Queen Victoria herself, exhibit 1)ï¿½ well, really, that argues that a fair number of Victorian-era bridegrooms must have done some fairly effective sex-education, at speed and on the fly, as it were. Otherwise, I presume their wives would have been (a) traumatized incredibly, and (b) loathed their so-called helpmates to really unparalleled degree. I am fairly sure that good properly married Victorians really had about as much fun in bed as any of the rest of usï¿½ they just didnï¿½t go on about all the details as much. This proper reticence just makes it harder for the rest of us. I donï¿½t mind, really.

Blondie says she will loan me some of her bodice-ripping romances, in order that I should get into the proper spirit. Yeough; if they dictate that I should have to write a sentence like ï¿½she grasped his throbbing man-root and guided it into her turgid fleshï¿½ I am so going to put my head in the oven. (For about 15 minutes)

It is an electric oven anyway, but you get the general idea.

Speaking of Planes…

11. February 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, My Head Hurts, Politics, Rant

I am glad to know that all of the federal income taxes I pay for an entire year won’t even cover the cost of one hour’s flight time in a C-32 – the plane that Nancy Pelosi feels that she needs. Just think, I can pay taxes for half of my working career knowing that I have covered the expenses for one round trip flight from Washington to San Francisco. Of course, there will be a reimbursement (at coach rate) for friends and family. Undoubtedly coach rate will have been established by reference to a red-eye flight booked several months in advance. Wouldn’t a more fair way be to calculate the ticket cost by amortizing the amount of paying passengers over the total cost of the flight? Hell, they’re all rich anyway.

It makes me sick.

Anatomy of a Rotten Day Part Deux

05. February 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Allied Treachery, Domestic, Good God, Memoir, sarcasm, The Funny

So this one time at Camp Pendelton, there was a Marine in my section and he had a bad day.(Found out that his wife had been sleeping with his best friend and she took the kids and split.)
Our wise SNCO called all of us NCOs into his office and said , “We needed to help this Marine out and make sure he does not hurt himself.”
So three of us were volun-told to get over to his house ASAP and take away and hide all of the things that he could hurt himself with (just in case).
I drew the short straw and got the knives, so I took note of all the sharpest and most lethal and packed them up to go to the armory. Then I hid the rest in plain sight.

Long story short he didn’t hurt himself… and he never found the knives I had hidden in plain view. He got out of the military, moved and never found them.

So I guess the moral is*if there is one*you’re not having a really shitty day—

unless I show up and hide your flatware!

Literary Distraction

27. January 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

As promised, a snipped from my current obsession, which is growing by leaps and bounds. As reader Andrew Brooks suggested “Rather then bemoan two novels of the Germans in the Texas hill country, let them rip and just think of it as TheChronicles of Barsetshire, but with cypress trees!”

From the epic tenatively known as “Adelsverein”, this is Chapter 8, “The Home Place”

The Writers Life Waltz

27. January 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Memoir, Pajama Game, World

It’s been kind of a frenetic waltz this week… which is a round-about way of explaining why I didn’t write much original stuff this week. I just got obsessed with the new book; yeah, this one has taken hold, and when I’m on a roll, I’m on a roll, and nothing else seems quite real, or very important.

See, the first book… well, it was actually the second book, if you count the memoir which you really can’t because that was all basically little scraps of reminiscence stitched together… the first book was pretty easy to write. I sat down and wrote the first draft in a pell-mell rush, all over the space of about two months. The plot was pretty much already there, from start to finish; being based upon real people and real events has the effect of handing me the hardest part on a silver platter already. All I had to do was flesh them out a little, do a little guessing as to how they might have related to each other, come up with some amusing conversation, and a lot of description… hey presto, there you go. 120,000 well-polished and carefully chosen words. As a celebrated wit whose name I can’t remember at the moment was supposed to have said, “It’s easy, just open a vein, and let it flow.”

It actually was easy, because I was able to think about them for a long time, before I actually buckled down and did the writing…. For me, that’s what I need to do about half the time; to work out in my head what needs to happen, and how to go about making it happen. Sometimes I need to bounce ideas off other people: believe me, that kind of feedback is above price. It’s were the best ideas develop. And sometimes the magic is happening. I sit down at the computer and stuff just happens. I cope up for air, and there’s half a chapter written, and it’s pure gold, and it’s already four in the afternoon, and where the hell did the time go?
Anyway, the last book was something I lived with for a long time, before I actually buckled down and put it all on paper.

(It’s still in front of a publisher, by the way … and there are two more I will submit it to, in case of rejection. (Have to wait and do it sequentially, these people are anal about simultaneous submissions!) As my writer friend on the West Coast says, trying to find a publisher for a novel is kind of like trying to find adoptive parents for a minority Down ’s syndrome child: they are out there, but it takes a bit of looking.)

The new book; now, the one about the German colonies in the Texas Hill Country? I have built the scaffolding of plot and character for that from scratch… although there are some real people in it, some of who are very interesting people in their own right and who will take over, if I don’t keep a firm grip on them… (You… sit down, and behave, this story is not about you!)
What is really curious to me is how many of the fictional people, and the plot events just seemed to spring up from something I read in the course of doing research. A sentence here, a paragraph there, even just a single name… and a whole character is launched, obstreperous, amusing, and fully alive to me. There were incidents and events that I just kept circling back around towards, without knowing quite why: I just had the sense that they would have something important to do with the story. I had to set them aside like pieces for a mosaic, and figure out how to fit them all together later. There are also some characters who start out in the plot as a sort of extra, with one or two lines, but one way and another they turn out to be a little more important and before you know it, there is a fully functional and almost essential sub-plot… when all I had really needed was… you know, like two lines! It may take a lot longer to work through the first draft, then sit down and expand, edit and polish to a high shine. I’m guessing six months, at least, especially if I have to take (bleah) more paid outside work!

At this rate of proliferation, there just might be two books in this epic: the first one to cover the immigration, the building of the settlements, and the peace treaty with the Comanche, and the second to cover the Civil War and aftermath. There is no end of incident to cover, not to mention operatic levels of drama, murder, revenge, stolen children, madness, true love, sudden death… all this and civil war, too. And maybe a cattle stampede, just to vary the program. Just by way of a tease, I think I shall post a sample chapter…. (Suggestions and feedback are welcome, always. And any introductions to a literary agent will be extremely welcome, being that the big publishers are closed to me, unless I have one… and they are even harder to find!)

Later: Entry deleted and re-entered, in order to allow comments. Something about punctuation in the title often screws these things us. Don’t know why – Sgt. Mom)

Global Warming???

16. January 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Critters, Domestic, General, Pajama Game

As best I know, Al Gore has not come to San Antonio lately to bang on about global warming; this winter ice storm is just one of the usual South Texas winter things, only colder, icier and more of an inconvenience than usual. Ice, freezing rain, bitter north wind; all the elevated highways and overpasses closed, school classes cancelled, and as many people as possible being urged to stay home. As Blondie lamented this morning to the Lesser Weevil:
“Ya suppose if we gave you the leash, you could just walk yourself?”

It’s a good thing that I still have all of my serious winter gear from when we lived in Utah. At the rate I wear my winter parka, insulated boots, gloves and other necessary winter stuff, they will last me the rest of my natural life, since they only get good use maybe three or four days of the year. This being one of them: our version of a snow day. Residents of northern tier states are laughing their asses off, though. By their standards, this is a good winter day. Only the ice all over the roads is cause for pause. I’ve seen these folks here drive on wet streets, the last thing they need is black ice. I am not keen on being anywhere in the vicinity when Bubbah from the West Side zips up to the big intersection at Thousand Oaks and Perrin-Beitel in his monster SUV, slams on the brakes as he hits a patch of ice and spins all the way down to the Post Office, scattering other cars before him like ninepins before a 3,000 pound bowling ball. I can drive on ice, and in snow, I just have no faith in anyone else on the roads around here being able to do so. After all, they only have to do so about once every five years, and that is just not enough to keep those skills current.

At least we had plenty of warning about this cold front; so all the tender plants are in the garage, or under cover on the back porch; so far the only potted plant badly affected is Blondie’s painted coleus… which may or may not make it. I just don’t think it is any more sheltered in the garage than it is on the back porch.

We walked up the hill with the dogs at about midmorning: treacherous patches of ice in odd places on driveways and on the sidewalks. Spike the toy shi-tzu is always invigorated by cold; must be all that fur. She bounded ahead, displaying every evidence of keen enjoyment. Sometimes I amuse myself by picturing a team of six or eight little dogs like her, all hitched to a miniature sled and dragging it through the Arctic snow. Even if it is a breed which is supposed to be pampered lap-dogs all, I suspect that Spike and her tiny kind actually have dreams of glory, and heroic deeds. Today she skidded on a couple of patches of ice, and did not venture onto a lawn more than once. The trees, the lawns and parked cars are all glazed over with a layer of ice, crackling underfoot as if you are wading through cornflakes. The scattering of trees which still have leaves are coated also; the north wind rattles the leaves and branches like bamboo castanets. We met one of our neighbors, grimly scraping ice off his windshield with a credit card, and we both tried to remember how far down in our respective glove-boxes are buried the plastic ice scrapers.

Blondie was to start classes today; something she was looking forward to after three weeks of being bored out of her mind at home, but classes at most schools today are cancelled. Practically every elevated overpass and freeway ramp is closed, so even if she did still have classes, it would take at least half the day to get across town to them. Public events and lectures have also been cancelled or postponed, and a couple of corporations and city offices are either closed, or ask only essential employees to come to work. No, this is a day to stay home, and stay warm, and work from home. My sometime boss, the real estate broker doesn’t even want me to venture out: the ice is even worse in his neighborhood. And most unusual for here, it looks to carry on for more than one day. It’s rare for a winter storm to discommode San Antonio for more than one day at a time, but this one looks like going for a record. No word on snow, though. It last snowed seriously here about twenty years ago, and people are still talking about it as if it were a blizzard that left fifteen-foot deep drifts.

I’ll flog away on the next book, and Blondie is going to do some loaves of bread: all you can do on a day like this! That is, as soon as we melt the ice around the door lock to Blondie’s car. Global warming, indeed.

The Daily Brief