Developing rain and nightmare travel and hopes for safe travel

Every year, Thanksgiving begins with such promise. The action begins at the grocery store, moves to the kitchen, then to the car or the airport for the trip to "grandmother's house," onward through naps and football and once-a-year conversations.

If you live in a metro area such as Atlanta, you know--from experience or listening to the news--that the holiday often ends in a travel nightmare. In this neck of the woods, we see giant traffic jams on I-75 and I-85 south as cars heading through the metro area sometimes back up to the Tennessee and South Carolina borders. The reports out of the airports are equally grim.

If I were suddenly appointed Tsar of Thanksgiving, I think I would issue an edict stating that the Monday after Thanksgiving would be a random holiday, held on a scattered basis so that everyone in the country isn't headed back to work at the same time.

Florida and Georgia would celebrate the holiday in alternating years. So would most other adjacent states. Then, like the staggered quitting times proposed in some metro areas to reduce the rush hour traffic, we might see fewer traffic jams, fewer wrecks, fewer injuries and fewer fatalities.

This year, rain moved into north and central Georgia, and I'm happy to say that my wife and I beat the rain back to the house. We had to leave her dad's farm a few hours earlier than planned, but it was worth it. A lot of people are still out there on the road now or sitting in an airport worrying about airport delays and cancelled flights.

It's a heck of a way to end the holiday. There are years when my list of things to be thankful for includes making it safely back home. I don't hear much rain on the roof yet here in Jackson County. But it's close.

And without driving out past the McDonalds and the QuickTrip and the KFC at the I-85 interchange, I know that there's a long line of red railights southbound toward the Sugar Hill exit, Gwinnett County and Atlanta. Many of those cars are headed for Macon and points south on into Florida with many miles to go before they're safely back home.

Since my wife and I are cozy and warm back inside our house with a tasty leftovers left to consume, I'm happy to say that as nice as Thanksgiving is, I'm a bit glad it's now a memory, and I send out white light to those on the roads and in the air in hopes they'll travel safe.

--Malcolm

Fantasy Reading Marathon

After reading the first two books in the Stephen R. Donaldson's epic fantasy trilogy The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant several years after the books were published in the late 1970s, I stopped reading fantasy. I was thinking seriously about writing a fantasy novel of my own and was concerned that I might be influenced by Donaldson's work.

Like the trilogy's novels, Lord Foul's Bane (1977), The Illearth War (1978) and The Power that Preserves (1979), my on-the-drawing board novel also included a respect for the power of nature and wooden staffs which focused a young avatar's own power. We both use the term "arch of time," but for vastly different intents. And, like Donaldson, I am a pacifist.

I probably didn't need to worry about unintentionally using Donaldson's themes, but his trilogy was having such a profound impact on me that I felt better putting it aside while working on the book that--some years later--ultimately was published as The Sun Singer. After finishing Sarabande, a follow-up novel to The Sun Singer this fall, I finally went back to Donaldson's critically acclaimed work.

In a reading marathon, I read the six novels that comprise The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (The Wounded Land, The One Tree, and White Gold Wielder), a total of 2,129 pages. Fans of the series know that after a hiatus, Donaldson came back to is epic stories about "The Land" in 2004 with the first book in a quartrology to be called The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

I'll read the quartrology some day, but I'm worn out and ready for something else. I still like Donaldson's dark, highly complex series with its gruff anti-hero. But I'm not the same person I was 34 years ago. As I said in  my post Fantasies with ‘personal stories’ that mirror our lives, I'm more interested now in fantasies that focus on individual protagonists rather than on world-changing struggles between the forces of good an evil.

Returning to Donaldson's epic after all these years involved a bit of time travel, and I'm not just talking about the 3,000-year gap (in the time-frame in "The Land") between the end of The Power That Preserves and the beginning of The Wounded Land. Reading a series that I started and then set aside 34 years ago was a bit nostalgic. It took me back to the years when I left college teaching and went into technical writing with plans to morph into a novelist.

Before Donaldson, I read a lot of science fiction, but was beginning to find myself more interested in the fantasy elements in SciFi than in the science. I was a fan of Frank Herbert's Dune because of its magic and (as Donaldson would call it), its Lore. Along with Dune, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant convinced me that the stories I wanted to tell could be told as fantasies.

So, reading-wise, you can "go home again," back to those novels that influenced your writing career even though you're not transformed back into the person you were then. I feel like I've just returned from a journey of several thousand years. I highly recommend Donald's "Chronicles" to those who like epic fantasies that compare very favorably in scope to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and George R.R. Martin's series that began with A Game of Thrones.

As for me, I'm only too happy to be reading Lisa Goldstein's sparkling 237-page contemporary fantasy The Uncertain Places with Erin Morgenstern's wild and crazy The Night Circus next on the list.

Magic Moments

Magic, moments,
When two hearts are carin’,
Magic, moments,
Memories we’ve been sharin’ . . .

I’ll never forget the moment we kissed,
The night of the hayride,
The way that we hugged to try to keep warm,
While takin' a sleigh ride.

--from Magic Moments by Burt Bacharach and Hal David


During my senior year in high school, Perry Como's hit version of "Magic Moments" was on the radio so often that it was impossible not to memorize the song, much less get the lyrical music out of one's head. Anyone in love--or who wanted to be in love--could identify with the concept of magic moments, those special times spent with the person they were going steady with (as we said then).

I can testify that after one is married the song still applies--not that I'm still listening to that old song. I can hear it, though as I type this post.

In those days, I was buying my first books about psychic and mystic phenomena. Like today's books, most of them offered recipes for various techniques that (purportedly) would yield wonderful results in faithfully practiced. I can testify, after years of reading those books, that if one doesn't practice those techniques faithfully, there will still be magic moments.

How to replicate them on demand is a skill I have not mastered. Nonetheless, I get a lot of  vicarious pleasure watching the characters in my novels do the magic that still remains the stuff of my dreams. In an interview with author Smoky Zeidel, I said that my characters to what I cannot. At the time, I was referring to primarily to travel and mountain climbing.

Amazon used to have a concordance that could be accessed on most of its books listings that showed the significant phrases used in the text. Quite often, most phrases were the names of the primary characters, their figures of speech, and the book's primary locations and settings. ("Holy Bear Puke" was a "significant phrase" in my 2004 novel The Sun Singer because it was a pet phrase of my character Cinnabar.)

At any rate, with the proper algorithms, perhaps such a concordance might also list a book's magic moments. Some of these might be kisses, rainbows and starry nights. Others would demonstrate true magic. In contemporary fantasies like The Sun Singer and Sarabande, the instances of magic per one thousand words would be higher than chance. Certainly, books by Tolkien, Rowling and Bradley would also have an above average amount of magic. Unlike real life where magic isn't usually accepted as real (much less as good), magic is a common and expected moment in fantasy novels.

That's why I write them. They show the world I believe exists just slightly beyond my everyday perception. Had I practiced the techniques in those books, I might see farther than I do. My protagonist in Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey (magical realism) climbed K2 and Mt. Everest, mountains I planned (while listening to that Perry Como song) to climb one day.

Likewise, in all three of these novels, characters borne out of my youthful dreaming and my adult imagination can see what the eye cannot see, hear what the ear cannot detect, and raise healing energy into the sky in the colors of the northern lights. I have given them many magic moments, and I am content with that.

--Malcolm 

Seeking Wider Reading Horizons

In this morning's edition of Book Bits, my blog of links for readers and writers, I lamented the fact that with up to 300,000 books being published each year, many review sites and best books sites state that they only consider books from "major publishers." I understand the problem. I can't keep up either, and leaving out small-press books is an easy way to reduce the chaos.

Obviously, publications and websites want traffic, so that goal rather lends itself to looking at books everybody's talking about. On the other hand, I don't think it would be that difficult for some of the book sites to widen their horizons by changing the major-publishers-only approach to "we consider books from major publishers and selected small presses."

By saying "selected small presses," book sites could still control the potential tidal wave of ARCs and review requests that would arrive on their doorsteps if they had no gatekeeper rules in place at all. It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than providing more publicity only to the books that are already getting the lion's share of publicity.

As a writer and reader of fantasy, I look forward to the day when more reviwers widen their horizons and admit the fact that some very good fantasy is coming from small presses. It won't be easy, for the publicity saturating the market from "big publishing" is very hard to resist. I can't resist it: the minute I read about Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus (Doubleday), I was hooked. I haven't read it yet, but I will.

On the other hand, with my horizons pushed outward just a little bit, I see that The Uncertain Places by Lisa Goldstein (Tachyon Publications, June 2011) is also very tempting even though it probably won't get the same amount of play as The Night Circus in spite of its veteran author. The publisher's description includes this: In this long-awaited new novel from American Book Award winner Lisa Goldstein, an ages-old family secret breaches the boundaries between reality and magic, revealing the places between them.

I'm thinking, I must have it. I'm glad to see the book is doing well on Amazon even though some sites and reviewers are keeping their horizons so narrow they won't discover it. Such reviewers can do better, I think.

Twitter and Other Sorrows

I wonder: if a person stops talking and starts listening on the Internet, does anyone notice?

As I watch the Tweets scroll past my window like acid rain on a grey day, I wonder what percentage of the them are read. Or, is it a matter of everyone's talking and nobody's listening?

Sometimes when I tweet a blog post I happen to like, I get a response back saying, "thanks for the shout out." I appreciate the thank you note, but since my shout  is one of millions, did it matter?

Do you ever wonder about such things?

We all want to be heard whether we're promoting books, web sites or simply shooting the breeze about family life. I'm tweeting about my book and you're tweeting about your book, but we're both in dire financial trouble, so (truth be told) neither one of us can affort to buy the other's book.

Meanwhile, neither one of us has time to really stop and talk about each other's books or families or day at the office because (truth be told) there are still a hundred tweets and Facebook updates left to check out. We understand each other, I think. That means we're each aware that between us we have a thousand friends and followers and that the day no longer permits such luxuries as a real conversation.

I LIKE you. You RT me. I tweet your post. You share my update. We're just moving shoutouts around without listening. I feel a lot of sorrow about this, about the fact that expediency has made our interactions so shallow and so expedient.

What about you? If you have a thousand Twitter followers, how many are really there? Listening, that is? If you have a thousand Facebook friends, how many of them are stopping by your page a couple of times a week to listen?

I feel like blogs, social networking and other related Internet sites are like a fast train, and my belief is that it's not bound for glory.

Perhaps I'm just not "wired probably" for all this dangling conversation.

--Malcolm