This was in north Texas during our last trip. The thing about this picture is that, before we left, June broke her wrist and didn’t know it. The dr. x-rayed it and said it was just a sprain. So we all take off for the Chism ranch up near Nocona and here is June saddling up with a wrist broken in three places. Not even wearing a brace.

When we got back June said her wrist it hurt so badly she went to a bone specialist and she x-rayed it again and…guess what. What with that and a herniated disc June can’t ride for the next month.

Great e-mail; from the Lighthouse Persons up in British Columbia, Jeff got the most amazing shots of an eagle attacking another bird of some kind on the sea surface, and then to get his prey back to the shore or the perching place where he/she could eat it, the eagles was actually ROWING with its wings through the waves! the pictures are astounding. Hope to link to it later.

It’s amazing because a.) it’s so good and b.) it got written.

The major character is inventive, physically strong, determined to stay alive and never gives up. He is funny and self-deprecating and smart. There are no interior monologues, or very few. No ruminating, depressive sadnesses, passive weeps, fixed gaze on unclean accumulations and/or stuff, long dull hopeless hours regretting things, horrible injuries that ruin one’s day and so on. It is refreshing as citrus. This astronaut is not defenseless before the might of foreign planets or objects. The plot is elementary; Mars v. Nerd.

It is a Robinson Crusoe story but very technical and for once I didn’t mind all the technical writing. The language is a little too breezy with nerd language and the end is just a bit improbable but I love writers who avoid clichés even if their orbit sends them banging into another one. Who knew the Martian atmosphere was nearly a vacuum? I thought it had some kind of an atmosphere, maybe nitrogen and something else unbreathable but it has about zero. Therefore sound does not carry. He loses his communication with earth. But earth (NASA) can see him from their satellite cameras so he Morse-codes things out with rocks, lumping around like the Michelin man in his EVA suit. Long and short rocks, I assume. He manages to raise potatoes. The way he makes water is hair-raising and explosive. He lives in a great tent-like thing called The Hab. They have to come and get him. He has to travel 3200 kilometers (about 1700 miles) across Mars to the pickup place in a rover, dragging his breathing equipment and food and water with him. Wagons Ho. Trust me, you will love it.

It started out as a self-published e-book (free) and then sold so many he was picked up by a major publisher. He has a movie option and I hope they make it. I have two options out and they never made either book into a movie. So it goes.

A strong protagonist like this can pick up the narrative and the entire story-line and carry it like a backpack without faltering.

And so I have been reminded that I need the Author’s Photograph here on the blog — me being an author. As well as riding around the vast spaces of Texas and so here are pictures of me on the Enemy women tour most of which I did by train, all over the United States. Top, reading in Tennessee with an author from East Tennessee who said ‘boooks’ for ‘books’ but then again I say ‘roof’ as if it were pronounced ‘roef’ as opposed to ‘rooof’. Bottom is cold, cold Minneapolis but it was a fabulous hotel. A big hotel. Behind me and beyond the plate glass is Minneapolis. What a place.

So if I have pictures of myself writing or playing the Irish Tin Whistle, which I am at present teaching myself, I will post those as well, it’s just that April and June have great I-phones and I ride with them and they take pictures.

Continuing work on the action novels. Years ago when I gave writing seminars or taught writing classes I asked the students to try an experiment — write nothing but action, I called it action-to-action. No dialogue, few tags. NO INTERIOR MONOLOGUES. Period. People who fell into the trap of interior monologues would be encased in detergent and shot down the laundry chute if I could find one. It is a very useful technique to learn. Few know how to do it, all too few.

But is it ever fun.

Yours truly PJ

Fun on YouTube, wandering about the online video planet. My interest has been searching out new sci-fi short films, and there have been some great discoveries. the very best is Stop, reviewed below. Most are not much more than seven or eight minutes long and so the plotting has to be very good indeed, if there is a story. In some, there’s not much story, but great visuals.  Above: from The Gift, reviewed below.

Nora —Go see it. It’s visually terrific and there’s the tiniest plot but tiny or not, it works. It works on contrasts — prim Nora the robot cleaning ‘droid and this creature on the deserted planet. The creature is male, dwarvish, bronze-colored, sensual, limber. So primness meets sexy and slightly crazy.

Seed — intriguing. So much unsaid. Again visually it is splendid.

Love like the aliens —this knocks me out. There should be a name for the visual style, or its stylishness, perhaps near-comicbook clarity, a graphic style, but very rich, drifting, dreamy. Something underwater about it. Very fast action in sharp cuts, then slow, slow, drifting. If you want to be thrown out of a flaming spaceship and rescued by an angel along with great music, this is one for you. Go.

As in pic above The Gift— is just about the top of the list for me, it is gripping. From Russia with weirdness. Straightforward shooting, no tricks, no stylishness. A robotic butler is somehow just there — the rest of the cityscape is in no way futuristic. A cold and gritty Moscow. It has a strong plot — a revenge plot. A guy who seems to be a survivor of the Gulag arrives at the wealthy apartment of somebody from the privileged nomenklatura and hands him a gift. Needs to be seen several times.

Project Shell— is okay. So much depends on the actors in the non-graphic shorts. The very worst is when some actress or voice animation actress has a stupid Valley Girl accent, it is beyond bad.  “Alpha you are now approaching Planet Bugglefutz, prepare retro rockets” or some such, said in that flattened, baby cute voice.

Anyway Shell is okay, sort of predictable, but interesting.

Closer — is good but you have to stick with it. Starts out with lots of CGI interstellar warfare, lumpy space battleships (lumpy is now very fashionable) blasting away at each other, but it deals with heroism, when one commander, a very attractive blonde woman lands on earth and dragoons a young couple making out in a park into the war, on the side of all that is right and good. The idea of being ‘A hero’ hits the young man and he likes it and so is. Loved it.

At the very top is Stop— is so strange and so good it is almost beyond description. I actually got physical chills crawling up my back watching this. It was shot with an old Bell&Howell film camera. No kidding. There is only one actor, and only one CGI effect and I am not even sure it is CGI or just some old ancient trick of superimposition of a ghost image. Just shows you what it means when something is just plain ‘well done’. Shot in an ordinary common landscape of some park in the east (US).

The one actor is somebody who films in the park and suddenly realizes he has lost 7 or 8 minutes of his life. It’s gone. He desperately tries to find out why, how. See it!!!

Some are fairly plotless but there is always, always something of a plot even in a wordless, personless short like Albiogenesis.

And sometimes the enthusiasm does indeed save the film, as in Losses, which is not sci-fi but just a short action film, I think 11 minutes. It uses a plot cliché but the action is wonderful and non-stop and the good guy wins. And you know they had an enormously good time doing it. Cost them about $500. And they are very good at angles, close-ups, lighting, tight cutting in the action scenes.

If you want to laugh for several minutes at a time, after a frustrating or gloomy day, go to the Pixar short, ‘Lifted’. It is sort of kind of more or less sci-fi.

More later as soon as I get my picture management program figured out…

We went to Big Bend again, third year, great trip, no mishaps. Seven hours on the road from utopia to the house we always rent ten miles north of Study Butte. Went up the Blue Creek trail (above) and a new trail on the Tornillo River, which was flat and sandy and fun. A cold wind.

Re-reading the Odyssey and getting a new perspective as always with the classics. Every time you re-read them it is new. Never noticed how much dialogue and personal interaction there is. Amazing that anyone could memorize the whole thing. So rich, so beautiful.

  That’s my honeysuckle in the last ice storm. In the meantime, the San Antonio symphony at the new Tobin center, more cold weather, a lot of reading, a lot of internet searching for good book blogs and singing. Riding this Wednesday, some of us going up to the Mill Creek area. Read Howey’s Sand which was good except for the prostitute mother, which I found not a believable plot device, and am also reading The Black Sheep, a history of the Marine fighter squadron in the Solomon Islands, WW2, led by Pappy Boyington.

Could any of us ever live through anything like that again, and still keep fighting? This question comes up when reading any WW2 history. They just seem like a different subspecies of homo sapiens sapiens. Their photographs look different; they were thinner and they looked back at the camera lens in a different way. They knew more. Their clothes were stronger cloth and thicker. Their hair was different.

Greg ‘Pappy’ Boyington was stopped by his flight controller one morning as he scrambled out of his tent for a dawn patrol. Boyington was running across the coral-based airstrip on one of the Solomons. His flight controller pointed out he didn’t have any shoes on. Boyington said, ‘I can fly an airplane with no shoes’. (He was hungover, badly) and the flight controller said. ‘Yes, but you’ll need them if you go down’.

I suppose everybody falls behind on their posts at this time of year. Include me. Singing with the Methodist choir, the bluegrass group, the Christmas all-choir cantata, and finally tomorrow Christmas eve services. There’s always a need for an alto. The cantata was a terrific success, and then the flash mob all over this little town from the restaurant to the bank was great fun.

Every time I re-read this book I am amazed all over again. At the contemporary feel of the Martians and their evil stuff, the detailed observations that Wells makes, things like laser rays frying everybody, the intense scenes of the evacuation of London and so on. Also at the rational and deeply observant tone of the narrative. He’s not mean; his characters aren’t haughty or cynical. That in itself is refreshing but the amazing part is the technical imagination and the fact of the great unscrewing of the cylinder while people sit and watch in carriages. Everybody is on horseback or in horse-drawn carriages, there are no telephones, no television, and only the people n the area where the Martians first start devastating everything know it’s happening! Because word doesn’t spread, because there’s no TV, no phones, and well, the newspapers didn’t get the reports because they were written by hand and delivered by post or railway. This was written in, I think, 1897. No bug-eyed monsters here, no ET, just sloppy leathery things that use immensely tall stalking thin things like radio towers, what today we would compare to radio towers. It is all completely believeable, nothing improbable in the least. So, I am in admiration. It is really an outstanding and unusual piece of writing. ‘Far ahead of his time’ ain’t in it. that’s why I love re-reading it. The details surprise me every time. So I am writing a dystopia where there is almost no technology for the common people, they’re back to kerosene lanterns, things move by rail, and only the elite have remnants of our technology, the old technology. I was thinking that the comparison of people with kerosene lanterns as opposed to the upper crust with advanced computers would be confusing but maybe not. Be confused. What the hell.

so every post has to have a picture and that is me and Rita going down the kid’s slide.

Re-reading Great Expectations with a feeling of disappointment in the limp-celery I-forgot-it-in-the-back-of-the-refrigerator main character Pip. He never does anything when all sorts of doable options lie about him. He never makes anything happen. Everything he tries elegantly fails.

What makes all of Dickens’ books for me are the secondary characters and GE has a good plenty of them but Pip drags the narrative behind him carelessly and limply like a trailing raincoat. I never noticed it before. The book is an object lesson in the awfulness of class snobbery which is awful of course but Pip seems to have an infinite capacity to endure boring people. Dickens wants us to see how flattened these people are. Okay, okay. He should have made Trabb’s boy the central character and we could have understood the Awfulness Of Class Snobbery by giving one chapter to Pip. Miss Havisham is BORING, Estella has no redeeming qualities and is equally as boring, and I wished somebody would shoot Pumblechook or send him to the Hulks.

What saves it is the atmosphere of the marshes, that of London, the details of things, the shipping in the Thames, their journey down the Thames . An alive world.

Read an article by Thomas Frank in Salon on the MacArthur Genius grants that had me laughing out loud. He points out the winners as ‘prize magnets’ and listed the buzzwords of admiration and approbation with which the awarders describe the work of the awardees; ‘contemporary’ — ‘experimental’ — ‘original’ — ‘innovative’ — ‘insight’ — alternative’ — ‘vibrant’ — ‘rooted’. The awardees ‘redefine’ and ‘reinvent’.