Beautiful Beaverton

A few years back, a developer got the notion that there should be a big multi-use construct in the middle of Beaverton.


Those of you unfamiliar with my town? Beaverton is where Portland goes to shop at 7-Elevens or chow down at Mickey D's ...


Um. Anyway, plans were drawn, ground broken, and Beaverton in the Round was begun. This was going to be apartments above, shops and restaurants below, across from a big gym, right on the MAX light rail line, all like that. A whole mini-city to revitalize the burg.


Developer ran out of money. Sold it at a loss, and last I head that developer ran out of money. The big lot where the torn-down movie theater sat is still vacant.


But there are some restaurants that started and survived, and one of them is Mingo. Which, as far as I am concerned, serves the best rustic Italian food I've ever eaten. Never had a bad meal there. Indoor or outdoor, with big, garage-bay doors that open when the weather is nice. You can watch the children play on the terraced lawn or in the fountains, and the trains as they go by. 


As a late celebration of our birthdays, we went to Mingo for supper yesterday. I had the lasagna with chicken and lobster mushrooms, and it was to die for. A small glass of thirty-year-old port for dessert. 


My only regret was that razor clams weren't in season, because those are one of the best pan-fried appetizers ever ...


We don't eat out that often, and can't afford to dine ala Mingo as much as we'd like, because we'd be a) beached walruses and b) broke pretty quick if we did, but it is a delightful treat. 

Joe Lansdale's Hyenas

In case you missed it, there's a Joe Lansdale novella available, Hyenas, which features Hap and Leonard.


I just downloaded it a few minutes ago, and while I haven't had a chance to read it yet, that's pretty much all you need to know if you are a Hap and Leonard fan. 


Really.

The Chitlin' Circuit

Reading Preston Lauterbach's first book, The Chitlin' Circuit, a history of the music and artists and venues from whence rock 'n' roll arose. 


This was mostly a southern thing, and the artists, customers, and more than a few of the promoters were black. It had a loose beginning in the late 1930's, starting with bands playing jazz, then moving into swing, blues, and bebop, and led to smaller groups who morphed into rock. And it's still around.


Years before the term "rock and roll" began to be used on white radio stations, and half a decade before the rise of Elvis, black performers were tearing up juke joints and larger venues across the south, from Texas to Memphis and everywhere in-between, playing seminal rock 'n' roll.  This took place on what  was known as the chitlin' circuit–named after a common dish in the south, made from pig intestines ...


It wasn't the high-brow route that people like Basie and Armstrong and Cab Calloway were playing, for white audiences, but where the black folks went to listen and dance. The small towns, little clubs, collectively called "the stroll."


It can be argued that the earliest rock came from the race records going all the way back to the 1930's. No doubt that the blues and jazz influenced rock, along with some hillbilly stuff, but the book makes a strong case that most of the white rock 'n' roll that blossomed in the fifties, with folks like Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins and the like was swiped from the black singers and players who worked the chitlin' circuit. There is plenty of documentation to back it up.


Ever hear Pat Boone doing Little Richard? Wop-bop-a-loo-bop ...


I found the period in WWII particularly fascinating, since the gas rationing that went into effect in 1942 effectively killed private bus travel. A lot of the musical groups moving from town-to-town were fairly large, fifteen, sixteen players, and when gasoline was limited to a few gallons for anybody without enough clout to get a bigger stamp ("A"-stickers for cars allowed only four gallons a week), that mode of transportation went away. As a result, some of the bands got smaller and stuffed into cars.


There were ways to game the system. One of the early promoters was making a ton of money running numbers, so he just bought more cars for his groups. If you could get four gallons a week for six cars and you had a siphon ... ?


It's a great read, detailing a part of American history most of us probably don't know much about. Check it out. 

Cars

 

My son got tickets to an exhibit at the Portland Art Museum, a display of some really cool cars, The Allure of the Automobile.


So we went:


Bentley to Bugatti, Pierce Arrow, Astin-Martin, Duesenberg, Steve McQueen's 1957 XK-SS, a '60 'vette, all of them redone to emulate mint condition.


Most of these were ancient, classics, and antiques, and the fun part was how futuristic they still looked, much less how they must have looked when they were made.


My favorite had to be the 1937 Hispano-Suiza custom-built for French apéritif baron André Dubonnet. Art Deco, bubble glass, the kind of car I thought was science fiction when I was a kid. 


Way cool. 

Goofy

Few things make a grown man look and sound sillier than handing him a baby. Goofy faces, funny noises, goo-goo talk ...

The Return of the Matadors

Ahem: 

Can I get a drum roll here? 

Good, good, bring it up louder ... hold for the dramatic timing ... and ...

The Matadors are back.


Hit the ride cymbal.


Yes. Finally. 


I got the rights reverted from Ace. Dan and Amy and I think even a son or two worked really hard and a bunch to get the manuscripts cleaned up, and the artwork done. We've put together our deal, and here we go. 


Khadaji, Dirishi, Bork, Sleel, Geneva, Red, Sister Clamp, Pen, and all the rest now blossom into electronic life.


This will be the first time the entire series will be offered in ebook format. Initially, the original trilogy, with The Man Who Never Missed; Matadora; and The Machiavelli Interface. Over the next couple of months, the other titles will come on line.

I love these covers. Simple, clean, classy, and readable. The artist, Angel Greenwood, did Dan Moran's latest ebook covers. 

Note: For those of you who would rather something with dynamite action/adventure cover art, do this: Take one of the images above and shrink it enough so you can mostly cover it with with your outstretched thumb. 

Okay. Now, move your thumb out of the way ... 

Notice that you can still read the title and author's name. In the world of ebookery, that's what matters the most. Any fine details go away once you get to postage-stamp-size, and that's what most people will see first, the itty-bitty image. Yeah, they can blow it up, but if the title isn't enough to grab a reader, chances are the artwork won't do it, either. 

Traditional publishing has started to take note of this, and you can already see cover layouts shifting because of electronic editions. 

But: The Matadors.

These will be available exclusively at FS& (aka Fat Sam, or FSand–sometimes Blogger doesn't let that ampersand get by, but prints it out and adds a semicolon. Whatever. If you want 'em, that's where to go. Also a link over in the list, and the images in the sidebar.

Dan has all the popular formats available, so whatever your reader, he should be able to supply a file that will work with it: Kindle, Nook, iPad, iPhone, laptop, whatever. There is a version suitable for print-on-demand.

Go. Buy copies. Tell your friends. Tell them to tell their friends. Help it go viral. Blab all over Facebook and Twitter. Somebody call Stephen Colbert ...


The author will appreciate it. 

Security

We have family visiting this week, and I had occasion to collect them at our local airport yesterday. Flight was about fifteen minutes late, no problem, but as I sat there waiting, I happened to notice that every other person walking around was a uniformed law enforcement officer. 


TSA, local police, K9, most I've ever seen at PDX.


And there were a number of civilians who seemed to be paying more attention to their surroundings than Aunt Sally waiting for Uncle Bob's flight to arrive, if you know what I mean. A couple of them gave me a scan that felt kind of like I'd been X-rayed. On the one hand, I was glad I left my pocketknife in the car. On the other, I was wondering if maybe I might wish I hadn't ...


I would guess that if anybody says "Boo!" at a major airport in the next few days, they'll be swarmed with armed folks wanting to know exactly what they meant by that. 

Star Wars Action Figures

Sorry. I had to put this one up ...

Sauce

Took the jar of blackberry hooch out to swirl around, and wound up moving it into a different container. The first one was not as tightly capped as I thought, and I didn't want to lose any to evaporation. We have a big Mason jar and I transferred it over. Hard to tell from the photo without a size comparison, but that's a half-gallon jar, and we have seven and some cups of the stuff, as I reckon. Be less once we filter out the solids.


Still not ready to drink, but, you know, as long as I was moving it from one container to another, I figured, I might as well taste it, just to see how it was coming along ...


Mmm, boy, it's gonna be good. Knock-your-socks-off potent, too, probably about 70-proof or so. 


The berries do most of the flavoring, but the citrus notes from the lemon juice and orange zest give it a nice crisp taste, and I didn't use half the sugar the old recipe did, so it won't be overly-sweet. The different liquors have combined nicely, and after a couple more weeks aging, it should be ready to bottle. 


I'll let you know how that goes. 


No, you can't have any. 

Online Class - Martial Arts for Writers

Come Tuesday–that's day after tomorrow as I write this–9/6/11–Rory Miller and I will be offering an online class at Savvy Authors. 


The class, which runs from 6 September to 3 October, is called "Martial Arts for Writers," and that's what it is. 


Here's my intro:

Martial Arts for Writers
Instructors: Rory Miller and Steve Perry. This is a how-to for writers who want to use martial arts in their stories. Rory Miller and I come from different backgrounds, and our takes on the subject don't always match, but between the two of us, we have been down a few roads that might offer directions to writers who know little about the notion of fisticuffs in fiction, or how best to stab somebody with assorted blades, or shoot them to good dramatic effect. We'll talk a bit about history, about the differences between movie-fu and real fights, and how to write a fight scene that moves and entertains. Questions are, of course, welcome, and if we don't know the answer, probably we can find it. How it works, as I understand it, is that we will post a lesson upon which we have collaborated, for students to read and digest. There's a forum wherein questions may be asked after each lesson, and we will do our best to answer them there. How you get into it is, you click on the link above and register, pay $30, and then log into the lessons as they are put online. There's a discount if you want to become a premium member.  Rory has done a class for these folks before, I haven't, so I'm hoping I got this part right.  If this is something you might find of interest, drop by and have a look. We had fun putting it together, and now and then, actually agreed on something.  Now and then ...

LEO Interaction

After I wrote the previous post, I went to Costco to pick up my new glasses. On the way home, as I was pulling onto a four-lane road, a woman blew past me in the left lane. Thirty-five mph zone, I had accelerated to 40 mph to get out of her way, but she went around me.


Being a good citizen, I slowed down to the limit ...


We were the only two cars on the road; the skies were smoky from a brisk wind bringing us a haze from the forest and grass fires near Mount Hood and points farther east. 


Half a mile away, as I was coming around a slight curve and over a rise, I heard a crash. I didn't see the impact, so I wasn't an eye witness, but I was close enough that glass was still flying from the smashed headlights when I topped the rise.


The driver who had passed me had hit a car. Both were facing the same direction–all of us heading south–and at first look, I guessed the second car had pulled out and gotten smacked. Given the damage, on second look, I figured the second car could have been making a left and gotten hit. Mostly the front ends on the drivers' side. Probably speed was a factor, but I guessed it was the car that got hit that was mostly at fault.


I was first on the scene. I pulled off the road, dug out my amber strobe, put my flashers on and went to help. Both cars were small, both had the front ends smashed pretty good, neither drivable. Radiator fluid spilling ongo the road, like that. 


There were two young women in the vehicle that had gotten hit and they were exiting the car when I got there. I asked, they seemed to be okay. One girl had a scrape below her left knee. Probably you should get off the road, I allowed.


The driver of the car that had passed me was more rattled. Her left wrist hurt, didn't look broken, no blood, and her face and neck were abraded by the impact with the air bag. The steering wheel and side bags had all deployed. She was pale and having trouble breathing. Turned out she had asthma, and the smoke wasn't helping. She had an inhaler, took a hit, her breathing cleared up, and I got her to the side of the road and told them to call the police, relatives, and their insurance companies.


All three seemed to be in mild shock, so I told them to sit down on the lawn. Happened we were right in front of a medical clinic, but nobody seemed to need immediate medical care.


Within a couple minutes, we had a fire truck with paramedics, an ambulance, and the Beaverton police. The paramedic did a quick interview, poked and prodded, used his stethoscope, and waved the ambulance guys off. Nobody needed a ride. 


One of the BPD officers interviewed me. Big kid, braces on his teeth. Very polite, thanked me for staying on the scene, put my info down on the report for the insurance companies. Made a joke about it being only a couple days past my birthday. 


Another encounter with my local LEOs, and no problems at all.

Thump 'Em, Danno ...

Just finished reading a nearly-there draft of Rory Miller's next book from YMAA, Force Decisions: A Citizen's Guide, Understanding how Police Determine Appropriate Use of Force.


Title is a mouthful, but what you see is what it is, and I think it's a valuable tool for Monday morning quarterbacks–including Yours Truly–when it comes to second-guessing your local gendarmes after a dust-up in which civilians get drubbed–or sometimes killed.


I'm pretty much a supporter of the thin blue line, and my experience with LEOs has been more good than bad. And I've found that good cops are every bit as ready to kick loose a bad cop as anybody. Their standards as to what constitute that are different than most civilians, and this is a good reference book to understand why.


Mostly, the book covers what is legal and what is departmental policy when it comes to LEOs applying force to folk, be they known felons or relatively innocent civilians. How the various departments come to their rules of engagement and what those are, is the meat of the book. 


There are some first-hand examples of confrontations good and bad, from the best-case to the worse-case scenarios. Some of these are stories Rory has told before, but they bear repeating. Being the first officer on the scene when it turns violent and possibly lethal, puts that officer into an instant pressure cooker. Life-or-death decisions have to be made in a heartbeat, and it's not a position I envy.


Rory has an informal writing style, two-people-having-coffee kind of thing that I enjoy, and it makes for much easier reading when you start getting into what can be dry points of law and policy. 


Overall, the book is well-written, informative, and a must-read for every citizen or group that has interactions with their police forces. You need to know, for instance, that doing what the officer tells you is more apt to get you better treatment. Calling him a motherfucker or physically resisting is more apt to get you thumped. You should know that anything the man with a badge and gun does that is over the line can be sorted out later–as long as you are there to sort it out; if he's wrong and you're dead, that's a bad trade. 


This one will be out in a few months, look for it, it's worth having in your library.


If Rory's book has a failing, it's that it doesn't really address the notion of bad cops. Rory says this could be because his department didn't seem to have many of those, or that maybe they tended to be better-behaved when he was around; still, it does need to be touched upon other than just, "Oh, well, yeah, there are bad cops." That won't do–that weakens the rest of the material. It doesn't have to be harped upon, but it does need to be acknowledged. I'd be really surprised if most of the good cops I've spoken to didn't have stories of guys in their department who got overly enthusiastic in their application of the law. 


Most of the time, when officers get into trouble it's because they have overstepped departmental policy, and while the heat of the moment can excuse some of it, the right to wear a gun and use it with the force of law behind you requires a much higher standard of behavior than needed for civilians. 


We expect our police to be honest and fair, and mostly they are, but when they cross the line, they should get nailed for it. There are LEO's who have been busted for driving drunk, road rage,  sleeping with underage teenage volunteers, and that's all happened in or around Portland in the last couple of weeks alone. You don't have to look too far to find the occasional bad apple. 


Now and then, an officer gets disciplined or even fired for going too far, and how those kinds of things are determined need, I think, to be shown. 


An aside, but relevant to the discussion: Policy protects an officer, but policy isn't always right. Those rules get changed all the time. 


As Rory points out in this book, the sleeper choke-hold used to be allowed all over, and he laments its loss, because usually it is effective and safe. MMA fighters do it all the time. I've had it done to me, just to see how effective it is. 


It's effective. Really.


However: after a couple of folks didn't wake up after having  a choke hold applied–I remember one case in Portland, involving a security guard who died–that policy was changed and the hold forbidden.  


Some of the local police were unhappy with that and had T-shirts made: Don't Choke 'em, Smoke 'em! 


I thought this was fairly stupid. The attitude of, "Fine, next time, we just shoot the bastard!" does not inspire citizens' confidence in their local police. Didn't me, anyway. Resisting arrest is not a crime that should be punishable by death. 


That twelve-year-old girl a couple years back, on the MAX train platform who got shot with a beanbag round at contact distance? Well, there was no written policy at the time about how far away a shooter needs to be to cook one off, but Portland officers were trained (at the time) at ten feet minimum distance. (L.A. based PARC says twenty-one to fifty-feet is optimal. Inside ten feet is considered dangerous.)


The officers who came out in support of Chris Humphreys were reacting to him being hung out by the police commissioner when he had followed department policy, such that it was. I can understand that; but most of the citizens and press did not understand the police attitude. What they saw was the entire force backing up a guy who shotgunned a preteen girl lying on the ground underneath another officer.


(And no department, by the by, says you could should whip out the beanbag shotgun and fire it while another officer is wrestling with a suspect. One officer had taken the girl to the ground, was on top of her, and his partner scooted around to hold the shotgun's muzzle just over her thigh. Good way to make sure you don't shoot your partner, unless he takes a bad roll just then. But it is really bad PR, and crappy policy, no matter how you spin it, especially if it is all on video, as this one was.)


Let me presume to speak for the public: If two experienced street cops can't take down an admittedly-strapping twelve-year-old girl who is resisting but unarmed, without reaching for the beanbag shotgun, they need additional training. 


Look at the video and see what you think ...

Modifiers

In regard to a recent discussion about grammar, a small bit of business about where one places modifiers, and how sentence construction has changed since I was a lad. 


Saw a bumper sticker recently: "I Only Drink Water." 


Which, if you read it properly, cannot possibly be true, else that driver wouldn't be operating a vehicle.


Adverbs are tricky. What s/he means is, "I drink only water," i.e., I  drink nothing but water. 


Not, the sole thing I do is drink water. 


Until, of course, I explode, since I apparently don't pee ...


Next time, "between" and "among ..."

And the Band Played On

Long-time readers here will probably recall that I like to read biographies and autobiographies. These are wide-ranging, though mostly of late they are of the musical variety, everything from blues to folk to classical to rock, and predominately, the last.


A biography is a story of a person's life written by somebody else. An autobiography is one written by somebody about him- or herself. 


Several of those I've read in the realm of rock are less about a single person and more portraits of the band as an entity. Thus while Don Felder's autobiography is from his viewpoint and covers his own upbringing, it is centered around, and focused more upon, his time with the Eagles. 


Most of these I've read focus upon bands or groups that were popular doing my coming-of-age and young adult years, from about 1960 until the late 1970's. (Once disco became a major part of the music scene, I switched to the oldies station ... and left it there ...)


The music you hear when you are young tends to stick with you. Not that you can't enjoy newer stuff when it comes along, but that song you were listening to just before you got laid the first time is ever so much more memorable than any you hear when you are fifty.


Unless, of course, you didn't get laid until you were fifty ...


Um. Anyway, mostly what I've done in the past is put up the name of the book, the author, and then reviewed the work, from the writing to the content. I'm not gonna do it that way this time. I'm not telling you the name of the book, who wrote it, or who the group was featured at the center. But I bet anybody who wants to can figure it out without having to work at it.  


There's a reason for this, and it involves me being able to say what I want to say without worrying about libel ...


I prefer a warts-and-all painting to a hagiography. And a lot of times, especially in autobiographies, the writer spends a fair amount of energy trying to justify his bad behavior, so you don't see many of the warts. Yeah, yeah, I toked up now and then, but just, you know, to be one of the boys.


And yeah, I indulged in some, ah ... partying with the young girls who came back stage and to our rooms, but, you know, a man would have to be a saint to resist and I really tried, but ...


Well, yeah, I got hooked on heroin, but I wasn't using the needle, I was just snorting it, and I was able to do my job, so it didn't really affect me ...


And so on. This is a natural human tendency, to offer up the "Yes, but–" explanation. We've all done that. 


Keith Richards probably did the best job I've read recently of telling it like it was without spending too much of the telling justifying his self-destructive actions. Keef, as you read, you realize, is a pretty smart fellow in a lot of ways. 


The latest book about which I  am going to speak is more of an all-warts-all-the-time picture, and apt to make the one Dorian Gray kept in his attic (even after much  debauchery) look like big-eyed children on black velvet by comparison.


This writer and this group–and you know who they are, and their music–had the gold and platinum records out the wazoo. They came out of the late sixties and at their peak, were the hottest act on the road. Some classic rock songs you would know unless you just got here from Mars. I liked their music.


And if half the stuff in the book is true, these guys were atop the pyramid of self-centered, pea-brained asshole rock stars. 


It's not just that they drank enough booze to float a battleship; nor that they took enough drugs to stone every sailor onboard that battleship into a coma; nor that they liked their groupies particularly young–thirteen? fourteen? hey, big enough, old enough! Nor is it just that they trashed hotel rooms, tore up the furniture, threw TV sets out the windows, and behaved like manic two-year-olds whenever they weren't on stage. Nor that they were cruel to everyone around them—and each other. 


Not just young and stupid, they were stupid first ...


All those things clumped together would be enough, but the real clincher is that past that, there was nobody home. Other than their music, they didn't appear to have any redeeming qualities. They didn't love dogs or children, they weren't self-aware. They were greedy, surly, ill-mannered, under-educated, felt entitled to whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it. They had egos to put small planets to shame. They didn't seem to care about anything except themselves.  


And when karma slouched round and began to beat the crap out of them, I had trouble feeling any sympathy for any of them. ODs, injury, deaths, these are terrible things, but in the back of my mind, that little voice kept nodding and saying, "Yep, yep, serves you right."


Eventually they disbanded, went their separate ways, and they all have enough money to live rich forever. But a great example of how power corrupts.

Drink Up

We usually pick enough blackberries each year to make a batch of blackberry liqueur. We got a book on such things several years ago, made different kinds–peach, apple, herbal, and blackberry, and the last is the one we liked the most.


The book's recipe was what we used and it is fine stuff, tasty as an after-dinner drink, and even a great topping for ice cream.


This year, I decided to forego the book's mix and kick it up a notch, so I went with an old family recipe. 


Well, not so old, given as how I made it up this morning, but different.


Here, the ingredients:


2 cups plain vodka
1 cup Southern Comfort
1 cup dark rum
2 cups white or pink wine - something dry and not too sweet
1-1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup lemon juice
Zest of one orange
Dash of vanilla
2 cups ripe blackberries.


Here's how you do it:


Put everything into a big jar. With a long-handled wooden spoon, crush the blackberries against the sides of the jar, enough to get a fair amount of juice from them. Stir like crazy to dissolve the sugar. Cap the jar and stick it into a dark closet. In two weeks, shake the mixture vigorously. I shouldn't have to say this, but make sure the cap is on tight before you do the agitation, okay?


Let it stand for another two weeks. 


These are minimum times, you can let it age for as long as you want,  but there's a point of diminishing returns. More than a month, it doesn't seem to get better, but neither does it get worse. I've heard tell of people who let stuff like this sit for a year without it going bad.


Use a strainer or cheesecloth to filter the blackberry sediment from the liquid, and repeat as necessary, two or three passes.


Once the larger particles are gone, you can use paper coffee filters (or a gold-mesh coffee cone) to do a final filtration. 


Pour into bottles and cork. If you keep it in a dark and relatively-cool place, the liqueur will keep as long as any other bottled hootch you have. 


Note: For the temperance folks who feel the need to drop me a note and warn me of the evils of drinking, as sometimes happens when I mention such things? Don't bother. You want to be a tea-totaller, fine by me, not my business. Nor is this your business–and remember, Jesus turned water into wine, not the other way around. 

Sneak Peek - TMWNM Cover

Cover by Angel Greenwood

Stay tuned to this station ...

Story Portals - Katya the Assassin

My sometimes-editor, sometimes-collaborator, and all the time friend, Larry Segriff, is launching a new venture, Story Portals. This is going to be an online store for fantasy tales, starting with short stories, then adding in full-length novels. 


These stories and books will be written by working professionals in the field, and in the initial roll-out, begin with short tales featuring Katya,  a trained assassin, courtesan, and worker of magicks. She kills people. She likes knives. She's a trained courtesan. What else do you need?


I am lucky enough to have a short story up in the first batch, a nasty little bit of business called "Just Desserts." And later, I'll have a part in a novel about Katya, working title of which is Assassin's Holiday. In this, I am paired with a younger writer some of you who drop round here know, Bobbe Edmonds.


Assuming, of course, that he gets off his lazy ass and finishes the thing ...


Um. Anyway, I urge you to drop by and have a look. 


Disclosure Notice: If you join and Larry makes a ton of money, some small measure of it will eventually filter down to me, and I must confess I wouldn't mind that. 


The site's official launch date is Thursday, September 1st, but you can sneak peek today and look around. There will be free samples, so you can see if you like it.


You can click on the link above, or over in the link list to the right.

Rings

Got the rings that Coach Sommer sent me installed in the oak tree out back. Nylon ought to last longer than the hemp rope did.

So far, all I can manage are chins in an L-sit. I think the iron cross is a long ways off. Just past Fantasyland there ...

You Know You're Old When ...

... you can remember when the mammoth bones your dog dragged into the cave were still fresh.


... you knew the Missing Link personally.


... television was a novelty.


... Oxygen was a novelty ...

Matadors

I've gone through the first couple of eManuscripts for the Matador series and put back the italics that had been stripped out. Even though that was all I was going to do, just check the hardcopy for those and fix 'em, I fell into the Reading Trap ...


Back before computers and spellcheckers and instant online dictionaries, I used to have a spelling book on my desk. Just lists of words, no definitions. I have an unabridged dictionary in three volumes in the bookcase next to my desk and I could have used that, but any time I pick up a dictionary to check spelling, I always get hung up in the sucker. Too much interesting information that tugs at me: Oh, wow, who knew that's where that word came from? And the sixth definition? I never knew that. And wait, just down the page, that word? Cool! Let me go check out that reference ...


Looking up the spelling of a word could result in a twenty-minute detour that I knew was better spent writing, so I got the speller.


Something similar happens when I read books that I wrote a while back.


Even using the global search in my WP to find a phrase that needed to be italicized didn't save me from the Trap. I would go there, and even as I highlighted and changed the font, a sentence below would snag my attention. Hmm ...


Next thing I knew, I was reading along, nodding. Yeah, yeah, that's not bad ...


Whoa. Stop it, Steve. Get back to work!


Too late ...


But here's the interesting part. These books–at least the first couple–have aged pretty well. Better than I expected.


I was on a panel with Ursula LeGuin once, and somebody asked the panelists if we look back at our old work in horror at how bad it was. Actually, she said, I'm usually surprised at how good it is.


Me, too. 


Not that we aren't better writers in a lot of ways, just that we maybe weren't as bad as we thought. 


Some of the technology in the Matadors that was so cutting-edge (I thought) when I first wrote it twenty-five years ago has been overtaken. But the story, the characters, they still seem to work. And the writing is, frankly, much better than I expected it would be. It actually holds up okay, especially for a guilty pleasure ...


Just a note from the revision battlefield. 


The Matadors are coming back to do their thing on your Kindle, iPad, computer, and even cell phone. Stay tuned.