Luncheon Ex Machina

The State of Things

2009-12-20T20:18:41Z

I did a Q&A for a blog that read The Misenchanted Sword as their book of the month for December. That was kind of fun -- got some interesting questions.

We got a foot and a half of snow. This really makes me appreciate having a much shorter driveway here in Takoma Park than we did in Gaithersburg. On the other hand, I miss the garage. What the heck, both cars are now dug out and functional.

Both kids will be here for Christmas; this'll be the first time Julian will actually see our new house. He's allegedly already en route, somewhat earlier than originally planned. It's a long drive from Boulder, so we don't know when he'll arrive.

Julie's sister Eileen was supposed to be traveling abroad for the holidays, but between a canceled flight and a case of bronchitis, she'll be here instead.

We've had water in the basement, and a waterproofing company is supposed to come fix it in January -- we put it off until after the holidays. Let's hope that this snow doesn't all melt and wind up under the furnace. Or that its failure to melt doesn't make the job that much more difficult.

I'm not getting a lot of writing done lately. Holidays and houses can be very distracting.

Despatches from Tacky Park

2009-12-02T05:34:49Z

We live near a limo company. It's based in a house near here, with their driveway and the one for the house next door full of stretch limos, and a row of Lincoln Town Cars parked on the street out front. I'm not quite sure whether they're entirely legal, running a business like that in a residential neighborhood, but they're there.

I checked out their webpage, which carefully never mentions a street address, or even whether they're in Maryland, DC, or Virginia. Probably just as well.

I actually rather like having them there. I suppose I might be less enthusiastic if I was right there next to them, but we aren't; we're close enough that we go past the place fairly often, either driving or on foot, but not close enough that they ever block our driveway or anything.

(Unlike the school buses. There's a school bus stop directly opposite our driveway, and I have, on occasion, had to sit there twenty feet from my driveway, waiting for the bus to move, while the frozen food in the back seat thawed.)

I find the limo company oddly fascinating. I like to guess about it. Why is it that on a typical weekday all the stretch limos are there, but the Town Cars are gone? Is it that they're all at the airports, picking up businessmen?

Most Sunday afternoons at least one of the white stretch limos will be out, which is presumably for weddings, but on the Sunday after Thanksgiving they were all in the driveways; I guess no one wanted to get married on the holiday weekend.

Saturdays usually see at least one stretch Caddy out somewhere.

We moved here in prom season, and of course on those weekend evenings both driveways were completely empty.

I also find it amusing to watch the drivers arrive for work -- guys in spiffy black suits with black gloves and chauffeur hats, getting out of battered Jeeps and Beetles.

I'll bet most of their customers have no idea that that spiffy stretch Hummer spends most of its time in someone's unpaved driveway on a quiet street, and its driver's own car is a little blue econobox.

I suppose it's a bit weird to take such an interest in an ordinary small business going about its normal operation, but hey, I'm a writer -- all kinds of strange things interest me.

Mysteries of the Human Mind

2009-11-21T19:29:42Z

We were discussing vacuum cleaners, and after reviewing the merits of Filter Queen, Eureka, and the like, I was thinking of the one we had when we lived in Pittsburgh, 1974-1977. It was a very nice vacuum, very old, a brand I don't think is around anymore, but I couldn't come up with the name.

Two syllables, I remembered that. Rowley? Rigby? For some reason I thought it started with R. Or maybe B. Or G.

Bagby? No, that was a mystery writer, George Bagby, but there was something that was sort of close about it. Bowlby? Garvey? No, those weren't right.

Obviously, I wasn't going to remember it right away, but it would come to me eventually. The conversation moved on.

Later, we were walking out to the car and I suddenly asked, apropos of nothing, "What was the name of the ghosts in Topper?"

Julie had no idea; she never saw the TV series, and I'm not sure she's read the Thorne Smith novel(s), either. I, however, had this very clear image in my mind of Marion...

Marion Kirby. That vacuum cleaner was a Kirby.

But why on Earth did I get to that by way of Topper? Why did I associate the vacuum cleaner with Marion Kirby, and not with her husband, or with the far-more-obvious Jack Kirby?

The human mind is a mysterious thing.

Skating Away

2009-11-17T18:48:10Z

Last night Julie and I had one of our rarer-than-I'd-like nights out, and went to dinner and a show.

Due to time constraints dinner was just burgers at Fuddruckers -- we'd planned to do something classier, but things at the Bureau ran late, and the show started at 7:00, so we made do.

The show was at the Verizon Center, and was "Kaleidoscope: Skating, Song, and Survivorship," a cancer benefit put together by Scott Hamilton and friends. At least in theory it's going to be a TV event, shown on Fox on Thanksgiving Day after the football game, though I didn't see it on the schedule here. The main sponsor was Sanofi-Aventis, and there were ten cancer support organizations involved, but we mostly went because hey, it was a good show.

Our seats were nine rows back, near the stage end of the ice. Very good view.

They featured three famous cancer survivors: Hamilton, Dorothy Hamill, and Olivia Newton-John. This was Hamilton's first skating performance in six years, but he was still good, and still did his trademark flips.

Really, everyone was good.

Newton-John only sang one song, and that was backed up with a children's chorus (flown in from Santa Barbara), but it was nice. The other two singers on the program were Katherine McPhee and David Archuleta, who both have new albums coming out that they want to publicize, but Archuleta's is a Christmas album, so his three songs were all traditional stuff, not his own compositions.

Archuleta has an absolutely beautiful voice; I hadn't realized, watching him on TV, just how beautiful, as our TV's speakers aren't good enough to do it justice. He also looked genuinely happy to be there, and connected with the crowd more than McPhee or Newton-John; he's very endearing in person.

As for the skating, Hamill doesn't do a lot of jumping or other really difficult stuff these days, since she hasn't competed in years, but she's still performing, and still very good at it. She looked like she was having fun.

Nancy Kerrigan did a couple of performances, and while she hasn't competed in years either, she did include difficult jumps -- one of which she missed, but after the show they did a re-take for TV, so you won't get to see her fall; the audience was invited to hang around to provide background, which we did.

Ashley Wagner and Rachael Flatt represented the younger generation of skaters, and gave splendid performances.

Ice dancers Charlie White and Meryl Davis were beautiful. Davis is a tiny little thing, and beautiful quite aside from her skating, but on the ice they're stunning.

Johnny Weir was supposed to skate, but canceled at the last minute, we don't know why, and was replaced by Viktor Petrenko, who did two numbers, both of which were very slick and lots of fun -- a cowboy number and a mambo. The guy's a great showman.

I'm probably forgetting someone; it was quite a show.

Oh, David Foster (fifteen-time Grammy winner -- as a producer, if you're wondering why you don't know the name) was the host, and played piano for a couple of the songs.

Because it was being done as a TV show there were several delays while technical stuff got squared away, and some of the introductions got repeated -- in one case a skater was introduced, did her stuff, and then got announced again when they realized the first take of the introduction wasn't good. She did not skate again, though. The audience was also asked for random applause every so often, to be plugged in after pre-recorded stuff we didn't see, and we obliged -- the crowd was very enthusiastic. Not as big as we expected, actually, but loud.

All in all, we were there from 7:00 until 10:30 for a show that I believe will be ninety minutes on TV. (I don't think the actual skating began until 8:00, but stuff was going on before that.)

It was fun.

The State of Things

2009-11-15T16:06:56Z

We had our long-awaited housewarming party Saturday. I think it went well; I had a fine time, certainly. There's leftover food that we'll be eating for awhile, but not too much; after a slow start we wound up with a pretty good turn-out. I think everyone enjoyed themselves.

That's the good news.

The first bad news is that I seem to have come down with a nasty cold; I first noticed a sniffle Friday night at a friend's house (no writing Friday; four-hour rule), and it's progressed to a headache and serious congestion. Dayquil held it off through the entire party, but has now worn off.

The second bad news is that our cat, Chanel, appears to be sick; she hasn't bothered to eat her last couple of meals, and spent as much of today as we let her curled up under my desk, not moving. She has an appointment with the vet for Monday.

The third bad news is that there's been something of a crisis at Julie's workplace, so she's been putting in a lot of overtime, and the party was the only reason she didn't go in Saturday. In fact, she did go to work Sunday morning. Bleah.

The fourth bad news is that we still don't have our new kitchen furniture; delivery was postponed yet again, and they're now telling us November 19th. Or later.

Sigh.

The State of Me

2009-11-13T04:56:13Z

Saw the endocrinologist today, and was declared to be in good health except for the whole pre-diabetic thing. Blood pressure was down from 131/80 to 124/78, weight was up a couple of pounds, compared to seven months ago.

Except for blood sugar, everything tested normal. I think that's a first; usually sodium or cholesterol is low, or triglycerides are high.

Got new shoes on Wednesday. Exciting week.

Egolink

2009-11-08T21:49:23Z

Casting Dragon Weather.

The State of Me

2009-11-06T08:16:11Z

I have an appointment with my endocrinologist next week. Y'know, when I was a kid I never expected to have an endocrinologist, but what can you do? It's an after-effect of spending years with a tumor in my head*. I've managed to gradually shed pretty much all the other symptoms, but I still take a tiny little pill every Friday** and see an endocrinologist twice a year.

Except the prolactinoma is long gone, my pituitary is behaving itself, so mostly the appointments wind up being more about me being pre-diabetic.

I got the blood work done Thursday. Lovely way to celebrate Guy Fawkes' Day, huh? Already got e-mail with some of the lab results. My blood sugar is creeping up. It's probably still short of actual diabetes, but it's well above normal. How annoying.

On the other hand, my cholesterol is just about perfect.

==

* Diagnosed June 2001. Had probably been there for a few years. Gone now.

** A half-dose of Dostinex, a.k.a. cabergoline, an ergot derivative that suppresses pituitary tumors. Wonderful stuff if you aren't in the 15% of the population who get headaches and nausea from taking it, which I'm not.

Egolink

2009-10-30T18:00:08Z

I've written a guest post for the SmartPop blog.

Egolink

2009-10-21T16:55:03Z

There's an essay of mine at Smart Pop, about James Bond.

Work in Progress: Realms of Light

2009-10-20T08:00:38Z

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 10/19/09

Last actual wordage added: 10/19/09

Pages added 10/19/09: 5

Current page count: 179

Estimated final page count: About 200

Deadline: None. Being written for serialization.

Comments: Yoshio is escorting Hsing back to the ship. I'm most of the way through Chapter Seventeen and have about 52,500 words written, with not very much plot left to go.

In other news, I've received my office copies of A Young Man Without Magic from Tor; it should be showing up in stores soon. (Official street date is November 10, but I expect it'll show up some places before that.)

Realms of Light: Chapter Twelve is on the web

2009-10-16T07:11:46Z

Thanks to one extremely generous donor, Chapter Twelve of Realms of Light has been posted to the web.

Chapter Fifteen has been e-mailed to donors, and I'm writing Chapter Sixteen.

Work in Progress: Realms of Light

2009-10-15T07:05:44Z

I've been posting these progress reports on SFF Net for years, but I think it's time to start putting them other places, as well.

These are (in case it's not obvious) an ongoing record of my day's fiction output. In this instance, Realms of Light is the long-planned sequel to Nightside City, my cyberpunk-influenced SF detective story that was originally published in 1989. I started writing the sequel almost immediately, but lack of interest from my publisher of the time, Del Rey Books, led to it being shelved for almost twenty years.

Last year I decided to go ahead and write it anyway, and I have a verbal agreement with FoxAcre Press (the current publisher of Nightside City to publish it once it's finished. I've been doing the first draft as an online serial on the "Storyteller's Bowl" model, same as I did with the last two Ethshar novels, but it hasn't been as successful.

Here's today's progress:

Last time looked at: 10/14/09*

Last actual wordage added: 10/14/09

Pages added 10/14/09: 5

Current page count: 169

Estimated final page count: About 200

Deadline: None. Being written for serialization.

Chapters paid for: 10.992

Chapters posted to the web: 11

Chapters e-mailed to donors: 14

Comments: Nearing the end of Chapter Sixteen; the story's going pretty quickly now that I'm nearing the end.

And I am nearing the end; I'm now thinking it'll only run eighteen chapters, though it could still take twenty. (I'd originally estimated twenty-five. It won't be that many.)

I'm over 50,000 words, which is good, but I doubt it'll get to 60,000. Just as well I'm not doing this for Tor. Might get significantly longer by the time I get through the final draft, though.

==

* For purposes of progress reports, a given date lasts until I go to bed; even though it's long after midnight, I still consider it 10/14/09.

Realms of Light: Chapter Eleven is on the web

2009-10-03T06:53:52Z

I'm still $7.00 short of target, but what the heck -- I've posted Chapter Eleven of Realms of Light. You can read it for free, but I only post a new chapter when I've received $250 in donations. (Donors can see all completed chapters; right now, that's up through Chapter Thirteen.)

For those who aren't familiar with this project, I'm serializing a sequel to my 1989 science fiction novel, Nightside City. When it's finished it'll be published in hardcopy by FoxAcre Press; Nightside City is already available from FoxAcre.

I post progress reports on a blog called the Serial Box.

When Realms of Light is finished, I'll start another Ethshar serial.

Further Despatches from the People's Republic of Takoma Park

2009-09-28T03:29:02Z

Aha! There is at least one national chain store in Takoma Park! There's a Subway, on Carroll Avenue in Old Town Takoma. Don't know how they got around the restrictions, but then I don't know just what the actual restrictions are.

It's probably a locally-owned franchise or something.

We did not eat there, but we walked past it on the way to the Takoma Park Antique & Classic Car Show this afternoon, down on Laurel Avenue.

Laurel Avenue is one short block; then you hit the District line. As I suspected from the location, the car show was pretty small -- maybe a dozen vehicles, rather than the hundreds that the big Rockville show gets every October. The cherry-red 1956 Caddy ragtop was a stunner, though, and there was a '54 Chevy that looked oddly familiar -- it was a sedan, but upon inspection I realized that when I was a kid my parents had the station wagon version of that exact model. The one at the show had been modified; it had a floor shifter and a tach, where the original had three on the tree and the usual American gauges of the time. And it was gray, where ours was green. Still, it made me a bit nostalgic.

Julie's not a car buff, so while I was chatting up the guys who'd brought the '31 Model A and the '61 Corvette she checked out a couple of the neighboring shops. Takoma Park has a lot of funky little shops. There's a bead shop in that block, and a vintage clothing store, and what I guess has to be considered an antique store even though their specialty seems to be American pop culture rather than the usual upscale bric-a-brac. Julie pointed out that the owners of this last were missing a bet -- they had two or three 'Vettes parked out front, being admired, and they had a bunch of old Corvette ads in stock that they were not setting out to lure in the car show fans. The fools.

And a final note -- did you know that in the early 1960s, Volvo built some cars that look an awful lot like the Studebaker Avanti?

The Whole World's Mad...

2009-09-25T07:16:25Z

When we first started looking for a new home, closer to Julie's job, we were keeping our options open, and we looked at townhouses and condos as well as single-family homes. We eventually decided no, we really did want our own house, but it was not a foregone conclusion.

Anyway, one of the first places we looked at was National Park Seminary, in Silver Spring. The original building had been a hotel, and then the site was a girls' finishing school, and then a military hospital, and finally it was abandoned and left to rot for about thirty years before a bunch of preservationists got together with developers and bought the place.

The central building, the old hotel, is now rental apartments. The outbuildings are being restored as single-family homes. The surrounding land and some of the buildings have been turned into townhouses.

The really interesting stuff, though, is the old dorms and classroom buildings, which are being rebuilt as luxury condos.

A couple of years ago, when we were still in the very early stages of looking at real estate, we seriously considered buying one of those condos. Specifically, we wanted the upstairs of the music hall -- I can't link to a floor plan or anything because it's been sold. In fact, it was already under contract when we first looked, which was a great disappointment to us. Still, we toured the place a couple of times, those parts that were open for visitors -- which wasn't much of it at the time, as construction was still very much ongoing.

The place had been a ruin, and needed a lot of renovation -- more than the developers realized, I think, as many of the condos, including the music hall suites, are running more than a year behind their original scheduled delivery dates. It was still in rough shape when we looked at it. Some of it was very cool, though; we got inside the chapel and the Aloha House and admired them.

The condos were expensive for what you got; yes, there were major tax breaks for historic properties, but the prices were still very high on a square footage basis, and the condo fees were ghastly. The location's good, but not ideal for us. So we decided not to buy there, but we were on their mailing list, in case the situation changed.

Then a year or so later we went back and checked out some of the new townhouses on the property. One floor plan was absolutely gorgeous, but didn't quite work for us; another had all the spaces we needed, but spread over four floors, which would mean a lot of climbing stairs. We decided to pass on those, but since we were in the area we took another look at the Seminary proper; progress was being made. The Aloha House was partly owner-occupied; the chapel was sold. All in all, though, the place was still something of a mess.

We got busy finding somewhere more suitable, and of course we eventually found it and moved, which kept us very busy, so we didn't think much about the Seminary.

But a few days ago we got an invitation to an open house on the evening of September 24th, and we said what the heck, why not?

So last night we headed up that way. And we figured we'd have dinner in the neighborhood; I'd gotten an e-mail from our Discover account listing a bunch of local restaurants they said would give us a $5.00 rebate if we ate there and paid with our Discover card. One of them is right near the Seminary.

So we went and drank the developer's booze and ate hors d'oeuvres and talked to a nice lady from the historic society that was responsible for putting together the redevelopment deal. We admired the Seminary ballroom, which is really very spiffy, and toured a couple of the finished condos. The place has made immense progress over the past year or so, and is turning out very nice indeed.

And we were informed that the condo we'd wanted in the music hall, originally scheduled for March 2008 delivery, still isn't ready, though they're scheduled to close next month. Jeez. That would have been a long, awkward wait.

So after we'd had our fill of admiring the architecture we headed out to dinner. We ordered, got our food, ate -- and discovered that the restaurant doesn't accept Discover.

Huh?

I mean, we found it by getting the address from a Discover e-mail; how can they not accept Discover?

So we paid with MasterCard and came home, and for the rest of the evening, every so often one or the other of us would say wonderingly, "We don't take Discover?"

I guess we won't be getting our $5.00 rebate, will we?

I've Been Podcast

2009-09-17T15:53:10Z

The SF podcast StarShip Sofa #99 includes my story "Spirit Dump." Kinda cool, this internet thing.

The Green-Eyed Monster

2009-09-10T20:22:54Z

I'm jealous.

Specifically, I'm jealous of Kurt Busiek. Because his website is so much cooler than mine.

I'm referring mostly (but not entirely) to the graphics. That's the thing about working in comics, especially when you've done it for a long time -- you have all these artists and letterers and designers you can call on to help out with your projects. In book publishing there are cover artists and book designers, but as a general thing I don't have any direct contacts with them, certainly not to the point I could ask them to help out with my website.

Then there's Kurt's Notes, which seem much more entertaining than my own blog posts. Again, they've got better visuals, but... oh, I dunno. It just seems as if I have less to say that anyone would care about, and I can't find the time to say much of it anyway.

And Kurt gets to work with characters everyone knows, like Superman and Spider-Man.

Ah, well. I know perfectly well that my own life is highly enviable, but whenever I look at busiek.com...

Despatches from the People's Republic of Takoma Park

2009-09-03T04:42:30Z

I grew up in a pretty leftish environment -- my family lived in Massachusetts, in the suburbs of Boston, and was active in the Unitarian-Universalist church; my father, a professor at Tufts, was one of those liberal academics you hear about. After leaving home, therefore, I got used to being surrounded by people whose political views were to the right of mine. That was the case, in varying degrees, in Pittsburgh, in Kentucky, and in Gaithersburg.

But now I live in Takoma Park, Maryland, famed locally as being inhabited largely by granola-munching treehuggers. This reputation is not entirely undeserved -- just as an example, Takoma Park was the first community in the United States to formally declare itself a nuclear-free zone (with an exception for the radiology department at the Adventist hospital). It is, in fact, the first place I have ever lived where my politics are to the right of center.

This is taking some getting used to.

In Gaithersburg, if I mowed the lawn, my next-door neighbor would take it as a hint to mow his own (and vice versa). When I mowed the lawn here a couple of days ago, my next-door neighbor took it as a hint to clean the sign declaring his yard a certified wildlife habitat.

In Gaithersburg one only saw yard signs in election season; around here there are always yard signs proclaiming civil marriage to be a civil right, or demanding "Stop the War" without specifying which war, or arguing in favor of expanding public transit ("Purple Line = Greener Future" is the single most common sign I see).

Most of the Obama/Biden signs are gone now, but not all of them. There weren't any McCain signs.

Recent city council meetings have been debating whether or not to ban gas-powered leaf-blowers -- not because they're noisy, but because they waste fossil fuel and pollute the air. They've resolved that no city employee will use the things anymore, but an outright ban is on hold until they figure out how much of a hassle enforcement would be.

The city will plant trees in your yard for you more or less at cost.

There are no chain stores in Takoma Park; they aren't allowed. This means most of the folks here do their shopping in Silver Spring or Washington or Hyattsville.

It's... interesting.

Forty Years After: 3

2009-08-14T18:52:23Z

Julie and I attended a 40th anniversary Woodstock tribute at the Strathmore Music Hall in Rockville on Thursday night. It was really good. An outfit called Bandhouse Gigs put it together, using a lot of local talent and a few not-so-local folks.

We were impressed enough to buy CDs by two of them, blues singer Patty Reese (who did the Janis Joplin numbers and really needs to update her webpage) and a band called GHz (who did the Hendrix segment). I already had a CD by Bill Kirchen, who covered John Fogarty's role in the Creedence Clearwater Revival medley.

(Yes, they sold CDs in the lobby -- and why not? Capitalism isn't that weird.)

Several acts were covered by made-for-the-occasion bands, mixing and matching musicians; the group they put together for Santana's "Soul Sacrifice" was really, really good, and the Sly and the Family Stone set had the audience on their feet and dancing.

There was a fair bit of overlap with the movie and the albums, but they did try to include some other stuff, so for example there was a Bert Sommer tribute (Paul Simon's "America"), and Joan Baez was represented by both "Joe Hill" and "Ain't No More Cane on the Brazos," the latter of which I had never heard before.

There were songs I hadn't heard in many, many years, like John Sebastian's "Younger Generation."

It was a three-hour show -- but that's counting a twenty-minute intermission. Still, we felt we got our money's worth.

Been awhile since we'd seen as much tie-dye as that, or as many peace signs.

Besides acts already mentioned, I'll want to check out the Cravin' Dogs, Crimestoppers, Naked Blue, and the Tone Rangers.

Forty Years After: 2

2009-08-14T18:37:33Z

I wasn't at Woodstock, in the sense of the big festival of 1969 that everyone calls "Woodstock" even though it was in Bethel.

The thing is, that was the Second Annual Woodstock Music & Art Fair, to give it its full title. I did, very briefly, attend the First Annual Woodstock Music & Art Fair, in August of 1968.

I was fourteen in August of 1968. My older sister Jody had landed a job as a counselor at a summer camp just outside Woodstock, New York. Camp was shutting down for the season, and my father was driving out to pick Jody up; I was bored, and went along for the ride.

Woodstock was a pleasant little village. We weren't picking Jody up at the camp, because it shut down Sunday morning around 11:00 and we wouldn't get there until Sunday afternoon; instead she was getting a ride into town, and we were going to meet her there. Seemed pretty straightforward.

Except when we got to Woodstock, the town common, or park, or whatever it was in the middle of town was full of people and art displays, and there was a band just finishing their set -- by the time we got the car parked they were done and starting to pack up their gear.

I got out and looked at the art show while waiting for Dad to find Jody (which took maybe fifteen minutes). I mostly remember it being very sunny, beautiful weather, and most of the art being dull -- lots of floral still lifes and vapid landscapes, a few abstracts, a few pictures of cats. Nothing psychedelic, so far as I can recall.

On the ride home Jody explained that yeah, that was the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, and they were hoping to make it an annual event. It was kind of a big deal locally; attendance had been close to a thousand, and they'd gotten their headline musical act, Cat Mother & the All-Night Newsboys, all the way from New York City. She'd gone there with some of the campers and other counselors Saturday and had a good time.

I was impressed; I'd actually heard of Cat Mother & the All-Night Newsboys and seen their album (all one of it) in the stores.

Incidentally, the "All-Night" part of their name is where the "All-Night" part of "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers" came from; I liked the sound of it.

So -- I was at the first Woodstock. For fifteen minutes, after the music was done, right before the artists started packing up.

Forty Years After: 1

2009-08-14T18:32:02Z

I wasn't at Woodstock in 1969.

I saw the ads in the papers -- I remember a full-page ad in the Boston Phoenix -- for this huge music festival that was coming up. In fact, it was so huge, looking at the list of acts, that I wondered whether it was legitimate, especially given that it was in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York. I mean, I'd heard about pop festivals, but they all seemed to be in far-off places like California.

But it appeared to be on the level.

I couldn't go, though. I'd only just turned fifteen, I couldn't drive, and even if I could, I didn't think my parents would let me go. Besides, I didn't have the price of a ticket (which I remember, probably inaccurately, as being forty bucks -- an incredible bargain for a show like that, but more than I could come up with).

My friend Jack talked about maybe hitchhiking out, and I considered it, but I'd never thumbed a ride for anything close to that distance, and in the event, Jack never did get there (despite what he told people later).

So on that Friday I was out in the back yard, doing nothing in particular, and I saw Carl Adler, one of our neighbors across the back fence, with his battered old sports car in the yard beside the barn. I wandered over and said hello and asked where he was going.

(Carl was eighteen. His sister Sigrid was my age; his sister Susan was the same age as my kid sister Ruth.)

Woodstock, he said. And he asked if I wanted to come; he wouldn't mind company.

I was so tempted.

He said he could wait ten, maybe fifteen minutes, so I could grab a bag and tell my mother, but then he was outta there, it was a long drive.

But I didn't have a ticket, I didn't have the money for a ticket, I didn't have permission and knew I wouldn't get it, and most of all I didn't have the nerve. So I said no.

Carl shrugged and drove off.

And then that night I watched the news on TV, and Saturday there was more, and I saw the Jefferson Airplane on Dick Cavett talking about the experience (they'd been helicoptered directly from the site to the studio), and I desperately wished I'd gone with Carl.

Monday evening Carl got home, and I asked him what it was like.

"Lousy," he said. Huge crowds, lines everywhere, too much walking, too much mud, couldn't get near the stage, the acoustics stank, the bands he could hear mostly weren't that good.

I was kind of boggled, as that didn't match what I'd been seeing and hearing on TV.

But then, as time passed and Carl (who'd had no access to any news of the outside world while he was there, in those primitive days without ubiquitous communication; his car's radio didn't work) heard what had been reported, and as it sank in that he was a local celebrity as the only guy in town who'd actually been there (others who set out for the festival were turned back or gave up before getting close), his memories began to change shape, and it got more and more wonderful in retrospect.

I haven't seen Carl in more than thirty years; I wonder how he remembers it now?

And I keep changing my mind between regretting passing up my chance, and thinking I did the right thing.

Realms of Light: Chapter Ten is on the web.

2009-08-05T05:20:58Z

Chapter Ten has finally been posted. I didn't really get the full $250 to pay for it, but I'm over 95% of the way there and decided not to be a dick about it. It's at
http://www.watt-evans.com/realmsoflight10.html. An explanation of how the serial works is at
http://www.watt-evans.com/realmsoflight0.html.

As always, this serial is first draft. When the novel is completed it will be revised, edited, and I hope eventually published in book form by FoxAcre Press. Anyone in the U.S. who contributes $25 or more to the serial will get a copy of that book; for Canada it requires $30, and elsewhere the minimum is $35.

All donors also now have the option of receiving new chapters in e-mail as soon as they're written, rather than having to wait until they're posted to the web. Chapter Thirteen has been sent out.

For every $250 I receive, I will post another chapter to the web. Chapters will be posted at a minimum interval of one week -- this one took four months. Sigh.

Chapter Fourteen is not yet written -- I've been too busy with moving and with better-paying work.

I do hope to finish the novel eventually, whether any more money comes in or not, but I'm not in any hurry. Money adds urgency.

What Should I Say?

2009-07-31T05:22:48Z

I haven't posted much lately. I mildly regret this, but I'm never sure what I can say that will provoke interesting discussion (my goal in virtually all my online activity) without also starting stupid arguments (see almost anything about politics or religion).

Elsewhere I often talk about TV shows or comic books, but that seems like pretty ephemeral stuff that doesn't really belong here -- or maybe I'm wrong; maybe this is exactly the place to give my take on the impending finale of "So You Think You Can Dance."

Advise me, please, anyone who's reading this.

The Writing Life

2009-07-16T07:41:37Z

For the past six months, my major occupation has been moving.

Seriously, I've spent more time on preparing and marketing our old house, house-hunting, financial preparation, packing, loading, unloading, unpacking, arranging, sorting, shelving, and so on than on writing or anything else. I'm not done yet, either.

For much of that time I didn't even try to maintain a normal writing schedule. I finished and delivered my last contracted novel in April, and since then my production has been, to put it politely, sporadic.

However I decided recently that I really needed to get back to work, and I've been trying to get my old habits back. I've been spending my days on the house, but at night, after Julie's gone to bed, I settle myself at the computer and... well, sometimes I write. Other times I find myself playing Spider Solitaire or Rocket Mania instead.

But I think I may have found a key element. So far this week I've had two nights when I managed to scratch out a page or two -- not very good pages, either -- and two days when the words were there. On Monday I had no trouble at all writing four good pages, and tonight I've just finished six.

And I figured out what I did those two nights that I did not do the other two: I booted up iTunes and set it to playing familiar music. On Monday I played the complete oeuvre of Sarah Brightman; tonight it's a playlist of my own creation named "Gloomy Chick Singers."

I've been deducting the cost of my CDs as an office expense for twenty years, and I think I've just demonstrated that it was a legitimate cost of doing business.