New Book

Recently, I was asked if I wanted to write a short story for a new series being produced by Adventure Boys. These are pulp-style stories for YA readers (YA meaning "young adult," which translates to the ten-to-twelve year-old age bracket, and in this case aimed at boys.)

The stories are illustrated, and then put into the format of an old pulp magazine. Along with the fiction is a short section of history about the period.

The one I did, in collaboration with Mike Stackpole, was a hoot. Reminds me of the old Hardy Boys mysteries I read as a lad. Good, clean, fun -- unlike what I usually write ...

The Adventure Boys website is still being built, but you can sign up for mailings there if you want.

Tailgaters

The little electronic sign I carry in my car to remind tailgaters not to kiss my rear bumper ...

The first message is polite. The second less so. Because I didn't want to run afoul of YouTube's decency regs, I cut the vid off before the second one finished. Probably you can guess what it says, though ...

Hardwired

Tomorrow morning, Thursday, bright and early, a friend of mine in L.A. is going in to have half his brain rewired. (He had the first half done a couple years back, and now he'll really set off the metal detectors ...)

It's mostly probes and stuff -- head gets locked into a vise that is screwed into the skull and that is latched to a frame on a table so nobody moves. There are long needles and electrodes and all like that, but they don't have to cut away half the brain case or anything. Still, it's not a walk in the park.

If you have any spare spiritual energy laying around, I would appreciate it if you'd direct some it toward L.A. tomorrow. Prayers, pleasant thoughts, white light, all are welcome. Some for the doctors, and some for geology -- we don't want an earthquake while he's on the table.

Oh, and I have to mention this: The neurosurgeon's name? And I swear this is true, is Igor ...

Thanks.

What a Difference a Day Makes

Nothing like hauling a ton or two of paper, cutting fifty or sixty cardboard boxes to flats, and dragging assorted household impedimenta out to the rented dumpster to get the the old lactic acids flowing, nosiree.

From eight-thirty yesterday morning until about five yesterday afternoon, and a sandwich on the move, I tossed stuff into Mr. Bin's open maw. Another hour or two should see it topped off.

So far, the new sink isn't leaking yet -- knock on wood -- and the garage guy comes in the morning.

Gives me much respect for people who have to work for a living. A day or two are more than enough for me, thank you very much.

Cleaning Frenzy in Progress

Like a shark feeding-frenzy -- cue the theme from Jaws, dah-dat, dah-dat -- a cleaning-frenzy involves a lot of thrashing about. Instead of blood in the water, there are swirls of trash -- bits of paper, cardboard boxes, broken crockery and furniture. Little things that ordinarily wouldn't get noticed suddenly appear as an impediment to life itself, and you are apt to find yourself with an old toothbrush cleaning along that crack between the stove and counter-top because you can't stand the idea of the gunk in it, even if you can't actually see it ...

What happens is that you start out slow, and then you get revved up, and you tend to haul ass in fifth gear until you run out of gas.

The Waste Management people arrived early this morning bearing the drop-box. Not huge as such bins go, a mere four yards, it is now empty.

When the cleaning frenzy is done, I expect it to be full. The only question is, how long will it take ... ?

Homeowner's Blues

The joy of owning your own house -- well, you and and the mortgage company owning it -- is large. Space between you and your neighbors, a permanent place for your stuff, a sense of belonging that bespeaks home in a way an apartment or rented house seldom, if ever, achieves.

The downside is the upkeep. Your house, you take care of it. House, yard, bushes, trees, lawn. Fortunately, I have bark-dusted enough so there isn't any lawn, but I'm still sawing up tree branches that fell during the last windstorm ...

Which is why, for the next few days, I will be doing work around the house more than on the computer.

The little things start to add up. The washerless faucet in the bathroom is dripping, and what that means is that, unlike the old kinds of valves you could take apart and just stick in a new rubber washer to fix, you now have to replace the whole thing. And because the chances of finding one that matches the rest of the still-working hardware on the sink are slim and snowball, that means the whole shebang has to be replaced.

So, a trip to Home Depot.

The meeting place of the driveway and the street has become mis-aligned, due to the roots of the gumball trees next to the curb. The cheapest and quickest fix is to rent a concrete grinder to smooth things. Neighborhood association won't let us take down the trees if they are healthy, aside from which, we like them. Ordinarily, I wouldn't care about the problem, since it's only the sidewalk I have to keep to city code, but the shift in tectonic plates there now causes all the water that used to run down the gutter on a rainy day to slosh over the curb and detour through my front yard. Somewhat distressing to step out the door and find yourself ankle-deep in swirling water lapping at your threshold ...

Another item to check into at Home Depot.

The newly cleaned-out garage which now hosts the new car requires a garage door opener if it is to be useful, and while these are relatively inexpensive, the chance of me being able to install one are probably not real good. Way I use tools, I'd hit the button on the garage door opener, all my toilets would flush, and I'd still be on the driveway trying to avoid drowning from the onrush of sloshed-over-the-curb rainwater.

Something else to look at whilst at Home Depot.

And the clearing of the garage resulted in a pile of junk on the side of the house. Moving Peter in order to pull Paul in out of the weather, so I have to get one of those dumpster thingees and see how much of a dent filling it up will make in the accreted household detritus. (The other joy of householding is that empty space fills up with junk. That spare, Japanese look I enjoy, has, over a few years, turned into a bargain-basement version of Hearst Castle. I wouldn't be surprised if my epitaph reflected this: Local Man Killed by Falling Debris Inside Own Home.)

Then, of course, it is time to do our income taxes ...

Never a dull moment.

My Precious ...

I used to do a stand-up routine at science fiction conventions, part of which was offering that the best job security in the world would be as an optometrist in Metropolis. Because everybody is obviously in dire need of glasses -- nobody can tell a bird from a plane from Superman, which indicates really bad eyes to me. Not to mention that a pair of horn-rims on the only guy who doesn't need them turns Superman into Clark Kent and nobody can see through that one, either.

Watching some of the old episodes, I came across another good one: Clark Kent wears a pinky ring on his left hand in the early episodes. And guess what? Superman wears exactly the same ring on his left pinky, too!

Continuity, where is thy sting?

Click on the picture, from the cover of one of the DVD sets, and see.

I'm having waaay too much fun here ...

Looking for a New Toy ... ?

with which to kill yourself?

Look no farther:

Suicide Stilts (aka: PoweriZers)

These are for people who want to take their trampolines with them ...

Next time you are at YouTube, check out some of the videos.

Cookies

One of the joys of getting older is that you get to see so many things change over the course of your life. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Nickel Cokes and candy bars are gone, but so are summer fears of catching polio. Radio dramas have faded, but we have hundreds of channels of television. (The golden age of TV, by the by, was supposedly the early fifties. Some of those years are better in memory than in truth. I recently got the old Superman series with George Reeves, on DVD, and most of those episodes don't hold up very well -- done on the cheap, awful EFX, talky, badly-written, and all of the actors should have died the first season from scenery-poisoning, given how much of it they chewed ...

We sent people to the moon, cured smallpox, and defeated the Evil Empire. The buggy whips of my youth are gone (unless I want to drop round Spartacus in Portland and check out their leather) and I can still find Brown's Velvet Pineapple Sherbet, if I want to fly back to Baton Rouge, and it still tastes as good as it did when I was a boy. Of course it would, being it is almost entirely unnatural ingredients and preservatives. A few years ago on a visit, I bought a half-gallon of it, and proceeded to eat it all over the course of two days ...

Jack's Cookie Company's Brown-Edge Lemon Thins are, however, no more.

Those favorite store-boughts of my childhood are as extinct as the dinosaurs. My mother went hunting them a few years back when I asked if the company was still in business, but there were none to be had.

The wonder of the world wide web is that it is a cornucopia of oddball information, and recently I went hunting for a clue to those cookies.

Apparently Jack's was bought up in the mid-sixties by the Murray Biscuit Company, which was in turn purchased by Beatrice Foods, and in the late nineties, Keebler, all now owned by Kellog's.

No brown-edge lemon thins, alas.

Apparently I wasn't the only person who remembered these treats fondly, and in answer to other queries, Gourmet Magazine published a recipe -- almost twenty years ago -- in which the need was addressed.

And some kind soul put it on the web where I found it.

The cookies feature Crisco, butter, sugar, various forms of lemon -- juice, extract, and zest -- and the other bakery things that icebox cookies have, flour, vanilla, baking powder and soda and salt and like that, and I can see why they went away. Nothing the least bit healthy about them, more fat than gravy-smothered pork chops ...

But, having found the recipe, I had to try them, so I went out and got the ingredients -- no Crisco in our house -- blended them together as instructed and after chilling the dough for a couple hours, popped them into the oven.

And the results?

Well, they came out pretty good. Great taste, nice texture, good flavor.

Not the same as the commercial ones, which had that preserved-uniformity and that were already-going-stale-in-the-package when you bought 'em. Are the home-baked ones better? Yeah, I'd have to say so.

Better. But they aren't the same ...

What a Waste

While it's not my intent to turn this into a look-who-died-now-blog, I have to report that stand-up comedian Richard Jeni is gone -- apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot.

The details are still hazy, but it seems he was having breakfast with his girlfriend. Got up, went into the shower, and shot himself. She called for help, and he was still alive when the police arrived, but died a few hours later in the hospital.

Reading between the lines, you can get the idea that he was depressed -- he'd cancelled some appearances, and some of the people interviewed indicated they knew he was having some problems, though they didn't say what.

It's well-known that comedians sometimes turn to humor to compensate for less-than-funny personal lives -- the act becomes therapy -- and it pays the bills.

Jeni was a regular on the Carson and Leno shows, had HBO specials, was in a few movies, even had a short-lived TV series. For my money, he was hands-down the funniest stand-up working. The one time we managed to see him in person, he had my kind-hearted, animal-loving, anti-cruelty wife laughing so hard she was crying -- and this doing a routine about orcas torturing and killing a baby seal.

You had to be there.

He was clever, his humor was sophisticated, and he was truly, deeply, genuinely funny. I never saw anybody work an audience as completely as he did. In one early routine, he hummed the first few bars of the theme for the National Geographic TV Show -- dah, dah, dah, daaah-dah! --
then held the mike out and waited as the audience filled in the rest, like a call-and-response blues singer.

What a shame. What a terrible waste of talent.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Stripe
1986-2007

After a year or so in a local college, my son went off to school in SoCal, in the fall of 1986. Suffering from acute half-empty-nest syndrome, my wife and I immediately went out and got a new puppy and two kittens.

The dog was a Chow-Chow, Roxanne. The kittens, gray tabbies, both male, we got from a German woman we called Helga, the Cat Nazi, and my daughter named them Spot and Stripe.

Spot was the sweet kitty who loved to sit in your lap. Stripe would rather be outside on his own.

Not six months later, Spot got into one of the garbage cans and found some moldy pizza and that was the end of him.

Stripe became an inside/outside kitty once his brother was gone, a now-and-then lap-cat, but he liked to roam and do combat with the neighborhood toms, even though he had been neutered. Got his ears tattered and some raging infections, but ruled our yard against all comers. He liked to sleep in odd places. A couple of the more interesting ones were in a frying pan on the stove, and in the bathroom sink.

We never expected him to more than last twenty years. We thought sure he'd get run over or mauled, and yet somehow, he managed to keep going.

He was blind in one eye and slowing down. He liked the new puppy, they would rub noses and he would put up with her licking his face. But he had to be near a litter box the last year or so, or he'd just go wherever he was, we couldn't let him run loose in the house. We put a bed in the garage with a heater in front of it, and that's where he spent cold days; warmer ones, he laid on a heating pad in a deck chair in the front courtyard. Now and then, he'd sit on my lap watching TV. He slept a lot.

Saturday, Stripe's belly swelled up, and while he didn't seem in any great discomfort, his appetite was off, and there was obviously something wrong. The diagnosis was that he probably had a bowel tumor, certainly some kind of blockage, but without X-rays and a battery of diagnostic tests, it was hard to be sure, and he wasn't a good candidate for surgery in any event. The prognosis was, at best, not good. Things were not going to get better.

We thought about what would be the kindest thing to do. And so we had him put down, and his ashes will join those of Cady and Scout out front. (Spot's remains, I buried out back almost twenty years ago. Regular pet cemetary, our yard ...)

Been a sad year for animals in our family. My old dog Scout and my daughter's dog Howard went on the same day a few months back; now the old cat. But, Stripe had a good run, four months shy of twenty-one, which is pretty good for an outside/inside cat.

And the big wheel keeps on turning ...

New Some New Bling?

Here's a watch for you:

Click here: Quenttin

No price on the website, but a little research, you can find out easily enough.

Given the current British pound to U.S. dollar exchange, you can pick one up for a mere $356,000, plus or minus a couple grand ...

Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's ...

George Reeves

My father was an electrical engineer, and enamored of all things electronic. Thus we bought our first television set so that he could play with it. He changed tubes, souped it up, motorized the antenna so it could be turned from inside, and managed to bring in -- albeit somewhat snowy and fuzzy at times -- the only two stations on the air within range of our house -- WAFB in Baton Rouge, and WDSU, in New Orleans.

The year was 1953, and the very first program that graced that little black and white screen in our house in Brookstown was The Adventures of Superman, starring George Reeves. Presented by Kellog's, that program, with what are now extremely cheesy special effects and awful scripts, guaranteed that I'd be glued to the screen when it aired. As a reader even then of Superman comic books, I was presold. Until then, we listened to the radio. After that, television ruled -- well, after books, for me.

I think they were already shooting in color the second season, even though there weren't any color TV sets to speak of. In black-and-white, it had a very noir look, epecially the first season.

(My father, who hunts down antique radio and TV tubes and restores old sets for collectors as a hobby, still has that old unit in his family room. Big, blonde wood cabinet, little screen. Last time I looked, it still worked.)

I can still recite the opening narration for the Superman show word-for-word. And for those men of my age, George Reeves is the only Superman, just as Sean Connery is the only real James Bond ...

Last fall, there was a movie in theaters, Hollywoodland, which is the story of George Reeves's mysterious death in 1959.

I remember that still, the shock. Suicide? What, did he use a kryptonite bullet ... ?

I meant to see the movie when it came out, but life got in the way and I didn't. It's on DVD and Pay-per-view now, so I finally caught it.

Hollywoodland -- which for those who don't know, is what the world-famous Hollywood real estate sign said before part of it blew down -- stars Ben Affleck as Reeves; Diane Lane as his married girlfriend -- amusing the name, hey? -- and Adrien Brody as the seedy private eye who snoops around after the cops close the case as an obvious suicide. Affleck is perfect as an actor that everybody knows will never be a star except himself; Lane, as his older mistress and wife of a mob-connected studio boss, plays the just-over-the-hill fading rose dead on. Brody's turn as the sleazo hard-drinking L.A. private detective is -- speaking as somebody who used to be one -- done right. Bob Hoskins plays the hard-as-nails studio boss, Mannix, and trots out his letter-perfect American accent once again.

Not a clunker in the cast.

There are glorious bits: Hoskins, Lane, Affleck and Ayumi Iizuka, who plays Hopkin's Japanese mistress, all have dinner together, the height of a civilized open-marriage. Lane's Toni Mannix wants to buy a house. "A good investment," her husband says when she asks him for it. He looks at Reeves. "Don't you think?" He knows who she's buying it for, and he doesn't care that she's sleeping with Reeves. When Reeves ventures a comment to Mannix's mistress, he said, "Don't talk to her." A beat, and then, "She doesn't speak English."

Later, Robin Tunney's Lenore Lemmon, Reeves's eventual fiance, says to a girlfriend when meeting Reeves in New York, "Superman wants to get laid." and then promptly does just that.

There's a scene where a small boy in a cowboy suit, supposedly based on a real event, approaches Reeves at a personal appearance with a real revolver and wants to shoot him to see the bullet bounce off, and Affleck shows Reeves's real fear as he tells the boy that the richochet might hurt somebody and they wouldn't want that ...

The movie explores the theory that Reeves didn't kill himself, and that one of a couple people had reason to off him. I thought it was well-done and balanced, even though it took a few liberties, it also had a lot of well-researched material in it. People looking for an answer to the question, murder or suicide? won't come away with an answer, but it made some good points about Reeves, as a man and as an actor, and for those of us who were kids when he ruled the skies over Metropolis -- with the L.A. Municipal Building standing in for the Daily Planet -- it's a fascinating movie.

Everything I have read indicates that Reeves did himself in. On the night he died, he was drunk, on pain medications, depressed, and there was a family history of suicide. He had money -- the residuals on the show were enough to pay the rent and then some, and he had a job lined up as a director on a movie. He was also about to start another season of Superman, which had been cancelled in 1958, but which had such a demand it had been picked up again to start filming in 1960. But he hated the role and thought it was beneath him, and he had to know his chances of working in front of the camera in anything else were slim. His role in From Here to Eternity was mostly cut, after preview audiences laughed when he appeared on screen: Look, it's Superman!

If you were ever a fan of the TV series, you'll probably enjoy seeing Hollywoodland.

If There's Something Strange in Your Neighborhood ...

Who you gonna call ... ?

Key is Smarter than I am ...

So the new car comes with what they call a "smart key." A rectangular bar with a worm-track machined in it, and three buttons on the plastic part. Locks doors and trunk, unlocks them, rolls windows up and down, and can be programmed to do other things, like put the top down while I'm not in it, like that.

Got two of them. Don't lose 'em, they said, because it costs a hundred and fifty bucks to replace one, and has to be shipped from England ...

But here's the part that really told me it had been a while since I got a new car: I asked the guy, so how do you get it open to change the battery? No screws visible. And the answer is, you don't need to. The battery is a rechargeable -- and the car charges it when it is in the ignition. Should last ten years, at least ...

Man. Here we are, living in the future!

All Things Must Pass

For almost three decades, I owned and drove two cars: a 1978 Volvo, seventeen years; and a 1995 Mazda MX-5 (Miata) for twelve years.

Starting the next car-driving decade, and moving up to a somewhat larger car than the Miata, behold our new Mini-Cooper. Probably you've seen them around, though they aren't common. There's one dealer in Oregon, and one in Washington, and if you want next year's model, you have to put your name on a list and wait. About three months, and no wiggle room on the sticker price. (Rent "The Italian Job" and watch what they do with these cars. The remake. Although the Michael Caine version in the old Mini is probably better ...)

No longer will slackwit drivers irritate me by tailgating my little red convertible.

Now, they'll irritate me by tailgating my little blue convertible.

Busy Days

In the natural cycle of my life, there are times when things roll along at a nice pace, other times when they get slow, and still other times when they start moving like a house afire.

Of late, the times is suddenly busy ...

Work -- never rains but it pours, all of a moment I have galleys, outlines, short stories, novels, all needing to be written right now. With family stuff, there are the kids, grandkids, my wife has a bad cold and just got back from Louisiana. We are setting up a memorial service for my mother-in-law, and selecting a gravesite. We have major housecleaning to do, a lot of junk that just has to go away. We are looking at buying a new car. There are things like silat, dogs, guitar, working out, and other time-fillers, and not enough time in the day to get to them all.

The wheel will turn again, given my experience, but until it does, I'm going to be hopping ...

Residuals

Because I used to write a fair amount of animation for television, I was able to join the Writers Guild of America, West, the organization that takes care of movie and TV writers. As a junior member -- read: without full membership or benefits -- of what is called The Animation Caucus.

The Guild is essentially a union, and Hollywood, if you work for the major studios, is a closed shop. If you write movies and you aren't a member -- actually, I think it's two movies -- you are required to join. It costs a nice chunk of change, but there are mucho benefits -- health insurance, minimum payments for work, and the Guild has enough clout to arbitrate arguments and, if need be, call a strike against the studios. On balance, this is a great organization and if you work in the biz, will pay for itself in a hurry.

I wasn't aware than any of the animation I wrote was subject to the perks that live-action writers get, one of which is residual payment for work beyond what you were paid for the original airing, or if it is aired overseas.

So I get this little check in the mail yesterday. Well, the check is normal-sized, just the amount is little, for foreign copyright royalties on a bunch of old episodes of Batman, Gargoyles, Ghostbusters, and Godzilla. These run like seventy cents, twenty-three cents, three dollars and ninety-one cents, etc. There are a lot of 'em, but totaled, they don't amount to much.

Still, it's free money, and I'm happy to get it ...

Old Hippie Flashback

Like many of my generation, my memories of the 60's are somewhat less than, um, perfect. The time is framed by a Peter Max psychedelic rainbow -- green microdot, orange sunshine, purple haze, all viewed through a distorted windowpane ...

Now and then, however, something roils the old memory pond, stirs the sludge and bottom muck, and some long-lost recollection rises and bobs to the surface.

Had one of those yesterday. I saw a bumper sticker, the match of which I haven't seen for forty years. That antique one was probably on the back of a beat-up VW bus. The new one was on the back of a new Volvo station wagon:

Gas, cash, or ass -- nobody rides for free ...

Lord, Lord. Like the Henley song about a Dead Head Sticker on the back of a Cadillac. Who could have seen that coming?

The Age of Aquarius tripped and fell on its way here, and once again we have a stupid war spending lives and money. Things have changed so much -- and then again, not at all ...

Peace: Wouldn't that be great?

We Can Stop at the Magic Store ...

Long-time couples, married or not, develop personal shorthand in their dialogs. Shared experiences that become staples. During a conversation, these make sense to them, but not to anybody outside the relationship -- unless they stop to explain.

When I was a young man living in L.A., my best buddy was a fairly serious amateur magician. He had gotten into it as a teenager, when we'd both lived in Baton Rouge, and had a pretty good collection of standard stage tricks -- linking rings, Chinese rice bowls, cabinets for making things vanish and appear, a cane that turned into a handkerchief, card tricks, even a full-dress suit, white tie and tails. It was from him that I learned old saw about how to do a stage performance: Don't think of yourself as a magician, think of yourself as an actor portraying a magician. Makes it easier to get that grand, scenery-chewing persona ...

Um. Anyway. During those years, Joe Berg had a magic shop on Hollywood Blvd. and this was the place for serious magicians to buy stuff and hang out, so sometimes we'd go there. I could do a few coin sleights, enough so they didn't kick me out. (Once, my friend and I managed to con our way into the Magic Castle in Hollywood, which was a club for professional magicians, and in those days, invitation-only. That might have been our best trick ever ...)

Our wives liked to get out now and again, but some of the places they wanted to go didn't interest us much, so we tended to drag our feet on those occasions. At some point, in a wonderfully transparent psychological ploy, my wife said to us, "Come on, go. We could stop at the magic store on the way ..."

I laughed then, and it's still funny now. It became our privatespeak for any attempt to fool each other that we caught. Uh huh. Right. And can we stop at the magic store on the way ... ?

No real point here. I just remembered it when I was fooling around with posting that coin vid. Figured I better put it down before I forgot it, in case I ever wanted to use it. This is how a writer's mind sometimes works. Odd connections that form unexpectedly.

Which, long as I am here, reminds me of another how-a-writer's-mind-works scene, from Bob Fosse's movie, All that Jazz. Joe Gideon, played by Roy Scheider, is a very thinly-disguised Fosse. He is cheating on his girlfriend, Kate, played by Ann Reinking. Who had been in real life, Fosse's girlfriend, and whom he cheated on. Talk about complicated. Reinking was gorgeous, a talented dancer, and later won a Tony for her choreography on Broadway. And she's aged very well, too -- but I am wandering. Back to the story:

Kate comes home unexpectedly and catches Joe in bed with the other woman.

During a following sequence later, they argue, with Vivaldi's Four Seasons playing in the b.g., and at one point, Joe tries to defend himself with a lame comment about giving her all he can, to which Kate's character tearfully says, "I just wish you weren't so generous with your cock!"

The look on Scheider/Gideon's face is priceless. You can see the wheels turning in his brain as he does a slow take: "That's ... good. Maybe I can use that sometime." Whereupon he stands, puts a cigarette between his lips and walks into the other room to shut off the music.

"It's show time, folks!"

Kate is essentially kicking his ass for being a scumbag boyfriend, and while trying to appear contrite, he's more delighted at the little phrase she's handed him than regretful. That's how writers are. And I'm betting that Fosse heard it directed at him and did use it when he wrote the script.

Any writer who saw that scene resonated with that line. Stuff pops up and the light goes on and you think, Wow, someday, I'm gonna find a place to use that ...

Listen for that little voice. You never know when one of those gems will just appear.

Spiral

So at silat class last night, we went back over some basic stuff we haven't done in a while, meat-and-potatoes moves -- sapu, kenjit, ankat (sweep, scissors-takedown, throws off an unweighted leg, for those of you who could care about Bahasa Indonesian terms.)

And one more time, I found myself nodding over the notion that learning for me is often like a slight upward spiral. As I climb, I continually circle, and find myself passing the same spot over and over. But each pass, I'm a little higher, so the angle of view is not quite indentical, even though I might be looking at the same scene. I see things I missed last time. And if I make it around again, I expect I'll see stuff I missed this time, too.

To quote Mr. Spock: Fascinating ...

Radioactive ...

For about a year, I've been wearing a Traser watch. I spend a fair amount of time -- ho, ho -- in the dark, up and about, and the phosphorescent dials on my watches, be they wrist or pocket models, glow for about thirty seconds after they are exposed to a bright light, then fade enough so as to be unreadable.

So I did some research into tritium, -- I used to have a tritium nightsight on a handgun that was very nice -- and I found there were watches, designed for the military originally, that use the technology. You can't quite read by the glow, but in pitch black or even partial darkness, you can't miss it. If I were skulking around in the night and trying to stay hidden, I'd wear long-sleeves, or stick this one in my pocket. It is really bright.

Tritium decays slowly, the light fades, and after eighteen or twenty years will be dim, and a few years later, won't glow any more, so I'll have to replace it.

My camera doesn't have the ability to get a good picture of what the watch face looks like in total darkness, but I found this little animated .GIF online that does.

And Here is the Outside Knuckle Roll

Keeping Your Fingers Supple - fingertip roll

For some reason, YouTube decided to repeat the sequence at twice normal speed at the end, dunno why. Would that I could do it that fast -- I'd be working the crowds at Vegas ...

Feed Me, Seymour!

So we got up this morning to a wet, sloppy, blowing snowfall. Won't stick, it's not cold enough on the flats, and it is already turning to rain, but we had to take our camper into the shop in the middle of it because that's when they could slot us, and traffic was, well, rush hour traffic compounded by icky weather.

Not being a morning person, I'd prefer that such things should commence no earlier than, say, eleven a.m. Those folks who run around going on about the beauty of the sunrise and all? It's just like a sunset, except on the other side of town ...

Our camper has in it a toilet, and it was leaking. Having expended my handyman abilities by tightening everything I could reach that was loose, and doing so in a space designed for Lilliputians, I realized it needed a new seal, and those aren't like the normal wax rings you can get at the hardware store for the house johns, so, in it had to go.

The idea of looking up to see the dogs wading neck-deep through black water effluvia in the camper is not one I wish to contemplate in any detail. If you think a toilet backing up at home is bad, picture the scene rolling down the freeway at sixty with it swirling around your ankles ...

Nope, no thank you, it went in to to the professionals.

Income taxes loom, the toothdriller wants to send his kids to college on my dime, the dog's surgery took another bite, and last month's heating bill during the cold and snow is the highest it's ever been in this house, and that with the thermostat dialed down every night. Easy come, easy go, so it is said, but have you ever noticed that spending it seems to happen a lot faster than making it?

Is it Safe?

Saw Mr. Dentist today, and without going into the too-much-information-ick-ick! realm, let me just say that some years ago I had a crown installed and, unbeknownst to me, it was badly-fitted. The result of that led to a pair of small dental caries where neither floss nor brush could effectively reach. These have now been drilled and filled, and a fitting for a new and -- we hope -- properly-positioned replacement crown done.

I brush, I floss, I Water Pik, and even so, I've had more cavities plugged than get filled on a busy weekend at the Mustang Ranch ...

The statute of limitations has run out on the original crown, and the guy who did the orginal work is now plying his trade in the afterlife anyhow, so that's that.

Never a dull moment ...

Snake Oil

In light of recent discussions, here and elsewhere, I am going to offer some free advice. (Given the price, one must consider its worth in that light -- might be worth exactly what one pays for it -- but I've never let that stop me before ...)

Leave off already with the snake oil.

People who pay attention to such things tend to hear alarms and see red flags when a claim seems, on the face of it too good to be true. It might be true, but as a basic rule one learns early in writing fiction, truth is no defense. It can be absolutely true, but if it doesn't sound true? It won't play.

If you have a product or service you wish to offer, it is much better in my mind to undersell it than to oversell it.

I know, I know, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, and advertisting folks will tell you that hype works, and for some it does.

Not for me. So if you are looking for discerning folks such as myself to try your product or service and you pound me over the head with how miraculously terrific and unbeatable it is, I'm not going to come have a look.

Recently, I wrote and offered some ad copy to a guy I know who has a training seminar. He and his co-teacher are extremely well-qualified, what they offer is great material -- this from folks I know and trust who have told me -- and you will certainly get your money's worth and then some, but the kind of student they really want is apt to turn away once the get a whiff of the cure-all, walk-on-water hype they've come up with to offer it.

Hide your light under a bushel. Hide the bushel. Tell us you think you have something worthwhile and why, but don't deck it out with neon and brass bands, please.

Look at the way you tell us about what you do. If in your description you have the words "best-ever," "revolutionary," "unique," or "unbeatable," then rewrite it. You don't have to be humble, but if something comes across as bullshit, that's going to lose those folks who aren't looking for that addition to their diet ...

More Mayhem with Sharp Steel ...

Thirty or so years ago, I worked in a medical clinic. As part of that, I got a lot of medical magazines and surgical catalogs, and in one of these, I came across a knife I thought was cool, so I ordered it.

It was an autopsy/dissection knife. Not a disposable, nor a scalpel, it was an old-style reusable, and looked rather like a hunting knife, something like the one pictured up top. The handle was black, ebony, I believe, and lightly fluted for a better grip. It was designed to flay open a corpse. German steel, cost about forty bucks as I recall.

Eventually, I gave it away or lost it, I can't recall exactly, and I was sorry. This was before I got interested in knives as a result of the study of silat. It was always kind of fun to tell people who asked about it: Oh, this? It's an autopsy knife ...

Got some great double-takes off that line.

It was a great tool and designed for the kind of thing that would serve a knife fighter ...

Which brings us to today's lesson: The right tool for the job.

Realistic knife defenses using one's bare hands and other body parts are iffy at best. Guy has a knife and you don't, run away. If you can't, find a weapon -- a chair, a piano, a bowling ball. If you can't do that, and you have no choice, and your barehanded stuff is all you have, then you have to go for broke. You'll get cut, and if you are lucky, not so bad that you can't take the guy before you bleed out.

If you are unlucky ... ? Well. You know.

The question is not whether you wind up in the hospital, you are going there, the question is only if it's gonna be the ER or the ICU.

I can't tell you what will work, save that trying like hell to survive will serve you better than assuming you won't.

But, I will offer a story concerning the idea that you can beat a knife barehanded like they do in the movies.

One of our semi-regular silat students and a nice guy is, let's call him "Jim," holds rank in another martial art, a Chinese hybrid system. He's either a 4th or 5th degree black belt, and highly regarded in that art. A while back, one of Jim's fellow black belts and some friends were out of an evening and got into a confrontation with some gang guys in a restaurant. Outnumbered and unarmed, the black belt and his buddies did the smart thing, they hauled ass.

The other guys gave chase, and as the black belt got into his car, he was stabbed, once, under the armpit. The wound proved fatal.

Jim was shaken by this. He had trained with this guy, and knew that he had known their knife defenses. So he grabbed one of the other black belts and a training knife and said, "Okay, look, come at me full force, no give-me-your-arm slomo stuff, don't tell what you are going to do, just do it, really try to stick me. Let's see which of our defenses work in that situation."

And it turned out, none of them worked.

So Jim stopped teaching those defenses, because he said that if somebody used one and got killed, he would feel responsible. That rather than give out a defective tool, better not to give out any.

The barehanded knife defenses I know are last-ditch, no-choice, back-to-the-wall things, and I hope I never have to pull them up. I don't know how good my chances would be, though I believe they would be better than not having them. They aren't fancy, they are simple and brutal. One of them is informally known as the "Oh, shit!" move, and that pretty much sums up the situation you're in if your attacker has a knife and you don't.

This is why it is a good weapon for somebody who is small or weak or infirm. With just a little bit of practice, a knife will equalize things against a larger, stronger attacker. Steel against flesh? Bet your money on the edge to win most of the time. Yeah, there are martial arts experts out there who can go bare against a knife and come out again, but they are few and far between.

Silat guys I know all carry a legal-sized knife. Some carry more than one. Go to a silat class and ask loudly if anybody has a knife you can borrow, and you are apt to be deafened by the sound of folders clicking open ...

Lot of knives out there. It would be wise if you consider yourself a martial artist to become passing familiar with them. Me, I am no expert and well aware of that. But I have put in some time to become used to seeing and playing with them. Forewarned is forearmed ...

Cut and Run

There is a South African style of knifefighting called "Piper." That's their logo above. Much of it, as I understand, is derived from prison-based material, and from actual assassins -- that is, stuff that really worked on the street well enough to get them put away for murder.

Lot of folks get carved up in SoAfrica. Knowing how to use a knife there is a survival characteristic.

It is pretty scary stuff to look at.

Rather than try to explain it here, I'll give you a direct link: Piper Knife Combatives

Go and have a look. You can also get reviews of the system by Mushtaq Ali and Bobbe Edmunds, over in my link list. (Traceless Warrior and Thick as Thieves, respectively). And I'm going to put a link to Piper in my list, too.

I first saw a garage tape of some the senior Piper players back in 2001. It looked nasty, but I saw some holes in it. A couple years ago, when I wrote my martial arts science fiction novel The Musashi Flex, I started the book with a knife fight. One of the fighters used a style called "Peepah," which was based on Piper. He got carved up by my protagonist Mourn, who was a galactic-class fighter and expert in a lot of martial arts.

Peepah/Piper didn't come off in the best of lights. Part of this was that I had seen but one old tape I used as a reference. Part of it was because my protagonist was an expert used to fighting to the death and had managed to survive twenty-five years doing it. (And if he lost, it was gonna be a really short novel ...)

Naturally, the senior students/creators of the Piper system weren't particular thrilled with how their art came off -- especially since they had been getting a lot of crap from traditional martial artists who disdained it. If you want to see really ugly politics and in-fighting, martial arts schools are the places to go. (We all say that there is no one perfect martial art -- but in our hearts, we all believe that whichever one we do comes the closest ...)

I re-visited Piper, saw some more recent vids, and noted that it was much improved from my original exposure. Not perfect -- I still see things I think an expert with a knife could exploit against Piper -- but it looks more coherent, is still evolving, and no two ways about it, has some really bad-ass stuff. A lot of traditional martial arts knife defenses simply won't work against these guys.

So I'm here to point that out. These guys have something, and if they continue to refine it, it's going to be as good a knife system as any, and better than most.

I still think Mourn could win -- he cheated after all, and that's a big part of his (and my) art. But I expect that he'd likely get cut in the doing of it. The old Javanese saying has it: In a knife fight, the loser is ashes, but the winner is charcoal ...

And there is your mayhem content for the day ...

Bunch Book

Got the galleys on the Bunch book today. We'll do a fast read and turn them around, and it seems that the novel will see the shelves in mid-summer, late June or early July, probably.

I think Bunch would be please that we stepped up and did it, though I also expect he'd bitch about the writing. Wouldn't be Bunch if he didn't.

Too bad, Chris. That's what you get for dying -- I get the last word.

I miss him.

Well, it Worked Once, so ...

We'll give it another try. This time, the knives are Shiva Ki's kerambits, 250 layers of laminated damascus., carried in a custom sheath by Chas Clements.

Mushtaq's Little Knife

In my continuing effort to keep at least a distant view of technology, I'm gonna try linking to a vid I did of Mushtaq's little tiger blade ...

Matters Medical

For five years, I worked as a PA-C in a family practice clinc, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana -- the upper respiratory illness capital of the country. (I was the second PA certified in the state, and would have been the first except for that Air Force guy who beat me to it by a week.) During that time, I was expose to all manner of infectious diseases, from the common cold to meningitis to Dengue Fever to ... well, a bunch of things. During flu season, we would typically have as many as two hundred patients with influenza passing through the place on a given day.

I never once got sick. Not one time in five years.

Nary a sniffle. Save for the epidemic-that-never-happened, the Swine Flu -- I didn't take flu shots, either.

Oh, I banged myself up from time to time. Badly sprained an ankle, pulled a few muscles whilst jogging or lifting weights or catching fainting patients. I had to be sewed up a few times for various lacerations -- dropped a samurai sword on my foot once, stepped on some glass, like that, but I never caught any infectious diseases.

I have a theory as to why. First, I was pretty faithful to practicing sterile technique. Washed my hands between every patient and didn't let them cough in my face. Second, I think the constant exposure to stuff helped my immune system. Yeah, I was a jock, worked out, did martial arts, and I took vitamins and ate pretty well, didn't smoke or seriously drink, but I think the main reasons I stayed well were these two things -- hand-washing and low-level exposure.

Today, I am nursing a nasty cold, sniffling, sneezing, all like that, and I generally develop one every winter. I think the reasons why are that I'm a stay-at-home writer who doesn't get much exposure to what's going around, and thus my immune system is weaker. Plus I have five grandsons who bring home what's going around and when I visit with them -- my little walking petri dish lab experiment boys -- I am more exposed to viruses than I was in the clinic. I pick 'em up, hug 'em, and even though I know I should go wash my hands after I do when they have colds, I don't. Of course, I am older, and that might play a part in it, but I still eat well, take vitamins, and work out.

Oh, well.

Second matter medical: In a couple hours, I have to take Layla, the puppy younger, to the vet to be spayed. She isn't going to be a show dog, and were she to get pregnant and have puppies, that would be bad, because we wouldn't be able to give any of them up. Spayed female dogs tend to live longer and are much less likely to develop certain cancers, so it's for her own good, but she's the baby and so little I cringe at the thought. Better for her in the long run, I know, but until now, she's liked going to the vet's office. And since she can't eat anything, she's curled up in her bed, hungry for breakfast, looking pitiful.

Just another perfect day in paradise ...

Troop Morale?

I am sooo tired of hearing the warhawks prattle on about how if we say anything that is not 100% in favor of the current administration's idiocy, that we will be hurting our troops' morale.

Morale? What morale?

Think of how you'd feel if you were packed onto a cargo plane and shipped to a godforsaken desert nine thousand miles away from home. Where you are to fight a war you never had a prayer of winning from the git-go against people who have been killing each other for more than a thousand years over which Caliph should be dancing on the head of a pin.

Where every other person you see on the street would happily kill you if he could get away with it. Where, every time you take a ride in your Humvee, there's a good chance some religious fanatic is willing to blow himself up to get you, or that there's an IED on the roadside with your name on it, and that you are protected by armor slightly more effective than Saran Wrap. That the National Guard guy riding next to you is somebody's grandfather.

That three thousand of your fellow servicemen and women have died in this burgeoning civil war you are refereeing, ten times that many have been wounded, many of them maimed and crippled, missing limbs, deaf, or blind.

That your tour of duty never ends because the military can't collect and train enough new cannon fodder to replace you. That most of the word hates you for being here, and that hundreds of thousands of the locals are dead since you arrived, more than a few by your hand.

It was me? My morale would be in the toilet. If I didn't think most of the citizens back home wanted nothing more that to shut this lunacy down and bring me home, I'd be really depressed.

So enough with the "It hurts troop morale to think the public doesn't support them." bullshit.

Fuck that.

And of course, our new Congress, the broom that we brought in for a clean sweep to end this war is girding their ball-less loins and buckling their belts over gutless bellies to bring forth a non-binding resolution!

How forthright of them! How brave! Harsh language to make the President feel bad. Colbert's wag of the finger. Ow, ow, stop!

About as useful as tits on a boar hog, that, and no way, no how what we hired them to do.

Oh, Steve, you have all the answers, do you? What would you do?

Easy. I was Congress, I'd look at my watch: Look, George, it's two o'clock. Let's say, by ... end of August, you have all the troops packed up and on their way home, hey? Or we shut off the money spigot that has been wasting the taxpayers' dollar on this brainlesss business, end of discussion, period.

All the rest of the rationalizations are just pouring more people and money down a bottomless rat hole. Surge? A surge is something that happens when you floor the accelerator on a Dodge Viper. Sending more people into harm's way isn't going to do jackshit except cost more lives.
Everybody with two neurons to spark at each other knows this. Shiites, Sunni, and Kurds aren't going to listen to the Crusaders this time, any more than they did last time.

Fuck it. Bring 'em home. We're coming up on five years into this mess. Bring 'em home.

SkyNet Warms Up

Well, apparently the quantum computer I offered up in a technothriller novel a couple years back is rapidly being developed.

Big Brother is little slow, but still on the road.

As Gina Davis said in the remake of The Fly: Be afraid. Be very afraid ...

Check it out: Quantum Computer

Rules? No Rules in a Knife Fight!

So a quick review of the knife seminar:

Mushtaq showed some basic moves from his training, Sonnon showed a few moves from his Russian background, and we all danced back and forth for a little while waving our training blades and a fun time was had by all. (Well, except maybe for one guy who had stayed after the main Path seminar who, at the end, voiced a question/opinion that this was nasty stuff, all this cutting and stabbing business, and why would he want to know it?)

Both Mushtaq and Sonnon are well-spoken and effective teachers, and what they showed us mostly didn't violate any principles of the art I study. You can't learn this kind of thing in two hours, it takes a lot of practice, but the idea was to open a door and show a glimmer of the material on the other side.

I'd offer that people who are serious about self-defense in today's society take a class like this, just to understand how dangerous a knife is. There's a silat guy who says that a knife takes away your first five years of training. By this he means, that even a fairly-untrained person with a blade is not somebody you want to face barehanded. Steel beats flesh most of the time.

I have spent some time training with knives, and what last night did was re-enforce the belief that going up against somebody with a blade who knows how to use it, even if you have one of your own, both of you are going to get cut. The only questions are, where and how bad ...

Afterward, a bunch of use decamped to Todd and Tiel's house, where they had prepared a sumptious feast. We sat around, ate, drank, and talked, and it was an intellectually stimulating and interesting evening. I left around midnight and they were still going.

(And in truth, Bobbe's euro-trash beer wasn't too bad. A little stale, being in the bottle so long, but better than Brew 102. Terry Trahan and I spent maybe a little too much time picking on the Kid, but he was a good sport about it.)

That's not a knife, THIS is a knife ...

So, Mushtaq Ali and Scott Sonnon are doing a short knife seminar tagged onto The Path workshop in Portland today, and it worked out that we did grandkids stuff early enough so I think I can swing on on by.

I don't know about Sonnon's bladework, though he certain has beaucoup credits across the board in various disciplines; Mushtaq has a bunch of silat, plus other things, including some recent exposure to African knifery, so it should prove to be very interesting ...

Blind Whitebread Perry Plays

So my latest attempt to learn a fingerstyle guitar piece. This one is El McMeen's arrangement of the traditional tune "The Water is Wide." Full of clicks and pops and squeaks and all, and a couple of flubs, but a work-in-progress. I really like the piece, and with some more practice, may some day be able to do it justice. It's in Dropped-C tuning (like Dropped-D, but everything tuned down a full step, to CGCFAD.

Want to hear it, click here, then on the hi-fi button under the title.

Autographing

So last night I want to First Wednesday, in Forest Grove, as part of the Author Autographing. This a monthly gathering designed to draw customers to the downtown area.

The big draw was Jean Auel, but I had a few folks drop by with books to sign. Jean was in the ice cream parlor, I was in the antique store, and I think the romance writer was in the spa.

As I was sitting there, being all writerly and smiling, I felt myself start to sink to port. The antique chair upon which I was perched just ... gave up the ghost, left front leg collapsed and snapped off at the seat.

Fortunately, it seemed to happen in slo-mo, so instead of being dumped unceremoniously onto the floor in view of the horrified passersby, I managed to catch myself in a squat-and-hop from which I stood to regard the mortally wounded furniture.

Oh, my. I hope that wasn't an expensive antique ... ?

I know that I'm a few pounds over my best fighting weight, but I guess I need to go on a diet.

Of course, after the shindig, a bunch of us went out to eat, good fried stuff and beer, so the diet had to wait until today ...

Don't Try This at Home ...

Here's vid for martial artists -- or those interested in unusual archery methods:

Click here

Transcend Dental Medication

Went to the dentist yesterday. I'll spare you the gory details, but lemme just say this:

Even a man who is pure at heart
And flosses and brushes each night
Can grow snaggle-toothed as a werewolf
When the exam light is full and bright ...

Aahhooo -- !

Classical Guitar Makers

Guitar-makers come in all shapes and sizes: on one end, you have folks like C.F. Martin, the company that produces thousands and thousands of instruments every year. On the other hand, you have the one-person-shop luthiers, who might make but a dozen instruments in that time, plus or minus a few.

Martin makes fine guitars, but if you want a classsical guitar much better than entry level, you want to find a luthier who makes them by hand. The good ones -- and there are far too many for me to list here -- you'll have to wait a while until they can get to you. (There are some luthiers in their fifties who have stopped taking new orders because they worry they won't live long enough to finish the ones they have on order -- they might be ten or twelve years out.)

Among those who are outstanding makers, I will mention two: Alan Carruth and J.S. Bogdanovich. These men can make for you a concert-quality instrument at a reasonable price and in a relatively short time. There are links to them in my list on this page, and if you are looking for a fine classical guitar at a cost that won't require robbing a bank to pay it, please, go check them out. Neither man could make a bad instrument if they tried.

Both men are acknowledged experts in their field, though both would be quick to wave that off. Some people in the guitar realm -- me included -- have been trying to get Alan Carruth to write a book for years, and it is my hope that he does someday, because he is a wealth of information on the care and feeding of stringed instruments, and not just guitars. Talks the talks, walks the walk.

Jack Bogdanovich, who also can walk his talk, has written a book, just out: Classical Guitar Making: A Modern Approach to Traditional Design, and if you have any interest in the subject, this is a gotta-have-it book.

I'm a terrible craftsman, it's hard for me to figure out which end of a screwdriver to use, but with this book, I think maybe even I could figure out how to build a classical guitar.

The volume is chock full of pictures, detailed how-tos, drawings, and the hard-learned knowledge of years of practice. If you like guitars, you'll enjoying having this on your shelf. If you think you might want to build one, you can't pass it up. At $29.95, it is a steal, oversize format, more than 300 pp.

You can find Jack's book here

Pukulan Pentjak Silat Sera - Core Principles

So, in last night's class, we played with the pukulan (hitting) aspect of Silat Sera, working on several things, but coming back to the bedrock of what we think makes this stuff work:

Position and sensitivity.

Without those two, yeah, you have technique, and if you are fast and strong enough, you might be able to make those work for you most of the time, but against somebody faster and stronger, that's apt to be iffy.

Or, to once again paraphrase the Fabulous Furry Freak Brother, Freewheelin' Frank, "Position will get you through times of no speed and power better than speed and power will get you through times of no position ..."

Or as Guru likes to say, it's like the three most important aspects of business and real estate:

1) Location. 2) Location. and 3) Location ...

Sensitivity, in this instance, means being relaxed enough to feel the flow of the encounter and to move accordingly. Once you are close -- short punch, elbow, knee range -- then feeling is better than seeing. If you can tell what an attacker is about to do by his shift in position or his set, you can control him.

I'm guessing that experienced martial artists probably won't be too surprised by this claim. Probably not too surprised by the notion that it's a lot harder to develop than simple blocks and counters, too ...

As for the forms -- we call them "djurus" -- with which we start each class, there is one contingent of the martial arts world that considers these a waste of time. "Dead" training, they say. How we look at it is, of course, somewhat different. Our analogy is that the djurus are ingredients -- flour, water, eggs, butter, salt, sugar -- which, once you have in hand, you can make a variety of things, depending on how you combine them. Cakes, pies, bread, cookies, scones, muffins, even paste ...

(Technically, the djurus are the upper body moves; the lower body ones are called langkahs. We combine them and just called them "djurus." We have eighteen of them that we feel pretty much cover what you need to know, and that you are fair way down that road if you can do the first two well, since the rest are based upon those.)

We feel that the djurus cover the ranges of hand motion one can effectively use, and that once you have these motions down, then you have the tools you need.

It's not as if I haven't heard all this a thousand times; every now and then, though, I blink and it makes more sense. One more step on the thousand mile journey.

One of my fellow students asked me last night, "So, how long did it take for you to get comfortable in your position?" To which I said, "I'm not there yet ..."

(The picture is of Guru Plinck, from the cover of the old Bukti Negara tape.)

Pacing (Beep, beep!)

A little bit about pacing in a novel. I think I might have spoken to this once before, but somebody asked, so ....

Writers tend to get freaked out about this, but here's my hit on how to keep a story moving.

Up to about 100,000 words, a typical chapter in an action/adventure novel will have three or four scenes. Generally speaking, any scene that runs more than 4-5 pp is probably too long. (For our purposes, a "scene" is usually one setting, with whichever characters you want to showcase. When the viewpoint shifts to a different locale, the scene is over. Not always, but mostly.)

More than a hundred-k, the scenes can be a bit longer, because the volume will allow it. People who pick up an eight-hundred-page novel aren't expecting to see MTV fast cuts, so you can take your time and fill out what you need -- within limits.

There's a story about a old man who goes to circus. He sits down, and a performer comes out leading three elephants. As the audience watches, the guy down in the center ring picks up an elephant and tosses it into the air.

Holy Crap! This is the most astounding thing anybody has ever seen! The crowd goes wild!

But wait! The guy catches the elephant, throws it up again, picks up the second elephant, then the third, and starts to juggle them!

Utterly amazing! The audience is stunned into silence. Impossible! Fantastic!

After a minute, with the guy still juggling three elephants, the old man leans over to his neighbor and says, "Is that it? That's all he's gonna do?"

Even miracles get old. If you get so involved in your research and you want your scene to reflect every bit of it and it runs on for ten pages? It will be boring to a certain percentage of your readers, no matter how fascinating you think it is. If you have two people sitting at a table telling each other stuff they both already know and it runs more than a page or two, that's bad, but even a gunfight palls after a few pages. The days wherein the Waverly novels could spend a hundred pp following the protagonist from his carriage as the strolls up the walk to the manor are gone.

Four, maybe five page for a scene. Past that, the longer it gets, the more a reader will want to skip ahead. Trust me on this. Or don't -- read a book you think really moves well and count the pages. A master storyteller can stretch it, of course, but since I'm not him, I'm telling you how the rest of us do it.

An action/adventure novel needs to be like a roller coaster ride. You can start easy, climb that first rise, then drop like a big rock, slow down to breathe, take off like gangbusters. Mix 'em up, until you get to the last big drop at the end, and then let us hear Goofy's waaaah-hooo-hooo-
hooo-hoooooo -- !

As you get closer to the end, in order to speed things up you can alternate a regular-length chapter with one that is a page or two long. Begin to punch up your language, veer away from "be" verbs and a bunch of adjectives and adverbs and strip the action down. Chop sentences short, use the em-dash, like this:

"Crap -- !"

"Yeah, tell me about -- oh, hell -- !"

What you want is a reader turning pages, not thinking, not looking for flaws in your plot, caught up in what you want him/her to be caught up in.

"I couldn't put it down." is just what you want to hear.