Empowerment

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Recommended as a worthwhile contemporary gothic novel, Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches is a feminist tour de force.  Set in a world similar, or perhaps parallel, to ours, it follows three witch sisters in 1893.  The sisters are estranged, having been raised by an abusive father, and each has found her own way to New Salem.  The old Salem had been destroyed after the witch trials.  The three find their lives drawn together, not even knowing the others are there.  But there are also still witch hunters.  None worse than Gideon Hill, the leading candidate for mayor.  I’ve long known that books written after Trump are often fairly obvious for the hatred that oozes from political leaders.  This is one such case.  The story is one of female empowerment in the face of constant male opposition.  It goes fairly quickly for a book its size.

It’s an enjoyable read but it grows, well, harrowing towards the end.  You come to like these three very different sisters and appreciate the gifts they offer to their world.  Men, however, make the rules and often they feel that women have no place in making decisions for the public good.  I’m amazed at the number of people who still believe this.  It makes novels such as this so important.  Women with power are crucial examples to present.  The three sisters may cause mayhem, but it is generally good for the city.  When men are in charge, things tend to get repressive.  Sound familiar?

Conveying the gist of a 500-page novel isn’t a simple task so I’ll simply say that this isn’t a conventional witch story.  There’s never a question that witches are good, but capable of doing bad things.  In other words, they are pretty much like all of us.  That’s not to deny that some people become evil and that such people will gain ardent, blind followers.  The characters are memorable and likable in their very humanness.  As far as genre goes, this is a magical realism novel.  As you get drawn into Harrow’s world it becomes believable.  It’s a book that should be widely read and its plea for tolerance must be heard.  I can think of other comparisons—others have also conveyed that an unquestioning religion may become evil unintentionally.  Such conversions aren’t the kind publicly discussed, but they do fit with human experience.  I’ve intentionally left out spoilers since I want to encourage readers.  It certainly has left me thoughtful.

International Standard

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Probably nobody gives them much of a thought.  ISBNs, that is.  International Standard Book Numbers.  An ISBN is a book’s unique identifier.  And they cost money.  I’m not sure how self-publishing works, but at some stage, whether it’s obvious or not, you have to pay for an ISBN if you want wide distribution.  And since they cost money, most publishers don’t assign an ISBN until a contract is signed.  If a deal falls through, hopefully they can recycle the ISBN and assign it to another book.  The system only began in the 1960s and not all books printed their ISBNs.  The thing about them is, the best way to find the book you’re looking for is by using the ISBN rather than the title.  Titles can’t be copyrighted, and that’s why you see so many books with the same name.  The ISBN won’t let you down.

My book, The Myth of Sleepy Hollow, now has an ISBN.  I just found out yesterday.  It’s 978-1-4766-9757-4, in case you’re curious.  It won’t lead to anything on the web yet since I haven’t submitted the manuscript and work hasn’t begun on the title.  It is, however, a step in that direction.  In the past, when I’ve signed book contracts, I’ve always felt a little anxious until the ISBN is assigned.  Is the publisher really sure about this?  Once they assign an ISBN they’ve started to invest in your ideas.  My book has existed in draft form for several months, but I’m going through it again, for the umpteenth time, to make it presentable to the world.

One of my jobs at Gorgias Press, my first full-time publishing gig, was to assign ISBNs.  They had to buy blocks of them and they came in a printout in a large notebook.  If a project with an ISBN didn’t materialize, some White-Out and a pen could save the company some money.  It was all very hands-on.  I imagine it’s gone electronic these days.  The ISBN is a technical code, by the way.  The 13-digit code, which is now common (it used to be ten), has a meaning.  The schematic below explains that.  The “group” section has to do with language and that’s followed by the publisher’s ID.  Simple deduction (and dashes) tell me that 4766 is McFarland.  That’s followed by the title identifier.  I’m not a numbers person, however.  Those of us drawn to the words part generally try to provide the inside content.  And since it’s a weekend I’d better get to it.  I have a submission deadline I’d like to meet. But I’m thinking about the ISBN.

Image credit: Sakurambo; via Wikimedia Commons, GNU Free Documentation License

Number Six

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Signing a book contract always makes me happy.  There’s a validation to it.  Someone thinks my thoughts are worthwhile.  And now I can reveal what it’s about.  Regular readers likely already have some inkling, due to the number of times I referenced Sleepy Hollow over the past couple of years.  I’ll provide more details closer to the time, but it struck me back when working on Holy Horror that few resources exist for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” despite its status as such a well-known story.  An agent or two agreed with me that the topic was good but they really weren’t sure it was a commercial project.  This despite the fact that Lindsey Beer is slated to write and direct a reboot of the famous 1999 movie.  It seemed that a book on the topic available at the time might sell.

John Quidor, The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

I tried a number of independent publishers that don’t require agents.  I learned that most of them won’t even reply to your emails.  It seems that to get published by any trade publisher you have to be already famous.  Or maybe my idea’s just not good.  Weird.  Finally I found a university press that thought it might be a good fit, and it occurred to me that McFarland, who recently dropped the price on Holy Horror, would be a good press for this kind of thing.  McFarland made an offer first, and yesterday they sent a contract.  Hopefully the book will be out next year.

This is quite a personal project.  The story is one of my early memories—most likely due to the Disney version of the story, and most likely as seen on television.  My treatment is, as in all of my books, idiosyncratic.  I look at things differently than other people do.  And I’ve been looking at Sleepy Hollow for half a century or so, and I’ve read quite a lot about Washington Irving and the Hudson Valley.  I don’t want to say too much since others write more swiftly than I do and some presses speed books along.  For the time being I can enjoy that rare feeling of having a book contract and an editor who’s excited about my project.  I do hope that the next book, number seven, might find a trade publisher.  What’s it about?  Well, I’m working on two at the moment, and it depends which reaches book length first.  And I can’t say anything since someone may scoop me.  So I’ll just bask a little bit before starting another work day.

An Interesting Prize

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If you’re born without it, you get by any way that you can.  Capital, that is.  Those of us who inherit nothing but active minds don’t stand a chance, really.  Without connections or the cash to draw others in, we tend to be scrappy.  And cheap.  This is probably the reason I’m drawn to characters like Ed Wood, and those who started American International Pictures.  I get the sense that Mark Thomas McGee must be an interesting guy.  After all, he met some of his idols when he was young.  Fast and Furious: The Story of American International Pictures is available in a second edition, I know, but I tend to find first editions fresher.  They say what’s really on an author’s mind.  Besides, used books have their own charm.

Although American International Pictures (AIP) was early on known for fast shooting schedules and cheap effects, it eventually started to earn some mainstream respectability before the company being acquired by Filmways.  Along the way they engaged some famous champions of cheap, such as Roger Corman.  A number of films discussed in this book were part of my childhood.  And as someone who’s always had to live cheaply (I just don’t comprehend finance), I found this an extremely hopeful book.  Some of these folks never became famous in the lifetimes, but they left a legacy.  And that’s a worthy goal.  I suspect that for those of us who can’t break into mainstream publishing, blogging is about building a legacy.  What some of us want, however, is to appear in print.

And I mean in print.  The book is an object.  I bought this one used.  I sometimes find interesting things in used books.  The former owner of this one (a McFarland hardcover!) carefully glued postcards of AIP movie posters to the covers and endsheets.  They didn’t put their name in it, but they (in pencil) ticked off the movies, presumably that they’d seen, from the filmography.  This is a person after my own heart.  I tend not to write in most books anymore, realizing that someday someone will probably sell them and, hey, it’s hard enough to make money in the book business.  But this personalization is something you can’t find in an ebook.  No, a book is meant to be held and loved.  This one clearly was.  As publishers chase more and more after electronic and audio books (the latter of which are also electronic) and learning moves from reading to watching, we’re losing something.  They’re called books, and they bear their own meaning.

Fear of Big Books

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I have to get over my fear of big books (I can’t find an official name for this and so I’ll coin machrysbibliophobia—and why did my autocorrect replace this with machrysbibliophobmia when there’s no such word?  It’s a scary world where my fears go unnamed—go, aporripsophobia!)  I’ve read many large novels with payoff (several by Stephen King and Neal Stephenson) and plenty of nonfiction from which I’ve learned a ton (perhaps literally).  But still, when a book I really want to read is big, I tremble.  I try to decide how to justify the time.  Now, I know I don’t have to justify time reading—that’s a constant activity.  I think it’s more a question of caesura, places to stop and perhaps claim credit for work done.  I’m not a fan of multiple volumes since that drives prices up.  Maybe just say it a bit more succinctly?

In my case—and I can only speak for myself—it’s all about a sense of accomplishment.  The distinct, discrete book that I’ve jammed into my gray matter along with its companions.  Some of us are driven by the shot of joy that accompanies completion.  I have a few compendia of authors/genres I really like.  I dip into them but never quite seem to have the time to finish them.  You see, recently watching the X-Files got me thinking about Charles Forte.  I have a compendium of his four books and I read Book of the Damned right through.  But I’ve got three more to go.  How are you supposed to count that on Goodreads, without its own ISBN?  Or the collected fiction and poetry of Poe.  It’s nice to have it all in one place, but will I ever read it cover-to-cover?  I tried once, really I did.

Scary books

As I write this I just started a big book.  It’s on a topic I really find fascinating but I’d been putting it off for some time because of my machrysbibliophobia.  I’ve been entrenched from before page 1.  I know it’s going to take me quite a long time to finish it—I have a job that takes its pound of flesh daily, and even when I do get a day off, well, mowing season is here.  And the porch needs painting again.  Maybe if non-Catholic monasteries were a thing I’d have time to devote to the reading I really must get done before my time’s up.  I like big books, but I’m also afraid of their ramifications.  Enough so even to name my fear.

Going Once, Going Twice

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Do you ever get that feeling that you’ve been sold?  One thing I learned early on in academic publishing is that buyouts aren’t that unusual.  I recently wrote about Transaction being acquired by Taylor and Francis, for example.  Just a couple days ago I noticed in Publishers Weekly that Bloomsbury had bought out Rowman & Littlefield’s academic wing.  Then, at a company meeting the buyout was mentioned again.  Finally, I had an email from R & L letting me know.  You see, Nightmares with the Bible was published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic.  This is an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield.  This means the rights to Nightmares have just been sold to Bloomsbury.  I do hope Bloomsbury has a more progressive idea about paperbacks!  In one of those strange synchronicities (all of this happened on the same day), I’d emailed one of the series editors of Horror and Scripture, asking if the series was still going.

I have no real concerns about being owned by Bloomsbury.  If you haven’t heard of them, it’s probably because they were a small operation until they took a chance on an unknown author by the name of J. K. Rowling.  Suddenly flush with cash, they started buying out smaller presses.  Big fish got to eat too!  Rowman & Littlefield had been buying out other publishers for years.  If you’re an academic you probably remember University Press of America.  Ever wonder where it went?  They bought Rowman & Littlefield in the late eighties and took over their name.  They bought other “assets”: Prometheus, Scarecrow Press, Hal Leonard.  They grew an enormous list of academic titles, now owned by Bloomsbury.

As someone who has knocked around academic publishing for some years now, it seems like this small world is getting even smaller.  Companies buy other companies and sometimes it works out for the benefit of authors.  Sometimes not.  Bloomsbury is only 37 years old.  Rowman & Littlefield was 75.  University Press of America (which first bought R & L, would’ve been 49.)  The younger buying out their elders.  Perhaps it’s because of my career malfunction, but I’ve discovered academic publishing to be a fascinating world in its own right.  Many academics pay little attention to the publisher, especially outside the big-name university presses.  But there are stories here.  I know that before I began working in the industry I’d never heard of Bloomsbury.  Then they bought out Continuum, which had bought out T & T Clark, from my beloved Edinburgh.  Now one of my books is under their umbrella.  And I have to wonder who will be sold next.

Unidentified

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Some topics are subject to ridicule.  The poster child for this is UFOs.  What’s so remarkable about Leslie Kean’s book is that she began as a skeptic.  She points out that before a sea change takes place intense ridicule against the new idea is normal.  Then Kean did an extraordinary thing—she actually looked at the evidence.  UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record is a remarkable book.  It’s filled with stories of the power of conversion.  Many UFO experts were skeptics at first, completely dismissive of the phenomenon, until they took a close look.  Official government files, even those available to the public, demonstrate the reality of UFOs.    Interestingly, as Kean highlights, the average person now no longer really requires convincing.  The elites (government officials, scientists, and mainstream media) are slow to accept the fact that UFOs/AUPs exist, even if we can’t say for sure what they are.  And they still like to poke fun.

Skepticism is necessary for science.  We can’t simply accept anyone’s word for something.  Kean’s book, which contains pieces written by an international group of high-ranking witnesses, points out that strong evidence does exist.  And it is possible that some group (not “the government”) does have more information than they’re sharing.  I also found it interesting that a number of countries—many, in fact—treat UFO reports from pilots seriously.  In the UK they are required to report them, for example.  In the United States, they are instructed to keep their mouths shut.  They doesn’t stop them from seeing what they do, however.  Still the ridicule taboo remains.

Ridicule of what we don’t understand must be a deeply ingrained defense mechanism.  As Kean notes, it took centuries before a heliocentric model was accepted.  People laughed.  And as recently as the nineteenth century it was considered impossible for rocks to fall from the sky.  Paradigms had to shift.  Meanwhile, people laughed.  We seem to have an aversion to anything in the sky other than God and angels.  Even in current models that assure us that the universe above us stretches on to infinity.  The only one “up there” is divine.  So we laugh at anyone who’s mastered the skies.  Until we catch up.  Heavier than air flight was impossible in my grandparents’ lifetimes.  People laughed at the idea.  It took me over a decade to find the courage to read this book—it made a little splash when it came out, but it didn’t change much.  Until the U.S. Navy fessed up.  Other countries had already done so.  Maybe we should see a psychologist about that laughing reflex, though.

Demons and Gremlins

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Gremlins have an ancient pedigree, whether they know it or not.  Credited with airplane problems during the Second World War, these meddlers in technology had an older cousin in the demon named Titivilus.  Titivilus was a demon said to be responsible for errors in the works of scribes.  Long before the printing press hit Europe, manuscripts were copied by hand, of course.  Anyone who works with Bibles, for example, knows that no ancient manuscript exists without errors.  But scribes copied more than Bibles, and anyone who has tried to copy an entire manuscript knows that errors always creep in.  (When I was a college student I tried to get my local church back home to set up a Bible-copying station so that when hungry parishioners were leaving the service they might stop and copy a verse.  This was to show how errors appeared in biblical texts.  The experiment took place but results were disappointing—full of errors but we didn’t get past the early chapters of Genesis).

However that may be, having a demon to blame for things going wrong proved to be mighty handy.  The tradition lasted well into modern times.  In the days of manual typesetting the young printers’ apprentices were called “printer’s devils.”  Demons were blamed for spilled cases—capital letters were kept in the upper case, and minuscules in the lower case—and other mishaps.  It may be a stretch, but such a demon interfering with humans trying to accomplish something important, led to ideas such as gremlins.  Most of us, I suspect, don’t like to confess that we’re sometimes clumsy or sleepy and make errors.  One of my notebooks is all crinkly because I knocked a nearly full water bottle over onto it while trying to catch a bug in my office.  ’Twas no demon, just haste making waste, as it does.

The idea of someone not human to blame is compelling.  All the more so because sometimes we are the legitimate victims of circumstance.  Life offers many opportunities to wander, unknowingly, into situations that might not turn out so well.  We don’t have minds well equipped to see the entire picture.  Even if we could the universe, we’re told, is infinite.  Who doesn’t make mistakes because of limited knowledge?  And sometimes those mistakes can eat up years of your life.  Doesn’t it seem more likely that a demon or gremlin lurks behind an all-too-human error in a judgmental world?  I’m sure that, for most people, if we knew better we wouldn’t have done it.  So we invent our demons.  We sometimes even give them names, and thus Titivilus was born.

Image credit: artist unknown, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Forgotten Books

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Would you rather never write a book or write a book that’s easily forgotten?  This question springs from a recent exercise of trying (unsuccessfully) to count the books I’ve read.  I mean going through and putting a finger on each one and counting, if I’d read it.  I encountered a surprising number of ordinals that evoked a blank stare—I don’t remember the book at all.   Or I remember having read it, but don’t recall what it was about.  (In one instance, the book was one my wife read, and not me.  That explained a lot!)  This got me thinking about what it takes to write a memorable book.  I’ve always been one to prefer either speculative fiction or the classics.  (I’m aware that “classics” are now being dismantled because they don’t represent all groups.  I’d call them “white men’s classics,” but a surprising number of them were written by women.)  If a book has a speculative element strong enough I will recall having read it.  I like weird stuff.

I’ve read books where parts of them, at least, have stayed with me for half-a-century.  I remember specific things I read as a child (and no, I’m not talking about Barney Beagle—although I do remember that too).  I like to believe that even the bits that are hazy indicate that the book isn’t truly lost, but buried somewhere.  The human mind has an amazing capacity to absorb things.  I’ve read at least three thousand books in my life—I have no idea how many, actually, but Goodreads has me at 1,000 and I started using it in 2013.  I’d been intentionally reading for about forty years already, at that point.  Three of them while working on my doctorate.

I recently (within easy memory) read a Doc Savage novel.  I’d read the entire series, or pretty near, as a junior high schooler.   Anyway, there were well over a hundred of them.  I remembered nothing in my recent re-read beyond Doc’s band of five companions.  The story was completely unfamiliar to me.  One of the more recent books I know I read but couldn’t remember the story at all was a New York Times bestseller.  I guess if I’ve forgotten the author he’ll still be okay on Mars in the future since many others must remember something about it.  I’ll be long gone by then, both on Mars and down here, I’m sure.  I do hope even by then something will remain of all the books I’ve read.

Price Drop

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Here’s a public service announcement for your Friday.  If you’ve been wanting to read Holy Horror but found the price too high, McFarland has now lowered the cover price to under $30.  Here’s the link: Holy Horror.  Of my non-academic books, this has been my “best seller.”  Since I’m currently shopping around another book, and since agents aren’t interested (at least not any more), I wondered whether McFarland might look at it.  The editor who handled Holy Horror had left, and the new editor responded to my concern about pricing by telling me that they lower prices after a couple of years.  She noticed, however, that Holy Horror had been overlooked in the price lowering process, so voila!  It’s now affordable.

This model, while not the same as trade publishing’s efforts to get primarily front-list sales, seems to make sense.  Too many publishers raise prices year after year, so if you don’t buy immediately you’ll pay more.  McFarland tends toward a paperback first model.  The first couple of years are aimed at library sales—and they do well at those—then they lower for individual purchase.  All I had to do was ask.  Two years ago I asked Lexington/Fortress Academic if they’d do a paperback of Nightmares with the Bible.  That poor book never had a chance.  The editor said they were considering it.  Instead they did the trick that publishers seem to like: decoupling the ebook price from the hardcover.  So you can buy some expensive electrons instead of holding a real book.  So it goes.  I’ve written a museum piece.

It’s a little too soon to say about The Wicker Man.  My experience has been that university presses, particularly British ones, like to raise prices rather than chasing sales.  If you’re reading this blog you know that I’ll market my books.  I even printed bookmarks for Holy Horror at my own expense.  Maybe it’s time to start distributing them again.  What a difference ten dollars can make!  I’m a book booster.  (You might not have noticed.)  I’m glad that McFarland understands that individuals will buy books, even if they’ve been out for a while.  The standard wisdom among academic publishers is “three years and then you’re done.”  If you’re inclined to help prove that business model wrong, you can now get Holy Horror without having to take out a second mortgage.  That’s cause for hope—any writer has the dream that her or his book will keep on selling.  Sharing this information will, it seems, make it wider known. Please pass it on.

Downtowns

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I recently wrote about the movie Peeping Tom.  I mentioned a scene, particularly creepy, where a news agent sells a girl a candy bar after selling an older man pornography.  Writing about this reminded me of my own youth.  After we’d moved to Rouseville, the nearest town with shops in western Pennsylvania was Oil City.  It had a reasonable downtown then—a couple of blocks with a Woolworth’s, Thrift Drugs, a movie theater (the lamented, lost Drake), stationary stores, and the like.  By the time I was in fifth grade I’d begun to discover books.  (Ours was not a reading family, being much more of the television crowd.)  Finding books in Oil City was a bit of a challenge.  There wasn’t a bookstore.  The nearest regular bookshop was all the way over in Meadville, and Mom didn’t want to drive that far too often.

I’ve noted before that I bought used books at the Goodwill up in Seneca (where we bought clothes and household items as well).  If you stayed downtown in Oil City, though, you could find books for less than a dollar in a bin at Woolworth’s.  (I still have a few of those cheaply printed and bound “Easy Eye” editions on my shelf.)  There was, however, just a door or two down, a mysterious shop where I’d spied a rotating wire rack of paperbacks.  I was curious and although Mom never forbade us to go in, she certainly didn’t encourage it.  I was a tween ravenous for new reading material.  This shop also sold magazines and tobacco products.  Some of the magazines had their covers obscured, and although on the cusp of puberty, I was really only after books.

One time I went in to give the wire rack a whirl.  I seem to recall that the owner gave a rather wry look when a minor, myopically focused on books, wandered in.  The fare there was not what I was used to.  There was a novel about Bigfoot, I recall.  I thought maybe that would be of interest, but I didn’t buy it.  When I walked out, I had that creepy feeling that seedy places seem to leave palpably on your skin.  I guess it might’ve been the feeling of that innocent little girl wandering into a shop selling nudie pictures to buy a candy bar—probably because it was the closest shop to home.  Such downtowns, and undoubtedly, such stores still exist.  They’ve become rare.  Downtown Oil City is no longer recognizable when I go there.  Now, it seems, there’s nowhere to buy books at all.

TV Zone

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An unenviable task, it must be, to try to sum up The Twilight Zone.  Barry Keith Grant, however, has done an admirable job in this TV Milestones volume.  He addresses in a forthright way one of the questions on my mind quite a bit as of late—what are the borders of genre?  For a creative species such as our own, with imaginations that range far and high, we blend unlikely ingredients.  The Twilight Zone had finished its initial run before I ever watched television, but I was around to catch early reruns.  Their focus on the weird, the unusual, the twist ending, informed my childhood love of the strange.  They also helped shape my imagination.  This little book helps to capture some of that.

I haven’t watched every episode of the series yet.  I’ve been making my way through it slowly since I really don’t have much time for watching, and I tend to give priority to movies.  Still, The Twilight Zone was one of the most influential television programs of all time, as Grant demonstrates.  Although he tries, it may be impossible to determine just why so many people use it as a frame of reference.  Even with my penchant for analyzing, I can’t work out what it was about those disparate, discrete episodes that so captured me.  Perhaps like most influences, it was specific episodes that hit very deep.  That showed new ways of thinking about things.  That opened up worlds of possibilities.

I was exposed to Serling’s stories not only through my own reading, but also through school.  I have no hope of remembering what grade it was in, but in one of my English classes we were assigned “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”  I was probably lost in the haze of puberty and adolescence at the time, but I remember well how that story made me feel.  And the teacher pointing out how people behaved when they were afraid.  Perhaps appropriately, Grant ends his book with a quote from that very episode.  Others, however, stayed with me as well.  Perhaps that’s the thing that’s so remarkable about the Zone—some episodes are not easily forgotten.  We’re accustomed to the flood of anodyne media that dowses us with entertainment of little consequence.  Some Twilight Zone episodes were that way as well.  But when we experience something significant, we tend to remember it and remember it well.  So many episodes did that kind of work on a mind too young to make lasting life decisions.  I guess I’m still waiting for Mr. Serling to step into frame and explain it.

Shadow Half

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Sometimes you just take a chance on a book you haven’t heard of.  You see, I keep a very active “to read” list.  The problem is that many books on it are a bit on the heavy side and it takes me a long time to get through lengthy books.  Every once in a while I go to a bookstore to browse for a book that’s short and speculative.  It seems that when I was growing up it wasn’t difficult to find fiction under 300 pages.  In any case, that’s how I found Sunny Moraine’s Your Shadow Half Remains.  It was in the “horror” section of a local bookstore.  (Even “horror” sections are now difficult to locate.)  It looked like it wouldn’t take me a month to read.  It was a good call.  It’s what I like in a scary story.

Not too gory and written with literary finesse, Your Shadow Half Remains is a pandemic story.  Well, not literally, but sort of literally.  It was published just this year and the story revolves around a pandemic in which people are infected by looking into each other’s eyes.  Nobody knows for sure how this happens, but people who are infected begin to act violently toward those around them before killing themselves.  Naturally, therefore, survivors begin to isolate themselves.  So Riley moves to a lake cabin where her grandparents got infected and died, but since there’s nobody else around the contagion can’t spread.  She lays in supplies and awaits, well, that’s just it—awaits what?  Her plan is interrupted, however, when she learns that she has a neighbor.  Maybe two.

One neighbor she starts to get to know, but they can’t look directly at one another and can’t really know each other’s motives.  Herein hangs the tale.  People are social creatures and the pandemic (in real life) caused much of its damage in the form of isolating ourselves from one another.  Other people, instead of being companions, were threats.  Especially in the early days when it wasn’t clear how the virus was spreading.  The safest thing was to stay home and avoid others.  It’s that aspect that Moraine really captures here.  A woman set to try to wait this thing out alone, but then, another person complicates things.  And how can you tell insanity from infection apart from insanity brought on by isolation?  Both seem to lead to the same results.  I took a chance on this unknown story, and it was a chance well taken.

Excess Ideas

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I sincerely hope that after I’m gone someone with more sense than me will look through my notebooks instead of just tossing them in the trash.  There are a ton of creative ideas there that I have no time to develop into stories.  I know that writers are frequently looking for new angles and ideas that haven’t been presented before.  I have them in spades.  Of course, unless someone is noticed at least by shortly after their passing, their stuff becomes detritus lost for all time.  I was thinking of family heirlooms recently.  I come from a poor family, not rich in stuff.  Indeed, most of what we still own is made of paper.  The rare family heirloom is something imbued with history.  One of my grandfather’s things (I have two of his books) that survived was a brief account of his life.  (Also paper.)

Members of his family—I’m still uncertain as to who—experimented with photography.  This was in the days of holding still while being shot, but there were some very interesting prints that made their way to me.  (Paper again.)  This was from the time that negatives were preserved on glass.  I imagine this led to storage issues over time.  And I also know that families have to move from time to time.  Things get lost during every move, from my experience.  In my grandfather’s very brief autobiography, he notes that these glass plates were kept under the floor of the barn and were forgotten at the time of a move.  I very much doubt that they’re still there.  Developers greedily come in with their backhoes and knock and dig and dump and pour.

I sometimes wonder what small, local history was lost on those glass plates.  Some families are erased from history—most of us are, in fact.  Generations on down the road there’s little evidence that we were even here.  For writers, a stab is being made at remembrance.  I tend to think of writing as being like a radio receiver for thoughts.  They may not originate with me.  Some of them are quite bizarre—trust me.  It makes me sad to think of them left rotting in some landfill.  My “Kilroy was here” is inscribed in notebooks.  If anybody’s interested, I’ll warn you in advance that my handwriting’s quite small.  And the ideas are uncensored.  There are so very many of them.  I don’t mind sharing, but I would appreciate the opportunity to try selling them myself, first.  If only I had the time to write them all out.  And I won’t be leaving them under the barn floor.

Wonderful Impossibility

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I used to tell my students that a semester break without reading a book that challenged your assumptions was wasted.  I tried to lead by example, but jobs are such fragile things.  Since I have no semester breaks I try to read books that push the limits more frequently.  I’d heard about Carlos Eire’s They Flew before the author had settled on a publisher.  (I don’t know him personally, but would be glad to.)  In case the title doesn’t do enough heavy lifting, the subtitle A History of the Impossible might help.  Yes, we’re stepping into the world of the post-secular here.  It’s a wonderful place.  Although much of the book deals with early modern cases of levitation, the study ranges wider than that.  Written by a respected historian, this is a very important book.  For many reasons.

I am glad to see Yale University Press joining with Chicago and some noted others (Rowman and Littlefield, for instance) in challenging a paradigm that is no longer upheld by science.  I can hear the howling already, but if you read carefully, with an open mind (which is required by science) you’ll quite possibly learn something here.  Our minds do influence our reality.  We haven’t figured out how because secularism ends the discussion with scorn.  That was true of the study of UFOs as well, until the U. S. Navy said, “Nope.  They’re real.”  (It only took about seven decades, so don’t expect instant results.)  We cut off our possibilities when we mock things out of habit.  I remember the Turok comic where one character said to another (give me a break—this has been five decades and I can’t recall all the names) “Fools scoff at what they don’t understand.”  Truer words have never been penned.

The impossible happens when scientists aren’t there to witness it.  It sometimes happens when they are.  Doubt that?  Read about the Pauli Effect.  Or call it gremlins, the choice is yours.  It’s real in either case.  Academics are often among the last, with the exception of Trump supporters, to see what’s been staring them in the face all along.  I’ll say more about this book on Goodreads, but let me float a hope here.  I want to go back to that indefinite article in Eire’s subtitle.  This is A History of the Impossible.  May more follow.  Others, such as Jeff Kripal, have been doing similar work for many years now.  We can ignore it, or scoff at it.  But I think that character in Turok got it right, even if I can’t remember his name.