Nextdoor

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Eight years we’ve been in this house.  In that time the only neighbor’s name we knew was the guy who owned the house immediately next door.  He bought the house only a couple of months before we bought ours.  We were sad to see him move out over the winter, but when I saw new folks milling about in the spring I went over and introduced myself.  Thankfully, they’re nice folks.  While I was talking to them a neighbor across the street who’d seen me hundreds of times without a word called out and introduced herself to them as well.  She didn’t ask my name and apparently didn’t feel the need to know it.  She did say that she grew up in the house on the other side of ours.

That is the house we see from all our south-facing windows.  Four different sets of people have lived there in eight years.  Only the second set ever told us their names and talked with us.  To be fair, it is a rental property, owned by the real estate agent who sold us this house.  All day long at work I can see the tenants coming and going.  A married couple maybe a decade younger than us was there first.  Then a couple in their twenties/thirties—the friendly ones.  Then another couple with a couple of kids.  From overheard observations I gathered he worked in recruitment for Binghamton University (where my daughter went) and Rutgers (the last school at which I taught).  We have both Binghamton and Rutgers swag, but that never spurred any interest on their part.  Now I can’t figure out the renters.  They look like students to me, maybe from nearby Lehigh University.  There’s two men and two women (I think) but they never act like couples.  Who knows?

The other day I was out fighting the weeds when another neighbor across the street was outside.  She asked my name and this led to a conversation and learning, after all these years, hers and her husband’s names.  All of this brought to mind something I learned as a candidate for the ministry in the United Methodist Church.  Methodists practice itineracy—bishops move ministers every few years so that a “permanent” minister doesn’t become too settled.  It was then that I learned most congregations (neighborhoods?) don’t really feel comfortable with a minister until after about seven years, I think it was.  Seems like our timing is about right.  For the first time in eight years we know the names of two sets of homeowners in our immediate vicinity.  Welcome to the neighborhood.  

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Inspiring Ideas

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Human minds are strange.  For instance, they often experience their best ideas when it’s difficult to write them down.  Or consider that our best work often comes just as time is running out, as if the added pressure is what produces these diamonds of thought.  Or yet again, the problem that resolved  itself just as your body’s dropping off to sleep and you’re too tired to write it down.  These kinds of things aren’t isolated incidents.  They happen all the time.  I was thinking about this because I found a broken shower memo board in the attic.  My wife gave this to me as a gift at Nashotah House.  I used to complain about having my best ideas while in the shower.  The internet and easy electronics may have existed, but they weren’t part of everyday life yet.  Besides, I prefer to write things down.  This plastic board could be mounted in the shower and had a waterproof “pen” that could work while wet.

Since minds are strange, after a while the best ideas stopped coming in the shower.  There was a way of recording them, so they shifted to other times.  These days they’re likely to come while I’m jogging.  I’m not inclined to stop and try to find some voice recording app on my phone, if I remember to take it, and I don’t jog with my pen and notebook that I otherwise keep at hand.  Since the idea is endangered, it shows up.  Sometimes it gets written down when I get home—I do keep a small notebook just inside the door—other times I see a fox or an owl and ideas vanish.  With my strange sleep schedule, I’m not inclined to arouse myself while a great idea dawns just as the theta waves start.  Generally it’s gone by morning.

For those of us who write, losing ideas is more like losing teeth than losing a hair.  It’s something substantial with fewer replacements available.  For whatever reason, ideas seem to have learned to avoid the time I’m in the shower.  At Nashotah that was generally after my morning writing session and jog, while getting ready to go to morning chapel.  These days showers tend to come after a long day at work, relaxing me before sleep.  My mind is already tired by then.  These rare ideas are almost playful at being inopportune.  If they are captured, they can be written down.  But they have to be trapped first.  As if they have minds of their own.

Scary Painting?

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The Painted tries.  It really does.  The premise is good but the execution makes it all look rather silly.  The failure comes from the writing, the acting, and the directing.  The idea of the plot is that paintings in a house inherited by Evelyn and Adam come to life because a jilted ancestor became a succubus and her painting controls the others in the house.  There are several points at which the logic of the premise breaks down and even more points where the family (Evelyn and Adam have three children) act in a way no sane person would act in such circumstances.   Plot points are raised and dropped.  Some of the special effects are pretty good, however.  Overall, though, this horror film doesn’t scare and it inadvertently becomes funny.  It’s really too bad because there is potential here.

The Elster family has inherited a gothic house from a cousin who died in a murder-suicide with her new husband.  This is because, using a grimoire, he summoned a painted demon who’s actually a succubus.  The Elsters move in and quickly determine that the paintings are attacking them.  Adam, who likes pornography because his business is failing (!), has a fling with the succubus but doesn’t tell anyone.  The family flees the house in the middle of the night, but the succubus has come home with them.  The parents, discovering this, leave the kids alone so they can go back to the inherited house to take care of things.  When they get there the paintings attack, but they end up burning them on the lawn and going home.  At home, naturally, things have gone wrong.

Their college-age son has locked himself in the basement with their youngest daughter to sacrifice her.  The parents arrive home and get the key (which the high school-aged daughter apparently couldn’t do), free their youngest, and lock their son in said basement.  He’s very nearly broken out by the time they begin the ritual, but it doesn’t work.  Adam finally confesses to his affair with the succubus and decides his suicide is what’s needed to take care of the issue.  It helps, but only when the image of the succubus is burned out of the painting does the danger really pass.   There is a sincerity to the movie—as I say, it clearly tries.  It’s not intentionally bad nor is it completely mishandled. It’s just altogether it doesn’t fill the frame.  Spirit painting is a wonderful idea for a horror film.  The Painting, it seems, was released just a bit before it was fully dried.

Forgotten

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As most horror fans know, on a stormy night in 1816 a group of Romantics gathered and a scary story “contest” was suggested.  The best known result of this contest was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  More devoted horror fans will also know that John William Polidori’s short story, “The Vampyre,” also had its origins on that night.  It was built on a very slim skeleton suggested by Lord Byron.  Percy Bysshe Shelley’s efforts are lost to history.  As are those of the most overlooked of the group, Claire Clairmont; her story was finished some time later, unpublished.  Claire’s birth name was actually Jane, and she was Mary Shelley’s step-sister.  (Mary was Godwin at the time.)  Percy, Mary, and Claire had traveled to Geneva at Claire’s suggestion.  She was pregnant with Lord Byron’s child.  Shelley and Byron became fast friends and the three young men present on that night would all die within eight years.

Claire is unjustly forgotten.  Of the five gathered in Villa Diodati she lived the longest, making it to eighty.  She had a difficult but occasionally warm relationship with her step-sister.  This book by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton is the first real biography of Claire.  She lived a fascinating life.  Drawn from diaries, letters, and reminiscences of friends, as well as the other sources of the historian’s art, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys is quite readable.  And moving.  Claire was young and infatuated with Byron when she set out to seduce him.  He never returned the love she felt for him, and took responsibility for their daughter on the condition that Claire never see him again.  Her inability to see her own child was the great sorrow of her long life.

Claire went on to live in Italy, France, Russia, and Austria.  She was fluent in French, Italian, and German.  By all accounts she was a gifted musician.  She hobnobbed with high society, often by being a governess in aristocratic households.  She lived near poverty at times, but inherited a living from Percy when his father died.  It’s the sad fate of many who don’t get published that they are forgotten to history.  (Being published is, I hasten to add, no guarantee either!)  Claire’s personality comes through in this account as that of a strong, vivacious woman who defied the conventions of her era.  She made her own way in the world, never marrying, yet being sought out by those who latterly wanted accounts of Shelley’s life.  She’d lived with Percy and Mary for several years.  This is a story of a different but fascinating time.  I hope that future treatments of that famous night in 1816 might take a bit more notice of this deserving, if forgotten, woman.

Dark Academese

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I thought I was having a stroke.  The words on the page just didn’t make sense.  Nouns were being used as verbs.  Gerunds were mugging nouns.  A subject for the sentence was impossible to be found.  Was this a brain seizure?  No, it was a piece of academic writing.  In a field in which I hold a terminal degree.  This made me feel plain terminal.  I wonder what has happened to academia.  My wife and I were going to be an academic couple.  We started out when there were defined academic disciplines and with a little bit of discipline-specific training you could read just about any journal article in said discipline.  Now hires are being made in what seem like completely made up fields.  People can’t explain their appointments, so they opt for addressing their current research project.  And I confirm with Toto that this isn’t Kansas anymore.

Fearing for my sanity, I asked my wife for a reality check.  She opined (probably correctly) that in the 1980s universities were issuing lots and lots of business degrees.  More and more people were thinking college was the same as job training, not teaching young people to think for themselves.  That could explain how the rules of grammar have been abandoned so that a humanities professor can make him/herself sound like a nuclear physicist.  And those of us with degrees from the early nineties are unemployable because the standard disciplines just aren’t on offer any more.  I scratched my head when the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh couldn’t get a position in religious studies approved but was launching a marina management major.  (No joke.)

I’m a fan of dark academia.  I think maybe it makes sense given the weirdness into which I’ve stumbled.  I like to think I have a reasonable education, but I often come across documents in my own field that I can’t hope to understand.  Perhaps I’m just a slave to S-V-O (subject-verb-object, to eschew obfuscation).  All I want is to be able to understand what I’m reading from my peers.  They’ve come to believe, however, that if you write so that people understand what you’re trying to express, they’ve somehow failed in erudition.  I love higher education.  I’d go back to the professorate in a wink.  I’d be considered somewhat more ancient than protoplasm, I expect.  I went to school to learn how to communicate effectively and to express my findings so that they could be understood.  Today I’m wiping my brow, glad to learn that this isn’t a stroke after all.

Let Me Explain

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One of the reasons, I believe, that people said I was such a good teacher is that I explain things.  Clearly and thoroughly.  Living in a nation that has never really valued teachers, I have come to understand just how rare clear and thorough explanations are.  In April, within one week, we had two urgent household repairs that both required financing.  Even though I experienced sticker shock both times, I listened carefully as this was explained.  Both times it was explained poorly and I had to put multiple calls in to each of the lenders after the fact.  I can’t tell you what this does to my blood pressure, but I can say I’m glad I had Cheerios for breakfast.  One of the services wasn’t even performed in the way that it was explained.  In any case, I wrote all the more detailed explanations down.  I learned that companies don’t send you any verification that you’ve paid off a loan anymore.  At least we haven’t received one.

I was doing okay with this.  Blood pressure back to normal.  Then I received a letter from the IRS.  This always raises blood pressure, even before opening the envelope.  In my experience, it’s never good news.  In this case it was an identity verification request.  Okay, that I can handle.  But then I found something unexpected on our 1040.  You never want to find something unexpected there!  We’d paid a professional to do our taxes for us, and all we had to do was sign on the dotted line (actually, sign the screen with your finger).  I ticked taxes off my to do list back in March.  Here it was May and I was finding an irregularity on my professionally filed taxes.  I called the vendor.  I soon learned that how this was being handled simply hadn’t been clearly explained in the office.

I hope that I’m a reasonably intelligent Homo sapiens; I can tie my own shoes and I can figure out how to get to Manhattan on fairly short notice, from two states away.  What is obvious to me is that many people of my species are not good at explaining things clearly and thoroughly.  I’ve worked for employers who’d rather see costly inefficiencies remain in place for years rather than hire a trainer who can explain things clearly.  I’ve left more than one HR office more confused than I walked in.  Why is it that we eschew good explanations about things like financing and taxing?  Last year I was scammed by a guy who, despite his moral deficiencies, explained things clearly and thoroughly.  He was lying through his teeth, but he could and did explain things.  What I’m wondering is why legitimate businesses can’t do the same, only with the truth.

Going Some Place?

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I recently had to drive to the Philadelphia Airport to drop off/pick up some folks.  Here in the Lehigh Valley I’m roughly an hour north of the city of brotherly love.  Like most sentient drivers, I’ve come to rely on GPS navigation.  Dropping off my parties turned into a nightmare of congestion.  The GPS solidly insisted that the turnpike, 476, was the “fastest” way.  One thing AI doesn’t understand is how people behave.  The flight required dropping off a couple hours before that known as “rush.”  476, once yet get near Philly has several pain points where traffic merges on from several ramps onto an already crawling stream of traffic.  That’s human behavior—never considering that the “longer time” route might actually be quicker.  Or at least a touch easier on the blood pressure.  Of these thousands and thousands of people, relatively few were going to the airport.  Once I got home from a journey that Al told me would be two-and-a-half hours, round trip (which was actually three-and-a-half), I began looking for alternate routes for pick up.

Pulling up the usual map app on my laptop, the only route shown was the turnpike, clearly not designed for this volume of traffic.  Not being native to Philadelphia, I don’t know my way around very well.  Then I began to lose trust in Al.  Interstate 95 also goes right by the airport.  I force-dragged the route over that way.  The estimate? Maybe fifteen minutes longer than the turnpike.  AI doesn’t understand that people who know the turnpike is a bad idea at this time of day will take it anyway.  It is the “fastest” way to where you’re going.  And who wants to waste time?

Me, I’d rather not shave off so many years of my life.  I’m not so foolish as to suppose I-95 would be much better, but with the “real-time” facts added in, it might very well save some time, and gray hairs, to go the somewhat longer, slower route.  Al didn’t even want to tell me that was an option.  Who could possibly want to go on at a slower pace, for mental health reasons?  Even en route it will try to reroute you back onto “the fastest” way that it clearly misunderstands.  I remember driving in Newark, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and, briefly, New York City.  Those who write algorithms are missing something basic.  Human psychology plays into this in a major way.  Al is not human nor does it “think.”  It calculates.  As for me, I calculate that the slower way may just be what the doctor ordered.

Rocky Ground

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When I begin to lose my sense of wonder, the natural world grounds me.  I’ve been an amateur rockhound for many years and I sometimes wonder if it’s because I grew up poor.  The idea that you can just pick up something valuable on the ground has a treasure-hunting aspect to it.  Movers, I’ve discovered, dislike rock collectors.  My collection is quite small, and most of it not on display.  The danger is that I’ll be wanting to pick up more interesting rocks.  Like much of nature, rocks are amazing if you look closely at them.  And when the mania hits, it takes all my attention.  We all know that gemstones tend to be small, but perhaps it’s the fact that they look very little like their finished state in the wild makes them intriguing.

This interest was recently rekindled by a visit to the Lehigh Valley’s local cave, The Lost River Canyon.  As with most local attractions, it takes some time to get around to them.  We decided to go during the recent heat wave since caves maintain a constant temperature, generally in the fifties, and during the height of the wave the outside air temperature was double that of the cave thermometer.  Caves often have rock shops associated with them because being in a cave will trigger the rock-hounding gene.  And I suspect I’m not the only one to whom this happens.  Like many preserved caves, Lost River Canyon was an accidental discovery and was later purchased by a family that has been running it as a tourist attraction ever since.  I left inspired to find my rock tumbler and get it rolling again.

It’s difficult to say when or how such obsessions originate.  When my daughter was really into dinosaurs I started looking into geology.  The next thing I knew I was a member of the Wisconsin Geological Society and was going on field trips to collect.  When I lost my job at Nashotah House I seriously considered enrolling in a geology degree program, put off by the fact that calculus and chemistry were pre-requisites.  I was a hopeless humanities major and advanced math just doesn’t psit well in my psyche.  Part of me wonders if the fascination doesn’t go back to Genesis.  Geology was the science that tolled the death knell for any kind of literal six-day creation.  When this rock madness hits other interests can, if I’m not careful, be shunted aside.  It’s important to feel grounded.

Siesta

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“Lazy” isn’t an adjective that most people who know me would apply.  I tend to be fidgety and can’t really sit still at work.  I have a body and I want to move it.  I have an active mind and I need to keep it stimulated.  The recent heatwave over the long Fourth of July weekend, though, enforced laziness.  We don’t have central air conditioning.  Some kind family members bought us a couple floor units for our bedrooms so sleep is technically possible when our bedroom nears 100 degrees in the late afternoon.  But during such sweltering conditions, we spend the day trying to move as little as possible.  Even stepping into a cold shower is difficult when the pipes have warmed up so that tepid is the best you can hope for.  I’ve got a lot of writing projects going, but quality work is difficult to do when the air is so hot.

I see the wisdom of the siesta.  When I volunteered on the archaeological dig at Tel Dor back in 1987, the digging ceased around noon.  Afternoons were too hot for physical labor.  Most people napped.  In hot climates around the world the siesta is necessary as well as practical.  Late capitalism assumes everyone’s in air conditioned offices and has abolished the idea.  It’s the kind of enforced laziness, however, that descended on me during the heat wave.  I’d be reading my book or watching a movie when I’d wake up to find the story quite different from what’d been filtering through my mind.  Or the movie having something going on that seemed to have no precedent.  It was okay for a day or two, but I started to grow restless.  There’s still lots of stuff to get done.

Weather extremes, meteorologists tell us, will only continue because we refuse to curb carbon emissions.  I do remember hot summers from when I was a kid, but the thermometer climbing up into high fever range for days at a time never happened.  Given my age, one thought that recurred during life under the heat dome was that perhaps this is what retirement (not in the cards) must be like.  Retired friends tell me that they’re busier than when they worked, but I do have to wonder if the timing is a bit more open.  The 9-2-5 relaxed a bit more.  It’s not that I’m lazy, but sitting in front of a computer all day earning money for someone else means the siesta’s not permitted.  And when it’s so hot out, it should be.  Otherwise fevered decisions follow.

Photo by Florian Siedl on Unsplash

Scary Scripture

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The question’s not as simple as whether chocolate and peanut butter go together.  What is it with horror and the Bible?  A number of us have explored that question in book form, but probably the most prolific is Brandon R. Grafius.  His Scared by the Bible is a mapping through terrain that will feel foreign to some: if you live for the beach in summer, why would you fly to Antarctica to visit the South Pole instead?  Part of the reason is clearly that the Bible isn’t the rainbow-and-unicorn book that it’s often made out to be.  Some parts—not a few—are pretty scary.  That’s Grafius’ entry point into how horror and the Bible are surprisingly compatible.  Interestingly, we had similar starts down this path.  A Bible given to us by a grandmother when we were a child, and the determination to read it.  My world was a bit more hellfire and brimstone than Grafius’ but we’ve ended up near the same place.

Often I thought, as I was reading it, “Are people going to get both these references?” (i.e., both the biblical story and the horror movie being cited).  After all, many Christian denominations still teach that horror is not helpful at best, and satanic at worst.  I just wonder how many of us there are who never found watching horror a spiritual problem.  I grew up thinking about death a lot.  Part of this was because Evangelical children’s literature raised the question of where would you spend eternity if you died today.  Seriously, some of the stories I read, along with Dick and Jane, still scare me today.  Religion often uses fear for its own purposes.  So does the Bible.  Grafius comes down to this at the end, asking if it’s intentional on the Bible’s part.

It seems to me that this is an important question to explore.  Religion has been weaponized through fear since at least the Reagan years.  More recently it has been aimed specifically at us “evil” liberals and our “culture of death” even as conservatives rain bombs on Iran.  We desperately need to understand religion’s now very intentional use of fear to retain power.  People are afraid.  They have reason to be.  Generally it’s not the emotional issues politicians hand-pick to garner votes.  Yes, the Bible is a source of fear.  Horror films are often also a source of scary thoughts.  They do have a lot in common.  We just need someone to come along with an open jar of peanut butter to run into someone eating a chocolate bar.

250 Years

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America doesn’t seem to be in a partying mood.  With more than the usual inanity coming from Foggy Bottom, and hot air being added to this heat dome, well, it might just be best to keep it simple.  Algae will grow, no matter what the self-appointed-divine say.  I remember a half century ago.  America seemed optimistic at its bicentennial.  Nixon was safely gone and Reagan hadn’t reared his fanged head yet.  It seemed like the country had a future.  These days, with more than regressive rhetoric, when emails from the Social Security Administration go out of their way to say how great Trump is, well, I think I’ll just stay home and watch a horror movie.  It’s less traumatic.

For me, as a kid, the Fourth of July was all about sparklers, black snakes, smoke bombs, and staying up late for fireworks.  Black snakes were these black discs about the size of a button coin battery that you lit with a match and the ash would fizz out the top into a “snake.”  It was an ephemeral thrill.  What we called “smoke bombs” were small colorful spheres that gushed colored smoke when you lit them.  We never played with anything explosive, but even the thought of these simple pleasures still brings a smile.  I haven’t seen anything like these trinkets (except sparklers) for many decades now.  I see from YouTube that they’re still being sold.  Almost as if the past fifty years never happened.  And staying up late to see fireworks only means being excessively sleepy at work on Monday morning.

I won’t be around for the tricentennial, presuming we survive what the Republican Party has up its sleeves.  I do hope things are more optimistic then.  I’ve been around long enough to notice the distinct difference in national outlook a mere fifty years can make.  I was born less than twenty years after the Second World War when everyone knew fascists were an evil to be avoided.  In just the last decade that has done a 180.  And we see what it’s like.  Our grocery bills are double what they were before our fearless leader took his post, claiming to make things better.  If I’m to believe the propaganda from the Social Security Administration things would be just rosy, could I afford to retire.  So our social experiment in democracy seems to have lasted only about two-hundred and fifty years.  Hopefully in another fifty what’s left of the United States will have come back to its senses or will have come up with something better than we have today.

Fictional Dreams

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It’s difficult to be discreet when you feel like shouting.  My first novel has been accepted for publication.  Since my fiction is published under a pseudonym I can’t tell you the title, but I’m very excited.  Chuffed, even.  It’s no secret that I’ve been publishing short fiction for years.  Even this novel was initially finished when I was in my forties.  Publishing is a slow business.  Although I could interest no agents (not for lack of trying), a couple said it was good.  Another publisher had decided, after accepting it, to pass on it anyway.  Mostly I’ve tried small, independent publishers.  Editors, however, are people with personal tastes and aligning your vision with theirs is half the trick.  If not three-quarters.

I’ve avoided self-publishing not because of the stigma—traditional publishing is devilishly hard to break into—but because of the effort involved.  Yes, you can price your books in the affordable range, but you have to arrange for printing and design.  Distribution can be a nightmare.  Also, it’s difficult to do with a nom de guerre.  Pen names are about as early as fiction writing itself, and unless you’re a major name, the title’s more likely to sell your book than your name is.  As more than one editor has told me, “It’s the writing that counts.”  Using a pseudonym comes naturally enough when you have a professional standing in a “serious” business.  Somehow we tend to think fiction writers can’t be serious people.  If they are they may have trouble finding a publisher.

Recently I’ve spoken to a couple of people who’d like to get published as a way of making money.  I try not to discourage such folk, but it’s important to keep in mind that making significant money from publishing is very rare.  You need to keep your day job.  I certainly wouldn’t complain if most royalties checks were actually over thirty dollars (which is very seldom, and since royalties come maybe once or twice a year, don’t base your mortgage on your wordsmithing).  Those of us who persist in writing tend to do so because we have no choice.  I can’t not write.  The forthcoming novel is, I think, fairly well written.  Some of the stories I had published, in retrospect, weren’t.  (Others very much were.)  At the time they seemed pretty good.  Although written over a decade ago, this novel seems to have held up over time.  At least I hope it has.  When it comes out it’ll be mixed in here amid the other books I discuss, I expect.  If I don’t end up shouting too loud, and spilling the beans, first.

Survival Writing

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Word of mouth tends to be remote these days.  I suspect local readers of this blog are quite few.  I work remotely and, like many Americans, have trouble getting to know people in the town where I live.  Still, I use this blog instead of my mouth.  Elizabeth Rosen used to write for Nickelodeon, which I find highly impressive.  As someone who has found venues to publish my fiction as common as oases in the Sahara, anyone who’s made a few bucks off their work makes me want to stand up and salute as if a general just walked into the room.  I just read Rosen’s chapbook Survival Skills and thought I’d talk about it.  (As an aside, I always thought “chapbook” referred to chapters, which confused me because most books have chapters.  The term probably derives from “chapman,” a kind of traveling salesperson who used to include these kinds of small books among the wares they sold.)

The seven stories in Survival Skills are short—Rosen tends toward flash fiction.  I’m impressed with how effective she is at it.  I’ve tried to write flash fiction and have found I need more narrative space that it allows.  Chapbooks are easily read in an hour or so, if you’re the kind to rush through things, but these tales left me thoughtful.  You get a sense from these brief accounts that people often do nasty things to one another, or to animals, and that sometimes we really should stop and think about what we’re doing.  At other times we have to realize that we’re animals too.  We forget that at our own peril.

As much as I like reading short stories, books of such are always difficult to summarize.  Going through Survival Skills, the stories do seem organically connected.  This is something that has prevented me from trying too hard to publish collections of my stories.  Like my mind, they’re all over the place.  I’ve attempted, from time to time, to approach my short story writing thematically but it has only resulted in a few tales of each subject.  I’d never considered a chapbook approach.  Even Edgar Allan Poe made his mark in the literary world with short stories.  Washington Irving published his Sketch Book in fascicles.  Publishing exists in many forms for those with stories to tell.  I’m glad to have found Rosen’s little book.  It has spurred me on to reading more short stories, which I should be doing as a matter of course.

Life’s Work

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It’s official.  I’ve now worked as an editor longer than I was a professor.  The latter was my chosen vocation, the former my fall-back.  I feel like I’ve tipped over a precipice.  As I’ve written before, I still think like a professor and would welcome back life in the classroom.  This came home to me in a major why when I realized that in my current position, in less than a month’s time, there will be only five people remaining in my starting department who were at my employer before I was.  At least twenty editors who were there when I started have left, most of them younger than me.  This was a world-rattling revelation.  You can’t choose your destiny.  You can do everything possible to make your plans happen, but change is constant and you have to make do.  None of this changes my mind, however.  A life has a calling, fulfilled or not.

I’m very grateful for all that I’ve learned about publishing, even if there’s still so much to learn.  As a young person I knew that writing would be part of my life.  I didn’t know what form it would take, and I guess I still don’t.  I’ve been getting positive signals from a publisher about a novel I completed thirteen years ago.  I’m doing my last set of edits on a very different novel that I finished initially last year.  I’ve made good progress on my seventh nonfiction book.  And there are many shorter projects in hand as well.

I was reading a book the other day where I was cited.  This got me to thinking about the concept of “life’s work.”  For some of us that’s measured in words.  I have no idea how many academic books cite me.  There’s software to measure such things, but it doesn’t capture every publication and I’m not that deluded that I’d spend much time checking on it.  Still, I do wonder if my life’s work (which is generally measured in written form) has made any difference at all.  I post thoughts here daily and they cover disparate topics.  (I had a record five “likes” recently for a post on the Bible.  Sometimes posts on monsters near that record.  Just sayin’.)  Academics tend not to cite blogs.  This one is, believe it or not, research-based.  That’s why I’m working on a bibliography.  When I’m dead and gone, and the auto-renew on this blog runs out, a good chunk of my life’s work will be archived away somewhere until electronic media cease to exist.  But one thing seems certain, most of the mentions I will have in print will be in the form of acknowledgements from having been an editor.

Novelization

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I watched the sci-fi horror film Splice a few years ago.  Long enough that I don’t recall many details.  When Claire Donner, a friend of mine from Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, told me she’d written a novelization of Splice, I knew I had to read it.  If you’ve seen the movie then you know the story.  If you haven’t, you can read it in her book.  I don’t often read novelizations—I read the one for Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, and as a young person read the original three Star Wars novelizations.  Such books really only apply to movies not already based on a novel, of course.  They give the reader a path into the inner lives of the characters.  Naturally, now I have to watch Splice again to see it through Donner’s lens.  The basic idea, if you want some encouragement, is that a couple of scientists add some human DNA into a gene-spliced animal being lab grown for enzymes to fight disease.

In the rawest sense, this is the story of Frankenstein for a more technological crowd.  Like Frankenstein, it is a sad story.  And like said sad story, it involves reproduction without two human parents.  The real builder this time, however, is Elsa and Donner gives considerable development to her motivations and thought process.  (I’m very curious to know if I can see that in the movie or not.)  Clive, her partner, isn’t aware of the source of the human DNA.  The spliced creature grows into the passably human Dren, who finds herself asking the questions Frankenstein’s creature asked about his own existence.  Like said creature, Dren has to be hidden away, and controlled.  At the same time, she is evolutionarily superior to her maker.  There’s a lot to see here, folks!

Having written a fair bit of fiction in my time, I do wonder what it might be like to do a novelization.  I suspect most of us, if a movie is well made, decide on the motivations of characters but how often do we delve into their inner lives?  I’m not sure that I do that most of the time.  When I write fiction I do it all the time.  I want to know my characters and why they are the way they are.  Sometimes they remain mysteries to me, but that doesn’t prevent me from trying.  This novelization is deftly done, and approved by the screenwriter/director.  And the deep motivations make the scenario plausible.  If you haven’t seen Splice you might enjoy doing so.  And then read the novel.  Or the other way around.