Nullius in Verba

Ya Cain’t Fix Stoopid

People have often commented on my driving . Usually the person riding my bumper is the one observing that I drive like a like old lady (not from Pasadena); while I can’t hear what they are saying, I can read lips.

Yesterday had all the elements of a great day as I drove my well-engineered Swedish chariot back up the switchbacks of CA Highway 29 over Mount St. Helena, sun and temperature were perfect for opening the sunroof and driving with the windows down.

With said windows open I heard tires squealing louder just out of my sight on the curve. I think NASCAR must make the average idjut think he can drive like Richard Petty or Dale Earnhardt. I was about at the apex of a left hairpin when the oncoming car careered around the bend straddling the double-yellow stripe. I had heard him (or her) coming, and since I drive as though most of the populace is as dumb as this guy, I went off into the gravel and avoided him.

While the safety equipment on my 1995 Volvo 850 would have protected me; I don’t need to prove it.

Drive safely everyone. Savor the moment and let the journey be as important as the destination.

For the record, my wife and mother-in-law love my driving.

Anthropology 101

I indulged my inner anthropologist over the weekend. It’s that time of year where we share our little southeastern shore of Clear Lake with—how shall I put this delicately?—morons. Wahoo! (This paroxysm of joy must be shouted to apprise everyone within 300 yards that the exclaimer is having a rapturous time.)

Memorial Weekend kicked off summer and that means wakeboarders, jet-skiers (aka dirt bikes on water), and water-skiers. With gas hovering near $4 a gallon here, where do people find the green? I guess if you can get the credit to buy a $12K jet ski, you can use credit to buy the gas. All must bring with them their soundtracks complete with sufficient bass to crumble concrete.

The squeals (presumably of delight) began Friday afternoon. One girl sunbathed on the dock. Four other equally pubescent girls frolicked on a six-person raft. One jumped up and down. “Oh yes! Yeah! Yeah!” she yelled. Her significant breasts bounced in counterpoint with little visible support. None of the bikinis contained enough fabric to make a useful handkerchief.

Now unattached cute little things don’t stay unnoticed for long. Aforementioned cuties send forth pheromones to lure males from the vicinity. I looked up from my chores when I heard the deep-throated thrub-dub of a ski boat idling. Four young males of the species initiated mating calls to the females, “Joo-see!”

A nubile female in a red bikini bent and displayed her rear to the males, gyrated her hips, then swiveled her head to look at them. “Uh huh,” she affirmatively responded to their ebullient mating chants, “JOO-see.”

By midmorning on Saturday, there were three boats and two jet skis tied up at the dock. Pubescent males swarmed around females like bees around a hive; 100-watt sound systems amplified the buzzing.

The mating frenzy culminated mid-afternoon. Two jet skis and three boats revved supercharged engines and roared off into deep water, one girl using her bikini top as a flag to wave around her head.

Ahh. Quiet again. Woohoo.

Editing my masterpiece

I trimmed 800 words from that 2100 word chapter. Literally, evaporated my carefully tended, sensitively considered, blah, blah, blah. Hot darn, 3 ½ pages sliced off like Van Gogh’s ear! And just about as painful. I hope it’s better (the story, not the ear). I know it’s shorter.

And lastly, I know it’s the weekend, so enjoy a sunrise on me.

How hard could it be?

How tough can it be to write a few pages? Easy peasy. In fact, I’ve already written it once: Chapter 8 of Timber beast. Two words describe it: preachy surplusage.

Elmore Leonard says “[t]ry to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

So, as I turn Timber Beast into The God of Trees, I’m looking at each chapter, each page, each passage, and asking myself:
• what is the point of this scene?
• how does it advance the plot?
• does it have a goal?
• is there conflict on every page?

Don’t mind me, you can skip the numbered part if you like. I’m going to work out what I’m trying to do. This scene currently takes place in a classroom. Not the most exciting spot on earth.

The point of the scene is to introduce another love interest, Liz Johnson, who is going to have the greatest impact on Nate, my protagonist.
It does advance the plot, sort of. Without Liz, I have to find other ways for Nate to discover clues and examine issues. Liz is a prime source of conflict in the story.
Goal…hmmm. Does just getting word count, count? No? I didn’t think so. Nate’s goal is to change the students’ minds about logging and getting away from the notion that natural is leaving the forest go fallow and Liz’s goal is to show what a putz Nate is. I know it needs work. I hate to lose this scene. It’s one of the few places the story talks about the issue of perception. How else can I illustrate that?
Conflict. Well there’s my inner conflict. The inner critic telling me how lousy it all is. Beside that—on the pages—to get conflict, Liz has to be on each page, throwing verbal bombs. In the Timber Beast manuscript, it’s told in third-person from Liz’s point of view. The conflict there comes from Liz’s conflict in being drawn to Nate and hating what he is talking about. I’m working The God of Trees in first-person and trying to go from Nate’s PoV. I will try changing it to Liz’s and see if that helps. It means the reader has one more character’s voice to get to know and will lessen the sympathy for Nate.

Hi, welcome back, Skipper. The noise you hear is just the lapidary barrel in my head working off the rough spots in the story.

Trouble Brewing

I had planned to brew on Sunday. I say planned. Planning being the operative verb. I pulled out my equipment (kettle, fermenter, spoon, ingredient kit). My great plan fell apart in assembly. My fermenter is a bucket with a spigot near the bottom. The spigot needed to be attached. I put it on and threw some water in to be sure of its watertightness. It was not watertight. As I started toweling up water off the floor, I noticed that one of the plugs near the baseboard was wet. Not good. It began to smoke. Really not good. Three inch flames shot from the outlet. Bad. The fire extinguisher kept for such occasions didn’t work. Yikes!

The circuit breaker tripped and the flames ended in an instant like they started.

So, I brewed a batch of American Wheat ale on Monday. In addition to the kit’s ingredients, I added a hint of fresh ginger, which should give it piquancy. As the reporters say, ‘it remains to be seen’ as to whether the batch turns out decent or not. One dog hair can spoil a batch and with my golden retriever, Peaches, wandering through the house, that can happen.

Yet, I still have a house for Peachy to wander through. Whatever I get, it’ll be sweet.

The Bemused, A Triangle, a musical

Synopsis (first draft): Euclid and Penelope are star-crossed math lovers. They are from different worlds. They don’t speak the other’s language. She’s English. He’s American. Soon they learn that they have the common language, love—of mathematics—and it looks like a formula that equals love. But during a discussion of String Theory, Penelope discovers that Euclid is a P-Brane. She calculates their love doesn’t add up and she dumps him for the guy who makes the ice sculptures on a cruise ship of Liberian registry.

Opening Song – The Sage Called Pythagoras (sung to the tune of Aquarius from Hair)

When math is what I can espouse
And triangles beat the parallel bars
I believe calculi charts the planets
And gravity steers the stars

This is the cloning of the sage of Pythagoras
The sage of Pythagoras
Pythagoras!
Pythagoras!

Bemused as right angles landing
It’s calculus I’m understanding!
No more split infinitives
Just give me integers or derivatives!
Put it all in an equation
And you’ll hear the celestial sphere’s gyration
Pythagoras!
Pythagoras!

Repeat until bored

Somewhat Self-Indulgent

One of last month’s reviews on YouWriteOn.com accused my story of being a “somewhat self-indulgent piece…”

I let a month go by to see if this review still rankled. It does. My feelings have festered. It seems that it’s time that I lanced this sucker and cleaned out the wound.

As I understand “somewhat self-indulgent” that means I ‘somewhat excessively’ indulged my own ‘appetites and desires.’ Or perhaps—according to the Oxford English Dictionary— my creative work is “lacking economy (careful use of words) and control (the power to restrain).”

Let’s skip what ‘somewhat excessively’ might mean for the moment. What would disturb anyone about such a characterization is that it’s just that—a characterization, bordering on psychoanalysis. If I need therapy, I’d prefer that it be from someone with credentials. I’m funny that way.

Now, if one were to do a better job of reviewing, one would review the piece and not resort to divining the writer’s motives for creating it.

Call the piece, “preachy,” “somewhat excessively laden with argot, bombast, buzzwords, cant, clichés, doublespeak, drivel, gibberish, and jargon,” or call it “heavy-handed,” and I’m fine with that. Review the story.

My reasons for writing the piece are that I believe this story needs to be told in a different way.

After all, as Kingsley Amis said, “If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.”

Let the healing begin.

Writing about forestry II

We just got back from San Luis Obispo. I spoke at the student chapter of the Society of American Foresters (SAF) there. It may seem odd to drive my high-performance Swedish driving machine (with 180K on the odometer) fourteen hours, seven minutes, 800 miles (roundtrip), and spend $118.66 for gas (plus $ for food and lodging), to talk to twenty people for a total of twenty minutes. It is. They gave me pizza. And it was good.

Thanks to Nikki Gross of Cal Poly’s SAF for inviting me. Thanks to Dr. Doug Piirto for sending out an email to lots of folks letting them know about my talk. Thanks to many of those folks taking time out of their day and studying for midterms to listen. And thanks to Norm Pillsbury for shining on his office hours to see me. My life is richer for it.

We talked about writing. The Cal Poly students and professors I talked with are experts in forestry. They know their stuff. Their writing in the professional journals is important. Yet, we need to look outward. I hope one of them starts a blog about forestry.

We also talked about my novel The God of Trees

Writing about forestry

On Wednesday, Mary, Peaches, and I will be zipping down to Cambria on the coast. It will be about six hours away. We have reservations for the Cambria Shores Inn, one of many inns in town that is pet-friendly. According to the front desk, they “not only allow dogs, they love them.” What’s not to love about a golden retriever like Peaches? Goldens may be the world’s sweetest breed.

The next day, I’ll be talking with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s student chapter of the Society of American Foresters. I picked May 24 way back last December. In prime procrastinator fashion, I thought that something akin to lightning would strike me between then and now and I’d be witty, amusing, and deep.

I think it’s a truism for everyone, except the current administration, to see him or her self as a fraud, at least sometimes. We got lucky and if we’re not careful, we’ll be exposed as the imposter that we know that we are. I graduated from Humboldt State University thirty-three years ago. Crap. What can I tell some college students, who know more about today’s forestry, about the business of forestry? Yes, I have been the assistant forest manager at Mountain Home State Forest (asst forest manager of a state forest has more gravitas than the local burger franchise, don’t you think?), coordinated the natural resource management training for the California Dept of Forestry and Fire Protection, and been the forest manager for Boggs Mountain State Forest. Still, that’s what I used to be. What can I impart about how to be relevant? How do I tell them how to have a vocation in forestry in the 21st century?

Time for a point of view shift. I’m going to talk about writing.

What could be better than books on TV?

It’s Friday, the weekend is almost upon us, and you know what that means—Book TV. Yes, if you’re nerd enough to watch C-SPAN 2 (the second of three Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network feeds) you’ll know that it covers the US Senate during the week and devotes itself to non-fiction authors on the weekend.

Mary and I have printed the schedule, highlighted all the authors we want to hear, and have the popcorn ready to go for good stuff like Jonathan Eig’s, Opening Day: The Story Of Jackie Robinson’s First Season…the only thing better would be a Ken Burn’s marathon.

Apparently, there are other diversions going on. Something called the NBA is doing something…I don’t know what. I understand that David Stern (whoever he is) is a doodyhead in Phoenix. Strong words.

Embrace your inner geek. Have a good weekend.