Flying On The Fringe

Well, we got a little rain, but no where near enough. I understand farmers are worried about hay crops for the winter, The fields here have rows of big bales, but I’m sure there should have been at least one more cutting, maybe two. I’m worried about the wildlife as well. Deer, normally pretty elusive, have been hanging out close to the house and eating our garden for the first time ever.

I doubt there will be a nut crop to support the squirrels. The year we moved to our property, there wasn’t a single squirrel on the entire 8 acres, or in the woods behind us. They all starved and froze to death the previous winter. It was two or three years before we spotted one in our yard, and a couple more years before we saw young ones growing up. I hate to think that might happen again this year.

I’m praying for the people affected by this, but I’m praying for the animals too.

All right, up front, this is a shameless plea for donations.

My younger son, Matt, is pushing hard to get his game development studio, Sanctum Games, moving forward. Like a lot of us, he’s coming off a couple years of setbacks, some of them heartbreaking, including the death of his former partner and mentor, Daniel.

He is moving forward. Kenneth Kidder has commissioned Sanctum Games to make a digital version of his table top game, Tortured Earth. To get things started, Sanctum Games has set up a site for donations (only $5):

https://ko-fi.com/sanctumgames

The funds will be used to pay the programmers and artists so they can get a demo prepared for a Kickstarter campaign to be launched later on.

To the right is sample of what one of the artists, John Kaufmann, will be producing for the game. Beautiful, isn’t it?

Olivia Davis is the second artist, Henry Yantz and Justin Fredericks will program the game, and Justin Wingo is the Sound Design artist.

As you can see, this is not a small operation. I can’t tell you all how proud I am of Matt for putting all this together and for becoming the budding entrepreneur he is.

Please help this promising group get started.

My love to all of you.

What kind of writer are you—plotter, pantser, or hybrid?

I recently saw a quote from C.G. Drews @PaperFury that really hit home for me. (Capitalization was part of the quote I saw on Facebook, so I am presenting it as it appeared.)

“there are three type of writers;

1) those who plot their books

2) those who discover their plot along the way

3) those who know what will happen but their book is a bit feral still, needs a bath, has bitten and will bite again.”

I’m sort of a hybrid writer. I do some plotting, but I have a bad habit of forgetting to look at the plot once I’ve created it, so my stories tend ultimately to flow more organically. However, when “pantsing” leaves me stuck in a corner, sometimes the plot helps bail me out, or at least gives me a structure for correcting whatever mistake got me into trouble.

But it was #3 that really struck me. Been there, done that. I’ve been bitten by my main character. In fact, at one point my main character threw the key element of the plot for an entire book out the window. I was trying to plot one day, and he basically just said, “Nope. Not doing that.”

I hope that every writer has a chance to experience having their MC talk back to them. It’s the moment at which you realize your characters have become living, breathing creatures. If they are real for you, they’ll be more real for your readers.

My advice is to listen respectfully when they talk back. They often know more about the direction the story should take than we, as the builders, do. In my case, my MC was absolutely correct. I knew it. I was still aggravated, because I had to start from scratch on that story, but I couldn’t deny he nailed it.

Perhaps some day I will once again experience the painful joy of being bitten by one of my characters. I look forward to it.

Got back from a week-long trip to Roswell, NM last week. It was interesting and surprising at the same time. I was expecting obvious commercialism, but I was surprised that everyone used the same “little green alien” image. There wasn’t a speck of difference from one shop to the next, or from one hotel to the next (almost all of which have a green alien welcoming visitors.

Even the street lights had alien faces. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of an alien face sporting an American flag for the Fourth of July. Do aliens dream of their own independence from …?

My friend Linda and I also visited the International UFO Museum and had a chance to study the details of the original Roswell crash. Some details we knew, of course, but there is always more to learn. Exhibits included transcripts of some of the actual radio traffic between the officers who were first dispatched to the scene and the operator back at base.

Our last stop was to the Robert H. Goddard Planetarium, where we saw an interesting presentation on the search for dark matter particles in the Hadron Collider in Cerne. Just days after we returned, there was breaking news about new particles discovered by scientists at Cerne, though not unfortunately dark matter. Also saw a news post about a research effort in a South Dakota mine where they are trying to capture the elusive dark matter particle.

For a science fiction writer it was a dream trip. The only thing that can top it will be if I finally get to visit the NASA research facility in California where one of my books takes place.

Do you believe it takes courage to be a writer?

I do. To be a good writer, you can’t just write and hold it close to your chest. You have to put it out there and accept criticism from readers and other writers. And you have to believe enough in yourself to put those first words on paper. My mother did a great job of instilling a degree of courage in me. She was notorious for informing me that she had signed me up for this or that activity.

The first was the Youth Crime and Civic Commission. (I wanted to be a spy, and it was the closest thing she could find.) I was irritated, but I soon learned to enjoy the meetings and events. It led to her second brilliant idea. One day she told me I should start writing newspaper articles about the Commission’s activities. She wanted me to call the Kansas City Star and offer to write for them. I was in high school. I thought she’d really gone too far ‘round the bend that time, so I decided to call her bluff. I called them. The receptionist didn’t bat an eye. She put me straight through to the Youth Page editor, who told me to submit an article and he’d look at it. Guess who had to eat crow? I wrote the article, he accepted it, and I wrote regularly for the Youth Page for the next two years until I left for college.

Actually, my experience in journalism started much earlier, in about the sixth grade, when my mother volunteered me to be the reporter for my 4-H club. No one else was willing to run for the position, so naturally I got elected. I had a monthly column in the Johnson County Kansas newspaper. I guess I should mention at this point that my mother grew up around newspaper people. Her mother worked for the Kansas City Kansan, and my mother had her first job for the paper. My dad was a photographer for the paper, and he taught me photography and photo developing, which became my 4-H projects.

The last time my mother enrolled me in something, I came home from school, and just inside the door I was informed I had joined the International Relations Council, a not-for-profit organization in Kansas City. When I attended the first dinner lecture, I was probably the only person there under the age of 50. However, having learned from previous experiences, I kept going. My first professional job was as Assistant to the Director of the International Relations Council.

Unlike my mother’s lessons in imagination, these lessons stuck in my mind when raising my kids, and they both got pushed into any activity I thought would fit with their interests. Matt wrote for a local newspaper during summers off from college, and Ben took piano lessons for almost ten years. In the process, he found out he was one of the gifted few who has “perfect pitch.” Coming from a family with zero musical ability, who would have guessed?

The moral of this story? You never know what your gifts might be until you try something new. Like writing.

You guys know I love to post about meteor showers, and watch when I can. Tonight, Earth has a chance at a rare event as we pass through the remains of the Comet 73P/Schwassen-Wachmann which broke up in 1996. We might see a real meteor storm around midnight tonight if we’re really lucky. I will be watching. For more information on this event, go to https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/tau-herculid-meteors-may-intense-shower/

When my sons were young, I would haul them out of bed in the middle of the night for summer meteor showers. We got to see a few, though usually only about one every few minutes, and it was rare for us all to see the same one. I guess you have to be crazy like me to find that exciting, though my older son Ben seemed to enjoy it. Of course, he’s the one who would simply enjoy being outside in the middle of the night anyway.

How about you guys? Any star gazers out there?

Did your parents encourage your imagination, or discourage it?

My mother did a lot to encourage my imagination, though I didn’t appreciate it when I was a child. Barbie dolls were all the rage when I was in elementary school. I didn’t care much for dolls, but I liked all the accessories in the stores. I had a “fashion” doll, but not a Barbie. When I wanted to buy new clothes for it, Mom handed me leftover scraps of cloth. I’m sure she hoped I’d decide to try my hand at sewing, but I made do with string for belts and safety pins.

I really wanted one of the fancy Barbie convertible cars. I got a shoe box and was told to use my imagination.

Admittedly, we probably couldn’t afford the store-bought car, but I doubt I would have gotten it anyway. I have to admit, a shoe box can be a car, a stage coach, or a spaceship.

My imagination allowed me to use a lawn swing tied to a tree as a stagecoach, and a swing on the swing set as a spaceship. I remember one summer afternoon when my cousin and I spent the afternoon exploring other planets. I also remember the sense of shock when my mother called us in to lunch and I realized I was “back” in my own yard. I hadn’t been there for hours, you see.

Looking back, I missed the importance of those lessons when raising my kids. I could afford to buy lots of “stuff,” and I am mortified at the boxes and boxes of toys I now have stored in the basement and barn. Fortunately, they seem to have survived my poor parenting. The older one complains I yelled too much (I did lecture A LOT), but he enjoys reading and is eager to try new things, go new places, and eat foods he hasn’t tried before. The younger one is an exceptional author and game designer.

At least I can say with confidence I never tried to discourage their imagination. What’s your story?