These tunes are hard to learn; Irish music is unexpected, with odd intervals, a phrase goes on longer and to odder places than one would think. Learning The Barney Pilgrim on my D whistle I have to memorize every note exactly, it doesn’t just fall into place as would, say, ‘Hard Times’. I wonder how old the Irish tunes are. Was watching a Youtube video on Aurignacian archaeological digs in France, and one of the archaeologists had made an exact replica of a bone flute that had been recovered —- 20,000 years old. Or more. It was holed exactly for the pentatonic scale. He played the first few bars of ‘Star Spangled Banner’ on it. That astounds me.  Back to Barney Pilgrim on this hot day (102), staying in the house except to go out and move the hose around from tree to tree.

And that kid has eight fingers on the whistle but in reality Irish whistles have only six holes. Details, details.

Reading blogs of some other authors I realize I am not much of a self-promoter. At one time I came up with a list of great ideas for self-promotion and sat there and looked at the list for a long time and then finally went back to writing my writing.

I am not making fun of authors who are good at it. No more than I would make fun of people who are good at sailing or water-colors or target shooting. I start out well and then I don’t have my heart in it. Wish I could sail, paint in water-colors, hit a target. Only with great effort.

Maybe if it weren’t so hot…

Hitting 100 every day and sometimes over — 102, 103. I am going through the last pass on News of the World and hope the editors don’t kill me for adding just one more sentence. Noticed a really bad, abrupt transition when the Captain is finishing up his reading in Spanish Fort and Simon the fiddler runs in and tells him the girl has run away, gone missing, perhaps kidnapped. I need something for the transition between the moment the Captain hears this, and when he and Simon are out looking for her. There isn’t anything. It howls for a transitive moment. So that’s my job for today, one sentence.

CHAPTER ONE

Wichita Falls, Texas, Winter 1870

Captain Kidd laid out the Boston Morning Journal on the lectern and began to read from the article on the Fifteenth Amendment. He had been born in 1798 and the third war of his lifetime had ended five years ago and he hoped never to see another but now the news of the world aged him more than time itself. Still he stayed his rounds, even during the cold spring rains. He had been at one time a printer but the war had taken his press and everything else, the economy of the Confederacy had fallen apart even before the surrender and so he now made his living in this drifting from one town to another in North Texas with his newspapers and journals in a waterproof portfolio and his coat collar turned up against the weather. He rode a very good horse and was concerned that someone might try to take the horse from him but so far so good. So he had arrived in Wichita Falls on February 26^th and tacked up his posters and put on his reading clothes in the stable. There was a hard rain outside and it was noisy but he had a good strong voice.

He shook out the Journal’s pages.

The Fifteenth Amendment, he read, which has just been signed between the several states February 3^rd, 1870, allows the vote to all men qualified to vote without regard to race or color or previous condition of servitude. He looked up from the text. His reading glasses caught the light. He bent slightly forward over the lectern. That means colored gentlemen, he said. Let us have no vaporings or girlish shrieks. He turned his head to search the crowd of faces turned up to him. I can hear you muttering, he said. Stop it. I hate muttering.

He glared at them and then said, Next. The Captain shook out another newspaper. The latest from the New York Herald Tribune states that the polar exploration ship Hansa is reported by a whaler as being crushed in sunk in the pack ice in its attempt to reach the North Pole; sunk at seventy degrees north latitude off Greenland. There is nothing in this article about survivors. He flipped the page impatiently.

The Captain had a clean-shaven face with runic angles, his hair was perfectly white and he was still six feet tall. His hair shone in the single hot ray from the bull’s-eye lantern. He carried a short-barreled Slocum revolver in his waistband at the back. It was a five-shot, thirty-two caliber and he had never liked it all that much but then he had rarely used it.

Over all the bare heads he saw Britt Johnson and his men, Paint Crawford and Dennis Vesey, at the back wall. They were free black men. Britt was a freighter and the other two were his driving crew. They held their hats in their hands, each with one booted foot cocked up against the wall behind them. The hall was full. It was a broad open space used for wool storage and community meetings and for people like himself. The crowd was almost all men, almost all white. The lantern lights were harsh, the air was dark. Captain Kidd traveled from town to town in north Texas with his newspapers and read aloud the news of the day to assemblies like this in halls or churches for a dime a head. He traveled alone and had no one to collect the dimes for him but not many people cheated and if they did somebody caught them at it and grabbed them by the lapels and wrenched them up in a knot and said You really ought to pay your goddamned dime, you know, like everybody else.

And then the coin would ring in the paint can.

#

He glanced up to see Britt Johnson lift a forefinger to him. Captain Kidd gave one brief nod, and completed his reading with an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer concerning the British physicist James Maxwell and his theories of electromagnetic disturbances in the ether whose wavelengths were longer than infrared radiation. This was to bore people and calm them down and put them into a state of impatience to leave; leave quietly. He had become impatient of trouble and other people’s emotions. His life seemed to him thin and sour, a bit spoiled, and it was something that had only come upon him lately. A slow dullness had seeped into him like coal gas and he did not know what to do about it except seek out quiet and solitude. He was always impatient to get the readings over with now.

The Captain folded the papers, put them in his portfolio. He bent to his left and blew out the bull’s eye lantern. As he walked through the crowd people reached out to him and shook his hand. A pale-haired man sat watching him. With him were two Indians or half-Indians that the Captain knew for Caddoes and not people of a commendable reputation. The man with the blond hair turned in his chair to stare at Britt. Then others came to thank the Captain for his readings, asked after his grown children. Kidd nodded, said tolerable, tolerable, and made his way back to Britt and his men to see what it was Britt wanted.

#

Captain Kidd thought it was going to be about the Fifteenth Amendment but it was not.

Yes sir, Captain Kidd, would you come with me? Britt straightened and lifted his hat to his head and so did Dennis and Paint. Britt said, I got a problem in my wagon.

She seemed to be about ten years old, dressed in the horse Indians’ manner in a deerskin shift with four rows of elk teeth sewn across the front. A thick blanket was pulled over her shoulders. Her hair was the color of maple sugar and in it she wore two down puffs bound onto a lock of her hair by their minute spines and also bound with a thin thread was a wing-feather from a golden eagle slanting between them. She sat perfectly composed, wearing the feather and a necklace of glass beads as if they were costly adornments. Her eyes were blue and her skin that odd bright color that occurs when fair skin has been burnt and weathered by the sun. She had no more expression than an egg.

I see, said Captain Kidd. I see.

Continue reading →

And Happy Canada Day dear friends up there in the True North Strong and Free!

I am rereading Nicholas Nickleby, and I think that it is very close to being my favorite of all Dicken’s  books. Tale of Two cities and The Pickwick Papers are at about the same level all jostling for top place. It’s because Nicholas is so assertive, clever, fast, kind, and sometimes truly wild. He’s a sort of action hero, written by a master. Several blog posts ago I wrote about re-reading Great Expectations and finding to my astonishment that I didn’t really like it any more. Well, I didn’t like Pip, and realized that in my first reading I had merely tolerated him for the sake of the great minor characters

When assaulted or those he loves are assaulted NN replies in kind, In any way he can, as fast as he can, as long as he can. So with the arrangements of a very good plot NN becomes a fast rocket through the entanglements of money and injustice and cruelty to the helpless. This makes him a hero figure. Therefore he is good to read about, and also, therefore, he is intelligent.

I wish I could find the article about Stupid Plots. At any rate, the upshot of it was, a Stupid Plot requires really stupid characters that could have solved the whole problem in a day if they hadn’t been so stupid. A moderately intelligent person could have figured their way out of the entanglements of  a Stupid Plot in even less than a day. Hours.

So writers who are poor at plots must necessarily have really dense characters and we tire of reading about really dense characters. Idiot, just get in the car and go to your friend’s house and hide in the bushes and find out what’s really happening. But nooooooo. Stupidman has to stare stupidly at a text message, call up somebody else, cry out, ‘Can there really be a killer on the loose near Tom’s house?’ And then call up the police and when the police brush him off, then check the FBI wanted files on line and then call up Susan and say ‘Susan, do you think Tom is having a psychotic episode?’ and on and on.

NN constantly surprises us with this assertiveness, his rightness. When he is with an actor’s troupe, and another actor, a bully, threatens NN and his friend the poor retarded little Smike, NN walks up to the bully and knocks him down. So that took care of that. On to other problems.

so I am enjoying it very much.

http://woodwardonwords.blogspot.com/

This is the link to my friend Caroline Woodward’s blog on writing; she and husband Jeff are lighthouse keepers off the cost of British Columbia and Jeff got the most incredible pictures of a bald eagle capturing a large, dark bird on the sea surface and then actually rowing. rowing I say, with its wings in order to drag its prey back to shore. I copied his shots and now I have lost them. They are in this computer somewhere, rowing away. Will try again.

So there they are, inexpertly done. Good way to find Woody’s writing and Jeff’s photos is just use Google or Bing images and type in her name. you get Jeff’s pictures as an extra added bonus.  A visit to their light station was one of the inspirations for Lighthouse Island. Back to my irish tin whistle practice. I sit on the front porch or pace up and down whistling away and the dog and the cat run for cover. Pam Crane and I are doing the intro to our Civil War Songs performance, she’s on the Irish tambor and me on whistle doing ‘Come To The Bower’, so look out Celtic Chieftans!

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