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Reading, Writing, Pondering: Big Life Themes, Literature, Contemporary/Historical Issues |
 Welcome to the 14th century, in a farflung outpost of the Holy Roman Empire, and a new Convent outpost of the terrrifically powerful Roman Catholic Church. Sound historically dull? Hopefully not so--for this is NOT an ordinary 14th Century Convent. Back after a six-year hiatus.... From NaNoWriMo historical Supernatural novels in Scotland, Michigan, South Alabama and historical horror in Standwood Station, GA-to the Phantom Northern Woods-to singlehandedly refighting the American Civil War-to exploring Social Justice and standing for First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution-we deal out horror, Supernatural, Historical, fantasy, mystery, and more. We do not fear outspokeness. And always, always, always, We Do History. Find it here. We write it. We read it. We hold strong opinions. We orate. Meanwhile, whether we're writing or just reading, we love to rave about books and authors right here!  |
| "The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened adn the story of what appeared to happen." Mary Roberts Rinehart Mystery Author, 1876-1958 http://www.online-literature.com/mary-rinehart/  |
| two very thought-provoking essays from The New York Times: on climate change, and on joy in the face of imminent death: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/magazine/14lives-t.html?_r=2&ref=magazine http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/magazine/14lives-t.html?_r=2&ref=magazine |
| On this date: 1969-first human walk on the Moon Carlos Santana born July 19: Lizzie Borden born Edgar Degas born Over the weekend I read Precipice by Tom Savage, a page-turning suspenseful “domestic” thriller set in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, by an author who himself is a native. I must admit the surprises kept coming and kept me on the edge of my seat right through to the very final page. Sunday and Monday I read a Christian mystery, The Dandelion Killer by Wanda Luttrell, also a page-turner. Then Monday evening I stayed up late to read in its entirety Dean Koontz's 2004 novel The Taking. Since I had finished all my current stack of library books on Saturday and won't get more until the out-of-town delivery of my reserve books to the Library this week (not yesterday, so will be today, tomorrow, or Thursday-our small town library closes on Friday-Sunday as do the City Offices)-I went searching through my stacks and boxes of books for reads, and pulled out both The Taking and Marilyn Harris' Portent, both of which of course I had read much earlier. I find that I read SO much that books I read even a couple years ago can profitably be reread and enjoyed “as new.” I chose both of these because they struck me as “environmental apocalypse” novels, or “The Earth fights back.” Well, on the first count, I was right about The Taking, not on the second, but let me tell you: I did not go to sleep until I had closed that book after the final page. My hair stood on end, my eyes bugged out, my jaw dropped, and I turned pages at nearly the speed of light. Reader, find this book and read it!! |
| “I have to agree with Kinetic Truthe-as a lifelong student of history, I see the American population over the last four centuries of residence in the New World as basically-sheep/ostrich/zombies. Not all, or there never would have been an American Revolution for Liberty. Not all, or there never would have been a War to free Slaves. Not all, or everybody would have followed President Woodrow Wilson's isolationist policies and not joined in to win WWI. Etc. You have to consider the tremendous expansion of the population over the last-say century and a half-since the Industrial Revolution-okay, last two centuries-take the original average percentage of sheep/ostrich/zombies, multiply that to find how many are now. Oh-and they're not all ostriches; some "genuinely believe" the lies of Big Propaganda Machine-and condemn all of us who try to seek the Truth-and those are the ones who worry me, not the sheep.” This is a comment I made on Facebook today in response to Kinetic Truthe's comment on the sheep percentage of the public. I found several interesting items this morning to share: http://www.survivalistnews.com/2010/07/07/fema-buses-spotted-in-gulf-port-alabam... http://www.survivalistnews.com/2010/07/08/u-s-navy-evacuates-gulf/ http://www.care2.com/causes/animal-welfare/blog/four-questions-to-ask-your-dairy... I've decided to post some of my Facebook comments-on-the-Gulf and on First Amendment venues here; also to begin again posting one or two chapters a day from my current novel-more-or-less-progressing, Finding the Abandoned Child, as I am rewriting/changing/expanding it so it's really not the “same” novel. Also I am about to remove my memberships from some groups because it is senseless to “be a member” if I never have the time or energy to participate and am “less than a lurker,” which is also what I am on most of my yahoo groups. “Less than a lurker” means I scarcely see the subject headings, much less open any emails.  Finding the Abandoned Child A Novel of Environmental Apocalypse Fantasy by Archie Standwood epigram: “We all live in a Yellow Submarine, Yellow Submarine, Yellow Submarine.”-The Beatles Chapter One epigram: “All the rivers flow into the sea, Yet the sea is not full. To the place where the rivers flow, There they flow again.” The populace of our small island City of Mellaigch was almost all asleep when the event occurred that changed all our lives. In our Compound only our Pastor Janns was awake and alert, studying his endless progression of religious works, closeted away in his study at the South angle of our pale stucco longhouse. The Pastor slept very little, perhaps two to four hours per night, due to injuries he had suffered during the Nevraigh War twenty-two years earlier, when he was a very young man. Pains kept him awake; Pastor, then a chaplain to the Mainland Kingdom of Devrellharre, had been captured and tortured by the Lillatuhn Mountain Trolls- and rather than take laudanum, which he believed to be addictive, he read and studied all night, and learned. I believe now that it was his need to be awake and unsedated that may have saved all our lives. Mamma and I slept, as did my cousins Natay-lee and Jahro, boys of twelve and eleven respectively. Mamma and I had taken the boys in when her sister Ja-lil-ah passed away last autumn season when her fishing canoe overturned. Now that it had been a season more than a year (for our world has six seasons per annum), the boys had pretty much settled in, although once in a while we would be awakened by Jahro's muted weeping in the night-but not nearly as often as when they first appeared, when Natay-lee acted out in constant anger and Jahro cried all night every night. Dawn slipped flat spatulate fingers across window sills and under the edges of curtains before the event that changed our city occurred. Only the cattle in the meadows atop the hilltop overlooking the Harbour watched it happen: both sunrise and the Disaster. They lowed quietly amongst themselves, looking down at the silent unoccupied fishing boats in the harbor bobbing on the sudden swells. They likely ignored the signs out to sea: the ashy slate colour of the firmament at the Eastern horizon; the booming surf just below that; the pounding from under the ocean as a tectonic plate shifted and resettled itself. The cattle weren't affected yet and so they didn't care. In their own creaturish way, they recognized that the dawn brought their milkers, and so they lowed patiently while they awaited relief. But relief would be delayed this morning, for quite some hours. Pastor Janns had just reached down a text on the Apocalypse-a critical study on the comparative beliefs of the Nevraigh Nomads and their Eastern neighbors, the Lillatuhn Mountain Troll, written by his close friend and colleague Professor Jannahs Nills, who had gone to live in the Nevrahnd Desert in the Eastern region, close to both ethnic groups- and settled back into his reading chair at the end of the study table closest to the window when he perceived the rumble. At first he thought he must have fallen asleep, and tilting the chair, had almost fallen and righted himself; then he realized he was not asleep at all and had not been. The rumble came from outdoors, not near the Complex, but somewhere just outside the City of Mellaigch. He slapped the book closed, jumping from the chair and this time in actuality tipping it over, running out of the Study and down the hall to the Northeast angle, where my mother had her suite. He banged on her sitting-room door until she awoke and sped through from her bedroom to open it. “Washundra! Awake! Something's happening-Apocalypse!” My mother doubted that, but clearly it must be a serious imminent event to disturb Pastor Janns to this extent. She tightened the sash on the blue silk robe she had already donned and opened the sitting-room door, pushing past the Pastor and rushing down the hall toward my room, which was three doors down, also on the North wall, so that my views were all of the hills North of the City. Since I had become a light sleeper over the past seasons, due to my perceived need to protect my young orphaned cousins, I was already awake and stepping through my doorway. “What is it, my Mother?” Chapter Two “”I don't know, child. Pastor says-” “Please, both of you-I'm not certain-just pack a quick bag and go! Go West!” With that admonition, Pastor Janns rushed back to his Study in the South wing and we could hear him stacking books. I looked at Mamma and she nodded. “Go, then, child, just a quick few changes of clothes, and meet me out in the patio. Quickly now.” We each returned to our rooms and hurried to find the necessities. I reached the patio before Mamma, but Pastor Janns already stood outside, satchel overloaded with books on his left shoulder. He reminded me of a colt straining at the stable door to get out and run. Clearly he was in a hurry and like a stallion in a smoke-filled stable, something had badly spooked him. As Mamma exited behind me with the cousins beyond her, I heard something now myself. An odd roar combined with a sort of rumble, as if the air itself were ruffled and perturbed. Up on the hills above the City, now I could hear the cattle lowing in perturbation. Somehow it did not sound like simply their dismay at late milking. Then I realized dawn had not even fully arrived, so it still was actually too early for milking. If that wasn't their complaint, then what was? As I thought this, the roar intensified. I noticed each of the nephews carried a bag too: Natay-Lee hefted a stuffed duffel, and Jahro had a book bag plus a canvas fishing tote, surely his mother's extra one, all he had left to remember her. So did Pastor Janns notice, and he reached over and took Natay-lee's. Though he was older by a year, Natay-lee was tall and wiry, whereas Jahro was sturdy and stocky, much more able to carry heavy loads, even though these sacks were not so light. With Mamma in the lead, we headed toward the outer door, located in the North-West corner of our compound. I saw that Mamma had locked the front door of our complex when the boys exited, and now she unlocked the outer gate, preceded us out, then turned to lock it behind us. She used an odd old huge skeleton key with a strange emblem inside the circle which formed the handle. Our compound had been in Mamma's family for untold generations; she had told me once that her family had been one of the first to found our City. The key looked sufficiently antique to have belonged to the original lock, installed millenia ago when the compound was constructed. Rust flakes dropped off as I watched. Without a word now she headed out, straight West toward the far side of town. Our home sat on a hill, not as high as the hills to the North where cattle grazed in meadows overlooking the Harbour, but high enough that we could not see the Harbour, the Wharf, or the sea from our compound. Below us on the hill, to the South and South-East, were commercial buildings, some of which reached four stories, thus blocking our view of the Harbour. When we eventually reached the diagonally - crossing Swan Street, though, we were amidst buildings of only two and rarely three stories, and because Swan was diagonal and slanted downhill toward the Harbor, we were at last able to see the water, and soon we identified the source of the roar: a tremendously high and wide tidal wave rolling like a Juggernaut of the Devrellharre-Nevraigh War across the Sea, headed directly toward our shores. Natay-lee, Jahro, and I halted in our tracks, riveted and wanting to watch it break over the cliffs protecting the Coves to East and West. For the three of us, this was an adventure: arising before dawn, packing and rushing away from home, watching this extraordinary wave! None of us young ones thought, of course, of the fisher-folk whose huts and cabins huddled down to the West end of the Wharf, nor of the small boats and canoes-their only livelihood-now bobbling atop the incoming waves. We just hoped to see a spectacular sight, but in my peripheral vision I saw Mamma and Pastor Janns exchange a quick look and immediately she ordered us away. “Youngsters! Now! Across Swan and head North West! Quickly as you can!” “MOVE!” roared the usually soft-spoken Pastor Janns. Needless to say, the cousins and I made haste in the indicated direction, following Mamma, while Pastor Janns paced behind us, I supposed ensuring we three would not make the mistake of Lot's wife and turn behind us to watch. Chapter Three A serious natural disaster had caused our small town to shift itself some distance to one end: that is, everybody moved out of the “center city” to one side and extended the town away from the area most affected. One set of those was the compound in which I and my mother lived. Buildings in our area of the City were not destroyed, being high enough that the Tsunami had not reached, or not to the point that we could not re-enter to acquire our possessions. No injuries, apparently-that we knew of- either above the Wharf. Just a good bit of uproar, an entire city, for the most part, moving house. But down at the Wharf, and around in the Coves on either side to West and East, all was a different story. A pastor lived in our compound too; besides my mother, he, and myself, there were only two others. We owned a long, oddly-angled, pale stucco longhouse with airy rooms and a wide yard, a building set in its compound which was one of the oldest in the center of the City, indeed anywhere in Mellaigch. It was Pastor Janns who explained quietly to me later, at the makeshift Shelter set up in the City Gymnasium West of the City, about the image of the Juggernaut of War, and what he had been thinking when the rumble first shifted his Study chair. |
| I am having the worst time writing my Environmental Disaster Fantasy novel, Finding the Abandoned Child, these past few days, and I have not yet analyzed accurately why this should be the case now. When I began the novel on June 6, it was inspired by a series of dreams the previous night, about environmental disaster and the mystery of the title. Well, I knew of course that the environmental apocalypse portion stemmed from my fears, anxieties, rage, and outright terror concerning the current and on-going destruction of the Gulf of Mexico and its land environs (and now it's looking like the Atlantic Coast is in for it too; and you can be assured that if New Orleans is experiencing oily precipitation, so will Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia-where I live-and the Carolinas, and on up the Atlantic Coastline. Maybe the Federal government should start worrying about the damage loss of tourism will do to the national economy, if the oil and tarballs work their way around between the Keys and Cuba and start up the Atlantic?). Well, environmental destruction is occurring with or without my writing this novel, but the question I have for myself is why now suddenly, here I am one week into JulNoWriMo, with a pledged goal of writing 50, 000 words in 30 days, hoping to finish both this novel and the one I worked on March 23-31 (Child-Puppets of The Testament Logging Corporation, a historical horror which is Book Three of a series.) In January, February, and March (March was MarNoWriMo) as is the case every November during NaNoWriMo, I have no trouble churning out the output. In fact in February and March I routinely managed anywhere from 2500-2800+ words a day! In March: I finished an existing novel, March 1-11 I wrote a new novel, the sequel, March 1-22 I wrote 20 chapters of a third novel, Book Three of that series, March 23-31. I should have kept on with it, because in April I wrote a 108-page stage play for Script Frenzy, which is one of the two most difficult writing tasks I have ever done. This novel has become the second most difficult. July 1 I decided it just wasn't disastrous enough (originally there had been no fatalities) so I rewrote and added on. Now I've got a scholar who was tortured under interrogation in a war twenty-two years earlier when he was a young military chaplain; many dead fisher-folk; and I'm about to put my fifteen-year-old feisty heroine into an interment camp, along with some members of her family. And I don't like it and that's what's wrong. It's pulling teeth to get the required minimum number of daily word count now (1,667). So I think one of two events is going to occur by tomorrow: either I stop on this one entirely for now and put it on ice (or water, more in keeping with the disaster), and work on the other novel to finish it. Or I give up the disaster-disaster-disaster negativity and instead start focusing on the mystery of the title: the abandoned infant, naked, silent, unsmiling, unblinking, my heroine discovers immediately after she has decided she cannot possibly catch up to her mother, who specifically instructed her to remain at the Shelter rather than to accompany her (Mother) back home to their compound. |
I'm seriously thinking about making copies of my daily multitude of comments on Facebook, which is where I rant, rave, praise, and denigrate the ongoing Gulf Crisis. Combining comments, questions, status postings, and shares, I probably put at least 1K words on FB daily.:) This is in addition to the minimum 1667 words I'm churning out daily for JulNoWriMo
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| In the United States, which happens to be where I live, today is Independence Day, when we commemorate America's freedom from colonization by England. I think today-especially in 2010-we need to remember to commemorate our Constitution, which guarantees us freedom of religion and freedom of speech. Yes, Gentle Readers, freedom of speech, which includes the right of volunteers, clean-up workers, and media personnel neither swayed by political concerns nor in the pay of private corporations, to report the truth, to speak of the accurate facts, to tell the American public and our global neighbors EXACTLY WHAT IS OCCURRING IN THE GULF. If you have been keeping up with the situation, you will know already that media personnel have been turned aside from certain locations in the Gulf Region, and forbidden to photograph, videotape or report. Our American Constitution guarantees FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Need I say more? http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/06/access-hard-to-come-by-in-reporting-... http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DuXsmL... http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.propublica.org%2Farticle%2Fphot... |
| July is JulNoWriMo on WDC, and I am participating. I set my goal at 50K, to complete two novels: Finding the Abandoned Child, the Environmental Disaster Fantasy begun June 6; Child-Puppets of The Testament Logging Corporation, Book Three of a series, begun during MarNoWriMo March 23-31. Yesterday I decided Finding The Abandoned Child was insufficiently disastrous; it began from a dream June 5-6, and in the initial version, everybody in the City survived the apocalypse and only property was damaged (and of course, livelihoods lost). I decided after weeks of sharing and researching and commenting and raving on Facebook about the Big Petroleum Environmental Apocalypse, and since the novel is after all my way of working through my fears, I need to get serious and get down with the Apocalyptic nature of the Disaster. So it's revamp, rewrite, and start anew. And three chapters went down yesterday for a total of 1710 words on a daily goal of 1667. |
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