Old Enough to Know Better

Successful Failure

2012-01-30T16:03:00.000-08:00

I dunno if I told you this story before, but if I did, it's been a while, and it came up during a discussion about ebooks, so I thought I'd offer it.

Some years ago, when I was blowin' and goin' and doing a lot of writing in major franchise universes, I got a call from a guy who worked for a game company. The company was a pioneer in online first-person shooter interactives, and doing really well with it. They were about to roll out another incarnation of the game, and would I be interested in doing a book tie-in?

I wasn't against the idea in general, but not particularly interested in that moment. I had a couple of high-profile, well-paying projects going, a couple of my own books stacked up behind those, and I allowed as much to the caller. But he was a fan, and he wondered if he and another game guy could come by, buy me lunch, and pitch me.

Okay, free lunch, why not?

So they came and pitched the idea. Action-adventure, military space opera, I could go in pretty much any direction I wanted. It would be fun, they said. Right up my alley.

Working for folks who don't have any real experience in book-land can be problematic. Having somebody look over your shoulder while you write is a pain in the posterior. You expect that in TV or movie stuff, it's part of the game, but in bookery, I want to be left alone to do the job.

We'll leave you alone, we promise.

Tempting; still, I was busy and really not that interested, so I rattled off a figure so high that I expected that would end the discussion.

They swallowed when they heard the number. We'll, uh, get back to you.

I grinned inwardly. Yeah, that's what I figured. So I went on my merry way, and thanks for lunch.

Few days later I got a call. Okay, let's do it!

Whoa! Really?

I talked to my agent, who got the parameters of the deal, and, well, I, um, reassessed my thinking.

Let me rephrase that: It was an offer I couldn't refuse. Not only was I looking at a nice six-figure advance, they were willing to ship a copy of the book with every game, which, if it was anything near the first version, would run to a million units. Be a lot of potential readers. And maybe more books like it down the line ...

But, wait–!

Once the book was published, my royalty on that would be 50%. Fifty percent? Where ten is normal for original stuff, and 1-2% is what you get on most tie-ins? Fifty percent?

They didn't know any better, we weren't going to tell them, and let's face it, greed laid her velvet claws onto me. Visions of sugar plums danced in my head.

Hear me rationalize: Hey, I'm gonna write stuff like this anyhow, and why not get well-paid for it? I mean, we've already determined what you are, Steve, now we're just haggling over the price ...

So. I came up with a storyline, filled it with martial arts, intrigue, lotta running and gunning, gave it a catchy title, and pitched it. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad, I thought.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

First thing that happened is the head honcho of the game company wanted to lay his hands on it, and he started offering helpful suggestions that indicated the man had never actually read a book: Ooh, wouldn't it be cool if we did this?

Actually, no, it would exceedingly stupid if we did this. But I said that politely.

Then the size and scope of the project was reassessed, altered, and the monster advance had to be shrunk. It was still a nice high five-figure advance, and the royalties would be the same.

It could still work.

We kicked the springboard back and forth a couple times, came up with one that was acceptable

Should have heard the rumble then, but avarice had stoppered my ears. I decided to go for it. Yeah, yeah, there was some risk, but it could really pay off. I mean, I buy lottery tickets now and then, so maybe ...

I started writing. A few weeks into it, a bigger game company cruised in, flashed sharkish teeth and gobbled up my employer. Bought 'em, lock-stock-and-barrel, then fired everybody, save the one book guy, who was so far down the line they didn't notice him.

But we were still okay.

I turned the ms in, got paid, and lo! a third game company came in, bought out the second, and the new owner looked around and ... shelved the entire project.

The book guy tried, he hustled his ass off, but IWDJ -- It Was Dead, Jim.

Did I mention that I was wrong about this project?

This kind of thing happens in Hollywood all the time. I know writers who have made good livings for years writing or rewriting scripts, none of which ever made it to the screen. But that rarely happens in the book world with a finished, not-too-badly-written genre book for which you have been paid. Only time it's ever happened to me.

What this all means is that I had written–I thought–a pretty good space opera novel that nobody was ever going to see. Got paid well for it, but even though I am much the hack, money isn't everything. As a writer, you want to see your stuff out there.

If I had it to do over again, would I? Probably. Money isn't everything, but on balance, I came out ahead.

This is, I think, why the appeal of ebookery is so strong. You can get it out there. Yes, maybe fourteen people will buy copies in the next nine months, and you won't get to go into the local book store and point at it and brag about it. But at least there's a chance it will be read. Somebody skimming down the page on Amazon.com might come across it, say "Hmm." and download it.

Something to be said for that.

Star Wars Bookery

2012-01-29T15:14:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not about to do another one, and the one about which I'm talking, Shadow Games, was by Maya Bohnhoff and Michael Reaves. The title, which wasn't the working one–that was Holostar–was apparently decided upon by fans, and the book hit the racks a couple months ago.

There is a lot of stuff in it that a couple of my fans have asked about, the teras kasi martial art, Black Sun, the character of Dash Rendar, yadda, yadda. Did I have a hand in the book?

Well. A little bit yes, and mostly, no.

First, the book was entirely written by Bohnhoff and Reaves. I have, from time to time as a friend and collaborator, contributed the odd scene or chapter to some of Michael's books, but nary a graph did I put in for this one. They wrote it, not me.

On the other hand, five years or so ago, Reaves and I talked about doing another Star Wars novel together (we've done three) and I came up with the basic premise of a story set in the entertainment industry. A rock star who is beset with danger and, hires some bodyguards, and who turns out to be not quite as innocent as first thought.

We batted the idea back and forth, changed the rock/holo star from a guy to a girl, cut, added, blended, and came up with characters and plots and settings and all, and pitched it to Del Rey. We thought it was unique for their universe. We could do a backstage tour of Star Wars celebrity and have a fine romp, elements of mystery, like that. Madonna. Or these days, Lady Gaga ...

Del Rey was not enthusiastic. They wanted changes, they wanted us to include canon-characters, and a few other things that would have made it into a much different book.

Reaves and I thought about it and decided we didn't want to do it that way.

So we thanked them, but decided we'd rather not. No harm, no foul, see you around.

Fast forward a couple of years. Del Rey dropped us a note: The idea had percolated and they had gotten more interested in it. What say?

Reaves and I talked. I didn't see that anything had changed, they still wanted us to do stuff I didn't want to do, so I told Reaves that. Well, he said, if I wasn't interested, would it be okay if he did it on his own? Or with Maya, with whom he had done other projects?

Sure, go ahead, with my blessing. Everybody who knows anything knows that the idea is not the big deal, the execution is. Have at it.

So he did.

(Meanwhile, I got a call from our SW's editor. Since I wasn't interested in doing a Star Wars novel, was I maybe interested in doing an Indiana Jones novel? Having never gotten to play in that area, but having done four SW's novels, I was interested in trying something new. So I did.)

Thus my input on Shadow Games was minimal. What I came up with, and later what Michael and I passed back and forth, is not exactly what he and Maya wound up doing, though the basic notion is the same. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but is there a scene where somebody gets an offer they can't refuse? They wake up with Jar-Jar Binks' head in their bed?

Or did that get cut ...?)

Gig II

2012-01-28T17:39:00.000-08:00

So, second gig with the Closet Musicians: Background music at a quilt show in a local Methodist church.

Only cost us two cans of food to get in.

Rock and Roll!

I'm sure I saw Paul Allen in the crowd, waiting for a chance to demand that we sell him our guitars for his Rock Museum in Seattle ...

Played for an hour, took a break, did another forty-five minutes, and realized we didn't really have enough material, once we took out the songs that weren't entirely appropriate for church. Couldn't do "Little Egypt," or "Johnny Wadd is Dead," now, could we?

Had one of our regular's granddaughters sit in with us. She's five.

Screwed up a couple, got a few harmonies all right. Our best number, there was no applause. Probably stunned that we pulled one off ...

Um. Anyway, we all decamped to Buster's Barbecue afterward and ate spicy critter flesh and baked beans and all like that, and had a fine old time.

Look for us on Public Access Cable Channel 11 or 22. CDs will be available ...

Hmmm

2012-01-27T15:16:00.001-08:00

A Writing Tip

2012-01-26T15:09:00.000-08:00

Couple posts ago, I put up a piece about an old bodybuilder. In an effort to make the comments about his (purported) drug use to achieve his physique funny, I used some hyperbolic references. How well that worked is up for debate, but I thought they were focused where I wanted them to be.

Let's take one of those and parse it, to show why I think it worked. Let us go back to the genesis of the idea: "He took enough drugs to grow from very small to very large!"

Nothing there. Too general. Doesn't convey much of anything.

"He took enough drugs to turn a dwarf into a giant!" Better, but still too bland.

"He took enough drugs to turn a dwarf into an NBA center!" Getting closer, but still not there.

"He took enough drugs to turn a Munchkin into Shaquille O'Neal!" Almost, but not quite. I want to add in what kind of drugs. And I want to make the image wider, so I multiply the entities:

I said, (He took) "Enough Human Growth Hormone to make the entire Munchkin cast of The Wizard of Oz into Shaquille O'Neal."

If you know the tropes, the dwarf Munchkins from WoZ morphing into a plus-seven-foot-three-hundred-and-fifty pound NBA basketball player via HGH is pretty specific.

You get a sharper image the more specific you are ... but only up to a point. If you over do it, if you go past the audience's knowledge, you lose them. If I said, "He took enough HGH to turn Charlie Becker into Shaquille O'Neal!" probably most people won't know that Becker played the Mayor Munchkin in the Wizard of Oz.

Too far.

So, the trick is to narrow your image down so it is sharp enough to resonate with readers at the most visceral level you can manage. If you have to explain it, you probably went too far.

Genetics

2012-01-26T14:49:00.000-08:00

Apparently my family didn't pass along either the shopping or furniture-moving gene to the male side of the line.

I buy things, but don't spend a lot of time dawdling about when I do it. This one? Or that one? That one. Ring it up.

Furniture at my mother's house? In all in the same places it was put fifty years ago when they moved in. Probably how it would be at my house, were it up to me.

Of course, it isn't up to me, is it?

My wife inherited both genes. She loves to shop, and every so often, furniture must be moved. In the latter category, yesterday was the start off another episode of musical chairs. And tables. And bookcases, and the wardrobe armoire ...

It's cheaper than moving to another house, which is the first choice when this comes upon my wife. And after forty-five years, I've gotten used to it ...

Modern Magic

2012-01-26T09:40:00.000-08:00

So, offhand, how old would you say this guy is? Now, you know it's a trick question because I asked it, but even so, you will almost certainly underguess it, if the poster of the picture on Facebook can be trusted: Go ahead, take a stab.

Ninety-one.

Are you kidding me? My first reaction was pure disbelief, and frankly, I'd want to see a notarized birth certificate and a passport before I bet money on it, but look at the picture of Sly Stallone, below, at my age, sixty-four. That's verifiable, so the guy above could easily be in his sixties or seventies, and that's incredible even so.

So, you ask, how do you achieve this level of muscularity? First, you need the genetics. Then the diet and exercise. Probably some plastic surgery and maybe Botox. And finally, drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. Enough anabolic steroids to turn a castrati boys choir into a room full of Incredible Hulks. Enough Human Growth Hormone to make the entire Munchkin cast of The Wizard of Oz into Shaquille O'Neal. And probably an assortment of pain-killers and diuretics sufficient to stone the entire crowd at the Super Bowl stadium.

But still. If you are looking for an excuse to be out of shape, age alone isn't it ...

Heartshot

2012-01-25T12:21:00.000-08:00

Years ago, my buddy Mike Byers, former military pilot; expert artist in glass and constructions various; guitarist, and writer; produced a magazine-killer story, "Heartshot."

Those of you unfamiliar with the MK term, this is a story you sell to a magazine that then goes belly-up before it can publish the piece. Naturally, you blame the story, as well you should, and piss on all you writers who killed my markets thus ...

Mike's story, about a unicorn hunter, and written, I recall, to offset the warm-fuzziness that was rampant–sorry had to do it–in the fantasy field at the time in regard to such creatures as unicorns and winged kitties and like that, went on to kill a couple more magazines before he retired it.(My worst killed two 'zines for sure, and maybe a third; I bow to no master.)

Well, it seems that somebody he knows who has the wherewithal to do it wants to make a short film of it. Might kill the moviemaker's business, too–and I'm sure Byers has warned him; still, that's way cool.

And you gotta love the logo ...

Knife Update

2012-01-24T20:07:00.000-08:00

Somebody asked about the cylinder knife ...

Chuck was not happy with how the handle came out, so he ordered another chunk of wood. Then he got a new job, and that kind of thing eats up a lot of time. Don't worry, he'll get back to it when he can. Can't hurry quality.

Dead Ends

2012-01-24T18:01:00.000-08:00

I am cleaning out my links here on ye olde blogge, and if you haven't posted anything on your blog in the last six months, I'll be deleting your link, come tomorrow.

Not that I'm trying to get you to post, since most of you who play online have probably gone to Facebook or Google or you Tweet, but if you aren't putting stuff up on your blog, no point in me sending folks your way.

Art Moves

2012-01-23T16:45:00.000-08:00

For a while, I've had Mike Byers's fused glass art panel over the fireplace insert. Lovely piece. But there is a lot of heat rising when we fire it up, and even though fused glass is certainly durable enough to withstand that, the mats aren't so rugged, so I've been looking for a new home.

Over my desk, on the top shelf as a backdrop for a limited-run Star Wars statuette of Vader, the Emperor, and Xizor seems to be the right spot ...

The knife in the f.g. is a gift from Bobbe E.; the little spaceship is a ballpoint pen set from my mother. If you click on the picture and expand it, you might be able to spot a tiny gold band near the top of the rocket. My baby ring ...

Who Knew?

2012-01-23T09:22:00.000-08:00

Ever hear of black light miniature golf? I hadn't, until this weekend. I've been to kid's parties at bowling alleys wherein they dim the house lights and light black light bulbs and spray fake fog and all, but Putt-Putt? Hadn't seen that one.

Apparently my daughter's boys found it and loved it, so we went.

In the basement of a building downtown, eighteen holes, looks like the Haunted Mansion from Disneyland. Only light is black light, and it's dim. Glowing socks and shoe laces, anything white shines like a lamp.

A psychedelic poster from the sixties, it was. Not that I can remember the sixties, but there are still some of the old posters out there. The golf balls glow, different colors, so they are easy to track. Place was packed, we had to wait for our flight to take off ...

The colors, man, the colors ... !

The Weakness of Words

2012-01-22T12:02:00.000-08:00

At the most recent jam session I attend, we worked on an old Delmore Brothers number, "Blues Stay Away From Me." From the late forties, it's not a hard song to play, but we haven't ever gotten it "right."

One of the women put it up for consideration. I'd never heard it, so I went to YouTube and listened to it, got the chords and words, and we gave it a try.

I played it too fast, and every time we came to it, that was the complaint, so I said, "Okay, pick a tempo and I'll follow along."

Better, but still not what the woman who offered it wanted. "It needs to be softened," she said.

"Softened? It's too loud?"

"No, it's not volume, but it needs to be ... softened." Accompanied by a vague wave.

"I don't understand. That's like saying you want it to be more orange. What does 'softened' mean in this context?"

She waved her hand again. Couldn't articulate it.

One of other players offered that he thought he understood what she meant, but he tried to say so, and that just muddied the waters more.

I said so. Wasn't trying to be nyah-nyah, just didn't get it.

The woman said, a bit testy, "Well, that's just my opinion."

I'm not arguing with your opinion. I just don't understand it ...

What I suspect is that she wants the song to sound just like the Delmore Brothers' version. Which, because we aren't them, ain't gonna happen.

We do a couple song like that. They fall short of somebody's expectation of what they should sound like.

I think this is a common desire among musicians, especially those with less experience. You hear a long you like, you want to learn it. You strive to make it sound exactly like the version you like, same words, same chords, same key, and you measure your success against the original. (In fact, if you go to a live concert and hear the song done by the original artists and they vary it from the recorded version, that seems wrong, somehow.)

Because I have spent most of my guitar playing and singing alone, I realized a long time ago that if I was going to achieve any kind of comfort, I'd have to alter some stuff, vocally or musically, or I wouldn't be able to do songs I loved.

Sometimes there's a double-back-flip-E23rd-diminished/augmented-hidden-in-the-weeds jazz chord that I can't play. So it gets turned into one I can.

I love the Beatles, but they sometimes sang in the chipmunk-range, and I can't go there vocally. When Art Garfunkel hits the high notes in "Bridge Over Troubled Water," that's like a fantasy in my case. (And actually, Artie can't hit them anymore, either, and he's Art Fucking Garfunkel.)

So I have rearranged much of what I play, most often dropping the key lower so I can hit the high notes without going into my head voice. Can't always do it, but since it's just me, that's not a problem. Sometimes, I drop the guitar tuning and do it that way. And sometimes, I go into head voice, just to see if I can. ("Head voice," is a term some of you might better know as "falsetto," and it's not entirely accurate as I use it here, but it gets the point across. I'm a natural baritone, can hit a couple bass notes and some tenor, but soprano? Nope.)

And even so, I have personalized stuff. My version of "Blackbird," which is a stretch in G, has different phrasing than Sir Paul's, and the picking pattern is not quite the same. It's recognizable as "Blackbird," but different. (I'd drop it to F, but the fingering goes up and down the neck and it would require a lot of effort to relearn those tenths elsewhere. So when I get to " ... niiight ..." I'm either going into falsetto or dropping an octave.)

Think of the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends." Then Joe Cocker's version. Both work for me, but they aren't the same.

And taste? That's another fun one when you are jamming. Somebody brought in John Prine's "Angel from Montgomery," which happens to be one of my favorites, the Bonnie Raitt version is a break-your-heart-killer.

Two of the women in the group didn't like it. One of them said "It doesn't go anywhere." The other said, "It's too slow and draggy."

I sputtered. "All songs don't have to be happy. Sometimes you do a lament, which is what this is. It's a great song."

They still didn't like it.

I expect my days with this group are going to be numbered ...

Down on the Farm

2012-01-21T09:59:00.000-08:00

When we were hippies, we decided to get back to the land. A bunch of us, mostly family, found a decrepit old house on seventeen acres, next to the river in Brusly, Louisiana. The owner would allow us to live there rent-free if we fixed the place up.

It was a big, concrete-walled house, built after the levee, on a long, narrow strip of land, and the place had been, we guessed, primarily a small ranch, cattle or horses–the acreage was mostly fenced-in grassy pasture.

So we acquired some livestock–a horse, a pair of goats, some chickens, seven dogs and a duck. Wife and I, two small children; my wife's cousin and his spouse; my sister-in-law; and a few assorted friends who came and went. We did some rude plumbing, hung paneling, built a carport, re-roofed the place.

Along the way, Cousin Jay got an old boat he worked on in the back.

I borrowed a rototiller and went to plow a garden space. First furrow, thirty feet, I hit a buried pipe and blew up the rototiller. Went to Sears, bought parts, and fixed it, in the process learning that I was about as well-equipped to repair small engines as I was to be a farmer.

Got it fixed, tilled the space. The women planted stuff.

Organic, of course.

The bugs in Louisiana loved us. No spray? They ate well at our place.

We learned that you don't plant watermelon next to gourds, because they cross. You get something that looks like yellow watermelon and tastes like wood pulp. Even the insects wouldn't eat it.

Mostly what survived were carrots and green onions. We went through a fifty pound bag of brown rice that year, fried with carrots and onions, and we all turned orange.

The horse, Miso, was a stallion, insane and never ridden. A neighbor who was a cowboy offered to break him to the saddle. He stayed on three, maybe four seconds, was bucked off, and the only thing that got broken was his arm.

The goats–Nan and Bill, of course–ran and hid every time we approached them.

The chickens didn't last long enough to have names. They escaped the coop, and one at a time, jumped into the yard where the pack of waiting dogs ate them. After the first one, we sat in the kitchen and watched. Birds that stupid deserved it, we thought.

The duck fell in love with Giesla, the mini-daschund, and followed her around everywhere.

We were probably the worst farmers who ever lived.

After the house was fixed up, the owner threw us out, and that was that. What I learned was: Never again ...

I told you that story so I could talk about this one:

A woman I know has written, under a pseudonym, Tammy Owen, a memoir of her farm days, House of Goats, and it is well-written, funny, touching, and actually useful for anybody who is considering the idea of becoming a gentleman (or lady) farmer. It's an ebook, available at Amazon.com or Smashwords.

You should check it out.

Raylan

2012-01-20T10:48:00.000-08:00

Okay, some of you are fans of one of my guilty pleasures, Justified. You know who United States Marshal Raylan Givens is. And if you are a mystery reader, you might know that the guy who came up with the character upon which the TV series is based is Elmore "Dutch" Leonard.

Leonard has been writing forever, has a slew of books, more than a couple of which have been made into movies. I'll get back to that in a minute.

Nice guy. I caught him in a gun mistake once, or so I thought. One of his characters was waving around a .38 auto pistol and I sent him a note explaining that probably wasn't the case. As it turned out, he knew that. He'd written ".380" in his manuscript, and a helpful copy editor assumed he had mistakenly added that "O" at the end and fixed it for him.

This is why you read your galleys when they send them to you.

Um. Anyway, Leonard has written a new novel starring Raylan. If you've followed the series on the tube, the book will be a disconnect–he has a story that the series used, sort of, but told slightly differently, and with not-quite-the-same characters acting in it. Kind of like an alternate universe. Boyd Crowder is in it, but not as much fun as he is in Justified. The owner of the store down in the holler who sells 'shine and runs the marijuana biz locally is a man, and not a woman, and the two idiot sons aren't quite the same in the book as in the series. The coal miner VP woman is there, but not the same. It will be familiar, but it doesn't go where you think it will if you've seen the televised version.

Still, it's a fun read, Leonard is a master, and I had a fine old time with it.

My favorite of the diamonds strewn about is a little bit of business that won't mean anything to anybody not a Leonard fan. Here's the set-up for a short exchange that takes place early in Chapter 8:

Long ago, Leonard wrote a novel, Valdez is Coming. The book was made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster, as a Mexican-American sheriff who tracks down and picks off bad guys who have murdered somebody and kidnapped a woman. At one point, he captures one of the villains, but turns him loose with a message for the leader of the bad guys: "Tell them, Valdez is coming."

In the novel, Raylan is talking to Loretta, a girl's whose father has been shot. She's about twelve or so:

"Before they showed," Loretta said, "Bob phoned and said to tell my dad, 'Valdez is comin.' You ever hear of anything like that?"

"I might've," Raylan said ..."

I fell out laughing when I read that. I expect Leonard's other hardcore fans will, too.

Mo Weather

2012-01-20T09:53:00.000-08:00

Been raining here the last couple of days, a fair amount. When we get standing water on our front walk, so you have to wade through it to get to the gate, that usually means the rest of the area is really flooded, and so it is this time. Some place in the mountains got fifteen inches of rain in twenty-four hours. We got just under three inches here, and a lot of places got a lot more. This on top of a couple inches of snow, so there was plenty of water to go around.

In Turner, just south of Salem, (home of the Enchanted Forest, along I-5) the local river jumped its banks. One guy, whose house was flooded years ago, had installed a moat around his house and it seemed to work, but a lot of houses weren't so lucky. Fourteen rivers at record flood stage.

The bridge at the duck pond went under. Lot of tree limbs came down in the gusty winds. Welcome to Oregon in the winter.

My car's battery died, or so I thought. Turned out it was just a loose connection that got wet as I sloshed down the road. Not that I could have fixed it. In my car, to get to the alternator and voltage regulator, you have to take the front bumper off ...

And so it goes ...

Health Food

2012-01-18T14:02:00.000-08:00

In a furtherance of my waffle experiments, behold the next one:

Waffles, chicken chunks in between the pair, smothered with chili. And delicious.

Health food? I said?

Why, yes. The waffles were buckwheat-cornmeal-flaxseed; the chicken was slow-roast rotisserie hormone-free, the skin removed; and the chili homemade, with turkey.

And besides that, I ate an apple, too ...

Vulture Peak

2012-01-18T10:04:00.000-08:00

Okay, here's another writer for you: John Burdett. He chronicles the adventures of Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a fairly-honest cop in Bankok, Thailand. Sonchai, the son of a whore, is a Buddhist, dope-smoker, part-time pimp for his mother's bar, and cat's paw for his boss, Colonel Vikhorn, who is one of the two biggest crooks in the country.

The latest is Vulture Peak, and there's not a whole lot I can tell you about it that will make much sense, because it, like the others in the series, is off-the-wall. Sex, violence, black comedy, I mean, it's not like any other mystery series you have ever read. Dead people, rich people, crazy people, some who are all three; Frankenstein's monster, organ-running, all in there ...

I came across the first one, Bangkok 8, a few years ago, and loved it, and have bought the ensuing novels as they came out.

To say the books are passing strange is to damn them with faint description. Best to get and read them in order, which I think is: Bangkok 8; Bangkok Tattoo; Bangkok Haunts; The Godfather of Katmandu; and Vulture Peak.

Oops ...

2012-01-18T09:29:00.000-08:00

Here's a surprise. Well. Maybe not if you ever watched the show ...

Weather

2012-01-18T09:20:00.000-08:00

Got to love the weather around here. Last night, it began to snow, and by one a.m., we had a couple of inches on the ground. At one-thirty, it turned to rain, and by eight this a.m., it was mostly washed away.

My gumball trees out front? Still haven't lost all their leaves yet ...

Bedside Reading, Sorta

2012-01-17T13:00:00.000-08:00

A quick tally on reading material and what forms it has been in at my house of late.

(According to stats I saw recently, most people in this country are not book readers, i.e., when queried, more people admit they haven't read one book in the previous year than allow they have. Of those who consider themselves readers, the average number of books they consumed in the previous year was nine.

Nine. Sad, isn't it?)

I got my iPad in June, 2011, primarily as a reader, though it has gone from luxury to necessity in other categories since. I started uploading books, magazines, and short stories into it. However, I continued to read treeware. Fewer paper books and magazines and stories that way than before, of course.

I've read about forty books on the iPad in the previous seven months, plus a dozen shorter works. Most of it is fiction. There are nine bios, memoirs, and technical books. Currently, I am in-progress on three novels: 11/22/63, by Stephen King; Vulture Peak, by John Burdett; and Raylan, by Elmore Leonard.

I make it twenty-five books in paper, plus magazines, of which I read two a month treeware. (The New Yorker, I switched to the iPad, that's one issue a week.)

At my peak, I read four-five books a week, and I'm down to half that; however, sixty-five books in seven-and-some months, that's not too bad for an old guy ...

American Sniper

2012-01-17T11:04:00.000-08:00

Just finished reading Chris Kyle's American Sniper ( with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice.)

Kyle, a Navy SEAL, was, when the book was written, the "most lethal" sniper in U.S. military history, somewhere around 160 confirmed kills, and probably more than that, since those numbers tend to be on the conservative side. Middle East, mostly urban Iraq, a couple of really long shots past two thousand meters.

Set 'em up, knock 'em down.

Kyle is a self-effacing teller when it comes to credit in his war stories–he lauds the Army and Marines–talks about how lucky he was. Says he wasn't the best shot out there, just in the right place at the right time to see a lot of action.

He downplays them, but he won multiple silver and bronze stars, along with other ribbons, so he's a certified hero, no question.

SEALs go through heavy-duty training, and we get all that, along with his early background. Essentially, he was a Texas cowboy, a real working one and a rodeo rider before he went into the military, a self-confessed redneck who liked to brawl and shoot, and plenty of both in his memoir. He's a tough guy, and he got chewed on pretty good along the way but sucked it up. He didn't want to be left behind because of injuries, and he couldn't wait to get into the thick of things. Broke his foot during his training and didn't tell anybody so they wouldn't make him wait until the next class.

You don't become a SEAL because you want to push paper as a REMF.

Absolutely a warrior, this guy.

Kyle is the man you want on the wall when the incoming shit arrives. He's not the guy you want to accidentally bump into having a beer down at the local pub. Nor, I would think, as a neighbor who has had a couple too many at the block barbecue.

(Kyle claims to have punched out former UDT (pre-SEAL units) and ex-Governor Jesse Ventura in a SEAL hangout bar in Colorado in 2006 when Ventura supposedly bad-mouthed the troops. Ventura says it never happened. One of a couple of "untrue lies," about him, he says. As opposed, I guess, to a "true lie ... ?"

Somebody needs to look up the definition ...

Supposedly there were witnesses to this altercation, but so far, they haven't stepped up to confirm or deny anything in public ...)

It's a warts-and-all portrait, the book, and Kyle's wife puts in her thoughts from time-to-time, which is an interesting counterpoint. God, family, country, that was Kyle, but in reverse–he was a SEAL first, then a husband and father, and God got what was left over. Great warrior. Lousy husband and father until he mustered out. He admits it, and there is a sense of that being the tip of an iceberg. Some PTSD that is mostly glossed-over, and I'd expect that. Going from a shooting war to the neighborhood Safeway overnight has got to be a major disconnect.

These days, Kyle runs a sniper school and private protection service, Craft International.
Have a look at the T-shirt:

There is an "And then I killed ... " flow to the story once you get to the shooting war, and an offhand shrug as to the doing of that. He was paid to shoot people, that's what he did. He enjoyed the hell out of it. No regrets, and the only time there's a hint of compassion in his telling is when he passes up a shot at a kid sent to fetch an RPG launcher. Other than that, he'd plink anybody who fit the ROE–rules of engagement–and one gets the feeling that sometimes those rules were, um, not altogether observed.

There's a lot of between-the-lines stuff here that seems to me to be way hairier than what is actually told, and what he says is bad enough.

It's an interesting read, and a way to get a feel for how top-of-the-line troops think and function in a war zone, and what it costs them there, and when they come home.

Mo' Blues

2012-01-16T09:28:00.000-08:00

Click here for a link to "My Babe."

We went to Artichoke Music's acoustic room Saturday night to hear Dave Mullany and Terry Robb "Bringing the Blues."

Dave played a set; then Terry did. Then they played a few songs together. Amazes me to see good musicians who haven't practiced together just click with each other and roll along like they'd been jamming every night for years ...

Most it was blues, though there were some side trips into other genres. Rags, primitive–Robb used to play with John Fahey–some gospel, some folk.

Dave is an accomplished guitarist and singer–he also did some stuff on a resonator uke. Terry is so good he makes it look as if he's about to doze off in the middle of blazing lead runs. Both men live in the groove.

Lot of us in the audience were guitarists, and some of us students of one player or the other. I've taken a few lessons from Dave.

The Artichoke room doubles as a cafe, you can squeeze maybe seventy-five people into it and it was full. Just enough amplification, no hair-streaming wall of sound, and the fartherest seats from the stage are close enough you can see all the fretwork as people play.

Made me want to come home and shoot my guitar again. Happens a lot when I see really good players ...

Seriously Cute

2012-01-14T14:20:00.001-08:00

You might need to take an injection of insulin before you watch this–it is really sweet ...

Gee Whiz ...

2012-01-14T12:44:00.000-08:00

Okay, I have to ask: Am I the only person who sees a serious lack of any functional brain activity in the current flap about Marines peeing on dead Taliban fighters?

First off, they are dead and literally don't care. But second?

In what universe is it okay to kill somebody, blowing them full of bullet holes or tossing them a hand grenade, raining down some big artillery, slitting a throat, whatever, but that's no sweat long as you don't piss on them afterward? Pissing on a dead guy is an atrocity? It shows disrespect? Whereas killing him is just peachy?

I mean, it's barking madness, isn't it?

What the fuck is wrong with people, they can think like that?

We are talking seriously fucked-up moral compasses here.

Justified

2012-01-13T23:16:00.000-08:00

Raylan is back, coming Tuesday.

Yeehaw!

Fun Video

2012-01-13T16:29:00.001-08:00

A Corgi herding ducks ...

The Jaguar

2012-01-13T14:42:00.000-08:00

If you are a fan of T. Jefferson Parker's mystery novels–and if you aren't, you should be–then you probably already know the latest Charlie Hood novel is out. The Jaguar is the fifth in the series, the others being, in order, L.A. Outlaws; The Renegades; Iron River; and The Border Lords.

Parker has other books, including a bunch of stand-alones, and they are all worth reading.

The Hood books are all off-the-wall, and they tend to get more so as they go along. There is an element of flat-out fantasy that shows up along the way, and while it is kept ambiguous in an earlier book, I'm really interested to see how Parker eventually pays it off.

The set-up is that Hood, a Los Angeles Sheriff's deputy, gets loaned to the ATF, and winds up in various adventures with gun-runners and drug cartels. There are colorful supporting characters, including the son of a woman with whom Hood was in love with, who is related to an infamous Mexican Robin Hood, Joaquin Murietta, whose head she keeps in a jar, and ... well, much else I'd tell you would be a spoiler, so I'm going to leave it at that.

Well, okay, a little more: In the latest, the McGuffin is a pregnant woman who is kidnapped, and a ticking clock thus started–in ten days she will be skinned alive. The guy who does it likes her, respects and admires her, but is going to allow it to happen anyway, unless certain conditions are met.

The book wanders through the Mexican countryside, into the jungle, this way and that; there's a hurricane, a flood, crocodiles, narcocorrido music, lepers, big money, a lot of shooting and people getting killed, and psychopaths every which way, one of whom is waaay more than he appears ...

What I recommend is that you buy them all and then read them in order. The experience will be much fuller. A fine and bumpy ride.

Caveat: Early on, Jefferson made some gun mistakes, for which he was called to task. He has better vetting now, but he's not a gun guy. Not enough to put me off him, but worth a couple of head-shakes. Just so you know.

Matadors Go Wide

2012-01-11T16:06:00.000-08:00

So, after a note from Dan Moran urging me to it, I uploaded the rest of the Matador novels to Amazon.com. In theory, all of them should be available there starting tomorrow. In theory.

Dan will continue to offer them on the Fat Sam site, and will likely clump some of them together into omnibuses–omnibi?–in the somewhen future. (He got a new job, lotta money, and he's apt to be busy for a time. Good on him.)

Anyway, you should be able to see the list by clicking on the amazon.com button down there on the right, urging you to buy even more ebooks. Or here, starting manana.

Editor's Note: The titles are all live, save for Black Steel; I tagged it incorrectly with the info for Brother Death, so I fixed that. Twelve hours, so they say. If anybody is waiting and tapping their foot, it's the second-to-last in the series–read the others first and get back to it. Or drop by Dan's store and get it there. Costs the same, and you get more versions that you can read on a plethora of devices anyhow.

Use It or Lose It

2012-01-10T10:10:00.000-08:00

"Rust never sleeps;" and "Use it or lose it." Two old sayings worn smooth by time and repetition, but as true as they ever were.

Why mention it today? Two activities bring this up for me: First, a guitar piece, El McMeen's dropped-D instrumental arrangement of the old love song "The Water is Wide," which I used to could play from memory but now can't.

The other is how tight my hamstrings and low back have gotten because I haven't paid attention to keeping them stretched. Strong and flexible are better than either alone.

For me, loss of guitar repertoire happens because a piece stops getting played and fades from memory. In my case, it's because I started spending more time on the pieces I practice with the other old folks at the Closet Musicians' jam. When you have more than you can play in a single session, some of it doesn't get practiced.

There are folks who have immense repertoires, who can play a hundred songs without going blank on the lyrics or forgetting a chord change. And if you play a piece often enough and long enough, it does tend to burn itself into your memory. "House of the Risin' Sun," in A-minor is one that I should be able to remember after I'm dead, given how long I've played it.

Stuff I practiced for a couple years that I haven't played in a couple years? Not so much. Robbing Yarrow to play McCartney . . .

I have noticed that if I go back to a mostly-forgotten piece, muscle-memory sometimes will give me a nudge in places and my fingers seem to be able to do a five or six-note run on their own. Somewhere down in the mental junkyard, some portion of it is not completely rusted through.

Ditto the tight muscles groups. As long as I can do the physical things I normally do, the stretches to be able to do just a little more tend to get put onto the back burner. But what happens, insidiously, is that the djurus stop going quite so low, or the range-of-motion on a hoisted weight is maybe a hair less. It sneaks up on you.

Yesterday, you could bend at the waist and put your hands on the floor; today, you can't scratch your knee unless you sit down. Bad. Bad.

Do I need to be able to drop into a full split? No. Would I like to be able to do so? Sure. But the cost versus the gain is a factor; I'm not going there. However, there is a balance point and I do need to achieve that.

Fortunately, I know what to do to remedy both of these creeping forms of entropy and it's simple: Practice the stuff I want to keep, and take a little extra time during the workout to lengthen the muscles that have shortened.

There are three steps involved here:

First, you have to be aware that there is a problem.

Second, you have to determine the solution.

Third, you execute the remedy.

Easy to remember with the acronym: BAD SEX ...

"Simple" and "easy" aren't the same, of course, and sometimes that third step is a killer, but the three-step approach is useful for a lot of what you run into in your life.

What Were They Thinking?

2012-01-09T19:13:00.001-08:00

Connections to Margaritaville

2012-01-09T12:16:00.000-08:00

Here's how the game Connections went this time:

I came across a nod to Key West, Florida, in an article I was reading, some offhand reference. So I went into the Apple bookstore and found a book called Mile Marker Zero, by William McKeen. It was a history, sort of, focused on the late sixties and early seventies, post-Pill, pre-AIDS, centered around the literary community there. Key West was one of Papa Hemingway's haunts before he moved to Cuba, and there were a plethora of other writers, who came there after they were famous or got so while they were living there.

Among the players are Hunter S. Thompson, Tom McGuane, Elizabeth Ashely, Margo Kidder, with passing references to Tennesee Williams and Truman Capote, and there is a lot of boozing, screwing, mate-swapping, and dope-smuggling going on, amongs the manly-men and womanly-women ...

You probably know that when Jimmy Buffett sings about Margaritaville, he's singing about Key West. Buffett, a so-so country singer, would up in Key West in the early seventies through the auspices of Jerry Jeff Walker. Went from sleeping on somebody's couch and getting shooed off doorstoops to fairly successful and rich. Once Buffett's music began focusing on the scene there, and he came up with a unique sound that spawned hit records and parrot-heads and franchise bars ...

There were a slew of other moves and shakers in the literary community down in the tropics and most of them seemed to party long and hard. Booze, sex, music, it was apparently quite the scene. Eventually, most of them moved away.

So whilst reading the McKeen book, which is a lot of fun, I came across the name Tom Corcoran who was one of the boys in the club. Corcoran eventually went on to become a writer, and did a series of mystery novels set in Key West, featuring a photographer named Rutledge. When he makes references to various folks, they ring true, because he was there.

In one of the books, there's a reference wherein his girlfriend grabs a baseball cap from Robicheaux's Dock and Bait Shop, in New Iberia, Louisiana. Dave Robicheaux is, of course, the protagonist in a bunch of novels by James Lee Burke ...

Art

2012-01-09T10:18:00.000-08:00

Photo by Penny Meyer, March, 2011.

Came across this when I read a posting on a website about the artist Carsten Van Osten, an artist, who among other work, like comics for Disney, paints miniature figures.

Always impressed by people who have this kind of talent.

Cramp

2012-01-06T17:41:00.000-08:00

Most recent silat class, I apparently overworked my left sartorius muscle. For those of you anatomically-challenged, this is the longest muscle in the body, a skinny strap, originating at the anterior-superior iliac spine. This is at top of the leg. The muscle crosses to the medial side (inseam) and inserts on the upper tibia, via the pes anserinus, the co-joined tendon. The muscle aids in flexion, abduction, and lateral rotation of the hip, and flexing of the knee.

If you step on a piece of gum and it sticks to your shoe and you lift your foot to look at the sole? It helps with all those actions. We have a kick that looks kind of like that, a hacky-sack sort of motion, and we did a fair amount of those last session.

We worked legs pretty good overall, did a lot of kicking, twisting, sweeping, all like that.

Um. Anyway, I was sitting in my office chair, playing my guitar, knees bent, both feet flat on the floor when all of a sudden that sucker seized up and it did not want to let go. I managed to stand and stretch it out, but boy, howdy, was that a not-fun surprise.

Cramp! Cramp! Ah, shit–cramp!

All better now.

As one of my correspondents here has pointed out, it's hell getting old.

Still beats the option, though ...

Wafflewich

2012-01-06T17:17:00.000-08:00

My wife made extra waffles this morning, and when it came time for lunch, I thought to myself, "Say, I've never had a sliced turkey and turkey hot dog sandwich on waffles before!"

So now I have.

Pretty good, too. The waffles are whole-grain, with various kinds of healthy germs and like that them. Meat, mustard, waffles ...

Scratch that one off the list ...

Amusing

2012-01-06T10:20:00.000-08:00

Saw a posting on Facebook I liked:

You're the product of four billion years of evolution–

Act like it.

And if you aren't into evolution, but deism or theism?

You were created by a Supreme Being and given dominion over the world–

Stop screwing around ...

Marketing

2012-01-05T15:43:00.000-08:00

I saw this while checking out of a market earlier today.

Maybe it's just me: Is it a major selling point that a snack with enough preservatives to outlast Twinkies and to keep something edible until the cockroaches take over is gluten free ... ?

Heard about the guy suing Mountain Dew because he found a dead mouse in a can of drink? Their response is that the stuff would have dissolved the mouse before he opened the can.

Is that comforting to anybody ... ?

Another Tragedy v2

2012-01-05T11:30:00.000-08:00

Eighth grade kid in Texas was killed by local police when he waved a handgun at them and refused to put it down. There was a building full of witnesses heard them yelling that over and over before they fired.

There is the usual aw-fuck-it! head shaking about how something like this can happen–especially since the kid's weapon was actually a pellet gun.

Kid punched somebody in the nose, pulled out the pistol, and then the police, answering a student-with-a-gun call, took him down.

His parents are in shock and stunned grief, and they wonder, why did the police have to shoot him three times? Why not only once? Or the unspoken one: Why at all? It wasn't even a real gun! He was a middle school boy, only fifteen. (Turned out it was twice; the head wound was a cut from the fall.)

Look at the two images above. Can you tell which is the 9mm pistol and which is the pellet gun copy? If you can, do you think you could do so if somebody had it in their hand and was pointing it at you?

Utah police kicked a door in Ogden, and six of them got shot, one fatally so, by somebody in the house. (Or maybe friendly fire, apparently that is a possibility.) But even so ...

Would you be counting your shots in either situation?

Over and over again, I bump up against this: If a bunch of LEO's pointing guns at you tell you to drop your weapon and you aren't ready to meet your maker? Drop the fucking thing. It's a lot easier to sort out the legalities if you are still around to do so.

Note: Airsoft and other pellet guns are often marked with a plastic day-glo red or orange ring at the muzzle, so they are instantly identifiable as such. See the images below:

How long do you figure it will be before some psycho realizes that dipping the muzzle of his real pistol into day-glow red paint will give him an advantage if the LEO standing across from him thinks he's got a pellet gun?

In California, a bill to make pellet guns of brightly-colored or clear plastic failed to pass recently, but that's probably not a bad idea. The clear, anyway:

But the bright colors? Not so much. Have a look at the SIG P238 and the Glock:

Jammed Thumb Blues

2012-01-04T11:14:00.000-08:00

Somewhen at the gym yesterday, I managed to jam my left thumb. Dunno exactly how, only that it got sore as the day went on, swelled a bit, and by evening, was bothering me enough I had to tape it, ice it, elevate it, yadda, yadda ...

My left thumb has been sprained so many times there's no connective tissue left that isn't scarred. I tape it before every silat class, but I haven't had a problem with it in the gym before. Of course, these days, I can literally sprain it taking my socks off, I'm not careful ...

I even put up a YouTube vid a while back on how to tape the sucker. Course, it doesn't do you any good if you don't do it ...

Live slow, die old, leave a hideous corpse ...

Paint Program

2012-01-03T15:57:00.000-08:00

Been fooling around with Corel Painter and the Wacom Bamboo Pad I got for Christmas. Top is the photo, shot with my iPad. Second is the "painting." Cool, huh?

Stick 'Em Danno

2012-01-03T15:30:00.000-08:00

I posted on this once before, but I came across some pictures while I was cleaning out files and thought I'd stick some of them up.

I know some expert knifemakers. And while I have the tool-using ability of a bull walrus in heat, I decided five or six years ago that I needed to make a knife, just to see if I could.

I sort-of could. Barely. And crudely. Real knifemakers just smile and shake their heads when they see it, but I didn't have much to work with insofar as my native ability.

What I did was, I annealed a machete, using a small blowtorch. Then I outlined the full-tang design, cut it out, using hacksaws and a Dremel. I heated the thing up until it was a straw-color, then quenched it in heavy oil. Polished and all like that, sharpened it, put a set of faux-ivory scales and a guard of water buffalo horn, held together with homemade brass rivets.

I imagine the first guy who figured out how to forge iron did a better job on his first knife, along with everybody who's operated a bellows and a grinder since, but I was inordinately pleased for several reasons.

First, I started with parts and wound up with a product that was the sum of those.

Second, I finished it, without going mad or burning the house down.

Third, I gained an appreciation for the real knifemakers with whom I did business.

There are a few of those whose blades I came to own that I can name, in no particular order: Steve Rollert, Shiva Ki, Mushtaq Ali Ansari, Chuck Pippin, Jeff Crowner. And after having tried to do what they do?

I really appreciate 'em ...

Work Out

2012-01-03T14:22:00.000-08:00

It's amusing to see all the new faces at the gym just after New Year's Day. All the resolutions, and how long they (don't) last ...

Local paper has a front page piece today on the phenomenon–people who sign up for gym membership, go once or twice–or not at all.

Four out of five people who have a gym membership don't use it, according to the article.

Four out of five.

I find that fascinating, though not surprising. Back when I was teaching martial arts, it was commonly known that the white belts paid the freight. People who sign up, get a uniform, last maybe a month, sometimes two or three, then quit.

What I find really funny is the lack of focus from the noobs who do show up. This morning, I went down to the aerobics room to use the back hyperextension rack, and the bikes and walkers and stairclimbers were all full. But the intent isn't there. They don't want to work out as much as they want to be able to say they worked out.

I'm sorry, but a guy pedaling lackadaisically on the stationary bike, listening to music on his iPod while reading a copy of The Ladies Home Journal? He's not going himself much good, and not nearly as much as he would if he concentrated on working up a sweat instead of just passing the time ...

Bookery

2012-01-03T10:55:00.000-08:00

Okay, so, one more pass to polish, and the book ms for The Ramal Extraction goes off to Ace.

The contract is still very much last-century–according to it, I'm supposed to provide a hard copy and an e-version–though my editor tells me not to bother with the print, it's all electronic nowadays.

Actually, it has been for a while. I don't think I've printed out hard copy on the last few submissions I've done–all the Clancy stuff with Tekno was via electronic files, as was the Predator book for Dark Horse and the Indiana Jones and zombies novel. Recent pitches for this and that, all done over the wire. The preferred format seems to be Word™, though I have translators that will allow conversion into pretty much whatever.

My editor, bless her, is very understanding. Even though the book is due now, pretty much any time during the month is okay with her.

Next one is due in September, and if I don't dawdle, I should be able to get one of the Matador e-titles done before I have to start on the next Cutter's Wars. Two books in eight months shouldn't be a problem, since I have a quarter of Churl drafted.

Of course, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions ...

Computer Confusion

2011-12-31T13:42:00.000-08:00

Current word-processing software is pretty neat, there are all kinds of bells and whistles unavailable back in the early desktop day, especially in the way one edits a document. Layout, styles, spellcheck, even grammar-check, though both the latter have drawbacks–writing science fiction or fantasy, you will likely use a lot of words the program won't recognize; and sometimes you will use a correctly-spelled word, but it's the wrong one: "sea," instead of "see." Of course, it could be any word: "Seal" or "Platypus." Spellchecker won't care.

The grammar checker might catch that, and certainly proper grammar has its place, but not so much in a novel. Lot of things I do deliberately that the grammar-checker says are wrong.

Since I'm in charge, we do it my way.

What is the old Churchill cavil? "Something I won't put up with." should properly be rendered as "Something up with which I will not put." to avoid ending the sentence in a preposition. Uh huh. Right.

Among the features in WP software is the auto-word count. Back in the day, you took your manuscript, picked three pages at random, and counted the lines and words per line on each page, multiplied that, then divided the total by three, to come up with a typical word-per-page count. (Between thin dialog and thick description, it did average out, and it was important to know that printers who charged by the page didn't differentiate twixt the two, a page was a page.)

Multiply that average you got by the number of pages you had, and that was what you wrote in the upper right hand corner, to give the editor and printer some idea of how long a book it was gonna be. And you rounded it off: "About 75,000 words." Not "About 75,102 words."
Because right away doing that, you'd mark yourself as somebody who didn't know the difference between "about" and "exactly ..."

My typewriter days, I averaged about 250 words per page, that being double-spaced pica and with one-inch margins all around.

Depending on the print size and page layout in the finished book, the ratio was somewhere in the vicinity of 10:7; i.e., for a 400 pp ms, you'd get 280 pp in print, more or less.

Early WP software, I adjusted fonts and spacing to give me the same as the typewriter did, and it made it simple to do the math. Four pages = a thousand words. Wanted 100,000 words? You needed 400 pp.

Nowadays, the machine gives you the number. Some of the software, you don't even have to ask, there's a running total at the bottom.

The problem is that none of the software does it quite the same. They tend to get close, but sometimes close is a relative term.

Current book-in-progress, the first draft in Pages–that's the Mac's default WP–the total words when I got to -30- came to 76,045. Since I was aiming for around 75K, that's close enough.

But if I check that file in OpenOffice.org's slimmed-down version of MS Word? the count is 77,449, which is more than 1400 words difference. How come?

They used different parameters, apparently. The way I learned it was five-letters-and-space equals a word, but obviously both aren't using the same method.

What is more interesting is that I have Pages installed on my iPad, and when I open the book there, the count is 75,965. Now, that's only eighty words difference from the Mac, no big deal, but still, it makes you realize that the computer version and the iPad version of the same software are not the same.

Caveat numerator ...

There's a Draft ...

2011-12-29T17:42:00.000-08:00

So: Through the first draft on the current novel-in-progress. Still needs another pass to add or subtract this 'n' that, smooth out the rough spots, but my Writer's Prayer was answered once again:

"Lord, don't let me die before I get the book done ..."

Because of the constraints of the contract, I am not able to put excerpts of it up here yet. Probably as we get closer to pub date, that will become possible.

When I get it polished, I may ask for a reader to run through it and see if it works. Given the time-crunch–it's technically due in three days, that might not happen; I'm not expecting the decks to be entirely cleared come New Year's Day over to the book house, but you never know. We'll see.

I'm pleased. It is (intentionally) leaner than what I have been doing of late. I pitched these at 75,000 words and it's hair over that. Might go up a tad on the rewrite, but not that much.

The book moves pretty fast, has a fair amount of action, guns going off, knives slicing, all like that.

Dunno when it is slotted for publication, probably some time late in 2012.

Cutter's Wars: The Ramal Extraction.

The next one's working title is, Cutter's Wars: The Vastalimi Gambit.

Dunno what the third one will be called, I haven't gotten around to doing anything on it yet. I may wait until the second one gets cranking and see what calls to me.

Addendum: When you run the spellchecker on a science fiction manuscript? You spend a lot of time tapping the "Learn" button ...

Rise of the Singer Songwriters

2011-12-29T13:16:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Sheila Weller's braided biography, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carley Simon–and the Journey of a Generation. It's a fun read, and showcases the best-known of the women singer/songwriters, starting with King in the late 1950s, picking up Mitchell and Simon along the way through the sixties and seventies.

They are much alike, but just as much different, these three. At eighteen, King was, with her first husband, a drone at the Brill Building, churning out hits for doo-wop rock groups in the late fifties and early sixties. This continued until the British Invasion changed the music scene in America.

At various times, they all had chart toppers on their own. Aside from the hits-for-money, King's Tapestry was the best-selling album by a woman for years, and still might be.

Mitchell's mostly-autobiographical songs, often covered by others, include "Both Sides Now," and "Woodstock," and "Big Yellow Taxi."

Simon's "You're So Vain," had everybody wondering who she was singing about, and there was a long list from which to choose. In what she calls her "belle of the ball year and a half," she had affairs with Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Mick Jagger, before she hooked up with James Taylor. Former lovers allow that they'd never been with anybody who enjoyed sex as much as she did. (And for the record, none of the men listed above are the so-vain character in her song; according to most sources, he is a blend of several different guys.)

Mitchell came out of Canada and the folk scene. Simon's parents were well-off–the surname come from the book company, Simon & Schuster. While King married early and frequently, Mitchell and Simon were less frequently monogamous.

All were connected to James Taylor, one of the first male singer/songwriters. King was in a working relationship with him; Mitchell was his lover for a time; and Simon had a short-lived, stormy marriage to Taylor, who was in and out of rehab for heroin addiction from an early age.

Weller points out that the three came of age with The Pill, and how that affected their behavior, along with a generation of women. There is a focus on the post-feminist aspect of their lives, and the turbulent times, and this is interesting, if now and then a tad overmuch in the "Right on, Sisters!" department.

It's gossipy, name-dropping, and full of little tidbits that give you the flavor of what it was like for a woman to come up in the music business in those days. Weller tells a story about how Carly Simon came to be associated with Albert Grossman, a club-owner who became a high-end manager early in the folk music days, with a stable that included Peter, Paul & Mary, the Band, Bob Dylan, and Janis Joplin. (An aggressive fellow who did things his way, Grossman made Noel Stookey change his name to "Paul," and forbade Mary Travers from exposing her skin to the sun, so as to keep that pale white look. Would they have done as well being called Peter, Noel, & Mary? If Mary had gotten a tan, would that have killed the trio?)

According to Simon, Grossman, a pudgy fellow and married, waved at the casting couch and "... offered me his body in exchange for worldly success. Sadly, his body was not the kind you would easily sell yourself for."

She declined, she said, and he didn't hold it against her, but worked to get her star aloft ...

I'm still in the middle of it, just leading into Woodstock, so the best is yet to come ...

Editor's Note:

While you have to admire this trio for their musical accomplishments, their personal lives took big beatings along the way. What love they seemed to find was in bits and pieces, and they were all much married and divorced (or in one case, widowed, due to a heroin OD) and none of them found anybody they could keep a relationship going with, least not when this book was finished a couple years back. Maybe that's what drove the engines of their talent, that lack of partner continuity.

Big price to pay, that.

MI4

2011-12-27T15:20:00.000-08:00

SFX: DIAL UP LALO SHIFRIN'S THEME FROM MISSION IMPOSSIBLE:

Saw MI4-Ghost Protocol with my son and grandson last week. Tom Cruise, doing some of his own stunts, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, and the pocket review is simple: If you liked the other Mission Impossible movies, you'll probably like this one. A little more humor in it, not as dire as some of them, and a nice twist fans of the series will enjoy.

Great locations and beautiful photography, from Budapest to Moscow to Dubai to India. Impressive stunt gags, brutal fight scenes, and the usual car and foot chases.

Big sandstorm and tall buildings ...

It has all the bells and whistles–self-destructing messages, delivered via phones and panels on ratty boxcars. Whiz-bang electronic toys that crack locks in a second, present parallax-free holograms to fool watchers, guns, bombs, gecko-pad gloves that let you spider up a glass wall, a gorgeous BMW concept car. An outrageous camera built into a contact lens. A device that creates a perfect 3D mask. A float-in-the-air magnetically-operated suit, and a cute robot to make it work ...

CONTINUE MUSIC OVER

Of course, half the high-tech gadgets fail at just the wrong instant, necessitating heroic emergency actions or sudden-death. It can't be too easy, no fun in that ...

Got crazed physicists, stolen atomic launch codes, a nuclear armageddon in the works, a gorgeous femme fatale wetwork op, handsome CIA spooks, and the geeky electronics guy who can wave his hands at a destroyed computer and fix it. A horny billionaire.

This time, the IM force is blamed for something they didn't do and the Secretary is forced to cut them off, so it's just four of them, one of whom is supposedly naught but an analyst without field experience dragged into it.

High production values, well-acted, funny bits, an impossible way to pull off the caper and save the IM force's bacon, nothing really wrong with it, but ...

It seemed a little flat, overall. Had some moments. And a bad guy who seemed a lot more durable than I would have expected, but since none of it is remotely believable, that's a shrug on top of a bunch of others. You go for the ride, and you can't stop and give it the fish eye.

Almost most an E-ticket ride, but maybe not quite up to the Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland ...

END THEME

Gun Grips

2011-12-26T13:12:00.000-08:00

I was on eBay recently and came across some cool-looking spalted Maple burl pistol grips by Randy Frantz, selling as RTF. Frantz is a gun guy in Arizona, and I have a fondness for Maple burl, as evidenced by the wood Chuck and I picked out for the handle of the CK, upon which he is working.

"Spalted" means that the wood was infested with a fungus at some point, and the resulting pattern as the wood and fungi chewed on each other can sometimes be quite attractive.

Good price, nice grips, check 'em out.

Survived Another Christmas

2011-12-26T11:16:00.000-08:00

Happy to report we are still here. And pleased to be in a situation in which I get to eat turkey and dressing and mashed potatoes and gravy and punkin' pie, given all those folks in the world who can't afford to do so.

It's a little rock in a backwater galaxy and my part of it is tiny indeed, but I'm glad to be here.

We had family over, exchanged gifts, ate, drank, laughed. Talked to distant family. All was well. The gym beckons: Yo, fat boy! Better get down here! (Watching basketball off and on all day didn't take all that much effort ...)

And got the lamp picture above from my son and daughter-in-law. Surprised it took them this long. If you don't get it, you've never seen A Christmas Story (aka The BB Gun Story.)

I hope you all had a good Christmas, too.

Hypnoglyph

2011-12-25T11:12:00.000-08:00

If you have an iPad (or iPhone/iPod) and you are looking for a way to burn free time you probably don't have, check into a program called Uzu.

Back in our hippie days, we had a little toy, I can't recall what it was called, but which was essentially a slab of clear plastic with a flexible backing and some kind of oil emulsion under it. You dragged your fingertip along the backing and got a shiny, colored line under the clear covering. You could vary it with pressure, use more than one finger, and create some cool, mind-blowing patterns.

The colors, man, the colors!

Uzu is the electronic counterpart, allowing you to create all manner of interactive foofaraw on the screen. Sucks you right in.

The grandsons had a ball with it yesterday. My son-in-law started playing with it and finally said, "You better take this away now ..."

Warning: Don't give it to anybody who is stoned, because I expect you won't get your device back until the battery dies.

Far out, dude ...

Dazed and Confused

2011-12-23T11:25:00.000-08:00

Reading in bed last night and I fell asleep early; earlier than I have in years. I'm usually a late-to-bed, late-to-rise person, an owl rather than a wren. Midnight, I'm usually still rattling around.

Yesterday started early, fetching a repaired laptop computer at the mall three days before Christmas. Even mad dogs and Englishmen avoid the mall at this time of year, so I went early to get in and out before the lemmings arrived.

Then there was a long slog on the book-in-progress, new stuff, cut-and-paste, rearranging this 'n' that. This was followed by a nearly a two-hour drive to get to class, all the loons on the road blocking my path and–I am certain–actively trying to smash me.

Then there was a harder-than-usual workout there, even plyometrics, who expected that?

And I was fasting, because I usually do that on Thursdays, the breath mint notwithstanding, so it wasn't as if I didn't have cause to be tired ...

But: What this resulted in was walking up two hours earlier than my norm. And I was awake, couldn't drop back off.

So, get up Steve. Pad down the hall.

I sat down at computer and went into work-fugue, and when I blinked and looked around, three hours had zipped past.

Great for getting pages in the done column, but given the time I started, it spaced me right out. I'm not used to being up at such an ungodly hour, putting work in the basket before the sun even comes up.

Had an online appointment I missed, unaware that today was Friday, and still haven't gotten around to eating anything yet.

Then again, given the various sprints I've been making through the draft, it looks as though the week off to visit the folks in Louisiana won't affect the delivery date of the novel to Ace next month. (I tend to cut deadlines pretty close, but I seldom miss one.) So, I'm almost through the first draft of CUTTER'S WARS: The Ramal Extraction. And it's going pretty well, if I do say so myself. It's not the Matadors, but I expect fans of them might find something to like in this one.

If I don't get back here before Christmas, I hope you and yours have happy holidays. If you can be with somebody who makes you smile? Go for it ...

White on White

2011-12-22T08:49:00.000-08:00

On record to be the driest December in these parts ever. Almost no rain, and no snow this month. (In 2008 around this time, we had a record snowfall, a foot on the ground at Steve's house. Gotta love Oregon weather.)

Which is not to say we don't have water in the air. The last couple weeks, we've had fog, hanging on all day some days, and on nights like last evening, it has gotten cold enough so the fog has frozen.

I used to wonder, how was it possible to have fog when the temperature was below freezing? Why didn't it just, you know, freeze and fall out the sky?

Same reason running water doesn't go solid as fast as standing water–that motion, heat, all like that.

However, when the things around you are below freezing–roofs, trees, sidewalks, spider webs–then the fog does coat that in a nice layer of rime.

So one could easily have a white Christmas without any snow ...

Speed Bump on the Information Highway

2011-12-21T12:56:00.000-08:00

My wife's Macbook Pro started acting up last night–printer and scanner were not printing and scanning, and when I restarted the computer, I got the Lonely Silver Screen: The restart sosumi, yes, but no Apple logo, no spinning ball, and naught else ...

So, off to the Apple Store, having first made an appointment to sit at the Genius Bar. Tech wired it up, fiddled with this and that, and declared the hard drive done crashed.

More of a problem with laptops, and since this one was functioning as a desktop most of the time, two-and-a-half years isn't bad.

They can replace the drive easily enough, have it done in a day or two. Maybe recover and port the data across, but if not, fortunately we have been running Time Machine, which automatically backs up all new input every hour, so restoration of the system should be as easy as checking a box when we power things up again.

Out of warranty, of course ...

It's always something.

The CK Sharpens ...

2011-12-20T11:57:00.000-08:00

Chuck Pippin's latest update, roughing out the guard for the cylinder knife. It's a heavy, thick, tsuba-style protector, and while tusba are usually round, or sometimes squared-off, this one is oval to facilitate a sheath carry. The weight will, I think, help the balance stay where we want it on the CK.

If you look in the b.g. to the lower right, just under the tang, you can see the unfinished handle.

This is sooo cool!

I'd Rather Have A Bottle In Front of Me ...

2011-12-20T11:41:00.000-08:00

... Than a frontal lobotomy ...

My youngest grandson, Nate, could get a job right now working for Mattel as a break-tester. Want to see if a new toy will hold up? Give it to Nate–no matter how indestructible you think it is? He can break it.

Behold Woody, the star of Toy Story. This is Woody v5 or 6, I think. The earlier versions are all dead, Jim. One of them was beheaded completely; by that, I don't mean Nate somehow worked the head off; I mean he destroyed the head, leaving a jagged neck.

Buzz Lightyear is gimpy, having lost a foot, a hand, and his wings. Jessie's innards have been pulled out to hang from her back.

We don't even want to talk about poor headless Bullseye.

If you are captured by the enemy, don't let them give you to the children ...

On the Road to Find Out

2011-12-17T15:32:00.000-08:00

Tooling along in the novel-in-progress, about which I will be intentionally-vague, and suddenly had one of those mini-epiphanies that sometimes slap me upside the head. A direction in which I had been driving the entire book, aiming for a particular destination, exactly there, knowing who did what, to whom, and why, suddenly just ... changed.

And of a moment, I clicked on the blinker and got into the turn lane. Didn't expect it, was perfectly happy with the route I'd been on, but there I went.

I'll have to fix stuff on the rewrite to lay the new direction in and make sure it makes sense, and that will involve some cut-and-paste, added or subtracted wordage hither and yon, like that, but that's okay. (And actually, not as much as I first thought, because on an unconscious level, I had to know this was coming–there are clues that pointed a reader this way, even though I didn't consciously put them in.)

Tap the brake, into the turn lane, go that way, and it'll be a better drive.

Or at least I think it will be, which goes to the same end, doesn't it? I'm at the wheel.

Sort of.

I usually don't natter on about the creative process of writing. My working motto has always been "Just tell the story," and this is sometimes more akin to watching it unfold and writing it down than it is being out in front of it leading.

How the Zeitgeist delivers its payload is something of a mystery to most writers I know, and doesn't bear too close a scrutiny: Look too hard, you might spook the golden goose, I don't want that.

Where do I get my crazy ideas? Not as important as that I get them at all.

Writing for me is this kind of schizophrenia–obviously as the writer, the tale is coming from my brain and through my fingers; on the other hand, there is a sense sometimes of being split into two people: I am also the watcher who sees and hears the story being shown and told by some invisible-but-present Muse. In this head, it's as if it is as much a surprise to me as it might be to a reader.

Sounds nutty to a lot of people, and I agree. But there it is.

The unconscious mind is a wondrous thing. It will chug along in the background, filing this away, getting rid of that, rearranging these things, and sometimes, it rings the bell and announces its presence: Hey, there, Steve. Look, I know we were going to take the interstate and drive straight through to our destination, but check it out, there is this scenic back road, the sign post is just ahead, and what say we go that way instead? Trust me, it'll be a more interesting trip if we do, see? And haven't I been setting it up all along?

Son-of-a-bitch, I believe you are right! Let's go!

Stay tuned for more adventures in the sunshine of my spotty mind ...

Just in Case You Missed This One ..

2011-12-16T14:22:00.000-08:00

From The Oregonian:

"Police arrested a man who allegedly assaulted three people with a blue light saber at a Hayden Island Toys R Us Wednesday night.

A 9-1-1 caller reported the incident about 9:50 p.m. and said the man was inside the store, 1800 Jantzen Beach Center, swinging the "Star Wars" weapon of choice at customers, said Sgt. Pete Simpson, a spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau. While the caller was on the phone, the man then left the store — light saber in hand — and walked out to the parking lot.

Officers tried to arrest the man, but he kept swinging the light saber at them, Simpson said. One tried to use his Taser on the suspect but the device didn't work.

Another officer used his Taser and made contact, but the man knocked one of the wires away with the light saber.

("Crap! The Force is strong in this one!")

The officers finally arrested the man after grabbing him and pinning him to the ground. The suspect, identified only as a 33-year-old Hillsboro man, was treated by medics at the scene and taken to an area hospital for a mental evaluation. He faces 'several criminal charges' after he is evaluated, Simpson said."

They took him in for a mental evaluation. You think?

How you like to be the officers getting that call? "That's what I said, we have a man with a light saber attacking patrons in the Toys R Us. Go get 'em, Luke ..."

Keeping Portland weird has never been a problem ...

Gotta Love This One

2011-12-16T10:24:00.000-08:00

Turn the sound down, if barking dogs aren't appropriate for your venue.
(Courtesy of Steve Van Harn.)

Oglaf

2011-12-16T10:05:00.000-08:00

I don't know how I missed this one, but my buddy Denny sent me a compilation of these strips, which you can find on the Oglaf Website. A perverse and twisted and profane web comic series, mostly NSFW (not safe for work) set in a really alternative-Middle Ages, with a wide cast, and featuring the mistreated Apprentice of a nasty magical Mistress.

A book that opens with a cum sprite from enchanted semen running to blab to the Mistress that the Apprentice is jerking off? Not everybody's cup of tea.

Really well-drawn by Australian artist Trudy Cooper, it ranges from funny to really funny, and while there is redeeming social value in it, let me not kid you, it's pretty much porn, straight, gay, and other ...

Fortunately, perverse, twisted, and profane is right up my alley.

As they say on the website, "Ruin Christmas with this thoughtless gift ..."

I went to buy Denny the T-shirt of Mistress and her magic falcon with the laser-beam eyes, but they were sold out.

One of my favorites is the one-pager "The Fountain of Doubt."

Lack of Critical Thinking

2011-12-14T14:42:00.000-08:00

The Occupy movement shut down three of the Port of Portland's terminals day before yesterday. For some vague notion that this is going to rectify problems with international trade, or that some bank has a piece of a shipping company, or to protect the dockworkers, or whichever, they stopped traffic coming and going into the gate(s) for the day.

Is it just me, that I am struck by the unthinking, and selfish actions people will go to in order to make some arcane point? Four hundred dockworkers took a day off without pay. Dozens of truck drivers trying to deliver local products to the port were turned back at the gate, and they ate the fuel costs and payment for their loads.

That's a great Christmas presents for the blue-collar working folks, isn't it? Sorry, but we need to do this for the greater good and all, and if you can't make your rent or your car payment or swing that bottle of medicine for granny this month? Too bad. We must all make sacrifices.

"Sorry for any inconvenience while we fix our Democracy," the sign says. "Inconvenient" is having to take a detour that puts you couple blocks off your route. Losing a days' wages or the delivery price for your trucking run hits the 99% everybody blathers about in the wallet.

And you know what? It won't fix anything. Who are you trying to change?

You think this is going to gain you friends and influence the working stiffs to see your point of view? The dockworkers and truckers were on your side, but this isn't the way to keep them there. It's all fun and games until somebody gets hurt, and stabbing somebody in the pocketbook who doesn't deserve it? Bad tactics.

Somebody needs to take a page from the Scarecrow here, and get a fucking brain.

Hit the Road, Jack

2011-12-14T14:22:00.000-08:00

Regular classical, left, half-size right.

One of the things I really missed when I took the big metal bird to Louisiana was my guitar. I play pretty much every day, hour to an hour and a half, and even though I didn't have that much spare time when I was there, I'd have found some to do music. I could have used it.

Last time I flew to Dallas for a con, I took my full-sized guitar, and the jet was big enough so I could get it into the overhead bin. On the most recent flight to Louisiana, I had to switch flights at DFW, and the little plane they put us on to BTR was one of those one-seat-on-the left, two-on-the-right crop-dusters, and there not only isn't enough room for a full-sized classical guitar in a case in the overhead, the flight was full enough so that normal carry-on that would fit had to be gate-checked from a lack of room. Either that, or fly holding your bag out the window ...

It's not my intent to spend any quality time on aeroplanes in the near future, but given the medical situation with my folks, another flight back down home is a matter of "when," and not "if." So I decided to look around for a little travel guitar.

I looked at Martin's Backpacker. Didn't like the way it felt, nor sounded. Even looked at a guitalele–six-strings, but a baritone uke's body, but it's tuned in A, and I didn't like that way that sounded, either. You can tune it down to E, but then you need Hawaiian slack-key chops.

So I needed a little guitar.

Before any of you offer I could have opted for the less-than-sane option of checking my classical guitar and submitting it to the baggage handlers–"Kreegah! Bundalo!" and DIAL UP TARZAN'S YELL IN THE B.G. to go with the great apes hurling luggage hither and yon–don't even go down that road. To get a case that would hold up would cost a thousand bucks. I mean, Calton's or some of the other nice spiffy new carbon fiber jobs are cool, lightweight and bulletproof, but I'm not going to be traveling that much.

I can, however, justify a half-size Yamaha classical guitar at just under a hundred and twenty bucks. Add a gig bag and tuner, and we're still talking no big deal compared to an airline-proof case.

These guitars were basically designed for children getting into playing classical, and quickly became useful for travelers.

The fretboard is tiny, and that requires some adjustment, but with the good Nylgut strings, it doesn't sound too bad. Plays better quietly, not a cannon, but I'm not looking to fill a concert hall with sound, and if it gets mauled en route somewhere, it won't be a major loss.

So, Merry Christmas, Steve. I'll let my wife put it under the tree.

Pippin's Puzzle Pieces

2011-12-14T08:29:00.000-08:00

'Tis the Season

2011-12-10T08:28:00.000-08:00

Not really close enough, but let's face it, when the Xmas lights start going up while the Hallowe'en punkin is still unrotted by the front door, December the 10th is not as outrageous as it used to be. I confess that I have my outside lights up, and probably we'll put up our white trash tree this weekend.

Ho, ho, ho!

Going with that, some things: First, Robert Earl Keene's video, "Merry Christmas from the Family," which has for the last few years been my favorite Christmas song. Joins my all-time favorite Christmas movie, "A Christmas Story," aka "The BB Gun Movie." If you haven't seen this one and you are within plus or minus ten years of my age, it's a real treat. I wait until Christmas Eve to watch it, after everybody has gone home and my wife is asleep.

And my own modest contribution to the holiday madness, "It's Not Christmas," lyrics, music, guitar and vocals by Yours Truly, which if you can stream music on your electronic device, is here ... (Lyrics, if you can't hear it and want to know, here.)

None of which have anything to do with the ostensible reason we celebrate Christmas, only my commentary on the whole commercialization of it all.

This Year's Christmas Card

2011-12-09T10:01:00.001-08:00

Chameleon

2011-12-08T18:11:00.000-08:00

On the screen over the sliding glass door onto my mother's patio, a few days ago when the temperature in south Louisiana was a balmy eighty degrees F.

Saw another one that same day on the mailbox when I went to collect the mail.

Probably hibernating now, since it has cooled off there, down around freezing for overnight lows ...

Soft Target Book Review

2011-12-08T08:31:00.000-08:00

Stephen Hunter's most recent novel. You should get it.

Knife Scales

2011-12-07T13:18:00.000-08:00

For those of you following the Pippin knife design and construction, we selected the wood for the handle: Big Leaf Maple burl, double-pressure stabilized and double-dyed, from Mike, at Woodlabs.

There were several gorgeous burls from which to choose: white oak, ash, more maple, but we both liked this one. Red will be next to the guard. Gonna be an outstanding knife.

Jambalaya, Crawfish Pie, Filé Gumbo ...

2011-12-07T13:07:00.000-08:00

My brother-in-law Gary's recipe for Jambalaya, photos and text by Dal Perry:

Family Matters

2011-12-07T12:43:00.000-08:00

I just got back from a week in Baton Rouge; my son and I flew down to see my folks.

Without getting into way too much information, my mother had a stroke, from which she is in rehab recovering. She's coming along, although it was not as minor as I understood. This is complicated because my father is in mid-stage Alzheimer's. My sister and her husband are there and carrying the heavy load, and I needed to go and offer some small help. There are therapists and nurses and home help to be scheduled, and a whole shitload of other things to deal with, things to be discussed, and it was not the most restful trip.

Odd disconnects: We got up at three a.m., caught an early flight to DFW. We left Portland, it was freezing and foggy. Day after we arrived in B.R., it got to 80º at my Mother's house.

Night before last, we had the AC running; at midnight, I had to switch it over to heat. The temperature difference went from a high of 80º to a low of 40º.

Welcome to the semi-tropics in December.

We had a family gathering, my brother-in-law Gary made Jambalaya on the patio in a big iron pot over a propane burner. I'll probably put his recipe up here when I think about it. Good stuff.

We spent our time either watching my father, who needs somebody with him round-the-clock, and going to visit my mother in the rehab facility, about twenty miles away, swapping off with other family.

It wasn't all doom-and-gloom. We had nice visits with sisters, and sisters-in-law, aunts, nieces and grand-nieces, in-laws. My other brother-in-law Dave came by with some nasty Dixie beer. My nieces two little girls ran us ragged playing baseball, tag, hide-'n'-go-seek, and even chess ...

My parents are fortunate to have a good family support system nearby. I was happy to have my son along for support.

If you have elderly parents and you've had to deal with these issues, you'll understand how it is without further ado; if you don't, I can't really convey how it feels to help your father get dressed and shower and hear for the fifth time on a given day where the pocket knife he carries came from:

"Steve gave me this."

"I know, Daddy. I'm Steve ..."

Or to be awakened for the sixth or seventh time in the middle of the night by a disoriented Alzheimer's patient wandering up and down the hall yelling for help because he can't find his way back to bed.

Thank God for my sister and her husband, Gary, and thanks to all of you who sent along prayers and best wishes, I do appreciate it.

If I owe you email, I'll get back to you once I get caught up.

Life is short. Enjoy it while you can ...

Geaux, Tigers ...

2011-12-03T20:37:00.000-08:00

So, in honor of the LSU/Georgia football game, which had a rocky start for tiger fans, we have these chips ...

The plain Who Dat? potato chips are pretty good.

The sweet potato chips are pretty bad.

The Tiger Tators Crawfish-flavored ones? Vile and disgusting ...

But the Tigers won the SEC and will play for the national championships.

New Sheriff in Town

2011-12-01T12:51:00.000-08:00

So, the Sheriff of Washington County, in which I reside, has retired, and one of his chief deputies has been sworn in as the new sheriff. Want to guess what his name is?

Pat Garrett.

Those of who with any knowledge of history might find that amusing. I did.

Oregon as had some fun law enforcement stories. Some years ago, the Chief of Police in Portland was one Charles Moose. During some demonstration or the other, a protestor was arrested, alleged that he was roughed up, and subsequently, he sued the police. Man's name was "Squirrel."

The piece was buried in the Metro section, but I cannot imagine how the headline writer missed that: SQUIRREL SUES MOOSE ...

Truth is ever so much stranger than fiction ...

Music that Will Endure

2011-11-30T12:14:00.000-08:00

For some reason this morning, I remembered an exchange I had with a young wanna-be writer, back in the paper mail days. We were discussing Art and Literature and Music and all like that, and this kid allowed as how the best musical group of the twentieth century, the one that would be remembered a hundred, even five hundred years down the line, revered above all others was ...

Supertramp.

I remembered laughing so hard I thought I was going to pee on myself when I read that.

Of course, none of us will be here in a hundred or five hundred years to see, and probably stranger things have happened, but ... a show of hands: Supertramp?

The Drop

2011-11-29T11:35:00.000-08:00

Harry Bosch is back ...

Fans of Connelly's L.A. detective need know no more, and if you are a mystery reader and not a fan? Pick up one of these and see if you aren't sucked in.

Bosch–named after the painter, yes–is a grizzled old murder cop who has been retired and is back on the unsolved cases squad. There are usually two or three storylines going: The main murder, which is often snagged in politics; a second case that often turns out as interesting as the first; and Harry's personal life, which involves a daughter and assorted women friends.

Bosch's creed as a detective is simple: Everyone matters or no one matters. He doggedly follows the evidence where it goes and calls it like he sees it, personal and political consequences be damned. And there are always lots of those damned consequences he'll have to deal with next time.

This round, in The Drop, Bosch is beset with a new case involving the death of his oldest enemy's son. Suicide? Or murder?

There is also an old rape/murder file in which DNA evidence seems to indicate it was done by an eight-year-old boy. If the DNA evidence is tainted, that could cause a shitload of problems.

There a new woman who has her own demons and a partner who doesn't like how Harry does things.

Connelly melds all this together with an offhand expertise and style that makes going for a drive with Harry like a visit with an old friend. I know this guy, what makes him tick, and watching him figure out whodunnit and how is always a great ride.

There are seventeen novels featuring Bosch, and Connelly also has a second series featuring L.A. lawyer Mickey Haller, aka "The Lincoln Lawyer," so called because in the beginning, he runs his office out of his car, a Lincoln. Haller is, just to make it more fun, Bosch's half-brother.

Been a couple of movies made from his books, including The Lincoln Lawyer and Bloodwork, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.

Now and again, on the TV show Castle, you'll see Connelly as one of Castle's poker-playing buddies, along with Dennis Lehane, James Patterson, and the late Stephen J. Cannell.

Dead Last Book Review

2011-11-27T13:42:00.000-08:00

It should come as no surprise to long-time readers here that I'm a big fan of John D. MacDonald's work, especially Travis McGee. Plug "Travis" into the blog's search pane and see.

One of my own novels is an homage to Trav, down to the lead character's name, and McGee's attitude permeates many of my other books.

Gonna steal, steal from the best.

Since MacDonald's death, nobody has stepped up to fill his shoes, but there are a handful of writers who work the Florida sun-sand-sea-beach-bum-mystery-solver vein to good effect; my two favorites are Carl Hiassen and James W. Hall.

Hiassen has a continuing character, Skink, a half-loon former Florida state Governor who has gone into the swamps to live and who, from time-to-time gets involved with a caper. Hiassen gets into environmental stuff that was usually part of MacDonald's storylines. Less in the forefront in McGee's adventures, it was a concern that MacDonald addressed: The grief at the vanishing beauty of the old Florida for what an ugly thing it is still changing into.

This is a through-line in a lot of stories that are ostensibly mysteries set in present-day Florida, and with good reason.

Hall's main character is Thorn, who is much more a beach bum than McGee–throughout most of the series, he makes a meager living tying fishing lure flies, and lives in a stilt house next to the water on one of the Keys.

If they met, Thorn and McGee would smile and nod at each other, both knowing at a glance they were brothers under the skin. Hedge knights who keep bumping into dragons.

Again, what has become a standard comment for me: If you've read this series, all you need know is the next one is out. If you haven't read them, you should. The ideal way would be to go back and collect the first one, from 1986, and work your way forward.

Hall has some surprises in Dead Last, a couple of which are solar plexus punches that took my breath away. Whoa! Didn't see that one coming ...

Not content to just let Thorn roll along easy after getting a big inheritance in a previous novel, Hall stirs his protagonist up, and turns him–and the readers–every which way but loose.

(Aside: I've always had a fondness for the name "Thorn," since that was also the name of the protagonist in my first novel, The Tularemia Gambit, back in 1981.)

I won't reveal the story, save in the most general way: A crappy TV show being shot in Miami features a serial killer who uses newspaper obituaries to select the next victim. This seems to set off a copycat killer, who drags Thorn into it.

If you don't know the term, google"zentai," and click on the picture search.

Life starts off hard for Thorn this time, and it gets harder as it goes along. I think John D. MacDonald would be proud of Hall, especially a twist that fans of The Lonely Silver Rain will surely smile about.

This is the best mystery I've read this year, and I've read more than a few.

You're Gonna Love This Part ...

2011-11-25T20:40:00.000-08:00

(Pictures by Chuck's son, Nate)

So a note from Chuck Pippin. Seems that he noticed a slight warp in the blade when he was done. Not major, but, he said, he would know it was there. So ...

So, he just up and made another blade. Bap! Just like that. And it's already heat-treated, eight-hundred grit polished, and he likes it better, since the tang is a little longer, and the shoulders are cleaner and like that.

Note: The blade will be etched, to bring out the damascus grain.

Wow. How interesting is that, to be able to just, you know, whip out a second blade?

He's thinking about using the same material for the guard, which would be way cool, and sending along some images of the handle material he's considering.

Makes me want to jump up and down. Of course, I'm too dignified and old for that.

Sorta ...

Amazing Knife Pictures!

2011-11-23T17:40:00.000-08:00

Mastersmith Pippin heats things up ...

Pre-heat (above)

Into the Fire

The Cremation of Sam McGee

Hot!

Still hot ...

What happens when still hot hits the quenching solution.

Cooler and tempered.

Wiped (above and below)

A Pause ...

2011-11-23T11:34:00.000-08:00

Haven't been here much lately, got some family medical stuff going on: Down in Louisiana, my mother has had a mild stroke. She's got local family gathered round, attending to her and to my father, who is in the middle stage of Alzheimer's.

Never a dull moment.

I've been talking to my sister and niece, had a conversation with my mother's primary care doctor, and she seems stable and relatively intact. Speech is pretty good, she can move okay, but she'll need to do rehab for a while to get back to normal for an eighty-five year old.

My son and I will be going down for a visit, after we get past the Thanksgiving flight jam. If you need to fly commercial around this time of year and you don't already have a ticket? Good luck with that.

Fortunately, it isn't critical that I get there immediately.

I'll keep you posted.

Yet More Knifery ...

2011-11-21T20:44:00.000-08:00

With a 320 grit, before annealing and tempering and like that. Handle samples TK ....

Ooh! Ooh!

Knife Progress

2011-11-19T21:44:00.000-08:00

More images from Chuck Pippin, as the blade gets shaped. The damascus will, he says, start to show back up once the steel is polished. The steel, by the by, is "... 416 layers. It's made up of 3 layers of 52100, 4 layers of 5160, 3 layers of 203E, and 3 layers of 15N20 ... folded 5 times."

Cool, hey?

Chuck has suggested that a round guard might not be idea for a sheathed blade this short and I agree. (A katana is fine because of the way it's carried.) We're going with an oval shape.

And more later ...

Anniversary

2011-11-19T09:14:00.000-08:00

This many years ...

Occupy

2011-11-18T13:30:00.000-08:00

Probably you've seen this image, from today's Oregonian. A woman, screaming at a cop, gets more seasoning with her meal than she expected.

I've been waiting before I weighed in on the Occupy Movement, a branch of which has been active in Portland for the last few weeks.

I have mixed emotions about it.

On the one hand, civil disobedience in pursuit of a just cause is valid and honorable. Lord knows we-the-people got screwed by Wall Street and big banks and very few of the folks who did it were punished for their actions. And with the economy in the toilet and the rich getting ever richer, if you aren't upset, you aren't paying attention. So I support them on that level, even if their desires seem passing vague. Life is unfair, we all know that, and would that it wasn't so, but ... what does this do to fix it?

On the other hand, the moment is all over the map, and that diffuse a focus is not the best tactic. It's not about camping in the park, though that seems to have been the biggest part shown to the world. Where shall we march today? Anybody got a charger for my iPhone?

Portland police have blown through more than three-quarters-of-million-bucks in overtime trying to keep things from getting out of hand downtown, and other crimes have been getting short shrift. If it's not an emergency call, don't bother, they don't have anybody to take the report.

People say nobody is in charge of the Occupy movement, and maybe officially, nobody is, but there are folks who bring the megaphone, and who start the discussions, so the idea that all the animals in the barnyard are equal falls to the notion that some are more equal than others. Always been that way and is apt to stay so. Every tribe has leaders; sometimes, they aren't obvious, but they are there. Grass movements work best when somebody sows fertile ground.

The right to free speech, to assemble and petition our government are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment, and I haven't heard anybody in local government say otherwise. However, that does not mean you can assemble in the middle of the freeway, or private property that belongs to somebody who doesn't want you there, and occupying a bank or a Starbucks isn't going to get the Supreme Court's blessing. You simply cannot go anywhere you want and do anything you want when you get there. And, welcome to Earth–what planet did you say you were from?

The Bill of Rights is not absolute, was never intended to be. Free speech doesn't mean you can stand up in a crowded theater and yell "Fire!"

If I can't sit on my usual stool at the lunch counter, or have to move to the back of the bus because you are protesting against racism, that doesn't hurt me, and good for you.

If you are blocking traffic on a bridge and an ambulance carrying a heart-attack victim cannot cross to take him to the hospital as a result and he dies, whose rights are being violated?

Yesterday, the tent city having been taken down last weekend, the protestors marched and started occupying banks in Portland. Which is fine, except that people who maybe had a real need to get their money in or out were being kept from entering. Guy who can't make his deposit and his rent check is gonna bounce? Again, whose rights are being violated?

Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, and that's why we have police, to protect folks from each other. Civil disobedience breaks laws, sometimes unjust ones, but there are limits as to what is acceptable.

Stand in front of my bank, put your hand on my chest and tell me, Sorry, Dude, but corporate America sucks, so I'm afraid I just can't let you go in and support that!

Really? Trust me, that won't the the smartest decision you make all day, though it might be the last one you make on your own for a little while. Bad tactic.

If you shove a police officer dressed in riot gear holding a three-foot baton or a pepper-spray fogger? Another bad tactic. Peaceful? Sure. Stand there passively, let them arrest and take you away, they shouldn't use any violence on you. Get feisty? Push and scream? Punch the mounted guy's horse? That makes you stupid, and you get no sympathy from me.

First time I really noticed this was watching the Chicago riots on TV during the convention in 1968. How smart is it to get into a man's face if he's standing there with a big, honkin' stick and leave to use it?

Here on Earth, we don't think much of that notion.

And this is not to say that some officers haven't stepped over the line and used too much force, because they have. And that's wrong, no two ways about it. But you had to know there were risks involved when you went down there, and if you didn't, see the last line three paragraphs above.

My advice? Re-focus. Develop some political power and use that. It will work better than camping in the cold rain and peeing in the bushes and blocking traffic. Being mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore! is not enough. You need a plan.

Got Dem Backed Up Toilet Blues

2011-11-18T12:31:00.000-08:00

Some stories just cry out to be told: The USS George H.W. Bush, a new, eight-billion-dollar aircraft carrier, has a major headache–pun intended. The vacuum system for the toilets is screwed up, and more than a few of the suckers are malfunctioning. Not flushing, or backing up, and the ship's Captain has seen to it that those have been locked. Which results in about six thousand sailors in serious need of places in which to take a dump ...

Half the johns are apparently down, and waiting times in some parts of the ship can run to half an hour ...

And you gotta love the Captain's name, too. Brian Luthor. Whose nickname is–anybody?–yep, that's right: "Lex."

Picture it: You are a sailor on a ship working for Lex Luthor, standing in line every time you need to go pee.

Join the Navy and see the hallway ...

Apparently some of the stoppages are due to folks sticking things into the toilets that ought not go into them, but even so, you have to wonder. You'd think for eight billion and change, one could get some place to go crap better than hanging one's ass out over the rail.

Yoo, hoo, sailor! New in town? Want to party? What? You want to use my bathroom ... ?

Placeholder for the Placeholder

2011-11-18T09:31:00.000-08:00

For those of you who don't know, I have a second blog where I do posts regarding my martial art, Pukulan Pentjak Silat Sera Plinck.

I put that one up as a placeholder for Maha Guru Plinck when the server Todd had up for our branch of the art crashed and died, and we never got around to repairing it.

That one only gets a few hits a day, mostly from silat students. I don't post there often, and those posts are narrow in scope, being mostly of interest to folks who are already training in the art. Nearly all of what in the backlog are my thoughts; there are a few things from Todd and Tiel on the art's basic principles.

From time-to-time, I mention it here, for those folks who might be interested in checking out the site.

Lay Down Candles

2011-11-17T09:09:00.000-08:00

Work up this morning, the electricity was out. The storm that came through last evening, while much more anemic than predicted–we got but a few hundredths of an inch of rain at my house–did arrive with gusty winds, and some trees and branches came down hither and yon, enough so something got knocked over somewhere.

Got up, lit a candle, put a log in the fireplace. The iPad was charged, and the 3G connection worked, so I was able to get on PGE's outage site and see there were several hundred folks in my area code sitting in the dark, and a couple thousand in the surrounding areas. PGE had logged four hundred and some calls telling them about it, so I didn't add my voice.

They expected the juice to be flowing again by nine o'clock, they said, but it was back on by 7:40 a.m.

And so it goes ...

Keep It Simple Stupid

2011-11-16T15:17:00.000-08:00

I was never a particular fan of the costume-rock band KISS. The one song I really liked was the power-ballad "Beth," and that was so unlike everything else they did, it was part of the attraction.

For me, KISS was about the show, not so much the music, and it didn't call to me. By the time they hit it big, I was past the days when I wanted to sit in front of amps turned up to eleven watching comic book rockers and explosions. Not that there's anything wrong with that ...

Ace Frehley (rhymes with "Hailey") one of the original four members and the lead guitarist, has done his autobiography, and I was curious enough to pick it up. Called No Regrets, it certainly seems to offer a few of those.

It's a warts-and-all story, but it didn't really move me. Maybe it is because I wasn't a big fan back in the day and don't care as much. Hardcore KISS fans will probably love it.

It's written well-enough; Joe Layden and John Ostrosky are co-credited as writers. It's got all the beats of a VH-1 rise-and-fall rock bio. The unknowns getting together, rehearsing, coming up with new songs and ideas for presentation that would set them apart. The subsequent rise from hauling their own gear from bar-to-bar, to getting a record deal, opening for bigger bands, then hitting it big-time.

It tells of how they agreed early on it would be all-for-one, one-for-all, evenly shared across the board. And how that ended badly.

There are sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, name-dropping, the excesses that should have killed them.

Well, a couple of them. Frehley (Spaceman) and Peter Criss (Kitten) were the party boys; Paul Stanley (Starchild) and Gene Simmons (Demon) didn't indulge in the booze and coke, though Simmons, as Frehley paints him, was a stone sex-addict totally without a sense of humor. He'd nail any woman who had a pulse, (and you get the impression that Frehley didn't think that was necessary,) and bring polaroids to show the boys the next day.

So they went up the ladder into arena rock, got locked into a Broadway-style performance that the live audiences loved, but that didn't usually translate into the albums, which were cranked out really fast, four of them in the first couple years.

Not that they didn't sell a lot of records, they did.

They spent several weeks in the studio doctoring the "live" album that brought them into the top echelon of seventies rockers, to get that unfiddled-with live-performance sound. Frehley's explanation is defensive, and ends with, "Does it matter?"

In the grand cosmic scheme of things? No. Of course, neither does Milli Vanilli ...

Frehley's love/hate relationship with the band is foremost on the pages. Simmons, nee Chaim Weitz, an Israeli by birth, gets skewered pretty well. At one point, after Frehley had left the band, Simmons supposedly called to ask him to show up at a TV roast in Simmons' honor. Frehley says this was puzzling, and he declined. He checked around and found out that nobody else in the band was going, either, and how sad was that? The roast was a disaster, he says, and no surprise that it was. He allows as how Simmons had no friends.

He also says Simmons was always about the money and fame, and that for Frehley, it was about the music, and he wasn't all that interested in the money.

Uh huh. I'm always a little leery when a millionaire rock star who spends high, wide, and everywhere says it's not about the money. Maybe it isn't, but he didn't turn it down.

There is a sequence in which Frehley says his daughter was the victim of a cruel trick by Simmons, and how he never liked the guy after that, and why that was one of the reasons he quit the band the second time. But the telling of how his daughter was in tears and him not bailing right then, or going over to punch Simmons out seems more a retrospective rationalization than it does fatherly outrage. I was really pissed off at the motherfucker, but, well, you know ...

Of course, when you are drunk or stoned or both, all your waking hours, recollections of things might be hazy. Like Keef, he says he's clean now but if anybody is taking bets on that not lasting, put me down for fifty bucks.

In the end, you don't come away with a portrait of the boys in KISS as hale-fellows-well-met, but of the usual disfunctional set of egos jockeying with assholes for the best spot at the trough.

Maybe after having read a slew of these, it ought not to be a surprise to me by now. It seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

When the Rain Comes

2011-11-16T12:13:00.000-08:00

Supposed to be a big storm moving in here today, rain, wind, followed by a drop in temperature that could, in theory, put a few wet snowflakes all the way to the valley floor by Friday.

It's all relative, of course. A "big" storm here drizzles an inch of rain in twenty-four hours. Where I grew up, any passing summer thundershower could drop three times that much in an hour or so, move off, and the water mostly dried up and gone by sundown. And those could happen almost every day from June to September, not counting the hurricanes.

In hurricane season, sometimes we'd get a foot of rain in twenty-four hours, more, and it only made the swamps cloudier, and irritated the alligators and cottonmouth moccasins ...

Driving in the rain doesn't bother me, nor most of the drivers up this way. Not like L.A. where, if somebody spits out their car window, everybody goes stark, raving mad behind the wheel.

Use my brakes? Are you insane?! I might skid! The default response to rain in L.A. is to tromp on the gas pedal.

I'm one to talk, though. Even after more than thirty years living here, if a snowflake lands on my driveway, I stay home. If God had wanted me to drive in the snow, I figure I'd have been born wearing skis ...

What's in a Name?

2011-11-15T13:20:00.000-08:00

Saturday night, my wife and I left Orycon and drove across the river in the rain to the Portland Historical Society, which pretty much has all the artifacts of Oregon history worth having. The state keeps most of the documents, but the Society keeps the hardware. Got a hundred thousand square foot warehouse full of it, out in Gresham.

Some friends of ours, considerably better off financially than are we, had the winning bid in a charity auction on a catered dinner for ten, to be be held after-hours at the place, and we were invited along.

The food, supplied by the Heathman, was outstanding. I had a dish of chicken, shrimp, and morel mushrooms to die for. Great red wine, too.

Part of the event was a chance to roam around the exhibits, getting a special tour from the director.

Electronic media are wonderful–TV, radio, ebooks, computers, iPads and the lot–but there is something lost with their gains. A hand-written letter from Mark Twain (signed "Sam Clements") to somebody in Oregon isn't so fascinating if you just read the text-version on your computer. Even a high-rez picture scanned into your computer simply isn't the same.

Look that that spidery, ornate handwriting on the copy of the Oregon constitution's preamble.

A copy of the first newspaper printed on the west coast was upstairs. They passed around a chunk of the Oregon Meteorite, the largest iron one ever found, and told a terrific story about where it was first located, how it was stolen, and where it wound up eventually. (In a planetarium in New York City.)

In the 1830s, the two men who owned most of the property known as The Clearing, on the Willamette River, decided they needed something a little classier to call it. Each wanted to name it after his home town. Asa Lovejoy was from Boston; William Pettygrove, from Portland, ME. They decided to flip a coin, best two out of three. Pettygrove won; had Lovejoy done so, we'd be Boston, the City of Roses, and our not-working basketball team called the Boston Trailblazers.

That penny, a large cent, is in a glass case just off the lobby.

There is a certain pleasure to be found wandering though history. The nine-foot-tall gasoline pump here; the old diving suit there; the gravy boat from the captain's chest of the first ship to sail up the Columbia. A pair of our current governor's old bluejeans ...

A fine time was had by all, and I learned a bit more about local history than I had known. What's not to like?

Orycon 33

2011-11-13T09:20:00.000-08:00

Went to Orycon this weekend, which I usually do. Missed one when we were living in Port Townsend and got snowed in one year, but mostly I try to be useful at the local shindig. I've toastmastered it a couple times, but am still waiting to be asked to be Guest of Honor. (Since they know I'm coming anyway, though, why would they do that?)

We are getting grayer and our kids and grandkids growing up-this was the 33rd incarnation.

Friday, I MCed the Endeavour Award. My part lasted about two minutes, went fine.

Saturday, I did panels, an autographing, and a reading. Steve Barnes, Rory Miller, and I were on a panel together about kung-fu versus wire-fu, that was fun. We were all booked solidly enough so we couldn't find a matching gap between gigs to do lunch or drinks. Too bad.

I did a panel on formidable women in fiction and that was also–I thought–both entertaining and enlightening. The panelists were bright, funny, and knew their stuff. One of them, now a small press publisher, was a woman I corresponded with for a time when she was at Dark Horse, and it was the first time we had met.

I sat next to William F. Nolan at the autographing. A man whose stuff I grew up reading, and whose book (with George Clayton Johnson) was the basis for the move Logan's Run.) Man has written 84 books. He's also 84 years old.

I followed Nolan at our readings. He did a funny short story about a ghost trying to kill his ex-wife. I read one of the Roy the Demon stories. I warned the audience that it was rated NC-17 for language and gave them a choice between that and "Jolly Roger," and they elected Roy.

Had a pretty good crowd for the reading, about twenty-five or so, but it looked smaller–for some reason they put us in the ballroom ...

Again, Black Steel

2011-11-13T09:05:00.000-08:00

Alan Maisey's catalogue is up. If you have an interest in a keris, or a couple of other Indonesian blades, have a look.

This one is Balinese, a thirteen-wave example of a rare pamor, buntel mayit, (aka tambang badung).

Misfire

2011-11-12T23:16:00.000-08:00

Just got back from a long day at Orycon, followed by a dinner with some friends at the Oregon Historical Society, and I'll report on those later. To unwind–I get pretty ramped up when I go to a convention, it's like being onstage wearing my party hat from start to finish–I decided to read a mystery novel I downloaded from iBooks.

Well-known writer, bestseller, and he throws a lot of gun stuff at the reader, most of which doesn't seem too bad. Then I came to a scene wherein the local cop points her Colt Cobra at a military investigator. Which starts out fine, writer calling it a double-action revolver, and then he gets to telling us the caliber: .45.

Nope, it isn't. The basic Cobra is .38 Special. Once upon a time, Colt made Cobras in .32 Colt, and even .22 LR, but they have all been out of production for a long time.

Maybe he meant the Colt King Cobra, which was around until the late 1990's as a production gun, not as neat as the Python, but a fine sidearm.

But–no. The CKC is chambered for .357 Magnum (and will thus shoot .38 Specials, as well.)

That was also the chambering of the Python. No .45's here.

There are revolvers that shoot .45 caliber ammunition, usually what they call Long Colt, and mostly not .45 ACP, which requires specially made cylinders that will handle .45 ACP, usually with half- or full moon-clips. And there is one tricked-out cylinder like the ones in Medusas for those revolvers with .45 barrels, but there isn't any such thing as a Cobra/King Cobra DA revolver in .45 caliber. Never has been. Won't ever be.

Good writer. Bad research. Five Hail Marys, Seven Our Fathers, go and sin no more.

Gumshoe

2011-11-12T09:36:00.000-08:00

The term "gumshoe" comes from the early athletic footwear, aka, sneakers, which were called that because the soft rubber soles allowed for a quiet walk. Back in the day when most folks wore shoes with leather soles and heels, clumping across a hard surface produced a certain amount of noise. Hard to steal up on somebody in your #12 cowboy boot on a wooden floor.

Gumshoes thus came to represent private eyes, who were into stealth.

In my misspent youth, I was a private eye. I did it for about five years, starting in Los Angeles working for a big agency, then opening my own business when I moved back to Louisiana.

Mostly, it's not like they depict it on TV or in the movies or in those hardboiled detective novels; however, it does have its moments, the business, and I had a few. Some were exciting, some funny, and those are fond memories.

I've spoken to a couple of those here in passing, but I've always wanted to do a memoir of my time in that realm, and while I certainly don't have any room on my plate at the moment, what with the books I already have piled up there, the first of which is due in about six weeks, I'm going to crank the back-burner up and get it cooking anyway.

Stay tuned.

Gizmos

2011-11-10T09:51:00.000-08:00

Our wedding anniversary is coming up in a little over week, and my wife has been eyeing a Kindle Fire. (Well, looking at pictures, since they haven't shipped any yet, and there's no place where you can lay hands on one to play with.)

We are Mac folks, however, have been since she owned and ran a newspaper that used a Mac toaster for layout, in the early 1990s. Try that some time, laying out a tabloid on a nine-inch screen. OS 4 or 5, as I recall.

The iPad has the same size screen as the first desktop we had. And that's about all they have in common.

The toaster, which quickly became a boat anchor, was but the first of many Macs that have cycled through here. The memory gets ever larger, the screens get bigger, and the price has gone down. Welcome to the future.

Um. Anyway, yesterday I decided to go see if there were any iPad 2s available. When I got mine, there was an eight-week waiting list, and I haven't been tracking that. While the Mac store down at the mall was packed with early Christmas shoppers–there were fifty or sixty people clogging up the place–they have an express desk. Say, what are the possibilities of getting an iPod 2 in such and such a configuration?

100% said the sweet young thing behind the table.

Okay. Gimme.

Yeah, it cost twice as much as the Kindle, more by the time you get the extended warranty, but if you are dyed-in-the-wool Apple fan, you know going in you are paying for the hardware and that there will be ten million programs and applications at prices from free to reasonable, to stuff into the new toy, so I went for it.

Mostly, it'll be a reader and web-surfer, and you can use WiFi (3G is a built-in option). Got the neat little magnetic cover that turns it off when you close it, color-coördinated, too.

She didn't know I was going to get it, and was properly surprised. Ran the battery way down yesterday playing with it.

Happy Anniversary!

Repost of an Old Video

2011-11-08T09:29:00.000-08:00

Somebody sent me a note about steel–wondering why it mattered so much in knifemaking.

Hereover, a fine example of why the steel (and temper) make a difference. It's a sword, but the principle is the same.