Hi Piers

More than ten years ago, in 1997, I abruptly stopped writing the fifth GEODYSSEY novel, Climate of Change, when I lost my market for historical fiction.  The publisher had bungled the series, labeling it Dark Fantasy, run sales into the ground, and was not interested in more.  SOP for publishers.  So I moved on to the ChroMagic series, my best fantasy, but publishers were interested only in Xanth and refused even to look at anything else.  That’s why that series went in due course to small press, Mundania.  But now as I age I am trying to wrap up loose ends, and am returning to unfinished projects like Climate and my horror novel The Sopaths.  Who knows; if I get a good movie, publishers may rediscover my books.  Not every aging writer has that prospect.  I spent two months cleaning up my study and sorting accumulated clippings by spreading them across the study floor in categories, then finally oriented on the novel itself.  I read the first 12 chapters, 112,000 words, making notes, and got ready to write the remaining 8 chapters.  I remembered exactly where to begin on Chapter 13.  It features a once nomadic people, the Alani or Alans, who settled in the Caucasus Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and today are known as the Ossetians.  I had read a charming incident of their history, wherein their army was defeated by an enemy and their prince captured.  So his sister the princess went to the enemy leader to plead for the release of the prince.  Probably she had ransom in mind; it’s customary in such situations.  Instead, the enemy leader took her prisoner too, and married her.  That’s all I remembered; I never followed up because that’s when the novel foundered.  In addition, when I sorted my clippings, I discovered that the legend of King Arthur in England derive from the Alani: the Romans sent a contingent of 3,000 Alani and other “barbarians” to patrol the unruly borders, and they brought their mythology with them.  That’s why it has been so hard to locate any physical or historical evidence of Arthur in England; he was a mythological immigrant.  I love these eye-opening aspects of historical research, and enjoy flashing my readers with them.  This was a double barreled way to got back into it.

So at last in mid March I set out to write the chapter.  And discovered that the Arthur clipping was missing, though I had just sorted it within the month.  So was the princess history.  I turned things upside down; neither was to be found.  Okay, I could do Arthur from memory, as I have plenty of material there.  As it turned out, I just bought a book on Arthur that covers that origin.  But the princess—I couldn’t make it without her.  She was the star.  That volume simply seemed not to be on my shelf, a decade later.  I didn’t note the title or author, but knew where it was.  I thought.  Sigh.  So was my project to founder thus ignominiously?  I didn’t know how to Google it, as I had no names, no exact date, though it was circa 1,300 AD.  But I might have an avenue.  My readers have come to my rescue on several prior occasions, finding things I couldn’t.  It certainly helps for a writer to have readers who are smarter than he is.  An example is my quest for The Green Girl, reviewed later in this column.  So maybe someone could help me now.  It was possible that in my search for Alani I did corollary research in adjacent cultures, like the Georgians and Armenians.  I would like to address the question of the Armenian genocide of 1915-23, but it may not be in my present compass.  Fantasy is easy to write; historical fiction is glacially slow in comparison, because of the enormous research required, and about 99% can’t be used.

I tried one more thing: I paged through my accumulated notes of a decade ago.  I am a well documented writer; every page I write is dated and printed out, every note too.  And there after an hour I found it: one reference to the Alan princess and the Armenians.  So I checked in a history of the Armenians and found it.  I had missed it before because I was checking Alani history, and it wasn’t there.  Maybe they weren’t proud of the incident.  But the Armenians were; she may have been the grandmother of their greatest early hero.  So I got it after all, after I had written the chapter set in AD 1300.  Confirmation is wonderful.  Except for one small hitch: the princess incident happened circa BC 180, almost 1,500 years earlier.  Oh, no!  What to do?  Okay, I made it mythological, reenacted by my cast of characters in 1300.  That worked fine.  So I’m happy; the bold lovely princess is mine, in her fashion.  And this is a taste of what writing historical fiction is like.  I love it, but it does have its challenges.

I generally have more reading than I have time for, being a slow reader, but since my business is writing, I have trouble passing up a worthwhile book.  So I chug along, trying to read at least ten pages a day, a book a month, and whatever else is needful, like the daily newspaper, science and commentary magazines, and mail.  Once in a while I actually get a book I want to read, instead of one for business or critique.  In this period I finished The Diary of Anais Nin 1931-1934.  I mentioned it last column, but had not yet completed it.  My wife gave it to me for Christmas, knowing my curiosity about this woman who lived from 1903 to 1977.  Did she actually seduce her own father?  Well, I still don’t know, because it turns out that there are eleven published volumes, from 1914 to 1974.  Yes, from her age 11 to age 74.  But only about 50% of the content of her diaries are published in the volumes, because a number of people with whom she interacted had privacy issues.  Including her husband, who is thus not mentioned at all.  She gets pregnant and loses the baby at six months, with no mention how she achieved that state.  Presumably her husband had something to do with it, but as far as the published diary is concerned, it was immaculately conceived.  So as for any possible sex with her father, forget it; there is no reference.  He did say “You are the synthesis of all the women I have loved.  What a pity that you are my daughter!”  But no evidence of actual sex between them.  She surely described it in evocative detail if it happened, but the expurgation banished it.  Coincidentally, she lost her baby in August, 1934, the same month that I was born in England.  But for the fickle finger of fate, I might have been hers.  Had that been so, who knows; I might have grown up to be a sensitive, expressive, evocative writer like Anais.

Sample quotes: she describes her residence in Paris, and says “I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”  “I feel like a well-appointed laboratory of the soul—myself, my home, my life—in which none of the vitally fecund or destructive, explosive experiments has yet begun.”  “The brain of man is filled with passageways, like the contours and multiple crossroads of the labyrinth.  In its curved folds lie the imprints of thousands of images, recordings of a million words.”  Of June, Henry Miller’s beautiful, conflicted wife (he wrote Tropic of Cancer, which June felt portrayed her horribly) she writes “she demands illusion as other women demand jewels.”  Of Henry she wrote “There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, graduations, nuances, and subtleties.  He is a genius and yet he is too explicit.  June slips between his fingers.  You cannot possess without loving.”  When as a teen she found a hidden cache of erotic books, she read them secretly and eagerly.  “I had my degree in erotic love.”  And of her analyst, who soon enough fell in love with her, as it seems just about any man who knew her did: “Suddenly I realized the tragedy of an analyst’s life…he is only allowed to look, to be the ‘voyeur,’ not to touch, not to be loved, desired, or hated.  My whole life was offered to him but did not belong to him.”  On love: “The idea of deserving love.  And then watching love being given to people who did nothing to deserve it.”  On Man and Woman: “Man attacks the vital center.  Woman fills out the circumference.”  On her father, when she met him after a decade’s separation: “I lose my terror and my pain.  I meet him again when I know that there is no possibility of fusion between father and daughter, only between man and woman…My father comes to me when I no longer need a father.”  And to her diary, perhaps her only true friend: “My dear Diary, it is Anais  who is speaking to you, and not someone who thinks as everybody should think.  Dear Diary, pity me, but listen to me.”  And I, as a diarist in my own right, understand.  She would have had me in thrall in five minutes.  In fact, she has me anyway.  I just wish I knew: did she have sex with her father?

One of the organizations I support is the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, FSEEE.  Every so often they send me a book.  I commented in prior years on Welfare Ranching, which showed how ranchers effectively leach off the government land that’s supposed to be in trust for all of us, and Wild Fire, which shows the ongoing disaster of America’s fire-controlling commitment.  This time it’s Thrillcraft, edited by George Wuerthner, and it is another volume of terrible beauty.  The articles range from mild to impassioned, and the pictures are lovely and horrible.  The essence is that motorized off-road vehicles ridden for fun are literally tearing up private lands, our state forests and wilderness areas.  They are only about five percent of the users of those wild areas, but they ruin it for everyone else.  Their loud noises freak out wild animals, driving them away so that their effective habitats are seriously reduced.  Their churning wheels tear up local plants and start erosion gullies.  They are doing far more damage that I had realized, and they need to be banned.  It isn’t as simple as trying to talk with them, to make them see the error of their ways.  They don’t give a shit about that.  A spot case history shows the way of it.  Colonel George had flown 500 combat missions over Viet Nam, so he was not a man to be intimidated.  Thrillcraft had done an estimated $1 billion worth of damage, tearing up ground cover so badly that utility poles were falling over.  On his property in Michigan in 1990 he found trespassing All Terrain Vehicle (ATV) operators popping wheelies in his private trout stream.  When he demanded their names, one rider dismounted and attacked him, breaking his nose.  When he fenced his posted stream and property, they cut the wire and pulled out the stakes.  When he reinforced the stakes with cement, they knocked them down.  When he pushed for a state policy of “closed unless posted open” he received death threats, his street lights were shot out, his mailbox smashed, his driveway seeded with broken glass, his eight-string fence on his Christmas tree farm cut in eighty eight places, and his wife was run over.  Talk to these criminals?  You talk to them.  But maybe have an irate posse from the NRA to back you up when you do.

So is anything being done about it?  Yes, in some areas, and the book details the progress being made.  But it is encountering a hostile national administration.  The Southern Utah Wilderness Association (SUWA) filed suit against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 1999 to force it to do its job and enforce protective laws.  In 2004 (note the tediousness of the court procedure, while the damage continues unabated) the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in SUWA’s favor and ordered the BLM to protect the wilderness from thrillcraft.  So then the Bush administration appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the public had no right to compel the BLM to enforce the laws protecting the wilderness study areas.  This is what happens when you stack the court with so-called conservatives who aren’t interested in conserving anything that private companies might exploit for money.  Manufacture and sale of thrillcraft is big business, and to hell with the pristine wilderness.  Forests, swamps, deserts, mountains, snowscapes look literally like hell after thrillcraft have torn them up.  Those vehicles need to be gone.

I read Immortality, by Kevin Bohacz, a self published 200,000 word science fiction novel.  I liken this one to Miss Universe with warts: an excellent novel marred by poor paragraphing.  Paragraphs are not simple collections of sentences, any more than galaxies are collections of stars; they are or should be far more dynamic, steering the reader persuasively along the course.  Not all writers seem to understand that.  But setting that aside, this is a well-written novel that has just about everything.  Something is killing animals and people in spot circles.  Things are normal, then suddenly in the course of a minute or so everyone drops dead, with no marks on them.  The story is the effort to fathom what is happening, and stop it.  It turns out their nerves have been neatly severed, without the surrounding flesh touched.  How can that be?  Then it turns out that there is something odd about certain bacteria; they seem to have, well, microscopic machine balls in them.  Is this connected?  It is hard to be sure, because the circles of death continue to appear, getting worse, disrupting human society.  Things fall apart; gangs develop and start wreaking their own mayhem, and the military units that are supposed to maintain order seem to have their own separate agendas.  There’s a good deal of violence.  Amidst this a few people labor to unriddle the mystery without getting killed themselves.  There is love and loss in a disintegrating society.  Gradually the truth emerges, and I have to say this is new to me, a truly intriguing mechanism by which our civilization is taken down.  What this novel needs is a going-over by a competent copy editor, and then it would be fully worthy of traditional print publication.

And I read The Green Girl, by Jack Williamson.  I had been looking for it, and mentioned it in my last column, and Eric Stover offered to send it to me.  I traded him for it, sending some books of mine he wanted.  And it is intriguing.  The book is a garish paperback of the sort that got the genre unfairly branded as junk.  Publishers have little if any taste in covers or in titles, as can be seen by the way they retitled Hamilton’s The Star Kings as Beyond the Moon, or Farmer’s Sketches Among the Ruins of my Mind as Blown.  The author died in 2006 at age 98, and was the one whose fiction hauled me into the genre, back in 1947, so he has a special place in my heart.  He discovered the genre in 1926 or 1927, was entranced by the works of Merritt and Burroughs, and soon was writing his own, getting serialized in the magazines.  A generation later I was the one entranced by Jack Williamson’s works, and later yet, new readers were similarly entranced by my own fiction.  Thus the torch is passed, in its fashion, and it is a special and fitting thing.

I can’t be sure, because the evidence is spotty, but I think The Green Girl could be his first full individual novel.  The book is a 1950 Avon paperback, but the copyright is 1930 by E. P. Inc, which I presume is the company publishing the magazine where it was serialized.  It must have been written circa 1929.  Thus we see Jack as a lad of perhaps 20, drastically overusing exclamation points and lurid phrasing, but nevertheless showing real talent.  He was after all still young, as was the genre.  So there are chapter titles like “The Globe of Crimson Doom,” “The Depths of Fear,” “The Lord of the Flame,” and “The Hill of Horror.”  I’m sure teen boys (girls knew better than to read this stuff) were utterly turned on.  The book is of course dated, being set in 1999 when an awful green cloud hides the sun and Earth plunges into cold, but of course that was 70 years in the future when this was written.  We all get caught by the march of heedless history, so much duller than our imaginations.  There are the mandatory (for the time) spot science descriptions to render verisimilitude for what is actually science fantasy.  But once that is taken into account, this is a fun adventure.  The girl’s name is Xenora, and she fears the chasm of Xath.  There is something eerily familiar about this nomenclature, though I swear I never saw this novel before.  I suspect that Jack was influenced by Coleridge’s poem Xanadu, as I was, and retained a certain liking for fantastic places or names beginning with X.  The adventure itself is fraught with wild coincidences, as our hero helps build an omnimobile that can traverse air, earth, and sea, and arrives in a land ten miles below sea level just in time to rescue his beloved green girl from the clutches of a tentacled flying monster.  You see, he had dreamed of her since childhood, and she had dreamed of him, so they knew each other from afar, perhaps telepathically.  So maybe their meeting wasn’t totally coincidental after all.  She’s a luscious princess, fighting to save her kingdom.  Unfortunately she loses it, and our hero saves her by further wild coincidence as he destroys the evil empire and brings her to the surface to live with him.  It is hardly great literature, but I found it instructive as a visit to the genre that existed prehistorically—that is, before I was born.  I was interested to note, in the spot research on the author that this prompted, that in his twenties he had psychological problems.  I suspect that this is true for most writers, and especially for SF/Fantasy/Horror genre writers.  Ordinary well balanced folk don’t conjure imaginative green girls or red tentacled monsters, and they certainly don’t subject themselves to the soul-damning gantlet that is the publishing process.  Jack Williamson truly was one of us.

And I read Bread of Dreams, by Pierro Camporesi.  There’s something about that first name that intrigues me; can’t think what it is.  This was for research for Climate of Change.  I bought it back in 1993, so was a bit slow in getting to it.  Its thesis is that the great motivator for human endeavor historically was hunger.  People in the lower tiers of the population were chronically starving, and they scrambled desperately for anything to eat.  They would dry and grind up locusts to make locust bread, or poppy seeds to make poppyseed bread, or worse.  Some of the ingredients were hallucinogenic, and that, combined with the mind-altering effect of hunger itself, put them in a chronic state of delusion.  That helped them cope with the awfulness of their situation.  They also suffered all manner of vile diseases, including intestinal worms; there was no way to escape them.  Filth was a way of life.  Cannibalism occurred distressingly often; sometimes they held lotteries for old folk to see which one would become food for the others.  It was said that carrion birds would not touch some who died of starvation, because there was nothing worth eating there.  I found this book depressing, sometimes stomach turning, and I am very glad I did not live (or die) in those times.  But you know, if our present population growth remains unchecked, we will in due course be returning to this state as the food runs out.  One of my mental hobbies is to try to figure out a way to avoid that crisis.  More, perhaps, anon.

I use a recumbent bicycle, partly for exercise, and an adult scooter, ditto.  Each morning I make the 1.6 mile round trip to pick up the daily newspapers, alternating running and scooting.  That’s fine, but as I age my balance becomes less secure, and I am concerned about the time when I will no longer be able to bike.  The answer may be a recumbent trike, ideal in the sense that it can’t fall over.  I prefer recumbent because that has a comfortable seat, instead of the banana-type seat that jams your crotch.  But I have remarked before on how inordinately expensive they can be, as much as twenty times the cost of a garden variety standard bicycle.  So we tried again, this time buying a Triton recumbent trike for about $400.  Alas, while it’s a decent machine, it’s too low for my wife to use—she can’t readily get up from floor level—and has only one gear, set for slow, which makes it essentially useless for my much faster travel.  Sigh.

I always did have a scientific bent.  Recently the store was out of our regular eggs, so we bought a dozen brown eggs at a higher price.  This reminded me of my experiment in first grade.  The question was, which was better, brown or white?  It stood to reason that the smaller the air pocket in an egg, the more egg you got, which was of course better.  So we opened one hard boiled egg of each persuasion and checked their pockets.  The brown egg had the smaller one.  So brown was better; I had verified it scientifically.  I never saw reason to repeat the experiment, or to change my conviction.  Yes, I know the color is determined by the color of the chicken who lays it, and the pocket grows as the egg ages.  We use whites because they are cheaper, even if inferior.  (Please, those of you who are convinced I am evincing bigotry here: this is irony.)

Generally I am trying to cut down on magazine subscriptions, but every so often I’m tempted by another.  This time it was SCIENCE ILLUSTRATED.  Science fascinates me, for all that I make my living in fantasy.  This magazine is okay, but we’ll probably let it drop after a year, as it has to be more than okay to warrant my continuing time.  I’ve always liked puzzles, but often avoid them so I won’t get sucked in to their addictive nature.  I glanced at the Brain Teasers page and saw this one: “Do this problem in your head.  Subtract the combined total of 4,000; 2,100; and one half from the combined total of 12,000; 1,200; and 12.  What do you get?”  Okay, the first two figures total 5,100.  The last three total 13,212.  But what about that one half in the middle?  The semicolon separates it from the second figure, so it doesn’t go there.  Does it mean 13,212-.5?  thus 13,211.5 minus 5,100 equals 8,111.5.  That is the answer they give.  My wife had no trouble with it; she made it 13,212 minus 5,100.5 equals 8,111.5.  Same answer, either way.  But this bothers me in two ways: why have that ambiguity in the .5, so you can’t be sure to which side of the equation it belongs?  And why have a straight math problem as a brain teaser?  That’s not cleverness, it’s just memory.  I think they made a mistake in punctuation.  Punctuation counts.  I remember in the old feature Believe It or Not they told how a life was saved when someone changed a message from “Pardon impossible.  To be shot at dawn” to “Pardon, impossible to be shot at dawn.”  Believe It or Not also had a riddle: punctuate this sentence: “The king and and and and and and and the queen.”  I pondered that for years, and concluded that there must be a man named Andand.  So it became “The king and Andand, and Andand and the queen.”  So I pay attention to punctuation, and judge that magazine in part by its failure to do so.

Odd notes: There was an eclipse of the moon in mid FeBlueberry.  We missed it, so what could we do?  Right: we rescheduled it for the following day, 2-20-2008 and saw it then.  I don’t think anyone else noticed the change.  A chain of thought took me back to a favorite phrase in the martial arts series I did with Roberto Fuentes.  I did not like expressing violence in familiar ways, such as heads getting squashed like dropped pumpkins, so asked my collaborator whether he could come up with some original ideas.  He did, and thus came to be my favorite: “His fist swung toward my face like a wrecking ball toward a condemned building.”  I have this mental picture of a giant face crumbling slowly, slowly to the ground as rubble.  Even as a child I tended to push the literary limits.  Theoretically The School In Rose Valley, the second best of eleven educational institutions I attended, at ages 11-12, was a creative non-censorship kind of place.  Until I wrote in an essay about religion that when Jesus died he went to occupy the Son, only they changed the O to U to show that he died for U.  Can’t think why they objected to such a clear explanation.  And I note with glee the rare reappearances of Gunk in the “Curtis” comic strip.  Gunk is a token white in a black strip, a crazy vegetarian, with magic and devious savvy.  Can’t think why I like him.  This time he was wearing an elegant white fur coat—surely fake fur, because he would not touch a dead animal hide—and a local bully wanted it, so Gunk gave it to him.  Only then did the bully discover that it made horrendous smells and could not be taken off.  And we discovered some new little plants floating in our returned-to-nature pool.  They were tiny green leaves with descending roots.  What were thy?  Then I checked a nearby mosquito pond—the county made it to attract mosquitoes, so they would know when there were enough to warrant dealing with—and it was covered by a mat of the same little plants.  So obviously they are common stock rather than a new form of alien life.  Ah, well.  They must reproduce mainly by fission, because we have seen no blooms.  But there must have been airborne spores to seed them in to our pool for the start.  And I fear for the little mulberry tree I rescued several years back.  Last year it did fine.  Then in the fall it put out root sprouts.  This spring those sprouts are flourishing, while the main tree is apparently dead.  What happened?  And once in college a song came on the radio, “I Dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair, Floating like zephyr on the soft summer air.”  Lovely song.  But someone sang a loud parody: “I dream of Brownie in the light blue jeans.”  I can’t remember the rest.  Maybe it was “Floating like zephyr on a soft hill of beans.”

Politics: as I see it, the Republicans know their presidential candidate will go down in flames, so they let McCain have it, so he’ll get stuck with the blame.  After all, they wouldn’t want one of their own to be lost in such a doomed cause.  McCain’s problem, for them, is that he thinks for himself and doesn’t always follow the party line.  For example, he says we shouldn’t torture.  That’s a party no-no.  Meanwhile my earlier prediction that ultimately the bigots hate women worse than blacks is playing out.  Of course there was another factor: my wife liked Barack, while I was leaning toward Hillary, despite her wrong vote authorizing the Iraq war and her failure to repudiate it in a timely manner.  But then she started playing dirty politics that hinted of racism.  That was Strike Two, and it reversed my tilt, and I leaned toward Barack instead.  It was a fateful decision, because thereafter he took a dozen primaries in succession, finishing with Vermont, where I came from, and developed a fair lead.  Too bad for Hillary, but she shouldn’t have gone dirty; some of us care about that sort of thing.

Ed Howdershelt, who got us to try Xandros before, sent Version 4, so I tried it.  For the past year I had Xandros on my correspondence computer, that doesn’t connect to my paying-writing computer (sorry, hackers), and it has worked okay.  A prior edition trashed my files, but this version didn’t, so I was willing to give it another try.  I liked Kubuntu, but it was incomplete, and it tended to make OpenOffice crash when I used escape to escape a menu.  I didn’t like that.  So I tried loading this new version on my writing system, and lo, it loaded and was complete.  Only then did I discover the key files I had forgotten to back up, or that I had backed up but when I went to read them turned out to be merely titles with zero bytes.  My bad; I should have verified them more carefully.  But the new Xandros’ most recent file was 15 months old, the same date as the version we already had set up a year ago for correspondence.  I am bemused that Xandros couldn’t find any improvements to make in a year.  I can suggest some.  The speller doesn’t know the most common word in the world, “okay”; sure, I added it, but it’s a curious omission.  When I used the word “jew” missing the capitol, the speller did not know that either.  Does it think it’s a bad word?  It has a panel for “Home Folder” but it appears to be pre-set; I set my default home path, as I did with Kubuntu, but Xandros ignores it.  Apparently Xandros turned off that useful feature, or didn’t know how to implement it.  So I have to stair step to and from my home directory, which is a nuisance.  Xandros evidently can automatically load OpenOffice, and correctly place the files I call up according to where they were when I closed, as Kubuntu did, but it refuses.  I know, because one time it did it, on March 20, 2008; all other times it doesn’t.  Why did they turn off that nice feature?  It forces me to waste extra time each day setting up, and yes, that does make me miss Kubuntu.  With Xandros it seems I can have either an automatic sleep mode after a certain time inactive, or I can have a screen saver.  Not both.  It’s like your date saying you can kiss her or hug her, not both: frustrating.  Xandros also has hangups about printing: it likes to offer K-print as default, ignoring the default Hewlett-Packard printer I use.  If I make it use HP, it starts it blinking, then goes to orange, refusing to print until I go there and physically press the green Print button.  If I accept the K-print it offers, it hesitates, then offers HP on a second menu, then it prints without making me hit the green button.  Is there a reason, other than Xandros proprietors showing their power by such stupid teasing?  On the other hand, it does back up my files when it says it does, unlike Kubuntu, which saved them only as I exited, and it has an easy time change, and it doesn’t crash when I use Escape, though it can crash when I plug in the backup flash drive, as Kubuntu could.  (And my wife’s Windows can crash when she disconnects from online; it seems to be an equal-opportunity type of foul-up.)  It can also write a file to another file’s name, obliterating that other file; I almost lost my most recent Survey update that way, when it became Chapter 13 of Climate of Change.  Fortunately I had a backup, and was able to restore it.  Xandros does have the games Kubuntu did not, which is nice.  So it’s a mixed bag.  More mixed than it ought to be.

Meanwhile I am in touch with a reader who is sending me a modem he says should work with this system.  I’d love to go online and quote the above paragraph to the Xandros folk; who knows, they might know how to fix some of it.  Maybe a version of Xandros actually exists that is less than a year old.  I will surely have a report on that aspect next time.

Speaking of my Survey of Electronic Publishers and related services, above, here is an excerpt from my update for Ellora’s Cave, the leading Erotic Romance electronic publisher: “This time I looked up their definition of Romantica, and I recommend their discussion of it to aspiring writers in this genre.  But one thing would help: how about spelling out exactly what terminology will do for what heat level?  Where do you say ‘love channel’ ‘cleft’ ‘vagina’ or ‘cunt’?  ‘Masculinity’ ‘member’ ‘penis’ or ‘cock’?  ‘Love’ ‘sex’ ‘intercourse’ or ‘fuck’?  Some straight lists of words should help.  I speak as one who has used all terms, but prefers to avoid extremes of political correctness or gutter talk.” And here is outrage: Amazon.com, which I think is the largest online bookseller, now is refusing to sell POD books that are not printed by its subsidiary, BookSurge.  I should think this is an antitrust law violation, but regardless, it seems like sufficient reason to stop doing business with Amazon.  They have already done it to Publish America.  I have my issues with PA, but on this one I’m with them, and I applaud their defiance of this power play.  Does Amazon think it’s Microsoft, which seems ready to use any tactic to further its own business regardless of its legality or the harm done to others?  I share the massive outrage this is generating.  Angela Hoy, of Booklocker, and publisher of Writers Weekly has a long discussion.  http://writersweekly.com/.

I received a couple ads for Pshsht!, a product guaranteed to provide a man an erection.  “Just spray a little Pshsht! on your penis, and it immediately will get hard…” and stay rock hard for hours.  You can have sex as long as you want, because it also slows down ejaculation.  So you can do it many times a night.  Okay, that’s their pitch, but they leave out some details.  Such as what does it cost, and how many doses are in a tube?  This could be a very expensive treatment.  I conjecture that it summons blood to the penis, like an inflammation, regardless whether the man is sexually aroused, and the reason he can last for hours it because he can’t necessarily climax with that hot dead stick.  Can he turn it off when not in the mood, or is he locked into rigidity until it wears off in its own sweet time?  So thanks, but no thanks; I don’t trust this.

Internet circulated humor: church signs.  One says “God does not believe in atheists.  Therefore atheists do not exist.”  Another says “Read the Bible—it will scare the hell out of you.”  And a cartoon showing Moses with the Tablets.  “Now let me get this straight.  The Arabs get the oil, and we have to cut off the ends of our what?”  One saying the woodpecker has to go, showing Moses’ loaded Ark getting pecked full of holes.

Internet Information on weddings: most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June.  Brides held a bouquet of flowers to hide their body odor.  With thatched roofs, things could fall into the house, so they had to string a sheet over the bed.  That’s how canopy beds got started.  An old Mark Trail comic remarks on fleas: before regular bathing was introduced, they were a problem for humans, and English noblewomen were the first to wear flea collars.

Outrage: here in Florida a 17 year old boy and 16 year old girl took bare pictures of themselves—and got prosecuted for violating child pornography laws.  Normally those laws are meant to stop adults from abusing minors.  From here it looks as if there are adults abusing minors: the police and prosecutors.  They are the ones who should be canned, not the kids.

Paul Dolan wrote me with an interesting question: how many teats does a centaur have?  His student Gina Battistella researched and found that horses have 2, cows 4, cats 8, dogs 10, and pigs 12-14.  Since centaurs have horse portions and human portions, would that be 2 above (humans have 2) and 2 below?  From which would a young centaur nurse?  My impression that only the upper 2 would be functional, because young centaurs have heads that reach up well above their bodies, and are not good at bending those heads down toward ground level.  But maybe there’s somebody out there who is more conversant with centaurs and can clarify this.

I contributed to, and received a copy of, FARMERPHILE, the special 90^th birthday issue of a fanzine devoted to Philip Jose Farmer and his works.  Phil is one of the significant writers of the genre, and though publishers seem no longer to know whether he exists (I know how that is) it’s nice to see such recognition.  Folk interested in acquiring issues—the first 11 are available—can contact mike@pjfarmer.com. 

Newspaper item: the estate of J R R Tolkien is suing New Line for unpaid royalties on Lord of the Rings.  They were supposed to pay 7.5% of gross receipts, and have paid nothing after the upfront license of $62,500.  You see, traditional print book publishers pay advances against royalties, and if the royalties earn out, they pay more.  But movie outfits pay licensing fees, which are not charged against royalties, so the royalties are owing from the start.  These are generally figured from a percentage of the net profits.  But they almost never actually pay; their creative accounting manages to show no profits, regardless how well the movies do.  But the Tolkien folk specified a percentage of the gross receipts, which is quite another matter.  It’s like the difference between the net after expenses, which can be vanishingly small, and the gross, which is a firm figure.  Lord of the Rings grossed almost six billion dollars worldwide.  That, if my math is correct, means they owe Tolkien about $450 million.  The suit wants $150 million (do they have a problem with their math?), unspecified punitive damages, and a court order giving the estate the right to terminate related rights, such as on The Hobbit, scheduled for 2010-11.  That could scuttle that upcoming movie.  Okay, this interests me, because I have movie deals on three fantasy series (well, Xanth is still in the option stage), and I don’t want to get similarly ripped off.  That’s why I have a high powered lawyer in on the deal.  I feel there should be some integrity in accounting, regardless of the medium.  This could get interesting, in due course.

I generally ignore ads, but sometimes I do read Flame, a Jewish-perspective discussion of situations in the Middle East.  One in March says that about two years ago, yielding to the pressure of world opinion, Israel decided to abandon Gaza and withdraw about 8,000 Israelis who had lived there for generations.  That decision was not well received by those settlers, who were doing well, but they did it.  And almost from the first day of the Gaza liberation the Gazans launched daily rocket attacks at Israel.  So much for appreciation.  There is more, but this may enough: do you think Israel will be eager to withdraw from the West Bank?

Email circulation has the story of three women who die together in an accident and go to heaven.  St. Peter tells them there is only one rule: don’t step on a duck.  But there are ducks all over, and one woman does step on one; as punishment Peter then chains her to a really ugly man for eternity.  The second woman tries hard, but later steps on a duck  and gets chained to another extremely ugly man.  The third woman tries harder, and manages to avoid doing it for months.  Then Peter comes and chains her to the most handsome man she’s ever seen.  “What did I do to deserve this?” she asks.  The man replies “I don’t know about you, but I stepped on a duck.”  Ouch.  But you know, I would hope that heaven has a better way of judging souls than their physical handsomeness.  And why is it overrun with ducks?  It must be knee-deep in poop by now.

It is to wince: US NEWS, March 10, has a discussion of the risks of oral sex.  It seems that there is more of it than there used to be, and young folk are getting venereal diseases orally.  Gonorrhea of the throat can be ugly.  The Last Word in NEW SCIENTIST had an interesting discussion relating extremes of hunger.  A reader pointed out that in an emergency, one could eat his own feces, which contain lots of good protein.  They could be cooked to eliminate the possibility of disease.

I ran into more odds and endments as I completed my study cleanup and organization of clippings.  August 3, 1997 Ask Marilyn column, where she says the Great Wall of China as 25-30 feet high, 15-30 feet across, and 4,000 miles long.  I remember I sent her a letter, then, pointing out that the 4,000 mile wall is a myth; it does not now, and never did exist.  I gave my source: The Great Wall of China, by Arthur Waldron.  It was an intermittent series of walls, with armed forces defending the spaces between them.  Marilyn never acknowledged or, as far as I know, ran a correction.  She may be smart, but not smart enough to be always accurate.

Clipping from 1992: the vegetarian diet has benefits.  Tastes good, costs less, low in saturated fats, cholesterol and calories, high in soluble fiber, loaded with vitamins and minerals.  In short, healthy.  No, of course I have no ulterior motive in presenting this; I’m merely commenting on an old clipping.  But as a lifelong vegetarian, I do seem to be reasonably healthy for my age.  A 1997 clipping says that vegetarianism is the wave of the future.  The number of vegetarians in the US is about 13 million and growing.  I suspect that trend has continued in the intervening decade.  Another 1997 article says that as more people around the world add meat to their diets, hunger looms.  If everyone adopted a vegetarian diet, current food production would feed ten billion people.  But problems of depleting aquifers and distribution make hunger endemic.

Clipping from 1990: psychologists find no link between religion and helping others.  The more intense the religion, the greater the cruelty.  No correlation between attendance at religious services and altruism.  In a check on cheating when on the honor code for an exam, the only group majority that did not cheat was the atheists.  In 1973 people on their way to give a talk on the Parable of the Good Samaritan were unlikely to pause to help an injured man.  Churchgoers are more intolerant of ethnic minorities than non-attenders are.  It concludes “No version of religious belief offers an ironclad guarantee that the followers will follow the Golden Rule.”  I have observed this sort of thing all along; it’s why I never joined a religion.  People are as they are, good, bad, and indifferent, and religion seems to make little if any difference.  1990 Dear Abby column: “Can religion be taught without teaching bigotry as well?…As long as ‘true believers’ are taught they are in any way superior to non-believers, they are well on their way to becoming qualified bigots, religious fanatics or members of one of the many hate groups spawned by such teachings through the ages.”  Were I religious, I would be appalled.  As it is, I’m not pleased. What would Jesus say?

Perhaps related: a 1992 clipping says that capital punishment has no measurable restraining effect on murder.  It is simply a demand for vengeance.  All the countries of the Western world have stopped executing criminals—except the United States.  “In 1988 there were 8.4 homicides per 100,000 Americans.  In Germany the figure was 4.2, in Britain 2.0, in Japan 1.2.”  And a 1991 clipping: “It has been found that societies that are most at ease with themselves and sexuality are least warlike.”  And another: the medicine deprenyl, discovered in the 1960s, was tested on rats. It made them get much more interested in sex, and live longer.  If people responded similarly, they might have more sex and live up to 150 years.  I’ll be interested in the human tests, if they are ever run.  But a 1992 clipping says that the simple act of making sperm substantially shortens a male worm’s lifespan, and might account for the human male’s shorter span.  And one for 1991: Bloody horror films are big at the box office because “there’s a thrill connected with terror in the same way there’s a thrill connected with sex.”  In movies and TV that children see, “Explicit violence is just fine; explicit sex is not OK [but] if there’s anything that’s likely to make the human race extinct, it’s not sex, its violence.”

1993 article by Carl Sagan on reports of alien abduction and seduction.  Aliens seem to like to probe the sexual parts of human beings, or to have sex with them.  What’s really going on?  He finds no physical evidence, and concludes it is hallucination.  He remarks on the ease with which we may be misled, the fashioning of our beliefs, and even the origins of our religions.

1997 clipping: chewing gum dates from about 7,000 BC.  Early gum was made from birch bark tar.

1997 article in TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: dental researchers have found the same microorganisms in human mouths the world over.  They have genetically engineered a strain of harmless bacterium that is capable of killing its cavity-causing cousins and taking over their natural habitat.  Clinical trials were expected to take five to ten years before this becomes generally available.  Okay, now it’s eleven years later: where is that magic treatment?  I have given up on expensive dentistry, that has enriched the dental profession without saving my teeth, and expect in due course to lose my teeth and go to dentures.  But something like this could change that picture.  Will they ever let it get through?

1992 article: men are in search of younger women.  Women want an honest partner.  “Is this sexist?  Sure.  It’s ageist.  It’s narcissist.  It’s empty-headed.  It’s unfair.  It’s loathsome.  And it’s true.”

1994 US NEWS article: people focus on IQ, but on average it explains less than ten percent of the variation in human behavior, and it can’t explain qualities of insight, morality,  and creativity.  As a highly creative person, I have looked askance at IQ throughout my adulthood, seeing it as a measure of conformity to largely irrelevant traits.  My interests are broader than remembering numbers backwards, as these HiPiers columns may show.  Yes, I could have joined Mensa; my mother did.  I never was interested.

You have heard of babies getting dumped anonymously at hospitals or on doorsteps?  A 1991 article  describes how elderly persons are getting similarly dumped, usually at night.  Some emergency rooms have eight or more cases a week.  Most are women who have outlived husbands and children; many have dementia.  They have become a burden.  I see the problem, but it makes me queasy, and not just because the age of my own senility is drawing nigh.  Is there a better answer?

And a current article: bullies are growing more vicious.  In 2005 28% of students ages 12 to 18 reported being bullied in the prior 6 months.  It’s not just stealing lunch money; one 15 year old was shot in the head in a classroom when he revealed that he was gay.  Increasingly, parents are filing law suits against schools that can’t or won’t protect the safety of their children.  Is there a solution to bullying?  Here’s’ a suggestion: remove the bullies.  Put them in separate reform schools or prison, depending, so that only peaceful students attend regular schools.  If it is online bullying, track down the sources and put them away too.  It can be done, if authorities want to.  Administrative indifference seems to be a major problem.

Arthur Clarke died.  Back in my day there were three top writers: Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur Clarke.  Heinlein was the best writer, Asimov was the most knowledgeable, and Clarke—well, I think if it had not been for the 2001 movie he would not have been as well known.  His prose did not sparkle, and his fictive romance was nil; as it turned out, he was gay.  But he had good ideas, and contributed significantly to the reputation of the science fiction genre.  I liked his Childhood’s End when I was in college.  The old order passeth.

Article in New Scientist on sleep: what is its purpose?  It’s a familiar question, without a satisfactory answer.  They have found that rats deprived of sleep too long die, so it does seem necessary.  But now there is progress: it may be that stress killed those rats, rather than loss of sleep.  Sleep may simply be nature’s way to conserve energy and keep a creature quiet during downtime, thus keeping it safe.  Then the brain takes advantage of the downtime to do routine maintenance, such as organizing memories. And REM sleep may be a form of brain exercise.  The brain, like the body, may suffer if it lies fallow too long, so there are maintenance programs to rev up body and brain, so that they will remain fit for activity on the morrow.  Thus a man’s nocturnal erections, that exercise the plumbing, may not be the only example.  Bears rouse periodically when hibernating, surely a similar principle.  When you store a motor for a long time, it’s best to run it every so often.  I think this is closing in on the truth, at last.

Article on THE HUMANIST on the looming water crisis: we are using up the available fresh water and this is already causing serious mischief around the world.  More efficient use of water could alleviate this—if there is political will.  It may be this, more than oil, that is our most urgent challenge.  I understand progress is being made in distilling it from the sea at lost cost.  That’s vital.

I have a huge additional pile of clippings, but have to cut it off somewhere.  They reflect my interests, but I’m interested in just about everything.  So, with muted regret, enough.

I’ll close with a couple of personal literary references.  The monograph on Piers Anthony, by Michael R Collings, done in 1983, is being put back into online circulation by Wildside press.  I did not agree with all of his conclusions, but that’s a disadvantage of being still alive when such papers are written.  And The Complete Guide to Writing Science Fiction Volume 1, to which I contributed a chapter, has won a 2008 Eppie for the nonfiction self help category.  I do believe it is a useful reference.

I proofread the page proofs for Xanth #32, Two to the Fifth.  I have already written the following novel, #33 Jumper Cable, and am making notes for the one after that, #34 Knot Gneiss, but the publisher takes two years to get them into print.  Publishers are notoriously slow.  I remember when agent Richard Curtis tried to set up a challenge: his authors could write their novels from scratch faster than their publishers could draw their advance checks.  But no publisher would take him up on it; they knew they would lose.  It’s not really inefficiency; it’s that they are reluctant to give up any money one day before they absolutely have to.  So authors can wait years for advances, and longer for royalties.  I’ve been there.  Anyway, this novel is due to be published in hardcover OctOgre 2008, and a year later in paperback.  Is it worth the wait?  Yes, I think so.  I form my best opinion of my novels when I proof the galleys, because they typically have aged a year or more (less for small press) and time lends perspective.  I do the best I can on every novel I write, but some, in my private estimate, turn out better than others.  You can’t win the jackpot every single time.  Two/Fifthstrikes me as one of the best of the recent Xanths, and I like it about as well as my last “best,” Pet Peeve.  It’s the story of Cyrus Cyborg, a playwright who is considered a catch by several of the lovely actresses in his plays.  Then Princess Rhythm, age twelve, confesses to having a crush on him.  He refuses to take that seriously; she’s a child.  Bad mistake; she’s also a Sorceress.  Never antagonize a Sorceress of any age.  She enchants herself to be ten years older, grabs him, and hauls him into a love spring.  Gives one heroic ellipsis…  And reverts to her normal age after an hour, leaving him hopelessly in love with a woman who won’t exist for another decade.  Did I mention about the folly of antagonizing a Sorceress?  But the stork, having received the signal, brings her a baby.  There are reasons for the dread Adult Conspiracy that children don’t necessarily appreciate.  Then it gets complicated.  Even when unapproachably young—Cyrus naturally honors the Adult Conspiracy throughout—and with a daughter who can’t be explained to others, the princess proves to be a dangerously jealous lover, and Cyrus is constantly wary.  At one point there is an expression on her face that would have been better on some other face.  Aside from this incidental interaction, there is the challenge of Ragna Roc, who means to take over Xanth in a dramatic final battle, or destroy it.  He does have the power.  The three princesses together, their magic cubed, take him on in the finale without any certainty of winning.  If that’s not enough to evoke your interest, you must be a cri-tic.

Then I read Ice Trap, by Kitty Sewell.  My wife bought it and tried it and didn’t like it, finding it tedious, and I think never finished it.  I saw it sitting on the floor with other books, waiting to be donated to a library.  Then I read a review of it in PARADE, saying it was a compelling novel.  That aroused my curiosity, so I read it, one of the few I read for pleasure rather than business.  I found it well done and, yes, compelling.  Oh, it could have used a more competent copy-editor, but that’s true for most books, and the author evidently does not know the distinction between “may” and “might.”  Join the throng!  I’m not a reviewer or critic, so I make allowances, and I recommend this novel to anyone.  The protagonist is a married doctor who suddenly receives a letter from his daughter.  But he never had children, so it has to be a mistake.  Then the girl’s mother sends in blood samples, and they confirm it.  That plays havoc with his marriage, apart from threatening him with long overdue child support.  He travels to investigate, and things just keep getting more confusing.  I love some of the description, such as this: “[Brenda] turned coquettishly on her heel and clicked her way back to the bar, buttocks grinding proudly against each other under the slinky red fabric.”   A woman wrote this?  Wow.  So I wound up delaying writing my own novel to finish reading this one, a pleasant rarity.

 I read Berserker Wars, by the late Fred Saberhagen.  My interest was because I learned, late, that the berserkers are machines that are methodically destroying all life in the galaxy.  My magic folk in the fifth ChroMagic novel, Key to Survival, now theoretically for sale at MUNDANIA, encounter similar machines.  Had I done what Saberhagen did forty years ago?  That bothered me.  So I read it, and it’s a collection of berserker stories, rather than a real novel.  It satisfied me that my approach to the life vs. machines war is different.  Mine is like a galactic-scope chess game, with the machines negotiating for advantage; they even send a lovely humanoid robot to be the king’s mistress.  He accepts, and converts her to the living side, thus reversing the ploy.  Saberhagen’s stories feature different takes on the problem, as one person or another encounters the deadly machines, which are far more than brutes.  One person succeeds in nullifying a berserker’s ability to act, so he can question it, but the machine is not cooperative.  It demands “In return for giving you such records, what lives am I offered to destroy?”  Beautiful!  The machine is not interested in food, money, sex or notoriety; it merely wants to forward its program.  But because of the brevity of the stories, and the different characters, I had some trouble getting a clear sense of the whole.  So I read a berserker novel, Berserker Blue Death.  Saberhagen writes well, with many original elements, but for my taste there is a certain distance between the reader and the characters.  I focus on immediacy, putting myself and my reader into the scene so that we live it together.  Saberhagen seems to have less personal feeling.  He describes it, but seems not to experience it as I do.  At least, so it seems to me; other readers may differ.  This novel seems to separate into two novellas, wrapping up one chase, then starting another, with several new characters in place of old ones.  I was not thrilled with the manner of one exchange: the captain, Domingo, survived an encounter with a berserker thanks in significant part to the ability of his pilot, Polly.  She even boarded him at her house for weeks during his recovery from severe injury, nursing him back to health.  He was aware that she was personally interested in him, but he was concerned only with his mission: to locate and destroy the Blue Death berserker that had killed his daughter.  Then he attended a festival where Polly was a leading dancer.  She danced beautifully, and she was beautiful, and she was doing it for him.  A lovely, competent, and feeling woman, one any man should be glad to love.  After the dance she came up to him, still breathing hard.  “Did you like it?”  He, still distracted by thought of the berserker, said “What?”  Her expectant look changed to something else.  She drew herself up straight, and departed wordlessly.  She had seen how little he cared.  So he got a new pilot for the new mission.  Okay, that certainly made the point.  Domingo reminded me of the TV Doctor House in his autistic inability to truly relate to the feelings of others.  But not only did it alienate Polly, it alienated me, the reader.  Polly deserved better.  So I wonder whether Saberhagen, like Domingo, truly cared about the feelings of his readers.  Some excellent writers can observe, organize, and describe things well, and tell good stories, yet display a treacherous insensitivity.

I read Deep Ancestry by Spencer Wells, research for my historical novel Climate of Change.  This is about the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC’s Genographic project.  They are taking cheek swabs from people all around the world, and analyzing their DNA to trace the patterns of man’s colonization of the world during the last fifty thousand or so years.  With DNA they can track it, time and place.  I find this absolutely fascinating.  My whole GEODYSSEY project originated with my curiosity about just this process, forty years ago.  Readers who have seen my early science fiction career, and later fantasy career, may not be aware that all along my truest interest has been historical.  Now at last they are zeroing in on the answers to abiding mysteries of our kind.  Such as if modern man emerged from Africa 110,000 years ago, why did he wait 50,000 years to check out Europe?  Now the answer is coming clear: it was a combination of things, mainly an event not discussed in this book, the eruption of Mt. Toba 73,000 years ago, that may have wiped out 99% of the human species, including perhaps all of them outside Africa.  That’s one likely reason they waited: they were extinct.  And a qualitative advance in the nature of our species, when language and the arts emerged and flowered.  Genetic drift can occur rapidly in a small sample, and the human nucleus may have become as small as 2,000.  That’s when it occurred, and the far better organized and effective species then recolonized the world.  The book traces the routes, and it makes revelatory sense.  Unfortunately two thirds of my novel was written in 1997, before the Genome Project, so some “errors” are built in, but I’m really glad to see this knowledge expanding.

I read Waking God II The Sacred Rota, by Brian L Doe and Philip F Harris.  This is a sequel to Waking God, published in 2006, or really a continuation of a three part story.  It is a science fantasy theological thriller, odd as that combination may seem to be.  The final battle is developing, and while they do argue theology, there are also people getting killed wholesale as the several themes slowly integrate.  I am agnostic, with no belief in the supernatural, but as before, I found portions of the discussion more interesting than the action.  Here’s when Lucifer harangues an Archangel: “You create demons and false hopes of redemption.  You build them mighty temples and give with one hand and slaughter with the other.  You have kept them separate and ignorant and give just enough to raise empty hopes.  You destroy their prophets and burn their seers.  If they question, you put them to the rack and crush all semblance of free thought.  You give them a doctrine of poverty and offer riches in your fantasy heaven.  Kill in the name of god and your treasure shall be immeasurable.  You divide them and thus conquer them, and tell them they have no responsibility but to be good sheep and to follow your demented dictates.”  This strikes me as an apt description of global religion.  I was intrigued by the Tarot discussion, because I did some research there, thirty years ago, when writing Tarot and devising my own 100 card Animation Tarot deck, because the established decks are clearly incomplete.  I conjecture that one author in this collaboration knows how to write, and the other knows his occult lore, because they clearly have done their Tarot homework.  So this is a novel worth reading, but it will help to have an open mind.  I fault it for developing serious characters who may then be thrown away, or suddenly having new significant characters for whom there was no prior reference.  (But it turned out I had forgotten that one of those was in the prior novel.  That will be clarified in the published edition of this one.)  So I think it needs better overall organization, but there is nevertheless much here that you probably won’t find in the tacitly expurgated traditional press.

And I read The Dark World by Henry Kuttner.  There’s a small personal story here.  Well, yes, I do see things as stories, being a story teller at heart.  I was contacted by the editor of the contemporary PLANET STORIES, which is not the same as the original magazine of that title;  they are an imprint of Paizo Publishing http://www.paizo.com/, which I understand was once part of Wizards of the Coast.  Anyway, they are republishing a number of the great old novels, with introductions by contemporary writers, hoping to attract a new audience.  Would I be interested in letting them have older novels of mine, like Steppe and Sos the Rope?  A writer has only one scripted answer to such a question: “Talk to my agent.”  So now editor and agent are in dialog, and I trust that something good will come of it.  He also asked whether I’d like to do an introduction to one of their other books.  One by Henry Kuttner was open.  Kuttner was one of the genre golden age writers, married to another, C L Moore, who used her initials rather than her name, Catherine, to mask her gender, because in those days women were thought not to be able to write straight hard-hitting science fantasy.  They were a remarkable team, until his untimely death from a heart attack at age 43.  So yes, I agreed to tackle Kuttner.  It was an interesting experience, because today I am old and critical and flaws in the text stand out like warts.  Had I read this novel in my impressionable teen years I surely would have been swept away.  But now—well, I’m still impressed.  The style is florid and yes, there are some warts, but the man was clearly an apt and imaginative writer, and this is the kind of tale to haul the reader in by the scruff of his neck, spin him around, and bash him into submission.  There is the sorceress Medea, with dark hair falling softly to her knees, loveliness and evil incarnate; what man can resist that?  There is our protagonist, an ordinary guy of 1946, which was when this was first published.  Except it turns out that that personality and those memories are an imprint on a far more cynical figure who simply wants to regain power and doesn’t mind whom he cheats or kills to get it.  Who will prevail: mister innocent nice guy, or mister competent mean guy?  So this is not a simple slay-the-monster, win-the-beauty story.  Yes, it’s worth bringing back for today’s readers to consider.

Another book sent by the publisher, PLANET STORIES, is Black God’s Kiss by C L Moore, with an apt introduction by Suzy McKee Charnas.  I read it because it’s a collection of Jirel of Joiry stories dating from around the year of my birth.  Jirel was perhaps the first shapely sword-swinging cursing female warrior in the genre.  She’s always getting into dire mischief and somehow surviving.  These are six tales of magic, mood, and grim prospects.  For example, in the title story Jirel is captured by a handsome male conqueror what has the nerve to kiss her.  She bites his throat, but he knocks her across the room, unconscious.  A real man’s man.  Jirel is furious.  She escapes and goes pretty literally to hell, determined to find a weapon that will destroy him.  Hell is not a nice place, not at all.  The weapon turns out to be a kiss of death, which will kill her if she doesn’t deliver it soon.  I found not a lot of plot, just the struggle against foul things in darkness.  The other stories are similar in essence, each one a dip into awfulness.  But well done.  It occurs to me that this is like Romance, only instead of constantly yearning for love and fulfillment, the girl is constantly struggling to survive horror.

Movies: We saw the movie Horton Hears a Who, adapted from the Dr. Seuss children’s story we read to our children way back when.  It’s a nice family movie, as Horton Elephant tries to communicate with, and safeguard the folk of Who, who live in a tiny speck.  It’s amazing how complicated that gets, as other creatures of the jungle refuse to accept the reality of a world they can’t see or hear.  As with other Dr. Seuss stories, there’s a gentle moral message in the background.  We should be more tolerant of things we don’t quite understand.

We saw Iron Man, which I understand developed from a comic book hero.  A wealthy playboy type industrialist (was Bruce Wayne/Batman the model?) suffers a revelation and builds a suit that converts him to an almost invincible metal man so he can do good in the world.  This stirs up opposition from those who prefer him simply to keep making conscienceless money for them.  Plenty of spectacular violence for those whose intellectual/emotional horizons extend no further.  I like his personal secretary, Pepper, the one close associate who is utterly loyal, whom he can’t do without, and whom he treats, well, as House treated Cameron and Domingo treated Polly.  But there’s a hint at the end that he will discover her, as it were, in a sequel movie.

And we saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  Sitting in theaters makes me sleepy, as does reading, so it was a struggle, and I surely missed some in the middle.  But then it got moving on a prolonged action sequence involving quicksand, swarming biting ants, a chase by the bad guys involving sword-craft while standing on trucks racing along the brink of a precipice—I mean, this one had everything, in conscious parody.  Including a wildly unbelievable conclusion that makes sense, on its own terms: a five thousand year old alien inter-dimensional flying saucer.  My kind of junk, for sure, despite their inaccuracy about the Maya, who were not current 5,000 years ago.  The original central American civilization was the Olmec, and even they did not go back that far.  Certainly they were not in the Amazon, where much of the movie takes place.  But this is a movie; for all their millions of dollars spent, they can’t afford a genuine historian or archaeologist.  Who knows: maybe aliens did sponsor the first civilization, as suggested.  There is even a kind of retroactive romance.  It turns out that Indiana Jones has a son, and still likes the feisty mother.  So we liked it, regardless.

I wrote a letter that became a spot essay on the problems of publishing.  Here, with identifying references censored, is an excerpt.

You are doing what you have to do.  I think the problem in publishing is not stupidity per se, though there is plenty of that, but the fact that there are a limited number of publishing slots being chased by more than a hundred times as many manuscripts.  So those slots are quickly filled, and editors don’t read any more prospects.  What’s the point, when the roster is already full?  So though some of those other manuscripts may be better than the ones being published, they don’t have a chance because there’s no room in the inn.  It is why luck plays so large a role: the luck to hit the right editor’s desk on that day when he has an open slot, before it is filled by some other manuscript that may not be as good as yours, but was there first.  So some superior novels really do get shut out, from pure bad luck.

That is apart from the problem of marginally competent editors who may not be able to tell the sheep from the goats, or dishonest ones who have agendas other than merit, or publishers that want only big sellers regardless of their quality.  I like to liken it to the unfunny joke about the woman who says “You think I’m good for only one thing!” and the man’s cynical response “And not very good at that.”  All many publishers want is to make money—and they’re not very good at that.  So it’s a crap shoot in a partially corrupted game.  Welcome to Parnassus!

I got my break back in the 1970s and rode it to bestsellerdom.  Now, with my career stifled by that same refusal of editors even to read my material, I am trying for the end run around the closed shop: the movies.  Should I get famous again, through no merit of my own other than the luck to score with a movie, I think I’ll set up a small list of worthy novels to mention if any publisher should ask for a recommendation, and [his novel] would be among them.  I resolved before I ever made it as a writer to use any notoriety I developed for good purposes, and I am still trying to do that.  My investment in the self publisher Xlibris is part of that—organized self publishing did not exist before Xlibris got on the scene a decade ago—and my ongoing survey of electronic publishers is another.  I can’t promise anything—they might change their mind about the movie, or it might have no effect—but if the opportunity should come, and I am able to help you gain significant traditional print publication, all I ask is that in the future you remember what it was like to be on the outside looking in, and assist others as you find feasible.  The world already has too many selfish “I got mine; too bad for you” writers.  Maybe a little bit of reform will come.

You might think that my attitude would stir up resentment and opposition among publishers and “I got mine” writers.  Maybe so; I have a 40+ year history of trouble with both, remain a pariah in some circles, and I suspect there are still those who condemn me on grounds that can’t actually stand the light of day.  Even some “name” writers seem to have little concern for the truth, and publishers, like politicians, should never be completely trusted.  But I hear from many who appreciate my efforts, and that helps make it worthwhile.

I encountered a reference to the claustrophobic properties of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI.  I never suffered from claustrophobia, until I got into one of these machines.  So I devised a little mental distraction to help others through the process.  Imagine there was a wreck, and you are trapped under a semi-trailer truck loaded with anvils, dynamite, and chlorine, that is slowly settling, clank by clank.  There is the faint odor of spilled gasoline and burning insulation.  Don’t worry; you probably won’t suffer more than a few minutes before oblivion mercifully extinguishes you.  Happy MRI!  (No need to thank me for this mental device; it’s a public service.)

Obscure words dept.: I encountered reference to the exclamation “Yikes!”  So I looked it up, just to verify its meaning.  Not in the big dictionaries.  So I went to the ultimate, the Oxford English Dictionary, OED, and that does have it.  It says it’s an exclamation of astonishment dating from 1971.  And Dork, which OED doesn’t have, but Random House does: a stupid or vulgar person, or, vulgarly, the penis, dating from 1960.  Oh?  It was a popular word and concept in Westtown, my Quaker high school circa 1950.  The dork was the fourth finger of either hand, hanging loose while the other fingers were firm.  You would crack it stingingly against the back of the victim’s head, dorking him.  Symbolically smacking him with a swinging penis, an insult.  So naturally you had to dork him back, lest you be considered a dork in the modern sense, and there could be horrendous dork fights.  It was a matter of dubious teen-boy honor.  I doubt it was confined to my school, but if it was, then we were its origin a decade before the dictionary got wind of it, and its true nature has remained obscure until this moment.  It’s about time the world knew the truth.

That little floating plant I mentioned last column: my wife had a brainstorm and remembered a term: duckweed.  I looked it up, and it described ours exactly.  Then a reader identified it also.  Supposedly ducks like to eat it, and inadvertently spread it in their feathers.  Maybe we have invisible ducks.  Now it threatens to take over the whole of our pool, so when I dip out water to quench our plants in our Apull-Mayhem drought—we now live in a fire zone—I dip out some duck weed too.  That may not be enough, and I may have to take a net and scoop it wholesale.  I don’t mind having some, but I don’t want it to rule the world.

I have been getting some reactions to a couple of recent books.  Under a Velvet Cloak, the Nox novel, Incarnation of Immortality #8, has garnered several quite positive reactions, one seriously negative one, and one sensible center one that concluded that it’s okay as an individual novel, but not up to the standard of the others.  I think that’s accurate.  Alfred, my biography of my father, is not a commercial book, but is available at Xlibris where I self published it, and last statement indicated a dozen sales, royalties of $30.  Family reactions to that have been generally positive, and there has been some agreement with my thesis that he suffered from Asperger’s syndrome.  The second Relationships erotic stories volume has been on sale at PHAZE, but I have as yet no responses from readers.  The publisher has the third volume, and I have notes for stories to make up a fourth volume, when I get around to it.  I’m really enjoying those stories.  I regard myself as a natural story writer who got into novels for economic reasons, being a commercial writer.  Now as I sink slowly toward senescence, I am returning in my fashion to my roots.

About publishing: it seems it is in trouble, with flat sales that may become declining sales.  Now of course that’s partly self inflicted.  I like to say that just as the IQ of a mob is lower than that of any of its members, the IQ of a publisher is lower than that of any of its participants.  There are ways it seems feudal, with each outfit competing for a larger share of the diminishing pie without much regard for the welfare of the industry as a whole.  Editors seem to have little notion what readers actually want, or maybe they just don’t care.  Booksellers are wedded to their procedures, similarly careless of the desires of readers.  Consider the books put on display: our local Publix store nook has space for maybe 200 titles, but displays only a fraction of that, because instead of one book per space, they put out maybe a dozen copies of the #1 bestseller, and six on the #2, and so on.  Those copies sit there for weeks, mostly unsold until eventually remaindered, while heavy readers like my wife look in vain for anything worthwhile she hasn’t already read.  So usually she passes it up, frustrated, buying nothing.  She would buy more if they had a better variety of titles by better writers.  Why do they do it?  Because, as I understand it, those spots are for sale.  If the publisher buys ten spots, it gets ten spots, regardless what the readers want.  That will sell a few more copies of that title as reluctant readers are corralled with little choice, but they will seek elsewhere when they can.  And there’s the situation of the industry, not understanding why it is selling copies of pushed titles but losing readers.  Same way the airlines make things as complicated, annoying, and expensive for their patrons as they can, and wonder why they are alienating travelers.  Serious reform is needed, but the Neandertal bosses won’t change, so it’s likely to be too slow to save their sorry asses.  It should not be long before electronic readers emerge which are truly light, cheap, easy to read, with maybe a hundred different titles of the user’s choice in memory, selected from electronic publishers who actually care about the tastes of their readers, and the drift away from physical books will accelerate while the archaic physical book industry scratches its collective head in puzzlement.  Maybe the industry is autistic, and can’t relate to the needs of real human folk.

Our well pump burned out, meaning another thousand dollar expense because we really can’t do without water.  I had our sun dial sitting on top of the well housing, and when I went to put it back, after, I tried to set it on Daylight Saving Time.  I discovered that it is locked on standard time and couldn’t be set an hour ahead.  It’s just a molded one piece unit I thought I could turn an hour’s worth.  Not so.  I was amazed, but it’s so.  Check yours; you’re likely to make the same discovery.

We got a slew and a half of returned bounced email messages we hadn’t sent.  Some spam outfit borrowed our address.  Not our computer, which is offline 23½ hours of the day, just our address, faked.  So if you got spammed by us, it wasn’t us.  Yes we complained to the server, and it took them a while to understand.  What, this never happened to anyone before?  Or did they just not want to be bothered?  Not all the deadheads are in publishing, it seems.

I saw a reference to Piers Plowman, the subject of a classic poem.  He symbolizes the virtues of hard work, honesty, and fairness.  I have no problem with those.  Dare I say that the world could use more Pierses?  No, I’d get crucified.

On Mayhem 27, 2008, a milestone: acquaintance Ed Howdershelt, whom I have known for 15 years, drove up with a friend and installed a Xandros-compatible modem for my system.  Now I can finally go online without having to use the Windows system.  I, naturally, was too ignorant to manage such a thing myself.  I don’t have it set up for email; that will still go through the Windows system my wife uses.  But future updates of my ongoing Survey of Electronic Publishers and Services will be done here, so I won’t have to constantly copy the file back and forth and wrestle with a system that doesn’t understand why I don’t use the QWERTY keyboard and keeps trying to switch me back to it.  There’s nothing like executing a command when suddenly in the wrong keyboard.  I should now also be able to Google for research from this system.  I must say that I have found the combination of Google and Wikipedia to be a real pleasure.  You see, a decade ago when I lost my market for Historical Fiction, I let my researcher go—no, he’s doing fine elsewhere—and I feared I would never be able to match his expertise doing it alone today.  But in the interim these online features came into being, and they are simply great.  So I am getting there, as I slowly complete my final GEODYSSEY novel Climate of Change.  These are invaluable tools for this purpose.  I’m sure they are similarly useful for other researchers.

I don’t pay a lot of attention to TV.  I’ll put on the TV news at 6:30 PM and largely ignore it as I focus on my writing, and we have it on in the evening, when I largely ignore it as I focus on reading a science magazine.  But I do pick up on somethings peripherally.  One is CSI Miami.  No, not the story line; in my secret heart all the clones of the original CSI are fakes with characters feebly imitating the originals.  Not that I would say that in public; I’m sure they all have their points.  Sometimes I pick up briefly on the fine sweatered points of their females.  Why aren’t there bosoms like that in real life?  But CSI Miami gets a larger share of my attention because of its photography.  It’s beautiful.  Just about every scene is carefully framed with a pastel background.  You could hang it on the wall as a painting.  I was an aspiring artist before I was an aspiring writer, and I still regard myself as an artist with words, and I notice.  There is an artist in the CSI Miami works.  More power to you, sir.

I run three times a week for exercise.  It’s only a 1.6 mile round trip along our long drive to pick up the newspapers, but I do it at my best feasible velocity, trusting that this is good for muscles, lungs, and heart.  There are stops along the way, so I’m not sure exactly what my speed is, but probably around seven miles per hour.  I was faster when younger, but I’m at an age where others are kicking the bucket with increasing frequency.  When I had some foot trouble in 2006 I had to go to larger running shoes–size 13—which feel like boats.  They remind me of the supposed remark by a shoe salesman when a woman gets large shoes: “And do you want the oars with those boats, ma’am?”  If I were in the market for a woman, other things being equal (not that they ever are), I would look at her feet and take the one with sensible shoes: sneakers, loafers, slippers, sandals, squared off boots, whatever, not those ridiculous high heels that give women ten times the foot problems that men have.  Women think they have more sense than men, but the case is questionable as long as they prop themselves up on painful stilts.  Anyway, those boats, uh, shoes, slowed me down so that my running times were 18-20 minutes.  But as I got the hang of them I started getting into the 17-18 minute range.  Then in March, for the first time this year, I started running under 17 minutes, sometimes even under 16:30.  I knew it wouldn’t last; for one thing, the heat of spring and summer vitiates my velocity.  But it did last, right through Apull and Mayhem, with my fastest run 16:01.  How could this be?  So I looked for any changes in my lifestyle, and found one: I had a bottle of the amino acid L-Arginine pills I had bought to try for erectile dysfunction.  When that didn’t work, I settled on 1/8 Viagra pills, which do work.  (There was even a seminar on “Viagra—10 years later,” in Orlando, May 19, 2008.  My daughter received an invitation, as a newsperson.)  The remaining bottle, 60-70 pills, was on my shelf, so what the hell, I took one a day just to use them up.  And that’s when my run series started.  Maybe it’s coincidence that my runs averaged a minute faster, but it does say that L-Arginine relates to exercise.  So I bought another bottle, for now.  What the heck, it’s cheap.

Perhaps related: Stuff comes in the mail.  One is The Sex Patch, guaranteed to make your penis start to swell within seconds and be rock-hard for four hours or more.  Seems to cost about six dollars a patch.  There’s a version for women, too, to arouse her and make her eager.  Another is a chewable erectile tablet, which makes your penis hard in a few minutes, for as little as a dollar per, if you buy 50.  Why don’t I quite trust these ads?

When I got my modem, I tested it by Googling a number of names, including my own.  I decided not to glance beyond the first ten entries of the almost 800,000 on me.  But not every name was there.  There are bigots who say “Some of my best friends are black.”  Well, my best friend, when I was in first grade, really was black, an I’m curious about him.  His name was Craig Work, and he had an IQ of 180, which is flirting with genius.  He was quite a guy, and he did much to make my hellish first grade boarding school experience survivable.  What became of him?  So what did Google find?  “Does Jenny Craig work?”  I realized it was hopeless, unless there is a way to make Google orient on a specific name and nothing else.

Someone forwarded a circular to me, an excerpt from a new book by Lee Iococca, who rescued Chrysler from doom.  “We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff…”  Well, yes, even if it is a mixed metaphor.  But it’s easier to call names than to really solve a problem.  What does he propose?  Essentially, find a strong leader.  I agree that would help, but even so, the remaining clueless bozos would filibuster to prevent any genuine reforms.  Even if reforms were accomplished, in a few years a promise-everything liar would get in and mess it all up.  We have seen it before.  We have too many clueless bozos in the voting population.  I remember debating with a Reagan supporter, circa 1980.  I asked him how Reagan could cut taxes, increase military spending, and balance the budget as he promised.  “I believe he can” was the reply.  Faith can be marvelous.  Then Reagan got in, and cut taxes, increased spending, and tripled the national debt.  That was reality, but conservatives seem never to learn.  Later Democrats got in and undid some of the damage.  Then came 2000, and that same agenda got in again, only worse.  As long as so many voters believe in fantasy, we’ll have a problem.

Another Internet essay commented on a movie, “Zeitgeist.”  The word means the Spirit of the Age.  The thesis seems to be that once the United States of America was respected, but not any more.  “We humans are myth-driven creatures.”  We have a three part myth of God, Country, and Prosperity.  Thus we believe in Jesus Christ, that ours is the greatest nation that ever existed, and capitalism can make us all rich.  This justifies enormous disparity in wealth, justifies war, and justifies atrocities against heathen non-believers.  And we are on the verge of a full-blown police state.  Unless we recognize what threatens and change course, soon.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL reports that political imprisonment, “disappearances” and torture continue, seemingly at an accelerated rate.  Yes, in America too, to our shame.  Because too many clueless bozos voted in politicians without conscience or any real appreciation of the American Constitution.  It reminds me of a card game.  I don’t know its name, but it is simple to play.  The object is to prevent any tens or higher showing, or any two cards adding up to ten, like six and four or seven and three or five and five or eight and two or nine and one.  The ace is a one.  Shuffle the deck and deal them out singly, face up, each card in a new pile.  See a Queen?  Quick, deal another card to cover her up.  See a six and a four?  Cover each up with a new card.  By the time the deck ends, with a number of face-up piles, you’d figure there would be few if any tens.  You’d figure wrong: all of them add up to tens.  Try it and see.  Okay, see a bad politician?  Vote him out!  But in the end, the bad ones dominate.  The deck is stacked.  Partly it’s deception, stupidity, cheating, and the corrupting effect of power.  Mainly, it’s that we are an imperfect species with skewed values.  We have the capability to be rational, but don’t necessarily exercise it.

I was curious how many books Andre Norton had published in her lifetime, as she may be one of the few who have had more than I.  So I Googled her and got a bibliography.  It goes only through 1998, says it lists 165, but when I counted the titles, it was 178, and I suspect she did some more recently, and some collaborations.  So she does have more, as I am now about about 135.  Of course I have a number of quarter million word novels, so my total published wordage could be more.

My correspondence with the minister continues, perhaps to his discomfort.  This time I said, in part, “I should think that you who believe in God would also believe that God put in place certain procedures to automatically update the cosmos, among them evolution, and would not violate the protocols by practicing magic.  That would  suggest that the original system was fouling up.  So as I see it, those who believe  in the supernatural don’t quite trust God to have done his job properly.  Prayer would be another example: the idea that God is so vain he needs constant praise from flatterers, or that anyone should be able to gain favors by asking for them instead of working for them.  Why should God violate his rules of procedure for such selfish loafers?  I think he would be disgusted by their attitude.”

Last time I mentioned the parody song, “I Dream of Brownie With the Light Blue Jeans.”  Betsy Kane sent me a link, and I learned that it’s an actual song that was recorded by Spike Jones.  Brownie turns out to be a beloved pet dog.

Another reader who attended The School in Rose Valley, where I was from 1945-47, covering grades 5-7 (I took 3 years to get through first grade, so was still making up time), remembered me, and sent a copy of the school magazines LEAVES, which I edited for an issue or two.  Volume 12, No. 2, March 1947.  It was basically a mimeo production, 25 pages, with articles, reports, and stories by the students.  Yes I had a story therein, “The Rose Valley Witch,” about a witch who stole a child and zoomed off on her broom.  Fortunately a quick-thinking boy followed her on his scooter and squirted her with a water pistol and peppered her with his beanshooter, rescuing the child.  Perhaps that foreshadowed my later career in fantasy.  Critics may say that nothing I have written since measures up to that one.

Carla Rothacker discussed my prior comment on how many breasts a centaur might have.  She concludes that the front breasts would be used, with the mother crouched down for the very young foal, later standing as the foal grew taller.  So she wouldn’t need a rear udder, and there would be no point in having an unused one.  That makes sense to me.

I received a flier on a prospective Death with Dignity law, to allow mentally competent, terminally ill adults with six months or less to live to obtain and self administer life-ending medication.  That makes sense to mo, but I don’t think it goes far enough.  What about the person who is almost totally paralyzed, in chronic pain, with no prospect for recovery?  Should he be forced to live decades in that prison of a body if he doesn’t want to?  What about the person whose life work is finished, his family has died, and he does not care to live longer in that bleak aftermath?  Or the one who can survive, but only with prohibitively costly medication that will bankrupt his whole family, leaving those he loves with no resources?  There may be rational cases for ending one’s life at a time of one’s choice.  Maybe a pill: obtained by court order, after making a persuasive case.  Take it, and in one hour there comes a jolt, maybe a bad catch in the breath and a leap of the heart that can’t be ignored.  At that time he can take the antidote and recover, if he has changed his mind, as some well might.  Or maybe the deathpill is in two parts which must be taken an hour apart or it won’t work.  So after the first hour he can take the second part and fade comfortably out, or not take it, and live.  Thus it requires a repeated positive decision to die.  Now before religious folk harangue me with “moral” objections, let me remind them that a fast, efficient, readily available death device already exists: the gun.  Put it to your head and pull the trigger.  It’s messy, but it works, and there need be no legal preparations.  The Second Amendment guarantees the right for any adult to possess this device.  I just think the pill would be a better way.

We live in the forest, on our small tree farm.  We’ve had no rain to speak of in six weeks, and it’s a drought.  (Correction: the day I edited this, Sunday JeJune 1^th, we got a generous two tenths of an inch of rain.  Glory be!)  Droughts make us nervous, because of the danger of fire.  Any idiot can toss a lighted cigarette out a car window and start a fire; we lost a number of small trees that way in the 1980s.  But the larger risk is our house and lives.  So we’re hoping for rain soon.  We have three bird baths, and they get good business in a drought.  One is simple a circular pan I put on the ground, so that forest creatures can drink if need be.  Some days it is untouched; other days it can drop a gallon.  I am curious what could drink a gallon, but never see it happening.  Meanwhile our house serves in its fashion: gopher tortoises have their burrows beside the foundation and graze in our yard, chimney swifts raise families in our chimney, frogs live in our returned-to-nature swimming pool.  Wrens nest on the porches.  But this week the ways of nature got too close for comfort: Caroll and Lina Wren had five nestlings beside the pool, but then Jean Owl spotted the nest and cleaned it out.  We tried to shoo the owl away, but she kept returning.  Sigh.

Daughter Cheryl—I like to remark how we old fogies who never accomplished anything in life live through our children, so this is our Daughter the Newspaper Woman—bought a Smart Car.  It’s a cute little thing that looks as if someone took a cleaver and chopped off the ends of it, so there’s just the center section, big enough for two plus bags of groceries.  But it has a safety feature a person needs to beware of: after about ten minutes unoccupied it locks itself.  She had left the key in it as she worked nearby, and got locked out.  Ouch.  That is impossible to do with our Prius; it won’t lock if the key is inside.  I tried it, just to make sure.

There’s a new service on the Internet: Wikileaks, which guarantees anonymity via computer technology so that anyone in any repressive regime can report the truth without retaliation.  “The Onion Router—TOR for short—feeds the information through random twists, then erases the “footprints.”  So will it make the truth available, or will propagandists also use it to hopelessly confuse the issues?  Some “leakers” may be intelligence agencies hoping to catch whistle-blowers in the act.  So this may require some settling in.

There was a Stamp Out Hunger day, when folk could leave non-perishable food items by mailbox or in post office for the needy.  We no longer have our dog, so I collected sealed cans of dogfood and took them in.  Are they acceptable?  There was no one to ask.  If not, they may simply be thrown out.  But it seems to me that some needy folk may have needy pets, so this should help.  I hope so.

Commentary in NEW SCIENTIST on “Our Mirror Morality.”  We have mirror neurons that activate when we observe something happening, such as someone smiling, yawning, weeping, or grimacing, so that we experience similar emotions.  This undermines moral relativism, which holds that there are no universal truths about right and wrong, only different social traditions.  It suggests that similar values are linked to the involuntary modeling of others generated by the mirror neurons.  Moral judgment may thus be hard wired and universal.  There are strong links between mirror neurons and language capacity, our chief social tool.  In sum, this may be the physical basis for empathy, one of the defining qualities of the human kind.  As I see it, empathy enables the arts, which are typical of humans and of no other Earthly creatures.

Do you need body parts?  A review of the book Body Shopping by Donna Dickenson suggests a horror.  Surgeons pillage dead bodies for bones, ligaments, heart valves, organs, and other valuable tissues.  Funeral directors may be paid a thousand dollars for a corpse, and the parts are resold for about $13,000 per body.  “Some companies boast that one cadaver can reap over $200,000.”  They stuff the bodies with plumbing piping to deceive relatives.  Body parts may be taken from people with AIDS, cancer, hepatitis, and other serious illnesses, in the US and abroad.  It seems the black market in body parts is here to stay.  I had a bone graft when I got my last tooth implant; now I wonder uncomfortably where that came from.

Are you shy?  You may suffer from social anxiety disorder, or social phobia.  The prospect of speaking up in a class or at a meeting can be so frightening that some folk will try to avoid such situations entirely.  But it is treatable.  People with it may be gregarious and outgoing in certain contexts.  But when they are out of their comfort zones they can be in trouble.  Talk therapy and medication may ameliorate it.  I know it’s possible to improve, because in the past I had some real problems, and I still would rather visit the dentist than travel alone.  I learned to abolish stage fright and handle audiences of any size.  I seldom attend conventions, but this is not because I have any problem being a public figure.  Anyone who has interacted with me at a convention has found me to be at ease and pertinent.  I simply don’t like to travel, and do like to write, so I normally stay home.  When I signed books with collaborator Julie Brady, Dream a Little Dream, she was inexperienced, so I handled it, setting things up for her so that she was able to be confidently public.  Later she said it was the best day of her life.  But if I were in an alien city, alone, I’d be the one needing help.

One of my favorite mysteries is the Higgs Boson.  They call it the God Particle, but that’s euphemism for the original description: The Goddam Particle.  It was postulated by physicist Peter Higgs, but it has never been spotted, and there is no certainty that it exists.  But it is needed to vindicate the Standard Model of physics, and there may be theoretical hell to pay of the God particle does not exist.  It is the thing that is supposed to bring mass to all other objects.  In that sense it’s a field that permeates the universe.  Now I have a problem with the notion that, say, a baseball will have no mass unless an invisible particle carries it to the ball, but I’m not a physicist.  My vague understanding is that when anything moves, it encounters resistance by the Higgs field, which may be a reincarnation of the ether they thought Einstein had abolished.  If you wade through water, you feel resistance.  If you wade through air you feel less resistance.  So Higgs may be a medium like that, and the degree of resistance encountered by a given object is the mass.  A cannonball encounters more resistance than a tennis ball.  So maybe it makes sense.  I understand that new powerful colliders will be coming on line soon, and they may finally spy the Higgs particle.  Then at last we’ll know.  Stay tuned.

I believe I have commented on this before, but still love it when I encounter it: “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”  Seneca the Younger.  So when you see a politician pushing religion, be wary; it’s more likely to be a tool than a belief.

Outrage: Lilly Ledbetter discovered decades later that male associates were being paid far more than she, for doing the same work.  About a thousand dollars a month.  So she sued and won, but the company appealed, and the Supreme Court reversed it, saying she should have sued at the outset, decades before.  This despite the Court’s knowledge that she had no way of knowing, then; only an anonymous tip had clued her in much later.  So Congress worked on a bill to address this obvious wrong—and Senate Republicans filibustered to block it.  I wonder how any Republican can look himself in the mirror.  This makes it clear that they are not merely overlooking such unfairness, they are actively supporting it.

Much has been made of Obama’s racist pastor, Jeremiah Wright.  But little has been made of McCain’s racist pastor, John Hagee, who says the Catholic Church is The Great Whore who has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust, and that God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins.  If candidates are to be blamed for the words of their pastors, let’s be even handed about it.  Apart from that, we need to take a hard look at the way religious leaders are compounding the problems of the planet, by preaching the gospel of be fruitful and multiply—when perhaps the root cause of most of the world’s problems is overpopulation.  We need to reduce the birth rate, not increase it.

What’s the truth about inflation?  There is evidence that the official figures are significantly understating it.  I remember tricks from my own experience.  For example, when we had our Volkswagen Bug, there were several prices for license tags, the bottom ones being D for Diminutive, and T for Tiny.  Ours was a T.  They did not raise the fees for a given category, but they did eliminate the lowest category, so that thereafter there was no T and we had to pay the higher rates for D.  So officially there was no price rise, but we were paying more.  It happens with groceries, too; the cheapest brand is discontinued, so you have to buy a more expensive one, while officially there has been no change.  The official tallies may arrange not to count the faster rising things.  Do they count paperback books?  In my day they were a universal 25 cents.  Now they are, what, eight dollars?  That would be 32 times the original price.  Gasoline was 29 cents a gallon.  Now it’s pushing four dollars.  That’s over 12 times.  Once you could practically buy out the grocery store for twenty dollars.  Now you need more like a hundred dollars, and you won’t be living rich.  But the authorities want you to think inflation is low, so they arrange the figures to match.  They change the basis for calculation.  They claim it is something like four percent a year, when actually it may be closer to ten percent.  A published graph shows superimposed lines of official vs. estimated real inflation for the period 1980-2008.  The official shows  it currently at about 4.5% while the real is just under 12%.  Exactly.  Perhaps related: it now costs more to make a penny than it’s worth: 1.26 cents.  Ditto for a nickel: 7.7 cents.  Four cents for a dime, ten cents for a quarter, 16 cents for a dollar coin, so those remain profitable.  In 2007 they produced 7.4 billion pennies and 1.2 billion nickels.  That would mean a loss of several billion cents.

Columnist Bill Maxwell had an article on stuttering.  It seems he was and is a stutterer.  But he learned to control it, though it was a private hell.  He avoids radio and television.  He reports that more than three million Americans, mostly males, stutter.  Famous people, like Winston Churchill, James Earl Jones, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Darwin, Theodore Roosevelt, and Aristotle were stutterers.  Okay, Maxwell is a good writer, so obviously it has little if anything to do with intellect.  But it is my understanding that stutters can chant or sing, so if they have to, they can sing their messages.  Would a simple sustained note do it?  It would be better than being unable to get the words out.

Are older writers getting screwed?  Of course, because just about all writers are screwed.  But in this case the question is age discrimination.  It’s not supposed to happen, but it does.  AARP reports that Larry Mintz, age 58, former writer for shows like Mork & Mindy and The Nanny, has filed an age discrimination suit against the Hollywood establishment, for himself and 150 other writers.  They will give statistical data to demonstrate a pattern of discrimination against writers over age 40.  I wish them well, being 73 myself and not inclined to go gently into that good night.  Writing ability, relevance and reliability are all that should count.

But speaking of getting screwed: the statistics of women getting raped in the military are horrendous.  The indications are that more than 40% are victims of sexual assault, and almost 30 percent report being raped during their military service, some by their superior officers or even their physicians.  During a routine gynecological exam, one female soldier was attacked and raped by the military physician.  Naturally many are afraid to report it, because retaliation can be physically deadly in the military, apart from wiping out any career prospects.  These women are trying to serve their country, and this is their reward?  I’m a man, and I like women and sex, but this is outrageous and I’m disgusted.  There should be serious courts-martial to rout this out.   It’s the abusers, not the victims, who should have their careers ruined.

About the universe: why is there something, rather than nothing?  Cosmologist/theologian Michael Heller, 72, won the Templeton Prize for addressing this question, but the article doesn’t give his answer.  Adolf Grunbaum addresses the subject in the June/July 2008 issue of FREE INQUIRY, saying it is perhaps philosophy’s most profound and disturbing question.  But as far as I can tell, his complicated discussion does not provide an answer.  However, this is merely Part 1; maybe he’ll answer it in Part 2.  Certainly it’s a question that bugs me.  My conjecture: there must be some problem even conceiving of nothingness.  Who is doing the conceiving?  Can there be nothing if there is nobody to appreciate it?  Can it even be imagined if there is no mind to imagine it?  So it might be a paradox that requires something to exist, if only a slight echo of thought energy.  And the tiniest of echoes could account for all the disorderly matter and energy in the cosmos.

Ends & odds: they have invented a device to repel teens.  It’s the Mosquito, a device that generates a shrill, piercing noise that only teens can hear.  Older folk, with degenerated hearing, can’t hear it, so aren’t repelled.  PETA—People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—is offering one million dollars for the first person to bring test-tube meat to the market.  They hope that by 2012 it will be possible to grow meat that isn’t run through animals.  It would look and taste the same and maybe have the same nutrition, but no animals would have to be killed.  But some PETA members are repulsed by the thought of eating animal tissue, regardless.  I’m interested, but would prefer to grow substitute meat via bacterial or fungal cultures.  We’ll see.  And Columnist Robyn Blumner has an excellent commentary titled “You bet I’m bitter.”  She has watched our country get hijacked by self serving incompetents without much conscience, who systematically void the Constitution, waste our former wealth, destroy our health system, manipulate data on climate change in favor of greed, dismantle the separation between church and state, practice torture, and trash our global reputation.  She concludes “You bet I’m bitter.  And when more than 80 percent of Americans think that we’re on the wrong track, I’m not the only one.”  Amen, sister, amen.

Another example requires an explanatory diversion: My blowout with once important editor Dave Hartwell, that arguably in the end may have cost me some key sales and him his career, occurred when he implied in a fanzine review that my novel Race Against Time was racist. I sharply refuted that, and he subsequently blacklisted me at three publishers because of that, until he lost his position because, his publisher said with delicious unconscious irony, he had been unable to develop best selling writers such as Piers Anthony. It seems his publisher didn’t know he had been blacklisting me. I think it served him right; he was wrong first to move a fanzine quarrel into a pro arena, showing that he cared more about a private grudge than about doing his job, which was an ethical issue; and second to blacklist a developing bestselling writer, which was a tactical career error. Evidently he did have a thing about the matter of race, and was on the wrong side of it. After he lost his position he wanted to kiss and make up with me; I didn’t bother to respond. I am a bad person to cross, as some others in Parnassus have learned, because I don’t quarrel capriciously and don’t forget or readily forgive. Remember, I was the one who was generally blacklisted for six years in the 70s because I protested being cheated by a publisher; it’s a sensitive matter. Think of the wife whose errant husband wants to return to her only after his mistress dumps him. That’s too late. Hartwell had a right to do an ignorant review, and I had a right to respond in the same venue. He should have let it go at that, instead of trying to send me a message that was likely to bring a return message he would not like. I think he was the last of my blacklisters to fall, none of them by any direct action of mine, but there’s nevertheless a certain cosmic justice. I remain militant, in the manner of one who manages to avoid the bullet aimed at his head; that person prefers to see justice done. Anyway, Craig Work never spoke of race, but my contact with him surely had a profound impact on my outlook, as this peripheral discussion may hint.

And in due course I got an email response: yes! Craig was delighted to hear from me, 65 years later. He remembered me and my sister. He was intrigued by my Web site, and may set up one himself. He belongs to a Unitarian-Universalist church. Small world! I have been married 52 years to the daughter of a U-U minister, who married us in his church. I’m not religious, but when you marry a minister’s daughter, some concessions are in order. Craig’s a musician who accompanied Harry Belafonte in night clubs, radio, and television. He is an athlete, winning four national championships in handball. He is a mathematician who was on the team that programmed computers for the Apollo flights and the Space Shuttle. Drafted for the Korean war, he taught grades 1-12 for the Army in Europe. So it is evident that he was always vastly smarter and more talented than I, yet he says he is slightly jealous of me for my writing. It is an irony of existence that the race (no pun) goes not always to the swift. He has written a memoir for his grandchildren. So I mentioned my ongoing electronic publishing survey; maybe there’s something there for him.

Well, now. If my passing reference to one failed search for a person resulted in belated success, thanks to my readers who generally know more than I do, should I try it again? Maybe so. Back in the 1930s my parents’ marriage was troubled from the outset; they were perfectly matched in religion, philosophy, intelligence, age and so on, and it didn’t matter that he was American and she English (a generation later I, English, married an American girl, and that worked out), but their differing personalities made their association a disaster. They didn’t even have sex until months after marriage, when his psychologist told him to stop stalling and do his duty. I was the result. It did not improve things. They soon went to Spain to do relief work feeding hungry children in the Spanish civil war of 1936-39. They tried to bring the children—my sister and me—along, but it was too dangerous and awkward, so we were returned to England, where our English grandparents hired a nanny to care for us, per the British way. It was just a passing convenience for them. But I came of age, as it were, in that year or two with the nanny. My earliest memories at age two or three are of her. I thought she was my mother. Then when I was four it was time to rejoin my parents in Spain, who were then two people on my peripheral awareness. “Are you going?” I asked the nanny. She said no. And thereby occurred the first and perhaps greatest emotional separation of my life. I don’t think I ever fully got over it. It has been said that a happy childhood interrupted by circumstance is what makes a writer, “the gift that keeps giving.” That was surely the root of my subsequent writing career.

Ever since, I have wondered about the nanny. How did she do in life? Did she care for other children? Did she remember me? She was probably just a teen girl hired to keep the children occupied. But to me she was the world. I understand there were two of them, Scottish sisters, who perhaps alternated in caring for my sister and me. They certainly did a good job, because it was the happiest point in my early life. Maybe what a child needs is someone who pays constant and supportive attention. It’s a critical time for the development of the brain, and I may owe such intelligence and empathy as I have to her care. Her name I believe was Bunty Stewart. That’s not a typo; it’s spelled with a T. When I Googled her I did find the name, but I’m not at all sure it’s the right person. The first entry says Actor: The Jade Heart. There are several movie references. I think that must be someone else. So the search foundered, the name perhaps obliterated by a more famous occupant. I don’t even know if she’s alive; she would be 88 to 92 by now, I think. So it may be a lost cause, regardless. But if any readers want to tackle it, welcome.

It’s the movie season, and we saw some. Wife #1 and Daughter #2 essentially make the viewing decisions, and for some reason they’re not much interested in the sexy stuff I am. So we saw Prince Caspian, which was okay but leaning more to war and violence than characterization, with just a hint of potential romance stifled. By the skewed standard of our contemporary culture, that makes it suitable for children. Me, I’d rather make love than make war, but I am evidently out of step. We saw The Incredible Hulk, which also was supremely violent, but with intriguing aspects. We saw Get Smart, which was fun, and I think the new actor for the role played it perfectly, and the new Agent 99 was cute. I especially like the dance sequence, wherein 99 does a fantastic and sexy dance with the host, while Smart selects a woman twice his mass and by damn makes it work. She’s not a total foil, either; at the end she gives the other girls the finger. And Wall-E, the best of the lot, about the best animation I’ve seen since Cars. I love the way Wall-E is obviously male, being squared off, dirty, rugged, and not phenomenally bright, while Eve-A (I may have the spelling wrong) is obviously female, being white, rounded, smooth, clean, with gentle doe-eyes, and she floats. I like the background concepts, such as Earth overwhelmed by garbage, the surviving humans so perfectly cared for in space that they are all nearly terminally fat and indolent, and the show run by the auto-pilot, who doesn’t want to give it up. I think it’s a gentle parody of a sequence in the classic movie 2001. Regardless, man is made to be in harness; give him everything without challenge, and he becomes a slug, pretty much as shown. No lecturing in the movie; it’s just the background, but obviously carefully thought out. It’s a great job.

And I watched a video. I buy, watch, and save videos, mostly VHS but increasingly DVD, and expect to watch the best ones again. But years go by and I’m always busy on something else, being a workaholic. But finally I had an afternoon free, and I re-watched Starship Troopers, based on Robert A Heinlein’s novel of the same title. We skipped it in the theaters, because it was apparent that his dark, brooding, thoughtful book had been debased to a shoot-em-up war with big bugs. But in 1999 I got it as a reduced-price video, being a chronic sucker for sales, watched it, and found it to be a nicely done juvenile in its own right. So this time, re-watching it after nine years, I was impressed with the tightness of the formula and the unremitting narrative tension. It just never lets go. As a writer, I admire that. Sure, there’s abuse of coincidence, such as when the protagonist’s family is wiped out back on Earth by an enemy meteor right when he’s talking with them via video. But formula is like that; you just have to accept it and appreciate it for what it is, an artificially fast moving story. I like the scene with the communal shower, where all the boys and girls wash together, thinking nothing of it; that’s a potent commentary on the future society. I note the tight military discipline, a hallmark of Heinlein, who was a military man before getting washed out, I think, by tuberculosis. Writing was his second love; he missed the military career, and it showed. He evidently believed that military service should be a requirement for citizenship. At least the movie is true to that. I like the way it showed the importance of using a knife despite having guns and spaceships galore, and has that knife make the difference in the terminal sequence. That’s good writing. So yes, this one was worth re-watching.

So I watched another video: Scent of a Woman. I bought it in 1995 and watched it, and regard it as my #2 video of all time, following What Dreams May Come. (I suspect my best theater-watched movie would be Titanic.) But the tape is getting old, and these things don’t keep forever, and I realized that I had better watch it again soon if I was going to. So I did. The story is of Charlie, a high school senior at a fancy college prep school in New England who happens to witness a prank that infuriates the headmaster. Pressure is put on Charlie to snitch on the perpetrators, which he doesn’t want to do. Meanwhile he gets a weekend job accompanying a blind retired Lt. Colonel with a sarcastic attitude. That turns out to be quite an adventure, as the Colonel means to visit New York, do all the fun things he has wanted to, and then shoot himself. There’s a lovely dance scene as the blind Colonel teaches a young woman the tango, turning out to be an excellent dancer. And when he drives an expensive Ferrari at speed. And when he comes unexpectedly to serve in loco parentis for Charlie at his hearing, and gives a speech that totally changes the picture. I remember how the headmaster was about to pronounce sentence, and the Colonel said “Not so fast!” and went on to lecture the school on the values it was inculcating: did it really want to teach students to betray their companions for personal benefit? Well, this time around there was no “Not so fast,” and the Colonel’s speech was anything but eloquent; it was replete with gutter terms. Memory is treacherous. But the essence and result were the same. Is it as good a movie as I remembered? Perhaps not, but still one well worth re-watching.

More contemporary movies: Mama Mia. This is a musical romp, a lot of fun. It does many of the songs of ABBA, a name I understand was formed from the initials of the names of four founders, a great group in its day. Unfortunately it did not include “Fernando,” which for my taste may be the best popular song ever recorded. I remember seeing ABBA on TV once, and they sang that song. Their two female singers were pretty girls, blonde and brunette, and when they sang together it was simply delightful. Anyway, the story line is that a girl about to be married does not know which of three men is her father, so she invites them all to the wedding. This does not please her mother, who wants never to see any of them again. Not all the singers are great, but there’s a folksy quality that makes it fun regardless. And finally the Batman movie, The Dark Knight. This was fully of sound and fury, signaling not much. As with the coyote and roadrunner cartoons, there’s always something afoot to get foiled, but not much of a resolution. They are trying to clean up Gotham City, preferring to do it without Batman’s help if they can, and the Joker is constantly messing it up. Where the Joker gets the resources to do such massive mischief is unclear; for example he blows up a hospital, which must have taken a huge pile of explosives and manpower without being observed. He abducts and booby traps a leading citizen and his girlfriend, in different places, so that Batman much choose which one to save. He saves the man, and the girl, whom Batman also loved, dies. Was there a point to this?

I read books. City of the Beast, by Michael Moorcock, another of the PLANET STORIES reissues. The original title was Warrior of Mars, which was more relevant. There’s something about publishers that makes them change good titles to inferior ones, apparently just because they can. It reminds me of Robert Heinlein’s remark that after an editor pisses on a manuscript he likes the taste better and he publishes it. This novel is a conscious emulation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series, full of unlikely adventure on a neighboring planet. It is worth remembering that out of such junk developed our modern science fiction and fantasy genres. Genres, like people, have their wild youths. So this is fun, but hardly deep.

Then I read a relative heavyweight: the manuscript The Ride, by Erinna Chen. This has its special story. Here, let me run the introduction I wrote for it, indented so readers can skip over it if so minded.

Introduction:

Piers Anthony

Erinna was supposed to mow the lawn that day. Instead she went bicycle riding with her friends. She was fifteen, after all. And got struck by a car. As she lay beside the road with compound fractures, half delirious, she decided she would write a letter to her favorite author of the time, Piers Anthony. Me. That was May 29, 1988.

But one thing led to another, and it was twenty years before she actually did so. Maybe that was just as well, because I was busy at the time. The day before, my wife’s birthday, we had moved with our two horses and three dogs to our new house on our small Florida tree farm. That day and the next we were in the throes of settling in, setting up computer, washing machine, cabinets and such. The last day of the month I tackled backlogged correspondence, typing 26 letters. Meanwhile my career writing continued. I was editing my novel And Eternity, the seventh in the Incarnations of Immortality fantasy series, featuring the replacement of an inattentive God with an activist woman.

In June I started writing Through the Ice, a collaboration with a young man who had died in a car accident at age 16, leaving his promising novel incomplete. His friends had asked me to finish it, and now I was doing so.

The following year I would begin a one-way correspondence with 12 year old Jenny, who was hit by a drunk driver in December 1988, spent three months in a coma, and who was roused from it by my first letter to her, sent at the behest of her mother. That was when they learned she was completely paralyzed except for a couple of fingers and a toe. She couldn’t even talk. That story was to be told in my Xanth novel Isle of View, with the character Jenny Elf, and in Letters to Jenny, publishing the first year of my letters to her. In 2008 I am still writing weekly letters, as she remains paralyzed. So it seems that period was a time of devastating car accidents for my young readers.

It may not have helped that this was the summer I taught our younger daughter to drive, preparatory for her departure to college. I had had a rollover at age 22 when I took my eye off the road to verify an address and found myself sailing off a six foot drop-off. I wondered, in mid-air, whether I would regain consciousness after landing. As it happened, I suffered only a bruised shoulder and a badly battered car, but knew I was lucky. I have never been a careless driver since, having learned my lesson well. I remain hyper-aware how suddenly deadly a moving car can be, and always use the seat belt. And as far as I know, my daughter has never had an accident, other than getting rear-ended at a stop, so it seems I taught her well enough.

Meanwhile Erinna’s experience became a book, tracing her slow recovery, her long relationship with Anthony (no relation to me), and her development as a person. I read it and found it interesting, thoughtful, and wholly worthwhile. No, not just because it mentions me. Because Erinna’s experience relates to the others of my experience at the time, mentioned above, with other details I never thought of. She turned sixteen in traction, in a partial body cast, her legs locked wide apart, no underwear (it couldn’t be fit over the cast) for any passing male or female to contemplate. When she started walking again, on crutches, after months off her feet, at one point children stared at her emaciated right leg. So her friend Nancy said loudly “Erinna, tell me again, HOW BIG WAS THE SHARK?” That awed the kids. Friends can be great.

The narrative is centered on her accident and grueling recovery, interspersed with incidents of her life before and after. Such as sex education. Age 5 with the neighbor boy: “If you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.” “Why?” “Because then we can go inside and watch TV.” The author remarks reminiscently “Already at age five I was agreeing to trade a glimpse of my naked body for something I wanted.” Age 11, visiting New Zealand relatives with her brother, with her vociferous grandmother in a public restaurant. Grandma talked loudly of her own sexual escapades, and of “leading young men into a frenzy, begging me with their erections!” Erinna almost died, but she learned.

Also along the way are her life lessons, given in Italics after the sequences that caused her to draw such conclusions. It is very easy, by not saying anything, to become an enabler to someone–a friend–who has a drinking or drug problem. This, after she learned from observation that a house mate was a functioning alcoholic. Trying to get past a slow-moving and shedding manure truck on a curvy road, and getting, well, shit on. If shit rains down upon you, it is an entirely different experience if you can laugh about it.

There was her father’s memory of leaving behind half their water during a long hike, and winding up drinking water from a horse trough with a rotting raccoon floating in it. Her experience in nursing school, where the authorities seemed to have a different agenda than the patients’ welfare and made it hard for anyone who might object. Marvelously insensitive doctors, one with a bedside manner like a rattlesnake. Observing surgery: “You never would forget seeing a person’s—your new friend’s—entire small and large intestines lifted up through a large incision and dumped on his chest in a glistening, malleable heap.”

On the unavoidable death of a premature baby who fought for life though doomed: “She was close to the edge of several borders: life, death, ethics, legality, choice.” My wife had three stillbirths in our first decade of marriage, the last one living for an hour. We know that grief. Erinna as a student nurse handled two live “dead” births, and went on with her life. But a week later she was suddenly, uncontrollably crying, as it caught up with her. Sometimes one’s mind and body know more than one’s consciousness. Sometimes responses to events are delayed; good and bad experiences take time to digest. Food takes time to digest, too, whether it was good, or so bad it made you sick.

As a nurse in training she went to Nicaragua, in 1998, where the situation was desperate. She quotes a poem: “Broken tools/ broken bodies/ broken promises/ broken hearts/ broken dreams./ Everything is broken/ except the people-/ still pushing.

The women there could get their tubes tied, for birth control. But the surgery was done without anesthetic. It was essentially torture. If they writhed or screamed in pain the doctors chided them. Yes, there was supposed to be anesthetic; the suspicion was that it was being siphoned off to sell on the black market, while the women suffered. Such is life in the Third World. When something unexpected and terrible happens, one does not believe it is really happening. You do not believe your own senses; you do not want to; you question what your mind is relaying to you.

This is Erinna’s twenty-year autobiography, just another largely anonymous life. It is also an exploration of learning and feeling that touches universal chords. Perhaps it was her accident that lent her perspective for the ages. I regard this as worth reading for its insights. Erinna has a pretty mind.

Yes, I’m trying to help her market it, but it remains hard to get the attention of anyone in Parnassus, the traditional print establishment, regardless of the merit of the piece. That’s just one of many ways I fault Parnassus, though I made my fortune there.

I read the manuscript The Cat in the Cradle, by Jay Bell. This, too, is different. On one level it is a straightforward fantasy novel, inspired to a degree by my Adept series, with Oligarchs with different colors of magic and varied motives. There is troubled romance, before things work out in the end. But it is very much its own novel, proceeding in different directions. And it features a gay protagonist. No, no sneeringly; the author is gay. So in this respect it is authentic. There are worthy girls interested in the protagonist and a man he meets, but it is the man he falls for. I was told years ago by a lesbian that gay romance is much the same as hereto romance, only with the genders changed. My limited observation since then (I’m not into that persuasion, so my view is somewhat distant) bears this out. And it is true here. I suspect this novel will get savaged in some quarters because of this aspect, but really, it should be appreciated for what it is, a fantasy with a slightly different love interest. There is no sex, just some kissing; it is G rated. It is worth reading. You know, they are still learning things about homosexuality. Bigots want to say “They choose that lifestyle!” without saying what is wrong with it. They claim the Bible forbids it, but they have to stretch and interpret to make the case, and I don’t think Jesus Christ ever commented on it. In fact I doubt he would have condemned it, because his philosophy was love, not hate. So I think the bigots are clothing their bigotry in religion, thus degrading their religion. Anyway, it seems that straight men have larger right brain hemispheres than straight women, whose two sides are symmetrical. Gay men also have symmetrical brains, while lesbians have larger right hemispheres. So it seems that if you like women, sexually, your right side is larger, regardless of your gender, while if you like men, your sides are even. It makes me wonder whether there are male and female hemispheres, with the right one being male, the left female. If the right is dominant, you go for women. But it is surely way more complicated than that.

One correspondent is what I would call a rabid anti-gay bigot. I’m absolutely heterosexual; I love the look and feel of women. But I support individual preference, following the Golden Rule: they don’t try to convert me, I don’t try to convert them. So I give him no satisfaction, but he keeps coming back (no pun intended). Last time he said I missed the point that gays don’t reproduce. Without it, he assures me, our human society would cease to exist. Here is my response:

You think I missed your point? Missing is not the same as disagreeing. I think your point is nonsense. I am enclosing a clipping of a letter published in the newspaper July 6, about how identity can hang on belief. It concludes “…you can probably never prove any disagreeable facts to such people. They’ve traded introspection and reason for the security, comfort, and certainty that their viewpoints, and thus their identity, are always 100 percent correct.”* In your viewpoint, homosexuality is evil, and reason won’t sway you.

Well, here’s another example of reason for you to avoid: today’s greatest global crisis is probably human overpopulation, despoiling the world, so any deviant sex that lessens the reproductive rate is surely beneficial. Human society will not survive a continuation of the present population trend. But if enough people divert their sexuality to nonreproductive forms, that may leave room for the remaining folk to continue normal reproductive behavior. You should be encouraging such diversion; human society as we know it may depend on that.

Okay, that surely won’t persuade him. In fact it may give him apoplexy. Which is part of the point; you get into this arena with me at your own risk, which may include getting your point rammed up your own ass. (The * asterisk [no pun on “ass”] is to credit the author of the quoted letter: Bret Coffman.)

For research I read A Book of the Basques, but Rodney Gallop. I bought it cut-rate from Daedalus in 1992, and then it sat neglected while I was on hiatus from historical fiction writing, but in Climate of Change one of my featured settings is Basque and now was its time. It was written in 1930, before I was born, but is quite relevant to my purpose. I learned that the Basques call themselves Eskualdunak, and their land Eskual Herria or Euzkadi, maybe derived from their word for Sun. So they are the Sun people. Similarly the Armenians, another of my settings, call themselves Hai. Yes, I explore the Armenian genocide of 1915, an ugly but mixed case. History is fascinating in its bypaths. Here is a quote from A Book of the Basques: “It will be recalled that since the dawn of civilization it has been a guiding principle of religious thought that spiritual power is a sublimation of sexual power. By the renouncement of the sexual function man gained a proportional increase of spiritual virtue.” That explains a lot. I have now completed Climate of Change, 172,000 words of human history told in human terms, and like it well enough, though I don’t know whether I can find a print publisher for it.

And one I haven’t read, but probably will: No Such Thing as a Free Ride, edited by Simon Sykes and Tom Sykes. This is a collection of hitchhiking experiences written by 57 contributors in many areas. I was asked to contribute years ago, and did so, and it is here: less than a page, remembering the kindness of a young woman who picked me up at night as I hitchhiked, though surely fearful I could be a criminal. She was relieved to learn I was just a college kid going home for the summer. She saved me miles of walking. I conclude “It was just a kindness one person did for another: one of the redeeming features of the human race—a bright spot in a dark night.” I wish I could thank her now, but I have no idea who she is. I am partway through the book, and the experiences cited by others dwarf mine in magnitude; it’s a fascinating book.

My wife and I had our 52^nd anniversary, and celebrated by having a slice of cheesecake. At our age and diet, that’s a big enough deal. Death will us part, but at present that does not threaten to be soon. I wonder: what percentage of marriages make it this distance? One? Two? Death and divorce are horrendous adversaries.

Sex ads keep coming in. What I noticed was the Free Gift associated with one horrendously expensive pill: a pheromone spray to attract women. Note the implication: use this, and a woman’s mind, convenience, or rational choice become irrelevant. She’s a slave to her nose. Were I a woman, I’d be annoyed. I wonder: assume that it works, and that the woman knows the otherwise unappealing man is using it. Will it still work?

Here is an excerpt from my update on NEW CONCEPTS publishing, self explanatory: “And a bad complaint: an author submitted a three chapter partial book, per their guidelines, then took time to work on it—and they published it as part of a three author collaboration, with the other authors picking up from her beginning. Now this sort of thing can be done; I’ve done it. But it has to be by contract, and that was not the case here. So it was an involuntary collaboration. The publisher says she was in breach of contract by not delivering; author says there was no specified due date. Looks from here as if the author has the right of it. Yes, it happened to me, in traditional print, decades ago when a publisher rendered my novel But What of Earth? into a collaboration without my knowledge, in egregious violation of the contract. I objected, and the publisher apologized, reverted the rights to me, fired the editor, and shut down the line. And fans said I was too easy on them because I didn’t sue. Okay, they were in the process of doing the last two things anyway. But I could have forced it, had I sued. I saw no need; I’m tough minded, but not that much of an ogre. I had the novel republished elsewhere, restored, with 25,000 words of commentary on the idiocies of the original editing. So in my judgment, unless the publisher can prove breach of contract by the author, such as a delivery deadline, it owes the author reversion and public apology, and shutdown of the book unless it can negotiate a contractual compromise with the author. Because arrogance like this needs to be curbed, for the good of the field.”

More on my ongoing Survey of Electronic Publishers and related services. I do it as a service to my readers and others, in significant part because folk that tell the truth can be subject to retaliation by errant publishers. Preditors & Editors is being sued right now, for telling on PUBLISH AMERICA. I am a battle-scarred veteran of that sort of thing, and am essentially immune to it today, and have an ornery attitude. I do have the will and the means to take it to any outfit that doubts, and I will demonstrate that in spades if challenged. So I am one of the few who both can and will do it, let the burning drops of saliva fall where they may. The service is generally appreciated by writers and even some publishers; they let me know. I guard my objectivity. But sometimes it get compromised regardless. Here is an example. In the course of an update dialogue with COBBLESTONE PRESS, one of the better electronic erotic publishers, I learned that they might be interested in a submission from me. As it happened, I had just the prior week summarized an idea that I thought I might never write, because it was too edgy even for the erotic market, which has its own taboos. But it just might fit this publisher’s interest in just such themes. So I described it, got interest, and in three days I wrote “Knave” and sent it in. Three weeks later came an acceptance. So now I am doing business there, and my objectivity has to suffer. Ah, well; readers of my Survey can take warning, though I will still report negatives I may receive on the publisher. They have a form for the Cover Art which should prevent the kind of miscues I and other writers have suffered. I mean once a foreign print publisher even put a Philip Jose Farmer cover on one of my novels; that’s how little they care about relevance. Yes, I sent Phil a copy. I doubt that will happen here, though Cobblestone ignored my art form, with my acquiescence. It’s that they had a better idea than I did.

So what’s “Knave” about? Jack, a young man between semesters in college, needs work for the summer. He answers an ad for a Knave, duties undefined, but the picture is of the Queen of Hearts card, and the Queen animates, doffs her clothing to reveal a figure that would make an hourglass clog its sand in shame, and beckons him to come to her. How can he resist? Thus Jack finds himself being sexually interviewed by the Queen of Clubs, who is mistress of all golf links and uses golf balls as sex toys on her and on him, and by the Queens of Diamonds and Spades, who deal respectively in money and gardening in sexual ways I doubt you have seen before. Until finally he comes to the Queen of Hearts, who really educates him. That’s where it gets edgy. It’s a sexual romp that is, I trust, unlike the usual erotic fare. We’ll see.

The old order passeth. Tom Disch died. Back in my day, everyone was talking about the two outstanding new writers, Roger Zelazny and Tom Disch. But, they said, Zelazny had far more potential. I’m not sure that was the case. What I remember about Disch was that he wrote a novel titled Camp Concentration that was the odds-on bet to win awards. It was published in hardcover, and a paperback publisher made an offer of about triple the going rate for it. The hardcover publisher controlled the rights, and brushed it off, maybe thinking it could get more. Better offers did not come, so the hardcover went back to the paperback—who told them to fuck off, understandably. Publishers routinely treat authors with contempt, but they forget themselves when they do it to other publishers. Might as well call a feminist Amazon “Cutie” while you’re at it. And so the novel was sold for much less, and received less promotion, and got nowhere. Disch was so disgusted he thought he might quit writing in the science fiction genre, and of course SFWA—Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America–was no help. They actually facilitated the illicit blacklist against me. Meanwhile Zelazny’s career got the right breaks and flourished, while Disch was largely forgotten. Because there is little fairness in publishing. I, then an unknown writer but ornery as ever, was commenting on the best novels of the time, and mentioned that I had spent about a year looking for Camp Concentration but couldn’t find it; it seemed to be already out of print. So I couldn’t review it. But, I said, by all accounts it was an excellent novel. And wouldn’t you know it, a critic—critics can be utter turds—chastised me for commenting on a book I hadn’t read. Years later I did find and read it, and it was a good novel. At any rate, Disch was probably the best writer you never heard of; now you have half a notion why.

Better known was Algis Budrys, who also died, age 77. I remember him for his taut SF novel Rogue Moon. He was some writer, when he was “on.” Later I read a lesser effort, whose title I don’t remember, and it wasn’t much, but part way through it suddenly came to life for me, and I was in the scene. Curious to know how that worked, being in the business of writing myself, I went back to locate the precise point where it happened. I located the sentence: “She ran gracefully beside him.” Huh? That was it? Maybe I visualized the girl’s graceful breasts bobbing as she jogged, and that visual flash tipped me into the scene. I’m a typical male, when it comes to girl watching. The lesson, if there was any, was that some random element may do it; a writer doesn’t always know what will draw the reader in. At any rate that was as close to personal as I got with Budrys, but I do remember him.

And Robert Asprin died, known for his humorous, punny Myth-begotten series, about the closest thing to Xanth extant. I met him in Dallas in 1982 and later contributed to an anthology he and his wife edited. I quipped that if there was a problem, take two Asprin and call in the morning. We weren’t close, but I’m sorry to see him die young. He was 61, a dozen years younger than I am, done in by natural causes.

Andre Norton died three years ago; I knew her and liked her, but read little of her fiction because I didn’t want to judge her. Now her estate is enmeshed in legal strife: who should control the rights to her published books? The issue is between her caretaker, Sue Stewart, and a long-time fan, Victor Horadam. I have no opinion, being ignorant of the issues there. But it does seem too bad there there has to be a problem.

But no, I did not die. I received yet another query whether I was alive. I wonder who starts these rumors? My guess is critics who wish I was dead. Wishing doesn’t make it so.

A reader advised me of an article about Lord Piers Anthony Weymouth Wedgwood. Now that’s an interesting name. My full name is Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob, so we have a similar handle on the name. We’re both from England. Maybe some day we’ll meet.

I graduated from Goddard College with a BA in creative writing; that’s where my career really started. I also became a vegetarian there, and found the girl I married. Another Goddard graduate wrote to introduce me to TLA, Tranformative Language Arts, which hosts an annual The Power of Words conference: Liberation Through the Spoken, Written and Sung Word—September 12-15, 2008 at Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont. Conference costs start at $210, with additional fees for pre- and post-conference workshops. Lodging and all meals on campus begin at $216, double, or $276, single. www.goddard.edu/powerofwords or call 802 454-8311. X204. Goddard today is not the same kind of institution it was when I attended, but this is surely worthwhile for those interested.

I received another of those tempting emails, this time from Anna, age 29, a pretty girl in Cheboksary, Russia. “I have gone to the agency of acquaintances and have paid money that to me have helped to find my prince in agency I have paid 1000 roubles that to me distances yours e-mail the address and have told you the person which approaches me, and here now I sit and write to you the letter…” Gee, Anna, I wish I could be your prince, but I don’t think my wife would understand.

Some newspaper items: on Senior Moments: they are “a literal paraphasia.” Most common is the temporary inability to recall a name or number or what you were about to do. I certainly suffer from it. It’s nice to have a name for it. Now instead of seeming like a dummy I can just explain that it’s—it’s–whatever. On religion: “21% of self-defined atheists believe in God.” I have a problem with that. On life: life expectancy for women in the united States is now 80.97 years; for men, 78.06 years. I guess that means when I turn 78, I’ll have about .06 of a year to put my affairs in order. On spelling: is it al-Qaida or al-Qaeda? Either will do, though I prefer the latter. On fuel: a blend of 90% gasoline and 10% ethanol will reduce mileage by about 3%. But they don’t charge you less for the mix, so you are losing. And a listing of the 35 articles of impeachment Dennis Kucinich read into the congressional record, containing items such as a fraudulent justification of the invasion of Iraq, creating secret laws, authorizing torture, spying on American citizens, signing statements, tampering with elections, and systematically undermining efforts to address global climate change. But congress isn’t interested, I think because Bush will soon be out anyway. Quote from Donald Kaul: “We went to war because President Bush and the oil gang wanted to install a puppet regime to ensure that Iraqi oil flowed to favored oil companies.” Actually the rest of the world knew that all along; only Americans have been deceived. And by Norman Soloman: “You wouldn’t know it from the mainline media coverage, but blueprints are readily available for a careful and complete U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.” They were made by the Task Force for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq. All else is largely rightist bluster and a controlled American press. And there are 48 countries in Africa, and 50 in Europe. I thought I was fairly well up on my geography, but I must be missing some. And the risk of homicide in the home is three times as much in houses with guns as in those without guns. I’d like to know how many gun owners actually drive off would-be robbers; that’s a key figure that’s hard to come by. Well, maybe this is it: Arthur Kellerman says he studied the matter, and guns kept in the home were 12 times as likely to be involved in the death or injury of a member of the household than in the killing or wounding of a bad guy in self defense. Intruders got to the home owner’s gun twice as often as the homeowner did. And one on cell phones by Sara Corbett, titled “Can the cell phone save the world?” The thesis is that the ready communication they provide enables people everywhere to make profitable connections they might otherwise have missed. They are becoming part of a person’s identity. It took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide, four years for the second billion, and two years for the third billion. 80% of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network. People everywhere are being empowered. I can see it; I have one, and my wife has one, Tracfones, that we seldom use, but give us time to get into the 21^st century. When I managed to get lost in our 90 acre tree farm—remember, I’m pushing senility, as these columns surely suggest—I cell-phoned my wife in the car, and she honked the horn so I knew which direction to go. You just never can tell when immediate personal communication will count.

The “Curtis” comic for July 9, 2008, was fun. Curtis is in summer school, and the teacher is an extremely shapely blonde whose every speech is musical. Curtis, overwhelmed, thinks “Hamina, hamina.” That’s where it loses me. What is Hamina? I suspect I’m about two generations out of date on slang.

A liberal column by Karyn Langhorne Folan remarks on dating “out.” The author is a black woman who married a white man. It seems that a black man marries a white woman as a status symbol, but a black woman must not marry out. “Worse was the dagger-like stare I endured once while at a restaurant with my husband and our baby daughter—not from an old, racist white person but a black man who was seated across a table from a white woman.” How hypocritical can you get?

From a brochure for AMERICANS UNITED FOR SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: “Throughout history, when religion has been combined with the raw power of government, it has spawned tyranny and oppression.” Yes, as in the Inquisition. The religious right seems eager to bring back that sort of thing. Our faith-based government is already torturing innocent people. Another liberal columnist, Ruth Gadebusch, says in part: With the Supreme Court’s ruling on habeas corpus that detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “we can at least hope that a modicum of moral direction has been restored to this nation.” The imprisoning “was done with malice afore-thought. Then we proceeded to ignore our constitution, the Geneva Conventions and anything else that got in our way.” We even espoused the kind of torture that we condemned the Japanese and Germans for doing in World War Two, not even caring that many of the detainees were innocent. I think the officials responsible should be put on trial for treason, because they have betrayed the most fundamental American values and laws.

NEW SCIENTIST, reviewing books on the root causes of hunger today despite there being enough food to feed everyone, concludes that it is not the textbook free market that is to blame. “It is neither free nor fair.” It is distorted by powerful players that control much of the world’s food supply. Which can be a problem with the free market: the schoolyard bullies take it over. Another quote from NEW SCIENTIST: “Fiction is a simulation than runs on the software of our minds.” Beautiful. Item on how the latest studies make it almost certain: brain scans show that a person is born gay or straight. On gender: girls are just as competitive as boys, they merely implement it differently. Boys are more physically aggressive; girls punish success by excluding her from their clique, whispering about her, or hiding from her. Another: Social Democrat Member of Parliament in Germany says that the great unspoken truth is how painless it will be to convert the world to renewable energy, especially solar power. And an item on emerald oil: emerald green crude oil produced by photosynthesis in algae. It could fuel cars, trucks, and aircraft—without consuming crops that can be used as food. The company aims to produce 10,000 barrels a day within five years. So it seems we can get off Arab oil, if we just do it. And one on the Large Hadron Collider near Switzerland, due to go on line in September. It may finally locate the mysterious Higgs boson, otherwise known as the God(damned) particle or field, and clarify the underlying nature of the universe. I’m a fan of Higgs, so I’ll be saying more about it, in due course, if it exists. They abolished the notion of the ether, the background substance of the universe, long ago, but I think it may exist, as the Higgs field. And one titled “Are We Doomed?” whose thesis is that societies inevitably get more complicated and increasingly fragile, until any little thing can bring them down. Ours is extremely complex, so probably doomed. Today’s population level depends on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. Take those away and there would be a reduction in population too gruesome to think about. So we won’t think about it, until, inevitably, it happens. I just hope I don’t live to see it. Plan B 3.0 by Lester R. Brown addresses this issue with an ambitious plan to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2020, stabilize climate, stabilize population, eradicate poverty, and restore the earth’s natural systems. Wind and solar are the centerpiece. More power to that! www.earthpolicy.org.

Susan Lee, of the Ferret & Dove Sanctuary, is a ball of positive energy. The purpose of the sanctuary is to provide a safe haven and humane treatment for small domestic animals and domestic doves. Many are adopted out to good homes (and they do make sure those homes are suitable), and those that aren’t are lovingly cared for. A few have been adopted as a result of prior mentions in this column. Those who would like to make a donation can get in touch via http://ferretanddovesanctuary.petfinder.org, or The Ferret & Dove Sanctuary, Inc., 3815 Tom Lane Drive, Pensacola, Florida 32504. I have also added their volunteer site to my Survey of electronic publishers and services; it’s a stretch, but some aspiring writers might be interested. I reserve the right to be arbitrary on occasion. Regardless, Susan, in one of her bursts of generosity, sent me several things. One is their little cookbook, Ferretly Fine & Doverly Home Cooking. These are assorted recipes for humans and non-humans, and helpful hints. Such as how to test an egg for freshness: put it in cool salted water. If it floats, it’s bad. She also sent four of her hand-stitched angels. Their knit wings are multi-colored, reaching from head to hem of skirt, and some have bead sashes. Their lower halves intrigue me, because there are bell-shaped skirts without legs or feet. That gave me an idea for Xanth: angels with invisible feet, floating o’er the landscape. Maybe one wants to come to earth, but needs to make her legs tangible, so it’s a challenge. How can anyone take seriously a girl whose panties are invisible? Maybe her name would be Susie.

And she sent a copy of the children’s book her husband, Wes Hurley, wrote, that Susan illustrated. It tells of the green frogs who loved mischief, and messed up blueberry pies cooling on the window sill. Then their feet got stained blue, and it wouldn’t wash off. This complicated their existence. It’s a nice story, with nice pictures, highly suitable for children. Naturally they can’t get the attention of Parnassus, the traditional print establishment, so have to self publish it.

SCIENCE NEWS has an article on edible insects. Yes, insects are a promising food for the future, being nutritious and easy to raise. And the fact is, we’re already eating them, though we don’t necessarily know it. For example, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) allows up to 60 insect fragments per 100 grams of chocolate, with similar allowances for other foods. So why not go whole hog, as it were, and eat insects openly?

DISCOVER has an article on energy, exploring the several major sources: oil, geothermal, nuclear, hydro, coal, natural gas. We obsess about the amount of oil that’s in Saudi Arabia, seeming unable to get off dependence on it, but the united States is just as dominant on coal, for example. And what about wind and solar? Those are everywhere; we just need to develop the instruments to harvest them, to have virtually inexhaustible nonpolluting power.

I contributed a short short story, “The Courting,” to the anthology Bits of the Dead, edited by Keith Gouveia. It is an anthology of zombie stories, published in print and electronically. Zombie fans will surely find the volume interesting. It’s available at Fictionwise.com, Amazon.com, and from the publisher, Coscom entertainment, www.coscomentertainment.com/bitsofthedead.html. I haven’t done much with zombies, outside of Xanth, where they are a rough analogy to persecuted minorities.

As I have mentioned on occasion, I have one big movie option remaining to be exercised: Warner Pictures on A Spell For Chameleon. After more than four years the decision date is finally arriving: when they either exercise the option and make the movie, or decline to. That date was August 20, 2008. But it turns out that they are extending it 100 days because of the writer’s strike. The strike of course did not affect this project, as they are not yet supposed to be working on it, but the option contract says it applies. It’s a technicality, but that’s the way it is. So it will be early December.

SCIENCE NEWS has a review of the nonfiction book Mirroring People, by Marco Iacoboni, which makes the case that mirror neurons are the physical component of empathy, thought to be at the core of human society. It may account for group behavior, and its absence may lead to disorders such as autism. Yes indeed; that has been my thesis. I think it is empathy that enables us to enjoy books and movies, putting ourselves into the places of those we are viewing. So without reader empathy, my career as a writer would tank.

This column is 9,300 words long. I keep hoping to get them shorter, and keep failing. Sigh.

We saw this year’s Mummy movie, on my 74^th birthday, AwGhost 6.  It has an intelligible story line and more violence than you can shake a bandage at, with flashes of humor, such as when the huge white yeti boot a bad guy over a building and cheer as if they scored a goal, or when the protagonist can’t catch a fish, so shoots them instead, and then his wife bites on a bullet when eating the cooked fish.  Is there any larger significance?  Not that I can fathom.  So this is the classical tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  But fun if you like that type, and actually I do.

In my program of re-watching videos I liked in the past, I watched Pleasantville, and liked it very well.  We saw it in the theater November 1, 1998 after finding the time of Antzinconvenient.  I would have preferred to see Antz, but went along, and then Pleasantville really wowed me and I was glad to have seen it instead.  We saw Antz later on TV, so didn’t actually miss it, and it’s good too.  Anyway, in Pleasantville a teen boy and girl, siblings, get magically transposed into a TV program of the 50s, Pleasantville, that is shown in black and white.  So now they are in black and white, and not totally pleased.  In Pleasantville everything is G rated and positive.  Everyone is cheerful and obeys all the rules and is always successful.  The basketball players always score baskets.  The girls are always pretty and properly dressed.  In short, to teens of the 90s, this is absolutely boring.  So Sister dates a local boy and starts showing him what a date can be.  Not only does that freak him out, it puts him into color.  Sister explains to Pleasantville Mother about sex, and since Father wouldn’t be into anything like that—remember the G rating—she tells Mother how to get sexual pleasure without a man.  Mother tries it in the bathtub, and not only does she experience a rare sensation, she becomes colorful too.  It seems that it is the experience of real emotion that does it, and all over town people start getting color.  Naturally there’s a conservative reaction, and in some places signs appear saying NO COLOREDS.  It goes on from there, freely dabbling in the social implications.  I think it’s a great movie.

I also re-watched Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s last movie.  Beautiful title, interesting movie.  Young doctor’s lovely wife confesses to having had a fantasy about an affair with another man, and that sends the doctor into a turmoil.  He sneaks into a sort of Satanic sex club, gets caught, his life is in peril, but one of the lovely ladies, a patient of his who recognizes him, proffers her life instead.  So they let him go and she dies of a drug overdose.  He tries to investigate, but his other contacts keep turning up abruptly dead.  Finally the Satanists make it clear that if he doesn’t give over and shut his mouth, his wife will pay the price.  So he will keep the secret, but he and his wife make up.  Is this really a great film?  It is intriguing, and I like the statuesque bare women, but I have to say that it’s good but not great.

A reader, Rigel Kent, sent me a link, in response to my passing comment on the peril of guns in the house: www.guncite.com/gun_control_gedgaga.html.  It seems the statistics cited by gun control nuts—if I’m going to call some folk gun nuts, I should designate the other side similarly—are incomplete.  Yes, when you add up the unintentional death, the criminal homicides, suicides, and unknowns you get 389, and only 9 self-protection homicides.  There’s the 43 to one ratio.  But there are as I see it two things about that.  First, the vast majority of those deaths, 333, are from suicide.  I feel that a person who wants to off himself should be allowed to, so I don’t regard this as gun abuse.  That leaves 56 deaths to 9 self protections.  That’s still a 7-1 negative ratio, but not nearly as horrendous.  Second, the study also compared violent deaths in the home that did not involve a gun.  The same categories this time are 0, 50, 347, 0 = 397, to 4 self protections.  The ratio is 99-1.  Again if you exclude suicides, it’s 50-4, or 12.5-1.  That’s worse than the guns!  It almost looks as if you are safer with the gun.  What about the times a bad guy comes to rob, rape, or kill you, but you warn him off with your gun and no one is killed?  But I think it more likely means that shit happens, with or without a gun, so there’s not a lot of difference.  It’s really a non-issue.  Which leaves me determinedly neutral on the issue.

Two Dear Abby columns in AwGhost addressed the issue of cheating in school.  This subject interests me, because I did not cheat in school, and graduated in the third quarter of my class (and not the top of that), then went on to become perhaps the most commercially successful member of that class.  Obviously my grades did not reflect my future.  I was indeed one of the smarter students in terms of IQ, and I associated with top students, rooming in the course of four years with three or four of them, the nerds, though that’s hardly a valid indication.  They knew, as the school did not, that I wasn’t stupid.  But as with the gun control issue, the context fudges the implication.  The school, for complicated reasons, simply did not address my needs or potential.  Had I cheated, I still would have been far from a top student.  My success as a writer owes a huge component to sheer guts and luck, with talent being a significant but not dominant factor—and of course talent was not what high school was about.  Memorization and conformity were the key elements, and imagination could be penalized, so you can see why I didn’t fit well.  But what about cheating?  Teachers—and I was once a teacher, and it was an issue—try to make students understand that cheating is wrong, and are met with incredulous stares and “Can I go now?”  Yes indeed.  When I taught high school English in the 1960s, my students tried to tell me that I didn’t have the right to penalize them for cheating.  It seems that attitude hasn’t changed. So here is my take on it, which hasn’t changed in more than fifty years: you are supposed to be in school to learn something, and tests are supposed to be an indication how well you are succeeding.  If you cheat, the tests are invalidated.  Then what’s the point?  So how can a cheater succeed in life?  Well, some do—witness the current political and corporate scenes—but the culture can suffer grievously as ignorant greed runs rampant.  People who cheat rather than learn are really cheating themselves as well as harming others whom they illegitimately displace.  They are best avoided.  I think I would favor keeping a close check, and removing cheaters from the educational scene, as they evidently aren’t interested in learning, leaving the classes to those who are serious.  What to do thereafter with the cheaters?  Let them languish uneducated until they learn the basic rule: honesty.

Dialogue with another fundamentalist, who asked me to give a reason why I don’t believe in God.  This is not the kind of dialogue I care for, because I know it is wasted time: a believer will never understand rational nonbelief.  I feel it should be the other way around: why does a believer believe, in the face of lack of evidence for the existence of the supernatural?  But you won’t get much in the way of a rational answer.  So, like Jesus, I sometimes resort to little stories.  That’s what his parables were: stories to make points that others might otherwise have trouble accepting.  Here is an excerpt:

There is a story about a guru who was pained by all the manifest evils of the world.  A friend said “But why not tune that out?  You have a good life here.  Focus on that, forget the rest, and be happy.”  And the guru said “It’s not the kind of happiness I care for.”

Okay.  I can see that belief in God, the Afterlife, and Cosmic Justice can be quite comforting, even if it is built of a tissue of illusion.  It’s not the kind of comfort I care for.

And more with the minister.  I remain free with my liberal humanist opinions, especially when asked:

You ask about the line between conviction and bigotry.  It can be tricky to fathom on occasion.  Bigots seldom see themselves as bigots; they simply take for granted that blacks, Jews, homosexuals, orientals and such are inferior and need to be kept in their place on the other side of the tracks for the sake of a smoothly functioning society.  What can fudge the line is when bigots know they are wrong, but instead of reforming, try to mask it.  So they use literacy tests that no one could pass to prevent blacks from voting, or seek to define marriage in such a way as to prevent gays from getting its advantages.  Where do I stand on such issues?  Any citizen should get to vote, and I hope will be informed and responsible, though it is evident that masses of uninformed do vote.  Any two people should get to marry.  Yes, to me marriage is between a man and a woman, but acknowledging that some see it differently, I leave the choice to them.  Maybe extend the present system, where the legal marriage is authorized by the state, while the social marriage is performed in a church ceremony.  So those who belong to churches that will marry gays can have the ceremony, while those whose churches won’t can still obtain the legal benefits of a state marriage. 

Too often I see greed, lust, and bigotry clothed in religion.  Look at the wealth of the Catholic Church.  Look at the masked plural marriages of the Mormons.  Look at those who say the Bible calls blacks the children of Cain.  Such things surely disgust you as they do me.  I just re-watched a video I had, refreshing my memory of it: Eyes Wide Shut, wherein a man with a troubled marriage blunders into a Satanic conclave where masked men have at beautiful bare masked women.  This is illicit sex clothed in religious vestments.  Religion, whether stemming from Heaven or Hell, can be used to justify anything.

My general attitude about homosexuality is that I am adamantly heterosexual, and I don’t want anyone even trying to convince me otherwise; my mind is closed in that respect.  I assume that the gays are similarly locked in to their orientation.  Therefor I follow the golden rule and do not try to change them, and don’t want them to try to change me.  With that understanding we can and do get along compatibly.  My wife and I were both shocked and sorry when the gay man who did the best work on my computer system, a close friend of our daughter’s, suddenly died of complications of diabetes.  We liked him.  I think a person who feels compelled to try to change gays or deny them ordinary rights is flirting with bigotry, even if his religion justifies it.

Okay, this may stir some outraged responses, not all of which will be bigoted; I like to think that the folk who read my blog-type columns are reasonably tolerant.  I am not saying that the Catholic Church is obsessed with money or the Mormons with sex; there’s a lot more to both than that, and much of it is good.  But some of their adherents do use those religions to clothe their unholy desires, and I’m not sure those religions completely condemn that minority, any more than the Southern Baptists truly condemn the underlying racism of their origin.

In a prior column I mentioned the cute little plants floating in our returned-to-nature swimming pool, which turned out to be duckweed.  It prospered, and expanded so much that I was afraid it would take over the whole pool.  I wasn’t sure our frogs would like that.  So I dipped out most of it, leaving a smaller amount to continue.  That was fine.  Then, abruptly, it disappeared.  Apparently some ailment wiped it out in a couple of days.  That saddened me.  But two months later, it is reappearing, with tiny plants slowly growing.  Did it get too hot in the summer for it?  Or is it like bamboo, which may all die, ridding itself of predators before regrowing?  Nature has mysteries yet.

Florida has suffered a drought the past few years, but finally Tropical Storm Fay came by, aiming for us as they all do, but these storms’ eyes are not very good so they generally miss.  She headed north but swerved east, and we got nothing.  So she turned around and tried again, this time missing us to the north.  But it was a closer miss, and we caught the southern edge.  It was about a nine inch event, catching us up in rain.  Then the drought resumed, as one storm after another missed Florida and plowed into Louisiana or Texas.  What we try to do is have them brush close enough to give us good rain, but not close enough to blow us away.  It’s a tricky maneuver.

My ne’er-do-well archery practice continues.  I loose 12 arrows with the right hand bow, then 12 with the left hand bow.  I have an array of 11 targets, with lesser ones surrounding the main one so that when I miss I don’t lose my five to six dollar arrows.  And I miss a lot.  Too often I am left standing with the bow aimed at center, watching the arrows fling wildly to the sides.  Was it the severely damaged or missing fletching?  Then one day it was rainy, so I stayed in and repaired damaged arrows.  The forked tip is the nock, and if it breaks I can’t loose the arrow.  I replaced 14 nocks, recovering in that manner 14 decent arrows.  Then I used them—and my scores were just as bad.  But it was an improvement, because my misses were more like inches instead of feet.  I miss the whole target array more seldom now.  Once, looking for a lost arrow, I saw instead the tail of a rattlesnake.  No problem; it wasn’t looking for trouble, and slowly slithered away.  I’m glad I didn’t step on it, though.  We let the local wildlife be.  The only exception is the pigs, because they wanted to take over the whole tree farm, ruining it for other creatures.  We allow them to be hunted, and that has solved that problem.  Another time I was using the metal detector to locate buried arrows, and passed a metal bolt that gave no signal.  What kind of metal is invisible to a metal detector?

We watched some of the Olympics.  Yes, it’s too bad that China has such a bad human rights record, but they did put on a phenomenal opening show, and some events were compelling.  For example a couple of the swims: when Lezak, in the last lap of the relay, was behind, swimming against the world record holder.  He buckled down, made the fastest surge ever, and won by under a tenth of a second.  Another was decided by one hundredth of a second.  Then there was Nastia, with a name that sounds like Hell, with a figure from Heaven.  And the closing show, where this London double-decker bus slowly turned inside out and became a performance stand.

On occasion I need a rhyme, or sometimes a word with a similar ending.  My rhyming dictionary was given me by my wife in 1960 with the inscription “This dictionary/ As you can see/ Is meant for rhymes/ Like me, be, thee.//  But ’cause this book/ Is just for you/ I will not look/ To make this work.”  How can I not love her?

Health.  I was given a bone density test, which I thought was incidental because I do not fit the profile for osteoporosis, that is bone loss.  I exercise seriously, remain lean, eat a healthy vegetarian diet, and take calcium, magnesium, and Vitamin D supplements.  Lo, I tested low.  It seems my thyroid deficiency—I’m on Synthroid, or its generic equivalent—is responsible.  A depletion of -2.5 is the threshold, and I was -3.7.  So I am being treated with Reclast.  Cost me $2700 for a single annual treatment.  I am covered by Medicare, and so is the drug, but they won’t cover it for me because I have not tried the oral Boniva which put my wife into chronic misery, or actually fractured a hip.  And how much would it cost Medicare if it had to cover a fractured hip?  Should I have waited for that before treatment?  Meanwhile I got a harness with a pocket, and now carry my cell phone with me when I run, so that if my hip should go, I will be able to call my wife, instead of lying alone in the forest for hours with the mosquitoes. Elsewhere in the wider family we got a serious scare: cancer.  It turned out not to be brain cancer, but cancer in the brain.  That’s not a meaningless distinction.  Brain cancer is awkward to treat because you can’t cut away an extra inch of tissue all around to be sure of getting it all.  But this was melanoma, skin cancer which had metastasized to the brain.  They treated it with the Gamma Knife, which focuses 201 beams of radiation on the tumor and fries it without damaging surrounding tissue.  If you have to have surgery in your head, this is the kind to have.  Hardly any recovery problem.  So what at first blush seemed like a death sentence turned out to be much less deadly, thanks to modern technology.  Meanwhile we got Cancer Awareness bracelets, soft plastic bands folk wear to show their solidarity with those who have suffered cancer.  Ours are black, for melanoma.  Other colors are for other types: breast = pink, lung = white, gray = brain, yellow = bladder, light blue = prostate, and so on.

Don Callandar died.  He was the author of the light fantasy series beginning with Pyromancer, which I blurbed in the 1990s.  We met when we went to Orlando to consider a retirement community there, Village on the Green, and he and his wife were very helpful.  He was a nice guy, and those were fun novels.

I placed three more novels with TOR in a package deal because I wanted to get the final GEODYSSEY novel, Climate of Change, into print.  So TOR will bring that out, and Xanths #33 Jumper Cable and #34 Knot Gneiss.  That last is about 4/5 through at this writing, moving well, and I expect to finish it in another month or so.  Xanth does normally move well.  I am in the process of completing the alphabet in Xanth titles; there are only four letters to go.

A chain of thought took me to a spot essay I wrote for Hugh Downs My America, copyright 2002, one of hundreds of books published in response to 9-11.  It was published on the first anniversary, and has some impassioned essays among the 150 there, but seems to have disappeared in the welter of similar books.  So now I’ll run that essay here, on the assumption that few of my readers have seen it.  The trends I noticed there seem to have worsened in the intervening six years, and I believe my thoughts remain relevant today.

I’m an immigrant.  I’m from England, and it was England I longed for as a child; America felt like exile.  My parents did relief work in Spain during its savage civil war, feeding starving children, until my father was “disappeared” by the victorious dictatorship.  He smuggled out a note, and with that and the threat of financial repercussions, they were able to get him free, though banished.  Thus we came to America on the last commercial ship out, as World War II engulfed Europe.  I don’t like discrimination against immigrants; too many are far worse off than we were, victims of totalitarian abuses.  American is a refuge.

I’m a writer.  I write because my imagination will not be suppressed.  America has the freedom for the flowering of the arts, including writing. When I write, I get love for my fiction and ire for my success.  I understand what it is like to be the object of such mixed attentions.

I’m a naturalized American.  My education, career, family, and future are here.  I believe in the constitutional values, for I choose to  subscribe to them, and wince when I see them abridged.  Unfortunately there is some of that occurring now, as fanaticism, greed, and lust for power prosper in the name of patriotism.  I do have a notion where that leads.  Yet I hope and believe that in time American will cast off these illnesses and return to the grandeur of its aspirations.

America is relatively wealthy and free and proud, so is loved and hated regardless of its merits.  Love inspires tolerance; hatred sponsors terrorism.  I saw one building become a ghastly smokestack, and a plane crash into another like a deadly chicken coming home to roost, and I saw the tall towers fall.  I  saw the heroes and the bigots roused, and the shock of illusion shattered.  I remembered the assassination of John Kennedy, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and I thought of the Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”

I’m an immigrant.  I’m a writer.  I’m American.

Here is the text of a letter I sent to the California Franchise Tax Board that I think is largely self explanatory.

Yesterday I received your dunning notice for $9,432.27, consisting of income tax for the year 2006, penalty, and interest.  I am not paying it.

We went through this in 1997; your records should confirm it, and if not, mine do.  I have never lived or worked in California, and therefore I am not a California taxpayer.  I have lived and worked in Florida since 1959.  I do not owe any California income tax.

My literary agent is in California; you wrote to me at his address.  He forwards payments from around the world to me in the normal agent/client manner.  If you lost my legal address, it is on this letter.  Please remove me from your mailing list.

And to think some folk say I don’t suffer fools or rascals gladly.

I am a slow reader, and can’t even keep up with the books I receive free.  I try to read at least ten pages a day of something, and I’m fairly choosy.  Here’s a report on some:

I mentioned last column No Such Thing as a Free Ride? edited by Simon and Tom Sikes, because I am in it.  Now I have read the full book, and have to say that there are hitchhiking stories therein that put mine to shame.  One is in comic form.  Another tells of picking up a stranded motorist in 1942 who turned out to be Edsel Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company.  Ford paid for their hotel room, sent them envelopes containing hundred dollar bills—a small fortune back then—and sent mechanics to fix their car, practically rebuilding it into a super car.  They had done a good turn for the right person.  Others are philosophical essays.  Some few are by women, who are at greater risk when hitchhiking.  Some hitched in other countries, not necessarily knowing the native language.  Such adventures make me nervous.

Warm Earth, by Angela Jackson.  This is a novel of the Spanish Civil War, as seen by three British nurses.  The author sent me a copy because years ago I helped a minor bit of her research by sending Bio of an Ogre, which contains as an appendix my mother’s narrative of my family’s experience there, per my note in the essay above.  This novel is massively detailed, and reading it gave me more of a feel for what it was like; I was at age four and five, too young to appreciate it then.  Many folk today don’t realize the significance of that war.  It was a kind of rehearsal  for World War Two, as the fascists of Germany and Italy sent their airplanes and troops to practice.  It started when Spain’s own military set out to take over, and their superiority of hardware enabled them to do it in three years.  A popular song on the loyalist side was “The Four Insurgent Generals,” which concluded “They’ll all be hanging!”  Alas, not so.  The nurses of the novel saw blood aplenty, and the tragedy of a noble but losing cause.  There is irony, as one nurse—not one of the protagonists—prefers to eat undisturbed. So she removes the latch from the kitchen door so no one else can get in.  Then new nurses came; there was an explosion, and they didn’t know where to find the missing handle, could not get out in time, and one died.  A protagonist wanted to report her, as she surely deserved to be brought to account.  But another overruled her: the effort would disrupt the war effort.  So the guilty nurse, showing no remorse, got away with it.  I winced, as I was supposed to.  Such things happen in war, and sacrifices do have to be made, not all of them honorable.  War is ugly, not romantic.  I am impressed by the depth of the author’s research, but I can see that she is not an experienced novelist.  She has an imperfect notion of paragraphing, and her characters did not quite come to life for me.  Three nurses, and I tended to confuse one with another.  Characters need to be well differentiated by appearance, character, and setting, and these were, but I think not sufficiently.  So I feel that some potential was wasted.  Still, it is a significant work, and I recommend it to those who have an interest in the subject.  That ugly little war should not be forgotten.

I read Bits of the Dead, an illustrated anthology edited by Kieth Gouveia, which I received because I contributed to it.  It consists of little zombie stories, as different authors present their takes on zombies, some of them stomach turning. If you are a zombie fan, as I am not, this could be fun.  My entry is “The Courting” wherein a zombie woman seduces a man who is about to die; that way she gets his expiring life essence.  I also read Blood of the Deadby A P Fuchs, another revolting story.  First there comes a sort of gray rain, then the zombies, converted in masses from ordinary living folk and insatiably hungry for living flesh.  I’m not clear why zombies, whose digestive system is rotting guts, want to eat at all, and why they can’t settle for zombie flesh.  Only about one person in a thousand avoids conversion, reason unknown, and these are the immediate target of the wretched throngs.  Four living folk are traced: an old man, a mature man, a young man, and a woman.  They are constantly  fighting off and fleeing the attacking zombies.  That’s essentially the book, which cuts off amid a scene unfinished, after a tantalizing glimpse at the powers that are behind the scene; it’s the first volume of a trilogy.  Presumably the gray rain and the survival of the few will be explained subsequently.

If my reaction to these books seems negative, it may be because I am not feeling well.  As I reached the point in this column where I started the reviews, I had that Reclast treatment.  It said there could be flu-like side effects.  That’s like “Some assembly required”: likely to be an aggravating understatement.  I might as well have had the flu itself.  It started ten hours after the infusion, when I got the sudden violent shivers.  In the next three days my fever peaked at 101.9°F and I felt awful.  I was weak, and my exercise schedule was wiped out: Archery, running, sex.  That last was when my wife knew it was serious.  I do assorted supplementary exercises; they too were extinguished.  Oh, I tried, but some involve getting down on the floor.  Getting down there was a tedious and sometimes painful chore, and getting back up was another, and I couldn’t do the exercises anyway.  A tortoise could have kept pace with the speed of my walking.  My hips hurt, and my knees, back, shoulders, and heels.  Yes, heels; they hurt.  I don’t recall that one from the flu.  My right thumb operated only with pain.  When I wanted to look to the side, I had to turn my whole body in that direction, because my neck was stiff.  My digestion wasn’t affected, directly, but food tasted like cardboard and finishing a cup of liquid was a challenge because my neck didn’t want to bend back.  I began to suffer urinary incontinence, starting to pee in my pants before I could make it to a proper place—and then it was be maybe half a bladderfull.  While a BM was the opposite, reluctant to depart the sanctity of my intestine.  That kind of thing is not much fun.  Sleeping at night was uncomfortable, because I have to sleep on my side, because of my collapsed disk, and my hip soon became uncomfortable to the point of pain, so I had to roll over to the other side.  And I was too weak to do it.  I had to shove myself an inch, pant a while, then shove another inch, getting into position so I could turn over without too much pain, and when I did I was perilously close to the edge of the bed, but unable to move myself back.  My wife said the sound of my groaning interfered with her sleep.  Each night seemed about three years long.  By day most of what I could do was sit in my easy chair and sleep; at least there my hips were not under pressure.  I couldn’t type effectively, because about every third word was badly typoed; my fingers were missing the keys.  The sloppiness wasn’t limited to typing.  I had to use the car to fetch the newspapers, and parked it skew so that we couldn’t get around it in the garage.  Today is the fourth day, my fever is down, and I’m resuming work on this column after three days doing essentially nothing, while my novel remains on pause at 77,000 words and incoming commitments wait.  I hope that soon I will recover enough to resume exercise and start catching up on the backlog.  I hope the treatment works, because it is costing me more than I expected.  I think my misery extended to the stock market, because during it the DOW dropped 777.7 points.  My wife is bearing with it.  OctOgre 1th update: I did run, actually walked and lumbered, and survived it.  My time for the route was under 17 minutes the last time before the treatment; this time it was over 27 minutes.  But it’s a start.  And the stock market, taking note of my improvement, bounced back almost 500 points.  You thought such things were random?

So the rest of this column will be abbreviated, with only passing nods given to items that deserve full discussions, and it may not be as scintillatingly sharp as usual.  Well, up to my normal standard, anyway.  I watched the video Obsession, distributed with our newspaper, whose thesis is that the Arabs are teaching hate of America in their schools.  Sure some are, but those freaks bear about the same relationship to the majority as the Ku Klux Klan does to Christianity.  We have our own hard-liners, as the Republican nominating convention demonstrated.  You can put lipstick on a pig, but it accomplishes nothing, and it annoys the pig.  Obsession doesn’t seem to mention the oil connection, which the reason we are messing around in that region of the world, and why we don’t just cut them off and leave them to their own bigotries.

I received a query from an author whose self published book spent weeks on the Barnes & Noble list in the top 15-20 percent, yet when his statements came they said he had under ten sales.  This looked skew to me, so I queried two publishers where I have connections, Xlibris and Mundania, whose statements I believe are accurate, and neither of which was the one to which the query related, and got immediate answers.  In essence, it is that the B&N list is meaningless, because it carries something like five million titles, the vast majority of which are out of print, second hand, or just junk books that nobody is buying anyway.  So even one copy sold puts it will into the top tier, and several copies would jack it up higher yet.  Those who make such lists don’t like to let it be known how irrelevant they are, because there’s a lot of business by interested visitors who would be less interested if they knew how small the pickings actually were.  So they don’t give out figures, just rankings.  They surely have the hard figures, they just keep them out of sight.

So let’s try to reconstruct a correspondence table, so that authors will have a better notion.  I conjecture that a book is not listed, say, in the top million, unless it sells at least one copy.  That would be in the top 20% of five million titles.  If so, then every book above it must sell at least that much.  So if # 1,000,000 sells one copy, there must be at least one million copies of assorted books sold.  Let’s say that # 100,000 sells ten copies, and is in the top 2% of five million.  The books above it must sell at least that much.  That means another million copies sold.  #10,000 would be in the top two tenths of one percent, and maybe sells 100 copies, which means another million.  We’re getting massive spread-out sales here, yet the individual title’s sales are dirt poor compared to those of any traditional print book.  My early Xanth novels have each sold over a million copies in paperback (they never had hardback editions); my electronic sales of other titles are in the tens or less.  What does it take to get, say, 50,000 sales per title?  I suspect you have to be into the straight top ten, not ten %, and anything below that is likely to be nothing much.  Probably sales are less than those I have conjectured.  So those rankings really are meaningless.  If any authors or publishers want to send me, anonymously, comparative figures, maybe we can get an alignment.  Meanwhile, ten copies or fewer sold after placing in the top two percent?  It seems not only possible but likely.  Your publishers are not necessarily cheating you; the system is giving you unrealistic expectations.  But I would like to blow the whistle on this systematic deception; authors deserve better, and there are small but honest publishers who may be unfairly condemned.

A reader wondered about the conventional wisdom that fiction should not carry a message.  “Must fiction be utterly pointless to be entertaining?”  I responded with a spot essay: “I have more than one take on this.  Fiction has more than one purpose or point as I see it, and one purpose is entertainment.  It should always be entertaining, because if it isn’t, few will bother to listen.  That is, originally stories were told around the fire in the evening, keeping children out of mischief.  If it didn’t interest them, they would stray, get lost, and eaten by a bear.  Books are a written form, serving a similar purpose.  Radio/TV/Internet are extensions of it.  All depend on their entertainment value to garner their audiences.  (paragraph) But originally fiction also educated and inculcated social values.  It also encouraged a greater facility with language, a hallmark of our species.  Our brain may have expanded enormously to accommodate the phenomenal intricacies and concepts of language.  So to me, fiction without purpose is like empty calories: it just makes you fat and lazy.  I believe there should always be a point.  It should be entertainingly phrased, but there.  My definition of purpose is broad: information, education, encouragement, diversion, wonder, laughter—we need all of these and more.  Any will do.  (paragraph) What you don’t want is a point without entertainment.  That’s a lecture, like foul-tasting medicine, and may alienate the audience.  But to claim that there should be no point is wrong.  (paragraph) In sum: good fiction should be a synthesis of purpose and entertainment.  Those who claim otherwise are surely ignorant.”

Last column I asked about “Hamina, hamina” in the Curtis comic strip as he viewed his luscious teacher.  I received several answers.  It seems it derives from Jackie Gleason in “The Honeymooners,” when he got flustered, a show I didn’t watch.  Another explanation is that it is used by men when they are speechless with lust for a woman.  That fits too.  Thanks, readers.

You may not have noticed or cared much about the Georgia vs. Russia situation, being distracted by the Olympics, and maybe never heard of South Ossetia, but it’s something I happen to know a bit about.  Because earlier this year I was completing my historical novel Climate of Change, and that’s a setting.  To make an obscenely shortened version of part of the vast panorama of Asia, one of the wild tribes that moved into Asia Minor was the Alani, and they have been in the Caucasus Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea for two thousand years, with shifting fortunes.  Remember my mention of the captured Alani princess in a prior column?  They are now known as the Ossetians, and they just want to be free to govern their own domain, which may be known as Alania, but they have been broken into two parts: North Ossetia and South Ossetia.  One is in the Russian sphere, the other in the Georgian sphere.  The South Ossetians have been allowed some reasonable autonomy.  But recently Georgia decided it was going to deprive them of that, and rolled in tanks, expecting the USA to back it up.  Utter folly!  The USA has a long history of reneging on commitments, and was true to form this time.  For one thing, all its spare resources are taken up in the ill-gotten war of choice in Iraq.  So when neighboring Alani ally Russia responded with tanks that counter-invaded Georgia, Georgia was screwed.  But Georgia started it.  They may lose South Ossetia, and it may finally merge with North Ossetia and become Alania, and I for one will be glad to see it.  There was similar mischief most of a century ago known as the Armenian Genocide; the Ossetians had sympathy for their oppressed neighbors.  I have been there, in my fashion, and remain an Alani fan.  I’d like to see the Basques, split between France and Spain, similarly freed and unified.

Newspaper item: the estimated life expectancy for a white male born in 1936 was 58 years.  I was born in in 1934, so I have outlived my term.  But someone who makes it to age 72 can expect to live a dozen more years.  That gives me another decade.  Okay.  I still have novels to write.

There are those who want to convert America from a secular state to a religious one.  I think those folk don’t much like the Constitution.  But little do they appreciate the can of worms they seek to open.  They think it would become a Christian state, but there is no guarantee it would work out that way.  It has been suggested that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster be state-established, its precepts being as valid as, say, Creationism.  That’s not what these advocates mean?  As I see it, one form of nonsense is as valid as another.

From time to time I see remarks by Republicans saying that the Democrats have accomplished almost nothing since they took over House and Senate two years ago.  A solicitation from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (for some reason both Republicans and Democrats seem to assume that as a registered independent since 1959, I must be one of them) gives a reason: the Republicans have now filibustered more bills than any congress in United States history.  So the obstructionists are hypocritically blaming the Democrats for doing nothing.  Of course the Democrats have an answer: vote so many of them in next time that they have a filibuster-proof majority.

One thing that chronically bemuses me is that most of those who oppose abortion also oppose sex education and contraception.  I think that’s nonsense, because effective contraception is the most likely way to stop abortions.  Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin is a poster case for the failure of this attitude, because her teen age unmarried daughter is pregnant.  If she can’t enforce abstinence in her own daughter, how does she think any other parent will?  People are welcome to their personal ideologies, but some realism would help.

Via the Internet, another itemization of the warning signs of fascism: strong nationalism, disdain for human rights, finding enemies as scapegoats to unify the population, supremacy of the military, sexism, controlled mass media, obsession with national security, religion in government, protection of corporate power, suppression of labor power, disdain for intellectuals and the arts, obsession with crime and punishment, rampant cronyism and corruption, and fraudulent elections.  Sound like anyone we know?

There has been a local spate of articles and outrage relating to pictures published of new scanning machines at the Tampa International Airport.  They in effect strip-search passengers without touching them.  A company worker demonstrated, a moderately esthetic woman in clothing, then shown from several angles via the screen.  She’s basically bare, her genital area showing, her breasts somewhat compacted by her invisible bra.  Overall, not a very attractive rendition.  I see this an an example of the problem of X-ray vision: what you see is not titillating.  So will it prevent passengers from smuggling bombs aboard planes?  I hope so.  Those who object: what alternative do they offer, given that there are those who do bomb and hijack airplanes?

And more sex ads arriving via snail.  Sniff ‘n’ Stiff claims that when you sniff it, in five second you’ll be erect, bigger and harder.  And Vaquerax says it will double the size of your penis, and triple its hardness.  Well, maybe.  Sounds much like the old Internet ads that promise the impossible.

Article in THE HUMANIST covers a familiar theme for me: if you are concerned about he environment, adopt a vegetarian diet.  It is the most environmentally friendly there is, while the meat diet is the opposite, wreaking damage, especially with modern high-intensity factory farming.  The livestock sector is responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions.  So apart from the moral question of the attendant cruelty to the animals, vegetarianism makes economic and environmental sense.  However, not all vegetation is equal.  Child labor is used in growing cocoa plants for the chocolate we like so well.  Children are kidnapped and sold into a life of slave labor.  They have tried to make a protocol that will phase out child labor, but most companies ignore it.

As usual, I have a pile of items I wanted to comment on, but I’m out of time.  Sigh.

Last column I described the onset of my Reclast Flu, the side effects to the expensive bone-thickening medication I took. I thought it would be over in a few days. I was wrong. The fever endured 18 days. Toward the end it was minimal, around 99 degrees, and my body felt less worse accordingly. I didn’t feel free to resume my exercises until the fever passed. My last exercise run before the flu was just under 17 minutes. The first one after it was 24 minutes for the same route. For Archery I normally loose 12 arrows right handed and 12 left handed. When I resumed I loosed one arrow, each side, and lacked the strength to loose a second. My aim, of course, was awful. But as NoRemember ended, my runs were back under 18 minutes and I was loosing 12 arrows, each side. My aim remained awful. During the fever, food tasted like cardboard; gradually thereafter taste returned. I lost about two pounds, and won’t rush to replace it; I am satisfied remaining lean. Apparently all the bone thickening medications can have horrendous side effects. Be warned.

In the throes of that ailment, I discover I missed a few Electronic Publisher Survey update entries for OctOgre. My apology, and I think I have them all current now. I receive quite a bit of feedback on that ongoing effort, much of it positive; writers do seem to be finding markets through it. That makes the considerable time it takes worthwhile.

I suppose it could have been coincidence, but concurrent with my malaise the stock market went crazy, making record daily losses, bouncing back, losing again, and generally showing the the economy was feeling as bad as I was. The macrocosm does at times seem to echo my microcosm. Remember, with magic, all things are possible. But contemporary economics remind me of a story I was told as a child: a man discovered that he could feed his cow a little less each day, and the cow didn’t notice. So he tried to see how far he could take it. He had the cow down to almost nothing. But then the cow died, ruining the experiment. Sheer bad luck, the farmer thought. Well, for the past eight years the governing party in America seems to have followed a similar course, raising prices but not wages, cutting back on health entitlements, unemployment insurance, and so on, so that the billionaires could get rapidly richer at the public expense. Then, by sheer bad luck, the economy died. They never saw it coming. I have another analogy: the greedy kids got control of the candy store. They had a ball, eating all the candy without paying for it. Finally the store ran out of candy and the kids were in sad straits. They wanted someone to pay off all the unpaid debts so they could restock the store with more candy and continue eating, but no one was interested. It seemed never to occur to them to act responsibly, with an eye to the future.

Meanwhile I have been active on other fronts. I published a novelette with Cobblestone, their Wicked line, and they seem very active in editing and promotion. As part of that I was asked to contribute a promotional blog entry for them, and did. Readership and responses seem small; there are many blogs there. But for those who don’t go near erotic publishers, and who might be interested, here is a reprint of it, self explanatory.

Piers Anthony

Blog

I’ve been around a while. My first story was published in 1963 and my first novel in 1967. The great majority of my experience is with traditional print publication. The newfangled Internet and its myriad magical offspring are a bit beyond my comfort zone. Sometimes I can find a Web site and assimilate its offerings, but sometimes it turns out to be a welter of confusion, demanding things like Flash, which never worked on my systems, or some more esoteric process I can’t even remember or pronounce, let alone use. I am after all 74 years old, and my synapses are hardening nicely, thank you. Reports of my demise constantly circulate like eager vultures, so far exaggerated or unfounded, but the birds evidently still hope. Maybe they know something I am in denial about.

How, then, did I ever get intimate with a young and hot outfit like Cobblestone? There’s a story there. There’s always a story; I have earned my living for two score years writing stories, so naturally that’s how I see it. To a hammer, everything else looks like a nail.

Because my reputation is in traditional print, and in my heyday my books really have been read by millions, I get a good deal of fan mail. In fact about one third of my working time the past 30 years has been taken by that correspondence. To me, every reader is a feeling person, and a letter deserves an answer. Yes, not every successful writer answers his fan mail. I suspect the majority do not, though I understand that Romance writers generally do. Good for them. But when I got into the Internet I realized that the potential for reader response was far greater, and the deluge could bury me. For one thing, it seems that half my readers are aspiring authors, and they all want me to tell them exactly how I did it, so they can do it too. But for some reason they are not quite satisfied with my answer that I earned my college BA in Creative Writing in 1956, and submitted stories for eight years until finally I got lucky and sold one. Yes, lucky; a writer may have infinite talent, but luck still will play about a 50% chance in his success. That, and hard work for a decade or so, can do it, though there is no assurance. Talent, persistence, and luck: there’s the formula. But my readers seem to lack the patience for that chancy route. As one told me, “You don’t understand. I need the money now.” No use telling him to write for the sheer satisfaction of the artistry of it, without any assurance of commercial success. Reality was clearly not his strong suit.

Still, I don’t enjoy educating aspiring writers about the one-to-one hundred odds against them that traditional print offers. Just getting a piece read by an editor is a long shot. So I looked for a more satisfactory answer. And there was electronic publishing. There the odds against a new writer may be only ten to one—I don’t think hard statistics exist—and if he chooses to go to self publishing, the odds are one to one. So I started a list of electronic publishers and related services, so that I would have that satisfactory answer to offer. It also helped that I could do it, making frank comments, without fear of losing my livelihood by getting blacklisted by publishers who don’t want ugly truths known. I was blacklisted for six years in the 1980s, essentially for truth telling, and I came out of it with an attitude like that of an abused pit bull dog. The whole of electronic publishing could vanish into a black hole and it really wouldn’t affect my livelihood. I list the publishers, and I describe anonymous feedback by writers who do have to fear blacklisting, and I make corrections when it turns out—oh horror!–that a publisher actually has the right of it. Thus the truth emerges, in due course. So yes, my ongoing survey is a source of ugly interactions, but no, it would take a lawsuit to stifle it. No one with any sense would ever get into a court of law against me, because I have the will and the means and a certain saliva-dripping eagerness to take it to them and they know it. I have been there and done that with traditional print outfits, and always won my case. Meanwhile my Survey does help new writers find prospects.

So what has all this to do with Cobblestone and me? Patience, I’m getting there. I published a complaint against Cobblestone, and that got proprietor Sable Grey on my tail. And I backed off, because this was one of those rare occasions when the publisher did have the right of it. The complaint had been about editing, and this publisher has strict but reasonable standards. Since then Sable and I have had an intermittent dialogue, not confined to editing or publishing, and I have to say I rather like her.

So when she mentioned starting up a Wicked new line with material that might push beyond the limits of other publishers, small wheels rotated in my ossifying cranium. My participation in electronic publishing can best be described as dabbling. What is it like to actually be an electronic author? It is information that might help me get my bearings for my comments on these publishers. As it happens, I keep a big file of ideas—I never throw away an idea!–and a week or so before I had summarized an intriguing one I expected never to write, because it was a bit beyond the pale. But maybe for this venue it would do. So I mentioned it to Sable, and it did not freak her out. That was a positive sign. So in three days, writing at white-hot speed, I wrote the approximately 10,000 word “Knave” and submitted it to Cobblestone. The rest is minor history.

I have now been through the Cobblestone editing process. I have dealt with copyeditors for over forty years, and I think I know about as much about the effective use of the English language as any writer does. Whoever said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds surely had copyeditors in mind. My story went through several copyediting drafts, and a fair number of changes were made. It didn’t help that at this time I was suffering from the side effects of the bone-thickening medication Reclast, which put me into a fever for eighteen days and for a time wiped out my physical and mental resources. I am now recovering, though am not yet back to 100%. At one point I simply told ye copyed to do it her way, because I lacked the concentration to do it myself. But I have to say that the revisions did make sense. In what way is this editing inferior to that of traditional print publication? In no way.

I won’t say much about the story itself. This is a blog about the background of its genesis, not a description. You can read “Knave” at your leisure, or not, as you choose. It is phrased as a young man’s erotic encounters with the four queens represented by a standard deck of cards. The Queen of Clubs governs all golf clubs, everywhere; she does things on the greens with golf balls that few women would do in a darkened bedroom. The Queen of Diamonds works in a vault filled with money, gold, and precious stones, and she has a rounded diamond dildo that—never mind. The Queen of Spades is an expert gardener, and she does things with carrots and turnips that hardly relate to nutrition. But the intriguing one is the Queen of Hearts, who has a very special way of making love that not every man can compass. That’s what put this story into the dubious category.

Then there was NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, wherein each November aspiring novelists try to write a 50,000 word novel in that one month, quality no object. The challenge is simply to get it done. I was asked to do one of their pep talks this year, so I did. It is phrased as an orientation lecture by a tough sergeant in a gym, with maybe a bit of a smile for those who get the humor. The NaNo folk may not have been amused; they cut and denatured it somewhat, deleting the saucier humor, so here is the full original text. As the month ends, I am getting half a slew of responses to it; it’s nice to know my effort is appreciated, even if incomplete. I had thought the pep talks would be run at the outset; instead they are spaced out, which makes sense, and mine was run the third week. But it means my thrust may be slightly off, considering that the participants would be most of the way through their novels by this time. Still, a number have expressed strong appreciation.

Pep Talk

by Piers Anthony

You’re a fool. You know that, don’t you? Because only a fool would try a stunt as crazy as this. You want to write a 50,000 word novel in one month?! Do you have sawdust in your skull? When there are so many other more useful things you could be doing, like cleaning up the house and yard, taking a correspondence course in Chinese, or contributing your time and effort to a charitable cause? Whatever is possessing you?

Consider the first card of the Tarot deck, titled The Fool. There’s this young man traipsing along with a small dog at his heel, toting a bag of his worldly goods on the end of his wooden staff, carrying a flower in his other hand, gazing raptly at the sky—and about to step off a cliff, because he isn’t watching his feet. A fool indeed. Does this feel familiar? It should. You’re doing much the same thing. What made you ever think you could bat out a bad book like that, let alone write anything readable?

So are you going to give up this folly and focus on reality before you step off the cliff? No? Are you sure? Even though you know you are about to confirm the suspicion of your dubious relatives, several acquaintances, and fewer friends that you never are going to amount to anything more than a dank hill of beans? That you’re too damned oink-headed to rise to the level of the very lowest rung of common sense?

Sigh. You’re a lost soul. So there’s no help for it but to join the lowly company of the other aspect of The Fool. Because the fact is, that Fool is a Dreamer, and it is Dreamers who ultimately make life worthwhile for the unimaginative rest of us. Sensible folk are animals who make money, feed their faces and reproduce, perpetuating their kind. They even make it part of their religion: be fruitful and multiply. Dreamers consider the wider universe. Dreamers build cathedrals, shape fine sculptures, and yes, generate literature. Dreamers are the artists who provide our rapacious species with some faint evidence of nobility.

So maybe you won’t be a successful novelist, or even a good one. At least you are trying. That, would you believe, puts you in a rarefied one percent of our kind. Maybe less than that. You aspire to something better than the normal rat race. You may not accomplish much, but it’s the attitude that counts. As with mutations: 99% of them are bad and don’t survive, but the 1% that are better are responsible for the evolution of species to a more fit state. Sorry, Creationists; I’m not talking to you; you’d be obliged to write your novel in six days, and rest on the seventh. You know the odds are against you, but who knows? If you don’t try, you’ll never be sure whether you might, just maybe, possibly, have done it. So you do have to make the effort, or be forever condemned in your own bleary eyes.

Actually, 50,000 words isn’t hard. You can write “Damn!” 50,000 times. Oh, you want a readable story! That will be more of a challenge. But you know, it can be done. In my heyday, before my wife’s health declined and I took over meals and chores, I routinely wrote 3,000 words a day, taking two days a week off to answer fan mail, and 60,000 words a month was par. Now I try for 1,500 and hope for 2,000. That will do it. If you write that much each day, minimum, and go over some days, you will have your quota in the month. On the 10^th of the month of August, 2008, I started writing my Xanth novel Knot Gneiss, about the challenge of a boulder that turns out to be not stone but a huge petrified knot of reverse wood that terrifies anyone who approaches it. Petrified = terrified, get it? And by the 30^th I had 35,000 words. That’s the same pace. If I can do it in my doddering old age—I’m 74—you can do it in your relative youth. What did I do on the 31st? I spent the morning on mail, and started this stupid Pep Talk in the afternoon, that’s what, and completed the first draft at 1500 words on Labor Day morning, working around my exercise routine and an hour grocery shopping in town. One day, part time—the same schedule you will attempt. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re a coed or an accountant, you can certainly give it a try. Remember, this is only an exercise, a—oh, you in the front row, you have a question? You say you are an coed? Okay, then. And you in the second row behind her. You say you arean accountant? That’s fine; I wasn’t try to disparage you.

Of course it will help if you have something to say, like maybe a halfway decent story. The fact is, good characters and a good situation will help a lot. So even though you may want to get right on into it, don’t. Pause to consider characters, setting, story, and rationale. That is, does it really make sense? If you get those right, before you start, your story will practically write itself. I constantly make notes along the way, which don’t count as story text, but do point me in the right direction. It’s a bit like stopping to put gasoline in the car before you cross the desert: a sensible thing. Another question? Yes, Coed, you can make a teen girl the main character. The rule of thumb is to write what you know, and you surely know about teendom. That goes for you too, Accountant, though I wouldn’t recommend filling your manuscript with figures, ha-ha. Not mathematical ones, anyway.

Of course you need ideas. What, you don’t have any? You can garner them from anywhere. I noticed that our daily newspaper comes in a plastic bag that is knotted. The knot’s too tight to undo without a lot of effort, so I just rip it open to get at the goodies inside. It’s a nuisance; I wish they’d leave it loose. But I thought, maybe there’s this cute delivery girl who has a crush on me, and she ties a love-knot to let me know. Not that at my age I’d know what to do with a real live girl, but it’s still a fun fantasy. Okay, there’s an idea. I could use it in my fiction. Maybe even in a Pep Talk. The mundane world has provided me with an opening. It will do the same for you, if you’re alert.

No, Coed; you can’t write a steamy collaborative romance about an illicit affair with an Accountant. You’re underage and he’s married. Now do you mind? I’m trying to conduct a Pep Talk here.

Here’s a secret: fictive text doesn’t necessary flow easily. Most of the time it’s more like cutting a highway through a mountain. You just have to keep working with your pick, chipping away at the rock, making slow progress. It may not be pretty at first. Prettiness doesn’t come until later, at the polishing stage, which is outside your month. You just have to get it done by brute force if necessary. So maybe your ongoing story isn’t very original. That’s okay, for this. Just get it done. Originality can be more in the eye of the reader than in any objective assessment.

Will you two stop whispering? I don’t care, Accountant, if you think my attitude doesn’t compute. Or if Coed thinks I’m a darned spoilsport. I’m trying to encourage half a slew of doubtful aspiring novelists to give it their best shot. Yes, actually, forbidden love is a workable theme. Half of all published novels are in the Romance genre, and they aren’t very original; in fact they have set formulas their authors must adhere to. But secret or forbidden love can fit a formula. So you can start anywhere. Even here. What, you want an example? Okay, try this for an outline:

Chapter 1: At first Accountant was annoyed by the knot in the newspaper bag… Chapter 2: He was amazed when he saw her, cute as a button, looking almost too young to drive. Then she caught his eye, and blushed… Chapter 3: Another morning she was in tears, because her car had broken down and she couldn’t complete the delivery route. Naturally he had to help… Chapter 4: “Oh, I’m so grateful, Mr. Accountant,” she said. “I don’t know how I can ever express my appreciation, unless…” She lifted her full blouse off over her head… Chapter 5: He was a huge gruff, florid, ugly stevedore of a man. “Have you been interfering with my sweet innocent daughter?” he demanded…

Not that I’m recommending junk like this; I’m just showing how you can make it from a standing start, even from a foolish daydream when you should have been paying attention to the Pep Talk. You will want to try for a bit more quality, of course, and maybe a spot of realism. Garner an Idea, assemble some Characters, find a suitable place to start, and turn them loose in your imagination. Now go home and start your engines. Some few of your sorry lot may yet become Authors.

Addendum: SPAM circular: Forbidden Love, by Accountant & Coed, roundly condemned by literacy critics, banned in 14 states and three countries, dedicated to Piers Anthony, without whose bad attitude this titillating short novel, written in only one month, would never have come to be.

Sigh.

The Writer’s Resource Romance Divas invited me to participate in their October Q&A event, and I did, in my fashion. I typically have trouble with popular sites, and did with this one, with entries that didn’t post and “Page Cannot be Displayed” notices. I think the Internet doesn’t like me. So I had to contribute by email and have them post it for me. But at least I was there in spirit.

I read books. Here is the letter of comment I made on The Kalinvar Tapes by J D Davis, one that is looking for a traditional print publisher.

This novel is phrased as a discovered manuscript, for verisimilitude relating to its content. It is the story of the discovery of a temporary alien base on the moon in Mare Crisium, first discovered by its heat traces from its nuclear power plant. The novel covers 16 years, 1967-1983 as global politics are navigated and a mission arranged to check the moon site. The indication of an alien visitation is confirmed, and alien records are taken from the deserted base. They are slowly deciphered, but jealous governments, paranoid secrecy, and sheer mischance result in the destruction of many of the tapes, and the deaths of most participants. So in the end, the potentially earth-shaking news of our first alien contact is stifled.

The novel starts slowly, with immense detail, and builds to excitement and romance before concluding obscurely. One get the impression that if aliens did visit our moon, this is the way it would play out. This is an intriguing, provocative story. I am left with one mystery never quite clarified: what did kill Nicholai Kalinvar? He was checking an alien grave on the moon; a puff of vapor came out, and he was half paralyzed thereafter and finally died. Did the alien vapor penetrate his space suit? Paranoid bureaucracy prevented any clear answer. I am left frustrated—exactly as the author intended.

I read Ogre’s Passing by Paul Melniczek, published by DOUBLE DRAGON www.double-dragon-ebooks.com. I like ogres, ever since my novel Ogre, Ogre became my first national bestseller. This is a fantasy adventure, first of a series, and a good one. Sarion is a highly skilled warrior who retired several years ago to farming. He is satisfied, as the horrors he saw in the western wilderness wiped out all the members of his party except him. But a party from the king arrives, recruiting him to return to that dread lowlands region, because he is the most knowledgeable person concerning its mysteries. So they go—and the horrors waste little time picking the men off. There’s a marauding ogre they want to track down and destroy, a fearsome foe, but that’s really only the beginning. There’s the dread killworm they thought was long extinct; unfortunately it’s not. There is evidence of ancient giants. There are intelligent alien species who don’t much like human beings. There are giant ancient ruins. It’s really just a travel and dread encounter story, but a gripping one, with the question of what the king’s party is really looking for. Evidently a larger story will unfold in the succeeding volumes. It should be a dramatic one. There is the hint of future romance. I recommend this for fantasy readers.

We saw a movie, Quantum of Solace, the current James Bond adventure, on Thanksgiving Day. It had so much violence, and cut so abruptly to new sequences, that I had difficulty following it. So the spot sequences were interesting, but the larger story was obscure. I suspect that movie makers have forgotten how to actually tell a coherent story. They think that violence substitutes for narrative clarity. I hope that some day one of them remembers the audience, and acts accordingly. It’s no wonder so many movies bomb.

I completed Xanth #34 Knot Gneiss, and believe it matches the Xanthly norm, which may not be saying much. That’s the one wherein Wenda Woodwife, who speaks in the forest dialect saying things like “I wood knot dew that to yew,” must transport a 150 pound malign knot of petrified reverse wood to the Good Magician’s castle. Naturally it terrifies anyone who approaches it, except Wenda herself, who isn’t petrified because she’s a former wood spirit. It’s a frightening challenge. Wenda is introduced in #33 Jumper Cable, not yet published, a close friend of Jumper Spider, and I liked her so well that she became the main character for the following novel. This about a woodwife: from the front she is a full-fleshed nymph, but from behind she is hollow. She’s actually carved from wood, and magically animated. That’s not my invention; it’s authentic mythology. Wenda becomes physically and emotionally whole when she finds love in the first novel, but gets reverted in the second, only reversed: her front side is hollow. That’s awkward, especially with her amorous husband.

My current project is typing my science fiction novel Cluster into the computer, to make it available electronically. The process is interesting, because it was published in 1977, and in 30 years I have forgotten whole chapters, and am reading them as new fiction. I am eliminating typos, extra dashes and exclamation points, adding spot clarifications, and finding alternates for symbols that no longer exist. Overall, I find it an excellent novel; I did know how to write in those days, before getting corrupted by fantasy.

Daughter #2 Cheryl believes in getting things done. For years we have had a problem with slowly developing sink holes in our three quarter mile long drive. You may think that all sink holes open up suddenly to swallow cars or houses, but in this area we have the dull gradual small kind that take years to develop, and we accommodate as necessary. So she had half a truckload of heavy gravel delivered, and I hauled my little wagon and spade out and started filling holes. I judge that one wagonful is about 300 pounds, and two or three fill the typical hole. Now the drive is drivable again. It’s an ongoing process, but we’ll keep the drive in shape.

In 1977 we bought a pendulum clock. We had seen a nice hexagonal one in the Wards catalog, and got it, but it wouldn’t run. So we returned it for another, and that didn’t run either. Turned out a truckload of the clocks had been dropped. So we gave up on that and went to a regular clock store and bought a less interesting and more expensive one. We were supposed to bring it back to the store after a month for checking or fine tuning, but in that month we moved to Citrus County and couldn’t manage it. Now it is 31 year later and the clock is still running, though I had to do some work re-gluing the pendulum, and aspects of its mechanism are showing signs of aging. For example, at 6 o’clock it bongs 8 times. At 7 it bongs 7 or 9. Recently I counted, and thought it bonged 10, but when I checked specifically it was still 7 or 9. Then 10 again. Was it teasing me? So I had my wife listen with me one time, and we verified it at 10. It really had added a bong. Sometimes.

I saw a news feature on TV, and at one point they showed girls jumping with delight. And I thought, that must be an evolutionary thing. Girls who jump make their breasts bounce, attracting attention to them, and men notice and are turned on, and more such girls thus reproduce than the non-jumping kind. Natural selection.

I like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It’s stirring, and there can even be words to it, as with a union song: “None shall push aside another, None shall let another fall; Walk beside me, O my brother, All for one and one for all.” But there’s one peculiarity. There’s a natural pause after “…another fall” but they never play it that way; instead the next line almost overrides it, stepping on its heels. “None shall let another fallWalk beside me…” Am I the only one aware of the natural cadence? Did some scribe miscopy the original notes and omit the pause, and no one noticed? I may never know. I remember a joke about the composer: Beethoven had done four symphonies but was stumped for a theme for the next. As he racked his mind, the cleaning woman came by, doing his office. She paused and said “If you don’t my mind asking, sir. Where do you get your ideas for all those wonderful symphonies you write?” He did not let on about his present composer’s block, which was driving him crazy, and tried to give her a positive answer. He said “Why I get ideas from anywhere. Even from you, my dear.” “Me? Me!” she exclaimed incredulously. “Ha ha ha haa!” And the Ha’s were the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

From my reading: there are huge world issues the American press pretty much ignores. 30,000 people a day die of malnutrition, curable diseases, and starvation. Farmers around the world grow more than enough to feed everyone, but commodity speculators and huge grain traders control prices and distribution. Starvation is profitable; an outfit called Cargill announced profits up 86 percent. Global hunger and massive wealth inequality are based on political policies that can be changed, and need to be, if there is ever to be national security, here or anywhere. Then there is sex trafficking, with teen girls sold into slavery, imprisoned in brothels until they die of AIDS. One of them, Somaly Mam, escaped in time and now runs an organization that extricates girls from forced prostitution. Her published memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence, offers lessons for tackling the problem. Gangsters who run the brothels tried to intimidate her, holding a gun to her head; when they failed, they kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter. A raid in Cambodia rescued more than 200 girls, but next day gangsters raided the shelter and took them back to the brothel. But her efforts are helping; it is no longer so easy to buy a 12-year-old girl for sex, and virgins are expensive. So how did Somaly herself escape? Once when she ran away from the brothel, police gang-raped her. Then her owner tied her down naked and poured live maggots over her skin and in her mouth. Another time she was tortured with electric shocks. She preferred foreign clients, because at least they didn’t beat her. Eventually a French aid worker married her, thus freeing her. The worst is in Asia, but similar occurs in America. More needs to be done.

Related: article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND titled “Why Do Men Buy Sex?” Because of course if men didn’t buy it, the pimps and brothels would have no business. Yes, men like sex, but that can’t be the whole story, because married men patronize prostitutes too. Why pay for it when you can get it free, presumably with a clean, attractive woman you love? The answer seems to be that real relationships with women can be risky and complicated, as million dollar divorce settlements hint, and men may not want to handle them. Prostitutes, in contrast, don’t have headaches or times of the month or inhibitions about certain body parts; they accept their customers unconditionally. It is intimacy on demand without backtalk or demands, any way, any time. It doesn’t have to be emotion-free, either; men tend to return to the same prostitute, liking her. A prostitute simulates the kind of women a man would like to marry, if she would only stay that way, perpetually pretty and obliging and undemanding. And, as the paragraph above indicates, if a man likes them young, like age twelve, the brothel may be the only place he can get it. It is evident that many men do. The child will oblige him as well as she is able, because she doesn’t want to be tortured. So it’s a relationship of mutual convenience, in the ugly real world. I doubt there is any easy solution.

I received a Welcome to Humanism package. I’m not sure why, as I have been a card-carrying Humanist for the past decade or so, and a lifelong one in practice. But it is nice material. Many famous folk have been Humanists, including Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Gene Roddenberry and the environmentalist Lester R Brown. “The AHA [American Humanist Association] provides a Humanist perspective in strong support of separation of religion from government, preservation and restoration of the environment, protection of civil rights and liberties, and promotion of personal choice regarding introduction of new life, family structure, and death with dignity.” In short, personal liberty, ethics, nature, and common sense. Their bimonthly magazine THE HUMANIST has interesting articles, such as in November/December 2008, “In Pursuit of the ‘God Particle.’” You know, the Higgs Boson, one of my hobbies. www.americanhumanist.org.

The WatchTower folk called on us, as they do every six months or so. I generally repeat that I’m not a prospect for conversion, but talk with them long enough so that they realize that I am not ignorant of their history and principles; my rejection is a politely informed decision. They insist on leaving their literature, and I do look at it. I look at everything, being as open minded as feasible. This time their pamphlet poses several Questions about God and the Bible, with answers. Here is a sample: What Happens to Us When We Die? The Bible teaches that at death, humans cease to exist, and are conscious of nothing at all. Ecclesiastes 9:5. So there are no ghosts. So is there any hope for the dead? Yes. They will in due course be resurrected and have the opportunity to live on a paradise earth, with perfect health and everlasting life for obedient humans. Okay, so it’s like cryogenics, freezing folk in the hope of eventual revivification. What bothers me, apart from the fantasy that there will ever be a revival, is the qualifier “obedient.” A servant or slave is obedient. Obedient to what? That is undefined. This purported Heaven could in fact be Hell. My belief is that death is the end of personal awareness, and there will be no subsequent restoration. I had better be right. But if the Jehovah’s Witnesses missed your block and you want to get in touch, try www.watchtower.org.

The weekly NEW SCIENTIST is my favorite magazine, the one I read for pleasure as well as information, and I refer to it often in these columns. This time I was brought up short by a fact that is obvious in retrospect. The articles “What politicians dare not say” (they don’t capitalize the latter words in titles) in the 18 October 2008 issue answers in this manner: “This is the logic of free-market capitalism: the economy must grow continuously or face an unpalatable collapse. With the environmental situation reaching crisis point, however, it is time to step pretending that mindlessly chasing economic growth is compatible with sustainability. We need something more robust than a comfort blanket to protect us from the damage we are wreaking on the planet. Figuring out an alternative to this doomed model is now a priority before a global recession, an unstable climate, or a combination of the two forces itself upon us.” Or, to put it my way: we are careering toward a wall, and we’d better turn aside before we smash. A faulty economic model is only part of the problem.

Also from NEW SCIENTIST, for 8 November 2008, “Private life of the brain.” It seems that the brain is never really at rest. When you are active and focusing, of course your brain is humming. But when you relax, it is humming just about as fast. Even in sleep. What is it doing? This is something I figured out decades ago, and it’s good to see science finally catching up. I spent about three years as a file clerk, and you know, filing is not necessarily a simple task. You have to figure out what type of papers you have, and key them in appropriately, and cross reference them, and file them in proper order. So that when there is a need for one particular paper among thousands, you can locate it immediately. A business that does not properly file will soon come to grief. So a significant part of the overhead of any business is filing. Well, your brain is constantly taking in new information, only it is a magnitude more complicated than papers. So what is it doing at rest? It is sorting and preserving memories. “The default network is involved, selectively storing and updating memories based on their importance from a personal perspective—whether they’re good, threatening, emotionally painful, and so on. To prevent a backlog of unstored memories building up, the network returns to its duties whenever it can.” Because of course feeling is what animates us, so we have to categorize and file feelings attached to memories. That’s a complex task. My thesis, covered in my 1994 historical novel Shame of Man, is that our nocturnal dreams represent the processing of the most challenging memories, the ones that must be considered consciously, because of their complexity and intense emotions. You can’t just toss those bombs into the hopper and hope they integrate properly.

I received yet another erection ad. This is a simple little strip you put on your tongue, and in five minutes you have an erection that lasts for 24 hours. It works just as well on women. Oh? I’m not sure I want to see a woman with an erection. 42 STIFF strips for about $50, including postage. I’m curious whether they actually work, but not curious enough to send for them. As it is, I cut Viagra tablets into eighths, and those fragments work well enough.

Another from NEW SCIENTIST, 15 November 2008: Warfare turns out to be as old as humanity itself. Why do we continue fighting, when obviously it is pointlessly destructive? Men have evolved a tendency toward aggression outside the group, but cooperation within it. I see that; consider competitive team sports, which are sublimated warfare. Thus the cooperative aspects that contribute so much to our society may derive from war. Women are much less so. So it may be that prayers fer world peace are futile; our species is not made that way, and civilization might dissolve if we no longer made war. I find that uncomfortable, but it may be true.

Other diverse items: Ad for a book, The Third Basic Instinct, by Alex S Key. The thesis is that there are three basic instincts: Survival, Reproduction, and the force for scientific discovery. It is subtitled “How Religion Doesn’t Get You.” I am not sure this computes, but my curiosity is not sufficient to make me buy the book. NEW SCIENTIST, yet again: “Is science fiction dying?” replete with pictures of junky old-time magazine covers and references to “sci-fi.” Brief discussions by William Gibson, Ursula Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nick Sagan, Stephen Baxter, and Margaret Atwood. They don’t think the genre is done for. Neither do I. Not that anyone asked me. Book review of Talent is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin. The thesis is that great performance is not necessarily the result of natural talent but of deliberate practice. In my view it requires both: natural potential melded with dedication. I regard myself as apt with words and concepts, and readers may judge my ability by reading this blog-type column or my published fiction, but I was no genius in school, not even in English. I got there by decades of effort to improve. Another newspaper article: psychologists say a few simple techniques can end racism in a few hours. How? Put two strangers together in four hour sessions, answering lists of questions, then competing against other teams. Then they talk about a variety of things. Finally they take turns wearing a blindfold while the partner gives instructions for navigating a maze. This develops relationships. Okay. I’ve seen them do that on TV, in Survivor. Google settled a controversial copyright case by agreeing to pay tens of millions of dollars in licensing fees to authors and publishers. Good enough.

I answer fan mail responsively. That is, a simple form thank-you to simple expressions of appreciation for my books, brief explanations as warranted, and full letters as required. Chris Boylan discussed the illegal immigrant problem and asked for my opinion. This evoked a spot lecture as follows:

Yes. As a legal immigrant and naturalized US citizen, I do have an interest. Vastly simplified, there are cold equations. Let’s say that Country A controls its population and protects its environment, so it’s a nice place to be. Country B does neither, so that it teems with hungry people who can’t survive at home. So they pour into Country A. That means that the irresponsible ruin it for the responsible. If it isn’t stopped, both countries will be wiped out.

But this is not the real story. The bosses, that is, the employers, politicians, financiers and such of Country A keep wages so low that Country A workers can’t afford to buy Country A goods. So the bosses import workers from Country B, who are so desperate they will take those jobs, just to survive. This is illegal, which means those workers really have no rights and dare not complain, even when there is substantial abuse that Country A workers would not tolerate. The bosses find this more profitable than paying a living wage to Country A workers—and Country B workers get the blame. It’s a neat system, for the bosses.

Why not pay a living wage? Because then prices would rise, stirring unrest in Country A that could have ugly repercussions for the bosses. Why not fence the illegal immigrants out? Because then the bosses would have to pay a living wage to Country A workers. Why isn’t the issue addressed openly? Because there are no convenient, cheap solutions. Trying seriously to fix it would probably lead to the reformists getting booted from office.

Need I comment politically? I have been liberal all my life, and the past eight years have been appalling as the lunatic right fringe got power and brought the country to the verge of ruin. I backed Barack Obama—somehow it always seemed to me there should be more to his name, like AloBama—and was glad to see him win. I’m sorry the Democrats didn’t quite achieve a filibuster-proof Senate. There’s a hell of a lot of damage to try to undo, and that same rightist fringe will fight nail and tooth to prevent meaningful reform, ironically in the name of morality. I consider it shit morality. Obama seems to be organizing well, however. It hope it works out.

As I have mentioned from time to time in this column, there has been motion picture interest in my fantasy series. Two of three options were exercised and things are in progress: Anime for Split Infinity, and a potential TV series for On A Pale Horse. Then Warner Pictures had a two year option on A Spell for Chameleon, which they extended for two more years. Yes, they paid handsomely for each year, so it seems to me they were serious. It got extended without pay for another hundred days because of the writer’s strike. I held this column open two extra days to get the result. Finally, December 3, 2008, the decision: and Warner didn’t show. After all that, it seems they let it expire by default. I suspect the recent financial crash made it impossible for them to raise the necessary money, because they surely wanted to make the movie. Sigh; I wanted them to make it too.

Remember last column when I reran a blog and a pep talk in this column? In the pep talk I mentioned the fond fantasy of a cute teen girl knotting the newspaper bags to show she had a secret crush on me? And I built that into a sample story for the struggling Nanowrimo folk? Oh, you skipped that as too dull to bother with? Sigh, why do I bother? Total fiction of course, and I’d never express such illicit daydreams openly. After all, I’m a septuagenarian, way past such foolish fancies. Well, now the same carrier delivers both our newspapers, and they no longer knot the bags, so even the pretense of the fantasy is gone. But one day we got two copies of the CITRUS COUNTRY CHRONICLE and none of the ST. PETE TIMES. So we called in the error, and in due course they brought us a correct replacement copy. I was just doing my hair, about to tie it into my ponytail, which is now over a foot long, when the door knocked. So I let my hair flop awkwardly and went to answer, and it was the paper. Delivered by a slender teen girl.

Xlibris has been sold. I hope the former CEO, John Feldcamp, writes a book about the experience, because it’s quite a story. I will proffer only sanitary highlights here. It started in 1997, and my wife and I were I believe the second “angel” investors in the company that year. Angel is the most risky aspect of venture capital investing; you gamble that the new company will succeed and pay back big, but more likely you will lose your money. I’m no financial gambler; I don’t even buy lottery tickets. I was raised as a Quaker, and though I did not join, a number of their precepts rubbed off on me, such as an aversion to gambling with money. Yes, there are other gambles, some unavoidable; life itself is a constant gamble. I did it because I wanted every person to be able to get his book published, regardless of the piss-on-you attitude of Parnassus, the big traditional print publishing establishment that doesn’t care whether the average aspiring writer lives or dies, except that maybe dead authors are easier to deal with than live ones. Yes, I made my fortune in Parnassus, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t get plenty of experience under the outhouse hole along the way or that I suffered any sudden revelation how great it was once I got mine. I differ in such respects from some other writers. I didn’t get into writing for the money either, despite being a commercial writer; it’s that writing is in my secular soul, and the money enables me to continue doing it. I never liked the system, and wanted to reform it. This offered a way.

Well, Feldcamp shopped Xlibris around, getting it started. He showed it to Ingram; they were impressed, but turned him down, then started Lightning Source. He showed it to Barnes & Noble. They decided to buy it. Then, the day of the sale, they changed their mind and canceled; they went and invested in iUniverse instead, drawing on what they had learned from Xlibris. It left Xlibris abruptly without a merger prospect, stranded before the altar, without funds to continue. Maybe they figured to pick up its assets with pennies on the dollar when it crashed. There are indeed sharks in those waters, and they will feed on angels when they can.

Well, that annoyed me. I’m not a good person to annoy, and I have encountered figurative sharks before. Xlibris had inspired two major publishing enterprises, and now was bereft. The upshot was that my wife and I tripled our investment and provided funds to keep the company going. Another significant angel investor joined in, and then the investing arm of Random House bought in, taking 50% of the company but not interfering with its operation. Now I never had much love for the titans of Parnassus, but I have to say that Random was the salvation of Xlibris, treating it generously, enabling it so survive, grow, and ultimately prosper, and I developed a solid respect for Random the investor while Random the publisher consistently turned down my books, even my fantasy, even Xanth. Talk of mixed emotions!

That was hardly the end of the story, and I hope the juicy bits can someday be told. It was one roller-coaster excursion as the boom/bust of the year 2000 and after lifted the company to a lofty height then dashed it down to the verge of bankruptcy. But in the end while other self publishers were tanking, Xlibris found its track and became outstandingly successful, thanks to the inspired guidance of founder Feldcamp and the support of Random. The outfit that bought Authorhouse and iUniverse made an offer for Xlibris. It was too low and we spurned it; we were not in the sorry state the others were. They made another offer, much better. I would rather have kept it independent, as Xlibris was ascending strongly, but the decision was to sell, and that was completed just after the turn of the year. So my wife and I have double our money back and are out of Xlibris. It has been an eleven year odyssey, and has accomplished what I wanted: today anyone can get published for a nominal price, about $500. I put twenty of my own books in, and they are earning out their publication fees. Xlibris, unlike some, pays honest royalties. There are a number of imitators, and many critics, but the way was forged by Xlibris; it changed the publication landscape. I am proud to claim that not only have my novels entertained many readers over the decades, perhaps saving the lives of some; my support for self publishing enables thousands of aspiring authors to get published after all, saving their dreams. I hope the new owners continue the tradition.

Apart from that, I have tried to help in other ways, such as by maintaining my ongoing survey of electronic publishers and related services, telling the truth there without fear of blacklisting or lawsuit or alienating friends. Yes, I have been threatened; I tell them politely to attempt a flying fornication at the moon. One thing about truth telling: it is normally (not always) a legal defense against a charge of libel, if a person has the will and the means to fight. I do. I tell writers to try Parnassus, which is where the money and fame are, then small press or electronic publishing; only if they fail there, and still want to see their books published, should they go to self publishing, with limited expectations. I don’t even recommend Xlibris, though I stand by it; Amazon’s Create Space is cheaper. I loaned money to enable Mundania Press to get started, and it too seems to be prospering. Not that my investments always succeed; I lost 100G on Pulpless.com, whose promise was not matched by performance. I have put my money where my mouth is, but I haven’t shut my mouth. I try to advise writers who ask for it, and sometimes that really helps them. I am doing what I can to reform the system, trusting that my efforts are leaving it marginally better than it was. That perhaps ensures my continuing alienation from the establishment. When I die, let that be my epitaph: I told it as it was.

I was asked for a Pep Talk for editing. I wrote it and sent it in, and never received an acknowledgment. So here it is, for those interested:

PEP TALK:

EDITING

Piers Anthony

As I see it, there are two main aspects to writing a novel, and a number of sub-aspects. The main ones are Writing it, and Marketing it. I love to write, but hate to market. That’s why I use a literary agent. (No, you can’t have one; that’s a whole ‘nother subject.) The cards are stacked against the new writer, so that no matter how great his (that’s the generic his, meaning his, hers, and its) novel is, chances are it will never be commercially published. That’s just the beginning of why I hate marketing.

But this is not about that. It’s about the Editing part of Writing. It seems that many writers hate to edit. I don’t understand that. I love to edit my own work. I find it easier to polish an existing manuscript than to create it. But of course I’ve been at it since 1954 when I realized in college that my dream was to be a writer. I suspect I have learned something about the process in that intervening half century. If you had been at it that long you would find it easier too. The first years are the hardest, and that’s where you are now.

So let’s see if I can get into your skin. You have bashed out a 50,000 word effort in a month or so, responding to a foolish creative challenge, and now you’re stuck with this obscene lump of verbiage that you half wish you could bury six miles deep. But that would mean admitting that you are a failure, that you have no talent, and that your mother in law or other frightful authority figure was right about you all along. That’s too much to choke down at the moment. It’s not that they’re necessarily wrong, but that you’ll be darned if you’ll give them the satisfaction. So somehow you have to grind this thing into shape so that it doesn’t reek too loudly of month-old cabbage. Great literature is too much to expect, but at least let it somehow achieve the illusion of average.

And that is what you hate: trying to turn this sow’s ear into a silk purse. You would rather slog through the six inch deep muck in an over-endowed pig pen in your bare feet. How can anyone in his right mind, or any mind at all, actually enjoy this feculent process?

Uh, I suspect you are giving yourself too little credit. What you really have is a diamond in the rough. Have you seen one of those, physically? It looks like a pocked fragment of rock from the bottom of a polluted stream. But when it is faceted and polished, its inherent glory shines forth. Face it: if you can Write it, you can Edit it. You just happen to need a different approach.

There are two types of personality involved in writing. Remember the famous story “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert L Stevenson? Where one was nice and the other nasty, but both used the same body? These two entities exist in you, too. There’s the divine Creative Spirit that generates the original text. That’s what governed while you were writing. Then there’s the mean spirited Critic who gets his jollies from tearing down the work of others. There’s hardly any piece of writing he can’t disparage in some manner. That’s the one you need now. Yes you do; it’s time to drink that potion and loose this monster on your text.

The Critic will search out every Sentence that is less that utterly perfect—that is, practically all of them—and hack it into suffering parts. He will pounce on any Word that is not exact by his warped definition. He will screw with your Paragraphs. He will disparage your Theme. He will deride the motives of your Characters. It seems as if nothing will ever completely satisfy him except a pile of literary rubble where your aspiring novel used to be. He comes across as a Destroyer, and he loves his work.

But you are not helpless. You can fight back by making spot changes that nullify his taunts. You can be like Winston Churchill, who, when chided for ending a sentence with a preposition, said “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.” He sure made a fool of the purists! It’s an ongoing battle, but you can chain the Critic, especially if you like a good dirty fight. Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. Battle him in the trenches, fight him in the high turrets, balk him in the open plain. Let him rage, because the ugly job has to be done, but do not let him win the day.

So he doesn’t like this Word: go to the thesaurus if you have to, to find another. It’s no shame to use the aids available. Many computer programs have them, and I do find them useful. Also, do use the speller, but don’t trust it completely. There’s a significant distinction between meet, meat, and mete that the speller won’t catch. You have to be in charge; the machine won’t do it all.

The Critic doesn’t like your sentence? Churchill could have fixed his by phrasing it “I will not put up with this sort of nonsense.” So can you. He doesn’t like your punctuation? Well, break up those run-on sentences and abolish half those exclamation points!!

Your paragraph is challenged? Well, if it’s three pages long, break it into five smaller ones. I see paragraphs as dynamic entities, gathering together particular aspects of your thought; a new slant should have a new paragraph. My original paragraph here began with “But you are not helpless,” and finished with “it wasn’t worth it.” Now it’s five smaller paragraphs. See how I did it, when my Critic got cracking. Yes, this pep talk got the same treatment I’m recommending, throughout.

Sure there will be metaphorical bodies strewn in the aisles, but your text will slowly, painfully, improve. And when you have stifled the Critic’s last foul blast, you will have a text that will silence your mother in law for a delicious moment. She may be incapable of saying anything good about it, because she is permanently locked in Critic mode, but she won’t be able to condemn it either. That will be your subtle victory. You will have made your piece as good as it can be. How can you say it wasn’t worth it?

I also get into spot essays in my correspondence. My dialogue with the minister is a chronic source. Here’s another sample:

You ask about my sentiment with respect to my income, or that of other successful writers: should it be redistributed to those more in need? I have had a series of lessons in the course of my life that have taught me caution. For example, when I was a child of about 6 the community we were in had a once a week or once a month event called the Frugal Meal. Instead of a full meal, only very simple cheap fare was served, and the money saved was donated to charity. But we children were given an extra glass of milk, instead of the water the others had. I pondered that, and, wanting to participate more properly, said I did not need to have a glass of milk. So they gave it to my sister, who was strictly a me-first person. Thus she had two glasses and I had none. She was quite satisfied with that; it augmented her sense of entitlement. When I digested that childhood experience, as it were, I concluded that generosity without strings attached was apt to be misused.

In the decade of my best-sellerdom, when I earned about ten million dollars (before taxes), I tried in a very general way to tithe it. Thus we have donated about one million dollars to educational institutions, sponsoring scholarships, archaeology, and oral history projects—things that would not otherwise have obtained funds. We invested in Xlibris in order to make it possible for individuals to bypass the cold equations of traditional print publishing, and I think it is fair to say the company would not exist today but for our support. Thousands of writers have seen their books in print because of it.

In short, I regard my larger income—that is, beyond what is needful to sustain our family—as a trust, and we are still trying to use it wisely. Our two daughters will be co-trustees of the foundation set up to distribute it after my wife and I pass on, and there will surely be beneficial uses for it. Our present life I suspect others would consider Spartan; we have no parties, take no world cruises, and do shop for sales. One third of my working time still goes to reader-related correspondence, as it has for decades; my time is part of my donation to the world, as money is not everything.

Whether writers like Rowling have a similar philosophy I can’t say. Certainly most politicians don’t. Consider McCain with his eight houses. I would have thought he could get by on fewer, and use the money to feed the hungry. But the past eight years on the national scene have been the triumph of greed over decency, in the process ruining the nation. I certainly hope there will be significant reform in the next eight years. I can’t say that religions do much better; their money seems to go to building cathedral-like churches rather than for human betterment, though some do do good work.

I trust that addresses your question. I don’t feel the need of any religious guidance to do what I believe is right.

I received a request from a twelve year old girl to answer her questions about writing as a profession. Here is my answer; you can fathom the general nature of the questions by the answers.

I will answer your questions, but I doubt you will be completely pleased. Free lance fiction writing, which is what I do, is not like garden-variety professions. There are no assigned working hours, there is no boss, and there is no regular paycheck. A writer is on his own, and that can be daunting.

1. The positive aspects of being a writer are independence, creativity, and notoriety. He/she sets his/her own hours and writes what he/she chooses. Success brings fame and money.
2. The negative aspects are that nothing is guaranteed. You may not write well, and even if you do, you may not be able to sell it or get it published.
3. No particular education is required. You just have to be able to write well. I have a BA in Creative Writing, but there are other successful writers who did not finish high school. However, a good education is surely helpful. Iff yoo thing this iz a gud sentens yoo ar unlikly two maek it az a writter. I do receive letters from aspiring writers who write like that.
4. I chose to become an author because creative writing was the only thing I really liked. I was lucky: after 8 years of trying, I made my first story sale.
5. An author writes stories or novels and tries to get them published.
6. An author needs facility of expression, and good ideas, and the ability to relate to the interests of the reader. Also good luck.
7. My primary advice to an aspiring writer is caution: likely heartbreak.
8. If you become an author, you can expect to make nothing. Only about one percent of aspiring writers ever sell anything they write.
9. It might take a year to write a novel; maybe forever to get it published.
10. My inspiration comes from a boundlessly creative mind.

I like to keep writing, being a writaholic. But my wife reminded me that there is a series of science fiction novels that we were unable to scan into electronic format, because they use an assortment of symbols that defeats the scanner. So now at two month intervals I am retyping my Cluster series of five novels, dating from circa 1977, making spot corrections of typos and awkward phrasing as I go. It’s an interesting experience. I discover to my surprise that I have forgotten most of their text so completely that it is new to me. So it’s like reading a novel someone else has written. That lends me a certain objectivity of judgment. I find that I like the way I wrote thirty years ago; I had a good imagination. I finished Cluster in Dismember and took a couple of weeks to catch up on reading and videos; more on that in a moment. Jamboree 1 I started in on Chaining the Lady. I remembered part of the first third of it; the rest is new canvas. In Marsh I will tackle Kirlian Quest. My dim memory is that the sequels get stronger as they go; we’ll see. Already I know that back when Xanth was starting, my science fiction was just as good as my fantasy; it just didn’t have the same commercial success. Best-sellerdom, like critical acclaim, owes more to chance than to talent; I know, having plumbed the depths as well as the heights. Am I hinting that those who manage best sellers and those who are literary critics don’t know what they are doing? Yes, indeed I am.

Okay, I mentioned videos. I used to buy them from Movies Unlimited, and was satisfied with its prices and service. But it appears to have dropped me from its mailing list. Maybe I wasn’t buying enough. Then I got a catalog from Critic’s Choice, a parallel service, so ordered there. I remembered seeing a preview for Robocop a couple decades back, wherein a law enforcement machine demonstrated its capacities, then glitched and blasted away at the good guys. Wow! So that trilogy was the first video I watched. Alas, it seems not nearly as good as I had hoped, with way too much violence and not enough originality. Worth watching once, but not again.

We don’t have cable or satellite, and broadband is not offered here; we really do live in the backwoods. So there’s a lot of TV we miss. Actually we don’t pay a lot of attention anyway; my wife normally reads a book while watching TV and I read a science magazine. But sometimes I do get curious about what the in-touch crowd sees. A female fan recommended Desperate Housewives. I had heard of it and assumed it was soap opera. But I like to think that my readers have better taste than the average, so I made a mental note. When Critic’s Choicehad the whole 23 hour first season on sale for $55 I took the plunge. And you know, I liked it. If it’s soap opera, it’s high grade. Even the jacket is clever: four lovely ladies—I doubt any other four housewives are as svelte as these—in white dresses, only when you pull out the box, the white is on that, and the translucent jacket shows nothing, literally, where their covered bodies were. It starts with an ordinary housewife who receives a letter, digs out a pistol, and shoots herself. She’s dead, and she is the narrator for the series. Now that’s what I call an intriguing beginning. Why did she do it? The letter said “I know what you did. It makes me sick. I’m going to tell.” So what did she do, whose threat of revelation makes her kill herself? That mystery carries the season. Those housewives really are desperate. One has an ongoing affair with a 17 year old neighbor boy, and a jealous husband; near-escapes are inevitable. One has four rambunctious boys who keep her in a state of chronic, yes, desperation. Once at a memorial service the boys jumped into the decorative pool and refused to come out; she had to jump in after them, fully clothed, while the mourners soberly watched. Another had an argument with her ex, and in her distraction followed him out the door while wrapped in a towel. He slammed the car door and took off. Only the end of the towel was caught in the door, and she was suddenly naked in broad daylight. And her house door had locked behind her. She tried to get in a window, but fell spread-eagled into the bushes. At which point a new neighbor man she was interested in appeared, wondering what the problem was. He kept his eyes studiously averted, but later remarked “Wow!” The more she considered that, the better she liked it. The four women are quite individual in personality, each with her quirks and problems. So yes, I liked this series. But as it went it became farther-fetched, and I may not follow up on the subsequent seasons.

A reader sent me a season of Man Show, which turned out to be light hearted fun, replete with shapely short-skirted young women bouncing high on a trampoline. Then I watched four episodes of Babylon 5, and found this series interesting science fantasy but not great. I am told that later seasons get better, but I ran out of time (the month ended) before getting farther. I also have the third season of Grey’s Anatomy, which I really want to watch, but again, my free time was up, the new year was upon me, and it must wait until I get slack time again late in FeBlueberry after finishing Chaining the Lady. I am a disciplined writer, and when I set up a schedule, I follow it. I tend to resent the last week of odd-numbered months, which I set aside for Survey updating and this HiPiers column, but I do them on schedule too.

So about those books I read, six of them in Dismember when I had slack time, one in Jamboree. The first was Modern Magic by Ann Cordwainer, published by Clotho Press (it’s in my Survey). This is a fun story about Liz, a teen girl, the one mundane one in a family of sorcerers. She makes it work despite all the magic around her, some of it hostile. When boyfriends come, she can’t be sure they aren’t secret sorcerers trying to learn about her family. Sometimes she is taken hostage by an enemy sorcerer. I kept thinking that she would turn out to be a sorceress after all, whose talent was to locate hidden sorcerers, but apparently not. Some of the situations get pretty serious; sorcerers can play for keeps. I enjoyed the novel, and believe the average reader will too.

Then I proofread my own Cluster, which I had just retyped. Yes, I found plenty of typos, and hope I did not miss many. Then Relationships 3, in my erotic story series. Not all are sexy, but most are. I think my favorite there is “Flower Fly,” the story about a young man who falls in love with a lesbian ten years his senior, who in turn loves a girl his age whose sexual orientation is undetermined, but she seems to really like him. So it’s a triangle. The lesbian, thoroughly versed and skilled in heterosexual expression, truly wants what is best for her beloved, whatever orientation that may be. They have quite a threesome finding out. That Relationships series in fun, and I have many more ideas, but I think I should see how the first three do before writing more.

Then Humanism as the Next Step, which came to me as an introductory package though I have been a card-carrying Humanist for the past decade, and a practicing one all my life. The table of contents is fouled up; they evidently could have used a competent proofreader. But it’s a nice summary of the history of Humanism, and its precepts. If you do have values, but don’t want them defined by a church, consider Humanism. My attitudes as expressed by this column are humanistic. The Humanists are making much of President Obama’s secular upbringing, I think making more of a case than there is, and their publicity campaign urged people to be good for goodness’ sake. That is, there is no need to invoke anyone’s god if you want to be good. For that they have been accused by conservatives of hate speech and likened to Adolf Hitler, the Nazi. It seems that being moral and upstanding without invoking God is by definition offensive to that type, and they freely indulge in hate speech themselves. An irate letter to the Humanist publication FREE MIND says “You don’t have to believe in a GOD. But don’t put off your immoral beliefs on other people. Your (sic) the one’s that will burn in HELL.” Another letter protests that we are a Christian nation, not atheist. Untrue; the USA is a constitutionally secular nation most of whose citizens are Christian. That’s a fundamental distinction that it seems many conservatives are too dim to comprehend. Maybe I can simplify it: the majority of our citizens are female, but this is not a female nation. The majority have brown hair, but this is not a brown-haired nation. Gender and hair color are descriptions, not requirements. The same goes for religion.

Then Li’l Abner 1944 by Al Capp. I’m a fan of Li’l Abner, though not of its author. This was sent to me by a fan who thought I might write an introduction for a future annual volume. I demurred, feeling not competent for this. But I read the book. I had read the first volume decades ago, and seen how primitive it was compared to its later heyday, but not found the subsequent ones on sale, so let it be. This one is the heyday. Part of it is Abner’s favorite comic strip hero, Fearless Fosdick, a parody of the Dick Tracy comic. But really not much of it; I remember later ones that weren’t here, such as Fosdick’s epic battle with Anyface. My favorite character, Evil Eye Fleegle, also wasn’t here. Fleegle was master of the whammy, an evil stare. As I recall, a quarter whammy would knock out a bird in flight, and a half whammy would melt a charging locomotive. I remember Fleegle practicing, letting loose with half the power of one eye, and next picture was the half-melted locomotive. So this volume was fun, but not as much fun as my memories. Oh, why don’t I like Al Capp himself? He was liberal, but as he aged turned conservative, espousing the self-interested nonsense of that persuasion. He also had trouble keeping his hands off young women; there were some ugly incidents. Yes, young women can be attractive, but a man’s hands must not just grab them against their will. He didn’t know?

Then I read The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays, by L A Rollins, who sent me a copy. He is of my stripe, annoyingly opinionated. It seems that Libertarians espouse a concept of natural rights, with which human beings are endowed by nature. I gather Ayn Rand was an apostle of this creed. Rollings takes it apart; there are no such rights, only what cultures grant. Another essay relates to the Holocaust, wherein six million Jews may have been killed by the Nazis. He is skeptical. He is not doubting that the Nazis murdered Jews, just unsure of the number. The number is surely fuzzy, in part because the Nazis also murdered Gypsies, homosexuals, and Russians. Was that six million the total, or just the Jewish portion, in which case the true numbers are much worse. I have my own concern about wholesale liquidation: the one million disarmed German soldiers that the Allies murdered after Wold War Two. When I was researching for my World War II novel Volk, one reference was Other Losses, by James Bacque, that details this. I gave it to my researcher, Alan Riggs and said in effect “Is this true?” He assimilated it, worked the numbers, and concluded that it was, and that Bacque might even have understated the case. The book received a killer review in the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, saying it was impossible; Eisenhower wouldn’t have countenanced it. Then cane the reactions to that review, from some of the few German soldiers who had escaped such death camps, and from guards of those camps, who were appalled by them. That book was a bestseller in Germany. But Americans don’t want to believe, even to this day. Possibly the more recent actions of the Bush administration will satisfy some Americans that we, too, can commit atrocities. This is hardly the only one. I am a naturalized citizen; I became American in part because I believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the democratic spirit of this nation. It sickens me when I see others shitting on those values. At any rate, it is obvious that Rollins’ book made me think, and it is worth reading by anyone else who likes to think. You don’t have to agree; just consider. His site is www.larollins.uuuq.com.

In Jamboree I read Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama. Some of you may have heard of him. The book was sent to me by Laura Kwon. It covers aspects of Barack’s early life. Actually he hardly knew his father; his main memory was when the man visited when he was ten. But his mixed parentage—black father from Kenya, Africa, white mother from Kansas—made him aware of different worlds. I know how it is, having come to America from England and Spain, at age six. I always found it easy to relate to aliens, and have often written about then in my science fiction and fantasy. Especially in the Cluster series, which fully describes sapient aliens from intellect to sexuality. Barack learned to relate to different groups, and that surely helped him politically. But in this volume there is no indication that he is headed for the presidency; he is still learning to know himself. He was born in Hawaii, lived in Indonesia, came to America, and visited his family in Kenya, broadening his perspective at every stage. He learned what it was like in the trenches. He learned to relate. But there were limits. In the preface to the reprinted edition he says of 9-11: “My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another’s heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.” I got to like his half sister Auma with whom he stayed when he visited Kenya, a smart, feeling woman. Kenya made him think, and it stayed with him. “How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don’t always satisfy me—for every Brown v. Board of Education I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed.” I like Barack too; he comes across as a good man, and a talented writer, something I notice. I am glad he made it to America’s highest office; I expect him to do it credit.

My wife gave me a Mio Moov GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) Navigation device for Christmas. It’s fascinating, as I get to know it. It marks our location with a little car symbol that moves as we travel, following the roads on its map. Its map is over a decade out of date, so sometimes it thinks we are cruising cross-country, but it never loses its cool. It just urges us to get back on the road. When we needed to reach a new address, it directed us, and when we got near and were looking around, trying to read the house numbers, it said our destination was 350 feet ahead, to the left. It was. We expect to attend a convention in Orlando in April at the behest of Mundania Press, and this should ensure that we get there. Newfangled highway interchanges are so complicated that I need such help.

Entry from my Survey update, self explanatory: Amazon has a feature, Sponsored Links, that is a service to readers, providing links to additional sources or information about the authors. But some authors are upset, because some of those links violate their privacy by providing personal addresses, phone numbers, and such, and Amazon will not remove them when requested by the authors. I checked Piers Anthony, and a Sponsored Link was for Docks and Piers supplies. No joke; you can check it yourself. Just be advised that I endorse no Docks or Piers; buy them at your own risk. That does not violate my privacy, but does show that this is an automated thing, not necessarily relevant. So authors should be warned that more than their books may be for sale here. I certainly don’t want my street address or phone number available for any kook who figures to erase me and take my place, figuring that no one will know the difference. My ghost would be really annoyed if no one noticed, though.

Our local county has a program for the safe disposal of outdated medications, some of which might damage the environment if carelessly dumped: one day a month they can be taken to the sheriff’s office. So we tried that. After about two hours we gave up and brought them home again; people were coming with huge bundles, and each individual item, whether of aspirin or company sample, had to be checked, labeled, and signed for. This will surely discourage people from availing themselves of this option; they do have other lives to lead. So the drugs may be dumped into the environment anyway. My wife was so annoyed she wrote a letter to the sheriff, detailing the problem and likely consequence. There was no response.

After AT&T cellular ripped us off three times, having no apparent interest in honoring paid-for service, we tried Tracfone. Their attitude differs substantially, and we are satisfied. With one exception: their online extension option proved to be unworkable; we finally gave up and phoned them directly, and then they got our simple extension logged. I don’t know what it is about online business in general; it just seems to be designed for hassle and failure. Why can’t they make it simple?

I seldom get a common cold these days, because I use massive doses of Vitamin C to stifle it. Recently I read that Vitamin D may be the reason colds triple in winter: we get less sun, so our skin makes less Vitamin D, and become vulnerable. That could be the case, but I wanted to verify it. Well, our daughter got a cold, and I caught it, and I tried C and D together. Neither helped. Then I ran a fever. Oh—C never abated a fever for me, and maybe D doesn’t either. This was a flu-like cold. Maybe next time I’ll be able to give D a proper test.

I turned in the third volume of Relationships to Mundania/Phaze, who has now published it. These are generally sexy stories, though the emphasis is on story; it’s not barebones erotica. They had a problem with my story “Serial,” about a male serial rapist who managed to trap a female serial rapist. The detail was no more lurid than what is typical; it was the idea of involuntary sex that bothered them. They recommended that that story be sent to eXcessica, whose limits are looser. That’s in my Survey, but I had had no business there. Thus I came to interact with proprietress Selena Kitt. Chalk up another favorable impression; if she is as helpful to all writers as she was to me, this outfit is highly recommended.

NEW SCIENTIST had an article on menopause: why does it exist, when a woman should be able to bear more offspring if she kept at it all her life? Its no mystery to me: childbirth is a life-threatening event, and the older a woman gets, the more risky it is. At some point the chances of her dying, and thus sacrificing not only her current baby, but the two or three prior dependent children, become greater than the chances of her seeing her prior children through to long-term survival. Grandchildren also survive better if grandmothers are there. Nature has found that point—about ten to twenty years before her likely death—and acted to preserve her life. Thus menopause increases her reproductive success by preserving the most descendants. It typically comes when her daughters start bearing children, freeing her to help them.

Probably not related: I received yet another penis ad, this one for Performance-Fusion Aphrodisiac Chewing Gum. It says it acts in three minutes, and the man can maintain his erection for twelve hours, can have multiple erections, all immensely powerful, and have more abundant ejaculation. The ad is replete with bare buxom young women gazing utterly turned-on at the camera. Costs $55 for 30 gums, less if you buy in quantity. Can all this be true? I doubt it. I suspect it is a variation of the grow-your-penis-three-inches-longer scam. Anyway, my prescription for Viagra is now 100 mg pills, I’m using a razor blade to cut them into sixteenths, and that works. That cuts the effective price down to under a dollar per. I don’t need twelve hour long erections, just one timed right for a weekly date. But the ad was fun reading. Oh—I also take L-Arginine, because while at first it didn’t seem to help erections, it did seem to speed up my exercise runs, which I take an an indication of health enhancement. But with longer term use, it does after all seem to help erections somewhat, providing a solider base for the Viagra to act on. Maybe that’s why I need so little.

I’m on thyroid medication, Synthroid, and that really seems to help. I am no longer depressive or chronically fatigued. But I also take kelp pills, to get extra iodine, because that’s the key to a healthy thyroid. Recently I read an article that says iodine is a miracle substance that actually makes people smarter. Almost a third of the world’s people don’t get enough iodine from food and water; they live in an iodine-poor environment. In extreme cases this leads to goiters that swell their necks, dwarfism, or cretinism. Worse is mental slowness. Iodized salt can fix this; it could add 10 to 15 points to their IQ. It could do more good at a cheaper price than just about anything else. If we just care to do it.

NEW SCIENTIST presents a notion for virtually limitless green energy: Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, OTEC. This uses the difference between the warm sea surface and the cold sea depths. The working fluid is ammonia, which boils at a low temperature. It is vaporized, then condensed by contact with cold deep water, and a turbine produces power. Think of the way a refrigerator or air conditioner works, only instead of using power to cool something, it uses temperature to power something. The cold of the ocean depth is virtually limitless for this purpose. The process works; the key is to build units big enough to power a city or continent. It would not contribute to global warming; if anything, it would cool the sea as energy is extracted.

Forrest J Ackerman died. He was just about the biggest early science fiction fan. He started the term “Sci-Fi” in 1954. I am one of those who dislike the term. Once my daughter encountered a man who used it, and she informed him that it wasn’t appreciated among real fans of the genre. That was Ackerman. When he learned whose daughter she was, he wrote “Sci-Fi shall not die!” on his business card, and she delivered it to me. I hate to say it, but he seems to have been right; now more people seem to use the vulgar term than those who don’t. Regardless, he was a dedicated fan, a legend in science fiction circles. For a time he was a literary agent, and he represented writers like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. He founded the magazine FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND and had a huge collection of genre movies. He was 92.

Bettie Page died. She was perhaps the most famous pinup model of the mid twentieth century. I somehow had never heard of her until one of my fans sent me a Bettie Page doll. She was an extremely shapely woman, and it’s one shapely doll. I suspect that her endowment was natural, in contrast to the surgically enhanced creatures of today. A newspaper article contrasts her to anorexic model Twiggy. I generally prefer slender to overstuffed, but I’ll take Bettie. She was 85.

Newspaper article by a college woman who is satisfied to be the mistress of an older man. Its a business relationship: he maintains her in elegant style, she provides him with esthetic company and sex. Each party gets his/her desire, and it’s highly compatible. What’s the difference between a mistress and a whore? I would counter with the question what does it matter? Both deliver paid service, just as do butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. If you don’t need or want that service, don’t buy it.

My daughter found an article on the changing value of the dollar. What would a thousand dollars in 1906 be worth in 2007? Different authorities have different answers. The Federal Reserve says a 1900 dollar would be worth $20 today. Another says that a thousand dollars worth of 1900 gold would be worth $36,500 today; that’s a 36-fold gain. A thousand dollars worth of labor in 1900 would be worth $20,000 today. Real estate you could buy for one year’s wages in 1900 would cost more than fifty years’ labor today. It concludes that the consumer price index does not tell the whole story. It sure doesn’t! The government wants to pretend it keeps inflation down, so it jimmies the figures.

Article by columnist David Brooks on greatness: a lot is owed to social circumstance. You can’t be whatever you want to be; the world decides that. But some do try harder. Most successful people have a phenomenal ability to focus their attention. This leads to creativity. “The less successful are not less worthy, they’re just less lucky.” Actually I see it as a combination: you do need talent to be a good writer, for example. But there are many with the talent, and few who make it big: that’s where the luck comes in.

Circulating email: story of a man who liked to hang out pantyhose for Christmas, instead of a sock, hoping Santa would oblige. So a family member, maybe a sister, bought an inflatable Love Doll and stuffed its legs into the pantyhose for Christmas. Granny saw it and was Not Amused, but Grandpa flirted with the Doll; they realized that his vision or something was fading. Then, during dinner, a spark flew, and the Doll made a sound like a whoopee cushion, sailed up, flew around the room twice, and fell in a heap. “The cat screamed. I passed cranberry sauce through my nose, and Grandpa ran across the room, fell to his knees, and began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. My brother fell back over his chair and wet his pants.” Granny walked out. They were able to repair the Doll. “I can’t wait until next Christmas.”

Newspaper article by Charlotte Sutton on why we need literary critics: “A newspaper film critic should encourage critical thinking, introduce new developments, consider the local scene, look beyond the weekend fanboy specials, be a weatherman on social trends, bring in a larger context, teach, inform, amuse, inspire, be heartened, be outraged.”

Last column I mentioned that Warner Pictures passed on the Xanth movie. Since then I have learned more of the context: the national financial crunch that hit the banks and the car companies also hit the publishing and movie industries. Studios are laying off hundreds, and projects are being canceled. They had spent over a million dollars on the Xanth script. I’m hoping that when the economy turns around, maybe by the end of 2009, interest in the Xanth movie will revive.

Ebooks are taking hold. Amazon’s Kindle is one, but others are in progress. They will become thinner and lighter, and some may even be flexible. Prices will come down. We’ll see. My wife reads a lot, and sticks to physical print books because she finds reading on the screen uncomfortable. If they get a reader that is as small and light as a paperback book and features print that is kind to her eyes, at a halfway reasonable price, she may convert. I suspect there are millions more like her.

I was asked permission to quote an essay on the different types of editor that exist. It’s a good enough essay, but I have one problem: I did not author it. It seems my name is attached, but it’s not mine. I suppose these mistakes happen.

Naturally I’m stifling further clippings and thoughts; once again I’m running overlength. I will blog again Apull 1^th .

Public Notice: I will attend the Romantic Times BOOKlovers Convention (www.rtconvention.com) in Orlando, Florida, Apull 22-26, at the behest of my publisher Mundania Press. Those interested are welcome to meet me, but a word of caution: my memory for names was never good, and has not improved in my dotage, so if we have met, corresponded, or had other interaction before, it will help if you advise me of that. Then, context in mind, I may remember you, or be able to fake it. Meanwhile I’ll be signing books and participating in other events as required. I should be readily identifiable, as there won’t be too many bearded old men with foot-long ponytails in attendance. My wife of 52 years will attend also; I would have trouble finding my way there otherwise, being an incompetent traveler in my senescence. She is past her illness and now can walk, but not far, so we’ll bring our wheelchair so I can push her around as necessary. I love pushing her around. So if you see a nondescript pony-tailed old timer pushing a woman in a wheelchair, chances are that’s me. That should make it easy for publishers listed in my ongoing Survey of Electronic Publishers & Related Services to avoid me.

We live on our small tree farm, and try to encourage the wildlife; in fact we’d like to convert it to a wildlife refuge. We allow hunting of only one creature: the feral pig. The pigs came here with Hernando de Soto in the 16^th century, for food, and some escaped and have been here ever since. They are a nuisance, as they forage so efficiently that there’s precious little left for the original creatures. When a band of swine have been through the forest it looks as if it had been disk-harrowed, and they can uproot plants and even trees. When I’m on our long drive and see a tusked boar weighing twice what I do, and he thinks about it before getting out of the way, I get nervous. So select hunters range our property, leaving the rabbits, turkeys, tortoises, deer and such alone, going after the pigs. But other hunters are not always scrupulous, and they poach deer. If we catch them, we’ll prosecute. Anyway, there were a doe and her fawn we saw along the drive, and then only the fawn: some ilk had evidently gotten the mother. The little deer seemed to be doing okay, and more than once I encountered him (I’m guessing about gender) close to our house. Perhaps he regarded it as a relatively safe haven, because wild cats don’t generally hang out that close. Then one day we spooked him along the drive when we were driving out on a routine grocery shopping trip. We slowed, and he bounded ahead, around a turn, and out of sight. But when we drew up to where he had been, there he was, lying half under the fence, moving only his head. We drove on so he could get up and move on. But an hour later, when we returned, he was still there. That meant real mischief. I think he must have jumped and misjudged the height of the fence there, and cracked into it and broken his neck, so that his body was paralyzed. So I called the local game warden, who said he would check and save the deer if he could, and in an hour the little deer was gone. I fear we inadvertently killed him. Damn, damn damn.

I discourage visitors. It’s not that I’m unsocial, but if I gave an afternoon to every fan who wanted it, I would have no time left to write. So when I attend a convention I am thoroughly available, but at home I’d rather be left alone. Most folk understand, but some folk are more persistent than others. One asked for his books to be autographed; I sent him some bookplates, as I hate handling books by mail. It’s expensive, time consuming, and risky, and a bookplate is every bit as authentic. But no, he wanted his books physically signed. Finally I agreed to let him bring them, and I took time to sign his carful. I don’t charge for such things; it’s purely courtesy, though I’m aware that autographed books fetch better prices on the market. He was appreciative; was there anything he could do in return? I said well, I was looking for a bibliography of Andre Norton’s works, she being one of the relatively few genre authors who published more books than I, at least so far. He said he knew where to find one. He departed, and I never heard from him again. He had gotten what he wanted. And it’s likely to be a long time if ever before I expend another afternoon that way. It’s not the time so much as my dislike of being used.

Then I heard from a photographer. He was doing a series on writers in their habitats, and would like to take pictures of me in mine. I was tempted to decline, because of the paragraph above, but decided to risk it. In due course he arrived: Kyle Cassidy, a vegetarian wearing a beard and a brown ponytail. What’s not to like? He took a squintillion pictures and went his way. Then came a package: a beautiful wrap-around picture of me in my messy study, a disc with the squintillion other pictures, and an autographed copy of his photographic book Armed America, portraits of gun owners in their homes, with brief statements why they own guns. I’m not all that enthusiastic about gun nuts, but it’s a beautiful and insightful book, and an indication what the writers book will be like. So it shows that you never can tell how a given contact will turn out. Armed America is published by Krause Publications, www.krausebooks.com. So why do they own guns? I think essentially it’s that a gun is a great equalizer. If you are old or ill or female, a gun will back off the brute who seeks to rob, bully, or molest you. If civilization collapses, you want to be prepared. For the young and fit, there is also hunting, and competitive events. I can see it. It’s a culture.

I still do archery for exercise, and my aim remains abysmal. I fear it means my vision is declining. For one thing I discovered that I now have trouble reading entries in the compacted Oxford English Dictionary, even using the magnifying glass. I can do it, but I really have to focus. Anyway, when it’s cold my aim gets even worse. Why? I think I finally figured it out: when I have thick padding on my chest, it pushes the bow out another half inch or so, and my grip on it is under tension, so that when I loose the arrow, the bow twists and changes the arrow’s direction. So it really is true: the arrows don’t go where I aim them, because their orientation changes. A little change here means a yard or so there. I also had a problem with two of my targets: their plastic covering tore, so I took it off, and then the cardboard boxes started coming apart so I took them off, and discovered that the contents are about 25 sheets of colored foam plastic. So I used duct tape to hold them together, and now I have the pretty colors showing, black, white, gray, blue, green. They work just fine. But my scores remain awful. For example, the last session I had before this column, counting center-hits as +1 and missing the target entirely as -1, my right side score was 3.5-3, and my left side score was 1-10. I adjusted the sight to make the arrows go lower, because last time out I had 6 go over the top of my target array, wasting time as I search for lost arrows. It must have helped, because this time only 5 went over the top. So I searched—and found 7. That catches me up on a couple lost before. That made it a good day, my style.

I was proofreading 30 year old novels of mine—more on that anon—and encountered a difficult grammatical issue. I remember how it gave me trouble with editor Lester del Rey. I had something like “He, like she, went home.” He changed it to “He, like her,” went home,” saying “like” is a preposition and requires the objective case. Now I was once an English teacher. I hated it, but I did know my subject. I said according to structural grammar just about any word can be used as any part of speech, and I was using “like” as a conjunction. He and she, he or she, he like she. You would not say “He and her went home.” Lester couldn’t get it, and it was a small part of the larger issue of his increasingly insensitive and sometimes wrongheaded editing that caused me to leave that publisher. But many grammarians unfamiliar with structural grammar think as he did, and I must say that there are contexts where it seems better to use “her” than “she.” It’s like who/whom, where whom may be correct but seem incorrect. “Whom did you call?” Our language can be messy. I’m pretty much of a purist, despite my pretense of colloquialism in these columns, and that bothers me.

Here in sunny central Florida it seldom gets down to freezing. That’s why we moved here after living in Vermont. Vermont is lovely, but the winters are too damn cold. Our second year here on the tree farm a cold snap took it down to an appalling 16°F. Now, 19 years later, we got a double cold snap that took it down to 20°, twice. I tried to protect our tame plants, tenting them under old sheets and boxes, but it was simply too much and they got wiped out. Some I regret more than others. There was the little volunteer Xanthosoma that decided to be a philodendron after a freeze cut it back last year. This time it seems to have been killed dead. No, glory be, after I wrote that I discovered two new leaves emerging from the ground. IT SURVIVES! There was the Turk’s Cap Hibiscus fragment I had inadvertently separated from its home clump and replanted. Fortunately that is coming back from the root. Every plant has its little history and I care for them all. But some dangers are more annoying than others. The second time some anonymous oaf cut his disreputable car through our front loop, mowing down our small trees, we acted. I had transplanted the little mulberry tree to protect it from this sort of thing, but its main stem was broken off. So we bought ten landscape timbers and I dug holes (apparently injuring my left arm; it still hurts three months later) and set them in, and now a rogue car can’t get in there. We have planted jasmine and honeysuckle by the posts and set small trellises for them to twine on. Also a little hanging birdbath; you can never have too many birdbaths. It isn’t only the birds using them; so do squirrels and insects, getting drinks, and some larger animals we don’t see: the ground bath can sometimes drop a gallon. The baths are a service to the neighborhood, especially during droughts, as now. We hope the area will become a protected garden of sorts.

I read Blood or Mead by Alan Alexander Beck. Its publication was interesting: it’s an Xlibris book that became a Create Space book. The author changed because he could charge half the price demanded by Xlibris, making it more salable. This is what I call high grade amateur; there’s a lot about writing the author doesn’t know. But there’s a lot about mythology and warfare he does know, and the book is packed with information on every kind of myth and weapon, as well as considerable action. It seems that when Yahweh becomes ascendant as God, the older gods like Odin aren’t pleased. They want to take back the world. But it’s no easy task. The protagonist is a man who dies in a fire with a number of acquaintances, then discovers the group of them in another realm where death threatens again. The gods are active behind the scenes, setting things up for their campaign. It’s an interesting perspective. Lucifer says “That’s why the whole notion of a created Hell is so ridiculous. Who would want to waste that much time and effort on gathering up every single soul that didn’t follow you and then torture them for all of eternity? It would just be foolish to do so.” Amen.

I read And Don’t Forget To Rescue the Other Princess, by Marc Bilgrey. This is the sequel to And Don’t Forget to Rescue the Princess, but is clear enough on its own. Unemployed wisecracking aspiring actor Al Breen is spirited back to the magic land, where he is required to rescue the king’s other daughter, who is the captive of an evil sorceress. He is accompanied by Nigel the Nervous, faint-hearted husband of the prior princess. The two suffer through a series of captures by monsters and creatures who find them edible, barely escaping, until mostly by luck they manage to mess up the sorceress and rescue the princess. No romance or sexual suggestion; it’s a clean story. This is a light-hearted fantasy romp that doesn’t take itself or anything else seriously. Mainly, it’s fun.

I addressed a tenth grade class at Lecanto, Florida. I don’t like to travel, but this was in Citrus County, which is close enough. We’re in the hinterlands, relatively unpopulated, but the school complex is like a town in itself, with 1,800 students. We had to pass their spot security verification just to enter, and be guided by an administrator to the classroom. About 20 students, some interested, some bored, which is par for that age. I brought three of my books for the class: the most recent Xanth novel Two to the Fifth as a sample of commercial publishing; the juvenile Tortoise Reform as a sample of small press publishing, and Mute as a sample of self publishing, as I republished it restored (it had been cut) after it went out of print twenty years ago. I had a list of their questions to answer, about how long it takes me to write a book (under three months, for a Xanth; longer for others), how long it take a publisher to publish it (two years), and what are the hardships of writing and publishing books (no assured income, lack of motivation for some, and dealing with publishers), how do I handle Writer’s Block [I use my Bracket System of self dialogue to discuss and work out the plotting snags] which I addressed and amended in my fashion. The class was polite and well behaved, a contrast to the classes I taught 44 years ago. Will any of those students eventually rise to become published authors? Doubtful, but possible.

I don’t give ignorant feminists much shrift. I mean the ones who harangue folk about things like Mrs. Ms. or Miss, and seem to think sex is a conspiracy by men to degrade women, while ignoring things like the continuing disparity between male and female wages, or glass ceilings. This one demanded “Are you trying to discourage female readers? The heroes are always male and these males treat females very discriminatorily…the books are also so anti-feminist. The use of nymphs, female centaurs and harpies is disgraceful…The use of Millie the Ghost…is despicable. Sex appeal? What kind of a talent is that?! The treatment of women in these books is awful. Can’t there be just one Heroine? One intelligent, brave, strong, independent female who is also desirable?…It’s sickening. AND OUGHT TO BE CORRECTED.” I replied “Try Harpy Thyme, The Color of Her Panties, Roc and a Hard Place, Zombie Lover, Cube Route, Currant Events, or Stork Naked. All have intelligent, motivated, desirable protagonists. Meanwhile, Xanth is mostly parody. You need to have the wit to recognize it when you see it.” Actually, maybe except Cube Route, where the woman establishes her sterling qualities and catches her man without using female wiles. I like to think that a woman doesn’t have to be beautiful or seductive to be worthwhile. In Pet Peeve Hannah Barbarian is really a beautiful Amazonian militant feminist, but she’s not the main character. Ah, well.

We saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire, and have to agree with the critics (though I don’t want to make a habit of that) that’s it’s a great movie. I liked the scene where he gets locked in the public toilet and escapes by dropping into the liquid shit, emerges totally covered, and dashed up to get a celebrity autograph. I was appalled at what I suspect is a true revelation: the proprietor of beggar children gouges out their eyes with a spoon because blind singers fetch more money than sighted ones. Overall it was a good story and an insight into the slums of India, which I hope are worse than ours.

Songs are always going through my mind, seemingly from a random collection in my cranium. One day it was “Coming Through the Rye.” And it started me thinking: exactly what is this Rye? “Every lassie has a laddie; none they say have I; but all the lads they smile on me, coming through the rye.” Is it a field of rye growing? Does she have a house there, and they pass by it? Why smile on her, but not date her? Or is it Rye Whiskey, and she’s a tavern wench, and the more they drink, the better she looks? I tried to look it up, but got nowhere. It surely has meaning, could I but fathom it.

Another song features clouds. “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, and yet somehow it’s clouds illusions I recall; I really don’t know clouds at all.” It goes on to make the same case about love, and about life. I like it, because I like clouds. It reminds me of the poetic comment by nineteenth century American poet Sidney Lanier, which I quote from imperfect memory: “What the cloud doeth, the Lord knoweth/ The cloud knoweth not;/ What the artist doeth, the Lord Knoweth/ Knoweth the artist not?” I regard myself as an artist with words, critics to the contrary notwithstanding, and I certainly hope I have some notion what I’m doing. But clouds, knowing or not, remain fascinating. There was a recent episode in Classic Peanuts where a little cloud floated by Snoopy Dog’s doghouse. He was surprised, not having seen a cloud before that was afraid of heights. I have always hoped some day to get time lapse equipment and take pictures of clouds, so as to accelerate them and see them boiling in the sky. But I suspect I’ll never get to it, and of course others have done it. So the word “cloud” conjures all sorts of incidental associations in my mind.

Philip Jose Farmer died, age 91. He was one of the giants of the science fiction genre. He burst onto the scene in 1952 with “The Lovers,” the story of a man’s affair with a lovely woman who turned out to be an insect, but that description hardly does it justice. It was marvelously worked out on several levels, and the woman, Jeanette, was one any man could love. A female college friend of mine, Barbara Baller, and I collaborated on a painting inspired by it, combining a bug and a nude woman. I did the bug, she did the woman. I mentioned in a fanzine dedicated to Farmer’s 90^th birthday that when my first story appeared in a magazine that also had a Farmer story, she was properly jealous. Farmer had been there for me in his fashion. “Now I am here for Phil in my fashion,” I concluded. “But I doubt anyone will be jealous. Ah, well; happy birthday anyway, Phil.” I also had the fortune to collaborate with Phil on a novel, The Caterpillar’s Question. I think it was the only novel collaboration he did. It derived from a multi-author novel Charles Platt conceived, where I wrote the first chapter, Phil wrote the second, and other authors wrote the remaining ones. But it foundered; quality was uneven and there was no firm direction. So later I bought out the project, and Phil and I alternated to complete the novel. It had its points, but I can’t say it was outstanding. I liked his “Mother” series, and The Night of Light, but never got into Riverworld, and read only one World of Tiers novel. I almost met Phil personally in Chicago at the World Fantasy Convention, circa 1990; we shared a panel. But then we went our ways, and never quite interacted directly. He was a great writer and as far as I know a decent man, and I’m sorry to see him go at any age.

Paul Harvey died, age 90. He was a radio newsman, and his commentary was always interesting. But in later years he became too obviously rightist partisan, and I stopped listening. I understand he earned three million dollar a year from endorsements, and his passion showed most clearly when he espoused a given paid product. I remember at one point wondering whether it was Aamway or Aamco he advertised, and which one got caught cheating customers. I believe it turned out he advertised both, and both were caught. Harvey was not one to let the facts get in the way of a good promotion. But I admired his precision of expression. He did verbally what I try to do in writing, but I think he was better at it than I am. I admire real talent wherever it occurs, and he had it. Too bad he misused it, by my definition. I don’t miss him.

REALMS OF FANTASY folded. When it first started up the editor asked me to contribute to it, and I agreed, and described a story idea I had. She said that was fine, and she’d be back in touch. She wasn’t; I had to call the home office to find out if the magazine was even on. So with no other guidance about its needs, because this was before the first issue was published, I wrote my story as a safe “vanilla” effort, with nothing that might offend anyone, and sent it in. Months passed, and finally it was rejected as lacking sparkle, safely after the issue had been filled, and I was never solicited for any replacement. But for years thereafter they used my name in their advertising, knowing it was a lie. It was hard to avoid the impression that all they wanted was my name, not my actual presence. I never saw an issue, but understand from a reader that the material was indifferent. Good riddance.

In FeBlueberry I proofread two more Cluster series novels, Chaining the Lady and Kirlian Quest, and in Marsh the last two, Thousandstar and Viscous Circle. I found Lady stronger than Cluster, and Quest stronger than Lady, a truly powerful intergalactic story. The last two were lesser novels, set in the framework established by the original trilogy. But when I read Thousandstar I discovered a remarkably compelling story, and it’s my favorite of the series. In it a human woman transfers her personality to an alien host who turns out to neither see nor hear, but to communicate by squirting jets of liquid at his fellows. It was an awful challenge to write, because I am visually and sonically oriented, and believe most of my readers are too, and I never did it again. But what a novel I came up with! For one thing the human lady and globular host fall in love, a seemingly futile emotion. Things do work out, in an unexpected way. Then Viscous Circle has a major pacifism vs. violence theme. What do you do when you must resist forcibly or suffer species extinction, but to do that would destroy your nature? I was raised as a Quaker, whose primary tenet is I think pacifism. I did not join, not being a pacifist, but retain a sold respect for Quaker principles. I married the daughter of a Unitarian-Universalist minister, and I believe that if there is good work quietly being done, chances are there’s either a Quaker or a U-U person behind it. Anyway, I think the exploration of this issue in this novel is about as good as any I have seen in the genre. Here the humans—Solarians–are the monsters. “The Solarian is a gross physical creature with bone-filled extremities, flesh-filled torso, and liquid-filled eyeballs sliding within moist sockets—” Naturally this description sickened the listeners. Now I’ll have to see about getting those five novels back into print electronically; that was the point of this exercise, after all. It turned out to be a significant emotional experience. It is my hope that when my powers as a writer fade, I will be the first, not the last, to know, and will act accordingly, instead of retreating into denial. Reviewing these five novels of about thirty years ago makes me wonder whether the fading is occurring, because I’m not sure I can write as well today.

Daylight Saving Time arrived ahead of schedule. The furshlugginer powers that be keep starting it sooner and ending it later, until now I believe it exists longer than standard time does. I remember the comment by one wit that it reminded him of the man who cut the end off a stick and glued it to the other end, to make the stick longer. It doesn’t affect me muchly, because I use no alarm clock and rise before dawn, but I do appreciate getting to bed an hour earlier. My wife doesn’t. I read a poem once about how some folk are early birds and others late birds, concluding “By some peculiar quirk of life/ They always wind up man and wife.” True for us.

Conservatives like to claim that raising the minimum wage causes job losses, because employers have to lay off workers. Article by Holly Sklar refutes that. States that raised their minimum wages above the federal level experienced better employment than states that did not. In general, employment rises when the minimum wage does. Eight years of Bush economics that stifled any raising of the minimum wage led to the worst unemployment in decades. Article by John Burl Smith in The DISH says that Republicans today are like those in power during the 1920s, whose policies bankrupted the country. Yes, they seem to be moral troglodytes, and to give them power is to invite disaster. It’s not just the USA. Article by Rebecca Solnit describes how Iceland in the mid 1990s put in place a comprehensive economic transformation program that included tax cuts, large-scale privatization, and a big leap into international finance. The banks were deregulated, privatized, and the currency allowed to float. Debts ballooned. It quickly became one of the world’s most affluent societies. Then it collapsed. Now it is trying to find its way out of the rubble. The candy store does need sensible management, something today’s “conservatives” seem unable to learn.

Related politics: column by Robyn Blumner explores how Wall Street ran wild, and brought down our economy. Why wasn’t there regulation and oversight to prevent this happening? After all, it was put in place after the 1929 debacle. “Here’s a news bulletin for you,” she says. “It was methodically bought off.” Exactly. Politicians steadily chipped away at the safeguarding regulations until finally they were gone. “The train wreck that is our economy is a consequence of special interests buying their way out of commonsense regulation and enforcement that would have stabilized the financial system and made it transparent. The financial industry paid $5 billion for this privilege. Now it will cost taxpayers potentially trillions.” Yes, we’ll have to put back the sensible rules, but the train remains wrecked. Repairs will be costly and time consuming. And Rush Limbaugh says he hopes Obama fails. Right. Rush would rather have the train stay wrecked if it means he can give the finger to the repair crew headed by a black man.

Homosexuality: my set piece on that is that I am straight, and I don’t want anyone telling me to try being gay, that maybe I’ll like it; I already know my orientation and it won’t change. It’s the look and feel of women that turn me on, now and forever. Okay, I assume that those of the gay persuasion feel much the same about their orientation. Therefore I follow the golden rule and leave them alone. That doesn’t mean we can’t associate, as many rewarding nonsexual human interactions exist; just don’t proselytize about orientation. A recent article by Candace Talmadge relates: “Even a cursory search of the four Gospels reveals that Jesus said nary a word of condemnation against gays and lesbians.” “So why do so many Christians get all worked up about homosexuality? Those who supposedly wrote against it were not Christians.” Well, the Apostle Paul did, but he also condemned fornicators, adulterers, thieves, the covetous, drunkards, revilers, extortionists. So why fixate solely on homosexuals? This wasn’t Jesus’ way. Okay, I suggest an answer: because bigots are putting their hangups into Christianity, and the hell with Jesus’ real concerns, like loving your neighbor. I like to think that if Jesus came to the world again, he would prefer to chat with open minded agnostics like me than with those who attribute bigotry to him. In fact I think he might be inclined to run those ilk the hell out of the temple.

Fascinating article in NEW SCIENTIST titled “The Furnace Within.” It seems that the distinction between being warm blooded or cold blooded is getting blurred. Some cold bloods have warm parts. I recall that the tuna fish warms its heart, for example, while some warm bloods, like bats, let their body temperature fall to the ambient environment while roosting. Being warm blooded is not necessarily an advantage; the higher metabolism requires far more eating, and this leads to needing about four times as much nitrogen per day as a similar sized reptile. This leads to excess carbon that needs to be gotten rid of. So, in effect, they burn it and breathe out the wastes. The burning produces heat, so their bodies are hot. A neat solution, making a virtue of the waste product. In fact I understand that oxygen itself was originally toxic refuse. We are creatures of poison.

Article in SCIENCE NEWS on the Dating Go Round. People naturally want to bond, but finding the right partner can be an anxiety-generating chore. I like to think that the key to a 50+ year marriage is finding the right partner, being the right partner, and luck. Evaluating dating preferences on paper is not the same as direct personal interaction. Also, what folk say they want in a partner is not necessarily what they actually want. I think I have commented before on the study that showed that in second marriages, the richer the man, the lighter the woman; that’s indicative. Speed Dating is one mechanism for choosing. It turns out that it makes a difference whether women sit in place and the men move from table to table, or the women move. Women become much less discriminating if they are moving. No pencil and paper test would reveal that. It seems that romantic passion feeds off a mixture of hope and uncertainty. Worry leads to pursuit of the relationship. Does she or doesn’t she? Women, with more to gain or lose in a relationship, tend to be more careful. In the speed dating, men wanted more contact with half the women they met, while women wanted it with only one third of the men. I think that if I were in such a situation I’d be pretty damn choosy. But I hope not to be in it.

Perhaps related: Sexting. That is, sending risque phone photos. It seems that even receiving such a picture can get you in trouble with the law. One boy received a provocative photo from a classmate and got kicked out of school. Which might be an easy way to frame someone you don’t like: send him a risque photo. There was a local news item about a 13 or 14 year old girl sending explicit nude pictures of herself to her boyfriend. She got in trouble for child pornography. I think the law can be an ass. If a girl wants to publicize her assets, let her do so, but make sure her parents know. It’s just possible that they might have another opinion, and the means to enforce it. Sex appeal is the device the female gender uses to attract the male, and it’s damned effective. Why should third parties who no longer have it get to mess up those who do?

Another peeve of mine is the way authorities try to stop people from controlling their own deaths. When a person faces nothing but pain and hideous expense to preserve his life a few more months, he should be allowed to end it by choice. The Final Exit Network, as I understand it, exists to assist people in making this personal choice. So now members of this network have been arrested for doing that. Not for killing anybody, understand; just for sending equipment that will assist a person in dying if he chooses to. Whatever happened to personal freedom? Somehow conservatives who claim to espouse it when it comes to things like paying taxes step to the other side when they want to interfere with a person’s decision to die. Fortunately there is a simple solution: get a gun. It’s the premier suicide device. Yes it’s messy, but it works. I don’t really like guns, but the constitution does grant citizens the right to possess them, and this is one obvious use. So are they going to start arresting gun dealers when suicides occur? Don’t hold your breath.

I remain disgusted by supposed authorities spouting false information. Article in the local newspaper says “vitamin C does not prevent, reduce the severity of or hasten the recovery from a common cold.” That’s an outright lie. I have used vitamin C to stop colds for decades. The key here is that it has never been tested in the laboratory. They try maybe a tenth of a gram a day, and it has only slight effect. What works is one gram an hour, continuing until symptoms abate. Try it and see for yourself. Vitamin C, universally used properly, could rapidly eliminate the common cold. But they remain careful never to test that level, so they can keep claiming it doesn’t work. Whose interest are they serving? Not the public’s. I had little use for commentator Paul Harvey, discussed above, but he was serious about his health and he accepted C in this connection. Even hard-core conservatives can cautiously approach reality when it pays them to do so.

Remember the editing Pep Talk I was asked to write, then the requester disappeared, so I ran in in my last column? Kathe Gogolewski ran it with my permission in her The Fiction Flyer ezine for writers, www.tri-studio.com/ezine.html. It’s a free magazine and has masses of interesting material. I also received an appreciation from a writer who was daunted by the prospect of editing a piece. I’m glad to help. Editing, like garbage collection, is a dirty but necessary business.

Naturally I don’t proselytize about vegetarianism. Much. Not more than once a column. This is my blog, okay? Another item in NEW SCIENTIST says that if we ditch meat, we might save the Earth. “Cutting back on beefburgers and bacon could wipe $20 trillion from the cost of fighting climate change.” The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency did a study. So I trust that patriotic, environmentally conscious folk will do their bit to save the world. What, you like the taste of cooked carcass too much? Then this should interest you: another article in THE DISH by John Burl Smith, titled “A Glimpse of the Future.” It seems that PETA (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) has offered one million dollars to the first researcher who produces commercially viable in vitro chicken grown in a lab that could be sold to the public, in the next four years. That is, test-tube meat. They can do it now, but it’s not cheap enough to be commercial. You need to produce it cheaper than live slaughtered chickens can. If they grow meat in giant tanks known as bioreactors it could produce enough to feed all the people on earth, and might also enable the growing of replacement bone, muscle, skin, kidneys and hearts for those in need. This is intriguing, and I’d love to see the poor cows and chickens spared the meat grinder, and the world incidentally saved. I take it half a step farther in my historical novel Climate of Change, forthcoming from TOR, wherein algae and fungus are used to generate food that looks, tastes, and is nutritionally identical to natural sources, including meat. But in the novel, it also includes a contraceptive quality, so those who eat it can’t reproduce unless they act to nullify that effect. Thus the population explosion is abated, and Earth is on the way to sustainability. So how do I, as a vegetarian, feel about test tube meat? I am uneasy. My objection to meat is that it hurts the animals from which it derives, but lab meat would ease that situation. Still, my gut would have a problem. My vegetarianism has religious force, which means it goes beyond rational analysis.

Column by Dolph Honicker discusses our deepening ignorance. 25% of us believe we have been reincarnated; 44% believe in ghosts; 50% that God created the universe less than 10,000 years ago; 20% think the sun might revolve around the earth. Tell me again: what century do we live in?

Article in NEW SCIENTIST says that the stink of flatulence could provide a surprising lift for men, because hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) causes erections in rats and may one day provide an alternative to Viagra in men. Does that mean that we old farts will come to rule the sexual world? That we no longer will have to threaten nubile young women with getting fondled to death?

Newspaper article on “Cane Fu”: a cane can be a marvelous defensive instrument. A person can take it anywhere, such as on an airplane, and not be rendered helpless if attacked. Even the hook end can be effective, used for catching an aggressor’s limb and yanking it.

Interesting article by Scott Barry Kaufman, “Confessions of a Late Bloomer” in PSYCHOLOGY TODAY. Sure genetics and environment count, but not everything falls into place together. For example, creativity and leadership rarely present themselves early. Child prodigies exist, but many significant advances in science and the arts are accomplished by those who were not remarkable in childhood. I certainly relate to that. I was nothing as a child, but became something later in life. The analogy I drew for Mr. Kaufman, which he likes, is that if you have a drag race between a sport car and a locomotive, and the finish line is a quarter mile away, the car will win. But if the line is a thousand miles away, the locomotive will win, as it gets up a velocity of 150 mph and pauses for nothing. I’m still steaming along my track at retirement age, having passed many sport cars. “Above a reasonable score,” Kaufman says, “IQ doesn’t do a very good job of predicting lifetime creative achievement. There even appears to be an optimal amount of formal schooling after which schooling can deter creative achievement. Beyond that lies the danger of getting too entrenched in the traditional thinking.” Yes indeed. How many Ph.Ds are effective creative writers, scientists, leaders, or other notable figures? Formal education can become a straitjacket.

“Non Sequitur” cartoon: Dr. Rorschach’s inspiration, coming as he changes the baby’s dirty diaper. “You know what this sorta looks like?” “Holy Molé” cartoon: Alien storyteller saying “Once upon a time there was a planet that slowly lost all its storytellers. As a result they no longer had insight, wisdom, or social consciousness. Finally they lost the ability to pay attention and became nothing but a bunch of galactic slackers.” Yes, of course storytellers have always been the hope of civilization. Can we stop this dreadful loss in time?

Article by Senator Jim Webb in the Sunday supplement PARADE: America has 5% of the world’s population and nearly 25% of its prisoners. We need to stop incarcerating drug addicts who represent no danger to others, so there is room for real criminals now on the street. I know the answer: decriminalize drug addiction. That doesn’t mean we approve of it, just that we’ll do our best to treat and possibly cure addicts instead of throwing them in prison to be supported by the taxpayer. Similar for alcoholics and the mentally ill; they don’t belong in prison.

Perhaps related: bombshell article in the April/May issue of FREE INQUIRY, the magazine for the Council for Secular Humanism (I subscribe, being a Humanist; find it at www.secularhumanism.org) titled “Exposing the Myth of Alcoholics Anonymous,” by Steven Mohr. The AA twelve step program is widely regarded as the only really effective treatment for alcoholics, recommended by doctors and often mandated by the courts. Uh-oh. “The truth is that the available evidence strongly suggests that AA treatment provides very little or no long-term help for active alcoholics. Further, there is ample evidence that long-term repeated exposure to this program is actually dangerous to many alcoholics who would fare better if left on their own.” Wow! AA says its a fellowship of men and women who share their experience to help each other recover, and that the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. Oh? “To be plain, there is ample evidence that AA is in reality a religious cult masquerading as a self-help group. The article goes into considerable detail to document that thesis. It seems that the AA success rate may be as low as 5%, and that alcoholics can do as well on their own, statistically. This reminds me of a study I read about decades ago, where mentally ill people who got psychiatric treatment had about a two thirds recovery rate. Then they studied mentally ill people who did not get such treatment, and their success rate was the same. It seems that the AA program does not improve on nature. So if that doesn’t work, what does? There are medications to reduce craving or interfere with the mechanism of getting drunk. In many cases alcoholism seems to be a mask covering severe depression or mental illness; treat those and maybe the alcoholism will abate. Check the latest research at www.nida.nih.gov/. And yes, the humanists have their own programs, such as Secular Organization for Sobriety (SOS). I don’t know whether that works any better, but it’s guaranteed non-religious.

Between projects I watch some videos. Thus I watched Breakfast Club, a movie I saw years ago, and sure enough, it remains a tense and insightful drama of high school kids in detention. I watched a season of Have Gun—Will Travel. I watched a season of Grey’s Anatomy. I have a season of House waiting. They’re all good. But no matter how good they are, I soon get antsy to be writing again. I’m a writaholic; I live for writing, and begin to suffocate when too long away from it. I will catch up on some necessary reading, then get to writing the semi-erotic stories for Relationships 4.

Sigh. Another overlength column, 7,400 words. Readers write in, sort of patting my hand and reassuring me that it’s okay to be verbose, but I really would like to shorten them. Maybe next time.

Every so often readers suggest that I make my column and Survey updates monthly instead of bimonthly. That should mean faster updating and shorter columns, so readers don’t have to get so much of a bellyfull digesting them. Okay, I’ll try it. Next column and update will be Jewel-lye, and I’ll continue monthly if that works out.

I read The Psychology of Creative Writing, edited by Scott Barry Kaufman and James C Kaufman. As a long-time creative writer I have a certain muted interest in the subject. Do these people have me zeroed in, or are they far afield? A little of each, perhaps. There is an enormous amount of information here, and much insight, and I did learn things. But I’m sort of like the quarterback who ignores all the coach’s scientific analysis and just plays the hell out of it by ear, and does okay. There’s a cruel motto that says that those who can do something, do; those who can’t, teach. The full statement goes something like this: those who can write, do; those who can’t write edit; those who can’t edit review; those who can’t review become critics and criticize all the others. It’s not necessarily true; though at times it does seem that the misfits pretend that they could write so much better than those writers they review, if only they cared to, though that too is rife with exceptions. Creative writing is a messy universe.

Let me start with some quotes from the book that I think have merit or are interesting: From the Forward, by Robert J Sternberg: “Writing has always been much harder to study and measure than reading, because it does not lend itself to multiple-choice or other objective forms of scoring.” “Whereas participants can sit down at pretty much any time and answer reading comprehension questions or solve mathematics problems, they cannot do the same for creative writing: sometimes the ideas just do not come!” “Arguably, with daunting threats to our survival as a species, our time for recognizing the importance of a creative approach to life is running out.” Amen.

From Jane Piirto: “The writer may value freedom of expression more than the feelings of others.” She says that many creative writers are manic-depressive, including some big names in literature, and many others are simply depressive. Well, I’m not bipolar, but was for decades mildly depressive, so it seems I’m in good company. She quotes John Cheever “The excitement of alcohol and the excitement of fantasy are very similar,” and concludes that it is unusual when these are not linked and present in creative writers. That may be so, but I am one of the exceptions. I don’t drink and write for the same reason I don’t drink and drive: it would be dangerous to my literary or physical welfare. I want my sharpest mind in gear when I write. “The image of the writer as humorist must take into account that many humorists are not known as sweet, nice, easygoing people, but are often rude, crotchety, and acidic.” Yes. That is a case I have made, hoping I’m another exception.

I really can’t go into similar detail on all the articles; there is not time or space. But this shows how much there is to assimilate in this volume. Many articles are couched in opaque Educationese, something you’d think educators would want to strive to eliminate. A random sample: “Among such theories included the concepts of dysphoric rumination, mood, and locus of control.” That theory remains opaque to me. Even ordinary words can be applied with special variants, such as “affect.” “Indeed, participants in whom positive affect had been induced tended to generate more unusual responses…” I thought it should be “positive effect,” but concluded it was particular usage, throughout the volume. Words don’t necessarily mean the same to academics as they do to the man on the street.

Other articles established that writers don’t live as long on average as other people, that they suffer more mental illness and are more prone to illness in general, female poets especially. Writing does seem to improve mood, and keeping a regular journal may be therapeutic. Third person viewpoint engenders a more positive feeling in the author than first person. The editor’s summation: “Those who benefit most from writing are those who write the most intensely, for the longest amount of time, and over the longest time span.” I started taking writing seriously in 1954, so that’s 55 years; it has surely done me a lot of good despite the frustrations of dealing with ignorant publishers, critics and fans.

More items: Screenwriters are treated by the studios as the lowest of the low, with ageism perceived to be so extreme that some even fake youth to get work. Minorities are hardly represented. There’s a story of a starlet so stupid she seduced the writer instead of the producer. “Artistic production is what economists call a ‘winner take all’ market. Robustly, throughout all human creative endeavors, there are a very small number of people who do extremely well and a large majority who fail.” Oh, yes. As for the teaching of writing, in the 20^th century “There was a culture in which abuse (ridicule, shaming, expressions of disgust) was often masked as ‘critique’ and hierarchical grading (A to F, or any system that assigns success or failure to creative work) was perceived as corrective.” Fortunately there was finally a popular rebellion against this nonsense, and teaching of creative writing is improving. The article on Shakespeare credits him with originating a fair number of contemporary phrases, including “what the dickens.” I have a problem with that, as Dickens lived about 250 years after Shakespeare. There may be four stages of creative writing: preparation, incubation, illumination, verification. Writers may get into a state of heightened awareness, complete engagement, and concentration. Criticism, too early, can kill off creative thinking. Yes, that’s one reason writers hate critics.

From “Writing as a Collaborative Act” by R Keith Sawyer I learn that C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien knew each other, and, essentially, Tolkien converted Lewis to Christianity in 1931. I didn’t know that! But here’s the one that hit me hardest: that famous story about how Samuel Taylor Coleridge woke from an opium dream and was writing what he discovered, there, “Kubla Khan,” when interrupted by a person from Porlock, and thus lost the continuation of his poem: that turns out to be false. Coleridge’s early notes of the poem included his early notes of the attendant story, in different versions. This was the poem that brought me to Coleridge, one of my favorite poets. Sigh. So it wasn’t crafted in a dream; it still has magic. I will not renounce Coleridge because it turns out that he worked at his trade the same way I do. “Creative writing is hard work; it involves a large amount of conscious editing and analysis, and it takes place over long periods of time with frequent revisions. Stories that make it seem otherwise, like Coleridge’s, are almost always false.” “…there is never a single big insight; instead there are hundreds and thousands of small mini-insights. The real work starts when many mini-insights are analyzed, reworked, and connected to each other, and as with every other type of creativity, many ideas that sound good at first end up in the trash.” This is true in my experience.

Quote from Orson Scott Card: “All but a handful of my stories have come from combining two completely unrelated ideas.” I have found similar, though the ideas are not necessarily unrelated. When I tried to merge hard core science fiction with hard core fantasy I came up with Split Infinity and the Adept series and waited for screams of outrage from readers that never came. The frisson from ideas can be like that between man and woman. Ideas, like people, come in all varieties. Perhaps a mark of a good writer is the ability to recognize a good idea when he encounters it, sifting it from the myriad wisps of chaff.

There’s a chapter on that dread ailment Writer’s Block. “These writing difficulties were of at least 3 months duration, with an average duration in the sample [45 writers] of 23 months.” Gracious! I realized early in my career that I could not afford Writer’s Block, so I worked out a way to abate it, and have not suffered it since. I would climb the wall if I suffered from it for one hour; months is simply not in my picture. My system is to immediately go into discussion with myself, which I type out the same as fictive text: “My hero has taken his girlfriend in his arms. What happens next? My mind is blank. Does he spit on her? No, I don’t think so. There must be something.” I keep discussing it until finally, minutes, hours or days later, and maybe thousands of words, I forge the monumentally original continuation: “I love you,” he says. If the block is more complicated (she’s his best friend’s mother?), I may shift projects. When my novel Omnivore slowed, I wrote the whole of Sos the Rope at lightning speed, then returned to Omnivore—which still moved slowly. But I did get it done in due course. So it wasn’t me so much as the material. But I suspect this is not exactly the problem other writers face; they may suffer from a fundamental lack of initiative to write anything. That’s more difficult. Writer’s Block doesn’t stop me; my wife’s illness, travel, required reading and such can soak up my working time, and that stops me, but not Block. Writing is to me like breathing; I can stop it only so long before I get uncomfortable. But the insights here are interesting. Blocked writers turn out generally to be desperately unhappy (I’m not), and that seems to cause the block, rather than the other way around. Thus devices of writing don’t suffice; they need emotional therapy. “Feelings of hostility, negativism, and resentment, are accompanied by writing-associated behaviors such as breaking, smashing, kicking, and throwing things, and by growing irritable and short-tempered with other people.” I think some of those writers must become reviewers or critics; that would explain a lot.

There’s more, much more; I am touching only on spot highlights or lowlights that trigger my companion comment. While this book is not easy reading, overall, it has an enormous amount of information and insight on the process and practice of creative writing, and I believe writers and nonwriters, creative or not, can benefit from its discussions. Probably individuals will want to study those chapters relevant to their interests. Is this text definitive? It has references galore. But I suspect that a popularized digest, written in non-academic language, would be more useful for ordinary folk.

I read The Great Divorce by C S Lewis, published in 1946. It was recommended to me by my minister correspondent, Gary Scharrer, so I pulled it off my shelf. It was sent to me by a reader named McCloud in 1990, so it was about due for reading. I admired Lewis’ science fiction trilogy Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, and I read his children’s Narnia series to my daughter when she was a child, twice. I enjoyed Shadowlands, the movie about his late-in-life love of an American woman. As the child of an American man and an English woman I can relate. So I am familiar with his SF/fantasy genre material from way back, but not so much his philosophical writing. The Great Divorce is definitely the latter. The protagonist finds himself in a bleak city and in due course realizes he has died and is in an aspect of Hell. Fortunately there’s a bus to Heaven, so he catches that. But Heaven is not quite what he expects; it’s sort of bleak itself, just a high landscape. The assorted visitors are ghosts who can achieve solidity and salvation in Heaven only by properly understanding and accepting themselves. The main part of it consists of snatches of conversation between various ghosts and the angelic residents of Heaven, who are trying to guide them, one on one. Now this is a nice literary device, as it enables the author to present a number of fouled-up people and discuss ways they might improve themselves, without having to follow them any father than convenient. But as a novel it isn’t much. It’s a platform for philosophic discussion. It demonstrates via dialog how narrow some people’s intellectual outlooks are. It makes the point that the achievement of Heaven is not simply finding a place of perpetual joy, but in learning to be worthy of it. So while it may turn on a minister, it doesn’t turn me on. I am too much with the sinful satisfactions of the Hell we call Life.

And I read Jumper Cable, Xanth #33, proofreading the page proofs. I usually get a good notion of my novel this way, because it has been a year or two since I wrote it, and time gives me a bit of perspective. I was concerned after reading my Cluster series after 30 years, wondering whether I still had similar writing ability. Xanth is fantasy humor and parody rather than science fiction, not the same sort of thing. But it was my impression that the writing competence was similar, which is reassuring. It features Jumper Spider, a distant descendant of Jumper in Xanth #3 Castle Roogna, who is busy doing his thing, jumping from weed to weed and biting the heads off bugs, satisfied. Then a Narrative Hook catches his carapace and hauls him into the foreign realm of Xanth Proper, which differs not in locale so much as scale: now he is the size of a pony. He rescues Wenda Woodwife, who is about to be molested by a village lout, and she becomes his closest friend. Wenda is a lush nymph from the front, but hollow from the back; she’s actually a shaped shell formed of wood, magically animated. They decide to make common cause, going to see the Good Magician, who can tell Jumper how to return to his realm, and Wenda how to become a real woman with a backside. She knows the route, and he can protect her from louts. Along the way they gather an assortment of other maidens and a harpy, and by the time they reach the Good Magician’s castle they are a party of six, all with their special problems. Humfrey gives them an assignment: locate and fix the cable that once connected Xanth to Mundania, something only Jumper can do, with the right help. The Magician temporarily fixes the five maidens’ problems; the fixes will become permanent once the cable has been repaired, and will be lost if it is not. And he adds two members to the group: the twin lovely nineteen year old princesses/sorceresses Dawn & Eve, who are on probation for quarreling over the same man. They are naughtily mischievous; when Jumper has to be transformed to manform, naturally he is naked, so Dawn flashes him with her bra and Eve flashes him with her panties, making his body react, to the embarrassment of everyone else. It goes on from there. Why is this mysterious cable so important? Read the novel, in due course.

A reader sent me a link with information about kefir, pronounced keh-fear. This is a cultured milk beverage that originated in the Caucasus Mountains, maybe a thousand years ago. It seems to promote a long healthy life, like up to a hundred years. It is cultured from grains, which are little globs of substance. It has an alcoholic content of about 1% and a slightly yeasty aroma. It seems to be a probiotic—that is, the opposite of antibiotic, promoting the kind of intestinal environment that facilitates digestion. There’s a story that the Russian Physicians Society in the early 1900s wanted to get a sample of kefir, because of its health benefits, but the Turks would not release the secret. So they asked the proprietors of a local cheese factory to help, and they sent a beautiful employee named Irina to coax a Caucasian prince. The prince was too canny to give up the secret, but he was smitten with Irina, and kidnapped her and proposed marriage. She refused, and in due course was rescued. Then she sued, but declined gold and jewels for a settlement, insisting on grains of kefir. And so the Russians got it at last. Now it is available for the rest of us; there’s an Australian source. A few grains and some milk or other hospitable nutrient will start a culture, which can then be carried forth indefinitely. It’s supposed to be easier than culturing yogurt. Okay, this interests me, and not just because of Irina; I doubt she’d date me anyway. Is this a miracle culture that can help me and mine live for a century? I don’t really believe it, but my curiosity has been piqued. Has anyone out there had experience with kefir? I’d like to get a user report.

It is the time of the great Digital TV Conversion. We were satisfied with Analog TV, here in the forgotten hinterlands, but the powers that be couldn’t just leave it alone. So they foisted Digital TV on us, requiring a Set-Top Box for every TV set and, for us in said hinterlands, the choice between Cable (we’re too far from civilization for that), Satellite (too expensive), DSL (not delivered here), or a taller TV Tower. So we went reluctantly for the tower: it cost about $1,200 for an extension lifting the antenna from 40 feet to 50 feet, and we got a new, larger antenna too, the best available. Would it work? It was a close call, but it did work. When there’s a storm, the wind blows the antenna around so that it points in the wrong direction, and we have to realign it, but that’s a nuisance we can handle. I had hoped that our four local channels would become eight or ten; my wife thought I was overoptimistic. Well, it turned out to be 33 on a good day and the right orientation, and we could rotate to get others if we had to. Stations that were formerly single now have one, two, or four separate channels, and the ones above channel 13 that we never reliably got before now are there. We were told that with digital you either get it perfectly, or not at all. That’s not true; here in the margin of the world we do get occasional spotty digital, with little squares missing from the picture and the sound becoming staccato. But usually reception is good. Exploring the new offerings, I discovered channel 62.2, LATN, a Spanish Language broadcast featuring mostly music videos. Why would I want to watch that, since I have forgotten more Spanish than I ever knew? Well, have you seen the girls on those videos? Sexiest creatures this side of Hell. Then there’s the interviewer Ana Laura Tanaka. When God was distributing Cute, she must have been first in line. I can’t understand a word she says, but who needs meaning? And she’s not the only one; they certainly zeroed in on my taste in women. Meanwhile my wife can get a constant-weather station any time. So we are becoming converts. Digital TV does have something to offer. But, all in all, it is not more reliable than analog; it’s more finicky.

I have read that America, with 5% of the world’s population, has 25% of its prison population. Does this make us safer physically or better people morally? It doesn’t seem to. Column by Neal Pierce says “We have placed one in 100 adults 18 and over behind bars, a nationwide prisoner total of 2.3 million. Probation and parole swell the total to 7.2 million Americans under some form of criminal justice system supervision. Why should we be incarcerating more people than do such regimes as China or Russia?” Damn good question. It costs $50 billion a year to state and local governments, and $5 billion to the federal prison system. A number of states spend as much or more on corrections as they do on higher education. Florida had over 100,000 inmates—I correspond with several—at a cost of $20,000 a year each. As if we didn’t have better uses for the money. What’s the solution? The column suggests that we should focus on effective ways to hold people accountable for breaking rules without jamming them back into what may be a $25,000 a year prison cell. Electronic monitoring, community service, residential programs, other options that are far cheaper and more effective than prison. I have another suggestion: decriminalize marijuana and related drug use. That doesn’t mean that society approves of it, just that such victimless “crimes” won’t be prosecuted. That single reform might cut the prison population in half and save a huge amount of money. A column by Clarence Page describes the way some private enterprises get cash for jailing children, such as a 15 year old girl who was put away for three months for posting a web site parody of an assistant principal at school. So much for freedom of speech, supposedly in the Constitution. A 14 year old girl made the mistake of slapping a friend back; she got nine months in juvenile jail. It isn’t just prisons; I remember when a fan of mine had her children taken away from her because her daughter had brought a copy of Virtual Mode to school to read; it took a legal case and months for her to get them back, and the experience was traumatic for the children. And in those “corrective” agencies there is a horrendous record of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse by staff members. When the FBI investigated, two judges were found guilty of sentencing thousands of children to jail, often without lawyers, in a kickback scheme that paid them millions. Welcome to American justice. I suspect we need to get the throw-away-the-key “conservatives” the hell out before we can achieve meaningful reform. Obviously they care about money more than about the children they claim to protect.

A related item: The Humanist May-June issue has a savage expose of what it can be like at Christian reform schools, told by a former inmate, Michele Tresler-Ulriksen. As a roughly normal rebellious sixteen year old girl she was delivered by her parents into a locked-down, all-girl, unlicensed, unregulated fundamentalist Baptist reform school. She was introduced to a small walk-in style closet they called the Get-Right Room. If a girl swore, rolled her eyes, refused to eat, refused to convert to their version of Christianity, or gave the staff any problems, that’s where she went. She witnessed extreme mental, emotional, and verbal abuse. Girls were encouraged to call out others’ imperfections in front of staff and students. Underweight girls were force-fed while food was withheld from overweight ones. Vegetarians were forced to eat large quantities of meat. The less intelligent had to sit in the corner and were called stupid. Lesbians were told they were going to burn in hell. The world slut and whoremonger were common. Plus six hours a day of Old Testament indoctrination. They were told repeatedly they were worthless and a disgrace to God and their parents. They were told that all the sin in the world was caused by Eve and that this was the reason girls have menstrual cycles and painful childbirth. That God intended them to bear children, and that should be their sole lot in life. “It was all about submission and subjugation.” Science was considered hogwash. Many girls who made it through the ordeal and were released suffered post traumatic stress disorder. Meanwhile parents were carefully deceived, thinking they were delivering their troubled teens to a loving place. I attended a religious school for four years, and while it was nowhere near as bad as this, actually a good school, it left me a lifelong agnostic who has rebuffed subsequent solicitations by the school.

I mentioned a line from the song “Coming through the Rye” last time. “Gin a body meet a body/ Coming thro’ the rye,/ Gin a body kiss a body,/ Need a body cry?” Was it a field of rye grass where they met? Or drinking rye whiskey in a tavern? What was the real story here? There were several responses. One described how Jenny dragged her petticoat while coming through the rye. Now why would she do that? Here is the most definitive, a spot entry from the private diary of Ted Walther dated Jan 28, 2007. The song is from a poem by Robert Burns, which seems to suggest that the rye is a meeting place. But Walther’s research discovered it’s more than that. It seems to be that there is a small river near where the poet lived, the Rye Water. There was no bridge in those days, just a ford. So the girls had to lift their petticoats if they were to cross over without getting their skirts wet. The young men would take advantage if a girl had a load on her head and her petticoats held up in her other hand, and snatch a kiss. My guess is they might also snatch a feel. So when they did that with Jenny, she dropped her petticoat and smacked the young suitor with her fist. Good thing she didn’t live in America, where she might get sent to prison for nine months for that. So her petticoats got wet, but her virtue was intact. But she lost a boyfriend. “Ev’ry Lassie has her laddie; Nane, they say, have I. Yet all the lads they smile on me, When coming thro’ the rye.” Good for Jenny! She must have had nice legs, to attract that attention.

We attended the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention, as announced last column, at the behest of Mundania Press, which paid our way. Mundania came into existence when I financed it to put my dirty fantasy novel Pornucopia back into print so my fans wouldn’t get ripped off for hundreds of dollars for used copies. Since then this small publisher has expanded hugely, with hundreds of authors and books. Unfortunately Dan Reitz, who runs Mundania, had to cancel his attendance; his wife had a setback in her recovery from surgery and it seemed risky to bring her along or leave her behind. We understand perfectly, as my wife’s health has made me quite cautious about external commitments. But Katherine Lively of the erotic imprint Phaze held the fort together with editor Alessia Brio.

We drove to the Wyndham-Orlando Resort, checked in at noon-fifteen and navigated the usual hangups as the personnel didn’t have the carefully pre-cleared arrangements clear; their call to Dan or Accounting got it straight. (Mental picture of their dialog: “It’s right there on the paper in front of you, idiot!” “Oh, that paper. Okay.”) I think it’s in the Big Book of hotel rules not to let anyone in without a reservations hassle, no matter how careful the preparations. But they gave us a nice ground-level room next to the convention center so the wheelchair would not have a problem. Our younger daughter Cheryl was also there the first day to help us orient; she got a Press Pass so she could write up a feature for the local newspaper, where she works. About our only complaint was that the room was infested by gnats or fruit flies who liked to buzz persistently in our faces. This is semi-tropical Florida, after all.

My wife elected to stay on her feet the first day, but all the walking and standing wore her out so that thereafter she was satisfied to let me push her in the wheelchair. I mention the rule of thumb again: not everyone in a wheelchair is paralyzed; some can stand and walk, just not for long or far. So the chair greatly extends their range and comfort. The resort complex is not perfectly adapted to handicapped folk; it was a 50-50 chance whether a given sidewalk terminated in a navigable ramp or a brutal curb. So we had either to stay on the road and risk traffic, or have my wife get to her feet while I got the chair over the curb, then resume her seat. Doors were another problem. Usually there was someone around to hold them open, but sometimes it was tricky and awkward. But overall the wheelchair was a great help, especially as we learned the most feasible routes.

Maybe this too needs repeating: why did I bring my wife along, if it is that complicated? Because I love her and need her, and have become fairly dependent on her in the course of nigh 53 years of marriage; she’s not just a sex object. I am pretty much of a travel idiot by myself; I get lost and knotted up trying to manage even simple aspects. When she’s along I am at ease. There is also the chance that she will enjoy the sights and events too. One day I took her touring the little pathways, fountains, and ponds of the complex, replete with flowers and exotic plants. Eating out together was also nice; the buffet is ideal for vegetarians, and far fancier than the meals I make at home.

My first program was an Author Chat, along with L A Banks, Catherine Asaro, and Carole Nelson Douglas. We had a responsive audience of about 80 people. Catherine mentioned that she was dyslexic; that’s one of my buttons, because my elder daughter was diagnosed dyslexic, and her symptoms were similar to mine when I was young, only in my day there was no dyslexia, only stupid students. So I took three years to struggle through first grade. Eventually I got the hang of it, and as I like to put it, it has been some time since anyone other than a critic thought I was stupid. So I have some affinity with Catherine. It seems that a surprising number of writers are dyslexic. Someone asked me about Jenny, my paralyzed correspondent who was struck at age 12 on her way to school by a drunk driver who simply cruised through the stopped traffic and took her out. She was in a coma three months, until they read my letter to her, bringing her out of it. But twenty years later she remains paralyzed, while the drunk driver paid no penalty. What’s wrong with this picture? The subject of fan mail came up: how do we handle it? I said my wife prints out email for me, I pencil answers, which she transcribes and sends. That doubles or triples my efficiency so I can keep up, though fan mail and related things like this Web site and my ongoing Survey of Electronic Publishing still take about a third of my working time. This seemed to have some impact on the other panelists: use family members to facilitate the process, instead of being up against the cold equations of either neglecting the fans or having all our time absorbed by them. Writers do need time to write books, after all. So we hit it off okay in that session, I think, trusting that the reports of the others will agree. I have focused on my own participation here, this being my blog; I was actually about one quarter of the whole chat group.

In between events I met and chatted with folk; I seemed to have many fans attending. I trust some did spot me by my advertised traits: a man with a ponytail pushing a woman in a wheelchair. I didn’t actually attend events where I wasn’t required, not from indifference but because we did retire often to rest in our room, have meals, etc. I stopped by the Phaze table and signed a number of their copies of my books that they were giving out. This was a promotional affair for publishers and authors, after all. They gave out myriads of goodies, ranging from bookmarks to free books; in fact there were whole goody-bags. The first one I got was wrong; they had given me another author’s and it had her markings and schedule. So I took it back. “You found it!” they exclaimed, relieved, and gave me mine. One I knickknack especially like is a soft red heart that you squeeze in your hand for exercise; it’s supposed to be good for blood pressure, I think. This one has a silhouette of a shapely demoness and says “Love Your Inner Demon” www.jackiekessler.com.

Thursday morning I had a filmed interview with Morgan Doremus. She’s the Web Content Producer for Romantic Times Magazine, the sponsor of the convention. It was straightforward: she asked me one question, and I rambled all over the universe, focusing more or less on Xanth. She remarked that she never knew what I would say; I guess I proved it. I just hope they edited it to make me look more coherent than I was. The interviews are scheduled to be posted starting in AwGhost 2009, until Apull 2010; mine should be somewhere in there.

We had lunch with Heather Osborn, the TOR Romance representative, although I don’t write Romance for Tor. It’s an irony that my big publisher was not the one to bring me to the convention, while the small one did. But it must also be said that I have a financial interest in Mundania and want it to succeed, as well as having my more provocative fantasy there, so I care more about it than for the big outfits. At any rate our dialog with Heather was perfectly compatible.

In the afternoon I made a 15 minute pop-in appearance at the panel on Nitty-Gritty of Selling On The Internet. I wasn’t crashing the party; it was arranged as a courtesy to some of my fans there. Moderator Kate Ryan gave me her seat and I fielded questions about my novels Volk, Firefly, and Mer-Cycle, as usual wandering far afield and telling them about the horror novel I never wrote, The Sopaths, (short for Sociopaths), but may some day. One asked me how I felt about second hand book sales. That is treacherous terrain, because the author makes nothing from such sales, and they may cut into paying sales. I said I don’t actually need money at this point, but do still need to be read, and wince at the thought of my books being destroyed after reading. I concluded “So I don’t really mind. Much.” I understand that my brief visit was much appreciated. Good; such appearances are pointless if not appreciated.

In the evening we watched the costumed people entering the Faery Ball, the girls replete with cute little wings, then retired.

Friday morning at about 6 AM I donned my running shoes and spent 25 minutes jogging around the complex in the near darkness. No one else was out. Naturally I got lost, but couldn’t stay lost because it’s not that big. Once I found the outside road I had no further trouble. I also exercised with hand weights, maintaining my routine as well as feasible. Many folk talk about health, but few seem to practice it as I do. Diet and exercise, seriously practiced, really are the keys; most else is dross.

We were in the main convention hall when a woman collared me: “You’re supposed to be in an interview now.” Oh? I had agreed to one, but the details had never been finalized and I had no idea of time or place. Apparently there was a glitch in informing me. My only communication, dated 4-15-2009, was when the RT Convention publicist Pat Simmons asked whether I was available and when, and I responded “As far as I know, I’m free Friday morning.” Thereafter I heard nothing, no confirmation, no indication it was on. So Kathryn Methuen, whose name I had not been given before, of The Hachiko interviewed me. I forget what I said; things begin to blur at conventions.

At 4 PM we went to the Mundania Press Publisher Spotlight. There were only about three other people there, but the dialog was compatible. Then came the RT Book Reviews awards Ceremony, where we chatted with the owner of the magazine who, if I’m not confused, is Kathryn Falk. The host magazine, RT BOOK REVIEWS, does review a lot of science fiction and fantasy. I like the way they organize it, and I will subscribe. Then they started calling out names for their awards. I was the second, for Pioneer of Genre Fiction, I being as far as I know the first to have an original paperback fantasy novel, Ogre, Ogre, make the national bestsellers lists. Thereafter others did, and fantasy is today a far more important genre than it was before then. There was a confusion, and they had me step up before the first scheduled recipient, though she was right there. Confused, I asked “Am I supposed to say something?” Apparently so, so I stepped to the podium, and couldn’t see the audience; the lighting made it become a pool of darkness. That was further offputting. I gave a brief credit to the woman who put me on that bestseller list, the late Judy-Lynne del Rey, who was physically a dwarf standing about three and a half feet tall, but a giant in publishing, forever changing the impact of SF/F genre fiction. She was a fun person; my daughters knew and liked her. After her, those who only thought they knew how to do it took over again, and Del Rey faded as an imprint. When I say Judy-Lynne is dead, I mean a whole remarkable publishing attitude is gone. At any rate, they had many other awards; there are more varieties of Romance genre fiction than I can track.

One thing I noticed during the day and the convention was their Mr. Romance contestants: handsome young men, most with long hair, who were models for cover artists. They men carefully escorted each person to the dais for the awards, and circulated generally at other times. The convention was 95% women, and they loved those models. We did not stay for their contest, but one of them was a fan of mine, and we posed together for a picture at his request. Someone else remarked that that was the first time she’d seen one of those hunks as a fan of someone else. Do you suppose if I let my hair loose I could be a cover model? If they wanted septuagenarians? No? Sigh.

Friday evening we took the Mundania/Phaze folk out to dinner. I regretted again that Dan Reitz could not be there. Saturday morning (I think) we chatted with an author who described how she had set back her teenaged son. “Girls suck!” he exclaimed, evidently because of a bad experience. “They do if you’re lucky,” she responded, flooring him. Moral: don’t mouth off in the presence of on Erotic Romance author, even if she is your mother.

Saturday was the big 300 author book signing. They gave me a separate table, which was just as well, because the first hour was solid, the second spotty, but all of the piled copies of Two to the Fifth, A Spell for Chameleon, Key to Havoc, Dragon’s Gold, and Pornucopia sold out. I hope the people who bought them are not disappointed. I did warn them about the nature of the last one.

In the afternoon I had a five minute back massage in the lobby. I give my wife massages, but haven’t had any myself; I wanted to pick up on technique. The massage itself did not seem special, but the effect lingered. Okay, now I know. In the evening we packed, and the convention was largely over.

Sunday morning we had breakfast, organized, turned in our room keys, and headed for home, a drive of about one and a half hours. We picked up mail and shopped for groceries. Home at last, we were greeted by the smell of hidden dead rat in the garage, a big load of accumulated email and regular mail, and newspapers. Then back to real life, including getting the trees along our long drive trimmed back, threat of a swine flu epidemic (and we have feral pigs on our tree farm), and a dentist visit. O joy.

I read The Sword and the Pen by Elysa Hendricks, who gave me an autographed copy at the RT Convention; she’s a fan of mine. This is a fantasy adventure with a nice twist: the leading female character of a fantasy novelist appears in his mundane world. Naturally she doesn’t understand it; our modern conveniences seem like powerful magic to her. I don’t think her appearance is ever explained, but it’s an interesting interaction. After a number of mischances he falls for her, and there’s a sex scene of the kind I prefer: not bypassed by an ellipsis. Why can’t all fiction be like this? Then in the second part the author finds himself in her world, which he has crafted but really doesn’t understand too well. He has marked her for death, to finish the series, but changes his mind, yet finds it hard to change the original story. As a writer myself, I understand; revisions can be complicated, because there are so many internal interactions in a novel. At any rate, I enjoyed the novel; it’s certainly not formula. She seems to update her Web site every one or two months with news of her latest. www.elysahendricks.com.

We saw a movie: X Origins Wolverine. From reviews we expected something disjointed and confusing. It was better than that; it followed a single protagonist and was roughly chronological. Those are two devices for clarity that many movie makers seem to have forgotten. There was much violence, but since the point was to show why this man was bitter, it was effective: he had reason. It wasn’t a great movie, but it was good enough, and we did enjoy it. There was a complication, however: during the previews the sound ceased. We notified the management, and someone came and turned it back on. But then it quit again, and they couldn’t fix it, so the whole theater-ful—all five of us—moved to an adjacent theater and picked it up half an hour later, seeing the previews again, this time with sound. Sound does make a difference.

I read Shannon Maguire: the Crown of Muirnin by Jim Paul. This is the manuscript of an aspiring writer’s Fantasy Romance, and it has some problems, but I should think that devotees of the genre should like it. It’s the story of an American teen girl who discovers when someone tries to kill her that she is a princess in an alternate fantasy realm. Her parents, the rightful rulers, have already been killed. She has to struggle to stay alive, literally, while learning the mechanisms of government. Naturally there’s an evil prince who wants her out of the way so he can take over. The elements are fairly standard, but well enough handled. The author was influenced by some of mine, such as having a telepathic equine (the Mode series), and you know, a girl can hardly have a better friend than a mind-reading unicorn.

I read Spellwright by Blake Charlton, sent to me by TOR for blurbing. This is a different kind of fantasy. The author is dyslexic—there seems to be a lot of that in writers, myself not necessarily excepted—so I’ll clarify that it seems to be a difficulty in seeing print exactly as it is, leading to chronic misspelling and confused words. In this case the protagonist, Nicodemus, is in training to be a spellwright, which is a kind of magician—the novel has its own refined terminology—but commands must be correctly spelled or they mess up. The analogy I think of is computer commands: you make one little mistake, and you can trash your file, send your private diary accidentally online, or shut down the system. So you have to do it right; the machine is literal minded and unforgiving. In this novel textual commands become all manner of effects including animate creatures like golems or gargoyles, which can assist you or bite your ass. So it’s really important to get it right. The protagonist is severely dyslexic, and can’t spell worth a damn. Oh, he tries, but his very presence can cause correctly spelled documents to become typo-ridden. This is magic, remember, familiar as this particular effect may be to mundane writers. So he has a problem. But he perseveres, hoping that somehow someway eventually he’ll be able to get it right. There are indications that he could be vitally important if he succeeds. However, this is not an easy story to get into, because it is not familiar magic; this business of written texts being devised within the arms, then flipped out to become animate creatures or curses which, when countered, deconstruct into fragments of text is tricky to follow at first. There are friends and enemies and a host of assorted officials in a complicated societal structure that I found confusing at first. There is only the barest hint of potential romance. But in time the underlying story came into focus, and it’s a good one. You need an apt mind (or perhaps a dyslexic one) to properly assimilate this novel, but it is worth it.

The following entry is more than 3,000 words long, about a personal quarrel, so if you are not interested in the subject, skip down a few pages, beyond the unspaced paragraphs, to resume my normal column.

As regular visitors to this HiPiers site know, I maintain on ongoing survey of electronic publishers and related services, including self publishing. This is simply a public service from which I obtain no benefit except the satisfaction of helping writers find avenues to decent publication. It takes a good deal of my time. We updated it every two months, about to become monthly, because we’re on dialup here in the hinterlands, so online access is slow and ties up our phone. We pay to have the regular updates posted by the webmistress. So I’m not eager to make spot updates between times. I have received many expressions of appreciation from authors who found good publishers or avoided bad ones. I do it in part because I believe it needs to be done, and not many writers have the resources I do to tell the truth. As I put it in the introduction: I do not check with publishers before running positive or negative feedback on them; this survey is of the nature of a review, and anonymity of sources is maintained. If I may summarize the general gist of publisher responses to bad reviews, it is “You’re a liar! We’ll sue! Tell us who blabbed so we can destroy them. Who the hell are you to make such judgments anyway?!” The anonymity is to ensure that publishers can’t retaliate against wronged writers who speak out. I know about retaliation, having been blacklisted for six years, 1969-75, by a traditional print publisher when I objected to being cheated. I am immune to that now, as my livelihood does not depend on electronic publishing, and I have the will and the means to handle any likely legal assault. In sum, I can’t be shut up by threats. Do you think I exaggerate about publishers’ reactions? That some don’t really try to intimidate or silence anyone who spells out their more shady actions? That they don’t use abusive language, threats, and sometimes legal action? Then this discussion may be a revelation. Publish America sued Preditors & Editors, a longstanding lister and rater of publishers, and—here is the scary part—won. This seems to confirm what I was told by a lawyer back in 1969, that I could be sued, and lose, for telling the truth. Huh? In America? Here is the key: it takes truth and a good lawyer to prevail. I took that advice to heart, and since then have made sure to have both when I get into it. So anyone who wants to shut me up for telling the truth today will soon discover they have caught a rattlesnake by the tail. My object, if attacked, is not merely to defend my position, but to make the attacker sorry he/she/it ever tackled me. To make an example everyone will appreciate, especially rogue publishers. Without that militant stance, my Survey would suffer inevitable erosion of relevance and eventually become pointless.

But some folk are slow to catch on. This time it’s Angela Hoy of Booklocker.com, who followed my gist-of-publisher-response summation as if reading from a script. I have a long entry on this publisher, giving positive and negative reports and detailing Angela’s prior effort to silence me and how I stiff-armed her about five years ago (you can read the entry in the Survey), but did correct the record on one charge that seemed to lack substance, that of whether she was promoting her own books at the expense of others. I concluded: So the question is whether this is a good publisher with a few disgruntled authors out of many, or one that sometimes treats writers in an arbitrary or unfair manner. Both may be true; I suspect that is the case. There followed more reports, positive and negative. I believe I have been tough but fair with her as I have with other publishers. Then came my February 2009 update: More negatives. It is said that proprietress Angela Hoy has not been published anywhere but here and that she is not a good writer. That she misuses stock photos for promotion, and that BookLocker’s claim to be the cheapest POD house is untrue; Create Space is cheaper, being essentially free. That despite its claims BookLocker really does not discriminate in what it publishes, and that it arranges to plant positive and negative comments on Amazon about particular authors’ books. That the publisher threatens critics with lawsuits to shut them up, and trashes their reputations. I don’t know how much of this is true, and some would be tricky to prove, but there is a smell, and my prior dealings with BookLocker suggest there is some substance at least to the charge that they threaten critics. Because, of course, Angela had threatened me exactly that way, so I knew that much was true. My whole report was true: I had a statement from what struck me as a credible source, and expressed it carefully, as you can see. I was told these things, but lack direct personal knowledge of aspects of the case, so acknowledge the possibility of error. However, the problem with anonymity is that it can serve as a cover for anyone with a private grudge to make false charges with impunity. Since I may not be in a position to be certain of the truth, as in this case, I compromise by running both the charges and their refutations, in due course, so readers can judge for themselves. I think this is about as fair as I can be, in such a situation. My interest is in the truth, whatever it may be, as nearly as it can be ascertained. Sometimes it is a matter of opinion, such as whether Angela is a good writer. It will not serve the public interest to have all negatives suppressed at the publisher’s will. This ongoing Survey is valid only to the extent it covers pros and cons. Otherwise it would be a whitewash. If anonymity of sources is not honored, sources will tend to disappear. Errant publishers will be able to cheat writers with near impunity, knowing individual writers don’t have the resources to sue, as was the case with me when I was blacklisted. The Survey would become no more useful in this respect than Angela’s own site is. In the larger arena, it is why journalists need a shield law. Sometimes it is the government itself trying to shut them up. In Latin America and Asia some areas are notorious for silencing truth-telling journalists by killing them. There are deadly sharks out there, and truth is their enemy.

Angela did not like this report. She said she does not threaten critics with lawsuits. Well, as I reported before: Angela said “What you are doing is illegal,” and said she was turning this matter over to her attorney. That certainly smelled like a legal threat to me, and it irritated me. It is best not to make threats unless you are prepared to make good on them, especially when you are dealing with me. I have been to law more than once, and always won my case, sometimes making the other party pay for my defense, as once when the lawsuit against me was completely spurious. (They were suing my agent’s clients without cause, merely to get at our agent, a dirty tactic. I fought back.) I suspect I am about as tough minded in this respect as any person is, as I state openly and often, and as those who have opposed me may verify. However, per my normal course, I said I would post her refutation in my June 2009 update, and I have done so. Most publishers have been satisfied with that. The fact is, most reports I run on publishers, positive and negative, turn out to be accurate, and I correct the ones that are mistaken. Some of the loudest screamers among publishers turn out to be the worst ones, as corroborations come in. Maybe that makes sense. A good publisher doesn’t fear the truth.

But not Angela. She responded with a conjecture about who had made the negative reports, (see tell us who blabbed, above) and concluded “Your statement that you won’t post an update until next month means the false allegations will continue to harm our business until you post that update. That is not fair and I’d appreciate an immediate update to your website.” Well, maybe, but I saw no reason to change my established policy merely because one publisher did not like a report. After all, what I have reported about Booklocker is at least in part true from my own experience, as mentioned above, and for all I know, wholly true. The issue is still being debated. I responded with a summary of my experience with blacklisting, concluding “So I well understand your frustration. However, I am not lying about you or anyone. I am reporting what I am privately told, and running corrections when I get them. I do the same for all publishers; there is no bias against you. If you tried to take legal action I would establish the inherent objectivity of the service I perform, and possibly require you to pay for the legal expense in refuting you…” This was no bluff; my patience with her was eroding, and I have done exactly that elsewhere, as mentioned above. I concluded “You will have to be satisfied with that.” In short, no preferential treatment for her just just because she couldn’t wait her turn. It had taken her more than three months to notice the update; she couldn’t wait three weeks?

Back she came, on the attack, foam fairly dripping from her muzzle. “Are you now, or have you ever been, on the Board of Directors at Xlibris, which competes directly with many of the publishers you’ve criticized on your website? Is it also true that you removed all negative comments you’d previously posted about AuthorHouse and iUniverse when Author Solutions (owner of AuthorHouse and iUniverse) purchased Xlibris?” Note the parallel phrasing to the notorious McCarthy Era of American history in the 1950s: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a Communist?” Those so challenged tended to get blacklisted out of business, regardless of the truth of the matter, until the US Army, in perhaps its finest legal battle, showed Joe McCarthy up for the crazy fool he was. My patience eroded further, and I showed my irritation. “You’re not much for doing your homework, are you? Check my HiPiers column for FeBlueberry 2009, wherein I discuss the whole history of Xlibris and my involvement, when I have been open about it throughout. But, specifically: yes, I was for several years on the Xlibris board of directors, but I posted negative as well as positive comments about it, as I do for all the publishers I list. On occasion I intervened to correct a foulup that the regular process didn’t, as I went straight to the top. I am now simplifying my posted histories because new ownership makes them less relevant. My ongoing survey is intended to assist writers in finding potential markets, electronic or self publishing. They may be in competition with each other, but my listing is an inclusive service. What part of this don’t you understand?”

Well, apparently she didn’t understand most of it. “I don’t see any disclaimer at the top of your publisher webpage that admits you are or were on the board of directors at Xlibris, which competes directly with companies you openly criticize (and carelessly post lies about) on your website. If you can drive business away from the other publishers to Xlibris, you, of course, can/did profit directly. Not publishing a disclaimer to this effect at the top of your page is dishonest, deceptive, and unethical, to say the least. I did notice your very small statement under the Xlibris listing…but it is 75% down on a very long webpage, where most people won’t see it. Many will have already decided not to work with the companies you’ve posted lies about further up the page, and may never see the statement about your investment in Xlibris. From your note below, I understand that, instead of posting all complaints about Xlibris, which you are/were part owner of, you intervened and helped fix some of the problems. You didn’t do this for all the other publishers. So, it’s obvious you were giving favorable treatment to Xlibris all along. After AuthorHouse/Author Solutions purchased Xlibris, you promptly removed complaints about AuthorHouse and about iUniverse (also owned by Author Solutions) from your webpage, despite the fact that ownership of those firms didn’t change at all. Author Solutions bought Xlibris, not the other way around. Removing complaints about firms associated with Author Solutions, just because they purchased Xlibris, which you are or have been a part-owner of, is biased. You’ve admitted you post anonymous complaints about companies. Some of those alleged complaints were submitted by people who never did business with the publishers. These could be ex-employees, ex-spouses, or even unethical competitors. You don’t check facts, nor even attempt to contact the publisher in question before posting lies about them. You post libelous comments at random, with no regard for the quality or accuracy of the information you are imparting on your readers. You simply do not care. When a publisher does send a rebuttal, you don’t immediately remove the lies, which makes you a party to the libel and the resulting damages. You might post a correction later, at a time convenient for you (‘next month’), further down on your webpage, but you don’t remove the original lie and, by that time, damage has already been done. If you don’t like the publisher’s response, even if they are correct and justified in their anger about the libel, you might even write an unprofessional response about them on your webpage, instead of apologizing for harming their reputation. From comments I’ve read from other publishers, it appears there are other victims of your malicious, unprofessional and biased behavior as well. A better response from you would have been, I am very sorry, Ms. Hoy. The lies I posted about you could have easily been proved as such with just a few minutes of research online. I will immediately remove the libelous statements from my website and will issue a public apology for the harm I have caused you.’ Instead you refused to immediately remove the lies you posted about me, and basically told me, in a professional way, to screw myself.”

Did I mention eroding patience? My involvement with Xlibris dated from 1997, before I started the Survey of electronic publishers, and I think before Booklocker and most of the others came on the scene, and it was for the same reason: to facilitate avenues of publication for aspiring writers who otherwise may have little chance. Typically I tell them to try the big print publishers, or small press, then the electronic publishers, and if they still get nowhere, consider self publishing. I recommended Lulu, which starts free, or Amazon’s Create Space, which seems to be the best bargain extant. When queried directly about Xlibris, I said it was honestly run and delivered good service, but that I, with a financial interest in it, might not be the best authority. I did not intervene with other publishers because I was not on their boards of directors and had no leverage. (Duh.) I did not list my involvement with Xlibris at the top of my Survey because that was not where such a statement belonged; I listed it in the entry on Xlibris itself. The same goes for Mundania Press, where I still have a financial involvement, and I did for Pulpless.com, where I lost a bundle. I also mention it when I do business with a publisher, such as the late Venus, or eXcessica, or Cobblestone, identifying it as a conflict of interest. Actually, my email suggests that some people come to the publishers with which I associate because of my presence there, rather than being repelled. So a notice at the top the the list might well betaken as advertising for those publishers. Angela’s statement, taken as a whole, is an unjustified attack on my motives and ethics. Apparently to her any criticism of her operation, however valid, is a malicious lie. Is it any wonder I honor anonymity? If she comes at me like this, how do you suppose she comes at critics who lack my resolution and resources? Her tirade is solid evidence that my policy is justified. Interestingly, there are now online ratings of doctors, where the same questions arise, anonymity vs. blacklisting, and some doctors are trying to get them shut down, but the consensus is that they are here to stay. Even Wikipedia sometimes has to shut down its free editing policy, as in the entry on Scientology: the pro- and anti- factions are so constantly engaged in “edit wars,” neither side much interested in an objective assessment, that the proprietor has become exasperated and is squelching some offending sites. I don’t need that kind of activity in my Survey. So I stopped trying to be halfway polite. “Bluntly: you are implying I am a liar and you are freely attributing false motives to me. You are obliquely threatening me. It is interesting to see the way your mind works. If you continue to annoy me by doing what you falsely accuse me of, I will discuss this matter, quoting you in my column. I prefer not to take legal action to swat a fly, but I don’t rule it out. I suggest that you take care what you are soliciting.” I think that’s a warning it would be difficult to misunderstand. My tolerance for verbal abuse is limited. And yes, overall I was suggesting that she take a flying fornication at the moon, as I typically do in such cases, showing my contempt for her unwarranted barrage.

But Angela rose to the occasion with yet another tirade. She repeated that I published lies about her (see you’re a liar! above), that by my refusal to remove them I became a party to them, and hinted that I might be profiting by using such lies to steer people away from other publishers to Xlibris. “You removed complaints about AuthorHouse and iUniverse when the owner of those companies, Author Solutions, purchased Xlibris. This is irrefutable and easily proven using Internet archives (which I have already screen-captured).” And so on, refusing to believe that I was simply giving the new owner a new slate, now that I have no financial involvement in any of it. It is my belief, without proof, that the owner intends to fold the other two publishers into Xlibris, because it has superior organization, personnel and facilities. Thus the proprietor may convert a losing operation into a winning one, guided by Xlibris. When I get reports on how the new conglomerate is doing, I will run them. And she remained mad that I still hadn’t apologized to her, as if I were the one at fault. One almost has to admire such gall. She actually believed that such outrageous charges and threats would make an experienced and knowledgeable antagonist back off? She had a lesson coming. I responded: “I did warn you. Now I will discuss this matter in my June 2009 column. You brought it on yourself.” And here it is. Will she, like Joe McCarthy, foolishly venture into the legal arena against one who is trying to maintain a public service despite harassment, and has blood on his sword? How strong is her death wish? Stay tuned. You can track her side of it at www.writersweekly.com, under the heading “Piers Anthony’s Anonymous Source is a Liar.” Hell hath no fury…

In fact I am already receiving feedback from readers of her discussion there, who seem to be as weak on research and accuracy she is. Such as this from one who claimed to have researched me: “But when on top of that, one takes into account your history of economic involvement with Xlibris, one is bound to conclude that you are unethical as well as irresponsible. Furthermore, your bully tactics against a person defamed by you are loathsome…” As if it was a crime to openly invest in Xlibris, and as if Angela is an abused innocent who does not accuse others of being liars when it may be a simple difference of opinion. Take a look at her site and see how often she does that. It reminds me of a long-ago cartoon of a boy explaining the fight: “It all started when he hit me back.” I do hit back. But responses don’t necessarily support Angela. Here is one: “What’s weird is she has set up her site as some ‘Better Business Bureau’ for books and decides when to meddle in the affairs of others, but she certainly doesn’t want to have people meddle in hers.” Yes; did I mention glass houses?

In sum: I treated Angela exactly as I treat any electronic publisher in my Survey, requiring her to wait her turn on rebuttal. She threw a tantrum.

Meanwhile came a frustration of another nature. My wife has a bicycle she uses for exercise, riding around the loop in front of our house. That was fine, until it got a flat rear tire. Okay, I took it down, removed the thorn, and fixed it the old fashioned way, with rubber cement and a patch. That held. Months later came another flat, this time the front tire. Another thorn. This time I used the newfangled kind of patch that requires no cement. I had used one on my scooter tire and it held perfectly. But in an hour the tire was flat again. I checked, and I had placed the patch wrong, beside the hole instead of over it. I lacked a way to mark the spot, so that in the process of locating the hole by submerging it in water, drying it, and patching, I had lost my place. This time I measured, and placed the patch that way. It held, and she rode on it. But next morning it was flat again. So I took it down again, discovering that half of the patch had loosened, allowing the leak to resume. I applied a new patch. That held for an hour, a day, and longer. But one week later the tire was flat again. Once more half the patch had worked loose. So I patched the patch. That’s not ideal, but I figured it was worth a try. An interesting thing about that front tire is that it is easy to dismount and mount: I can readily do it barehanded. I’m not sure whether that’s a new design, or whether the tire is too big for the rim. No, the patched patch held only a few hours. This time we bought an old-fashioned repair kit, the kind with rubber patches and rubber cement, and used one of them for repair #5. That one held.

I read The Father of All Lies by Robert Seger, to be published by Millennial Mind Publishers, www.american-book.com. This is Historical Religious Fiction. It has a nice perspective: the history of the world as seen by Lucifer. Yes, the author has read my own For Love of Evil, featuring Satan as the Incarnation of Evil. Seger’s novel is a different story, however. Its theme, in a very general way, is that God is not a nice deity; he expects absolute obedience to his every command, and the slightest deviation is grounds for extermination. Lucifer has more conscience and tries to save people, but again and again he fails. His efforts relate to such historical figures as Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Columbus. (I didn’t find Noah.) At last he concludes that only by seeking knowledge can the world’s people begin to achieve independence. God will of course fight it, as he always has (remember the Inquisition?), but perhaps in time it will happen. So this is a challenging book, but not well written enough for me to endorse it completely. Read it for the perspective and ideas.

We saw the newfangled version of Star Trek. I was always a somewhat peripheral fan of the original series, because its hour long programs overlapped the TV news my wife watched, so I saw only the second halves of most of them. I never saw the subsequent series at all, so to me the original cast represents the only authentic Star Trek. Actually, the movies I see are determined by Wife #1 and Daughter #2, so it’s just the luck of their choice that I got to see this one. So how does this reworked movie stack up? Actually, not badly, considering. They show the very beginning, as I’m not sure the original did, and the characters demonstrate more human emotion than I remember. Plenty of action and hokey science, including even time travel. I loved the new Uhura, with the long ponytail; if I were in the market for a girlfriend, and appearance was all that counted, she’d be near the head of the list. But I think my favorite character was Spock-the-Elder, played by the original actor; he simply came across with authority. I liked having the two of them, Elder and Younger, together, with the one advising the other.

I always had a good memories for stories, perhaps not surprising considering I’m a writer. It used to be that I could watch the middle of a TV show for 15 seconds, the recount the full story, if it was a rerun, as TV normally is. Sometimes I suspect that if the TV execs could swing it, even their new programs would consist of reruns. But that was then. Today I tend to do two or three things at once, such as reading, eating supper, and watching TV, and usually reading takes most of my attention. So now I can have trouble telling whether a given show is a rerun. But sometimes the TV does grab my attention. A shapely actress can do it, or a rare coherent story. But sometimes something comes out of left field. This happened during a Sarah Connors Terminator episode. I like the lady robot, so tend to watch her, though the rest of it seems to be increasingly far-fetched. In this case, there was a male character I hadn’t noticed, and a little girl whose presence I didn’t fathom. They sat facing each other across a table, and he was singing something like “Donny, where’s your trousers?” After a while she started joining in, and it was just the cutest thing. I have no idea why, or how such a song contributed to the larger story, if it did, but if I catch a rerun on that, I’ll pay more attention.

I do odd mental accounts. That is, I add up things that would hardly make sense to any normal person. Remember when I balked at getting a tooth repaired, when I learned it would cost me $4,000 to fix half a tooth? So now I have (another) gap in my mouth. Well, I have said that I could surely find better uses for that amount of money than fixing one tooth. That lingered in my mind, and now I have the half-tooth account: in my mind half that money went to pay for a semester’s college education for a female prisoner who is trying to better herself for when she gets out, and half went for home improvements: getting that taller TV tower so we could get Digital TV, and getting the trees around our house and along our long drive trimmed back so that delivery trucks can get in and storms won’t bash the branches into the house and knock off more tiles. So, in essence, half public service, half for us. Overall, much better use for that money.

Words interest me. I’m still learning new ones, and new aspects of old ones. For exactly, fait accompli, meaning something already done, sometimes sneakily, in pronounced with an N. Fe-ta-kon-PLE. Accented on the last syllable, and no M there. How did that happen? All my big dictionaries agree, so it must be so. I will try to correct my errant pronunciation.

Interesting news item: there’s a question about pesticide contamination in Coca-Cola and Pepsi. The companies swear it’s not true, but in India they are spraying these beverages on their crops, and they work. It seems these drinks are cheaper than regular pesticide spray, so it makes economic sense.

J G Ballard died. He was well known in the science fiction genre and highly regarded. Less so by me, because he seemed like a one-string guitar: all his science fiction seemed to consist of destroying the world. The Crystal World had crystals overgrowing it; The Wind from Nowherehad wind doing it; The Drowned World saw it flooded out. Naturally critics loved this destruction, but I craved greater variety and less pessimism. It was only when I saw the movie based on his autobiography, Empire of the Sun, that I came to understand his basis. He lived in China as a child when the Japanese invaded, and he saw his world destroyed. That evidently made a considerable impression on him. However, he was a skilled writer, and I understand his mainstream books, though similarly negative, had more variety. So I acknowledge him as a significant figure in the field, if not to my taste.

Newspaper article by David Brooks comments on a longitudinal study of 268 promising young men entering Harvard College in the late 1930s. They were bright, polished, affluent, well-adjusted, and ambitious. Surely they were destined for success. Uh, no. Some outstanding ones had lives of failure and doom. A third of them had bouts of mental illness. Alcoholism was a “running plague.” And the must mundane personalities often produced the most solid success. How could this be? This interests me, because though I never went near Harvard, I was nothing as a child and as a student, pretty much through college, yet had perhaps the most noticeable success in life while the more promising students in my schools seem to have faded out. Is there a formula? I did a paper in high school trying to discover the common factor in the origin of the world’s most notorious leaders, and concluded that it was impossible to tell by a person’s youth how he would turn out in maturity. For example, Adolf Hitler aspired to be an architect. He didn’t make it, but he may have been responsible for killing six million Jews. That sort of thing remains true in this more authoritative study. The study’s overseer concludes that relationships are the key to happiness. “Happiness is love. Full Stop,” he says. Can it really be that simple? Should I attribute my success to my nigh 53 year long marriage and my close (as writers go) relationship to my readers? I suspect there is something else.

Newspaper item: why don’t stars personally answer their fan mail? Because of fears following a rash of stalker incidents, including kidnapping threats and once a suicide outside a star’s home. That’s the problem: stalkers can be dangerous to themselves or their targets. I think this applies mainly to movie/TV stars, but politicians can also be targeted, and the more successful writers. I do answer my mail personally, penciling answers on printouts, but try to keep my address and phone number off the Internet so that fans can’t just drop in on me. Usually they just want to take my time, as if I have nothing better to do with it, such as earning my living, but sometimes they want more. I have had a number of love letters over the years, and a few hate letters; I am cautious about meeting either type of person in person. Should a big Xanth movie finally connect, as it almost did last year, making me ten times as famous, I well might have to stop being personal.

I finally set up a PayPal account so I can buy things on the Internet. I was assured it was easy, but I was sure it wouldn’t be. I was born in another century, in another country; things don’t work for me the way they do for natives. So I collected all the information I might possibly need, and oriented on the Paypal site. After five attempts, all of which failed—it simply refused to load for me—I took a break. Did I mention how things don’t work for me? Later in the day I tried again, and this time got it. But every time I tried to learn something, I had to wait minutes for it to load in the new information, which turned out not to be relevant. Finally I started the signup process, and naturally it asked questions that weren’t on my list. Also, the print was so small, even when I expanded to full screen, that I was unable to proofread properly, and had to return twice to redo items. But finally I got through it, and got an email confirmation with more questions. So now I have a PayPal account, and all it took me was an hour and a quarter of frustration. Welcome to the 21^st Century!

I received an email with the provocative question “Should collared shirts be compulsory on the golf course?” There followed seven pictures of healthy short-skirted, bare-breasted young women making golf shots. Conclusion: “No, I didn’t think so either.”

I received letters from Loren Blalock relating to the route the Spanish Conquistador Hernando de Soto took through America. Tatham Mound, the major novel of my career, relates, as de Soto becomes a character in it. Not everyone realizes that he wasn’t so much interested in exploring America as in looking for gold and damn well meant to find it. He had about 600 men in his party, and a number of attack dogs that were used to intimidate the native Americans—the Indians—or kill them when they refused to tell where the gold was hidden. Some dogs were trained to attack the genitals: a rather effective threat. Thus the truth, that there was no gold, cost much pain and many lives. My protagonist, an Indian man, and his young daughter were captured in Florida, and he was made to serve as a guide. If he did not do well, his daughter would be killed. So he did his best, until they were able to escape. Thus this portion of my novel, showing de Soto as he was: a tough, effective, greedy, and unscrupulous leader. We facilitated things by largely financing the excavation and curation (study) of the artifacts of Tatham Mound, which was discovered unmolested in Citrus County, Florida, not far from where we live. The University of Florida handled it, under the direction of Dr. Milanich, and our daughter participated as a volunteer. I believe several doctorates came out of that project, and much was learned about the local Tocobaga tribe, also known as the Safety Harbor culture of the sixteenth century. It was a worthwhile enterprise, and my novel animating a few of the skeletons found therein was only a fraction of it. The Tocobaga suffered a massive die-off at that time, and glass beads brought from Spain by de Soto to trade with the natives were found in the burial mound. From this I concluded that de Soto passed close by, and that the diseases his party brought, like smallpox, wiped out the Indians. In fact the Indian population of North America was thought to be about 40 million, 95% of whom were killed by the white man’s plagues. It was one of history’s greatest near-genocides, which most Americans prefer to pretend didn’t happen. So my novel is a tragedy, as is Native American history. Naturally my readers prefer Xanth.

There has been some question concerning the route actually taken by de Soto’s party. I am no expert here, my participation being largely financial and fictional, but I can say that there have been some fierce debates about exactly where de Soto landed—Tampa Bay or farther south—and exactly where he traveled through Florida and on into the mainland proper. Actual physical evidence is scant, and narratives of the time differ. So any actual artifacts found along that route would be supremely important. Loren Blaylock, if I understand his position adequately, found an artifact with de Soto’s name on it—the only such ever found—near St. Augustine, on the other side of the state. But the authorities won’t look at it because, Blaylock suspects, it would place de Soto’s actual trail elsewhere from what they have decided. It certainly would!

Okay. My interest is in the truth, whatever it may be. So I contacted Dr. Milanich to inquire. He responded that he was familiar with Blaylock’s artifact, and had looked at it personally, and concluded that it was not authentic. Dr. Milanich, in contrast to me, is in a position to have an informed opinion, and I’m not about to challenge it. There are sophisticated mechanisms for analyzing and dating artifacts, and if they put the authenticity in question, I accept that. But I do know how resistive scientists are to anything that challenges their preset notions. Consider the impact of plate tectonics on the “known” fact that the continents were always where they are now. The resistance to the theory of evolution that continues to this day. Examples abound. So if de Soto landed across the state from where present texts say, there would be similar resistance. I’m with the established order on this one, and not just because I patterned my novel on it, but am cautious. There may be surprises yet.

I mentioned in passing my interest in obtaining a bibliography of Andre Norton, last column. Several readers sent me links. Now I know that she published around 155-180 books, the number nebulous because of problems how to count them. Does an anthology she provided an introduction to count? What about omnibus volumes containing three of her novels already listed? What about retitled and republished novels? What about novelettes published as individual books? So it’s spongy. But I do appreciate the information from readers.

I answer each letter as I deem appropriate. Each one is from a person, regardless of age, gender, or station. Here is my answer to Kristen Champion, self explanatory:

You wrote a remarkably literate letter for a middle school student, with some thoughtful questions. I wall answer them as well as I am able.

Originally I typed two-finger on the QWERTY keyboard layout. Then I changed to the more efficient Dvorak layout, and learned touch. A decade later, when they stopped making good manual typewriters, I computerized. That was in 1984. But I have to say I have never matched my speed and accuracy of two-finger. That was about 30 words a minute. However, it is much easier to make corrections on the computer, and I don’t have to retype pages, so overall it is faster.

I think I sleep about 7 hours a night. It’s hard to judge, because I’m a morning person and my wife is a night person, and since her illness a few years ago I make most meals and stay up until she retires. So I get up around 5:15 AM and turn in around 12:45 AM at night. But I fall asleep in my easy chair in the evening, and get in a couple hours from about 10:30-12:30. That adds up to about 6.5 hours. And yes, you need more sleep—and not in class.

I think my talent is creative writing.

What would Xanth’s mascot be? I never thought about that before. A mascot is any person, animal, or thing that is supposed to bring good luck. Dragons abound in Xanth, but they abound everywhere in fantasy, so are not original enough for my taste. The name Xanth means yellow, so maybe something yellow. Xanth also has naughty humor, unlike most other fantasy. I’ve got it: yellow panties, to freak out any man, boy, or mother of teens. They empower any girl who flashes them, in and out of Xanth. Don’t they?

I already know what the next three Xanths are about, following #32 Two to the Fifth, which is now in hardcover. #33 is Jumper Cable, about a descendant of Jumper Spider who must repair a special cable with the help of 7 maidens. #34 is Knot Gneiss, about Jumper’s friend Wenda Woodwife, who has a nymphly front but no back, being hollow from behind, who speaks with the forest dialect: “I wood knot dew that to yew.” She has to transport a boulder made of petrified reverse wood that naturally terrifies (petrifies) everyone else. #35 will be Well-Tempered Clavicle, a pun on the musical piece Well-Tempered Clavier. A clavier is an ancient sort of piano. This one’s about a walking skeleton, the son of Marrow Bones, who discovers he can remove his clavicle (shoulder bone) and use it to tap beautiful music on his ribs. The music is so lovely that Princess Dawn falls in love with him. Unfortunately her nice bones are covered with shapely flesh, so she’s not his type.

I like words, unsurprisingly. New Scientist had one, Agnotology, the study of deliberately created ignorance, such as the falsehoods about evolution that are spread by creationists. Okay, so I looked it up in my dictionaries. Not there. I did find Agnoiology, the study of ignorance. Did New Scientist typo it, or invent a variant?

Article by Bob Herbert described the military’s great shame: how it handles rape. A female army officer was attacked in her bed by a superior officer intent on raping her. She fought him off, then tried to prefer charges. When she persisted, they threatened to prefer changes against her for assault of the man she resisted. It is estimated that up to 80% of military rapes go unreported, and those that are reported generally bring wrist-slap punishment. It’s a situation that could be ameliorated if the military wanted to. There’s the rub. “Real change, drastic change, will have to be imposed from outside the military. It will not come from within.” I served two years in the army, 1957-59, and while I saw no rapes, I saw plenty else, and have to agree; it’s a locked-in culture.

We saw the movie Night at the Museum, the sequel, celebrating Wife & Daughter’s birthdays. It was wild and fun, though I’m not sure better than the original, because it had so much going on at once, and not much of a story line. Essentially, they were closing down the old familiar exhibits, which was like killing them. Naturally something had to be done. Meanwhile Pharaoh, sounding much like the proprietor of the TV series So You Think You Can Dance, criticizing the performance of everyone else, wanted to conquer the world, and there were battles throughout. And the famed female aviator Amelia Earhart got a thing for the night watchman protagonist, and she was a pretty girl with a tight bottom and a feisty attitude. So we enjoyed it, but I don’t regard it as one for the ages.

I am making notes for Xanth #35, Well-Tempered Clavicle, summarized above. The protagonist is Picka Bones, traveling with his sister Joy’nt. I have encountered a stupid obstacle: I have forgotten how walking skeletons reproduce. Princess Dawn needs to know, just in case she can get Picka’s attention. Sure she knows anything about anything alive, but Picka is not exactly alive. So I go to the source of all information, my readers, who often know more about Xanth than I do. I’ll give a small credit in the novel to the first few who tell me how skeletons make children, and where it is told in what Xanth novel. That way I can spare my aging brain some strain.

I have a story, “Knave,” in Cobblestone’s Wicked line. It has sold about 20 copies so far, strictly small peanuts. But I enjoyed writing it, and have other ideas that might be similarly published. So I realized it was time to do some homework. That’s why I set up my PayPal account. I went to Cobblestone and bought 6 other stories in the same line mine is. I could name them, but prefer just to say that they enabled me to zero in on their standard sexual vocabulary—Cock seems to be the operative term for penis, sometimes Dick, and Pussy or Cunt for vagina, sometimes Hole, and Ass for the male or female region. Clit. Tit. Fuck for the activity, along with assorted alternates. Cum for ejaculate. Each story is well written, with few typos, and represents a single man/woman sex sequence in a particular setting, graphically described, told from the female viewpoint. (Mine is male viewpoint.) The settings can be interesting, involving time travel, shape changing, satanic but virile men, fantasy bondage, and so on. The women typically have an eagerness for sex rivaling that of the men, which is part of the nature of erotic fantasy. You seldom find that in real life. Their desire is stimulated by how the men look, rather than their character. That, too, is hardly the way real women are. Daring? Pushing the edge? Not by my definition. It’s just male fantasy sex. They remind me of the erotic videos I have gotten, where they have different settings containing 10-15 minute in/out sex scenes that could have occurred anywhere. No stories to speak of, just women moaning in delight from the mere penetration of a penis. Again, not realistic. I like sex, but I also like stories, and ideally the realistic merger of the two, but some of my notions might freak out the clientèle for what I see here. So at this juncture I’m not sure I’ll write more for this market, worthy as it may be for those of more limited imagination. But we’ll see; there are other publishers to sample.

I continue with my exercises. My runs are abysmally slow compared to last year; I’m not sure why, but suspect the wet weather. My archery—well, the last session prior to editing this column, counting scores to the center of the target as +1 and misses of the whole target as -1, was 3-7 right side, and 1-11 left side, and one arrow was lost. Again. Why do I bother? Because the point is the exercise, not the time or score, and the exercise keeps me reasonably fit, considering my age. Similarly I exercise my mind, doing newspaper puzzles and things like this column, avidly reading science magazines, as well as writing stories and novels.

So I’ll see you again on one month, I trust at considerably briefer length than this 15,600 word effort.

This is the first of my monthly columns, contrasted with my bimonthly columns of the past decade or so.  My purpose is to be a bit more current, regularize my schedule, and to cut the length.  This one is 5,100 words, and I hope future ones will be less.  It remains a blog-type effort, reflecting my experiences and thoughts.  There is no larger political, religious, social, or practical agenda, though my liberal, agnostic, vegetarian realism is bound to show.  My comments on books, movies, events and people always reflects my personal take on them, objective and subjective.  Those who don’t like my positions are free to take a flying leap into a bad-tempered tornado—uh, let me rephrase: politely disagree or to read something else.  The same goes for my ongoing Survey of Electronic Publishers and Related Services, elsewhere at this site.  I have very little sympathy for those who seem to think I don’t have a right to my own opinions on my own site.

I read Island of Fog, by Keith Robinson.  This is a juvenile novel featuring twelve year old children who are confined with their parents on an island perpetually shrouded by fog.   The story is of the mystery of the fog and their residence within it.  They discover that it issues from a vent on the interior of the island, which seems to be guarded by a dangerous monster, and that a sea monster prevents them from trying to escape the island.  Their parents are close-mouthed.  Then it gets worse: the children start developing special transforming abilities, becoming monsters indeed, but able to revert at will to their human forms.  What is going on?  Slowly they find out.  They keep it from the adults, especially a nosy outsider, not trusting her motives, and this seems justified.  I loved this novel; it starts interesting, develops tension, and concludes with reasonable explanations that relate to the whole world.  It is evidently the first of a series.  It should be some series.  The author was pleased with my reaction, and has described our correspondence in his blog at www.unearthlytales.com/.

We saw the animated movie Up.  I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that.  It starts with the protagonist as a child who is befriended by a slightly pushy girl who has imagination and ambition.  They grow up, marry, and have a good life, but never quite get around to her last ambition, to visit a special remarkable waterfall in South America. Seemingly suddenly she has passed on and he is old, crotchety, feeble, and left with the house, lonely memories, and her things-to-do scrapbook.  Younger folk want to move him out so they can have the space.  This portion was really a summary, but it impacted me, because I too met a girl long ago, one thing led to another, and this month we had our 53^rd anniversary; more on that anon.  I doubt there is as much time ahead of us as we have behind us, and I fear becoming an old crotchety widower with a house, memories, and surpassing loneliness.  A woman can make such a difference in a man’s life!  Fortunately this is only the beginning of the movie.  He gets into a phenomenal adventure, with his house floating away lofted by a myriad colored balloons.  Yes it’s animation, but soon enough you tune that aspect out and are in the story, which gets scary in places.  There’s no new romance, and no earth-shaking accomplishments, but it is satisfying on a personal basis.  This is perhaps the best movie I’ve seen so far this year, though I haven’t forgotten Slumdog Millionaire.  It’s a close call.

I read The Faceless Man by Jack Vance, originally published as The Anome.  Small publisher Underwood-Miller published it in 1983 and sent me a hardcover copy, part of a boxed set.  A quarter century has passed, so I thought it was about time to read it.  Jack Vance has been a favorite genre author of mine ever since I read a story from The Dying Earth about fifty years ago, and I regard him as perhaps the finest fantasy author extant.  I try to read a variety of material, ranging from rank amateur to award winning, in a constant assessment of the nature of writing.  This is, I think, one of Vance’s incidental novels, the story of a young man in an excruciatingly controlling society, who manages to break free to an extent and travel as a musician.  He wants to free his mother from her servitude, but by the time he earns the money to do so, she has been abducted by raiders and is dying.  He is annoyed, to understate the case, and tries to get the anonymous ruler, the faceless man, to avenge her by wiping out the brutish raiders.  But he is not taken seriously.  Eventually he forges satisfaction of a kind, though I found the conclusion inconclusive.  Along the way I found strengths and weaknesses of the author.  Vance is a master stylist who can take some getting used to.  I remember back in 1966 in a dialogue with Keith Laumer he mentioned Vance with admiration.  I said Vance’s dialogue was wooden.  “Not wooden, carved,” he said.  I thought about it and concluded he was correct.  There is real beauty there when you tune in to it.  Describing the society’s emphasis on rites of purification, an elder mentions “the necessary depravity of birth.”  A critic of that society said “Consider: a group which nightly intoxicates itself into a frenzy of erotic hallucinations under the pretext of religious asceticism—isn’t this sublime insouciance?”  Along a drive were “clear glass tablets, each encasing the monumental effigy of a dynastic king.  The poses were identical; the kings stood with right feet slightly forward, forefingers pointing at the ground, the faces wearing somber, almost puzzled expressions, eyes staring ahead, as if in contemplation of an astounding future.”  The city itself is interesting.  “In all the human universe there was no city like Garwiy, which was built of glass—blocks, slabs, prisms, cylinders of glass: purple, green, lavender, blue, rose, dark scarlet.”  Yet I fault the author for having an imperfect grasp of proper paragraphing, and being at times immune to the concerns of the reader.  So it’s a mixture of marvelously detailed physical and cultural descriptions, highly original ideas, and occasional obscurity or dullness.  Yet toward the end as things come into focus it has all the gentleness of a machine gun turret rising out of the fog and orienting on the viewer.  I’d call Vance an acquired taste.

In the June 2009 column I asked for help from readers on how walking skeletons reproduce, for which I will give a credit in the book.  The most comprehensive early answer was by Erin Schram, who identified the novels and even quoted relevant passages.  Others were by Russell Leverett, Heather Hatch, Sean Draven, Jan Perlmutter, Bridget “Bee” Allen, Kerry Melissa Anne Garrigan.  They will be listed.  Oh—how do they do it?  He strikes her so hard she flies apart.  This is known as knocking her up.  He selects small bones from the collection and assembles them into a baby skeleton.  I’m not sure how his girlfriend Princess Dawn will go for that, nice as her bones may be; women can be fussy about the darnedest things.  How are the genders distinguished?  Girl skeletons have one more rib.  I will give this list of credits in the Author’s Note in Well-Tempered Clavicle, which should be published in 2011, assuming I get it written and sold in good order.

Related, but not for credit in a book: Cassie Palmer read Air Apparent and asked a question: since the supposedly murdered body in the Good Magician’s Castle’s cellar turned out to be Fracto Cloud in condensed form, why did Fracto condense in the first place?  Clouds don’t like to condense unless they have to.  My senility strikes again; I don’t remember.  Is there a reader out there who does remember?

We had our 53^rd anniversary, as mentioned aboove.  Did we fling a wild party?  No.  Make passionate love?  No.  Go out for a movie and dinner?  No.  We stayed quietly home and celebrated by having a slice of cheesecake.  It was too sweet.  I worked on an erotic story for Relationships 4, “Running the Line,” about a man who gets caught in a women’s club version of “roofies,” which they called “cellarees,” with the man being the one who is drugged and made a sex slave for a few hours, and wakes with a sore member and no memory of the event.  PHAZE may balk, so it may go to eXcessica or elsewhere where they aren’t quite as taboo conscious.  I refuse to be unduly limited by the limitations of electronic publishers; I get enough of that in traditional print.  And I answered five fan letters.  My wife spent the afternoon answering the phone at CASA, the local shelter for abused women, unpaid volunteer work, as she does each week.  I’m tempted to tell callers on the phone who ask for her that she’s at the abused women’s shelter, and listen for the ensuing silence.  But there were no calls here that afternoon.  It was nevertheless a day to remember.  In the morning I thought I’d re-watch one of my videos, my way of celebrating (I’m an old fogy, remember, with a good deal more fading past than promising future), but when I tried to get it out of the tight shelving a bunch of stuff carelessly stacked on top fell behind the shelf.  So I got down on my knees and pulled out the lower VHS cassettes so I could reach behind and fish out the assorted fallen stuff.  Frustrating waste of time.  When I had things out, I replaced the cassettes and put things away.  The last was a DVD that must have been lost there for a long time.  I turned it over, and it was Flight Plan with Jodie Foster.  Wow!  I had been looking for that for months with no success.  Now I know what had happened to it.  So I put it in and re-watched it.  That’s the story of the woman who, with her six year old daughter, flies back to America with the casket of her accidentally dead husband.  They sleep during the long flight.  Then she wakes, and the seat beside her is empty; her daughter is gone, and not only does no one on the plane know where she is, they tell her that there is no record of her daughter ever having been on the plane.  In fact the record shows that the daughter died with the husband.  Jodie, near the breaking point, must have imagined that the girl survived.  So she’s not just crazed, she’s crazy.  It goes on from there, and of course the viewer’s sympathy is with Jodie, because we saw the girl with her as they boarded.  I certainly relate, because when I first suffered the depression and fatigue, back in 1966, that thirty years later turned out to be a thyroid deficiency, they diagnosed me as imagining it, and I got excluded on my insurance for all mental disease.  As I like to say, I wasn’t crazy, the medical profession was.  Today, with chronic fatigue rampant, and some doctors suffering from it, they are less quick to call it imaginary.  So I know exactly how it feels to know you are right (that is, I knew I had a physical, not mental condition) and not only not be believed, but be labeled kooky because of it.  I’m sure many viewers have had roughly similar experiences in lesser venues.  So I enjoyed the serendipitously found video.  Then in the late afternoon came rain.  We need rain; Florida has been in a three year drought that has precipitously (pun) dropped the water table, and we don’t want any more dead trees on our tree farm.  But nature, with its perversity, likes to schedule rain at the most inconvenient times.  So at 5 PM, when my wife was ready to drive home, she called me: so much rain and lightning out that she preferred to wait a bit for it to abate.  Naturally that aggravated Nature (you are getting these puns?  Naturally—Nature?) and she threw a fit worthy of some publishers.  There was a three minute power failure, followed by others, as the storm raged.  Came a second call at 5:25 from the Prius (do I need to spell out why we use a highly fuel efficient car, or why we have cell phones?): there was a dead pine tree down near our gate blocking her access.  The storm had blown it down, completing the trap.  So I piled clippers, hand saw, and 6 foot crowbar into the van (or why we have two cars?) and drove out there, ¾ mile, in the constantly flashing lightning, booming thunder, and drenchpouring squalls.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen our drive so flooded before.  I mean, the weather was really out to get us.  I parked the other side of the fallen tree, struggled into a flimsy raincoat, and started sawing, while the rain still poured down.  Yes, all that lightning as I stood in the coursing river that was our drive made us nervous, but there was no way out but on.  The trunk was neatly caught between the living pine trees on either side of the drive; it had to be severed.  It was a perfectly timed, perfectly placed obstruction.  And almost immediately in that wetness the saw blade bound.  I wished I could have used the small electric saw we have, but I didn’t dare in such weather.  Or the ax, but its head is loose, making it dangerous to use in distracting circumstances.  So I struggled, jamming the saw blade a few inches at a time, until I was far enough through to use the crowbar to jam the trunk to the side and open the cut a bit for more sawing.  I finally got it severed, then hauled half the tree out to the north, and swung the other half aside to the south.  (Or why I exercise seriously, maintaining my fitness for emergencies?)  That enabled my wife to drive through, and in due course I followed.  Of course the storm eased then; no point in raining when I didn’t have to be out in it.  The total rainfall came to three inches, our most for a day so far this year.  (The St Pete Timesnewspaper, which seems sometimes to make up its local weather figures, reported no significant rain in the county that day, though some areas got as much as eight inches according to the TV.)  As I also like to say, I have absolutely no belief in the supernatural; therefore the supernatural has a grudge against me, and every so often messes up my life, just to show it can.  Thus passed our anniversary.  Surely there are no questions.

Next day I watched the video I had been going to see, before I found Flight Plan.  This was In the Realm of the Senses, which I had first watched in 2003 and pretty much forgotten in six years.  But as I viewed it, it came back with a vengeance.  This is a powerful, erotic, once-banned tragic love story of an ex-prostitute who takes a position in a wealthy household, has an affair with the master, and becomes obsessive.  He is understandably intrigued; she’s a very pretty girl.  The older woman who runs his household tries to warn him that this girl is dangerous to him, whereupon he rapes the woman; I gather this is his way of saying she should mind her own business.  But she is correct, and the girl is in due course the death of him.  She is insanely jealous of his other affairs, and of his wife; she mentions her desire to cut off his penis so it can’t go into any other woman.  She is constantly taking it into her, vaginally and orally.  They experiment with her choking him, to give him a stronger erection while he is in her; when that leads to his death, she does cut off his genitals and saves them.  She loved truly too well.  Along the way are intriguing incidents, such as when they are eating shelled whole eggs, and he pushes one into her vagina so that she has to squat like a chicken and lay it back out.  We see all of her nice body, and his penis, and we see the sex directly and the egg going in and out; no ellipses here.  It’s some movie, based, apparently, on a true story in Japan in 1936.

In the JeJune column I mentioned noticing a song in Terminator TV.  Ian Covell filled me in on that.  It’s a humorous traditional Scottish song titled “Donald, Where’s Your Trousers?”  It turns out that Donald is wearing a kilt.  “I just got in from the Isle of Skye/ I’m not very big and I’m awfully shy/ The ladies shout as I go by/ ‘Donald where’s your trousers?’”   Cute.  I’ve been intrigued by the Scottish Island of Skye ever since hearing the evocative “Skye Boat Song” as a child.  It’s more like a peninsula than a true island, but it has a history.

Article in NEW SCIENTIST about the problem of law and libel.  As I have shown in my ongoing survey of electronic publishing and related services, publishers stop at little to suppress adverse reviews, regardless of the merits of the cases.  It’s an arena, and the person who enters it must be prepared to fight.  It seems that this is true in more than publishing.  Challenge the scientific validity of a claim or product, and you can get sued for libel even if what you say is true.  Because the truth might cost a company sales and money, and it will fight savagely to maintain its business.  Writers may have their articles edited before publication to avoid the risk.  It reminds me of historical religious objection to such ideas as the world being round or revolving around the sun, and they had some nasty ways to enforce such objections, such as torture or burning at the stake.  Now Britain has stern libel laws, whose oppressive reach extends far beyond Britain.  Anything published in English, as is common in America, might be seen by a reader in England, so any English language publication can be affected.  An example: The Guardian newspaper published an opinion piece suggesting the the use of chiropractic—that is, bone manipulation–for treating various children’s ailments was bogus.  So the British Chiropractic Association sued for libel.  Other outfits sue similarly to stifle research.  They don’t have to show that any damage has been suffered; it is the defendant who has to refute that.  This “reverse burden of proof,” in the opinion of many, discredits British libel law.  Forget about having the right of the case; if you don’t have the money to make your case, you lose, and that judgment can be enforced outside Britain.  The state of New York has gone so far as to legislate to prevent English libel judgments being enforced there.  Elsewhere, if you have scientific criticism, better keep your mouth shut, as it can cost you.  Anyway, another article in NEW SCIENTIST examines chiropractic claims.  These are not made by all practitioners, but some do believe they can treat asthma, digestive disorders, infant colic, menstrual pains, sport injuries, tension headaches, migraine, as well as back pain.  Three controlled studies have found that spinal manipulation has no beneficial effect on most of these.  I’m a skeptic myself, but I will say that it was a chiropractor who took one look at me when I was young and diagnosed a problem: my right side was an inch or so higher than my left side.  He had me stand on two scales, and 60 pounds was on one, 40 pounds on the other.  My whole body was misaligned.  I believe it dated from the year I used a scooter as a child; I always pushed with my right foot, and apparently my right leg wound up longer.  I had to wear corrective shoes for some time, to grow my body back into alignment.  So how come the regular doctors missed that?  Today, incidentally, I use a scooter, and I make damn sure to use both feet evenly.  In fact I push once with my left, then once with my right, alternating every time.  Nevertheless, I simply don’t believe that bone manipulation is likely to alleviate a digestive disorder, and I resent the idea that I could be sued for saying so here in my own blog column.  How about the American First Amendment—you know, freedom of speech?  It’s not free if some special interest in another country can stifle it despite having no proof that my belief is false.  I was born in England, and was British for my first 24 years before being naturalized American, and retain considerable respect for the old country, but this is wrong.

Another NEW SCIENTIST article considers creativity’s complex relationship with IQ.  This of course interests me, as I am not the smartest person I know, but I may be one of the creativest.  ( = craziest, to some critics.)  It seems there is a chemical, N-acetyl-aspartate, NAA, that is associated with mental health and metabolism.  High levels of NAA in one section of the brain is associated with intelligence.  Low of NAA levels correlates with high creativity in people of average intelligence. But the reverse was true in folk with high intelligence.  Now there’s a creative result!  They conjecture that smarter people have tighter control of their frontal cortexes, so it doesn’t interfere.  They wonder whether NAA also correlates with convergent thinking: the ability to bring lots of individual factors together into a single idea.  Maybe so; like maybe writing a novel?

And another NEW SCIENTIST article is about female ejaculation.  It seems some women do.  Here is the key: the sexual anatomy of men and women differs imperfectly.  You know how men have nipples and women have a clitoris, which is a vestigial penis.  I understand that the organ that becomes the prostate in men becomes the uterus in women.  But maybe not, because they have found some prostate tissue in women, and this can produce and ejaculate some fluid.  They analyzed this fluid and found it is similar to male ejaculate.  The fabled G-spot may relate, being more such tissue.  Some say that the visible clitoris is merely the tip of a much more substantial organ that extends back around the vagina.  So it is true: some women have more male in them than others.

Yet another “manliness” ad in the snail mail, this one for Erextra, a male enhancement supplement.  “Be prepared for something big.”  And that’s the extent of its claim.  They are selling it on the basis of the reader’s assumption, with no tangible claims.  So when it doesn’t work, the user has no recourse.  I do consider that big—big humbug.  But I wrote a short-short story, “Sex-Ion,” based on the idea that such novelties actually work.  I get ideas from all over, which is one reason I read junk mail.

A big issue today is health care reform.  We have what is claimed to be the best, but seems to be the worst national health care among first-world countries, with about 46 million people uninsured while HMOs have huge bonuses for their CEOs.  Special interests dominate the system, leading to ever increasing prices and costs.  It seems that some 60% of all bankruptcies are wholly or partly caused by medical charges.  I object on principle to this your-money-or-your-life approach; too many people are impoverished or dying.  A newspaper article says we have to ask whether the doctor is set up to meet the needs of the patient, or to maximize revenue.  Someone has to be accountable for the totality of care; otherwise you get a system that has no brakes.  One promising reform is to have a single-payer plan, that can bargain down prices for drugs and procedures, making them affordable to more people who need them.  They have it in other countries, and it works.  So when the Senate Finance Committee had a public roundtable discussion, advocates came and posed a simple question: Will you allow an advocate for a single-payer national health plan to have a seat at the table?  And for that those advocates were arrested and jailed.  Is this really America and not Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia?  Did we recently have an election that shifted power to the reformists?  Apparently not.  If I were in charge, it would not be the people’s true representatives getting hustled to prison.

War is an ugly business, especially when conducted by chicken hawks—you know, those who avoid service for themselves, but are eager to promote wars for others to fight—who have little idea of the real needs of soldiers in the field.  Apart from the dreadful tally of post traumatic stress syndrome victims loosed upon a thoughtless society, there are the routine conditions.  The Army Field Manual says you need a minimum on one gallon of water a day to survive, and in desert conditions a soldier’s water losses can be up to four gallons a day.  In Iraq temperatures reached 130 degrees, but soldiers were given half a gallon of water a day.  They started getting sick, getting kidney stones, and passing out.  How did they survive?  They raided the pallets of bottled water.  Right: they had to turn criminal to get enough drinking water.  I am one of those who feel that invading Iraq was wrong, but apart from that we should support our troops, who have no choice about being there.  This is more like pissing on the troops, if the piss doesn’t dry up in the heat.

A “Shoe” comic strip, remarking that they used to give the criminally insane straitjackets, but now they get their own talk shows.  Can’t think whom it’s thinking of.  Maybe someone will sue.

From the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC): two residents of West Bend, Wisconsin, complained about library books dealing with gay and lesbian issues, claiming they suffered emotional damage because of the presence of the books in the library.  The Christian Civil Liberties Union is suing.  “They seek monetary damage against the city and library, resignation of the mayor, removal and a public burning of the books.”  So they are book-burners.  I think Jesus Christ would weep to see such intolerance practiced in his name.  But don’t condemn all folk in West Bend as bigots; others there are mobilizing to defend the First Amendment, free speech.  If you don’t like books about homosexual issues, don’t read them, but you can’t deny others their right to read them.  It’s that simple.

Energy is a global problem, including finding enough of it, and dealing with the pollutions it causes.  How can we “green” our society?  America is still hostage to special interests to an unfortunate extent, but other countries aren’t necessarily handcuffed by monetary greed.  Freiburg, Germany has become a model, moving increasingly toward energy-saving alternatives.  The town center is a vehicle-free zone with foot-wide water canals running along the streets to provide natural cooling and ambiance.  There’s a public transit system of electric trams and buses.  Grassy swales (dips) to percolate rainwater into the aquifer, while sewage waste is collected in a biogas plant along with organic household waste for electric power generation.  Solar power, cycling paths, walkways, stores within strolling distance from residential sections.  There are no free-standing homes; instead there are attractive four story buildings with balconies.  Residents can sell their extra solar power back to the city, so they have an incentive for efficiency.  We could do it in America, too—if we wanted to.

A woman named Terry Martin Hekker wrote a book defending her choice to stay home and devote herself to her family, titled Ever Since Adam & Eve, the Satisfactions of Housewifery and Motherhood in the Age of Do-Your-Own-Thing.  Then on her 40^th wedding anniversary her husband dumped her for a younger woman, plunging her into economic and social chaos.  So she wrote a second book, titled Disregard First Book.  Now she champions women’s right to have their own careers and be independent.  She learned late, but she did learn.  More power to her.

Here in Florida a horror story has been about the way four boys in a middle school raped another boy with a hockey stick on four occasions.  It seems parents and school administrators are the last to know about the kind of bullying that can go on.  I suspect it’s because they don’t want to know.  I learned about bullying from the bottom up, when I was the smallest person in my school class, male or female.  I learned to fight, and my militant attitude continues to this day.  I don’t like bullies, and those who try it against me now—I’m thinking primarily of publishers—can discover a hard-nosed response they don’t like.  I have gone to law more than once, and always won my case.  But I fear I am the exception; other victims may be scarred for life.  Reform is needed, and it should start at the schools.  What do I recommend?  Know the signs, locate the bullies, and remove them from the schools.  They can go to reform schools or prison.  It has been said that a bully is a baby criminal; that may be the case.  That will leave the majority of students to pursue their education without being savaged by those without conscience.  It can be done—if the schools want to.  I was once a high school teacher, and I’m not at all sure they want to, unfortunately.

I’m getting older, and can’t do all the things I could when younger, and time seems to fly by ever-faster.  Are popular celebrity icons dying younger, or is it just my aging perspective?  I’m thinking of Farah Fawcett, once of Charlie’s Angels, at age 62, and Michael Jackson, you know, brother of the woman with the breast, at age 50.  It seemed like only a few hours between them.

Until Aw-Ghost, then, weather and critics permitting.

We live on our tree farm, and rain is important.  We lost maybe ten percent of our trees in the drought of 1998.  Florida has been in a three year drought, dropping the water table way down, but things started looking up, or coming down as it were, in mid Mayhem, and we had 10.55 inches that month.  Then 9.65 in JeJune.  Jewel-Lye started well, but then diminished late, and two days before the end we were at 6.75 inches.  It would take over three inches to get it up to snuff, and that did not seem likely; were were getting mostly dry heaves, with loud thunder and about five drops.  But late on the 30^th we got half an inch.  Then I was catching up on letters Friday the 31st, and wanted to bike out to fetch in the mail and close our gate about 4:45 PM, but then rain started, timing it perfectly.  So I waited for it to clear, as it usually did.  You’ve heard about the watched pot never boiling?  Sometimes a waited rain never stops.  It just kept going, getting heavier, for two hours.  And by damn, it finally come to 3.15 inches, beating the deluge with which it had celebrated our anniversary back in Mayhem, and brought the month to 10.4 inches.  We had to drive out for the mail; there was a quarter mile of overflowing puddles along the drive.  We’ll keep it.

I read Codename Prague by D Harlan Wilson.  This novel is described by its author as slapstick and “literary” and graphic, a pop cultural apocalypse in which schizophrenia, psychosis, idiocy, etc. have become to varying degrees normative conditions.  “I think [it] can function as a kind of morality tale.”  Well, it is indeed all that.  My problem is that I read fiction for maybe two reasons: to enjoy the diversion from dull mundane reality, or to assess it for an informed opinion on its merits.  I am not a fan of cyberpunk, if that is what this is, don’t understand it, and don’t get pleasure from it.  I prefer solidly plotted stories, and this is at best thinly plotted.  So I can’t form an informed opinion.  Let me illustrate my problem with a quote, more or less random, from the novel: “The psychophysical process of attack is not a fundament of this physionietzschean martial art.  Nor is the art of defense.  The enlightened scikungfi fighter will have transcended these useless tactics.  Neither aggression nor protectioninforms her character.  Or rather, these things inform her character to such a degree that they metaentropically implode into nothingness.  I stand here.  I blink, I breathe.  I exist.  And I fucking kill you and eat your gore.  That is the True Way of scikungfi.  Many like to think they follow and practice the True Way.  But mass man is nothing but a hack bodhisattva.  He always will be.”  This is a statement of one of the many divergent philosophies in the novel, replete with obscure or oblique references such as to kung fu or the one to the German philosopher Nietzsche, who developed the theory of the Ubermensch (superman) in Thus Spake Zarathustra.  In the end he went insane, but the Nazi Germans and others were quite taken with many of his views.  That’s just a hint of the wider intellectual parameters of this novel.  I am reminded of the works of James Joyce; Finnegans Wake is said to be well worth the two to four years it takes to properly read it.  But as I said, it’s not my thing.  So I’m not in a position to recommend it, but that is not at all the same thing as saying it’s not competent; I suspect it’s a good novel of its type.

We visited Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park with visiting Family.  This is essentially a loop of a mile or so of jungle river boardwalk from which you can view assorted rare birds, mammals,  reptiles and fish. A prime attraction is Lucifer the hippopotamus, who swims, eats, and defecates splatteringly.  There are red wolves, black bears, bobcats, deer, and manatee; sand hill cranes (I describe their call as sounding like winding a creaky grandfather clock; we have them around our tree farm) and rare whooping cranes, hawks and owls.  There are poisonous snakes in the reptile house, and alligators and turtles in the river.  You can go down inside the underwater observatory to see the fish swimming close.  It’s all fun for tourists and children, and a reminder of the precious wildlife heritage that is being slowly marginalized by the relentless overpopulation of mankind.

Last column I mentioned the problem of Fracto Cloud in Air Apparent: how did he get compacted to solidity?  Jim Hull provided the answer, and others like Misty Zaebst commented: Fracto just happened to be floating near the Good Magician’s Castle at the time the Random Factor exchanged places with Hugo.  It’s what clouds do, between storms.  So the Random Factor exchanged again, this time with Fracto, thus confining him compacted in the cellar.  Where the Factor went thereafter is not clear, but obviously he didn’t stay aloft.

I was born in a prior century and have difficulty keeping up with new-fangled devices, but I try in my desultory fashion.  In Jewel-Lye my wife took the plunge and bought a Sony Reader PRS 505 and an Amazon Kindle 2.  This report is based on her experience.  She’s a dedicated print book reader, as she coincidentally dates from my century, and she was not in a hurry to struggle with the new stuff.  But with print booksellers seemingly dedicated to perpetuating their own oblivion, such as filling six book slots with the same book rather than with six different books so readers can have some choice, thus guaranteeing monstrous returns as well as wasted money paying for those slots, some alternative is needed.  Her problem is that she doesn’t like reading books on the computer screen; it anchors her there, and the print is not to her taste.  Well, these readers are about the size and heft of print books, between hardcover and paperback, and their print looks similar.  So she can hold one like a print book and read it comfortably, or take it with her where she goes.  She has now read several books on each reader, and it looks as though she will continue, though she’ll still also be reading print books.

But there are cautions.  It was a federal case to get books for the Sony.  They had to be downloaded to a computer, and her computer refused to access the Sony site; she had to go to Fictionwise, who turned out to use a different monetary account system, so she had a hassle setting that up.  Sure, these things are supposed to be convenient, easy, and user friendly.  Any more laughs for the day?  They show little sign of actually wanting to sell books, maybe taking a page from the print publisher marketing.  It took her several days and many hours to get a few books for the Sony.  In contrast, Kindle was easy.  No computer connection needed; she could, and did, from her easy chair.  She already had an account at Amazon, so that was no problem, and the Kindle registered itself to her identity automatically.  So she bought several books and started reading.  In this respect, the Kindle beat the Sony hands down.  How about actual use?  The Kindle has duplicate page turning controls she found convenient, and was set up for easy use, while the Sony was less comfortable.  Kindle wins again.  Both have peculiarities of typesetting, words oddly divided, stray symbols inserted, as if the machine readers get confused or take lunch breaks, but overall they are equivalently readable.  Both have enlargement features: three for Sony, six for Kindle, better organized.  Folk of our generation really appreciate the option of larger print.  Sony indicates the page you are on of the total, such as 23 of 310; Kindle gives a percentage of the way through.  Either system is okay, and both will hold your place between sessions.

In sum: the readers work, they provide books a bit cheaper than print editions, there’s a wider and more convenient selection, and she’ll be using them increasingly in future, especially Kindle.  Will I be getting into them?  Surely in time.  The Sony can display a regular computer manuscript, which could be useful; the Kindle can, but requires a conversion hassle that makes it not worthwhile.  The Kindle also has a problem that should make readers wary: Amazon can and does delete sold novels without notice when it has a mind.  It happened to books like George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984.  This wasn’t censorship; turned out they were illicit editions, so the sales were canceled retroactively, and the money refunded.  But this business of taking back novels: suppose you’re midway through, and your page goes blank, because someone in Cincinnati says she’s pained by a dirty word in a classic novel and the book has to be removed and burned?  Suppose I put my own erotic novel manuscript on for proofreading, and a critic decides to abolish it sight unseen because there’s sex in it?  Think it can’t happen electronically?  The censors will sure as hell try.  There needs to be some protection set up for readers, not to mention authors.  It’s not a problem with the Sony, because of the more limited access.

I use a scooter to make the morning 1.6 mile round trip for the newspapers.  I have commented before about fixing flat tires.  Well, I had another siege.  The rear tire went flat; I dismounted it, patched it, and used it.  A week or so later it happened again.  There was another puncture next to the original one.  I checked for a thorn embedded in the tire, but found none.  Another week, flat again, with another adjacent puncture.  My wife suggested that there could be a spike that did not manifest until there was pressure from outside the tire, so that after a couple of trips it gradually poked through.  I married her for her brains, as I like to say when she dresses up nice.  No, I don’t know why the women in my family get annoyed with me.  So this time I really checked, pushing against the outside while running my thumb inside.  And found it!  A tiny splinter maybe an eighth or a sixteenth of an inch long.  I got that out, and I think this time the tire will last.  After four patches in one month.

I make most meals, having taken over when my wife got ill five years ago, but there are things I never quite picked up on.  Such as eggs on Sunday: I can fry them or scramble them, but for variety I wanted to make an omelet.  So she took over and showed me the steps.  Next week I did it myself, and it was clumsy but edible.  Each week I improve a little, I trust, as my senescent synapses slowly adapt.  It’s not all that easy to do it right, as most wives and few husbands know.

We saw the movie Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  I was disappointed.  We have seen the prior movies but they are spaced a year so so apart, and details fade.  I realize that the later books are big, and much has to be cut to fit the movie format, but it seemed like butchery rather than surgery.  The first hour consisted of assorted separate scenes that did not seem to connect to the whole.  Harry is about to get a date with a pretty girl, but is hauled away for an session with the Hogwash (oops; typo) school proprietor.  A train steams through a snowy landscape.  Someone attacks Harry.  Boys meet and talk.  There’s an airborne basketball game.  A friend gets slipped a love potion and falls for the wrong girl.  Only in the latter section did it seem to get organized.  I think movie makers need to reorient on viewers, so as to put together a more coherent narrative.  We’re not mind readers; we need to have things presented and connected clearly.  Yet I know that if the Xanth movie ever is revived they’ll butcher it the same way and won’t allow me anywhere near the script, leaving me to answer to confused and disappointed viewers, some of whom will swear off Xanth.  So this is merely an early futile scream in the wilderness.  It’s the American way.  It’s too bad.

Sometimes a letter becomes a spot essay I want to share with Column readers.  Here’s an example.  Bill Hagen was told by an English teacher that good writing requires entirely avoiding the use of the verb to be and all its conjugations and tenses, such as am, are, is, was, were, etc.  “Do you think to be verbs should be avoided or, at least, used sparingly?  Or is my poor friend a misguided lunatic?”  I replied:

This reminds me of Winston Churchill’s response when chided for ending a sentence with a preposition: “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.”  He was right; it’s a phony rule.  Likewise, excluding certain words or phrases from a narrative without reference to the context seems nonsensical to me.  I try to write clearly, because without clarity a piece of writing is useless.  If an infinitive is needed to make something clear, I’ll use it.  It’s that simple.

Technically “to be” is not a verb but an infinitive, which is a statement of being, or a noun.  It’s a legitimate part of the language.  Imagine Hamlet declaiming “To be or not to be, that is the question” with that infinitive deleted.

It would be a far greater challenge to avoid all the “be” forms and tenses without sacrificing clarity.  So I conclude that yes, your friend is a misguided lunatic.

One of the major problems facing the world today is Energy: its acquisition, and its effects on the health of people and the world.  Oil is polluting and being depleted.  America has coal to burn, literally, but it pollutes worse and destroys landscapes.  There’s natural gas, and there’s organically grown energy sources.  There’s nuclear.  Each has its own problems, some of them formidable.  Naturally I support Solar, Geothermal, Wind, Tidal power sources, and maybe some dams (the wrong dam in the wrong place can be an environmental disaster), but these too have their challenges.  Is there a fast fix for today?  Well, there may be.  An article in the June 27, 2009 NEW SCIENTIST says that all over the world, in the ocean, there is methane clathrate, a gas squeezed to 160 times its density in normal air.  Much of it is frozen under the northern and southern permafrost.  A chunk of it looks like dirty ice.  Touch a match to it, and it flames.  When it burns, it’s only half as polluting as coal.  There is as much energy in it as in all the fossil fuel reserves put together.  If used exclusively, replacing all other fuels, it would provide global energy for the next hundred years, by which time maybe science will have found a better source.  Can it be mined without undermining the stability of our shores?  They are developing techniques to accomplish that.  So this is a leading prospect to solve both our energy and pollution problems, if we care to do what is necessary to apply it.

I’m a writer.  I like to write.  In fact, writing is my way of life; I live for it.  As I like to say, when I croak, I hope to be halfway through an excellent novel.  The main problem is securing time to write as much as I want to.  In recent years my wife’s situation has reduced my time, but she is doing better now and I’m doing all right.  At present I have more time than I expected, because I finished my Cluster series project months early.  So I’m using the time to write some erotica, before getting on to the next Xanth novel.  In Jewel-lye I completed Relationships 4, calculated wordage about 90,000 (calculated refers to how much space it will take in a printed book, which is more than the literal, computer-counted wordage, because things like dialogue take more space) that I will market in due course; there are some good stories there.  At mid-month I set up for an erotic romance novel, Eroma, the word coined from EROtic ROMAnce, developed from several story ideas that I thought would do better as chapters than as individual efforts.  And wouldn’t you know it, at that point three reader-written novels landed on me for comment, plus two lesser manuscripts.  I’m a slow reader; these threatened to wipe out my writing time.  Folk don’t necessarily realize that the time I spend reading comes out of my writing time, not out of my meal making or housekeeping time.  So I compromised: I read and commented on the two manuscripts, in those two days managing also to write 600 and 150 words of my novel.  Then I tackled the first book at ten pages a day, and I plan to continue reading at that rate until all three are caught up, maybe in two months.  Most of the time I hogged for my writing.  And in ten days I wrote 33,000 words.  In the old days that was a standard pace, but today 2,000 words a day is more likely.  At the moment I’m in Chapter 3, “Poop of the Day,” wherein a restaurant serves excellent food in a sickening manner.  When the novel is done, I may query a number of electronic publishers to see if any can handle a piece this robust.  It’s not Pornucopia, but it has its points, and there may be a marketing problem.  Call it my twisted idea of fun, pushing limits, causing publishers who think they have no taboos to reconsider even when it doesn’t violate the standard ones.  There’s always the prospect of self publishing, an option I have worked to make available for everyone.  I hope to complete the novel in another month, and we’ll see.

I bid adieu to REALMS OF FANTASY in a prior column, the magazine that bounced my solicited story, then used my name falsely forever in its promotions.  But then it revived from death, and I received an issue, the first I had seen.  Why?  Because it seems SF CHRONICLE, to which I subscribed, folded, and my subscription is being filled out with ROF instead.  It’s a big slick magazine, full color ads and illos, 84 pages from cover to cover.  I discover that MUNDANIA PRESS has a full page ad featuring my books, especially Under a Velvet Cloak.  So I suppose in that sense I am in it, now.

David Eddings died.  He was three years older than I, but came on the scene later, and I blurbed his first fantasy novel at DEL REY, Pawn of Prophecy.  He was another part of the phenomenon that Judy-Lynn del Rey generated, putting the genre of Fantasy on the bestseller map.  He went on to surpass me in success; my blurbs sometimes do that, as was the case with Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind.  Eddings was a great fantasy writer, well worth reading today.  And yes, the deaths of fantasy writers slightly older than I am does make me nervous.

I read Dog Gone It! The True Story of Elko, by Roger Brannon.  It is self published, with no title page or publication information.  We bought it via AMAZON for $14.95.  Why?  Because I know the author.  I met him a decade or so back.  He is blind, and Elko was his seeing-eye dog, a yellow lab who liked the ladies.  This narrative provides some insights what it is like to be blind, and how guide dogs work.  “On this visit Elko decided he wanted to introduce himself to my sister, and she yelled at him with ‘GET YOUR NOSE OUT OF MY BUTT!’”  Not every sighted person is nice to the blind; one man had an obnoxious dog who wanted to attack Roger, so that Elko had to intervene to protect him, and when Roger protested the man threatened him.  God, if You are looking for a fitting subject to strike blind, I have a nomination for You.  The small volume concludes with a series of biblical quotes, and discussions how they relate to life with Elko and to humanity in general.  I recommend it to those who want to know more about the realities of using a seeing-eye dog, and to those who like dogs in general, even those who like girls too well.

I read Osceola’s Cave, by Henri L’Audace, published by OUTSKIRTS PRESS.  This is a mainstream novel set in Citrus County, Florida.  In fact the author got the idea for it while working on my property.  There is reference to a land-owning science fiction writer interested in restoring his property to a balanced ecosystem.  I wonder who that could be?  One section of my property has the overgrown remnant of an old mine, a big old pit you could build several houses in.  In the novel it’s a natural cave, covered over except for a small hole at the surface.  The implication is that Indian Chief Osceola used it.  However, the present owner (not the writer) is a brutal man who rapes and kills unwary women, and whose idea for the cave is not to bring in archaeologists but to keep it secret and use it to bring in groups of women for raping.  This is the first volume of a series, and I suspect the story will get really ugly in places.  Not my type of thing.

Dr. George Tiller was murdered by an anti-abortion fanatic.  Now I have a set piece on abortion: I don’t like abortion, you don’t like it, I don’t know anyone who does.  Do doctors say “I’m giving up my lucrative practice as a plastic surgeon so I can enjoy doing abortions”?  Do teen girls say “I’m getting pregnant again so I can have another wonderful abortion”?  As I see it, there are very few truly innocent people in the world, but surely an unborn baby is as close as one can come.  If there is guilt, it is surely of the parents of that ill-gotten fetus.  Thus we have the guilty killing the innocent.  I wish there would never be another abortion in the world.  That means I wish there would never be another unwanted baby.  That’s why I support universal, available, affordable, safe contraception.  What, do I hear a sudden silence from anti-abortion conservatives?  (I’m more like an antiabortion liberal.)  Surely they know that teens will be teens, as they themselves once were, and that accidents will happen, so the only way to be sure no unwanted pregnancies occur is contraception.  Do those who oppose contraception want more abortions?  Or are they outright hypocrites?  I’ll leave that question hanging in case the shoe pinches.  I suspect there are folk who choose not to realize that sex is not just for procreation; it is also a significant social lubricant, giving men reason to associate with women even when they don’t want more children.  Otherwise we would  be like many animals, the genders coming together only for procreative mating and ignoring each other otherwise.  Social sex is a fair part of what makes us human.  So what of Dr. Tiller?   Radicals called him Tiller the Baby Killer and did everything but openly solicit his murder.  Small wonder that one of their acolytes obeyed.  But here’s the thing: Dr. Tiller had a general practice, and by all accounts of those who knew him personally was a nice and decent guy.  The abortions he performed were of catastrophically deformed fetuses that would hardly survive birth, or pregnant children too young to carry a baby to term, suicidal, retarded, or mentally ill victims of statutory rape, or women stricken with cancer or other deadly complications so that the pregnancy endangered their lives.  As I said, I don’t like abortion, but if there is ever a case for it, this is it.  So-called conservatives differ?  Why don’t they go after the statuary rapists?  Or those who murder in the name of pro-life?  I had my brush with abortion when my wife’s second pregnancy seemed to be stalled, and they concluded that the fetus had died and was spoiling inside her; it had to be removed for her survival.  But when they got to the point, it turned out to have grown, so wasn’t dead, and the operation was immediately canceled.  Unfortunately she later lost it anyway, stillborn, and I understand that too is called an abortion.  So I have to say from bitter experience there is a place.  And yes, though I abhor the abortion of a viable fetus, I do believe it should be the woman and her family who make that difficult decision, not a freak ranting radical of the religious right with nothing at stake except his desire to impose his supposed values on someone else.  I don’t like the killing of animals for meat, either, but I leave that decision also to each individual person.  Tolerance isn’t just for the things you personally like.  Otherwise I would have a license to kill those who needlessly slaughter innocent lambs for food, wouldn’t I?

Interesting article in NEW SCIENTIST for July 4, 2009: is warfare in our genes?  This is coming into question.  Individual fights and violence have always existed in our species, but organized warfare?  The first evidence of that dates to about 14,000 years ago.  The suggestion is that when man started settling down instead of wandering, as with the start of agriculture, he could no longer walk away from trouble.  Otherwise others would simply drive him off and steal what he had grown for his family.  So it seems that warfare emerged because of a changing lifestyle.  Natural disasters like floods and droughts contributed because of their impact on resources.  Swelling populations and dwindling food supplies were factors.  Modern society is much less violent than long ago.  Also, democracies rarely if ever wage war against each other.  “Major obstacles to peace include the lack of tolerance inherent in religious fundamentalism, which not only triggers conflicts but often contributes to the suppression of women…”  Two keys to peace are population control and cheap, clean, reliable alternatives to fossil fuels.  When female education and economic opportunities rise, birth rates fall and population stabilizes, so there is less inclination for war.  I think of how the Taliban in Afghanistan are bombing schools for girls; they prefer to subjugate women.  So perhaps we know what to do to truly promote peace: promote liberalism.

Walter Kronkheit died, age 92.  In my secret mind I always thought of his name as “Walter Crankcase,” no disrespect intended.  He was a highly respected newsman, considered by many to be the most trusted man in America.  Early in his career he was fired from his job because he questioned their shabby journalistic practices.  I suspect he should have been kept and the boss who fired him fired.  He also riled a sponsor by correcting the grammar of an ad: “Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.”  More power to him!  Later he replaced Edward R Murrow as TV anchor.  I remember the ads for “Listen to Murrow tomorrow.”  And I remember how when Kronkheit retired they replaced him with surly Dan Rather rather than with nice Roger Mudd.  Disgusted, I quit watching that network news and never returned.  So an age has passed and I am saddened.  Kronkheit was a good man.

John S Berry died, age 84.  No, I had not heard of him either.  He was the man who promoted the lubricant WD-40.  It turns out that the company struggled for some time to develop it, finally succeeding on the 40^th try.  So it was named Water Displacement 40^thattempt.

As regular readers of this column know—yes, some do exist—I am a fan of the Higgs Bosun, though I’m not sure it exists.  An article in PARADE for July 26, 2009 relates.  In the 1960s and 70s theorists developed the “standard model” of high-energy physics, that predicted what kinds of particles come together to form electrons, protons, and neutrons.  Twelve major ones have been discovered, six of which are charged particles called quarks, and six uncharged called leptons.  I wonder whether the lepton says to the quark “You give me a charge”?  Theoretically six particles carry force, called bosons, and they have found five.  The sixth is the Higgs.  If they don’t find it, the standard model will require revision, which will be a complicated mess.  So they have to find it, but it is not eager to be found.  Higgs is supposed to carry mass to other particles, and without mass the universe as we know it would not exist.  Exactly why a thing can’t have mass without that mass being hand-carried to it by an obliging boson I’m not sure; I always thought that mass was inherent.  In fact I regard it as a dimension, but that’s probably another discussion.  At any rate, contemporary physicists believe they need the Higgs and don’t want their belief to turn out to be illusion, so they are searching for it much as the Bush administration searched for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to validate their rationale.  With the problem with the big new Large Hadron Collider near Switzerland, the American Fermilab has a second chance, and they are working madly to try to find Higgs first.  They are getting close, but it’s no easy search.  They have established the limits of its mass (who brings mass to the mass-carrier?), providing a smaller region to hunt in, but can they actually nab it before the Large Hadron Collider gets back into action and nails it?  Stay tuned; this race is still in progress.

Newspaper article, really a book review of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham, I find fascinating.  I wrote a five novel series of historical fiction, GEODYSSEY, covering the global history of our species for the past eight million or so years; who we are and how we came to be is one of my long-term interests.  The fifth novel, Climate of Change, will be published by TOR in due course; its theme is, as you might guess, the effect climate has had on us.  How we discovered fire and learned to use it is of course important, just as how we became omnivores, eating animals as well as vegetables.  But somehow I missed what is suddenly obvious: we used fire for cooking, and that transformed out diet, giving us a far wider range.  Things like potatoes and grains aren’t very edible raw, and neither is most meat.  Cooking changed all that, allowing us to shrink our gut and put more energy into our growing brain, as this book says, and that made all the difference.  Many edible things are more edible when cooked, yielding more of their nutrients, providing more nourishment for less effort.  There is not physical evidence of man’s controlled use of fire going back before 800,000 years ago, but probably we’ve been using it a million years before that, as signaled by that shrinking gut and swelling brain.  It’s like the question of boats: could mankind sail 50,000 years ago?  There no evidence of boats, but man did colonize Australia then, and surely he didn’t swim, fly or tunnel.  So we know there were boats—and similarly there must have been fire.  Cooking encouraged division of labor.  Men hunted the animals, women cooked them.  The suggestion is that marriage was not to ensure paternity, but primarily an economic contract.  It seems that those today who eschew cooked foods are all thin.  (Say, those of you who are desperate to lose weight, there’s your diet: only raw things.  If it doesn’t kill you, it will make you thin.)  That suggests the advantage cooking is.  So yes, cooking must have been a prime factor in making us human.  How come no one, including me, failed to catch on to this obvious fact long ago?

I have commented before on bullying at school, something I detest.  A recent newspaper article remarks on bullying at work.  It’s not physical so much as mistreatment, as the less competent and less scrupulous target and harass their more decent, ethical, and competent co-workers, to drive them out.  Thirty seven percent of Americans have reported being bullied at work.  That has similar consequences, making victims literally sick.  The standard advice to those who encounter it is to look for another job.  But today in the recession, there may not be another job, so people are stuck.  It’s rough.  I had not thought of it as such at the time, but this makes me realize that it was something similar that drove me out of a good job in industry and damaged my health, nigh five decades ago.  I realized that I was not being fairly treated, but I had no recourse except to leave.  When I went to writing full time I feared I would be tense because there would be no guaranteed paycheck; instead I felt relief that no longer could I be blamed and rebuked for things that were not my fault.  I suspect that many who are trapped in less than ideal jobs understand perfectly.  I love writing, but as it turned out, I also like being in charge of my own destiny.  It is far less stressful.

I saw a newspaper ad headlined GREAT SEX IS NO LONGER A MYSTERY, offering to send a bottle of their potency pills free, because they are so sure you will want more after you try it.  I was tempted.  I’m pushing 75, and though my interest in sex remains strong, my performance is diminishing, even with Viagra.  If a pill could restore my potential of, say, twenty years ago, I’d consider it.  But I was wary of the catch.  Well, a newspaper column, The People’s Pharmacy, recently addressed that question, and a TV report identified the likely kicker.  These miracle pills generally cost a lot and don’t work.  But when you order the free bottle, they may get your credit card information and charge you for two more bottles, sending a package of three: one free, two charged.  Then when it doesn’t work, lotsa luck getting them to stop billing you, let alone refund your money.  It’s a scam.

What was the origin of the dollar sign, $?  It turns out that’s unknown.  They conjecture that it derives from the Spanish peso, or maybe pieces of eight.  Abbreviate pesos to PS, and the two can overlap and come to resemble $.  Makes cents to me.

What is the key to happiness?  As a long-time mild depressive—I have said that if others have depression, I have recession—I’m interested.  It may be the small pleasures, according to University of North Carolina research, rather than big ones.  People think that a million dollars would make them happy.  I’ve got more than that, but it doesn’t effect my daily mood.  When I spy a new star flower on our star jasmine I am pleased; when I make a score in left handed archery I am thrilled; when I solve the daily chess and Jumble word puzzles I’m gratified; when it rains on our tree farm after a drought I’m relieved and encouraged; when I learned that a review I did in this column of a novel garnered the interest of a movie-maker, who contacted the author, I was surprised and delighted; when I have a good day writing I am turned on; when I hear a pretty song on the radio I pause to listen, savoring the brief joy of it; when I see a pretty girl, or a picture of a pretty girl, I feel a rush of good feeling; when we discovered an assortment of the vegetarian imitation meat Quorn in the local grocery store I was happy.  Actually, completing this column pleases me.  Now I realize that this is indeed the secret.  Little things that few others notice or care about.  Maybe I’m not recessive after all.

Our elder daughter, Penelope Carolyn Jacob, died of apparent respiratory paralysis on September 3, 2009. She is survived by her husband John, eight year old daughter Logan, her sister Cheryl, and us, her parents. We are somewhat in shock, and our attendance to other matters, such as correspondence, may suffer for a while. Penny lived in Oregon, and was in rehabilitation following brain surgery for melanoma that had metastasized there, pressing on nerves that controlled her right side, paralyzing it. She had trouble breathing, then was abruptly gone. We are helping her family in whatever ways we can, and Cheryl is there for the month to help also. I will have a more complete discussion in my OctOgre 2009 HiPiers column.

There will be no funeral or service, per her preference. Those who would like to contribute may do so by planting a tree in their neighborhood, as Penny loved trees, or a contribution in her name to the Eugene Waldorf School, 1350 McLean Blvd., Eugene, OR 97405. There is no obligation.

Original post:

Fifty three years and a couple of months ago I married a smart brown-haired nineteen year old girl.  I was always partial to that type.   She was nicknamed Cam, for the initials of her maiden name: Carol Ann Marble.  Ever since I have teased her about not staying nineteen, as if all problems could have been avoided thereby.  When she had her 43^rd birthday I quoted Gilbert & Sullivan “She might very well pass for forty three, in the dark with a light behind her.”  In the course of novel writing this AwGhost I had need to pattern a wedding sequence, so my wife dug out her photo album, which included the text of our own wedding ceremony, along with many early pictures.  Ah, nostalgia!  We looked so impossibly young in those days.  She also saved the several poems I wrote her in those romantic years.  Here are three:

To Cam:

Two years ago in Florida

The twenty-third of June

What ended there and started then

Will not be finished soon

For there and then the knot was tied

I lost my carefree life

And forfeited my single days

And gained a loving wife

Though she is sometimes difficult

Puts the horse behind the cart

And smiles and sniffles all at once

I love her with all my heart.

Happy Anniversary Dear

I married a girl of nineteen

So sweet with her hair full of sheen

  Five years went by

  ‘Til I realized that I

Had a wife I could not contravene.

One lesson I now underscore:

Not to trust what she says anymore

  For I checked on her age

  And what was my rage

When I found she is twenty and four.

At one time we attended some square dancing classes, because we had enjoyed square dancing in college.  But in the course of cleaning up the floor she got a case of housemaid’s knee, similar to tennis elbow, a joint affliction.  For that occasion I wrote, with one word tastefully omitted (after all, she was a minister’s daughter):

There was a young lady named Cam

Who got herself into a jam

She hurted her knee

On a floor-scrubbing spree

And now she can’t dance worth a

Sometimes I wrote poems for others, too.  Once my wife’s grandmother gave me for Christmas a key chain with a little padded box to hold the key.  I don’t remember the first stanza, but from memory here is the concluding one:

So thanks again for what you did

Unearthing from the place it hid

The coffin with the flip-top lid

I read Eala’s Misfit by Chris Condoleo.  I had read a sample, and it was a close call, so I asked to see the whole, and this was the second book of the three that arrived almost together in mid AwGhost.  My impression is mixed .  There’s a nice cover and bookmark.  It’s the story of a girl whose mother is killed, and the girl is protected by being exiled to an alternate reality orphanage for several years.  She had magic powers which are blocked off, including her knowledge of them.  It’s ugly; no one likes her there, and she suffers nightmares.  But it seems her magic manifests in her dreams.  For example, one day a girl torments her with a snake.  That night she dreams of snakes—and fifty or more real snakes go after the tormenting girl.  There is this kind of imagination throughout the novel.  Unfortunately the level of writing is less than professional, and it seems somewhat haphazardly organized, a common fault in amateur writers, by no coincidence.  So I deem it unpublishable by a commercial house, but there is imagination and a story there.  www.eppyscreations.com.

Charles N Brown died.  He was the proprietor of the genre news magazine LOCUS.  I met him three times as I remember, maybe more, encountering him mostly at conventions.  Back around 1966 I met him in New York and he was compatible, and lent me the dinosaur novel Before the Dawn, by John Taine I think, as I was then writing my dinosaur novel Orn.  Later he started LOCUS and sent me free copies, though I insisted on paying for them.  He showed me around part of the American Bookseller’s Convention in Dallas, in 1982.  I visited his house in the San Francisco area 1987, as part of an Author Tour, where he interviewed me.  So you might think all was compatible.  Only on the surface.  I mentioned once, privately, that it seemed to me to be a waste of space to list things like authors delivering books to publishers; what counted was sales and publication.  Apparently he couldn’t handle even that mild private criticism, because thereafter news and reviews relating to my works turned negative.  For example LOCUS ran the news of the British Fantasy Society annual award winners every year except one: the year A Spell for Chameleon won, and there was no mention of that win in the magazine, apparently to try to prevent it from winning any American award.  When my autobiography Bio of an Ogre was published, the LOCUS review was so negative you might have thought I was an ax murderer.  In one case a review put (sic) to call attention to a supposed error in my book—an error that was not in the published edition.  In the past decade or so LOCUS has not reviewed my books at all, I presume because there were too many protests about the unfairness of the ones it had been running.  (Sometimes the authors of unacknowledged protests sent me copies of their letters.)  Its agenda seemed to be that if it couldn’t pan my books, it wouldn’t review them at all.  So as far as objective news went, LOCUS was not to be trusted; it had a personal agenda on me, and I presume on others; I heard complaints.  There were other examples, but I think I’ve made the point.  That showed me how small Brown really was.  He used what was supposed to be an objective news and review magazine to push his private spite.  Too  bad; that meant that nothing in it could be completely trusted.  The SF/fantasy genre needs accurate sources of information, and LOCUS has become pretty much the only game in town.  I suppose that makes corruption easy.  Whether things will change there now that Brown is gone I don’t know; I suspect not.  There’s really not a lot of worthwhile genre news in it, maybe because others, like me, no longer bother to inform it.

I like shapely young women.  It’s like bird watching: you catch every glimpse you can, but you never touch or become too obvious.  On rare occasions I’ll see one with a low décolletage leaning forward in the grocery store to fetch an item from a low shelf, or to lift things out of her cart.  Electrifying glimpses!  They pretend they don’t know what they’re showing, and I pretend I don’t notice.  Much of polite society is fashioned of pretense.  In off moments I put on the LATN TV channel, as they evidently cater to sight-seeing men of any age or language, with marvelously endowed pretty-faced creatures who show a good deal of breast and leg.  I also collect pictures I encounter.  One source is the glossy bra ads in the newspaper.  I have discovered that while girl calendars can be sexy—a correspondent in Hawaii sends me Hawaiian beauties—and PLAYBOY magazine ads can be sexy, these tend to be so obviously artificial that they lose appeal.  You fear that if you could actually touch one of those models, the glaze would crack.  But the bra ads are crafted to seem natural, as if real women are wearing them.  Slender, shapely, pretty creatures with glorious hair and perfect makeup, but still seeming to be genuine women in dishabille.  They turn me on, and I cut out and save the better pictures.  Some of the best are modeling Ambrielle bras.  Maybe the model for that brand just happens to be my type.  Thick long brown hair.  I never went for blondes romantically.  On the street you have a pretty good indication which women are married and which are looking: the lookers are slender with lovely hair, while the married hack off their hair and put on weight, as if they just can’t wait to turn off their men.  So half the men dump them and go for new slender haired ones, as the 50% divorce rate suggests.  No mystery there.  But you know, if I were looking for a woman to keep, in contrast to bird watching, I think I’d look first at her feet.  Most American women hobble themselves on high heels, suffering ten times as many foot ailments as men, because they think that makes their legs look better.  As if bobby-sox college girls are unattractive?  As if men look at ankles and calves rather than boobs and asses?  To me, a feminist in high heels is a fraud.  I’d go for one with sensible footwear, knowing that it probably reflected a sensible mind.

Last column I discussed my wife’s experience with the Kindle and Sony readers. Now I have experience of my own: deluged with reading—I’m making slow progress—I’m reading one manuscript on the Sony.  That works okay, except that one day its battery was half charged, and overnight it dropped to zero so I had to recharge instead of read.  Apparently these things, supposedly using no power when pages aren’t being changed, are depleting their batteries when turned off, which is a no-no in my book.  Otherwise it’s okay.  It holds my place and the text is legible.  There’s about to be a new version that will have wireless loading, like the Kindle, and I understand Barnes & Noble is working on a similar device.  Eventually these things will merge with computers and cell phones, so that any unit will do anything.  A newspaper article titled “The Kindle Killers” says that people will read onscreen using machines they already own, so why bother with a separate reader?  But I suspect Amazon will counter by adding features like email to the Kindle and ask why bother with a computer?  I wonder whether Google will get into the fray, as it now has a considerable interest in online reading.  It should be an interesting battle.

Senator Ted Kennedy died, age 77.  Two years older than I am—that makes me nervous.  My first vote as an American citizen was for his brother John, who, three years into his presidency, visited Tampa Bay Florida and was welcomed, then visited Dallas Texas and they killed him.  That’s a simplification of a situation that grows uglier when inspected in more detail.  Ted was a strong liberal force in the Senate.  He might have been president, but for a couple of things.  One was the “Mudd Slide,” when Roger Mudd interviewed him, asked him why he wanted to be president, and he had trouble answering.  You’d have thought he would have had a canned answer ready.  If someone asked my why I want to be a writer, I would not draw a blank.  (So why do I?  Um, hum, let me ponder that.)  The other was Chappaquiddick.  The story is that Ted took a young female campaign worker out for a tryst, missed a turn, drove into the bay, managed to escape the sinking car, but she didn’t, and drowned.  Bad scene, and the truth was never known.  But of course I figured it out, maybe alone among mundanes, and even put it, thinly veiled, into a novel decades ago.  Now it can be told: Ted took Mary-Jo out, but suspected they were being followed, maybe by a rival politician or a photographer seeking a scoop for a trash tabloid.  So he devised a way to discover who was spying on him: he got out and hid in the brush, watching for the pursuing car, while Mary-Jo took the wheel and drove on, maybe with the lights off.  But she was not familiar with the road, and in the darkness missed a turn and plunged into the water and drowned.  When Ted caught up to that place and discovered what had happened, it was too late.  Since he couldn’t tell the truth—that he wasn’t even there when it happened, because of his paranoia—he took the blame, and it severely crippled his political career.  He was a good man, but severely flawed.

The debate about health care reform is on.  Republicans used the same arguments in the 1960s to oppose Medicare that they are using now, and they are similarly invalid.  Here’s a key to the hypocrisy and ignorance of it: when they were disrupting a town hall style discussion—you know, denying others their right to freedom of expression—they protested that they didn’t want government running health insurance.  It’s their mantra that this is burdensome and inefficient, that private insurers can do it cheaper and better.  But they don’t want the so called public option, where a government agency competes with the private ones, fearing that it would take away their business.  How, if it’s so inefficient?  So they were asked how many protesters were on Medicare?  It turned out that about half were.  But that’s government insurance.  And they booed, refusing to believe it.  The fact is, Medicare is about the most efficient insurer extant, with overhead costs of three percent, while the average for private insurers is more like thirty percent.  How ignorant can you get?  As I like to say, you don’t have to be stupid or ignorant to be conservative, but it helps.  Republican office holders surely know the truth, but keep silent.  It is tempting to suspect that you don’t have to be a liar to be a Republican, but it seems that helps too.  Cynthia Tucker had a good column commenting on the situation, pointing out that private insurers spend a lot of time and money figuring out ways to deny legitimate claims.  Sometimes they hope the victim is just too sick to fight back.  What’s wrong with profit?  It has no place when it’s people’s health and lives at stake.  If a new car is too expensive you can walk away, but if your health care is too expensive, you die.  The private insurance industry doesn’t want real competition; that would interfere with those multi-million dollar CEO bonuses, while clients suffer and perish.  So yes, we need a complete overhaul, to cover the nigh fifty million uninsured people in America, to stop companies from cheating their sick clients, and to make health care affordable for all.  Failing that, a reasonable compromise is to have that public option.

A study shows that children can indeed suffer from chronic depression.  Duh!  I could have told them that when I was a depressive child.  Psychiatrists thought it couldn’t happen.  It did not take me long as a child to conclude that psychiatrists had little notion of real children.  Indeed, as an adult I have my doubts that psychiatry itself is valid; I suspect that profession deludes itself about its relevance.  That is perhaps the only thing I agree with the Scientologists about, though I don’t buy their manta either.  I finally refused to see any more child psychiatrists.  I date my long slow recovery from that decision; it was my turning point.

I finished writing my erotic romance novel Eroma, EROtic ROMAnce, and sent it to my agent.  It’s an 86,000 calculated, 74,000 computer word love story concluding with a wedding and honeymoon, sexy as hell.  I suspect it will prove to be unmarketable to traditional print publishers, so probably I will query a number of electronic publishers.  It’s about the erotic romance game, “Eroma,” wherein avatars compete somewhat in the manner of TV Survivor type series, only the competition is sexual, and there’s a vast mundane audience that can deliver instant feedback on what it likes or hates.  Each contestant has his/her avatar, and the avatars not only interact in assorted challenging settings, they can have sex complete with orgasms that the mundane contestants experience.  In one setting, male players have to overcome and penetrate amazon-like defenders of a fantasy castle, turning them off by reaching the switch where the cervix normally is and triggering a thirty second mutual orgasm.  Female players have to prevent warriors from penetrating to their orgasmic switches.  So it’s sexual combat between eager contestants, male and female; the game is careful not to use the word “rape.”  Other sequences become less conventional and more challenging.  I suspect some publishers will balk just from seeing the title of Chapter 3: “Poop of the Day.”  That features a restaurant where the waiters poop out the food entries, before it gets worse.  No, this is not reveling in filth; the food is perfectly tasty and healthy, and this is a pseudo setting; nothing is really real.  But some contestants have a problem with the manner of its apparent genesis, and get eliminated by the vomit factor.  Fancy that.  So I suspect that even the wilder erotic publishers have not before seen anything quite like Eroma, and may not want to.  But I had fun writing it.  In SapTimber I will start writing Xanth #35, Well-Tempered Clavicle, which is a rather different genre, and not just because there’s no open sex.

Newspaper article titled “Early Vegetarian Activism” turns out to mean exactly that, with a picture of a six year old vegetarian girl.  “Young children are deciding to cut meat out of their diets and many of their meat-eating parents are backing them.”  More power to them!  They realize that animals are being mistreated, and are acting to deter that.  About three percent of American adults are vegetarians, evenly divided between reasons of health and animal welfare.  I’m the latter.  But you know, vegetarianism can be healthy if you pay attention, and a careful vegetarian is apt to be healthier than a careless omnivore.  Eat plenty of nuts and fruits.  We also take a flaxseed oil supplement, for the omega 3 that meaters get from fish.

I read a review of a novel titled Touch that looks interesting.  It’s about a flat-chested girl with three male friends who spends a year in another city with her mom.  In that time she blossoms, developing marvelous breasts.  Then she returns and enters high school with her friends, only it’s not the same, because they now see her in a different light.  You don’t say!  One touches her chest: intentionally?  Did she let him?  It becomes a lawsuit.  I may buy that book if I see it.  I notice breasts, as mentioned above.  In my GEODYSSEY historical series I conjecture that full breasts were once a signal of pregnancy and nursing, meaning a woman was sexually unavailable and therefore of little male interest.  Only when they shrank back to nothing was she breedable.  But when our kind rose to two feet, and babies couldn’t run along on their own in the manner animal babies can, women had to carry them, and they needed more help from men, including when they were nursing, so nature managed a remarkable turnabout: making full breasts become sexually desirable instead of turnoffs.  And you know, they work.  Women also became sexually available at all times, even when not fertile, to encourage men to remain interested.  I suspect it happened at a time of species contraction, when maybe 95% were wiped out, and the only survivors were the women with that essential male help.  Men wouldn’t have done it for nothing; they had to be compelled.  Continuous sex is compelling.  It hasn’t changed all that much today.  Many men still try to impregnate women and bug out, but they can’t escape the lure of sex.  So full breasts are, really, one of several defining marks of our species.  Our overdeveloped brain is another, and our fur-less skin, the most efficient cooling mechanism in the animal kingdom, so we can forage in the noon sun while the big predators can’t.  The study of mankind is fascinating.  So are breasts.  If you think otherwise, you’re probably not a man.

Now they have jeans with eyes set along the lower crease of the buttock so that they wink as the girl walks.  It seems only fair that a girl’s bottom gets the chance to peer back at the boy’s eyes focusing on it from behind.  Bottoms are about as interesting as breasts; that’s why young jeans are so tight.  Reminds me of the question: what’s the first thing you notice about a woman?  Answer: is she coming or going?  Obviously you can’t answer unless you know that.

Total Sci-Fi Online, a British web site that spun off from Dr. Who fandom, ranked the 100 best genre movies, and #1 was the 1982 Blade Runner.  Okay.  I might rank them differently, if I had the time and inclination to watch the full list.  I still remember Forbidden Planet from the 1950s, but can’t be sure how I would rate it today.  One problem with such rankings is that people tend to go by nostalgia, so the old “classics” score higher than they may deserve.

Newspaper column by Robyn Blumner describes a new convention, the Moth.  This is the second oldest profession, storytelling, in an updated guise.  You have about ten minutes to tell a true story without notes.  Music plays in the background.  I’m sure sessions can be fascinating.  But of course I would think that, because I’m a storyteller.  I really do believe that storytelling is another of the defining marks of our species.  It’s the leading art, and it may be responsible for much of our facility with language and our unity as a species.  If you’re human, you like a good story.  Don’t you?

Perhaps related: Ask Marylin had an item on vocabulary.  How many words must a person from another language learn, to communicate adequately in ours?  About 500, though 1,000 is better, plus some knowledge of verb tenses.  So if you want to tell a story in English, but you know only 499 words, tough luck.  Also perhaps related: Garrison Keillor remarks that “Bloggers are writers who’ve been liberated from editors, and some of them take you back to the thrilling days of frontier journalism, before the colleges squashed the profession.”  This rings true to me, as I write this blog-type column that is untouched by editorial restrictions.  Have you noticed?  He continues: “The Internet is a powerful tide that is washing away some enormous castles and releasing a lovely sense of independence and playfulness in the American people.”  Yes, the Internet is breaking down the corroded channels of the old order and opening things up for a wild new order.  Of course the early results are mixed, and there’s a fair amount of shit out there.  But as with mutations, though 99% be bad, that remaining 1% will surely forge a better future.

I commented above on breasts above.  Okay, NEW SCIENTIST for August 8 has a feature “10 Mysteries of You” that explores other aspects of our nature.    Blushing may be a signal of honest feeling.  Laughter—women tend to want it, men provide it.  That must explain my funny fantasy, which seems have a larger female than male readership.  Pubic hair is probably to express (spread) compelling scent, as well as signaling sexual maturity.  Teenagers—it seems other species don’t have them, and it may exist to allow young humans more time to develop their full physical and mental capacities.  Dreams may be to process memories.  Yes, I covered that in GEODYSSEY long ago, before science caught on.  Altruism may be to help your species, and therefore ultimately yourself, to survive.  Art may correlate with intelligent creativity.  Oh, do I ever believe that!  Superstition may have led into religion—after all, what is religion, but organized superstition?–providing some feeling of security in uncertain times; it is growing now, as more people are suffering economic and, in other parts of the world, physical distress.  Kissing may derive from breast feeding: the lips are a pleasure center that can be turned to social use.  And nose picking—almost everyone does it, often covertly, but science does not know why.  Well, I can enlighten science: it is to clean out a stuffed nose when the snot is too solid to blow out.  Need I say, duh?

Another NEW SCIENTIST article suggests that cold weather may have allowed our species to grow larger brains.  A study suggests that population size governed the need for bigger brains, to outsmart neighbors in a brain arms race, but the heat the brain generates limits it unless the weather cools.  It seems our efficient skin cooling system can do only so much to compensate for the albatross that is our bulging brain.  So larger population and cooler weather made bigger brains helpful and possible, and now that we have them, we have other ways to handle the heat.  Like air conditioning.  We’d better, lest the global warming we are making causes us to lose our minds.

And one on “The Third Replicator.”  The first replicator was the gene, the basis of biological evolution.  We are what we are physically and in raw brain power because of that.  The second replicator was the meme, the basis of cultural evolution.  We have language, art, music, and religion because of it.  The third may be—well, they’re looking for a suitable title, but I’ll use macheme, for machine meme, one of their suggestions, along with T-rep, for technological replicator.  That is, our machines, including computer programs, are now evolving largely on their own.  This process, the article says, is greedy, selfish, and utterly blind to the consequences of its own expansion.  We can see it happening; do we care?  This reminds me of the fragment of a poem by American Poet Sidney Lanier, one I admire: “What the cloud doeth, the Lord knoweth; the cloud knoweth not.  What the artist doeth, the Lord knoweth; knoweth the artist not?”  We are the artist who is loosing this process on the world, and it may have the potential to destroy us and the world.  Know we not?

This column and Survey update may be posted sightly early, and the OctOgre ones may be slightly late, because our Web Mistress is away for a month on family business.  Bear with it.

This is not a normal HiPiers column.  It is devoted in large part to my daughter Penny, who died September 3, 2009, age 41.  Those who read these columns for my cynical or humorous remarks on this & that may prefer to skip down a couple of asterisks, because what follows is mostly pained nostalgia.  I have not normally mentioned my daughters here with much detail, because they prefer their privacy, but this is different.

Penny was born October 12, 1967, and we named her Penelope Carolyn Jacob, Penny for short, though in adult life she returned to Penelope.  She will always be Penny to me.  I wrote a bit of a poem to celebrate the event, concluding “We thought our child was Heaven-Cent, and so we called her Penny.”  Part of that later became the title for a Xanth novel.  My wife Carol (Cam) and I married June 23, 1956, but our first three babies died at birth, the last one living only an hour.  The first miscarriage in 1957 catapulted me into the US Army, as I was abruptly eligible for the draft.  The second, in 1958, was a painful drawn-out process.  It turned out that Cam’s uterus had a septum that divided it, so that not all of it was available for a fetus.  We got that fixed after the third, in 1962.  The worst day of my life was as I recall May 5, 1962, when I lost my job, my wife lost our baby, and a doctor told me that my fatigue and depression were all in my head and would pass when I realized that my fears were groundless.  And my insurance tried to rider (exclude) me for all mental disease, because of my groundless concerns; obviously I was crazy.  Decades later it turned out to be undiagnosed hypothyroidism, largely fixed by Synthroid pills or the generic equivalent, Levothyroxin.  Is it any wonder I have been cynical about modern medicine?   Ironically, the lack of children freed Cam to go to work so that I could stay home and try to fulfill my dream of being a writer.  In November of that year I made my first story sale, and in 1966 my first novel sale.  I was on my way.  I would not have been able to take that gamble, had any of our first three children survived.  I called it success via the money’s paw.  That is, I got what I wanted, but at a price I would never have paid, had I had a choice.  Thus the background for Penny’s arrival; it wasn’t any casual thing.  My wife and I agreed that the birth of our first surviving baby changed our lives more than our marriage itself had.  That may have been an exaggeration, but certainly Penny’s birth was more significant for us than first births are for normal couples.  We had feared we would never be able to have children of our own, and we doubted we could adopt, as adoption agencies were notoriously choosy.  I was an agnostic, politically independent (when it wasn’t fashionable), vegetarian science fiction writer, and we existed on the verge of poverty.  Obviously no fit parent.

Because I was the one at home, I took care of Penny when Cam went back to work.  She was my little girl, the foremost female in my life.  Again, perhaps an exaggeration, but my wife did not object.  I fed her, I changed her diapers, I held her on my shoulder while she slept.  She was hyperactive and would not sleep alone.  Oh, yes, Penny was an education in what Dr. Spock didn’t know about babies.  Just put them down, he said; they’ll cry a while, then sleep.  Well, I tried that one night.  As I recall, I stayed awake on edge for close to two hours, listening to her cry in the next room.  Then I heard a choking sound and had to check.  She had vomited what looked like blood.  After a moment I remembered I had fed her some cherry pudding.  But that was the first and last time I tried that.  Any mother, and a fair number of fathers, will understand.  They do notnecessarily settle down when left.  We did not use baby sitters, highly conscious of the fragility of life.

Penny changed my manner of writing.  It dropped to 50% of what it had been, because of the time taken caring for her.  At first I put her bassinet on my lap and typed, but that continued only as long as she was small enough for that.  She liked sleeping to the sound of typing.  When I paused to think of my next paragraph, she would wake and fuss, and I had to type something, anything, to calm her.  This was not the best way to write a novel.  So I learned to write in pencil, on a clipboard, literally dropping it when I had to grab for Penny.  Because I had to watch her constantly.  Once I focused on the radio, to change the station, only a few seconds.  When I returned my gaze to Penny, she opened her mouth and blood came out.  She had fallen against the couch and cut her lip.  Lessons like this honed my skill.  At any rate, Penny and I got along well.  Cam, in due course, was bothered when Penny seemed not really to know who she was.  When we had our second baby, Cheryl, Cam quit work and took care of her herself.  Thus Penny was “my” daughter, and Cheryl was “her” daughter.  Once when they were misbehaving we threatened to exchange daughters, and both of them, appalled, behaved.  But ultimately they did understand that both of them were both of our children.

We never cut Penny’s hair, and it finally grew to be a yard long, beautiful blond tresses.  I used to braid it for her, sometimes with a single braid, sometimes with two, sometimes with three or five.  If you want to be conventional, don’t choose a creative father.  Her mother did her little sister Cheryl’s hair, and tended to keep it short, but when eventually Cheryl took control and grew hers, it was was also a yard long, brown.  I called them our vanilla and chocolate haired girls.  I love long hair on a woman, and I think my daughters picked up on that.  I used to say that Penny owed her energy to her long hair, like the Biblical Samson.

All was not always happy.  With the best of intentions we enrolled Penny in a community swimming class.  We had encouraged her to like the water, but once when she was about two when I had her in the sea I got stung by a jellyfish, jumped, and accidentally dunked her.  I apologized and explained, but thereafter she was politely distant.  Well, it turned out that the swimming class was a variant of sink or swim; they took the children out, then dunked them in deep water, forcing them to scramble to get out.  We didn’t know.  We didn’t understand why Penny came to dislike classes, so we attended one and watched.  They reassured Penny, took her out, and dunked her.  She was so upset she vomited in the water.  I was appalled, but an instructor reassured me: “Don’t worry; she’s been dunked before.”  As if that barbarity made it all right.  Well, we took her home, bought a plastic pool 12 feet wide and 18 inches deep, and encouraged Penny to play there, one of us always watching.  And there she learned to like the water, and to swim.  We had undone the damage done by the swimming school, we hoped.  What the hell did they think they were doing?  How many other children have been traumatized by this atrocity?  It’s not exactly water-boarding, but there’s an affiliation.

With children came pets.  We got a Dalmatian dog we named Canute, but he got kidney stones and had to be put down.  Unable to force the concept of death on her, I told Penny were were leaving him at the vet.  I regarded it as lying to my child, and hated the need.  A year later a pet cat, Pandora Two, got run over.  I buried her and said nothing.  But three days later Penny asked, and I had to tell her, and it devastated her, and me.  Truth can be awful.

Penny learned to walk at nine and a half months, and started talking around a year.  My wife told me she had a large vocabulary, but I didn’t credit it.  The average child is said to have a vocabulary of about ten words at age eighteen months.  So I checked Penny at fifteen months, and was astonished to discover she knew over 200 words.  I checked again at age eighteen months, and it was over 500 words.  We still have the list of them.  No, she wasn’t a genius, though she was bright enough to make the high IQ class in school despite being learning disabled, as it turned out.  So was her sister.  I think the ten words at 18 months folk don’t know what they’re talking about; children are smarter than that.

All went reasonably well until Penny started school.  She did well enough in preschool, but in first grade the teacher was yelling at her from the first day.  What did they think this was, a swimming class?  Okay, we got on it, and got her tested, and she was diagnosed dyslexic.  She was also hyperactive, and extremely sensitive; an unkind word could throw her into tears.  Her early reading problems echoed mine.  In my day dyslexia did not exist, only stupid or willful students, and it took me three years and five schools to make it through first grade.  I was determined that the school system would not do to my daughter what it had done to me.  We got the school system to move her to a school that had a program for learning disabled children.  That got her out of that class.  Throughout her education, into college, I was there for her; teachers learned not to abuse my child.  I made an impression, as readers of these columns might imagine.  I retained my own teaching certificate for years, just in case.  One example: we did not require vegetarianism of our children, or any other social convention, like religion, so they could choose for themselves.  However, the home environment was vegetarian, and they did become vegetarians.  But her college used a food  service that laced meat products into practically everything.  So we helped Penny apply for an exemption, so she could buy her own food instead of paying for the food service she did not use.  This was supposed to be reviewed by three professors.  They didn’t bother; they simply turned her down.  That annoyed me.  I told her “I’m going to show you how the real world works.”  I wrote a careful letter to the head man, enclosing a copy of our correspondence so he could see for himself how Penny’s student rights had been violated.  Then I said “I will consider our payment for the food service to be an involuntary contribution to the college.  You may sure we will not make a voluntary one.”  That crossed with a solicitation from the college.  We were at that time coincidentally financing a $75,000 excavation of Tatham Mound for the University of Florida.  News like that surely travels in academic circles.  And just like that, the decision was reversed.  It was a useful lesson for Penny:  you don’t always have to sit still for abuse.  In later years she did assert her rights.

There was another college-related matter.  In high school Penny discovered that it was difficult to live her own life when she was a bestselling writer’s child.  One boy asked her “Are you Piers Anthony’s daughter?”  When she said yes, he said “Then I love you!”  He wasn’t fooling.  That was not the type of love she wanted.  So when she went to college, she swore all her friends to secrecy, so that she could become known for herself.  So did her little sister, in due course.  Eventually the news did get out, but by that time Penny had established her own identity.  I understand completely.  I did tease her that I was satisfied to live a thousand miles from my dysfunctional family, and then Penny was satisfied to live three thousand miles from me.

Children tend to be impatient with the restrictions adults place on them.  Penny referred to being on a short leash when we took them to a convention.  Once she demanded of me, challengingly, “Daddy, when will I stop being a child?”  I answered “When you are no longer afraid of the dark.”  She never brought it up again.

When she was a baby, I wrote my first draft in pencil, as mentioned above, and typed that when Penny slept.  It was viable.  I could travel and write that way.  Time passed, and one day I realized that Penny was preparing for college and I no longer needed to be constantly at hand.  They stopped making good manual typewriters, so I jumped in 1984 from pencil to the computer.  It is almost as versatile as pencil.  Penny completed college, and later took over and ran our book-selling endeavor, HiPiers.  She was the one who set up the HiPiers.com web site.  She called herself Peacy, from her initials, P C.  Eventually we had to shut it down, but the site remained.  Today our younger daughter Cheryl transcribes my column and Survey updates, while Cam prints out email for me to answer in pencil, and transcribes that for the answers.  It remains very much a family operation.  My records on over a hundred novels retain Penny’s impact: she made up most of those folders.

She had impact on my writing, too.  When she was ten she was horse crazy, and we did get her a horse, Sky Blue, a hackney mare, a former harness racer, fourteen hands tall.  That’s small for a horse, but Blue was the perfect horse and I really liked her.  She was the model for Night Mare Imbri in Xanth, and Neysa Unicorn in the Adept series.  Penny was the model for Princess Ivy, whose age roughly paralleled Penny’s age as she grew up.  Ivy found her Man from Mundania, but I waited for Penny to romance and marry, and she took her time.  After eight years I finally divorced Ivy from Penny, and Ivy immediately married Grey Murphy.  Whereupon Penny married, having evidently been shown the way.  Ivy had triplet daughters; Penny confined herself to a single daughter.  When I was fashioning the Ogre Calendar I stalled on the second month, until Penny suggested FeBlueberry.  That was it, when the redberries are blue with cold.  She suggested that when the barbarian got dirt in his head in Crewel Lye—his horse had had to scrape up his brains with a hoof when they got scattered on the ground—that he would thereafter have a dirty mind that got stirred up when he saw a pretty woman.  I made it a recurring pun, but the bleeping editor cut out most of the repetitions.  In time such censoring caused me to leave that publisher.

Penny became a doula, which is a person who assists pregnant women, supporting them through the births of their babies.  It can really help.  Later she had her own baby, and surely knew what to expect.  She married in 1995, and they moved to Oregon, not liking the Florida heat.  Our association became mainly by phone, and I think she became more like Cam’s daughter than mine.  But I still had some influence.  I used to remark in Family letters that I regarded myself as the most liberal member of my family, BP: Before Penny.  She was so liberal even I could not always fathom it.  Sometimes this led to family quarrels, and for a time she was hardly speaking to her sister, her mother, or me.  But such things pass in time.  Our family life was not idyllic; it was real.  I learned of the handsome Jacob Sheep, with four horns, told Penny, and soon she was keeping Jacob Sheep on her farm, along with emu and other animals.  She liked animals, as I do.  Once they caught a snake going after their chicks.  They let the snake have an egg instead, and gave it a private place to rest while it digested the egg. 

Originally they had cable TV, but it seems Penny lost interest in that when they moved to a non-reception area, and they simply did not watch regular television, just occasional videos.  Their lives seemed to be full without it.  Penny was in touch by phone, email, and her Dreams and Bones blog site.

But about four years ago Penny had melanoma, skin cancer.  They thought they got it all, and she had about three years without concern, but last year it metastasized to her brain.  This, as we learn, is an all-too-familiar history.  Cancer does not die or give up, it lurks and strikes again.  She had Gamma Knife surgery, which is a non-invasive kind of focused radiation treatment, to kill the two tumors, an easy fix.  But she had a problem using her right side.  The tumors, and later their scar tissue, pressed on key nerves.  They were not, as it eventually turned out, quite dead.  Then tumors appeared in her lungs.  Surgery took those out.  But related steroid treatment, to control the inflammation, caused a horrendous weight gain because of edema.  As I understand it, edema is not the same as fat; it is the retention of water or other fluid in the cells and tissues of the body, making them swell.  She must have weighed 350 pounds, and could no longer walk.  She and her family visited us in July, two months before her death, and when I saw her I feared for her life. 

And more tumors came back to her brain.  This time she had to have brain surgery of the open-the-head kind.  They had to cut her hair short, for the first time in her life.  That seemed to be successful, though it bruised her brain, and she was beginning to recover use of her right arm and leg.  Some fragments of scar tissue remained, “dirt,” and some air when they closed her up.  She said that now she was a confirmed airhead with a dirty mind.  Her progress was not rapid, and the insurance company said it would stop paying.  This of course is the nature of insurance companies.  Penny had some problems with the rehab center; I suspect they had not heard of vegetarianism, and sick or well, Penny asserted her rights.  She called her mother and suggested that I write a Parent-to-Teacher type letter to the rehab facility.  She may have been thinking of that college food service matter.  Meanwhile her husband was changing jobs, so as to be closer, and they were preparing to move, to be closer to their daughter Logan’s school.  Logan was eight, pushing nine, an innovative girl.  Everything to facilitate Penny’s limited condition.  We supported them financially, of course.  Even with insurance, this type of illness gets expensive.

Her sister Cheryl made arrangements for a month off from work, and flew out to help Penny’s family cope for September.  We are boarding Cheryl’s Cat Stagecoach (named after the road where he was found and rescued as a kitten a decade ago) for the month, doing our part. Cheryl spent three days seeing to Logan and coordinating things.  She and Logan were visiting Penny in the rehab facility, arriving as Penny was being returned from a shower.  “Hi, Logan!” Penny said.  Then she had trouble breathing, so the visitors were ushered out while the personnel attended to that.  But it was more serious.  Penny had apparent respiratory paralysis, maybe from pressure on that nerve, and she died.  On the morning of September 3, 2009.  We were in shock.

Now Penny is a memory.  I keep encountering evidences of her presence in our lives, and choke up again.  I have a closet where I keep important papers, and mounted on the door is a wooden woodpecker who pecks the door when you pull the chain; Penny gave me that.  I was checking back correspondence and on the back of one of my penciled letters to a reader was a page of Penny’s blog, because I tend to write on used paper.  I was putting away the week’s laundry, and there was one of the Jacob Sheep T-shirts Penny had given me.  Choke.  I step outside our house, and there by the corner is the juniper tree she used as a living Christmas tree, then passed along to us, and we planted it; we all prefer not to kill trees for holidays.  And of course our lives were affected daily for a dozen years when Penny saved a puppy from being sent to SPCA and she became ours, the late Obsidian Dog.  Her room remains, unused, with her old dolls, toys, and dresses.  We donned the cancer wrist bands she sent us several years ago after her first siege: black, for melanoma.  We will wear them till we die.  It just goes on, sweet pain.  Yes, I know, other families have suffered similar losses, and I feel for them.  Now it is our turn.  What did Penny ever do to deserve this awful death?  Nothing.  I am not religious, but I can see how some can turn to religion if it offers comfort in such situations.  I will not; I prefer to suffer as I have lived, facing reality.

Penny’s blog site, which may in due course be shut down, is http://dreamsandbones.net/blog.  She and I were visiting my father, her grandfather, a decade or so back, and in the car she played a Pete Seeger tape, and we were both enchanted by the line “We are made of dreams and bones.”  I had reference to it in a GEODYSSEY novel, and she made it her web site.  I teased her endlessly about it, referring to it as Beans & Drones, Screams and Cones, whatever.  I did not mention it here on my site, because she valued her privacy.  That privacy is largely meaningless now.  She kept things positive there; we did not realize the extent of the physical and emotional pain she was in, because she did not want us to know.  Now we are learning, too late.

Oh Penny, you were my precious little girl.  I held you as a baby, I read to you as a child, I taught you to drive as a teen, I walked you down the aisle when you married.  I told you that if you had a problem you couldn’t handle, come to me, because my resources were greater than yours and I could handle it.  But I couldn’t handle this.

Oh, Penny!  We love you and grieve for you.  We always will.

*

The rest of this entry will be somewhat abbreviated, because I lack the heart for more.  Thursday, September 3, 2009 was for us a routine day.  Well, my scooter rear tire popped as I was fetching the newspapers, and I had to walk the last third of a mile home.  Then I discovered that my wife’s bike had a flat front tire, when it had been fine the day before.  Two in one day; was it an omen?  I had my usual archery session, I think scoring 2-5 right side, 1-8 left side, and spent time searching for lost arrows.  We drove to town for grocery shopping and such, and I picked up a copy of my recent bone density test, which showed improvement this past year; it’s no longer osteoporosis, but osteopenia, a lesser condition.  We returned an hour later.  We had lunch.  I tackled scooter and bike, but found that neither tire could be patched, so they were out of service.  Then I planned to read the first ten pages of a novel sent to me for comment, and after that to start writing Xanth #35, Well Tempered Clavicle.  The phone rang.  It was our younger daughter Cheryl, in Oregon for the month of September to help out while our elder Penelope got through rehabilitation after brain surgery.  And our world was abruptly preempted. Penny had just died.

It was as if there were two channels active in our minds, both constantly on.  One was Penny.  The other was everything else.  I had been taking Vitamin C to abate a toothache—yes, it worked, or seemed to, that time—and was about to ease up on it; I decided to continue, because now I was in constant stress.  I wrote an emergency supplement to my monthly Family letter, telling the wider family about Penny, and my wife emailed it out to them all.  And that day I started writing this Column entry.  What else could I do?

Life continues.  We bought puncture-proof inner tubes, tire linings to prevent punctures, and a new tire for the scooter, and I got the cycles back in working order.  I continued my exercise program, though the first time after Penny’s death, my right-bow bowstring snapped.  If that was another omen, it was too late.  I kept working on the Column, while my wife handled the myriad phone calls and emails.  We are functioning, not happily, but sufficiently.  So are John and Logan, and Cheryl is helping twice as much as she anticipated.  All we can do is carry on.

There were aftershocks that caught us imperfectly prepared.  John sent us a package with pictures they had taken, and something else: an embossing tool that we must have given to Penny before she went to college, that would imprint LIBRARY OF PENNY JACOB on a page.  She won’t be using it any more.  That broke us up.  When I was writing Xanth #35, slowly, escaping half a step from my grief, I needed a simple musical instrument for Princess Dawn to play.  I have an ocarina, so I decided on that.  And my wife reminded me that Penny had given me that ocarina.  Another aftershock.  When I use the bathroom, there on the counter is a 5.5 by 8 inch mirror with the word PENNY on it, dating from the days we labeled things so the children wouldn’t have to fight over them.  It had been left behind when Penny moved on out into college and adult life, and turned up maybe two decades later; I told her of it, but somehow the time was never right to return it, because it’s heavy and travel is better light.  Now it will never be returned, and each time I see it, comes another aftershock of remembrance.  The intricately carved-out gold plated British coin that John gave me when they married, hanging on my desk ever since: ONE PENNY.  For several days I had a mild burning in my chest, something I hadn’t felt since suffering romantic heartbreak in college.  This wasn’t romantic, but it was heartbreak.

We have had many letters from those who had known Penny, and some who planted trees in her memory, and we really appreciated their kind words.  Also many nice consolation notes from readers, each a mild aftershock, yet also much appreciated .  We also learned of her fear and depression in that last year as she fought the implacable foe.  As her husband put it, her grim dance with melanoma; move and counter-move, until at last it got her.  She had always been bright and cheerful with us, probably not wanting to burden us with her true desolation.  We were positive with her, not wanting to burden her with our misgivings.  I’m not sure how any of us could have done otherwise, yet it is a painful irony.

On September 20 was the Memorial Service, in Eugene, Oregon.  We were unable to attend; travel that far would be dangerous for my wife.  But we recorded our messages, which were played there.  We understand about 75 people attended, including many relatives and friends, and it lasted two hours, a tremendous outpouring of feeling.  They recorded it, and we will in due course listen to the whole of it.  I don’t feel free to quote other Memorial messages here, but here is mine:

Ah, Penny—you were supposed to grieve for us, not we for you.  You were our bright blond hyperactive little girl, our first surviving child after a decade of losses, so full of curiosity and mischief! In time you grew up and disappeared into an adult, becoming Penelope, but you will always be Penny to us.  We tracked you with our minds and hearts, through college, career, and marriage.  You became a parent in your own right, with a child of your own to dominate your attention, as you dominated ours. 

Now you are gone and we are desolate.  All we can say is thank you, Penny, for being in our lives, for the time you had.  We will never stop loving you.

Back to this HiPiers column, concluding this unhappy presentation.  We lost our first three children, as noted above.  Make that four.

Oh, Penny!  Oh, Penny!

*

I did the usual things in the month of SapTimber, but slower because of my distraction, and they will get less play here than normal.  I wrote the first 30,000 words of Well-Tempered Clavicle.  I did some reading.  One I finished last month, but it missed the review because my column had to go to press early.  It was Under the Blue Sun, by W R Hagen, a self published science fiction novel that deserves traditional publication.  People are disappearing on a colony planet, but there is no alarm; the authorities seem not even to be aware of it.  What’s going on?  The natives seem small and harmless, but our protagonist suspects they are not.  He’s right, with a vengeance.  It’s a good adventure.

And I read a children’s novel, Felix and the Sword of Sefu, by Catherine Mesick.  I have done a few children’s novels, and appreciate the challenge of telling an interesting story when there’s no romance, certainly no sex, and limited violence.  This one succeeds; it is well written, interesting and compelling throughout.  There are intriguing details, such as rain falling upward from the ground, frogs that breathe fire, and small clouds that float at ground level, spying on people.  Also interesting twists; I kept being surprised.  Also a dramatic story, as our twelve year old protagonist struggles to figure things out and stop a malign wizard from getting the powerful sword.  That makes it seem more standard than it is.  I was entertained, and I’m sure children would like it just as much.  I am encouraging the author to seek publication.

Will Hamlin died, age 91.  He was my guiding professor at Goddard College the last two years, 1954-56, as I labored to become a writer.  I know he did not think much of my efforts, and I don’t fault him for that; I was not close to the writer I was eventually to become.  But it was a necessary stage, and he was patient throughout.  He was also there for me when I got suspended for a week for being in the lounge with my fiancée, an issue wherein I maintain to this day I was in the right (and no one argues the case today); he was I think the only faculty member to stand openly in my corner, along with virtually all the students.  He was there for me when I needed a reference to get my American Citizenship, two years later in the US Army.  So I owe Will.  I heard later of him hitting on a coed—it seems to be the kind of thing college professors do—and I was sorry to learn of that.  So he wasn’t perfect, but a significant part of what I am today I believe I owe to him.

Mary Travers died.  She was the female singer in Peter, Paul, and Mary, with socially aware songs like “Blowing in the Wind.”  She was my wife’s age, with a truly evocative voice.  I hardly notice popular singers, but I noticed her.

William Safire died.  As a general rule I have little use for conservatives, because of the essential selfishness and dishonesty of their philosophy as it has become today, but I liked his column “On Language” when our local newspaper carried it, and leaned some things from it.  I wrote him once, and got a card response, saying in effect every person must do his part.  So I consider him a conservative who was in the process of rising above his nature.

The current political crisis is the push for health care insurance reform.  Count me among those who believe that if there is not a public option, it’s not worth having; that’s what will break the grasping companies’ hold on the system so that it’s no longer your money or your life.  Naturally the insurance industry is fighting to retain the old system and its profits, while people go bankrupt and die because of the expense of health care.  Other developed countries cover all their people better at half the cost.  However, there’s a quiet light shining.  It seems that there is a national system of Federally Qualified Health Centers that serve about 20 million people, and may soon expand to serve triple that number.  It’s not insurance, but direct health care, including dental, transportation to the centers, counseling, health care classes, and related, serving primarily low income folk in rural areas.  They charge what folk can afford, and no one is turned away.  Rich and poor, all can come and receive competent treatment.  They have essentially solved the problem of primary care for local residents in their vicinity.  So maybe if the insurance greedheads succeed in stifling the public insurance option, this endeavor will expand and skip the insurance entirely, simply providing direct medical care.  What a shining vision!

I signed up for a clinical research study.  This one is to evaluate a new investigational influenza vaccine for adults 65 and older, who normally don’t get as much protection from flu shots as younger folk do.  They actually will pay participants, but I’m doing it because flu is a serious killer, however many folk may survive it unscathed, and I’d like to see it conquered.  (And I’d reallylike to see cancer conquered, but that’s not in this study.)  So I hope my participation helps save thousands of old fogies like me.

Several months ago Yitz Aaronson sent me a link to an outfit selling “Tuffy Liners” that you put in your bicycle tires to stop punctures and flats.  I bought the same thing locally, but appreciate his reminding me.  I used similar liners decades ago, and they do work.  So now I hope to have no further flats on my scooter or recumbent bike.

Column by Walter Brasch points out what became obvious the moment he said it: the folk who scream “Socialist!!” at anything they don’t approve, such as aid for the most needy (do they have any notion what socialism is?  Here is a brief on that: it is government control of manufacture and distribution, as in England) and abhor the government’s involvement in anything—okay, they should, to be consistent, refuse to accept Social Security checks or Medicare.  When the swine flu vaccine is available, they should refuse to take it.  Thus they will remain true to their principles as they starve and expire.  I’ll be interested to see whether any actually do that.  A column by E J Dionne Jr suggests similar for the gun nuts: if they want guns to be freely available everywhere, why not let them into the court houses, Congress, the White House?  Let every legislator carry a gun, and all his constituents, mixing freely.  Guns make everyone safer, so they should not be excluded from any venue, should they?  Make the whole world absolutely safe.  Again, I’ll be interested to see if any legislators approve such freedom.  Actually, I believe there is a case to be made for arming everyone everywhere; I just don’t like the hypocrisy of advocating it while refusing to practice it.

As regular readers of this blog-column know, I am a vegetarian, because I don’t like hurting animals.  But suppose there were another source for meat, that did not involve killing or abusing animals?  Well, there may be.  They can theoretically take as little as a single cell and grow it in a laboratory into enough meat to feed the global population.  So how would I feel about eating such a steak?  This could be a test of my own principles.  I think I would worry about them sneaking in slaughtered animals under the guise of lab-grown meat.  So I would really rather have plant-grown pseudo meat.  And I think I’d be happier if it did not look or taste like killed cows or chickens.

I don’t watch a lot of sports on TV, but my wife does, and I pick it up peripherally.  There was a hard-fought match where Serena Williams was playing Kim Clijsters.  Two things about that: Clijsters was unranked and unseeded, yet she defeated both Williams sisters and all others to win the tournament.  How is it that the authorities apparently had no inkling the woman knew how to play tennis?  I thought seeding is supposed to suggest who they think is most likely to win.  Otherwise what’s the point in ranking or seeding?  I saw some of her play, and I would have known in one minute that she was one tough player.  Maybe we need new authorities who can see the obvious.  The other thing is the manner Serena lost.  It was close, and she served, and the linesman called a foot fault.  That cost her one point.  She protested, and they penalized her another point.  That cost her the match.  As far as I know they never ran that one through a replay slow-motion to see whether she was actually guilty of the foot fault.  Suppose she was not, and protested, understandably, and they were so jealous of their prerogatives that rather than admit error they washed her out of the match?  Thus matches may be decided not on the basis of the best play, but on who chooses to defend a bad call, or on the manners of those who get screwed.  Maybe I’m sensitive because I was once washed out of a Ping Pong tournament by a bad call.  In my case, I was ahead 17-14 with a likely win, when the scorekeeper got it reversed and called it 14-17, a six point difference.  That close to the end of the game I was unable to make it up, and lost.  I kept my mouth shut, a good sport, but it rankled.  If you don’t protest error, you lose.  (That relates to my attitude about publishers wronging authors.)  So I see a possible need for reforms in tennis—not just the manner it is played, but the manner it is ranked and scored.  Because I’d rather see the best player win.  Surely I’m not alone in this, authorities to the contrary notwithstanding.

Quote form a liberal column by Donald Kaul: “Maybe it is time to stop calling this collection of yahoos, mountebanks, ribbon clerks, faith healers and tinfoil collectors conservatives.  What, after all, are they trying to conserve?  Not the environment, certainly.  Not one of them sees global warming as a problem.  They have yet to see a clear-cut forest or strip mine or an oil well in the wilderness that they don’t like.  And the only endangered species they’re interested in protecting is lobbyists.”

In NEW SCIENTIST, a review of The Age of Empathy by Frans de Waal, makes the point that empathy is found in a number of animals besides humans.  It seems that cooperation, rather than nature red in tooth and claw, is far more common than we have thought.  That makes me pause, because I thought empathy was a defining characteristic of humanity.  A characteristic, certainly, but it seems not one that distinguishes us from other animals.

I surely would have had more comments on my reading.  But Penny took up much of my attention, and my reading has fallen behind.  Maybe some other month.  A recurring toothache is messing me up as I complete this, coloring my physical being somewhat as the loss of Penny colors my emotional being; I’ll be going to partial dentures in the near future, hoping that helps with that part of it.

The second month following the death of our daughter Penny from cancer was easier than the first. The sieges of helpless grief are spaced farther apart. Normal life is resuming, albeit with a certain translucent tinge or cast that deletes a portion of routine pleasures, like a flashback in a movie that is in shades of gray instead of color. We received many cards, letters, and emails of consolation, most of which we answered, all of which we appreciated. Some were from people who had suffered similar losses, of parent, spouse, or child, and truly understand. I note one especially, from Pat Lisenbee, who made a string art picture in honor of Penny. String art might sound like nothing, but that’s not the case; it consists of little pegs in a board, and the string is wound from peg to peg to form the picture. In this case, a fancy multi-lined eight pointed star set against a background of flowers, done in red, green, and white. The words are “Our flower PENELOPE CAROLYN is now a STAR in our Universe!” This is clearly hand made, representing work on Pat’s part, and beautiful. We will put it in Penny’s room, which is becoming a kind of memorial site.

I am left with a tangent thought: if this is what it is like to lose an adult child, how could any politician ever arrange to make a war of choice, that would inflict similar grief on three or four thousand otherwise innocent American families and perhaps ten times that many other families for no legitimate purpose? Should it be required, as has been suggested, that such a politician’s own children be the first to serve on the deadly front line? That the children of all who vote for that needless war be similarly drafted? That might encourage a certain worthwhile caution. I’m not sure what else would bequeath some sense of responsibility to those who evidently lack it.

I don’t have a lot to remark on this month, per that translucent cast. We saw no movies, I watched no videos. I simply kept up with letters, chores, reading, exercise, following the dull routine. What else was there to do? I am sure my enthusiasm for things will revive; it is reviving now. But as with a recession, it may take some time for the process to be complete, if it ever is. I suspect there will always be that gap, like a lost tooth, where our daughter was. 

Speaking of which: I am fed up with the ongoing carnage that is my mouth. No, I don’t mean I’ll stop saying things that enrage editors, publishers, critics, conservatives, and other ilk. I mean my fragmenting teeth. My estimate is that I may have put, in constant dollars, in the course of my life, a hundred thousand dollars into my mouth, as well as following a routine of avoiding sweets, taking calcium, magnesium, Vitamin D, not eating between meals, brushing four times a day, regular hygiene and dentist appointments, crowns, root canals (I believe I have had a dozen; I lost count) and so on, none of which seems to make a significant difference. The destruction proceeds apace, at a cost of thousands of dollars per tooth as crowns fall off, enamel shatters, and infection gets inside. Similar attention to personal care has made the rest of my body a fair model of health considering my age; my doctor always remarks on it. But not my teeth. Oh, my dentists would be happy to continue expensive maintenance indefinitely. I’m not. So finally I have made the decision I suspect I should have made thirty or forty years ago, and will go to partial dentures. I’ll have my teeth out, except for the implants and the few in good shape; in fact that will have been done OctOgre 30, and I expect to edit this column in a semi-drugged state of pain suppression. I also bought on sale from Hamilton for $24.95 the complete British Danger Mouse series, over 24 hours, which I hope will divert me from discomfort while not being a great loss if the medication interferes with my memory of it. But thereafter I will no longer be gap-toothed, and I hope I no longer have expensive mouth maintenance. We’ll see.

I read The Rooting of Evil, by Paul Melniczek, the sequel to Ogre’s Passing, which I read and enjoyed last year, published by DOUBLE DRAGON. (See my HiPiers column for Dismember 2008.) This time the horrors of the deadly lowlands follow our protagonists out into the more civilized realm, and are just as devastating. There are also developing political complications. You might think that an ancient monster thought extinct might be shy about attacking a fortified human city. You would be disabused. The tension is almost unremitting, and the novel is compelling despite the lack of romance. One scene I liked, because it faked me out, was when they succeeded in hemming in an advancing monster. It then drilled into the ground and disappeared. They dumped burning pitch in after it. Battle won? No, it turned out that the monster was merely tunneling under the town wall, and it came up inside the city while they were uselessly burning the tunnel behind it.

And I read The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block, who sent me an autographed copy saying “For Piers—Thank you for making my teenage years infinitely more tolerable! I owe Isidora to your wonderful Xanth!” Isidora is a fantasy land where the folk are happy in their forgetfulness. But this is not frivolous fantasy. It’s a story of early-onset Alzheimer’s that takes its victims out in their thirties instead of in old age. Put this near the top of ailments you don’t want to suffer: the slow but inevitable loss of your mind. But it’s not really a downbeat story; it’s interesting throughout. The author is a born writer with lovely nuances of expression. One incidental sequence shows the young protagonist being approached by a girl who inquires whether he has ever seen a vagina before. Then she shows him, and freaks him out. But his main quest is for the origin of his mother, whose mind is dissolving, and for Isidora. Finally he locates them, in a sadly satisfying denouement. This novel was an international bestseller and has five pages of plaudits by leading reviewers; I recommend it anyway.

They have discovered a vegetarian spider. No, Jumper, in Xanth #33 Jumper Cable, now out in hardcover, is not a vegetarian, though he bears a certain family resemblance. They are both jumping spiders, for one thing. This one is the first of 40,000 identified spider species to confine its diet to vegetation, a certain species of acacia. It has to fight past vicious guardian ants to get it, so there is danger in hunting for a plant. Thus life emulates fiction, perhaps, to a degree.

I still try to answer my mail responsively. That means I have different styles for different people. I had an enthusiastic letter from a ten year old girl, so I answered her questions with candor:

So you’re ten, almost eleven. I’m seventy five, but by a weird coincidence I once was your age, and later we had two daughters your age too. They both grew up and disappeared into adults. The elder one, Penny, married and had a girl of her own. Then, alas, Penny got melanoma, which is a type of cancer, and died last month, not long before her daughter turned nine. So we are very sad.

I am always having more ideas for Xanth books, and am now writing the 35th Xanth novel, Well-Tempered Clavicle, about a walking skeleton who can take off his clavicles (shoulder bones) and play music on his ribs. He plays so well that Princess Dawn, who is Dor’s granddaughter, falls in love with him. That’s a problem, because she’s really not his type. She has all that flesh on her nice bones, a real turnoff for a walking skeleton, as you might imagine. Ugh!

I probably enjoyed writing Ogre, Ogre the most, because people had accused me of being an ogre at fan conventions, when I had never even been to one (critics aren’t fastidious about the truth). So next novel I made an ogre the hero, and that novel became my first national bestseller.

I like Florida, because it’s warm. We once lived in Vermont—your mother will point it out for you on the map—and it was very pretty in the Green Mountains, but also very cold in winter, so we moved.

Draw you a bunny? I once dated a girl named Bunny in college, but that didn’t last. The next girl I married, and that has lasted 53 years so far. So instead of drawing you a bunny, I’ll do one as an emoticon. Do you know about those? You make them from punctuation and read them sideways. So here’s my bunny, with two sort of floppy ears, two dot like eyes, and a big smile. %:)

I was interviewed for a radio show. It is complicated for us to tune in on these things on slow dialup, so I haven’t heard it, but you can at http://TheAuthorHour.com/piers-anthony/.

Frustration. i was typing as usual, when my capitalization stopped working. that is, no capitalization of sentences, no “i” changed to “I.” AutoCorrect in OpenOffice is on for both, but it seems all of AutoCorrect has become inoperative. I copied the file to my backup system downstairs, and it works there, so it’s not my files; it’s this system. i wasted most of an hour fruitlessly checking everything. i must either go back and correct capitals “by hand” or waste even more time trying to fix a problem that shouldn’t exist. if there’s a geek out there who knows instantly what my problem is–I am referring to capitalization, not my personality–and can advise me by email, i will welcome his input. meanwhile, i’ll just leave it as it is. (if i have to suffer, you have to suffer.)

several months ago i saw an obit for one Corin Tellado, 81, well-known Spanish author of more than 4,000 romance novels. i once lived in Spain, but i was only five years old and Tellado would have been 12 or 13 so i wouldn’t have heard of her anyway. but as a prolific novelist myself, i have some notion what it takes, and i don’t see how any one person could write that many novels in a lifetime. if she wrote for 60 years she would have to complete more than one novel a week, unremittingly. was it a typo for 400? that would still be a formidable number. I am 75, a writaholic, yet have had only 140 books published. so far.

i look at everything that comes in. you never can tell where there will be something interesting. for example, in the newsletter FUNERAL CONSUMERS ALLIANCE, dedicated to the public’s right to choose meaningful, dignified, and affordable funerals, http://www.funerals.org, it details requirements in the Bereavement Consumers Protection Act now wending its way through Congress. give cemetery consumers the right to buy only the goods and services they want. bar cemeteries from forcing families to buy entire packages of goods or services when all they want is particular items. require cemeteries to disclose rules and regulations. require cemeteries to keep accurate records. bar cemeteries from lying about the law. now maybe I’m overly sensitive, having recently lost a family member who was cremated and wanted no funeral, but the idea of freshly grief-stricken families being lied to, denied information, and required to buy expensive packages they may neither want nor can afford appalls me. i would have thought that decent treatment would be standard practice. silly me. it seems that more than $1 billion is missing from funeral and cemetery trust funds, and that in some cases buried remains are pulled from the ground and thrown on a refuse heap. oil speculator Clayton Smart is currently in jail charged with stealing at least $70 million in cemetery trust funds. i guess he figures whatever is underground belongs to him. obviously reform is needed.

The Dish, owner-thedishlist@treet.ctinetworks.com, circulates some interesting material. this time it gives the background of Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940), a Quaker born in West Chester, PA. my family is Quaker (formally known as the Religious Society of Friends), centered around West Chester. i did not become a Quaker, but have an abiding respect for Quaker principles. among them are pacifism and opposition to war. i’m not a pacifist and I think some wars are justified, such as the one to stop the Nazis, World War Two, which is part of the reason i’m not Quaker. Butler joined the Marines, to the disapproval of his family (i was drafted into the Army, to similar disapproval; i felt my conscience would be violated less there than in prison, my alternative) and served well in and out of action; he was wounded twice and received two Medals of Honor for heroism. so he was no out-of-the loop crackpot. thus what he said about war is of lasting interest. “WAR is a racket. it always has been. it is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. it is the only one international in scope. it is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” remember what i said above about making war to no purpose? obviously there is a purpose: to make new millionaires and billionaires, as Butler said. he asked how many of those millionaires shouldered a rifle, dug trenches, went hungry, spent sleepless nights in foxholes under fire, or were wounded or killed in battle? “For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people–who do not profit.”

Column by Joe Volk, Executive Secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (a Quaker lobby in the public interest) addressed the problem of how to pay for health care: reduce the current annual military budget of $700 billion to $500 billion, and use the saved $200 billion to pay for health care for all. sure, that would mean fewer new billionaires, but many more lives saved. it works for me.

Florida State University is developing the OGZEB, Off-Grid, Zero Emissions Building. it will run on hydrogen generated by solar power; the roof is a solid array of photo-voltaic solar collectors. it will be heated by a geothermal system. more power to it!

Article in NEW SCIENTIST “How green is your pet?” suggests that the ecological pawprint of household pets rivals that of family cars, such as large dogs, because they calculate the meat the animals eat. so if you’re a pet-owning environmentalist, maybe you need to reconsider. it concludes that some pets are less worse than others. “Rabbits are good, provided you eat them.”

Why are human beings, alone of all primates, naked? our body hair is so thin it conceals almost nothing. NEW SCIENTIST addresses this chronic mystery. in my GEODYSSEY series i started with the Aquatic hypothesis, that there was a water stage in our evolution that encouraged the loss of fur and the development of subcutaneous fat to replace hair’s insulative properties. Then i switched to the Cooling hypothesis, that bare skin radiated heat and dissipated cooling sweat more efficiently, so that mankind developed the most efficient body cooling system in the animal kingdom. that enabled him to cool his burgeoning heat-producing brain, and to forage in the noonday sun in a manner no predator could. in fact i suspect he raided and stole predator carcases, covered by that heat, and thus gained concentrated food. but this NS article has a caveat: women presumably did not hunt wildebeests at noon, so why did they lose as much or more fur than the men? so it remained a mystery to NS. well, not to me. i knew that the loss of hair coincided with the increasing use of clothing, in the past million years, so that not only could man sweat to cool by day, he could pile on artificial fur by night for warmth. his burgeoning brain repaid its caloric cost by providing the wit to make and use efficient clothing. in fact clothing was so effective that it enabled him to burst out of Africa and range into the cooler rest of the world, even the chill arctic. so maybe it wasn’t heat, so much, that deleted the hair, it was cold that made clothing more useful than fur. hairlessness and clothing made man the most versatile animal yet, and it worked just as well for woman. better, in fact, because her smaller, lighter body needed more protective covering. three weeks later came reader responses to the article, and they amended this. intelligence enabled not just clothing, but also shelter and the use of fire, perhaps the greatest single factor in mankind’s control of his environment, as it also multiplied food sources via cooking. also, a letter pointed out, all hairy and feathered species spend large amounts of time grooming themselves or each other, picking out dirt, burrs, and parasites. man’s bare skin needs little such attention, so saves an enormous amount of time, which can be used for hunting, foraging, traveling, fighting, and social intercourse. such as the development of language and culture. so why are we bare? no mystery at all; it’s a significant part of our dominance of the world.

This discussion does not address other qualities of mankind, such as the ability to carry things including food and children, to make and use tools and weapons, and to coordinate hunting and foraging to make them more efficient. it doesn’t explain why women retain full breasts, or the retention of head and pubic hair. it doesn’t address one of the most truly defining aspects of our kind: Art, in the forms of painting, sculpture, music, and storytelling among others. History: our ability to learn from experience, and remember the hard lessons, so that each generation can pick up where the prior one left off. but i have addressed such things before in my fiction and columns; no need to bore readers here. i continue to find the study of man (including woman, especially when bare) fascinating. there is so vastly much more to explore. don’t get me started.

On OctOgre 30 i got the teeth extracted as mentioned above, only 5 or 6 as it turned out; they are not removing any really sound ones. i am suffering through the attendant bleeding and soft diet, but have been able to continue routine activities, with my wife’s help. Yes, now and then a spot of saliva-diluted blood does fall on the keyboard. that will pass. i hate having to curtail my exercise routine. as for Danger Mouse–he will have to wait until i complete the novel. This is Xanth #35 Well-Tempered Clavicle, about the musical walking skeleton and the princess, with #34 Knot Gneiss on deckfor publication in 2010, about Wenda Woodwife and her chore of transporting a not-at-all nice 150 pound knot of petrified reverse wood that terrifies anyone who approaches it. In SapTimber i wrote about 32,000 words of Clavicle, which is low for me; in OctOgre i wrote about 52,000, suggestive of my recovery from distraction. thus these minor mundane indications of adaptation to grief. what is there to do, except to get on with life?  my feelings won’t bring her back.

Several readers sent suggestions about fixing my capitalization problem in my last column, but none were on target. I finally managed to fix it myself by finding the “May I?” button. That’s the one that’s there solely to torpedo you when all you want to do is handle your project. I believe I have remarked before on my theory that Open Source is populated to an extent by refugees from Microsoft, who bring their bad habits with them. Such as contempt for clarity, simplicity, and user friendliness. In this case the May-I button is hidden in Formatting—AutoFormat—While Typing. Mine had gotten unchecked, and that cut out all of the AutoCorrect function. Why they don’t have the AutoCorrect turnon with the AutoCorrect address—well, as I said, they don’t seem to be interested in making it easy.

In that vein: Ed Howdershelt, who came up and got me online a couple years ago, came up again to install the current version of Ubuntu, as he had a spare disk. I used Kubuntu for a year or so, preferring the KDE environment, but was willing to try this for the sake of OpenOffice 3. Ubuntu installed, but couldn’t handle my modem. So we had to put the old Xandros back on, and it worked but all my defaults had been wiped, including my customized keyboard, and it was a hassle restoring them. Another week Ed came up again to try installing OpenOffice 3 directly on Xandros, but it wouldn’t. It turns out that you can’t get there from here; Xandros doesn’t recognize the current OpenOffice. Apparently the Xandros folk don’t much care about staying current with other open source software. This spells the likely conclusion of my association with Xandros. For too long it has teased me with its occasional shutdowns when I try to back up material, its refusal to recognize my printer directly, its turnoff of my keyboard when doing automatic backups so that I wind up with letters missing from words or commands, and its refusal to save my session setup for next time. It can do that last, as once every so often it does, but normally it doesn’t, so that I have to take ten minutes each morning setting things up “by hand.” Programs can do these things regularly, because prior programs did. I may try Ubuntu again and see if we can find a modem that will work with it. Or Kubuntu, the KDE environment variant I prefer, though when I used Kubuntu before it was incomplete in three sources we tried, as if they had never bothered to check it before distributing it. Another time he brought PCLinuxOS, that claims to be easy to install and full featured. But it wouldn’t install. No error messages, no cautions; it recognized my system, it said it was installing, but then the screen went blank and activity stopped. That’s par for this course. Another time we got a virus, so sought to install an online virus program; it said it was a 13 hour download, and it did tie up our phone line overnight. Then it said it was missing a file and wouldn’t work. They couldn’t have warned us before wasting all that time? That, too is par; it’s why we don’t much like online updating. It generally is complicated, ties up our phone for hours, and then doesn’t work. So we bought Norton at a store, and it slows down our Windows system almost as much as the virus did; we have to turn it off to get things done. Don’t get me started on why I don’t much like Norton. And yes, I feel the whole hassle should be unnecessary. An open source operating system should address an open source modem and open source word processor without hassle. I guess I am still looking for the perfect Linux distribution that actually behaves the way it should: straightforward, full featured, reliable. But as I said above, about open source programmers, who seem determined to drive users back to Microsoft…Years ago in the local Linux users group someone said he wanted a system that worked out of the box, and two others bawled him out for even wanting it. Thereafter I tuned out of that organization, as it obviously did not represent folk like me who do want hassle-free performance. Are we that rare? So it seems I won’t be able to upgrade unless I get a geek here to do it. How we miss Tim, who set up my present system years ago, before he died. If there’s a geek within range of the Citrus County area who knows how to tame the balky tiger of my system on Linux, get in touch; we might be able to do some business. And no, they don’t even offer broadband here in the hinterland; dial-up is us.

I kept writing, and finished Xanth #35 Well-Tempered Clavicle within three months, which is decent, considering my mood and the computer problems. Is the novel up to Xanthly snuff, considering the whole of it was written during my grief for the loss of my daughter? The readers will have to say, in due course. But I think it’s close. I do know how to write, critics to the contrary notwithstanding, regardless of my mood at the time. This is the story of well-tempered Picka Bone, son of the walking skeleton Marrow Bones, who winds up traveling with Princess Dawn, daughter of Prince Dolph and Electra: their fathers once traveled together. Picka learns that he can detach his shoulder bones—clavicles–and play beautiful music on his ribs. So beautiful that Dawn falls in love with him, though she is not his type; all that shapely flesh on her nice bones turns him off. The horrendous Music Monster, however, does want to marry her, and realizes that he needs to destroy Picka to make her amenable. The details get complicated as Picka reluctantly faces off musically against the Monster with Dawn as the prize. The title is a parody of Johann Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, a famous piece of piano music.

The moment I finished the Xanth novel, came the page proofs for GEODYSSEY #5 Climate of Change. I spent Thanksgiving day and weekend proofreading. This is serious historical fiction, the kind critics are careful not to read so they can continue to blame me for writing only funny fantasy. This novel follows in its fashion the fortunes of five diverse human cultures: the Xhosa of Africa, the Basques of Europe, the Alani of the near east, the aborigines of Australia, and the Maya of Central America. Prior novels in the series have gone back as far as eight million years; this one is relatively restrained, going back only 100,000 years. But it does have its points, I like to think. My interest in the real nature of our species remains, as is evident in the HiPiers columns discussions. This novel differs from the others in the series in that there are no fixed relationships, apart from the blood ties of Family; instead any of three brothers may marry one woman, and either of two woman may marry her brother. All combinations are tried, in the course of the novel, so that we see how alternate combinations work out. The fact is, just about any man can make it with just about any woman, in our species, if both care to try, and here they do. There is one other complication: some folk insist that marriage begin with rape. Others are understandably put off by this, so there’s a fair amount of sexual tension. TOR will publish it in hardcover in May 2010.

On to lesser things. I started growing out my hair when I was 70½, when my wife could no longer cut it. It is now creeping up on 5 years, and I have a foot-long ponytail, with the longest hair maybe a foot and a half. If hair grows six inches a year, why isn’t it two and a half feet long? Apparently I am up against the limit of hair follicle life. Not that I really needed to match the lovely yard-long tresses of my daughters. Penny was my vanilla haired daughter, Cheryl is my chocolate haired daughter. I’m sort of in between, a muddy mix. I use hair glop to condition my hair and keep it from tangling. I have used Alberto VO5 for years, but now am experimenting also with Brylcreem and Vitalis. (I have trouble remembering that last, and think of Velva, Vigaro, or Velveeta, which probably wouldn’t work as well.) Brylcreem works but I have to put on twice as much, and Vitalis is liquid and I have to soak it on. So I think I’ll stick with VO5. I use hair ties with marble-sized balls to tie my ponytail together; my wife call them “bobbles.”

I remain on the dread Soft Diet, following my tooth extractions, and have lost weight. But as my gums heal I am returning to a normal diet, though I have only a few teeth that can chew nuts. I look forward to getting my partial dentures, trusting that then I will be able to chew with authority.

New term, for me: cougar. Not the wild cat, but an older woman who dates younger men. The man may be in his early twenties, the woman within a decade one side or the other of 45. It seems that many young men prefer cougars, because they are experienced and interested, and don’t have issues about saving it for marriage. I suspect young women might do well to study the ways of cougars, and emulate them. But maybe it take that extra twenty years to learn. I remember the remark a man made about dating older women: “They don’t smell, they don’t tell, they don’t swell, and they’re grateful as hell.” I once remarked to an email reader who wondered why I have young pretty women in my fiction instead of more realistic ones that I’d like to write about a handsome, wealthy young man having an affair with a poor plain 50 year old woman, but there was no market for that kind of fiction. But that made it a challenge, and now just such a story leads off my Relationships 4 collection, which I will market any day now; I finished it back in July. I didn’t know about cougars then, though I had heard of MILFs = Mother In Law Figures. This woman is neither. Anyway, what mystifies me is the origin of the term: why cougar? There must be a reason.

Eye-opening figure: I heard that more soldiers today die of suicide than in combat. That means the toll is substantially worse than the statistics indicate. It’s one of these figures that are hard to accept a first blush, like the fact that more men get raped than women, because of prison.

I briefly ran out of magazines to read while ignoring TV in the evening, a rare event. Understand, these are science and social comment magazines, with content. NEW SCIENTIST, DISCOVER, SCIENCE NEWS, LIBERAL OPINION WEEK, THE WEEK, THE HUMANIST, FREE INQUIRY, US NEWS—that sort of thing, none of them frivolous. I’m a slow reader, so they tend to back up. But sometimes hitches in delivery make a gap, and for a couple of days I had none. So I checked and discovered a book I had set aside ten or fifteen years ago for just such an emergency: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes. Today’s readers may not realize just how good this comic strip was. It just might be the best ever, certainly on a par with Li’l Abner in its heyday, Pogo, or Peanuts. Calvin is a six year old brat of a boy with a stuffed tiger named Hobbes. But in his mind, Hobbes is a real tiger who can talk. Calvin is a small boy with a huge wild imagination. Can’t think why that appeals to me. So this is my book review for this month. If you never heard of Calvin, your life is incomplete.

The AARP magazine ran a feature on myths about illness. It said that taking vitamin C won’t help. Too bad; this means that AARP is buying into the myth that Vitamin C doesn’t help with a cold. I wish the authors of such articles would do their homework, rather than spreading misinformation. I’ve said it before and will repeat it here: when symptoms of a cold start, take one gram of Vitamin C per hour until the symptoms abate. Normally that will stifle that cold. Those who say otherwise simply haven’t tried it. Why suffer the miseries of the common cold when you can so readily abate them?

Item in DISCOVER: geothermal heating and cooling of homes is becoming more popular. The government is offering a 30% rebate on the purchase of geothermal heat pumps. 250 feet down, the ground is a relatively constant 50 degrees F, year round, and this is used as a source, in the manner of a refrigerator, either direction. You can save about a third of your energy cost this way.

And in NEW SCIENTIST: some folk are smarter than others, but that’s not the whole story. What counts is how you use it. High IQ us about mental power, but rational thinking is about control. One study showed no correlation between intelligence and a person’s ability to avoid some common traps. For example, if a bat and ball cost $1.10 total, and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, what does the ball cost? No, not a dime; that would be a difference of only .90. It is .05. Obvious in retrospect, but smart people miss it as often as average people do. That explains a lot. I’m no intellectual genius, but I try to use common sense, and I have seen experts muff it. For example I remarked to a space-probe engineer that a single-stage rocket would be the most efficient way to put a payload into orbit. He corrected me, saying that multiple stages are most efficient. He was wrong. One stage, in which all of the non-orbiting mass is used as fuel, has to be best. Common sense. It’s not the way we do it, for valid reasons, but it should be the ideal. A favorite of mine, in part because it caught me, was given in the book The Education of T C Mits (The Celebrated Man in the Street): one job gives a raise of $50 every 6 months, the other a raise of $200 every year. Which pays better? Would you believe, it is the first?

And in SCIENCE NEWS: they have discovered that using humor and emotion to target a reading audience is more effective than simply piling on the facts. Duh! Free-lance fiction writers have always been more skilled at getting through to readers, whether in fiction or nonfiction, because they have no captive student audience; they have to keep it interesting or they lose their readers. So they do. You thought it was coincidence that made you read this column?

I have dialogues with assorted readers about This & That that can lead to interesting bypaths. Tom Lang sent me a copy of THE TECH, which I think is an MIT newspaper. One of its articles is titled “Untangling the Traditions That Begot Early Christianity” by Roberto Perez-Franco, reviewing the book Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, by Earl Doherty. This says that Jesus was indeed neither god nor man. “He was just the mythical amalgam of several previous independent traditions and cults.” It seems there is a detailed argument whose conclusion, simply rendered, is that there was no historical Jesus. Ever. I find this interesting, as I am that anomaly who believes in Jesus but not in God. I read the applicable portions of the New Testament carefully when researching for my novel Tarot, where Jesus is a character, and concluded that they had the semblance of authenticity. That there was a person who truly tried to improve the world, and was literally crucified for it. Jesus believed in a God who did not in the end believe in Jesus. I further believe that if Jesus came again, preaching the same message, he would seek to drive out the money changers who govern the temple and would be crucified again, by rich conservative Christians who no longer honor any significant part of his thesis. But could Jesus never have existed? It seems that the research and argument in this book is persuasive. As a skeptical believer in Jesus I am shaken. I suspect it will be worse for the devoted religionists, who may seek to burn this book in their supposed defense of Jesus.

NEW SCIENTIST has an article on the resurgent Large Hadron Collider, which is now cranking up again. It seeks to verify the Higgs Boson, perhaps my favorite ghost. The result will be highly significant either way: if it finds it, or if it doesn’t. Supersymmetry (SUSY), a leading candidate for the Theory of Everything, may be on the line. Naturally America will be watching politics, celebrity scandals, and sports games, but the real significance is here. In the same issue is also a summary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a similarly telling exploration in biology that conservatives still don’t necessarily accept, 150 years later. They seem to be rather slow learners. I like to think that Jesus would have accepted it as God’s way to fine-tune life.

And a newspaper article suggests that researchers think they can turn peaceful ants into ravening killers of other ants by changing their chemical signals. I wonder whether they could use a similar technique to do the reverse with human beings, and bring peace. It’s a thought.

I remarked last time on cougars, older women who play with younger men, and MILFs, which I conjectured stands for Mother In Law Figures.  Readers corrected me and introduced me to the Urban Dictionary www.urbandictionary.com, which has such definitions.  It seems that cougars may be so named because they tend to be evasive, hiding their nature until they get a man isolated, or because they hunt and pounce.  Why they should need to evade or hunt or pounce I’m not sure; the average young man is eager to get into any well-stuffed panties he can catch, age no barrier.  And MILF stands for Mom I’d Like (to) Fuck.  Live and learn; I’m still doing both.

We finally saw a movie, the first since our daughter died.  We attended with Daughter #2 Cheryl, who I think tracks every movie ever made.  This was 2012, the date deriving from the Maya Calendar, which ends in that year.  No, the Mayas did not predict the end of the world; it was merely the completion of a long cycle that could mean anything, including destruction or a new beginning.  I have reference to their complex calendar in GEODYSSEY #5, Climate of Change, due from TOR in hardcover in Mayhem 2010.  The movie suggests that a burst of radiation from the sun heats the core of the world, and the crust starts to melt and buckle.  The crust we live on.  It’s standard formula, following a few individuals or families as they struggle to win their way to giant armored arks that can ride out the deluge when the sea heaves.  Reviews said there was not much plot, but terrific effects.  Well, there was enough story to carry it, and the effects were phenomenal, as they escape in a car with the road buckling behind them and buildings falling before them.  Then in a small airplane as the runway cracks asunder and the ground collapses.  And in a larger plane as the huge quiescent volcano that is the Yellowstone national park revives and spews fire streams into the air.  And a yet larger plane, crossing the world without quite enough fuel.  Evidently the producer lacked the imagination to get more variety of dangers, but still, the scenes are breathtaking.  Just turn off your thinking mind and go with the flow, like a roller coaster.

I read I Sing the Body Departed by J R Rain.  A man discovers he is a ghost, without quite remembering the details.  He must figure out who killed him and why, and resolve the mystery of a young boy ghost he encounters.  He can draw limited power from living people or from electric circuits so as to become faintly visible or audible or have some slight physical impact.  A lady medium can see and hear him, and some other living folk can perceive him if they try.  It’s a murder mystery with a different kind of protagonist.  I found it easy reading and interesting, if not phenomenal.  He’s afraid to move on, in part because he fears it is Hell he is destined for, and he does have some grounds for concern.  This strikes me as a reasonable explanation for the ghosts we know of.

I don’t pay a lot of attention to scandals of the moment, but do note that Tiger Woods got caught making out with what, a dozen girlfriends?  So they named him athlete of the decade.  I guess he had balls, and found holes to fill.

I read Feeling Lucky by Walter Knight.  This is a facile romp, parodying the follies of recent wars and manners.  The protagonist is a gambling addict, constantly getting into debt and trouble, and as constantly wangling his way out of both.  At one point he takes an enlistment bonus, uses it to win big money, then discovers he can’t simply repay it.  He’s stuck in the military service, fighting spider-like creatures who invaded an Earth colony planet.  He and his men go on a spider-killing spree until they get captured.  Then the spiders put him on trial, and we see things from their side: he was wantonly slaughtering spider men, women, and children.  They do have a case.  As one of his men remarks, “Think about it.  We killed over 300 spiders here today.  Big spiders, little spiders, all kinds of different spiders.  And then, we ate them.  We cooked them and we ate them.  They’re going to be real pissed off about that.”  He manages to get out of that and go after an ant empire that was going to attack the human empire.  It’s wild, improbable, but great adventure.  Its the first of a ten novel series.  www.PenumbraPublishing.com. They are listed in my Survey of electronic publishers.

I set up three main chores for Dismember 2009: spreading more gravel along our long irregular drive, reshelving and properly listing my collection of file copies of all my novels, and setting up a new operating system for my writing computer.  All were problematical in their fashions.  I have a little wagon I use for moving my archery targets and for gravel, and I used it, but a tire went flat, so next day I used the wheelbarrow.  A full load there must weigh around 300 pounds, and I was really straining to lift and push it along.  I got the job done, but then came down with hemorrhoids.  O joy.  That’s a pain in the ass, and just in time for Christmas Day.

The shelving consisted of taking down all my file copies of my own published novels in their American, British, German, Japanese etc. editions, hardcover, trade paperbacks, mass market paperbacks, several hundred copies in all.  I cleared new shelves to make space, checked the editions off on a bibliography printout, and put them back in order of publication, with series grouped.  Straightforward, I thought.  Ha.  Some copies were missing; it seemed I had never received some author copies from my foreign rights agent.  Too often publishers simply ignore contractual details like author’s copies, and the author who makes too much of an issue can get blacklisted.  I have been there, done that.  So I don’t make an issue unless they stiff me on payment, as they sometimes do.  So I have missing copies, annoyingly.  Then I reconciled the marked biblio with my Master List, which is my file recording the novels I write, where I sell them, how well they do, etc.  So if a fan asks whether there was ever a French edition of Omnivore, for example, I can look it up and say yes, in 1973, but I have no copy.  Well it had taken me about 11 hours to reshelve the books.  It took longer to reconcile the lists.  But I got it done.

And the computer.  T M and Michelle Chandrasekhar very nicely sent me disks with Ubuntu and Kubuntu 9.10, and I installed Kubuntu.  Sigh.  This is supposed to be one of the sharpest distributions of the Linux operating system, but it turned out to be a monster.  It wiped out my modem connection; I can no longer go online.  Oh, there are instructions for how to get back online.  They begin by telling me to go online and download the program I need to do it.  I kid you not; it’s Catch 22.  Apparently no one at Ubuntu ever actually tried to do it via dial-up on a new machine.  Then I could not get my keyboard.  I use the original Dvorak, but the computer folk randomly moved the punctuation around so that for example my “don’t” comes out “don;t.”  So I substitute my keyboard variant and use that.  What we do is put it in place of the Denmark keyboard, because that abbreviates Dk, which then stands for Dvorak.  But Kubuntu has hidden the keyboard files somewhere inaccessible to we can’t access them, and I am stuck using the wrong punctuation, then painstakingly correcting it “by hand,” as I did when editing this column. Obviously I won’t be typing a novel that way.  Kubuntu also has no games.  They surely existed, but again, there is no way to access them.  I like to play the card game “Grandfather” to unwind.  Now I can’t unwind, as perhaps the ire of this paragraph shows.  I have several macros I like to set up and use, such as for Date, Time, and the degree symbol.  But when I try to assign a macro to a key, such as control D for Date, Kubuntu intercepts with a message that I need Java to do that, then locks up my system including the keyboard, which I have to crash and reset to get out of.  Again, my patience with this sort of thing is limited.  Nobody in Kubuntu has tried to post a macro?  A prior edition of Kubuntu I used several years back did not have that problem: why does it suddenly need Java, and why won’t it wait for me to try to get it?  And I normally back up my material several times a day, because when I didn’t, my system crashed and cost me irreplaceable material.  But Kubuntu stopped letting me backup to my disk, claiming it was read-only.  So I went to another disk and it worked several times, then locked up similarly. I had to go to a third disk.  Then another day it started allowing me to use the first disk, a few times, before it locked up again.  But you can see how I am loath to use a program that picks and chooses when it will let me back up.  There are lesser nuisances, such as its occasional refusal to let me copy in a file to a particular directory, and its refusal to hold my defaults in the file handler Konqueror, and a very slow Open File facility in OpenOffice that I timed at two minutes and six seconds to open just one file.  There are features I like, and I think it could be a nice system.  But as it stands, it’s a nest of scorpions, not at all suitable for serious use by a non-geek.  Yes, we bought huge Ubuntu manuals; no, they didn’t help.  I expect to try Ubuntu next, to see if it has similar problems: if it does, I’ll have to return to my years-old Xandros, which at least does work, if creakily. Meanwhile I had to do the Survey update on my wife’s Windows computer.  I believe I have remarked before on the folly of Open Source driving serious users back to Microsoft.  I suspect I have fans at Microsoft who are seriously entertained observing my efforts to flee their corral.

I also wrote an erotic story, “Medusa,” 10,000 words, to donate to eXcessica, which covers its operating costs by selling anthologies of donated stories.  This publisher seems worthwhile, so I support it in this manner.  “Medusa” is the story of a member of HETA—Humans for the Ethical Treatment of Aliens—who takes a job with the space service to care for and study a captive alien (to us) creature.  She is tiger-like, and has tentacles on her head to hold what she eats, thus the nickname.  She comes to trust him, and reveals more of her nature: she is near-sapient, and she is a versatile shape-changer.  Not instant, but in the course of hours she is remarkably apt.  She assumes the form of a lovely human woman, offering him sex in exchange for his help for her to escape before she gets killed.  He sympathizes, and he knows HETA will be really interested, and she is damned tempting.  But if he enters her cage, will she instead kill him?  There is no fool like a stiff with a stiff penis.  Thus proceeds the story.

Mundane incident: we got a flat tire on our Prius, an unrepairable blowout.  I got out the manual and started in to jack up the car and replace the blown tire with the temporary spare kept under the back deck.  The job took an hour and a half, including pumping up the spare, as I felt my way through step by step, and then it was a four hour round trip to the Crystal River dealer to get a new tire and general service on the car.  Ours was not subject to the recall as it did not have the floor mat that could lock the accelerator on.  So the matter consumed much of the last Wednesday of the year.  But, surprise: everything was in order.  The tools were where the manual said they were, the jack worked, and they even had straps to fasten down the blown tire.  The temporary tire worked perfectly.  Once again, Prius showed it was crafted with the user in mind.  Maybe Toyota should set up a school for computer programmers…

Last column I remarked on the several hair conditioners I use, now that I have long locks.  Readers sent in suggestions.  I really don’t need more brands, but am willing to experiment.  So I tried Mane ‘n Tail, which is for horses and for people.  Okay, it makes for a full-bodied mass, yes, like a horse’s tail.  I prefer the more controlled look I get with VO5, but there’s a case to be made for the horsey look.  So I recommend it for filly fanciers who want to resemble their steeds, or maybe for men who want to attract horsewomen.  It’s a huge bottle that will last for a long time.  My daughter also found SMOOTH AS SILK conditioner for me, which you apply and then rinse out.  That’s even more fluffy, making me look as if I have three times as much hair as I have.  Well…

We have a Kindle Reader, and a Sony Reader.  We bought a third, the Foxit eSlick, to compare.  Well, the Kindle was easy from the start; the Sony was a struggle but finally worked.  The eSlick is a monster that we have yet to tame, complicated and balky.  So my wife reads novels on the Kindle, I read manuscripts on the Sony, and maybe eventually we’ll tame the eSlick and find out what it can do.  Meanwhile it seems that five publishing giants are banding together to develop a new electronic reader that will display color and work on a variety of devices, hoping to challenge Kindle.  Well, we’ll be interested, when.  But they had better make it easy to set up and operate.  That means they should ban computer programmers.

NEW SCIENTIST reviewed a book titled Storms of My Grandchildren: The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity by James Hansen.  The reviewer says it is the most frightening book he has read.  I can see why.  It says that our overuse of fossil fuels, combined with the brighter sunlight, will trigger a runaway greenhouse effect that will ultimately lead to the oceans boiling away.  This won’t happen in our lifetimes, but it does suggest that life on Earth as we know it will inevitably perish.  Our contemporary governments are more responsive to short term special interests than to the common good, and will not halt the deadly process: international efforts are not effective for that reason.  Unless we have a literal green revolution overthrowing the present system, and soon, we are doomed.  Okay, this could be an exaggeration, but the author’s prior predictions, such as about the rapid melting of the ice caps, are proving out, and he’s probably right this time.  We will continue in denial until it is too late.  I’m glad I am not living in my great-grandchildren’s world.

Here’s something to consider: according to the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change.  It makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined.  Driving a Prius helps (we do), but if we’re eating Big Macs (we don’t) we’re hurting the environment more.  Farmed animals produce 130 times as much waste as the human population, and it is not treated; it is sprayed into the environment.  The livestock industry  consumes 70% of the water in the American West.  If irrigation supports were removed, ground beef would cost $35 a pound.  It takes 26 calories fed to an animal to produce 1 calorie of animal flesh.  So its really a colossal waste of food.  Also, there are health advantages in vegetarian diets.  And, I add, it is no longer necessary to give up the look, feel, and taste of meat: there are vegetable substitutes that seem very similar to the originals.  So there’s really not much excuse, is there?  Vegetarianism is the wave of the future—if there is to be a livable future on this planet.

And another: a man named Stan Ovshinsky is doing something tangible to help the environment.  He developed the technology and designed the production method that made it possible to produce solar cell material “by the mile.”  In Auburn Hills north of Detroit is a plant with a machine about the length of a football field running continuously, turning out miles of thin, flexible solar energy material from which solar panels can be sliced and shaped. Affordable power from the sun: this is getting there.  The same man invented the nickel metal hydride battery that hybrid cars use, and he has a hybrid hydrogen prototype car using a safe solid-state hydrogen storage system he invented.  Now there’s a car for the future!

Item in THE WEEK: Religion today is increasingly a do-it-yourself approach.  Folk pick and choose beliefs regardless of the religions they profess to belong to.  For example, 22% of Christians believe in reincarnation, which is part of Buddhism and Hinduism, not Christianity.

According to JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why it Matters, by James W Douglass, President Kennedy was slain as a warning to future presidents and members of congress not to challenge the military-industrial complex.  Kennedy tried to thwart the efforts of top military officers who wanted to make a first nuclear strike on the Soviet union, and he withdrew defense contracts from US steel companies that reneged on their promises not to raise prices, and he made a treaty with the Soviet Union to ban atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.  But his worst sin was secretly reaching out to Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev to explore ways to make peace.  The huge profits are in war.  So Kennedy was killed.  Do I believe this?  I wouldn’t put it past the profiteers, but I don’t see evidence that they actually did it.  He was killed by a lone gunman.  I’d like to know more, in part because I have a thing about Kennedy: he was the first president I got to vote for, after achieving my US citizenship.  I think it’s a shame that he was killed.  There are ways in which President Obama reminds me of Kennedy; I hope the parallel does not extent to his assassination.

We’re on the University of Florida mailing list (not the only one we’re on, dating from the days when we had more money and donated more generously for projects we supported), so we get their slick magazine EXPLORE featuring their research.  It can be impressive.  Their research on human lice offers insight into the development of clothing.  That’s one of my interests, because I believe that clothing was integral to mankind’s development of hairlessness: as I have mentioned before, he had to have lost his fur in conjunction with the wearing of clothing.  So what does this have to do with lice?  Well, there are head lice and body/clothing lice.  The latter could not have emerged until clothing existed (duh!), so if we figure out when those lice evolved, we will know when clothing did.  And a study of the mutation rate and DNA of modern lice suggests that the two types diverged about 650,000 years ago.  The accepted figure for clothing has been 100,000 years: so much for that.  It also seems that when Neandertal man diverged from modern man, so did his body lice. Neandertal is gone, but his lice survive as a subspecies on modern man.  That indicates that the two man-types did interact socially.  Hell, they probably had sex, though they couldn’t breed, and the lice transferred when the bodies were in close contact.  The lice reveal the ancient scandal.  Somewhere the ghost of a Neandertal maiden may be blushing.

Which may relate: today’s youth fashion is Hooking Up.  That is, having casual sex without expectation of any larger commitment.  It seems that about 75% of college students hook up by their senior year, with an average number of 6.9 partners.  Six and nine tenths?  I’d be nervous about having sex with a girl who was only nine-tenths there.  But of course I’m well into old fogeydom and don’t understand contemporary ways.  Still, since Neandertals were more solid than Moderns, maybe nine tenths of one of their girls would seem to be all there anyway.  But no, I’m not actually old enough or young enough to know from personal experience.

They may be on the verge of developing an effective anti-computer-virus vaccine.  This will intercept any file or attachment that could possible hold a virus and attach a code to it that will disable any virus it contains.  It won’t need to know what virus is there; it’s a general purpose treatment that will nullify any virus.  Will it work?  I have always felt that the servers could eliminate viruses if they really wanted to.  So they may balk at this.  We’ll see.

I mentioned having a number of teeth out, to make way for partial dentures.  It turns out that the process will take months, as they do things one at a time.  I have had two root canals in supportive teeth, and one tooth has been prepared for a crown.  I am belatedly realizing that I may have blundered into the most time consuming and expensive option.  I didn’t want to sacrifice teeth that were in good order, just take out the bad ones.  My wife say I should have had them all out and gotten full dentures; it would have been faster and cheaper. Maybe so.  At any rate, now I am chewing on about four teeth, and it takes me 1.5 to 2 hours to complete supper.  Sometimes I start falling asleep before I finish.  I bite my tongue too often; it seems my tongue gets carelessly into those spaces between teeth.  So I supplement with what I call “glop”–nutritive drinks.  Publix had a half price sale on Boost, and Nutrament at a dollar a can, and their store-brand equivalent is relatively cheap, and Sam’s Club is cheaper, so we have plenty.  But I look forward to the time, still months distant, when I will have a full set of teeth again and can chew efficiently.

We had a quiet Christmas day.  Usually we have had visits and/or calls from the daughters and families, but this time one daughter is dead and the other is in Oregon helping that family.  So we were alone together.  It reminds me of the general course of our marriage, wherein for the first decade or so it was just us, as we suffered miscarriages of our first three babies.  Then we had two decades of family, until the second daughter departed for college. Then twenty years alone again, but the daughters were in constant touch.  Now it is quiet.  I think of how late in 2008 I had the devastating “Reclast Flu” a non-illness that nevertheless had me in a fever for 18 days and took me months to recover from.  But late in 2009 was worse.  My wife was on the phone, and when I came she passed me a note: PENNY DIED.  And the bottom fell out of that portion of my existence.  We are coping, but that’s a wound that will never heal completely.

Life continues.  We have assorted plants, and each has its nature and its history.  One was a Christmas Cactus whose pot I set near the back screen door until we decided where to plant it.  But when weeks later I went to pick up the pot, it fell apart.  The plant had rooted to the pavement.  So we left it there, and it has prospered.  This year I counted 115 flower buds forming, and they bloomed profusely in December.  The last one opened on Christmas day, vindicating its name.  We are boarding Chery’s cat Stagecoach, so named because she found him lost as a month-old kitten on Stagecoach Road, about a decade ago.  He has come to know and accept us, knowing that Cheryl will return in time.  And the last day of the year I repaired a blown wagon tire.  Little successes like these brighten my dull existence.  Sure, I’d love to have a blockbuster movie made from one of my novels, and become famous again for a few months, but until that happens, plants, cats, and tires are about my mundane speed.

My best to all of you for the year 2010.

We had a huge event in Citrus County Florida this month: Lucifer Hippopotamus turned 50. He’s an honorary citizen so that he can share the Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park with the native animals. He was born January 26, 1960, weighs 6,000 pounds, and is a vegetarian. What more can you ask? They made him a big birthday cake, which I think he ate in one mouthful. Who says things are dull here in the Florida hinterland?

My archery practice ranges from bad to worse. I score a plus point when I hit the one square foot center from 150 feet, and a minus point when I miss the two foot square target entirely. I have baffle targets surrounding it, as as not to lose too many arrows. These days I seldom have a positive score. The point is the challenge and exercise, not the score, but I would be satisfied to have some better scores. One thing I have found over the years is that the misses get wild in cold weather. I conjecture that the heavy clothing I wear on those days distorts my aim. Yet it seems to me that when there is a line of sight to the target, the arrow should go approximately where I aim it. It doesn’t. On cold days the arrows from the right hand bow veer wide left, and those from the left bow veer wide right. I am talking about feet, not inches; I have measured it as far as five feet from where I aimed. I hold the bow loosely to avoid twisting as I loose arrows; it doesn’t matter. So what is causing the veer? The day I wrote this paragraph the temperature outside was in the thirties, rising from the twenties. My scores were 1-8 right side, 0-11 left side, and the misses were not even close. Correcting my aim helps some; I have to aim off the target, but then the arrows either go where I aim them (about the only time), or veer so far that they still miss the target on the opposite side. I am baffled.

I finally started watching the videos I got months ago. One was The 10^th Victim, which I had read as a story back in the 1950s as I dimly recall. The 1965 movie is about a future where the ultimate hunt is of human beings. So a prominent male hunter and a prominent female huntress face off, and naturally they get romantically interested in each other. It’s okay, but the forty-odd years since the movie was made do date it, both technologically and socially. What they thought was sexy then is relatively dull today. The later Mr. and Mrs. Smith is similar in respects, and better, though surely derivative. I also watched Forbidden Planet, dating from 1956 when my fiancee (yes, I married her a few months later; and yes, it lasted) and I saw it. We were wowed. So how did it seem to me over 50 years later? Not bad, actually. Yes the special effects, then so marvelous, today are creaky, and yes, the pretty girl is mainly decorative, and background tends to be lecturesome. But what a story! The survivor of an earlier colony has discovered the remnant technology of an ancient alien civilization that grants enormous power. But a terrible monster from the id attacks. It turns out to be from the buried primitive human mind. This is what destroyed the aliens: their own primitive minds. It will similarly destroy the humans, if that technology is not destroyed first. That remains a concept to conjure with, fifty years later. Also, this movie introduced what become the Star Trek framework of a spaceship venturing to strange realms, and using beams to transport personnel. And Robbie the Robot, who was to go on to star in his own movie The Invisible Boyand a sloppy TV series. So this was a formative movie, and yes, a classic. I watched Johnny Got His Gun, said to be the most devastating anti-war movie ever made. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t available for decades. Well. I don’t see it as necessarily anti-war, but it is a cruel story. Johnny is struck by a shell on the last day of World War One, survives, but winds up as a quadruple amputee without sight or hearing, locked in his own darkness. He relives his personal history, including memories of his girlfriend, whom we see briefly bare breasted. She comes to nurse him, and manages to communicate by sketching letters on his chest, spelling out words. Thus enabled to communicate, he begs to be killed. She tries to do it, a mercy killing, but is caught and banished. He must continue living, horribly imprisoned.

We also watched a current movie, Sherlock Holmes. It certainly had action, but I had trouble following the story. For example, he’s having a drink with his girlfriend, then suddenly is tied naked on a bed, alone, and has to get out of that. Huh? But my daughter explained: girlfriend drugged his wine and played a trick on him. I just wasn’t sharp enough to follow that nuance.

And we watched Avatar. Sure, it abuses coincidence, has unrealistic huge humanoid aliens, and is really a White man Merges with Natives story. The floating mountains must have been inspired by the art work of Patrick Woodroffe, who I doubt got credited. And a fan asked me why I didn’t have a credit, because he thought it borrowed from my Cluster series, especially the last, Viscous Circle, wherein human beings occupy alien hosts and may indeed side with the natives. But the fact is that when you are in the science/fantasy genre you are inspired by a common pool of notions. Bluntly, I regard this as the best movie I’ve seen since Titanic, which I understand had the same director, so perhaps it is no coincidence. The man really does know how to make a movie, rare as that talent may be in the industry. Human adventure on an alien world, Star Wars type machinery, phenomenal effects, environmentalist theme, a central love story of human man and native womanI have written that kind myself more than once, and love it. This is my kind of junk.

I read Labyrinth of Fire by Keith Robinson. This is a sequel to the author’s Island of Fog that I liked last year, a children’s story. Okay, the protagonists are still twelve year old shape changers, but this is no pantywaist effort. It is realistic within its framework and hard-hitting physically and emotionally. The protagonist Hal can turn into a fire-breathing dragon, but he can’t fly, which puts him at a severe disadvantage. Because real dragons can fly and have taken to eating people, and it is Hal’s job to talk them out of it. Yeah, sure, like President Obama talking the Republicans out of filibustering his projects: lots of luck even if you don’t get toasted. Hal also can’t admit that maybe possibly he just might like a girl a little, Abigail; worse, she knows it. Remember, he’s twelve. I recommend this novel for adults as well as children; it’s not really juvenile. I have just one significant reservation: there are eight children, introduced in Island of Fog, and they are difficult to assimilate all at once. There should be a bookmark with them listed, or a listing of major characters and their abilities, so that the reader can get them straight without hassle. Meanwhile, try my solution: I folded the corner of page 17, where one paragraph lists each child and his/her alternate form. Then I had no trouble. And the author says he will make such a bookmark. www.UnearthlyTales.com.

I read The Ship of Ishtar by A Merritt. This is a classic, republished by PAIZO PUBLISHING as part of its PLANET STORIES series. (There’s something I like about those P names; probably because P words have appealed to me ever since I was named Piers.) I remember as a child finding a book in the library I believe by the same author, Seven Footprints to Satan. I asked my mother whether that would be good, and she said, no it wouldn’t interest me. So I know it would, and read it, and was fascinated. (Side note: I tried to look up A Merritt to verify my information, but he wasn’t listed in my references, which are fairly comprehensive. That’s weird. I guess fame really is fleeting.) I had heard of this one since way back, but never had the opportunity to read it. Ship of Ishtar was first published in 1924, a decade before my birth, in the stone age of modern fantasy fiction, and later republished with fine Virgil Finlay illustrations. Many of them feature lovely flowing-hair, bare-breasted young women. (Something I like about those, too.) This is a rollicking adventure, dated in style and mood and in references to race that might be expurgated today, but still a phenomenal story. John Kenton receives an ancient block containing a yard-long model of an oared ship. Then he gets drawn into its realm and is aboard it, participating in the action. Throughout the novel he gets involuntarily drawn back and forth between the ship and his room as the Goddess Ishtar toys with him, perhaps seeking to use him in her battle with the dark god Nergal. He falls in love with the beautiful warrior priestess Sharane, and struggles to win her love. The rest is sheer action, with a number of intriguing scenes. For example, when the dark lord sends his minions to attack the ship, the goddess responds by sending floating bubbles containing nude maidens. The warriors are quickly distracted, and the attack fails. I had some trouble getting into it, as there was a plethora of names, before it settled on the main theme, and I’m not sure the reason for protagonist’s involvement was ever clarified. There are way too many exclamation points and incomplete sentences. So it is imperfect, in my view, but yes, an early classic, and I applaud PAIZO for making it available for today’s readers. Paizo.com/planetstories.

A chore for Jamboree was to clear out the garage. There’s stuff there dating back thirty years or more, despite our having moved here only 21 years ago. Long-time married folk will understand how that can happen. For one thing, there was the smell of a dead rat, and I wanted to locate it and get it out. Well, I shaped up the garage somewhat over the course of several days and found the rat, and a chain of thought took me to a story idea: this old man is cleaning his garage, and discovers this yellow box with a pill marked EAT ME, a vial marked DRINK ME, and a notebook marked READ ME. So he does, and finds himself in Xanth, with a magic talent. And I wound up writing Chapter 1 of Xanth #36 Luck of the Draw. Now you know what it’s all about. No, I’m not writing myself into Xanth; he’s 80 and fat and has to compete for the love of 16 year old Princess Harmony. In Xanth he’s 18it was a youth potionbut my wife wouldn’t let me have the love of a teen princess, for some reason. So this is how a chore leads to writing. I’ll write the rest of the novel later in the year. I already need to revise the chapter, because of a reader suggestion.

I also wrote Rat Bait, to donate to eXcessica. I really don’t need money, and they do. Solita’s seven year old daughter Lita is afraid to spend another night in a new bed, so Solita sleeps there instead, to show her daughter there’s nothing to fear. And the incubus comes after her, forcing her into horrendous, physically impossible sex, such as plumbing her gut a foot deep with his monstrous tongue, or filling her with quarts of burning semen. Nothing shows physically; it’s all in the spirit. But it is nevertheless savage rape. So now she knows what her daughter feared. The problem is, how can she stop the incubus before he succeeds in capturing her soul and making her his sex slave forever? Well, maybe she can use spiritual rat bait, giving him something he likes but that slowly enslaves him, reversing the ploy. But that means giving him more of the sickening sex. This is about as sexually graphic a story as I’ve done. It will appear in a sexual horror anthology.

Sexual horror of another nature: in the health newsletter ALTERNATIVES I read that in one study one in four girls ages 14 to 19 are infected with a venereal disease, mostly chlamydia. Another study was of girls ages 14 to 17, with a similar figure. They start having sex between 13 and 15, and soon a quarter are infected. When they get treated, they tend to get reinfected in six months. They simply don’t take precautions, and this can have lifetime consequences. I suspect that many are denied information about sex by the Mundane Adult Conspiracy, so go on the assumption that what they don’t know won’t hurt them. Ouch! The hell with so-called morality; those girls need to be educated before they reach puberty so they can protect themselves if they want to. Just-say-no strictures simply don’t work, and it’s way past time to find something that does work. Like maybe realistic classes in sexuality, and providing anti-venereal-disease kits. In the US Army in my day sexual advice consisted essentially of Don’t do it, but when you do, use this condom and anti-VD kit. That’s practical. There should be similar classes for boys, because obviously the girls are not getting much VD from each other.

And I wrote Inversion for The Horror Zine, which solicited me for a story. This is a short story about a young man who encounters a lovely girl who says she’s an alien female doing research for a paper on the mating procedure of the human male. Well, now. But all is not quite as it seems. But it turned out to be too sexy for that market, so I wrote the science fiction Lost Things about a blind boy, a telepathic dog, and an invisible tiger. Naturally it’s not that simple. That one the editor liked. They do more than horror, so represent a market for thoughtful science fiction and fantasy too.

I finally gave up on Kubuntu, and tried its parent Ubuntu as an operating system. What do you know: this one is complete, in that it has Games and other functions. I discovered that my main objection to it, years ago, has been abated: it is no longer limited to two or four Desktops or Workplaces, but will set up any number desired. So I set it for ten, and that’s fine. It had the same balk on placing macros as Kubuntu does, but this time I tried saying Okay repeatedly, and after 15 times it let me continue the process, and I placed my macros. So that aspect is fine. The question is, how come the Ubuntu proprietors never discovered this glitch? Did they never try to place a macro? Did no one in their community ever try it, and advise them of the problem? Well, at least I found the solution: 15 okays in succession, per placement. Thereafter a reader, Scott M Stelle, advised me of a way to fix that: essentially it is to go to Tools Options, turn on Quickstarter, and turn off the Java requirement. But when I did that, it demanded at the macro outset that I turn Java back on, 15 times before it gave up. So the glitch remains. It doesn’t need Java, but thinks it does, and still needs fixing. Ubuntu does back up material without balking, and generally functions well. It does have problems, however. I can’t get my variant Dvor疚 keyboard on it, so am for now settling for their Dvor疚 despite 35 years touch typing on mine, but it doesn’t like to let me have it. It says it’s my default, but it lies. I have to reset, change it from indicated Dvor疚 to indicated standard, then change it back to Dvor疚. That gets its attention and it lets me have it. Again, doesn’t any programmer actually try that feature? Even their Dvor疚 is much better than QWERTY. Ubuntu lacks some KDE features I like, such as the Move File and Move Paragraph commands, and Kubuntu gives me size and date specifics on the files I back up, in contrast to Ubuntu’s just saying there’s a file there. I like to know the size and dates of the files I replace, because sometimes one isn’t exactly what you assume. When I check statistics it may show it in the wrong workplace, or simply hide it; I have to move to a different file window, then back to get it to show. No one at Ubuntu ever tried to find the wordage of a document? What are they doing in these regular six month updates, playing tiddlywinks? Once when I cranked up it lost the mouse cursor, and that is used for so much, like changing keyboards, that it made it nonfunctional. Why don’t I go to the Ubuntu web site and advise them of the problems they evidently don’t know about? Because of another problem: I can’t get it to go online; it doesn’t recognize my modems. That’s another thing than should be corrected. My prior modem worked fine with Xandros: how come Ubuntu never heard of it? But it does have nice features, such as a better presentation of OpenOffice 3. Kubuntu has OO3, but its language, page number, sizing and similar indicators fade out and reappear only randomly, which is aggravating as hell. Ubuntu’s OO3 keeps them visible and useful. Meanwhile it is nice having the games back, though it doesn’t have the variant of Scorpion I like, or Grandfather. So I checked through and discovered Gypsy. I won the first game, lost 26 in a row, then won two. Why am I choosy about card games? Because I like to relax with them to relieve tension, and require the right degree of playability. Klondike is 99% luck; Free Cell is mind-bendingly devious. Gypsy is playable, with luck and skill interacting nicely. I have my foibles, such as when there’s a choice of cards to turn over I always wonder about the one not turned, which might have been the one that would lead to a won game. Gypsy allows me to undo recent moves and try the alternate routes, picking the best one. I love that. Yes, the odds of winning seem to be about one in ten, but at least I get to try my utmost without straining my brain. So Ubuntu has its points, and I’m using it, for now. But like Miss Universe with hairy warts on her nose, I feel there could readily be improvements.

But you know, the Empire may strike back. Last column I remarked on how I might have fans at Microsoft being amused by my efforts to escape them. Sure enough, I heard from one. He described a keyboard layout revision program they have that sound like the old SmartKey I used in the stone age of personal computers, in the 1980s. It enabled me to redefine any and all keys, and I loved it. So if it comes to choice between my keyboard or Open Source, that will be difficult. I want to take our new Windows system online and check it out. If we could get it to go online. Apparently nobody who is anybody uses dial-up any more. So why do we? Because they don’t offer broadband here. In our area, yes: they send us ads for it. But not for our house in the forest. Maybe they caught on to who I am, penetrating my mundane identity that masks my Piers Anthony identity, and are trying to suppress me. Maybe they just like to see me rant.

We had cold weather. Yes, of course it’s winter. But this is Florida; we don’t know what frozen water looks or feels like, outside the freezer. It certainly doesn’t belong on the ground and trees. We had sleet collected on surfaces, and it took several days to melt. I keep informal records, and the first two weeks of Jamboree were a record for our tree farm, considering depth and duration. Our lowest low was 19°F, bracketed by four other days in the 20s. Our record low, set in 1989, was 16°, but that was only a two day plunge. This one took out all our cultivated plants and some of our daughter’s plants she had brought for us to safeguard. Sigh; I misjudged the necessary precautions.

Incidental musing: when we grocery shop I notice what I call shopping cart diplomacy. If we see a cart left near where we park, we take it and use it. If someone is just finishing with one, we’ll take it, saving them the trouble of pushing it back to store or cart parking site. No one fights over cart possession; it’s to each according to his need. All is amicable. How nice it would be if international diplomacy were similar. If people could simply take what they need, without greed, and help others get what they need without jealousy.

Item from THE WEEK: a man has invented Roxxxy, a female sex robot who can speak simple sentences. I presume she never says no. I’ve had lady robots, such as Sheen (for Machine) in my Adept series and elsewhere, most recently in ChroMagic with Shee. They of course have all the good aspects of living women, such as nice breasts, and none of the bad ones, like fits of temper. And yes, I’ve had male robots too, that please women for similar reasons. Roxxxy costs $7,000: maybe when the price comes down a bit, like to $99, I’ll be interested. Meanwhile Natalie Leotta told me of another effort in Mundania to catch up to my fiction, this time Under a Velvet Cloak, where I have a one inch cube that projects a keyboard and screen and makes a usable computer. This one is Light Touch, which projects a usable keyboard on any flat surface. Mundania is trying, but I think I’m still ahead.

Newspaper article: people speak of falling in love, but love is better when it’s built deliberately. Find the ideal partner, then participate in joint activities that are conducive to the development of love. Makes sense to me. When I was in college I did look at relationships with my eyes open. I believed that if a relationship would work without love, than it was more likely to last with love. It did work for me. One of my story ideas is to have an ideal couple, maybe selected by parents, that does not want to love, and see how long the non-love lasts. Maybe some day I’ll write it.

Another article about obesity says that experiments with monkeys showed that when the diet was controlled, none got fat, but when they were allowed to eat freely, some got fat and some didn’t. So if genetics keeps you thin, fine, but if it doesn’t, strict calorie control will work. In my family, my parents both got fat in the end, while my sister and I remain lean. Both of us watch what we eat, and exercise, so it seems to be discipline rather than genetics that accounts for us. My daughters did put on weight. Do I have discipline? Oh, yes; a writer needs it; it is as important as talent and luck. Anyway, I appreciate a comment Dear Abby made: …food banks are struggling and American children depend on school nutrition programs for survival, while audiences view eating contests as entertainment. And that’s more obscene than any X-rated movie will ever be… Amen. US NEWS & WORLD REPORT says that one danger is high-fructose corn syrup. A decades-long, 88,000 woman Nurse’s Health Study found that drinking one 12 ounce can of regular soda (containing High-Fructose) daily boosts a woman’s risk of later having a heart attack by 24%; two or more sodas a day raise that to 35%. I had a letter from a fan thanking me for calling attention to this common but deadly food additive; she eliminated it and her health improved. It is of course to my interest to safeguard my readers. It is appearing in yogurt, bread, everything; you need to read the ingredients to catch it. But if that effort spares you a later heart attack…

Maybe related: NEW SCIENTIST had a brief interview with the author of Catching Fire: How cooking made us human. He says our gut is about 60% of the volume it would have to be if we did not eat cooked foods. Adaptation to cooking seems to have occurred 1.9 million years ago, and that marks our divergence from the apes. We saved digestive energy and expanded our brain. It seems to have been a good investment.

That Burj Khalifa building in Dubai is 2,717 feet tall. Compare the Empire State Building at 1,455 feet. The Burj is magnificent. Whether it is a sensible investment for a financially troubled state I am not sure. Someone might fly an airplane into it.

THE HIGHTOWER LOWDOWN had a discussion making the case that ACORN’s real crime is that it empowers the poor. That’s why the fat-cat special interests targeted it. They tried that pimp and whore ploy on several offices. The staff in Philadelphia and Sandy Ego called the cops on them. In Baltimore they played along but took no action. The original tape was doctored. You know, like substituting a different question for the one answered. You can screw anyone that way. Is your name John Q Public? Yes. Then substitute Do you fornicate with pigs? and play that instead of the original, with the same answer. You think they didn’t do that? They refuse to make the full original video available for verification.

The Large Hadron Collider is revving up. The hope is that, apart from my pet the Higgs boson, it will spot the neutralino and solve the mystery of Dark Matter. Stay tuned; I am fascinated by the search, and will keep you informed. (Would appreciation of Science, Magic, and the Liberal Outlook collapse if not for my Columns? Well…)

Here’s a shocker: an organization called GiveWell analyzed leading charities, rating them in four areas: do they have their intended effect, are they cost effective, are they scalablethat is, can do equivalently more with more donationsand are they transparent/accountable, so anyone can see how they handle their money. GiveWell gave its top rating to just four charities: VillageReach, StopTB Partnership, Nurse-Family Partnership, and KIPP, which supports education programs in the US. Never heard of them? Neither had I. So what of the well known ones, like UNICEF, Oxfam, Red Cross, Planned Parenthood, and Christian Children’s Fund? They essentially flunked. So when you donate…

Fox had terrific promotion for their new adventure series Human Target. We watched it. It’s okay, not phenomenal, but fun watching. A full page add showed the hero clinging to a rope ladder dangling from a helicopter on fire while the derriere of a young woman scrambles inside. We didn’t see that scene. I’d have liked to see more of that lady’s bottom. Ah, well.

NEW SCIENTIST article on Consciousness not yet explained. I’m a fan of consciousness. The big three questions I’d like to have answers to before I die are why does anything exist instead of nothing, how did life come about, and the secret of consciousness. I think that it must be a kind of feedback circuit that, once fathomed, could be duplicated in a machine. Yes, robot consciousness, including subjectivity and feeling, like the machines in my fiction. But this article argues persuasively that we are unlikely to be able to define consciousness physiologically. It would be like calling love the interaction of glands, missing the essence. Maybe so, but I hope we can find a way to duplicate it outside of a brain.

Some conservative congressmen don’t like the new whole-body imaging devices coming to airports. You don’t have to look at my wife and 8 year old daughter naked to secure an airplane, Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz says. Ah, argues liberal columnist Froma Harrop, but we do. People are sneaking explosives aboard in their underwear. What good is privacy, if it enables terrorists to blow up planes? Harrop concludes: Let’s set aside flights without such security procedures for them. We who submit will feel safeand they will take their chances. In all fairness, their 8-year-old daughters should be allowed to fly with us. Andthat might have the advantage that the idiot prudes would get themselves blown up on their unsafe flights, making way for more sensible congressmen. Unfortunately it’s not that simple; terrorists are now planning to hide explosives in body cavities. Would the machine know whether it was shit in there, or plastic explosive? I would guess that some terrorists will swallow balloons-full of explosives. We’ll need more than virtual nudity to stop that.

J D Salinger died, age 91. He was the author of Catcher in the Rye, the story of a teen rebel. I read it as a teen, as I recall, and found it effective. One thing I remember, over 50 years later, is how the censors protested the words Fuck You therein. Yes, the words were there. The protagonist saw them scrawled on a library step, so he labored to scrub them off, disgusted. If the censors had bothered to read the book before screaming, maybe they would have let it be. But censors do tend to be ignorant nuts. Like the trick definition: ignoranus = ignorant asshole.

NEW SCIENTIST ran a picture of EB, thought to be the most beautiful structure in mathematics. Well, I’d argue in favor of the Mandlebrot set, but certainly EB is one phenomenal picture, like a giant iris. As I have mentioned before, my future in higher math was stifled by ignorant high school language requirements, but I retain a certain distant appreciation.

And one more NEW SCIENTIST article. I do read other magazines, but it’s my favorite. This one’s on emotions. It seems that the standard set consists of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Surprise, and Disgust. Now they are finding others, like Elevation, Interest, Gratitude, Pride, and Confusion. Interesting. Love and Hate are not emotions? Maybe they are conditions.

Newspaper: They want to exhume Leonardo da Vinci’s body to solve a mystery about the Mona Lisa painting. Huh? But it turns out that it does make sense. The suspicion is that he was a closet homosexual, and he painted himself as a woman with a secret smile. A study of the bones of his head could show whether they match the features of the painting. What a joke on posterity!

I try not to belabor my daughter’s death unduly here, but it does remain on my mind. Maybe this will be the last mention. I was pondering, trying to decide after the fact what might have been Penny’s happiest and saddest days. I could well be mistaken. She had her strong points and her weak points, and no one really knows the heart of another person. She said the happiest was when she got her horse, Sky Blue. Penny was then 10, and Blue was 15. I liked to say that Blue’s business was raising preteen girls to teendom; she had done the same for her prior owner. I suspect another would be the day Penny got married in 1995. She organized it herself, a pagan wedding in her back yard. I escorted her to the tree, and suddenly she dissolved into tears. Of joy, I think. A third might have been when she birthed her daughter, our granddaughter, whom she nursed for more than three years. The saddest? I remember when the stray cat we adapted, Pandora II, turned out to be the perfect house cat. But she went out one evening and got run over. I had to tell Penny, then about age 6, and that was one of the awfullest scenes of my life. That first grief of death of a loved onehow do you ease a child through that? Then there was the loss of her garden, several years later. A neighbor had carelessly left the gate open, and the horse got in and ate it down. Couldn’t blame the horse for doing what horses do. Penny spent something like three hours tearfully hoeing the ground clear to set up for another garden, working out her emotion, but it was fall and it simply couldn’t be done. I hated that too. And I suspect a third was the discovery that her melanoma, supposedly cut out of her shoulder, had returned, metastasizing in force, a likely death sentence.

But let me conclude with a less ugly memory. Once when Penny was about twelve, she wanted to stay up late on a weekend night to watch a horror movie on TV. I explained to her that I was concerned that it would really scare her, but I let her choose. She watched it. Next day she said Daddy, next time I want to watch a scary movie, don’t let me.

I am participating in a flu survey. It’s a double blind one, with two thirds of the participants getting a double dose of regular flu vaccine and one third a single dose, to see whether retirement-age fogies like me do better on the heavier doses. It started in SapTimber, and for four months I sailed through without symptoms of anything. Then my wife came down with a bad cold that gave her a 100° fever and constricted her breathing to the point that we made a trip to the hospital emergency room. At our age even a bad cold can be a serious matter. They said something is going around. So she coped by staying home and downstairs, lacking the energy to get upstairs, while I ran the household. After a week I came down with it, with a fever of 100.1°, runny nose, coughing, but I think not as bad, because I continued functioning normally. So I called it in to the flue survey folk, because they need to check out anything that might possibly be the flu. They had me come in for a sputum check, which meant a prod up my noseouch!and checked my temperature, which was normal. The rest of the day, before and after, it was just over 99° That figures. No, I didn’t rest; I had chores to do, especially while my wife was worse off than I was. I eased up on my exercise routine, though. So how come I got a cold, when I uses Vitamin C to stop colds? Because for me it works on cold colds, but not on hot ones; if there’s a fever, I’m stuck for it. It’s the only cold I’ve gotten in years.

I read Scaring the Crows, by Gregory Miller, one of my readers who became a writer himself. This is a collection of 21 spooky stories. Many are finely characterized slice-of-life efforts, which is not my genre, but some aren’t. My favorite is Arachno, about an old woman in a mental hospital who thinks she’s a spider. She eats bugs and spins a nest from yarn. At the end, sure enough, she stings, binds, and will eat the attendants. Another is Wolf Stone, wherein a young man sees a two century old picture of a lovely young woman and is so taken with her that he digs up her grave. He shouldn’t have; she is undead, a vampire or werewolf, and he is doomed. In the title story a woman who fears all men is stalked by a male scarecrow; each day he is closer to her house, until finally he is inside. She can’t complain because the authorities are men. So while this volume is not entirely to my taste, it does have its points. The stories are well written, with a fine sense of detail character and mood; you really get to know the people therein. The author was mentored by Ray Bradbury, so if you are a Bradbury fan, you may relate well to this.

I watched another of my videos, encouraged in part by my fever. This one was Logan’s Run, a 1976 science fiction movie I thought I had seen, but must not have, because I remembered none of it. I got it party because of the name, matching that of Granddaughter Logan; I thought she might like seeing it. But she watches nothing scary or violent, perhaps because of her mother’s caution; remember that scary movie incident last column? I don’t think it’s that bad, but I’m not a half-orphaned nine year old girl. Of course she’s in Oregon, and we’re in Florida, so chances of watching it with her are reasonably remote. Ah, well. It set in the 23^rd century, where humanity lives in a single dome city which nobody leaves, supported by machines. No one lives beyond age 30; when a person reaches that age, he/she has just one option: enter the Carrousel which is really a hunt game, with sandmen pursuing and shooting them. Except that some few may escape. Our protagonist is recruited to search out the perhaps mythical Sanctuary so they can destroy it. He asks a girl to help, because she wears an ankh, a symbol of it. She doesn’t trust him, with good reason, but by the time they make it out of the dome they are in love. There’s even a few seconds of nudity when they have to scramble out of freezing soaking clothes: I go for that sort of thing. They discover that hardly anyone lives outside, but the air is breathable; it is possible to survive there, with no age limit. They return to tell the others, but the machines won’t allow it, of course. It’s a good adventure, more of my kind of junk.

I also watched A Bridge Too Far, a World War Two movie, a good one, but at the time I was so focused on trying to get my computer keyboard (more on that in a moment) that I did not gave it proper attention. It did strike me as a quality movie about a world War Two mess-up, and it showed the enemy forces reasonably. So I can recommend it to those who are not distracted at the moment.

Literary pirating is a constant problem, especially via the Internet. It cheats authors and publishers, as these leeches steal and sell their books with nothing paid to the owners. I once had a fan letter from a reader who had enjoyed many of my books, but was slightly embarrassed that he had paid for none of them. I support libraries, which make literature accessible to all, and the Library of Congress’ free recordings for the blind and disabled. I don’t have to make money from everything. But piracy is not the same; it is simply theft, with the thieves making money they don’t deserve. Here is the letter I sent to the eBay VERO address, by fax as they require, self explanatory, with specific addresses deleted for this reprise:

Dear eBay:

I am the Intellectual Property Rights holder of more than 140 published books, many of which are frequently pirated as ebooks or audio on eBay. Evan Filipek has complained several times on my behalf, as he is authorized to do. My literary agent Joel Gotler has complained. And I believe I have done so directly. My concern is not that you are unresponsive, but that you have put in place a mechanism that serves my need, and surely the need of other victims of piracy, poorly. In fact it may even make it more difficult for me to protest piracy on eBay than it is for the pirates to steal my books. I doubt that this can be your intention.

Here is the situation: a pirate offering of many titles will appear on eBay and run for a few hours, garnering what illicit sales it can. Naturally the pirate dos not inform me. By the time I become aware of it, the offering is likely to be gone, and I am left without recourse. Yes, you will shut down the offering when notified—but another with a different designation will appear, and the process must begin again. As long as you require individual notice from me personally about each instance of piracy, your service is essentially useless to me.

Here is what I suggest, if you wish to get serious about piracy. Designate certain chronic targets for piracy—I can hardly be the only one—as off limits for eBay marketing, unless the marketers have documentable approval from the representatives of the rights holders. That should effectively stifle the piracy without further hassle. Does this make sense to you?

I regard this as a reasonable suggestion, politely expressed. I received no response. In fact they continued to claim that they had never heard from me, and used that as a reason not to act. So two weeks later I sent another letter, this time to their email address.

To the eBay VERO program:

I faxed you a letter dated February 3, 2010 about the frequent pirating of my books on eBay. You did not acknowledge, and it seems that you continue to say you have no record of my ever contacting you. Your lack of response was similar when I faxed you in 2008. I am reluctant to believe that you insist on faxing when you do not acknowledge faxing. So, assuming that my prior letter did not get through to you, I am attaching a copy with this letter.

If you do not acknowledge this letter, it will leave the impression that you are not really interested in stopping piracy via eBay.

This time they did respond, since I had forced the issue, with a form letter describing their VERO program. Yes, the one that doesn’t work for me or any of the bestselling authors, for the reason I explained. My free translation of their attitude with the polite euphemisms deleted: “Forget it, buster; we know our way doesn’t work, but we are not interested in actually stopping piracy, from which we make money indirectly. We prefer to continue pretending that we are addressing the problem, without actually doing so. Get lost.” So I consulted a lawyer, but he said the pirates fade in and out, and by the time a lawsuit got going, the pirates would have shifted venues and there’d be no remaining case. Like the recipe for rabbit stew: first catch your rabbit. I see it as similar to the problem of stopping the pirates who capture and hold ships for ransom in the Indian Ocean: by the time the authorities get there it’s usually too late, by no coincidence; they have found haven in a lawless nation. Trying to nail eBay for knowingly facilitating piracy would be a tricky case to make, as it speaks to motive, an extremely slippery slope. Remember the phenomenal struggle Harlan Ellison had nabbing AOL about piracy? The legal action taken by the music industry to try to stop the pirating of songs? Even victory in the courts did not, it seems, really stop the thefts, and the music industry suffered grievously. So it seems the pirates can get away with it, and eBay can get away with enabling them, in this tacit collusion, and that’s why eBay is not serious about stopping it. Why should they put themselves out when it’s only authors, publishers, and legitimate booksellers getting ripped off, not eBay itself? It’s easier to keep talking the talk without walking the walk.

Not perfectly related, but perhaps in a similar bailiwick: publisher Macmillan, which is by a chain of acquisitions now my publisher, has taken on Amazon about the latter’s selling the electronic editions of their novels for $9.99. I have remarked before how Amazon runs small publishers through the grinder, cutting their margins to the point where they risk operating at a loss, and many simply have to stop selling via Amazon. Macmillan, facing similar numbers, is not small; it’s one of the largest publishing complexes extant. So when Amazon pulled its stunt of removing the buy-buttons from Macmillan books, as it has done before with others, Macmillan pushed back. And what do you know: Amazon discovered it couldn’t bully a bigger boy. It is in the process of yielding on the pricing of Macmillan books. The Author’s Guild has been watching this, and launched WhoMovedMyBuy Button.com to enable authors to track Amazon’s removal of the buy buttons on their books. It seems that Amazon, like pirates, does not necessarily notify those harmed by its actions. Author’s Guild expects to monitor Amazon for years to come. Amazon is not a pirate, but some of its activities emit a similar smell.

In Jamboree I gave up on Kubuntu, which was a disaster, and installed its parent Ubuntu. It has flaws, but overall is viable. But it wouldn’t let me have my keyboard. Then in FeBlueberry Jeff Yu wrote me, saying the process is simple. He spelled it out. It’s a matter of going to a terminal, typing xmodmap to get my system’s key assignments, then making a small file to list the changes I want. Naturally for me it was not that simple. I was in their Dvorak layout, but what it showed me was the standard American QWERTY layout. So I reinstalled Ubuntu, losing all my defaults, but getting Dvorak set as the default layout. Then it did give me that, and I made the modification file–and lost it because I didn’t know how to save it. Jeff advised me on that, I tried again, and this time it worked. Thanks to him, I have my keyboard back, and at this point I expect to stay with Ubuntu. Placing macros is a pain—I hope they get around to fixing that process some year—but once I place them I don’t need to do it again. Not having information on the specifications of a file I am replacing when I back up is another pain, because sometimes you don’t have the files you think you have, but I try to make sure I’m doing it right. Its balkiness in pasting files where I want them can be annoying; if I’m not careful I wind up with files scattered around my system like gobs of blood spattered about the body instead of where it belongs. So there are assorted little things that they really should have fixed long ago. But overall it’s a good distribution, and I’m glad to have my card games back. Now if I can just somehow manage to get it to go online via dialup…

I read Robots Have No Tails by Henry Kuttner. This is another in the PLANET STORIES series PAIZO is republishing, a service to the history of the genre. I remembered reading those stories in ASTOUNDING SF long ago, about Gallegher, an inventor who is a genius when drunk, but can’t remember what he did after he sobers up. As it turned out, I remembered only one, the last of five, which makes sense since it was the only one published after I started reading the magazine. So how did I like the full collection? Actually I was not nearly as impressed at age 75 as I was at age 14. Fancy that. The stories are fun, but not really well organized and sometimes there are loose ends. For example in one Gallegher invents a machine that eats dirt, and wonders where all that dirt goes. I don’t believe that is ever explained. So it was nice to catch up on this, but I’d call it a passing diversion rather than great literature.

At our age—my wife and I are septuagenarians, which means in English that we in our 70s—what passes for adventure can consist of things real folk would hardly notice. My wife flushed a toilet, and it overflowed. In fact it backed up, flooding the shower stall as well as the floor. I got going with the plunger, but the blockage was as firm as a venue for piracy. It wasn’t just that toilet; none of the house drains would drain. We had a problem, being unable to flush toilets, wash dishes, or do laundry. Naturally it happened on a Friday evening. That freaked out my wife; women care about such things. So we spent the night in a local hotel. This led to a juxtaposition of rather different moods. You see, for me a night in a hotel with my wife is a romantic occasion. For her it was a damned inconvenience. So while I was waxing amorous, she was fretting about clogging toilets. I suspect this is typical of marriages; men and women have different priorities. We did get to watch the Olympics opening show, and have a nice buffet style breakfast in the morning, which I didn’t have to make. Then we returned home and called the plumber, and he came over and established that roots were clogging the septic tank and access thereto. We do live in a forest with real live trees and vines. In due course, and a healthy bill, it was fixed. Our adventure of the month. Or, in summary: love and the septic tank.

I’ve been on a virtual soft diet for several months, as my progress toward dentures proceeds glacially. I do eat solid foods, but I have only about five chewing teeth, and eating supper can take me up to two hours. So I supplement a lot with glop—that is, balanced nutritional drink, and that’s fine. But I have lost weight. Couple years back I weighed about 150 pounds nude in the morning. A paunch was starting, so I decided to drop five pounds, to 145. I did, but then came the dentistry, and now it’s about 140. I’m getting too lean, but I figure that will change once I finally at last eventually get those teeth in a few more months. Meanwhile there’s a problem: my trousers don’t stay up. I have things like a glasses case and cell phone hooked to them, weighing them down. I have to keep tightening my belt, but that gets uncomfortable and my pants still drop. So I have moved into suspenders. They work, though my shoulders feel the weight. But there are side effects. For example, when I have to poop it can be on short notice. At my age a successful poop can be an accomplishment, and I take it when I can get it. So I hurry to the bathroom—and can’t drop my pants, because of the suspenders. I have to remove a heavy shirt or two, or a jacket, this being winter, and put them back on when I’m done. So it becomes more complicated than just doing it. I’ll be glad when summer comes and I can wear shorts again, no suspenders.

Much of my present life consists of minutia, which I’m sure is typical. I’m a artist at heart; I took art classes four years in high school and two years in college before concluding that I would not be able to make it commercially as a painter, and abruptly switched to writing. In long retrospect I think that was a good decision, and writing has been my fulfillment in ways I doubt painting could have been, regardless of my level of ability or recompense. Actually I regard fiction writing as a form of storytelling, and as an art. But still my sense of esthetics shows in assorted little ways. When I tie my hair back in a ponytail I like to match the color of the tie—my wife calls them bobbles—to the color of my shirt. When I hang up towels I fold them so the tag is neatly in back and the fold is to the left, a pleasing display. When I take stamps from a 20 stamp sheet to amend the postage on letters, I take them in patterns, forming Xs or crosses or alternating spaces. When I type the address on a letter I like the length of the lines to be reasonably even, so I will spell out “avenue” or similar if that accomplishes that. I like things to be esthetic, though I know no one else will notice, or care if they do. It’s the way I am. My wife calls it compulsive. I call it artistic.

Last year I had a bone mass measurement, as hypothyroidism, which I have, can lead to loss of bone density and eventually to fractures or broken bones. It turned out that my bones were indeed eroding, and I had the expensive osteoporosis treatment Reclast, whose side effects wiped me out and put me in a fever for 18 days. I did not want a repeat treatment despite the assurance that “some flu-like symptoms” would not repeat. I took extra calcium, magnesium, strontium, and of course plenty of Vitamin D via pill and sunshine. I even added butter to my diet, because of a report that that helps. After a year I requested another bone density test, to see if the medication and my efforts had turned the corner. It turned out they had; I now have osteopenia rather than osteoporosis. Fine. But Medicare decided not to pay for the test. It would have paid for a far more expensive unnecessary Reclast repeat treatment, and it would have paid for the bone density test if a different specialty of doctor had asked for it, but it would not pay for mine. Okay, my attitude has always been that if the government doesn’t pay for a test I want, I will pay for it myself. But they won’t let me. Instead they are stiffing the lab that made the test. We went in and talked to the lab folk, and they said we couldn’t pay for it without horrendous complications for them; they would simply have to take the loss. That bothers me.

Once I had my keyboard, I went to work on a novel. For one thing, I have to work on a real project in order to fathom all the nuances of a computer program. There are countless little things I do when writing that don’t come up at other times, like copying revisions to a printout file or assembling chapters into a novel file. So I resumed work on my horror novel The Sopaths. I conceived this back around 1980 or earlier—the first related note in my Idea File is undated, which means it’s old—and collected a huge folder of newspaper clippings from 1980 on, relating to man’s inhumanity to man. Eventually I stopped, because the awful items just kept coming. But I didn’t write the novel, because it was simply too horrible to write, let alone publish. The essence is simple: there are a limited number of human souls available, about six billion, and when the global population exceeds that number, babies start being born without souls. They look just like regular babies, but without souls they have no conscience or capacity to develop one. So as they grow and achieve increasing independence, their totally unscrupulous nature becomes apparent. They are utterly sociopathic. Hence the contraction to sopath. If a three year old sopath sees a two year old child eating candy, the sopath will take the candy for himself. If he gets punished for that, next time he will make sure the smaller child doesn’t tell by clubbing him to death, then eating the candy with no remorse. If he gets punished for that, he will watch for his chance, then kill the parent. He does have desires and feelings, just not decency. There simply are no moral limits, only practical ones. Picture a politician, if that helps convey the concept. There is no physical way to distinguish a sopath from a normal person; a soul can’t be measured. The older the sopath gets, the more deviously dangerous he becomes. In time civilization itself will be threatened, as the number of sopaths rivals the number of souled folk. Unless action is taken. That’s where the story comes in, as a man whose family is wiped out by its sopath member, before he kills it, gets together with a woman in a similar situation, and they adopt two children, similar survivors. They have to start killing children others don’t understand are sopaths. Others prefer to think they are just misunderstood children, being in denial. And of course reducing the birth rate to avoid the issue is opposed by implacable religious and political forces. I am finding ways to make the story less awful so that it can be written, but it’s still not pleasant. And yes, I am doing it now in part because of the mood the death of my daughter put me in. I wrote the first chapter in 2001 and quit; in FeBluberry 2010 I wrote the next four chapters. Will it ever be published? Maybe not commercially, but today with self publishing viable, probably yes. This is the last of my unfinished projects; I have been trying to catch up on them as my future diminishes, just in case the inevitable happens.

Interesting public legal notice in the newspaper: “If you are age 40 or over and write or were interested in writing for television, a proposed settlement may affect your rights.” It seems to be a class-action lawsuit about age discrimination, and the settlement is seventy million dollars. I am over 40, but never tried to write for television, so I am not involved, but I applaud the effort. Maybe in due course there will be a similar one about age discrimination in regular publishing. The idea of rejecting good, original, commercial fiction simply because the author is over 40 appalls me. If I ran the world, any editor or publisher caught doing that would be immediately put out of business, especially if it had existed more than 40 years. The literary and/or commercial quality of the material should be the primary consideration, not the age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation or whatever of the author.

Item in SCIENCE NEWS and surely elsewhere: modern man’s ancestor Homo erectus may have crossed the sea 800,000 years ago. Certainly well before the 9,000 years they have hitherto credited. For example, they showed up on Crete over 130,000 years ago, and that means either crossing the water or flying, and I am skeptical about the latter. Mankind was doing things eons before historical records indicate.

Letter by Christopher Radulich in the ST PETERSBURG TIMES asks if corporations are now considered legally people with full First Amendment rights, so they can swamp the elections with money in the guise of free speech, why can they still be bought and sold? Yes, isn’t slavery illegal?

William Tenn died, age 89. He was the pseudonym for Philip Klass, and a great science fiction writer. When I discovered science fiction, with the March 1947 issue of ASTOUNDING magazine, one of the stories therein that captivated me was “Child’s Play” by him, which described the complications when a man of the present accidentally got hold of a Build-A-Man kit from the future.

Excerpt in THE WEEK from a book by John West, The Last Goodnights. It describes how he helped his parents commit suicide, and may face legal action because of it. His father had terminal cancer and faced ugly physical decline and death in months; his mother had Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, and emphysema. “Should she have been forced to deteriorate into a walking vegetable, soiling herself, wandering into traffic, hunched over like a crab, and coughing up blood, just because some people say that’s how it’s always been and always should be?” So he helped them take the pills they needed to overdose themselves to death. Was he wrong? Not as I see it. I think a person’s death, like a person’s life, should be governed to the extent feasible by the choice of that person. Maybe duly authenticated by a court, to prevent abuse. If I faced the loss of my health and mind, with only pain and ruinous expense to postpone the inevitable, I would want to end my life at a time and manner of my choice. Quick, painless, tidy, and noble. Wouldn’t anyone? I have thought that there should exist a two-stage euthanasia pill, that gives a wakeup jolt an hour after taking it to remind you that this is lethal. At that point you can take the antidote, or maybe you have to make a second pill, and then you will fade on out painlessly.

Article in NEW SCIENTIST ABOUT HUMOR: it turns out to be far more complicated than primeval pleasures like sex or food. Yes. I admit to secret pride in the fact that I made most of my success with humor. If you can write humor, you can probably write anything. Critics without a sense of humor are of course deficient. People’s sense of humor says a lot about them. I have always mistrusted those who find jokes about blacks, gays, women, or Jews hilarious. One of my favorite publications is Rationale of the Dirty Joke by G Legman, a huge two volume edition summarizing thousands of jokes, whose thesis is that the key to a person’s character is accurately defined by his favorite dirty joke. My favorite relates to the power of language. I wrote to Legman I think in the 1970s, to point out that his enormous compendium lacked that joke, and he admitted it. Here it is, in summary: A trucker entered a wayside eatery and demands a cuppa coffee and a fucking donut. Well, they haul him into court for obscenity. Then he tells his story, about the awful fucking day he’s had, when the fucking truck wouldn’t start, got a fucking flat tire, and so on, with that single adjective of choice used everywhere. He concludes “Then I saw this neat fucking little restaurant, and this nice fucking waitress comes up and says what’ll you fucking have, and I say gimme a cuppa coffee and a donut.” At which point the waitress jumps up in the courtroom and cries “That’s a fucking lie!” and the judge bangs his gavel and says “Quiet, or I’ll clear the fucking courtroom!” Make of that what you will, critics; I still think it’s hilarious.

We watched the two weeks of the Winter Olympics in Canada, a grand show. Who would have expected a photo finish in a 50 kilometer skiing race? What they can do these days on skate boards is amazing. But I am bothered by the hair-trigger disqualifications that sometimes eliminate the obvious best performers for accidental technical fouls, such as the Korean tag-team skaters or the American Ohno. How about some sense of proportion? Isn’t the idea to showcase the best players in the world, rather than demonstrating how arbitrary the officials can be?

I was sent a copy of a radio interview for The Author Hour I did a while back. I will try to include the link here, so that anyone who wants to listen to it can do so. I tend to sound nasal and not too smart, but what else is news?

The Author Hour interview site, thanks to Matthew Peterson.

Marsh was a reading month, because books piled in. I’m a slow reader, and I read selectively, but it is a constant struggle to balance what I do for others, such as blurbing books, with what I do for myself, which is writing my stories and novels. Most folk have to weigh their needs and wants against their finances; I weigh them against my available time. But I have to say that though I seldom read for entertainment, any more than others spend money for the love of spending, I do enjoy much of what I read, and sometimes learn from it.

I read The Weaving, but Gerald Costlow. This is the story of Rose, the Witch of the Woods, who is a nice person who uses her magic to help others, and Lilith, an evil demoness who feeds on human flesh. In between are three Ladies, who are telepathically linked oracles, Rose’s husband Tom, and assorted royal men who seek power for good or ill. What counts, of course, is how the story is told. It is interesting as the characters interact personally and magically. At one point Rose’s party is ambushed by almost-invisible elves who are definitely not cute figures; they are deadly. Rose warns her companions to cover their eyes, then invokes a blinding spell. This makes a brilliant flash of light that blinds all who take it in open-eyed. That effectively incapacitates the enemy. She also adds an unbinding spell that further complicates things: things come untied, from clothing to bowstrings. I like that; I picture pants dropping to the ground as bows lose their tension. So the action in this novel is not conventional swordplay or sorcery, though that exists; there are different yet effective uses of magic. Another touch is the way the three Ladies relate. They are lusty, and when one has sex, the others feel it too. They have no privacy from each other, but don’t need it. So this novel is fun without being phenomenal. Pill Hill Press, www.pillhillpress.com, their titles available from most online retailers.

I read Mirror of Opposition, by T S Robinson. This is the story of three boys in a martial arts school, curious and rebellious in the normal manner, imaginatively punished for their infractions. It quickly gets serious, as they discover first a mysterious cave, then an eyeless body in the sea. The latter means the school has been discovered by the enemy, and the attack is soon upon them. Their fellow samurai students are soon slaughtered, and they are separated. One goes to the cave, that conceals a potent mirror; another is taken over by the enemy and comes to kill the first and gain the magic power of the mirror; the third is sent on a deadly route of discovery. There is mayhem and bloodshed galore, but also a fair grounding in the philosophy of the art. Years pass, and in due course they interact again, finally reunifying against a common enemy. This may sound standard, but there’s a difference: one is alive, one is dead, and one is undead. Thus they have three rather distinct perspectives. It’s an almost all male cast and there is no romance; it’s pure combat adventure, but it does move well and should appeal to those who have any notion of the discipline of martial art. Available at Xlibris, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com. www.tsrbook.com. t-s-r@juno.com.

And I read The Vault of Heaven, by Peter Orullian. This won’t be published until April 2011; TOR sent me an advance copy for blurbing. (Clarification: a blurb is a brief favorable comment used to help promote a book; authors do it for other authors all the time. I mention this because once when I mentioned blurbing a book, a reader bawled me out for my insulting language.) It is 891 pages long, a first novel. At my normal 10 pages a day rate, or half an hour a day, that would take me three months to finish. The problem with reading longer at a time is that reading tends to put me to sleep, so it’s a struggle. Well, as I like to put it, editors are not, despite appearances, total idiots. They don’t like long novels, they don’t like unknown authors, they think that one book a year is all a reader will read by a given author, and who knows what other fallacies that are deadly to an author’s success. They cling to their fables despite constant refutation by the marketplace. A woman once told me that sequels never sell as well as the original novels. What bothered me was that she was the publisher of a major imprint, interested in Xanth, which did not make the national best seller lists until the fifth novel in the series. You bet Xanth did not go there. But once in a while an editor recognizes a good book, and it gets loose despite the publisher’s best efforts to stifle it. Then all other editors try to copy that book the following year, desperately questing for the next bestseller. It’s a crazy business. So when I see a publisher gearing up for a major promotion on a long novel by a first time author, I figure there must be something special going on. Chances are it’s a remarkable book, so I make the effort to read it. In this case I did so on a crash basis, that being more efficient, though it meant I had a constant battle against sleepiness. I read at 50 to 150 pages a day, squeezing out my writing on my own novel, my card games, the TV news I like to watch, the pretty girls on LATN, and anything else that could be spared, letting stray chores like accounting, updating my ongoing Survey of electronic publishers, and recording fans’ Xanth puns accumulate. That’s what it takes. I still had to keep up with our family doctor’s appointments, my exercise routine, making meals, and other household chores, of course; life does tend to interfere with work.

The Vault of Heaven is a major fantasy adventure, standard in general outline but original in detail. The protagonist is Tahn (I have to fight my spell program, which automatically changes it to “than”) a young man of an outlying village who can’t remember his life before age 12. He’s a hunter, and what he looses an arrow at he hits; he doesn’t brag about it, but it shows. Once an innocent man was being hanged; Tahn’s arrow severed the rope as he dropped, saving him. For that Tahn got arrested and thrown in a vile dungeon, but it does make the point. His sister Wendra was raped and is about to give birth just as monsters called Bar’dyn attack. A strange man called Vendanj and his intriguing female companion Mira require Tahn to travel with them for reasons they won’t say. But first Tahn hurries back to help his sister in her hour of need. There’s a Bar’dyn looming over her. Tahn draws his bow—and something prevents him from loosing the arrow. The monster escapes with the stillborn baby (I think because it was squeezed prematurely out of her by the monster). He has betrayed his sister. Why? He trusts his insight, but doesn’t understand it. Indeed, he is not an ordinary man, and that insight relates to his unremembered origin. This kind of mystery and emotional torment pervade the novel, and not all of it is explained or justified by its conclusion. There will surely be a sequel. This is one huge, powerful, compelling, hard-hitting story, splitting into several story lines in the center, then reunifying, and with a background that is well conceived and motivations that are at times painfully realistic. Including the brutal arrogance of power, that could have been describing, oh, the attitude of the huge-bonus-taking bankers after receiving public bailout money: “But it is also the vile product of Quietgiven [the enemy], prideful, lustful, scornful creatures who would take for themselves and leave the penalties of their avarice for us all to pay in the body of a wounded land.” Justice is not necessarily served in the courts, as political convenience trumps truth and honest men are framed and removed. There is magic, but it has its costs, so is used only sparingly. There is slight romance, as Tahn’s interest in Mira just may be returned. She’s the sister of a queen in her land of Far; the fact that she’s along on this mission hints at its importance. So does the determination of the enemy to stop it. Mainly, this is a pyramid of a story, laid down block by huge block as it slowly builds toward the sky. Yes, it is well worth reading, and the author will surely become known hereafter.

I read Who Fears the Devil? by Manly Wade Wellman, an author appearing in the period I was a genre devotee whose work I somehow never read. Maybe I thought that with a name like that he would be stuffy. Well, he’s not. This collection is published by PAIZO, www.paizo.com/, and they sent it as part of their PLANET STORIES series of books that include a couple of mine. I may have said this before, but it bears repeating: I believe PAIZO is doing a real service by republishing the classics and fellow travelers from the heyday of science fiction/fantasy/horror magazines and small press, before it was discovered by mainstream interests, notably the movies and comics and games. I probably would never have read this author otherwise. This is the complete series of Silver John stories and vignettes. John is a wandering folk singer of the Appalachian Mountains, centering on the Asheville, North Carolina region. I’m aware of that because when I got out of the U S Army in 1959, stationed in Oklahoma, we considered where to go, and Asheville seemed ideal in many respects. So I wrote to the chamber of commerce and got a welcome. I wrote back and asked what prospects were for employment there, and got no answer. That was answer enough, and we moved to Florida instead. I retain a certain fondness for this place where I have never been. Anyway, John is called silver because his guitar has silver strings, which are said to sound better and they prevent the devil or his minions from molesting John. There’s a rich local background, replete with many a winsome girl, most of whom have rose cheeks and butter-colored hair. Magic pervades it, often mean-spirited. We get to see some of the nocturnal menaces, such as the Toller, the Flat, the Bammat and the Behinder. You never see that last, because it’s always behind you. Right; I know that from my own experience as a boy walking miles through the forest in the Green Mountains of Vermont in the 1940s. The Behinder followed me, but no matter how quickly I turned around, it always hid before I could see it. But if I did not constantly turn, it was likely to catch up to me, and then I’d be doomed. John does catch a glimpse of it as it attacks another man. “Then I knew why nobody’s supposed to see one. I wish I hadn’t.” So be warned not to try too hard to see it. The stories have some intriguing titles, like “Oh Ugly Bird!” “Frogfather,” “The Desrick on Yandro” where the Behinder is, and “Where Did She Wander?” That first one is more or less typical: there’s a mean man who wants to make out with Winnie, a young pretty girl, and no one dares oppose him. Anyone who tries gets attacked by the ugly bird, sort of a vulture thing. When it attacks John, he whams it with the guitar, and the silver strings wipe it out and the man too, because both were aspects of the devil and silver was deadly to them. Thus John inadvertently saves the day. He’s not really a hero, just a singer in search of new songs, but somehow he generally finds some supernatural threat and/or a blonde damsel to be rescued. One of them is so grateful she decides to marry him, somewhat against his will. He flees, but she follows, and when he sees her feet bleeding from her desperate effort, he can’t flee any more, and does marry her. This is a nice collection, and I recommend it to horror fans and to those who like intriguing stories of any kind.

For the past six months or so I have been working on my partial dentures. It’s been a slow and expensive and at times painful process. This time it was the plaster casts they make, the impressions, so they know what space the dentures have to fit into. I thought that would be routine. It wasn’t. It seems my jaws have bone in odd places, and the frameworks for the molds didn’t fit well. They had to try several, and each painfully bashed a bone. They had to try three times on the upper, twice on the lower. O ugly mold! I hope that’s the last time I have to go through that experience. With luck during the month of Apull I will have a full set of teeth again, and will be able to chew my food without a struggle.

Once I caught up on the reading, to a degree—I still have several hundred thousand words to catch up on–I viewed some videos. One of these was The World’s Fastest Indian, with Anthony Hopkins. There’s something about that actor I like; it must be the first name. He’s one fine actor, with a number of excellent movies. I borrowed it from a correspondent who is a Hopkins fan, sending her Forbidden Planet to view similarly. Our taste in movies overlaps only peripherally, but every so often we find one we agree on. This is one. It it about motorcycling, based on a true event, not something I have had interest in, but when Hopkins does it, it’s interesting and charming. He wants to set a world speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats. He’s also a character. He pees by his little lemon tree, to give it nitrogen fertilizer, just as I pee for plants I value.  If you like it, pee on it. He lectures people on the evils of smoking. He makes the trip from New Zealand on a shoestring budget, sailing on a tramp steamer, staying at a flop house, and so on. He brings out the best in people. For example the transvestite clerk at the flop house is charmed by him, and helps him get around Los Angeles. The used car man is impressed by the way he tunes up the motor and offers him a job. An Indian gives him a folk remedy for prostate trouble that helps. A woman running a junk yard where he gets a broken axle fixed, and winds up sleeping with her in every sense. A hitchhiker he picks up. A racer he meets, who intercedes to get them to let him race when the authorities balk, because no way does he qualify: too old, no safety equipment, didn’t register in advance, and so on. He just seems to have that effect, and it’s heartwarming. So the officials bend the rules to give him a chance, expecting him to wash out. Their cars track him up to 95 miles per hour. Then he accelerates and leaves them behind. They conclude that he is qualified to try the official time trial. The personnel pass the hat around to raise money for him. They are all rooting for him. They time him mile by mile as he gets up over 150 mph, 170, 190, and finally for the 8^th mile just over 200, the record for this type of cycle. Which was made for 54 mph; he has tinkered with it. And crashes, but survives. He has achieved his dream. I loved this movie, and recommend it to anyone who likes a good human interest story.

Here in Florida we have been in semi-drought conditions for years, and the water table got so low at one point that we had to have our well redrilled to be deeper. But this is an el Nino winter and we are finally getting rain. We got over six inches in one day, and twelve inches for the month of Marsh. Glorious! Back in 1998 we had flooding during the el Nino, but that was followed by a prolonged drought. I hope that doesn’t happen this time. Water is precious, and to me here on the tree farm good weather is a rainy day.

I fussed before about the new Windows 7 system not getting online. Then my wife made a startling discovery: it did have a modem. It simply didn’t bother to let us know about it. She saw the plug in back, so connected it, and then it admitted to the modem. “Oh, you mean that modem…” as it were. So we have taken it online. We haven’t gotten it set up for email yet, but surely will when we find the right program that can handle the kind of boilerplate texts HiPiers needs. Things like “Piers Anthony appreciates hearing from you” and the complete Xanth list of 36 novels to date (#36 I’ll write this year; I have done one chapter) that would be tedious to type out ever time. It also has Word. I tried typing one of my weekly Jenny letters on it and it was weird, as I have not used Word in a decade. It still doesn’t let me know the saved status of a document, which is dangerous when importing and exporting files; I don’t want to overwrite the new one with the old one, for example, as can happen. So it is evident that Microsoft still has a mean streak, sticking it to the user. But it does show the ongoing wordage count, something I have longed for for decades. I looked in vain for a way to back up my file, until my wife clued me in: there seems to be no command, but you can drag it to the backup disk. Oh. I started updating my electronic publishing survey on it, again testing to see how it worked, and it was okay for one hour. Then–

Then I heard a cry. It was my wife. She had stumbled and fallen while handling the laundry, and had bruised her ribs and fractured her left elbow and right knee. I managed to get her into the wheelchair and then the car and drove her to the emergency room and she wound up in the hospital and then at a rehabilitation unit, where she is doing well enough considering that her arm and leg are in casts and she hates being helpless. Meanwhile I’m home alone and not enjoying it. Doing my own email was a challenge but I am managing as I remember the protocols. My wife gives me email advice when I visit her, and my daughter comes over to help me past the hangups, so I am keeping up. But my Survey update and HiPiers column halted in place at that moment. The Survey will have to pause where I was, through the letters G and H, and the latter portion of the column will be abbreviated. Fortunately I had done the reviews as I read the books.

I have a pile of clippings I saved for passing comment. I will remark on a few of these. NEW SCIENTIST had an article on a survey about belief, and there are some oddities. As a general rule there is a correlation between education and lack of belief in God, but this does not apply to the supernatural. Under 30% of folk without an elementary education believe in telepathy, while over 50% of those with degree-level education do. There has not been much research about atheism, so that’s vague. It asks the question if religion comes naturally to mankind, why are so many resistant to it? I’m agnostic, which means I do not pretend to know the nature of ultimate reality, but I strongly doubt the supernatural. So call me a resistant. The distance between me and a true believer is about 99%, and between me and an atheist about 1%. I just don’t feel the authority to say there is no God, though I doubt it. I mean where aside from the fallible Bible do Christian believers get their information, and where do atheists get theirs? How can they all be so sure, one way or the other, without tangible evidence? I think they are all arrogant. And no, I don’t believe in telepathy, though I love it for my fiction.

Elsewhere in NEW SCIENTIST I learn that they have developed a new treatment that is 100% effective against bedbugs: heat. Heat the room to 56 degrees C (I’m not sure how much that is in Fahrenheit) and it’s lethal to all insects from egg to maturity. They have found what appears to be writing on 60,000 year old eggshells. I believe it; surely writing had a long slow development from marking how many eggs someone found to describing the type of chicken. Mankind of that day was about as smart as mankind today, just not as educated. And a capsule description of game theory, something that has come into my writing, notably the Game in the Adept series. It’s the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. A and B are arrested for a suspected crime and placed in separate cells. If one confesses and the other doesn’t, he will be set free, while his adamant partner gets 10 years, and vice versa. So it seems better to confess—except that if both confess, each gets 5 years. If neither confesses, each will get 6 months. Neither knows what the other does, until it’s too late. So do you confess and get zero to five years, or do you remain silent and get 6 months to ten years? It’s one hell of a nervous gamble either way, because so much depends on your partner in crime. How well do you know him, and how bad a dirt bag is he? If you can trust him to keep his mouth shut, you can both get off with 6 months, but if he betrays you, sucker…

I like chocolate, as most folk do. But child slavery is involved in much of its production. Look for Fair-trade certification to be sure that stringent environmental and labor standards are met. I’ll be checking that; I hope there’s an indication on the package.

Newspaper item: There was a prom in Mississippi that a girl wanted to bring her girlfriend to, and she wanted to wear a tux. Right, a lesbian date. Rather than allow it, the school canceled the prom. Now there’s a lawsuit. Why the hell couldn’t they have allowed her to bring her date? As I see it, the problem was not with the girl but with the bigoted authorities.

From THE WEEK: a new study indicates that liberals are 11 IQ points smarter than conservatives. Well, duh! I hadn’t realized that the difference was that close. Another from THE WEEK: looking at curvy women can be as rewarding for a man as the buzz from drugs or alcohol. I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never been drunk or done drugs, but I sure do like to look at curvy women if they are young and svelte. I remember a lovely description: “She has curves in places where other girls don’t even have places.” I assume that does not refer to a corpulent lass.

Personal note: I saw in a sale catalog a Seiko watch with a rotating timing bezel for half price. We bought a similar sale six years ago and were quite satisfied, so we ordered two. They arrived when my wife was in rehab, and helped cheer us in a dark moment. Now if only we can figure out how to remove some links in the metal watch bands so as to make them fit our wrists. We did it before, but have forgotten how. Ah, senility. Regardless, they are very nice watches, our splurge of the month.

Bizarro cartoon: two pigs riding in a car. The driver says “The cops never stop me since I got these vanity plates.” The plate says H1N1. That is, swine flu. Mother Goose & Grimm comic: the insurance agent is telling Noah “Yes, it rained 40 days and 40 nights, and yes, your boat landed on the top of a mountain…But that’s not how we define a ‘Flood.’” Which in turn reminds me of my flood novel, Rings of Ice, where I wanted a flood of 80-100 feet sea rise, so I calculated a reasonable rate of one inch an hour day and night, across the globe. It came to 40 days and nights, so I used that, figuring the scholars of the Bible must have known something. I figured there would be runoff from the higher elevations, so the sea level would rise a bit more than an inch an hour. Sure enough a critic took off on me for that seeming Biblical reference. Remember, critics are fashioned of fecal matter, and not just in their heads.

Okay, there are more clippings, but not more time. I hope next month is less disruptive. I hope my wife gets safely home; the house is too damned quiet. Would you believe, with all the reading I did this month, I still have three novels to go? While my current novel-in-progress waits. I get antsy.

My reading continued unabated. I read My Brother’s Keeper, by Adron J Smitley. This is what I would call dark fantasy, with very little magic in it, but considerable imagination. The author, like so many, had poured his soul into his novel, then found no publisher for it, and finally had to self publish. He wondered whether he should simply give up his dream of being a novelist. I have been there, done that, and have considerable sympathy. I was even told by the editor of GALAXY magazine H L Gold to stop even trying to compete. It was with considerable private relish I later saw my writing career surpass his. He was for a time a good editor, but he was also an arrogant anus and I keep him in mind as an excellent example never to emulate. Arrogance goeth before a fall. So I try to be fair minded and treat all aspirants courteously. I can give an informed opinion on fantasy, and it may be negative, but seldom if ever dismissive. That’s more than it seems most established writers will do.

My Brother’s Keeper does not generally sparkle stylistically, and it moves slowly. Nevertheless it has power, both in its setting and its story. You see, it is Biblical is a special sense. The protagonist is Seth, a later son of Adam and Eve. Seth is consumed by hate for his older brother Cain, who killed his other brother Able. No, no, don’t stop reading there. Consider the source material. In the Bible, Adam and Eve, and perhaps Lilith, were the first human people on Earth. When Cain was banished for his crime, he went and dwelt among the people of Nod, marrying and siring his own line. Where did these Nod folk come from? They must have been human, because they could interbreed with Adam’s descendants. But if they weren’t other children of Adam, how could this be? And Adam’s other children: assuming they did not suffer a procreative orgy of incest, whom did each marry? We have to assume that the Bible is speaking at least somewhat figuratively. That enables it to align with science and archaeology. As I see it—remember, the major project of my career was the historical series GEODYSSEY, whose last novel Climate of Change is about to be published, so I have thought about human descent a lot—there was always a slowly evolving human culture. The genetic pattern of one man and one woman were passed on to the people of today. That does not mean that they were the only people then, just that when two people make a baby, the baby gets aspects from each, and what it doesn’t pass along is lost to the record. There was a viable community throughout. That is what is in this novel: a viable community. It tells a story of those particular people that could have been close to the reality, with love, betrayal, and hate. Because Seth is determined to seek out and kill Cain, but in the intervening years Cain has changed and is no longer the brutal warrior he was. Seth’s hate causes him to become somewhat like Cain, and there is no easy resolution here. It’s an ugly but compelling story, with thoughtful points. The kind of thing that traditional print publishing evidently doesn’t want, but that readers might find worthwhile. The kind of thing self publishing was made for. So the author has an offer: he will give away signed copies, postage paid, to the first ten people who contact him at coinspinner@zoominternet.net. Maybe that will start to get the word out.

I read Search of the Sunken City by Marion R Jones. This may have been inspired by Raiders of the Lost Ark, with a map discovered that may identify a leading city of Atlantis. A college professor is dating a young woman, but her wealthy banker father objects to her going into anthropology and breaks it up by getting him reassigned far away. She doesn’t know why he left, and isn’t pleased about being dumped. Then they are thrown together again as they search for Atlantis, with mutual attraction warring with anger. It is like a scavenger hunt, taking them to the Sphinx in Egypt and an underground temple for a necessary artifact. It is the time of Pearl Harbor, and a Japanese mission is pursuing them, wanting to get the secrets of Atlantis first and have power to win the war and rule the world. Every time they make a breakthrough, the Japanese catch up and try to take it from them. Thus mystery, action, romance, fantasy, and brutality mix to make a fast moving adventure. They finally do find Atlantis under the sea, and it is a marvel. This was self published, with no address listed to buy it. There are copious typos, but it is a good story.

And I read Xanth # 34 Knot Gneiss by yours truly, proofing the page proofs. This will be published in OctOgre in hardcover. It’s a sort of sequel within the series to #33 Jumper Cable, where Jumper Spider’s best friend was Wenda Woodwife, who is hollow behind and speaks in the forest dialect: “I wood knot dew that to yew.” I liked her, so this time she’s the main character. She is married to Prince Charming, who was dumped by the Little Mermaid, and has become a whole woman. But she suffers violent mood swings, so goes to the Good Magician to get them abated, and has to transport a 150 pound knot of petrified reverse wood to his castle so it can’t do damage elsewhere. If nasty goblins should get hold of it, they could use it to terrify and conquer Xanth. She’s a wood nymph so can handle wood, you see. She enlists Jumper as a Companion, and it builds from there. That petrified knot is definitely not gneiss or nice; it terrifies everyone but Wenda. Petrified, terrified, get it? Another Companion is Princess Ida, who is forlornly hoping to find her ideal man, though she is now in her forties. So it’s a typically wacky adventure, down to the Xanth standard.

April is the cruelest month. Remember, last month as I was updating the Survey of Electronic Publishers and Related Services, my wife fell and fractured her left elbow and right knee. Nothing showed; the fractures were hairline within the joints, but nevertheless debilitating. She was in the emergency room, then the hospital, then the rehabilitation facility, which I abbreviate to “The Madhouse.” She could not get a decent night’s rest or sleep there because the noise was continuous. She had to take sleeping pills, and they were not always effective. Carts being wheeled along the halls, people coming and going, other patients calling out. Some had mental as well as physical problems. The man across the hall was supposed to remain in bed or wheelchair, but didn’t, so was rigged with a warning alarm to summon a nurse when he got up. So he got up, the alarm would go off, and he would scream “Turn the damn thing off!” not realizing that he was the one activating it. Her roommate had the TV on continuously, not set to my wife’s stations, watched or unwatched. And the physical therapy she found horrendous, because they took it seriously, but she is weak because of her CIPD—Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy, or shorting out of the nerves controlling the limbs—and it seems they did not quite understand she wasn’t malingering, she was weak. I sneaked her vitamin pills in to her, because the personnel did not allow self medication and it seems distrusted foreign pills of any kind, probably with reason if any patients are closet addicts. I took her dirty clothes and washed them at home and brought them back, and I took her in the wheelchair for walks along the adjacent Nature Trail, where it was serene, quiet, and wholesome. Yes, I also stole some kisses. It was a great day, after three weeks, when I could bring her home again, because at home it is quiet and she could finally catch up on rest.

So I got in the Prius to drive there to fetch her—and the car wouldn’t start. It absolutely balked, flashing red and orange warnings and listing the fuel as empty. It had worked fine the prior day, and I had just filled the tank. What had possessed it? So I had to switch to our other car, a Chrysler Town & Country van we have driven only 3,000 miles in five years because we bought it to accommodate a driver, wheelchair, groceries, and others, when my wife was wheelchair bound and fading, but then she had gotten better and we didn’t need those other things, and the Prius gets twice the mileage. I did not like the van, finding it balky, cumbersome, and unfamiliar. But now I had to use it—and it behaved perfectly, giving me no trouble. I picked her up and brought her home, and have been using the van for my routine grocery shopping and mail trips, no trouble. It certainly came through when the Prius balked. But what was wrong with the Prius, which had picked the very worst time to balk? Well, after a week we arranged for AAA to haul it in to the dealer, and when the man checked under the hood, there was a rat’s nest with six mostly unused packets of rat bait. There had not been any rat’s nest when I checked it when it first balked; I conjecture that first the rat chewed the wiring to make sure the car stayed in place, then built its nest and started collecting baits for the future. Rats are smart vermin. But then the bait it had eaten at the outset caught up with it, and the rat was gone, leaving the nest and hoard of baits to its heirs. Mystery solved. Relatives helped bring the car back from the dealer once it was repaired—that rat cost us $350—relieving me of the worry about leaving my wife home alone longer than minimally. Families can be a great help when you need them.

So now my wife was safely home, and I was back to making all meals and things. She had been making her own breakfasts, doing the laundry, and the email, but now could do none of those things, so I did them, as I had five years before. This is the nature of marriage, from each according to his ability, to each according to her need. I kept up with that and the reading, but my writing disappeared again, and I was tired and short of sleep. I was glad to have her back, regardless. She could not get up the stairs, so used the bed we had installed 5 years before when she was incapacitated, and at night I unfolded the hide-a-bed and kept her company in case there should be any problem then. She can walk with the walker, but transitioning between it and bed, toilet, or wheelchair can be difficult, so I stay close. It occurred to me that it could be difficult for an outsider to distinguish between spousal protectiveness and spousal abuse. She was asked at the hospital whether she was a victim. She said no, but many victims do say no, covering for their abusers, and abusers can be men who favorably impress everyone else. I suspect that even some writers are abusers, sacrilegious as that notion may be. I trust there are other signs they could check, like whether she flinches when anyone comes close, so that they were reassured. It is ironic that she volunteers one afternoon a week at CASA, the abused women’s shelter; they sent her a friendly get-well card.

I used the new Windows 7 computer to start my Survey updating, with my wife safely in bed in the living room, and after a half hour struggle by us both, user-hostile Windows 7 finally let me import my file and get online to work. After a couple hours I broke for lunch, going offline, then returned—and it balked, saying the protocols were wrong and it couldn’t go online. Did I mention user unfriendly? So I had to go to my wife’s older system, which is less argumentative. It wasn’t until next day when our daughter visited that the new one got unwillingly functional again; she’s of the next generation, and computers are more cautious about pointlessly messing those folk up. So I got the update done, no thanks to Windows.

In between times I played some card games. I have been stressed recently, and a card game seems to relieve that somewhat. Originally I liked the easier variant of Scorpion, a playable game—by that I mean you have a reasonable chance to make choices and use your mind, rather than having it be pure dumb luck—and when I changed systems they didn’t offer that, so I moved to Grandfather, which was similar, with about a one in three chance to win. When I moved again they didn’t have that, so I tried other games, and liked Gypsy, where I won 15%, but finally settled on Baker’s Dozen, which may be the best one yet. There are different versions, but the one Ubuntu has is simply all the cards laid out face up in four rows so that you can see exactly what you’re getting. You have to uncover aces, then twos, etc, building up to kings, as is the case with so many games. Suits are irrelevant in the main layout; any six can go on any seven, for example. They make sure to see that all kings are on the top row, because kings can’t move to empty columns so it would be impossible to get past a king burying lower cards. Seems easy to play, but I won only about one in three games. Then I learned how to play it better; don’t just look for easy aces, consider where the later cards will balk. One game I struggled with over 40 minutes and could not win; it had one king atop another, the one exception to kings being on the top row, and four queens over lower cards, so that no matter how I played, one queen would always block a lower card. Now when I see that setup I skip to another game, because I want to be able to win at least theoretically. Actually if the bottom row had all even cards it would be unplayable, so I would avoid that layout too. There are surely more subtle unwinnables. I started winning nine of ten games and bringing up my average from 33% to 50%, then to 67%. It can be a challenge; I have won in four minutes and in 40 minutes, and some layouts are more challenging than others. So I like it, and will stay with it until the next Linux distribution, when I will surely have to find a new game.

On to incidental items. It seems that chocolate is related to depression. Depressed folk eat more chocolate. But it is as yet uncertain whether chocolate mitigates depression, or causes it, or there is a craving that does not actually ameliorate the condition, like a man longing for an unobtainable woman. There was a picture of a local car crash, the car lying upside down before a billboard advertising for help with car accidents. Nice juxtaposition. The ASK MARILYN column says that “multitasking” is a myth; folk who do it, do worse on the separate tasks. I’m one who normally eats supper, watches TV, and reads a science magazine at the same time, and I agree. Eating is on auto-pilot, but my attention goes back an forth between the other two, and normally the TV loses out. She remarks that you can’t write a paragraph and read one at the same time. Again I agree, having tried to do it. And of course folk who text while driving are begging for trouble. NEW SCIENTIST had an article on “Loony Moons.” When I was young I thought the local planets were boring, but that was because little was known about them. When I research them for the Space Tyrant series I was satisfied that they can be fascinating. Consider Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanic body in the system, looking like a cheese pizza with pepper and onions, surely an incarnation of Hell. The assorted planets and moons are wildly different, and some may harbor life, not as we know it, but nevertheless valid. Another article suggests that the online game World of Warcraft is an opportunity to study social science, because they are dynamic and every facet is recorded so it can be analyzed. So it’s virtual; it remains valid. What, it asks, if religion is factually false, but necessary for human well-being? I find that question intriguing as hell. I received a snail letter wishing to enlist my support for the thesis of the book Unplugged: My Journey into the Dark World of Video Addiction, by Ryan C Van Cleave. I am demurring, in part because I am largely ignorant of online gaming, and because I suspect that addicts will find something to focus on, whether cocaine, gambling, sex, writing, or the Internet. Trying to erase one facet won’t eliminate the problem, and I’m not even sure that game addiction is an evil. Consider sex, where virtually every man is an addict; is that bad?  Maybe if I knew more I’d be more alarmed. But I will relay the news that Video Game Addiction Awareness Week is May 21 – June 6. And an item on insect brains: large integrated social structures make for bigger brains. This has serious implications for the development of the human brain. We are a highly social species, and that may have powered our unusual brain development. And slow thinking may nurture creativity. I have always been mentally slow, by which I mean not stupid but taking time to get there, like a locomotive getting started, and I am one of the more creative persons I know. It seems there is a physical brain connection, gray matter vs. white matter. Fascinating.

I received an email solicitation for a 28^th amendment to the Constitution that makes sense to me. Here it is: “Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the united States.” I would vote for that, but it has a snowflake’s chance in Hades of passing the corrupted governing body we have at present. It would stop them from voting themselves privileges, like low-cost top of the line health insurance, that they won’t let the rest of us have.

Two incidental quotes from THE WEEK: “Life is one long process of getting tired.” Samuel Butler. “Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 percent of them are wrong.” H L Mencken. Reminds me of Theodore Sturgeon’s observation that ethics is what a person decides for himself, while morality is what society decides for him. Thus killing innocent people is considered moral in war, while a girl showing too much breast in public is immoral. I have always been impatient with this sort of thing. From DISCOVER MAGAZINE: Scientists at Oregon State University have identified vast quantities of water beneath the ocean floor. There may be more water under the oceans than inthem. Ah, but is it fresh water? Can we get it cheaper than by filtering it from the seas?

Newspaper item: sex makes a person as happy as money. The value of going from sex less than once a month to more than once a month is equivalent to about $40,000 in annual income. People who have had no sex in the past year are especially unhappy. People under age 40 have sex about once a week; less for those over 40. Well, I am well over 40, and have sex once a week when my wife is not away in hospital or rehab, and my income is well over $40,000 a year, so I should be pretty happy. I am actually somewhat depressive, but probably would be far worse if I lost sex and income. I just renewed my prescription for Viagra, and discovered that six pills now cost $102.98. That’s over $17 per pill. Sure, I cut them into eighths, reducing the cost per dose, but I think I won’t be buying more of that brand, maybe because it makes sex lower my finances too much. I understand that in the old days a man could hire a whole prostitute for the same amount, $2. Probably not related is another sex ad I received, this one for the penis-hardener STRONG. Typically they show men having sex with luscious eager young women, themselves a potent aphrodisiac. For about $48 you can get 12 doses, which comes to $4 per dose. Thanks, but I’ll stick to my fractional Viagra pills this year. Then we’ll see. Item in THE WEEK remarks that most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve their lives. Being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year. Wow! I’ve been married almost 54 years; that would come to about $5,400,000. I’m rich! Or would be, if I could afford the Viagra.

Column by Gene Lyons blows the whistle on Republican leaders. A party document recently uncovered reveals that they divide potential donors into two groups: simple-minded dimwits and the thy egoists. They dazzle the simpletons with scare talk about socialism, invented death panels, baby-killing abortions, and such while plying the rich egoists with luxury retreats, tickets to pro fights, and association with luminaries such as New Gingrich. “The people who put the thing together not only don’t believe in the causes they advocate; they have no intention of delivering on their implied promises should they return to power.” For sure. “More than 90 percent of the budget deficits the Tea party activists rail about were created on President Bush’s watch.” Meanwhile according to columnist David Brooks, President Obama is doing better than many folk realize, pushing health care reform “with a tenacity unmatched in modern political history” and “has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency.” So why is his popularity dropping? Partly from a continuous Republican barrage that simply makes up many of its “facts” such as trying to blame him for the deficit they created. There is also racism; liberal columnists report getting deluged with the N word. “We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.”

NEW SCIENTIST had an article on the eruption of Mt. Toba 74,000 years ago. It may not have wiped out humanity as badly as was thought, but it remains the largest eruption of the past two million years. It blew out nearly twice the volume of matter contained in Mt. Everest. Here are comparisons: Mt. St. Helens put out about half a cubic kilometer of matter. Mt. Pinatubo put out ten times as much, 5 cubic kilometers. Krakatoa in 1883 put out 12 cubic kilometers. Toba put out 2,500 cubic kilometers, or 5,000 times as much as St. Helens. I don’t think we would have wanted to sit near the rim to get a ringside view of the action.

The greed-heads have been pushing to drill for oil off the coasts of Florida, claiming that with modern technology it’s safe. Well, the Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing a number of people, and it is now spewing out over 200,000 gallons a day, and it could take as long as 90 days to cap it. Meanwhile the Gulf Stream could bring some of it ashore along the Florida Gold Coast. It may be America’s worst environmental disaster in decades. Safe? My aching ass! And they wonder why we Florida residents don’t want more such drilling in our neighborhood. What will it take to satisfy them that it’s dangerous–Mt. Toba in oils?

Meanwhile there has been a constant influx of letters and manuscripts from readers. I try to respond responsively, and to give good advice when asked, but some readers seem to be dedicated to simply taking my time. It gets wearing. I make my answers as brief and polite as feasible, and turn down about half the manuscripts I am asked to read, but still seem to be operating on a deficit of time. I did manage to write one more chapter in The Sopaths, and made notes for the continuation, before things blocked up again, and maybe in Mayhem I can write some more. Fortunately I had allowed about six months for it, more than I ever expected to need. Fate and fans rushed to fill in that time.

As I like to say: more anon, when.

I watched an amateur video, Matsy Palmer, produced by David D’Champ. This is a naughty 90 minute cartoon showing the story of Earth in the year 2069 when the Nazi Unification Terrorist Society NUTS has stolen the Polar Elliptical Navigation Intercept Station PENIS and is holding it for ransom. So Matsy Palmer must activate the Tactical Women’s Assault Team TWAT to deal with this threat. The figures are animated drawings of the kind where only the mouth moves when speaking, and only the active figure in a scene moves at all. So there wasn’t a spare hundred million dollars to make for more realistic animations; what there is is sufficient to carry the story. The figures talk, move, and have simulated sex. That is, there are bare figures rocking together and with effects, but you don’t actually see the intimate details; call it soft core. Many are well endowed young women in colorful two-piece outfits that, being holographic, can fade out on occasion to leave them naked, albeit with breasts that show no nipples. One messed up her captors by wearing real clothing that wouldn’t fade. The sound is a bit fuzzy. Once you accept the limits of the staging, it moves along okay. The Nuts capture the Twats and try to sexually torture them to death, but it doesn’t work, I’m not sure why. So in the end the home team wins after heroic struggle. Web Site is www.317Prod.com. Or it can be purchased at www.matsypalmermovies.com. Anyone interested in licensing it for broadcast can call (213) 925-7768.

A correspondent sent me the video movie Up in the Air, featuring George Clooney as a professional firer. That is, a man who travels around the country to fire people who work for other companies, I suppose because the company bosses don’t have the gumption to do their own dirty work. So he leaves a trail of destroyed lives. He is breaking in a new employee, a pretty woman who is learning how to fire. He also encounters a woman who shares his philosophy of challenging sex and non-commitment. They have trysts in various airports, and he really get to like her. But in the end he discovers that this woman is actually a married housewife with children; her traveling trysts are just a way to get relief from the humdrum mundane existence. The woman he is training learns that one of her “clients” whom she doesn’t even remember committed suicide, and she quits this job. So he is left with his job, his traveling, but a rather empty existence. Moralistic, if you well, but realistically portrayed, and I did find it moving and saddening. It made me glad that I am coming up on 54 years of marriage. After three miscarriages we feared we could never have children, and after years of rejections I feared I would never be a pro writer, but in time we got it all, in spades. How much better it has been than the high life that is shown in the movie! So now I better appreciate what I have, yes, even the tragedy of the loss of our daughter. It has been a full life.

I read Sun Symbiosis, by Forrest Sol, a pen name for a PhD in environmental science. This is presented as a novel, but is actually a book-length essay phrased as an extended interview. I had to tell the author that it really didn’t work for me as a novel, because there is no human interaction other than between the interviewer and his subject, both male. A novel does better with a rich background of science or fantasy and a telling human story, preferably a romantic one, and perhaps a moral theme. An example is the movie Avatar. I’m not sure whether that was a novel first, but if so, it was surely a good one. Sun Symbiosis has the background, and is in fact a work of formidable imagination, and a moral theme: saving the environment. The author clearly knows what he is talking about; I am judging not by his doctorate but by my own awareness of the issues. For example he has a major project to reverse global warming by flooding deserts with sea water and letting it evaporate. Ah, I thought, but that would load the land with salt. Then he addressed that aspect too, so it was factored in. He addresses the arguments made by the naysayers, those who prefer to pretend that there is no warming, and if there is, it is not by human hand. There is an impassioned speech made by the female president of the USA invoking God, I think not really as a religious concept, but as a common belief most of the world shares, so that there can be a way to unify diverse people in the effort to save the planet. “You are right to believe in God. I know that some of you become very uncomfortable when I speak this way. If it is any consolation to the skeptics, I have great respect for science, and I defer to the advice of scientists in all technical matters. But it is also science that informs my faith. And it is my joy to affirm the miracle that nature and the natural world are more clear than any ancient text written by human hands in the search for consciousness greater than our own.” As a lifelong agnostic I find this a worthy statement.

But this is only part of it. Much of the story centers around a special project to study dark energy. This president fully supported that, and it seemed to be on the verge of a phenomenal breakthrough, when she abruptly canceled it, erased the records, and arranged to have laws passed to prevent any continuation of the study made for three generations. What happened? That is the mystery of this story. Because as it turns out, they discovered a universe of dark energy beings who might be considered alive but not at all in the manner we think of life. One inhabits the sun, and is a significant component of it. Others travel across the universe to tune in on the flickering consciousnesses that we know as people. It seems the dark energy beings are addicted to consciousness; it’s like a drug or perhaps pornography. We are not aware of them, and they do not harm us; they are part of that other, overlapping realm we can barely fathom even conceptually. But with this dark energy project we could become aware of them, and just possibly interact with them. Are we as a species mature enough to safely do that? Maybe in three generations.

So I deem this book not to be a proper novel, and I suspect the average reader would not understand or appreciate it. But it ranges into territory that not much science fiction does, and I think it should be worth the while of the intelligent, motivated, moral (in the sense of doing what is best for the world) reader. If it can find a publisher.

Mayhem was a mixed month for me. My wife’s incapacity soaked up much of my time, but it was good to have her home. I did not like living alone, the generous three weeks she was gone. When she returned she couldn’t mount the stairs to the bedroom, so she slept on her bed in the living room, set up five years before when she was similarly incapacitated for different reason. She could walk with the walker, but the question was suppose she fell in the night, walking to the bathroom, and I was asleep upstairs and didn’t hear and couldn’t help? So I unlimbered the hide-a-bed in the living room and slept there, almost adjacent, and that solved that problem. Gradually she improved, and was able to walk with a cane instead of the walker. It was great when she was able to go grocery shopping with me again. I pushed her around in the riding basket cart and she was able to find whatever she wanted. Then I came down with the stomach flu and spent a day pooping at either end. A day or so later, on her birthday, she got it too, which sort of spoiled things. But we handled it, as we do the rest of life. I have had to master things outside my normal mode, such as fixing her breakfast including the morning cup of coffee. That’s less simple than you might think. On Sunday it consists of three quarters of a cup of water heated in the microwave two and a half minutes—more than that, it furiously boils over when the coffee is added, as I discovered—then one quarter teaspoon of regular instant coffee, three quarters of a spoon of decaf, one spoon of Ovaltine, and fill it up with whole milk. On other days it’s a different formula. This doesn’t come naturally to me, as I am a lifelong non-drinker of coffee, tea, and soft drinks. The rest of breakfast is similarly intricate, as is the array of nine pills in the morning. Handling the laundry is similarly devious. We have a washer and a dryer, and she made printed instructions, but still I managed to pour the detergent into the fabric softener slot, a no-no. I struggle to remember that towels, alone of the loads, do not take fabric softener sheets in the dryer. Even folding clothing has its pitfalls. For example, I fold a shirt forward; she folds it backward. I think this is a natural reflection of gender roles: men are essentially forward, women backward. So I fold mine forward, and hers backward. But maybe you can see why my writing slowed. Sunday I got up at 5 AM, but did not turn on this computer until after 3 PM. I was busy attending to household functions.

I finally got my dentures, after seven months and about ten thousand dollars. I’m not using them, because they chafe my gums so that it’s too painful to put them in. I daresay we’ll get that straightened away in due course. I wish Florida allowed denturists to practice; I suspect one of them would have been faster, cheaper, and made a better fit. At any rate, I’m sure the dentures will get adjusted in due course, and I’ll be able to chew more thoroughly than I do now.

My mind is always working, even during routine chores. For example, when doing the laundry I have learned that socks exist to fall on the dirty floor, no matter how carefully you handle the batch, and they’re not too keen on pairing off correctly. Lint is surprisingly intriguing; it’s like gauze, and you might be able to make a fluffy garment from it. When grocery shopping I like what I call shopping card diplomacy: if you need a cart you take it, and when you no longer need it, you leave it. If another shopper is just finishing as you arrive, you take her cart, saving her a trip to the store or cart hanger. It’s all so convenient and amicable, without possessiveness. Now if only the world could be run like that!

I finally watched the first season of Danger Mouse, the British cartoon series. It’s fun, though it is the type where only the person talking moves. He’s sort of an ordinary mouse with an eye patch, not handsome or muscular or brilliant. He just sort of muddles through the various adventures, somehow prevailing. Many of them feature arch enemy Baron Greenback, a frog also known as the Terrible Toad, who constantly tries to eliminate Danger Mouse and conquer the world. Huge robots, ghosts, all manner of threats—I don’t know how the Baron manages to develop such fancy devices, but Danger Mouse always manages to foil them, somehow, barely.

Robert Tralins died, age 84. I knew him by correspondence; he was a character. He sent me a clock that runs backward, and it still keeps time in my study. I learned more from his epitaph than I remembered from his letters. I am mentioned, as is L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Dianetics and Scientology, who was a science fiction/fantasy/horror writer in his day. Tralins authored 251 titles, which puts him safely ahead of me, and some were wild. One was with Madame Sherry, who ran a bordello frequented by wealthy and famous clients, which got raided, and she spent a year in jail. Then Tralins worked with her on her tell-all memoir, Pleasure Is My Business, published in 1961. It was banned as obscene, lewd, degrading, sadistic, masochistic, and disgusting, until that was reversed by the US Supreme Court in 1964. He lived in Tampa Bay. He had prostate cancer, that it seems finally took him out. But clearly he was a writer you could call a writer, and to paraphrase a more famous quote, we may not see his like again.

Martin Gardner died. He was known for his clever books of mathematical games and puzzles, some of which influenced my writing. He had a column in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN for a quarter century. He was twenty years older than I. It’s nice to see a person carry his intellect into old age.

Frank Frazetta died. He was about six years my senior, one of the phenomenal genre artists. I’m not sure he ever did a cover for any of my books, he being more into high-paying movie and TV art, but I’d have been honored if he had. I do have a book of his fantastic art. It seems publishers were known to buy one of his paintings, then commission a writer to turn out a novel to go with it. That’s pretty potent art. Muscular heroes, awesome monsters, and bare women—oh, those women!

I read Irving Wishbutton: The Questing Academy, by Brian Clopper, at least the portion sent by the author. I reviewed his children’s books Graham the Gargoyle here back in 2001, and Paul the Pillow Monster in 2004. This one is also for young folk, but I think older ones. It’s fabulous. Irving Wishbutton discovers himself atop a hill. He learns that he is a character in an as-yet forming novel, and he has to attend a school designed for such characters so that they can fill out and in due course do justice to their stories. There are things like the Office of Fine Aunts (yes, there’s a pun there) and many weird characters from other stories. Irving is a “smudge” because his author has not yet worked out his full description. Characters become more fully formed as their authors do them. Once their novels are fully realized, they will go into them and play their scenes. Right now it’s like a wild boarding school. Irving’s roommate is a ferocious column of ash that can coil like a rattlesnake. Then he learns that he has no roommate, and others think he is making it up. This, among other things, messes up his relation with a prospective girlfriend. Characters are not allowed to date other characters in their own books, but can associate with those in other books. The scenes alternate with glimpses at reality, as Irving’s author handles his routine household chores, his children, etc., and gradually works out the details of his novel, which will really put Irving through a wringer with monsters and threats galore. But the story Irving is experiencing here is not the one he is destined for; the school has its own intrigues and dangers. Overall, this strikes me as one great story, and I hope the author is able to get it published traditionally. Readers of any age should enjoy it. The author is looking for an agent, having struggled for years with the giant bottleneck that is our traditional publishing system. He deserves to be known.

My own writing slowed, but I did write another 23,000 words of my horror novel The Sopathsand completed the first draft at about 60,000 words. (In normal times, 60,000 words would be one month’s production for me.) It may be conventionally unpublishable, but I think I have finally succeeded in seeing a horror novel through without it veering into something else. For years I didn’t write it because it was too horrible; then I succeeded in taming it to the point were it was too un-horrible; finally I achieved the right level, I think. Here is the key: at one point my protagonist picks his little daughter up by the feet and bashes her head into a wall, breaking her neck and killing her, because she is a sopath, really a wild creature in disguise, who has killed the rest of his family and is coming after him. Later another underage sopath girl does him a favor, so he is obliged not to kill her—it’s a conscience thing—and she wants to have sex with him. He demurs, of course, but she’s persistent and pretty graphic about what she wants, and it is true that sopaths have no civilized restrictions. If killing gets them that they want, they kill. If trading favors does it, they trade. If sex does it, they have sex, age no barrier. They’re not ravening monsters, merely individuals with desires and no scruples, somewhat like school bullies or company bosses. I fear publishers will say okay to the killing of children, but freak out at the notion of their being sexual. Yet this is integral to the story; it is the nature of the sopath state. In fact there’s a teen sopath who uses sex to virtually enslave men so that they will do her bidding, which includes brutal torture of those who oppose her. It’s ugly, but I will not have it censured into meaninglessness. We’ll see.

When I delved into my voluminous Sopaths file of ugly news items it turned out not to be a lot of use, because filling a book with repeated and similar examples of man’s inhumanity to man does not a novel make, at least by my definition. But some offshoots can be interesting. A newspaper column in May 1989 by Theo Lippman Jr was titled “Conservatism can’t cure crime.” Conservatives like to say that it’s wishy-washy liberalism that encourages crime; start getting tough with criminals, and crime will decrease. Well, Richard Nixon (how ironic: a criminal president getting tough with criminals) and Ronald Reagan put in conservative judges, revived the death penalty—so a few innocent folk get executed, it happens, get over it—encouraged police to damn well not coddle criminals—conservatives don’t seem to much like the Miranda rights business, feeling that criminals shouldn’t have rights—tromped on the illegal drug trade, and built prisons galore. In twenty years the prison population rose from about 200,000 to over half a million. So what was the result? The annual number of violent crimes more than doubled. I suspect that trend has continued in the intervening twenty years. Does the death penalty have a deterrent value? The statistics give that the lie. I remember commentator Paul Harvey saying that well, the criminal who is executed is deterred from every committing another crime. Uh-huh, and if he is innocent, execution prevents him from ever committing a crime. So let’s execute everyone, and have no crime at all. So what do the conservatives say now that the evidence refutes them? That crime is the liberals’ fault. You can’t get through to a closed mind. Perhaps related: it seems that conservative Republican states have more divorces and teen pregnancy than do liberal democratic states. Denial simply doesn’t work, but like faith, it persists regardless.

I read the newspaper comics. Bizarro for 5-03-2010 has the teacher telling her little students “Today we’ll pretend to be classical composers.” One says “I’ll be Brahms!” Another says “I’ll be Beethoven!” And young Arnold Schwarzenegger says “I’ll be Bach!” Mother Goose & Grimm for 5-13-2010 has one character saying he went to a séance for the male sheep who died last year. What did the sheep say? The grass is greener on the other side. Non Sequitur for 5-28-2010 has the child protagonist traveling back to the dinosaur age in her friend’s time machine. She conjunctures that Adam and Eve could have been time travelers escaping their overpopulated world, but got stuck in the past and ironically started the human race. Then she returns to the present. Whereupon Adam says “I thought they’d never leave.” And Eve says “Whatever. Now you can get our machine fixed, right?” Holy Mole for 5-31-2010 has their two creatures resting under a palm tree on a sea isle. They are finally far from civilization and its greed and ugly excesses. Then the water turns dark: light sweet crude oil.

I try to answer the questions fans pose. Sometimes it’s a challenge. Here’s an example. A girl had her topic for a demonstration speech for her English class: “How do you defend your castle from dragons?” She asked my advice. Here is my response.

Well, a good deep broad moat with a huge fierce moat monster would help stop land dragons. If you could tame a roc bird, that could stop flying dragons. Failing that, you might try to buy them off by feeding them, though the delectable maidens they have a taste for might object to being put to that use. Maybe the simplest defense would be to buy a pet basilisk and give it the run of the outer wall of the castle. A mature basilisk is only six inches long, so it’s not complicated to house, and the mere sight of it can wipe out any living creature. Even its breath is poisonous, which is why your best friend doesn’t really like being called “basilisk breath.” In fact you might even be able to fake it by hoisting a warning flag with a picture of a basilisk on it: when the dragons see that, they will stay well away.

But mainly it’s like getting into drugs: it’s a hell of a lot easier to stay clear of them, than to deal with them once you’re hooked. Try to build your castle in a dragon-free zone.

THE DISH generally has interesting material. In their distribution for 5-11-2010 they ask the reader to imagine hundreds of black protesters armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition descending on Washington DC, speaking of the need for political revolution, possible even armed conflict, in the event that laws they don’t like are enforced by the government. How would the authorities react? Because that’s what white gun enthusiasts did. Imagine white members of Congress, while walking to work, being surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom spits on a congressman for not voting the way the protester desired. That’s what white Tea Party protesters did. Imagine a rap artist calling a white president a piece of shit, saying he should suck on the artist’s machine gun. White rocker Ted Nugent said that about President Obama. Do we really have color-blind laws and justice in America?

Assorted items: News of a really devious computer virus: it causes the Internet Explorer to pop porn sites, and causes the regular programs to be considered viruses. Followed by an ad for a fake virus protection program. It seems that some new fathers get postpartum depression too. How is that, when I understand that it is mostly a body chemistry thing as the mother separates physically from her baby? Well, dads can have their schedules disrupted too; I remember getting about two hours of sleep a night when taking care of my baby girl. (Who died last year. Sigh.) They can have the stress of juggling work and new home responsibilities. Yes, my writing output cut in half. And they lose sexual intimacy. That could certainly do it; decent sex can be hard to come by in the best of times. They picked a picture taken by the Hubble telescope to celebrate it’s 20^th anniversary. That’s some picture! It looks like a wild science fiction magazine cover showing smoky fiery trolls in space. Letter in Dear Abby from an athletic, youthful-looking mother dining out with her son, being mistaken for a cougar. The columnist remarked that what attracts men to older women is that they are confident, relaxed, comfortable with themselves, and fun to be around, while younger women don’t bother to be subtle about wanting men with money. As an older man with money, I can see the cougar appeal. Essay by Dr. Victor C Strasburger: “For American media, sex is fun, sex is sexy, and sex is used to sell everything from cars to shampoo. But mention ‘birth control’ and somehow you’ve crossed the line…If we can spend more than half a billion dollars advertising ED drugs, surely we can spend a few dollars advertising condoms and birth control pills.” He points out that studies show that giving kids access to birth control does not increase sexual activity or lower the age of first intercourse, but can bring lower rates of teen pregnancy. And, I’m sure, lower rates of VD. Now there is genetic evidence that our ancestors did after all manage to breed some with the Neandertals. Of course they had sex; that’s inevitable, if only the raping of captive women. But hitherto there’s been no evidence that any of it resulted in any pregnancies. It seems a few cases did.

Quotes published in THE WEEK: “The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.” Robertson Davies. “Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice con have.” James Baldwin. And a news item: 63% of married women in the US say they would prefer to watch a movie, read a book, or catch an extra hour of sleep, rather than have sex with their husbands. I guess settled husbands are boring. How would they feel about handsome hot potent strangers? Or about letting their husbands do it with sex bombs while those wives take their naps?

Garrison Keillor can be a pretty sharp observer. In a recent essay he says that the onset of self publishing dooms traditional publishing. “It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it.” Well, I say that it had its joys, but the frequent abusive arrogance of it brought about the need for alternatives, which I have labored to facilitate. Don’t miss the New Era, Garrison.

And a promotional note: Paizo Press Planet Stories has brought out its edition of my early SF novel Sos the Rope, with a nice introduction by Robert E Vardeman. I wrote Sos in about a month and it won a $5,000 contest that helped put me on the map. It moved rapidly because I adapted it from a long chapter in my unpublished college thesis novel The Unstilled World, improving on what I had written before. It is sword and club adventure in a post-apocalyptic world that has reverted to near savagery. So those who have been suffering for lack of my early fiction may fulfill their desire now. Who knows, it could lead to one or two sales. Paizo.com/planetstories.

I read the huge 300,000 word novel The Walrus & the Warlock, by Hugh Cook, sent by PAIZO publishing as part of their Planet Stories series of reprints. Paizo.com/planetstories. I had never heard of this author, and indeed this novel was not published before in America. Hugh Cook was born in 1956 and died in 2008, with Walrus published in 1988. He was taken out by cancer at age 52. That makes it personal for me in my fashion, because my daughter died of cancer a year later, a decade younger. At any rate, the title refers to two pirate ships that generally oppose each other. The protagonist is sixteen year old Drake, who longs for adventure and power but hardly has the wit to survive his teens. On his sixteenth birthday, we learn, he celebrates by getting (a) laid; (b) drunk; (c) into an enormous amount of trouble. That’s typical of the way this novel summarizes key aspects; we never learn much more about the detail of those three activities. Thereafter his foolishness gets him into legal trouble, and the ogre king of the country has him dumped in the sea several leagues out. If he swims back to shore by nightfall, maybe he’ll get to marry the king’s daughter. He doesn’t; on the verge of drowning he is rescued by a passing boat, which is how he meets the fair red maiden Zanya and falls instantly and desperately in love with her. He pursues her through the rest of the novel, though at first she is not much interested. Drake is constantly getting into trouble, sometimes because others betray him, sometimes because of his own recklessness, and barely escaping with his hide mostly intact. He more or less involuntarily joins a pirate crew and learns a lot. He encounters assorted vicious monsters. He experiences man’s brutality to man. At once point he is imprisoned with a garrulous old man as a cell-mate. Then the man dies, and Drake longs to have him back. “In fact, Drake got some of the old man back as part of his next dole of soup, but he did not know that, and thus gained no comfort from it.” That offers a notion of the harsh dry wit. It’s really quite a story, though it has its problems. In the center it lapses into summary, as if the author meant to return to fill it out but forgot. There are also typos, and I think some missing text: illustrations were inserted, but these replaced rather than adding to the prior text on those pages. A competent proofreader should have caught that. The story ends abruptly without a resolution, as if part of a longer narrative hacked off to fit the volume. A competent editor would have fixed that. But I seem to be of the quaint old school, where competence counted. It is part of a series. But for rollicking adventure, this suffices.

I have been frustrated by not being able to take my system online as has been the case since I upgraded from Xandros to Kubuntu last Dismember, thence to Ubuntu in Jamboree . When I do my monthly Survey update, for example, I have to copy the file to a backup disc, then copy it into a Windows system, do my updating there, and then copy it back to mine. Windows can get balky about it, sometimes refusing to recognize my disc or flash drive. Microsoft does like to poke its finger in the eye of competing systems, without being obvious enough to get the government down on its back for abusive competition, which I suspect it finds a nuisance. It’s easier and cleaner for me simply to do it on my own system, staying entirely clear of Windows. I didn’t parody it as Macrohard Doors in Xanth for nothing. This month I heard from a local fan, Brian Smith, who is also a Linux geek: that is, one who knows how to crack the whip and make the ornery animal that is the average computer behave. He came here on Father’s Day and we spent seven hours battling the monster, in the course of which I learned that having to click Okay 15 times to get a macro placed on a key is an OpenOffice problem, rather than an Ubuntu problem. Well, if I have any OpenOffice programmers reading this, I hope they will risk the wrath of their braindead administration and fix that glitch, and while they’re at it, restore the paragraph place-switching option it used to have. I wanted a KDE system, but some Brian brought turned out actually to be Gnome when we checked them on Live, that is, looking at them without installing. Kubuntu still is incomplete, with no access to the section that includes games; I think it’s been about five years now, and either they haven’t noticed, or don’t want their KDE version to be too useful compared to their home-base Ubuntu. PCLOS had no OpenOffice suite; too bad for that. OpenSUSE looked good; I asked whether it was related to Dr. Seuss, but we concluded probably not. So we installed that—and it wouldn’t let me have my Dvorak keyboard. In fact it refused to allow any alternate to the standard American QWERTY layout. This turned to to be a Known Problem, but it didn’t matter; it was adamant. Too bad; I would have switched to it otherwise. So finally we returned to Ubuntu, this time the current upgrade, 10.04. But it wouldn’t print. Turned out you need to download the driver for the printer, something that was unnecessary before. I guess Ubuntu thought it was getting too damned user-friendly, so it threw in the monkey wrench. I have remarked before how programmers for Linux distributions seem to be fugitives from Windows, and bring their user-be-damned attitude with them. How to download, when Ubuntu won’t deign to touch a modem? Ah, here’s where geekdom scores. Brian hooked up an external modem he had brought, USRobotics, and got Ubuntu to recognize that. Voila! Maybe he caught Ubuntu off-guard, and next revision they’ll make sure to eliminate access to external as well as internal modems. Presto, we were online and downloading the software, which took about an hour. Then the printer worked. Next day I went online to look up some sites and update a couple of entries on the Electronic Publishing Survey. The new Ubuntu has its little hangups, of course, like insisting that I invoke my variant Dvorak keyboard by opening a terminal and typing “xmodmap .Xmodmap” each time I crank up, when the prior Ubuntu accepted it automatically. Say, I wonder whether xmodmap would enable me to reprogram the number-pad Enter key to be SaveAll, as I did a couple decades back? I don’t dare try, because if they treat that key as the same as the regular Enter key I could lose my ability to use it.  They are different keys, but Microsoft refuses to recognize that, and maybe Linux copies that bad attitude. It also can’t save my OpenOffice working session; it thinks I have crashed when I shut down, and insists on running the Recovery process. And Firefox automatically checks “Work Offline” so that I can get mousetrapped when I’m trying to go online, and the Nautilus File Browser still won’t tell me the size and date of a file I’m replacing on the backup disc, and of the myriad options Ubuntu offers it takes care not to make these snags optional. I think programmers do know what options are useful, and make sure to exclude those, somewhat the way Windows takes care to gray out only those particular options you most need to invoke: you can see but can’t touch, which is of course more maddening than if they simply didn’t include them. I also get annoyed at the constant solicitation for a four hour upgrade download I don’t want and can’t use, each time I crank up, and it seems there’s no way to turn off that solicitation. But the system is working in its fashion, with some prior nuisances fixed, and I can now access the Internet. I did do the latest month’s Survey updating on it, relatively fast and easy. If I want the perfect system I guess I’ll have to design it myself, including simple obvious user-friendly features, then hire an independent programmer to shape it up. It would make the kind of simple easy macros that used to exist on primitive computers, include the Move File option that also once existed, have the ability to save layouts of called-up files so that they will appear where they were when you closed, when the system is cranked up again, so you don’t have to load a bunch each time and reset defaults, it would be bug-free, and so on. Above all, it would run correctly out of the box, with no extended setup hassles. Then finally there will be a system that is not only user friendly but writer friendly. Ah, it is to foolishly dream; the geeks would never let me have it.

On our 54^th anniversary my wife and I joined with Daughter Cheryl to see the movie Knight and Day. It was essentially action-packed fluff, verging on parody of James Bond and other movies, but fun. The man has a C-cell sized battery that can power a small city, so naturally the bad guys want it and will kill to get it. Girl gets involved, apparently just because she’s there, not realizing the danger they are in. So while she’s changing her shirt in the airplane’s toilet stall, he’s fighting the ambush on the plane, which consists of everyone else on it, including the pilots and stewardess. It goes on from there. He warns her that official-seeming men will tell her that they are taking her to safety, when actually they mean to kill her, and he drugs her to get her out of it. Gradually they get interested in each other; it is a romance. By the end of the movie he is injured and recovering; they are ready to take him to a safe place, and she, catching on, drugs him and rescues him in a nice reversal. They expect to be hidden and happy together in South Africa.

A reader, Chad Woody, clued me in: I did have a cover painting by artist Frank Frazetta, for the SF Book Club edition or Orn. The copy was on my shelf; I just didn’t know to check for it.

We bought things. We use remote phones in the house, because it’s a big house and my wife can’t get around rapidly, and it easy to keep those phones close by. Our old set is Siemens, and for almost a decade it has served well. But they are starting to waver, so when there was a sale we bought a set of 4 Vtech remote phones for $70, and they work well. We did not disconnect the Siemens, so now we have 7 remote phones scattered around the house, plus our Tracfone cell phones, which also work well, in contrast to he AT&T cell phones we had before. We have two refrigerators, one from our prior house that now sits in the oven-like garage and for 23 years has worked perfectly. But we fear it is not immortal, so we replaced—the house refrigerator, which was leaking and knocking and not keeping things fully cold. We got a larger, 26 cubic foot, Samsung that should be able to take most of what’s in the garage machine if it croaks and meanwhile is keeping things cold. In fact when I first tried to scoop frozen yogurt—it’s almost indistinguishable from ice cream, but we think healthier—it was rock hard. So we had little adjustments to make, and now the stuff can be scooped. Since I took over meal making five years ago I have gotten more interested in things like stoves and refrigerators.

Readers send me invitations to be a Friend or to join a Site. Look, folks: I’m in the backwoods, on dial-up, because here in the primitive hinterland for all I know they think broadband is a stripe around the posterior of a heavyset woman. Downloads of pictures can take literally hours, tying up our phone line. It happens periodically when well-meaning souls forward two copies of a folio of pictures. So I don’t do YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace, Flog or whatever. I’m not sure I would do them even if I had broadband, because as I have said, I’m from another century that predates much of this new-fangled stuff and I have other uses for my time, such as writing my stories and novels and keeping up with the constant barrage of fan letters. So thanks for your interest, but please leave me out of it. What would I do if I did have broadband? I’d probably watch The Naked News, if it still exists; I’ve never seen it, alas, but it seems like my kind of program. Which gives a hint what fogies did in my day: girl watching. I wonder what today’s folk do?

I mentioned correspondence. Every so often I actually say something in a letter. Here are a couple of examples:

You ask what the one greatest obstacle is for me when I start to write a new book: mental, physical, legal, or political?  None of the above.  I love writing, and am constantly getting ideas for it.  I take care of my health so have no physical barrier.  I am an established writer, and know of no legal obstacles in that respect.  I am an ardent independent liberal politically, but that does not interfere with my writing.  No, the single worst obstacle is marketing.  I have great imagination, and skill honed over the course of decades, but I want what I write to be read, and that means getting it published, and that in turn means catering to the limited tastes of publishers.  So there are projects I never tackled because I knew they could not be published.  Every so often I make another effort to be different or original, and have just completed a novel titled The Sopaths that may be unpublishable.  Its thesis is that overpopulation causes the world to run out of souls, so babies start being born without souls, and thus have no capacity for conscience, remorse, empathy, or appreciation of the arts.  They are incorrigible little monsters in human form.  They will do anything without hesitation to get what they want, lying, cheating, stealing, bullying, and killing without compunction.  Because that includes using sex, and they are children, publishers will freak out for that reason alone.  I may have to self publish it instead.  We’ll see.  But there’s the obstacle, and it’s one all writers face.  They must hew to narrow channels, or go unpublished.  Now you know.

I was asked a question: “How do I stop their suffering?”

I presume you mean the suffering of folk who are confined to drear Mundania for life. The only way I see to stop that kind of suffering is imagination. Xanth is an imaginary realm that isn’t actually all that safe or fun for ordinary residents, because there are dragons, nickelpedes, and nasty clouds that like to soak parades, picnics, and sun bathers. Even the fact that every resident has a magic talent doesn’t help much, because most talents are minor like the ability to make a spot appear on a wall. But there’s always the hope of discovering something nice, like a friendly tangle tree or a healing elixir spring.

But in Mundania there is no promise of magic, apart from things like the rainbow that can be seen from only one side. About all a person can do is try to help others get along better. That’s about as close as Mundania comes to personal magic: when you help someone else, you feel better yourself. Even just talking to someone who is lonely, using your imagination to make it interesting, can make you own life more interesting. Weird, isn’t it?

News items: In Toronto Canada a neighbor’s 5 year old grandson was driving a loud ATV for hours along the quiet street, disturbing the neighborhood. Not a crime, just a nuisance. Obviously the brat’s family didn’t care who else was disturbed. Finally Marika De Florio had had enough. So she went out topless in her 56 year old splendor just, you know, taking a little walk. And that child was suddenly whisked off the street. Problem solved. Well, the police were called, but they said there was no law there against such exposure. I mean, what’s wrong with the human body as God made it? Thus peace returned to the neighborhood. In South Africa women are trying out a new device: a female condom with rows of hooks that latch on to a man’s penis when it penetrates. If he tries to remove it, it clasps tighter, maybe in the manner of a thumb lock; he can’t get it off without a doctor’s help. Thousands of these are being distributed to women in South Africa, which has the highest rape-rate in the world. I suspect that will change, especially if they start arresting men who get the condom on them, as there’s really no way for that to happen except by poking into it inside an unwilling woman.

They have discovered why chimpanzees make war, and it may be an insight into why humans like war so well. They make raids to harass and kill members of other tribes, weakening those tribes, until it is feasible to take over their territory. Then they have more fruit trees to forage among, their females eat better, reproduce faster, and the tribe grows bigger and stronger. So the instinct for aggressive territoriality may date back to before the separation of man from chimp.

 Fifty years ago there was a scary movie, Psycho. I remember. We saw it. We still wonder whether there was a trigger in the movie to set off screaming, because when the famous shower scene came everyone was suddenly screaming and thrashing around. We were not in the first row, and had to thrash too, because we were trying to watch the damn scene and every time we got a glimpse, the folk in front of us would shift to block it off. It was one damned effective sequence in a movie that had up to that point been moderately dull, featuring Janet Leigh’s long drive alone. I understand that she insisted that the movie be changed to feature her more, regardless of the harm done to it. Hitchcock should have known better.

A reader sent me a link to a www.boingboing.net site that featured a discussion of my dirty fantasy Pornucopia. It shows the cover, quotes blurb material, “And a few words, supposedly written by Piers Anthony…” I did indeed write them, warning readers that this is not Xanth. “But those who want their minds wickedly stretched, read on.” Then comments by site participants, dated June 15 and 16, 2020. “It’s not my mind that I’m used to getting wickedly stretched.” “Pornucopia is amazing! I’ve read it three or four times.” “I would have preferred to have heard about The Magic Fart, for what are obviously mature and thoughtful reasons.” “Good lord, I’m surprised nobody mentioned Firefly.” “If you’re shocked by this, do not read his Bio of a Space Tyrant, or Apprentice Adept series, or his Tarot series…Xanth is actually kind of out of character compared with his other books.” And on, with many generally perceptive comments. Until I encountered this one: “I tried to read his books…the writing was so bad!” I would have liked to have some specifics there, as I doubt there is much that can be faulted grammatically or in general presentation. I do know my trade. I suspect this person encountered mind-stretching concepts and couldn’t handle them, so condemned the books. That is, a conservative. “Then he had some other book that was focused on a tree in a backyard or something that was all pedophilia.” This, too, is curious. The novel in question must be Shade of the Tree, which contains no pedophilia. Maybe a confusion with Firefly, which does have a graphic child sex scene? One of the things I question is why the author of a murder mystery is not branded a murderer, or the author of a war adventure a warmonger, but the author of a book with a child-sex scene is suspected of pedophilia. I think that ugliness, like beauty, is largely in the eye of the beholder. But here in this same forum is what I consider to be an excellent discussion by “Coherent”: “I have always thought very well of Piers Anthony for having the balls to put erotic images and concepts in his writing. Even, yes, underage sexuality. My youth was filled with sexual discovery: Sex isn’t something you discover magically at 12 or 14 or 18 by someone flipping a switch in your body. For me, the introduction to sexuality was a journey that started at 6 years of age and continued to flourish until maturity. The idea that children are sexless is a myth. It’s perpetuated by those who would prefer to forget how sexuality gently pervades our lives, from our conception until our death.” Exactly. I try to write realistically, even in the oxymoronic boundaries of fantasy, and this includes references to natural functions and childhood awareness of sex. But for the record, for those who evidently doubt, my private personal taste is in slender, long-haired brunette women from menarche on.

The price of e-readers is coming down, with Kindle now under $200, and there is increasing competition. I am trying to make all of my titles available electronically, but accomplishing that is a challenge. Fans assume that electronic publishers are eager for my books; that’s not necessarily the case. For one thing, I’m fairly knowledgeable about terms, and won’t sign a bad contract. Publishers can get annoyed by authors who insist on fair deals with things like audit clauses.

Article in NEW SCIENTIST titled “Dream Catcher” explores lucid dreaming. That’s when, as I put in when I book-signed Dream A Little Dream with co-author Julie Brady, whose novel was based on her lucid dreaming, you are asleep, and dreaming, and you know it’s a dream and you can change it. One of my favorite science fiction stories is “Dreams Are Sacred” by Peter Phillips, published in 1948, where they had a device to enable a man to enter the dream of another man and change it. I liked the beginning of it, wherein a boy was afraid of monsters in his dreams, so his father took him out for a day of practice with a powerful handgun that could blast apart old treestumps. Its detonation numbed the boy’s hands; he really appreciated its power. “Tonight when your dream monsters come, this gun will be with you…” his father said. And it was, and those monsters didn’t stand a chance. Anyway, now lucid dreaming may provide an insight into the nature of consciousness. Three mysteries that have fascinated me all my life are (1) why is there something instead of nothing, enabling our universe; (2) how did life come to be; and (3) what is consciousness. Progress is being made on all of these, and I hope to have answers before I die. I believe that consciousness may be the first to be solved, and that it will turn out to be an emergent property of feedback loops. That is, circuits of the brain looking back at their own functioning processes, and when this is done on a sufficient scale, voila! Consciousness. So machine consciousness should be possible, when the design is right. But as usual, I’m ahead of science, and doubt I will get credit for my insights when the official answer comes. Anyway, the article says (I am simplifying considerably) there are two types of consciousness, Primary and Secondary. Primary is what everyone has, including animals, essentially seeing and feeling and reacting. Secondary is more complicated, because of an extra feedback loop: you are aware of being aware. This is thought to be unique to humans. Dreams are Primary, where you accept without much question what you see, even when it is nonsense. Lucid dreams may be Secondary, as you analyze and second guess your dreams. So they are studying the brains of sleeping subjects to see what lights up during what kind of dreaming. This separation of brain areas can’t be done with awake subjects, because they have both kinds of consciousness in gear. Only when dreaming does Secondary consciousness tune out so they can define Primary alone. Then when Secondary kicks in, in a lucid dream, what brain circuits are added? They are teaching people to learn how to lucid dream, so they can be studied. They are trying to zero in on why some things, like reading, can’t be done in dreams. They are finding that lucid dreaming is not simply consciousness in dreams; the brain is in a different state than full awake consciousness, between the other two states. I think this is a great line of research.

And they are now catching on to something I figured out long ago: asteroid impacts on Earth can trigger shock waves that evoke monstrous volcanic action. So the Deccan Traps in India that released a huge miles-deep amount of lava and evidently helped extinguish the dinosaurs 65 million years ago may have derived from a meteor impact. There’s iridium in that lava, which is rare in the Earth’s crust, but common in meteors.

And the wider effects of agriculture. Yes, it feeds the world, and wipes out native life. It also changes the situation of man. In the old, pre-ag days, if a man had a nasty neighbor he could walk away and hunt/gather somewhere else, avoiding trouble. But agriculture meant sedentism, that is settling down in one place, so he could no longer walk away. He had to deal with that neighbor, and that could get violent. Thus, perhaps, war, as with the chimps.

British Petroleum will fork out $20 billion to compensate business losses by those dependent on the Gulf for their livelihoods, as in fishing and tourism. It won’t be enough. Is the oil spill the worst American natural disaster? A newspaper article says not yet. The Dust Bowl of the thirties, brought on by poor farming, economically wiped out whole states. The Johnstown Flood of 1889, caused by a poorly maintained dam,  killed about 2,000 people. But the Oil Spill ain’t over yet.

Opinion essay in NEW SCIENTIST on lying by Dorothy Rowe. It seems we all do it, and shouldn’t. At about age 3 or 4 children learn that if they want to get along, they can’t stick entirely to the truth. It’s a matter of self image. We can’t see reality directly, only our interpretations of it. I think of an analogy with the computer: we don’t see the dots and spaces that make up the numbers zero and one in endless lines, we see the graphic interpretations of those codes, which form words and pictures on the screen. We need those translated images. If the computer glitches and we get screenfuls of numbers and symbols instead of pictures, we have a problem, and we try to get the comforting images restored. So in life we lie, to others and to ourselves, to maintain those pretend pictures. It seems we even lie about lying, calling it denial. “Lying gives us the temporary delusion that our personal and social worlds are intact, that we are loved, that we are safe, and above all, that we are not likely to (be) overwhelmed by the uncertainty inherent in living in a world we can never truly know.” “Lies have networks of consequences we did not expect or intend.” They may protect us in the short term, but can be disastrous in the long term. So it is ultimately better to come to terms with reality. I agree, and try with imperfect success to be rational and honest at all times. This does complicate my life, as when I challenge a dishonest publisher or when I call a spade a spade and lose a friend. There’s a long potential discussion there; I do have specifics in mind. Complete honesty at all times may be impossible, because there are those who will kill rather than suffer their delusions to be exposed. Isn’t that what killing in the name of religion is about?

Which reminds me of the organized lies that are advertising. There’s an ad on TV that I haven’t figured out what for, about the delights of a five year old imagination, with crudely drawn paper figures mixing with a contemporary city background. My favorite part is where it is singing about defying all expectation, and a paper bus is passing, and opens its mouth wide to sing expectaTION, making the paper picture come alive.

In the month of JeJune I finished writing my horror novel The Sopaths and sent it to my agent to see whether it is conventionally publishable, which it well may not be. I wrote a short story, “Privy” for an original anthology The Forsaken Ones. That’s about an old outhouse that still stinks after a decade of disuse. So why didn’t the shit compost and lose its smell? Therein lies he story. I read a big novel. I ran the household, and saw my wife gradually improve, until by month’s end she was, if not 100%, coming within sight of it. I had the pleasure of updating my Survey of Electronic Publishers on my own Linux system again. So it was, really, an upbeat month, though the death of my elder daughter last year still weighs upon me. I expect to take Jewel-Lye off, as it were, then get to work on Xanth #36 Luck of the Draw. Normally my slack time fills in solidly, instantly, but I do hope to watch some more videos. Relaxation comes hard to a workaholic. We’ll see.

Jewel-Lye was my month off, catching up on things before resuming Xanth #36 Luck of the Draw in AwGhost. I wrote the first chapter back in Jamboree when I got an inspiration, but the hard work remained for later in the year. I expected to do a lot of reading, as I had agreed to look at several reader novels, and I’m a slow reader who tends to fall asleep after ten pages. It’s not that reading bores me, but that it relaxes me. It’s a problem that senescence is not ameliorating; chances are that by the time you read this, I’ll be 76. But then the expected novels didn’t arrive. So I wrote three erotic stories, to be saved for Relationships 5, some time after Relationships 4 wends it’s way into print. I find I enjoy writing erotic stories; there are numerous ideas for them in my voluminous Ideas file. Maybe I’ll make it yet as a dirty old man. So I wrote “Statues” about a man who volunteers to help with weighing and marking bales of donated clothing (a job I once did for pay between college semesters), on the weekend when the air conditioning is turned off. It’s 90 degrees F in there, and he and the woman volunteer will both be sweat-soaked in minutes. So they agree to work naked to save their clothing. They each have significant others and don’t want to mess up up those relationships, but they do start turning each other on, and it shows in rather obvious fashion, as can happen with men. How can they abate this burgeoning desire without cheating on the others? Maybe it’s a matter of technical definition; there are other kinds of sex that the partners don’t go for, so doing that shouldn’t be regarded as cheating on them. You bet it goes on from there, in spades. Then I wrote a sequel, “Just Desserts,” when their partners learn about it and catch them in an unnatural act. And, surprise, are turned on by it, and want to participate. That gets really unnatural, as “desserts” becomes literal. Then another story, “Difference,” wherein a young man moves in with three attractive young women: a bisexual, a lesbian, and a transsexual, all of whom expect regular sex. The lesbian only because she wants to have a baby and doesn’t want artificial insemination; she’s a really nice girl who is conservative about that sort of thing. Then he falls in love with the lesbian. Uh-oh. So you can see I have fun exploring special relationships in fiction that I have no experience with in real life; it’s sexual fantasy. Then halfway through the month the books piled in together, and the stories came to a screeching halt. My free time had evaporated. Much of this column will consist of book reports. Such is a writer’s dull life.

In Dismember 1999 I bought several VCR videos. One of the ones my wife and I watched together was What Dreams May Came, starring Robin Williams, which we had missed in the theater the year before, based on a 1978 novel. The best movies don’t necessarily come to our conservative county. We loved it; in fact it became my favorite movie. Five years later, on my birthday in AwGhost 2004, I watched it again. More recently a reader, Greg Miller, knowing I liked it, sent it to me on DVD. So now, six years later, I watched it again. And what a movie it is! Robin Williams was known for humor, as in the TV series Mork and Mindy, but in this one he is deadly serious. There is heartbreak here, and stunning beauty, and devastating despair, and I still do feel that it is one of the greatest movies ever made.

Chris is boating when he collides with Annie, and they hit it off. She has long brown hair and is always laughing. Then they marry. Then they have children, a boy and girl. It is deliberate summary, setting the scene. The children are abruptly killed in a car accident, and Annie doesn’t laugh any more. Then four years later, Chris dies in another car accident, and Annie is inconsolable. Chris finds his way to Heaven, where the imagination of each soul generates the setting. Heaven is exactly what you choose it to be, in this case a splendidly colorful painted landscape modeled after his wife’s art. He is guided by a man who turns out to be his son in disguise, and by a woman who turns out to be his daughter. Then distraught Annie commits suicide. That does not mean she joins him in Heaven; as a suicide she goes to Hell. Chris refuses to accept that, so he tries what has never been done before: to rescue a soul from Hell. And we see the horrors of Hell, as ugly as Heaven is beautiful. He finds her, but her Hell is of her own making and she won’t leave it. Until at last, unable to bring her out of it, he decides to join her in it, so they will be together. That gets through to her, and she returns with him to Heaven, where she gladly reunites with their pet dog and children. Now it will be happiness ever after.

I have no belief in the supernatural, and do not believe in Heaven, Hell, or any Afterlife. But I appreciate their appeal; indeed I earn my living from fantasy. It’s a matter of the willing suspension of disbelief. I love the idea of defining your own Heaven or Hell; it makes so much sense. I love the imagery, the lovely flowers of Heaven, the ugly fires of Hell, and the challenge of recovering true love. The real horror it presents is not eternal torture, but the risk of losing your mind. This is about as nice a presentation as I have encountered. But this time I watched it with a difference: the memory of the death of my own daughter. Now I relate to the loss of a child in a way I did not before. To lose two children, and then a spouse? I can appreciate how suicide would become an option, to escape the unrelenting grief. So there was a special emotional impact. I am all too much aware how fragile life can be, how tenuous our relationships are. I know my life will end in due course, and so will my wife’s life; chances are that one of us will outlive the other, and I dread that conclusion, in part because for me it truly will be the end. It would certainly be nice to believe in Heaven, where we could be together again, but despite my appreciation of fantasy, I am an utter realist.

I read The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island, subtitled A Tragedy for People Who Eat Food, by Cameron Pierce, to be published in the fall of 2010 by Eraserhead Press, www.eraserheadpress.com/.  This short fantasy novel is weird, wicked, wonderful. It features a sad pickle named Gaston Glew and his girlfriend the pancake Fanny W Fod, who looks literally good enough to eat. She has peanut butter lips, blueberry eyes, chocolate chip dimples, and hair softer than cinnamon. “She lactated the most delicious maple beer in the universe.”She is happy because all pancakes are chronically happy, but she longs for a sad creature to love and make happy. She lives in a zucchini castle and has a Cuddlywumpus locked in the dungeon. But if you think this is a children’s story, beware; it is of quite another nature. At one point Gaston the Pickle has somewhat graphic sex with an obliging pancake lass, with a pickle penis that turns out to be longer than he is, ejaculates brine, then butts her face, mashing it in and messily killing her. It’s not ill will so much as random mayhem by a really unhappy creature. I recommend this novel to strong stomached folk who prefer something imaginatively different, preferably those who don’t eat food.

I read The Sword of Fire and Sea by Erin Hoffman. This is a fantasy adventure, first of a series. Captain Vidarian is required by the head priestess Endera to conduct her niece, the priestess Ariadel Windhammer, to a place of safety, but the journey will be dangerous. It seems that Ariadel is, or is destined to be, very important in the social/political scheme of things, and her life is in danger from the enemy Vkortha. Vidarian tries, but a pirate ship attacks his ship, Ariadel invokes fire magic to destroy it, and thus advertises her presence. Now formidable magical enemies can orient on her. It goes on from there, as Vidarian tries to hide her by taking her overland, but a savage storm comes and sweeps her away just as Vidarian is getting romantically interested in her. So he sets out to recover her, asking assistance from the fire priestesses, and getting some from three formidable telepathic griffins, who are way beyond animals, being intelligent and more trustworthy than most humans. He is also granted magical power of his own, and becomes as important a figure as Ariadel. In fact he is the Tesseract, relating to the magic of the Void between the four standard elements of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air. But he has a lot of learning to do before he can safely handle much of this mysterious and dangerous power. After a horrendous struggle he manages to rescue Ariadel, who was almost killed. And that’s just the highlights of Part 1. Part 2 sees Vidarian begin to develop his powers, and of course he and Ariadel are in love. Endera, who sent him on this mission, turns out to represent the enemy, and they have to battle her and the fire priestesses. Yet in Part 3 Endera helps them, because it is the Tesseract who must open or forever seal the Gate to a devastatingly dangerous other world. No one can be sure of his decision, but it needs to be made. The complicated plot may be confusing when jammed together in this one paragraph, but it makes more sense in the novel. If you like hard-hitting fantasy adventure with a lot of magic, this is your series. It is to be published by Pyr Books.

A reader sent a link to a discussion I hadn’t picked up on before, by Holly Lisle. For years this savvy published author has had sensible discussions of the challenges of writing and selling that should be helpful to novice writers. Now she’s getting more actively into it, somewhat as I did when I invested in small publishers like Mundania Press and self publisher Xlibris. I know from experience that this can be a hazardous route; I took some losses, though in the end it was okay. She is setting up an online magazine, REBEL TALES, http://rebeltales.com/, open to Science Fiction and Fantasy stories and novels. But there’s a difference: her article is subtitled My War for the Midlist. Her thesis is that too many publishers today focus almost exclusively on the frontlist, the new stuff, then let it drop into the void. In the old days writers could get continuing income from sales of their earlier titles, but now midlist authors are being washed out because their works are no longer being sold. This is bad for literature, because some very good books can be rendered unavailable, and some good writers washed out through no fault of their own. Some authors try to get around this by self publishing their reverted older titles, as I have done. But this should be unnecessary; they should stay in print. So this is to be a publisher dedicated to doing that. With electronic publishing it is feasible in a way it isn’t in traditional print; any publisher can do it, so this isn’t new in that sense. What’s new is the focus on making the midlist work and paying the authors regularly, monthly. I hope it succeeds. But I have seen great hopes in publishing founder before. Holly Lisle is more experienced than most, and is tackling it seriously. We’ll see.

I read The Return of Ixtab, by Robert Zitella. This is a near-future science fiction action novel with three main settings. One is an office worker who is mysteriously gaining muscle. Another is a company security man who does what the boss requires, including killing strangers. A third is two brothers, Maya princes of another time, vying for leadership. The unifying aspect is the end of the Maya calendar in 2012: is this really the end of the world coming? I have an incidental interest, as I have reference to the Mayan calendar in my novel Climate of Change; Zitella’s discussion seems competent. The story lines are interesting, the novel is hard-hitting with a smashing conclusion, but I see no deeper meaning here, and the outcome is not entirely satisfactory for my taste. This is entertainment only. It is to be published in February, 2011, by Emerald Publishing. I take this to be www.emeraldpublishing.co.uk, not normally an entertainment publisher.

I read The Train Ride Home by Jason K Albee. I had read this a decade ago as a screenplay; now the author has novelized it. I really didn’t remember it. It is an action-packed fantasy that has just about everything: mystery, murder, betrayal, love, monsters, magic at a nonstop pace. The protagonist, Pete, loses his fiancée to his twin brother, who then is killed. Pete goes to the funeral, planning to ride a train home, using a ticket his young secretary gives him. But it’s hardly that simple. The fiancée he lost now seems desperate to win him back, but he’s not interested, and his brother had connections to the Mob which is trying to kill Pete, who elected not to sign up. He barely makes it to the train, which stops at a station that was shut down half a century ago and has a conductor who is nine feet tall. I did mention that this is fantasy? It turns out to be some ride home, as mobsters get on the train and try to kill him there. Pete gets a magic sword from a stranger and manages to escape into a fantasy realm along the way, where he winds up working for a kingdom and falling in love with Princess Red, though she is betrothed to a possessive prince. It’s wild throughout as Red’s twin sister, Princess Blue, seems interested in Pete, and enemies galore try to take him out.  After several years he has to flee to the train again and finally get home, where one more paradoxical surprise awaits him, tying the whole thing together. However, the novel is not well written or edited (maybe this is a before-editing copy), and important events are glossed over rather than properly exploited. So I can recommend this for those who like wild fantasy adventure and romance, but not to more literate readers. http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com.

Newspaper column by Leonard Pitts, prefaced by a quote from Francis Jeffrey 1773-1850: “Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence.” Amen to that; it’s easier for some folk to get mad than to admit their bigotry. The column exposes the unfairness of the no-fly list. If you get on that list, they won’t let you fly, won’t tell you why, won’t show you the list, won’t remove your name, and won’t let you appeal. So if you’re there because of a confusion of names, tough shit; you’re screwed. This is what the government considers fair play in America?

Creason’s Archery went out of business after 55 years. This was the Citrus County shop where I bought bows, arrows, targets, and got advice. I still practice twice a week, and my aim remains abysmal―actually I think I aim well, but the arrows simply don’t go where I aim them, their flight I think distorted by the arrow rest―and mean to continue, as I do it for exercise. I can get supplies by mail order from Cabela’s, but I’m sorry to see Creason’s go.

It turns out that the odds of winning the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes are one in one and three quarter billion. Lotsa luck there, you dreamer. Other statistics quoted in THE WEEK: in 1928 the top 1% of Americans received almost 24% of the nation’s total income. After the crash and the Depression and reforms that dropped to under 9% in the 1970s. Then came Reagonism and Bushism, greed ruled supreme, and in 2008 it was back up to 23.5%, and the economy crashed again. Because the mass of peons below don’t have enough money to buy what the economy produces, such as cars and houses. Or, in too many cases, food. You do have to feed the cow if you want her to produce; conservatives seem not to understand that. Perhaps related: newspaper article about the Elliott Wave theory that, for one forecaster, predicts a market slide ahead worse than the Great Depression or the Panic of 1873. The Dow may drop from 10,000 to well below 1,000 in the course of five or six years. I’m a skeptic, but your know, there was a prediction a few years back that the Dow would halve its value, and it did, briefly. This sort of thing makes me nervous.

Article in DISCOVER MAGAZINE on the Streetlight effect: researchers tend to look where the looking is good, rather than where the answers are likely to be. This is capsulized in a joke: police find a drunk man crawling on hands and knees under a streetlight. He’s searching for his wallet, which he dropped across the street. So why is he looking here? Because the light’s better here. That would be funnier if serious researchers didn’t do much the same thing. It seems that irregular heartbeats were associated with a higher risk of death, so they focused on medication to smooth out heartbeats. That worked, but also tripled the death rate. Because researchers were focusing on regularity rather than on death. It seems examples abound across many sciences. Hmm―I wonder whether that could explain the medical establishment’s inability to appreciate the way Vitamin C can stop the common cold? Maybe, but I think it more likely that the sponsors of the myriad expensive alternate medicines simply don’t want to study and verify something that would gut their business. They don’t actually want the common cold abolished; it’s a cash cow. Too bad about you folk who have to keep suffering from it.

From the USF MAGAZINE (University of South Florida): they have found a sea slug that makes chlorophyll. Seems it has stolen genes from algae so that it can make its own food by photosynthesis. It does it in each generation by feasting on algae and harvesting the key genes. Now if we can just learn that neat trick from the slug, we could profit enormously.

So why do the stubborn folk in Afghanistan and elsewhere keep bombing our peacekeeping troops? NEW SCIENTIST offers an answer: its vengeance. Try reversing it to see how it works. Suppose foreign troops invaded your town, burned your house, raped your wife, enslaved your children, and would have tortured and killed you if you hadn’t happened to be out of town that day? What would you do? Chances are, with nothing left to lose, you’d go after those troops any way you could, using guerrilla tactics, and you would never agree to peace with the foreigners in charge. Vengeance would be your overriding objective, any way you could achieve it. You would not listen to their rationale that they are merely establishing order. Neither would you care much for the distinction between enemy troops on the ground and enemy bombers dropping devastation like napalm from the sky. Well, this is what happens in a war zone, though you don’t see it publicized by the local newspapers. War is not a polite honorable thing. The larger rights and wrongs of the case disappear; all you know is the utter unfairness of what happened to you personally, and your hatred burns eternal. If you could, you would destroy the enemy entirely. Since you can’t, you’ll possibly settle for them getting the hell out of your territory. Okay, let’s moderate the example somewhat: the enemy merely bombs the factory where you work, so you no longer can earn a living. Do you smile and say thank you, massa? Or do you plot retribution? It’s not just us; the internal war in the Eastern Congo, Africa, is responsible for 5.4 million deaths through 2007, ongoing at 45,000 a month. Women have been mutilated, children forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls raped so badly that their internal tissues tear and their wastes mix with their genitalia. Collateral damage of war. Would you shrug and forgive that?

Interesting item in the AARP bulletin for July/August 2010 about taking a class for those who are afraid to fly, the AAir Born class. On the first day the members shared their stories. Some had been in airplane accidents, some suffered from claustrophobia, some simply feared flying. After two days of discussion and lessons, it was time for their flight. They went as a group, supporting each other. In the plane one young woman wept, but stayed put. And they made a short flight and survived. I have had my own nervousness about flying. I never yielded to it, but can appreciate the feelings of those who do.

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is not the only oil outrage. It seems that Texaco in the course of 30 years from the early 1960s to the early 1990s drilled for oil in the Amazon, dumped billions of gallons of waste products directly into rivers, gouged out more than 900 unlined waste pits that leach toxic waste into the jungle soil and groundwater, and departed. Now there’s a lawsuit, but chances are that a section of the jungle as big as Rhode Island will never really recover.

As a vegetarian I noticed this: shapely actress Pamela Anderson ran a vegetarian ad campaign for PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It’s a picture of her with her body marked for the choice cuts, Breast, Ribs, Rump etc. And Canada banned the ad. So she’s not allowed to use her own body as an example; they consider it demeaning to women. But it seems they don’t consider what the meat industry does as demeaning to animals.

Newspaper article: boys have more trouble learning to read than girls do. Don’t I know it; my sister entered first grade with a fifth or sixth grade reading ability, while it took me three years to plow through first grade because I couldn’t read. They have discovered that fart jokes help get the boys’ attention so they can start reading. I doubt they’d care to use my novel The Magic Fart as a text, but the principle remains. Captain Underpants is mentioned. I remember when they first started substituting terms like underpants for other text in Star Trek. “Captain, that things alive! That blast came from those underpants!” Hilarious, and maybe educational.

They are discovering that cuddly robot animals may do a better job with people in nursing homes than normal people do. I can see it. Robots won’t be judgmental or impatient. The robots even have essential eye contact.

And they have discovered that infections in childhood can lead to lower IQ in adulthood. It seems that the child has to expend resources fighting the illness instead of building new brain cells. I wonder how smart I might have been, had I not suffered childhood illnesses? Sigh.

My computer system is working well enough, thanks to geek help, though it has its little ways. For example, my special keyboard will invoke automatically, but only if I automatically summon a Terminal. If I don’t, no keyboard, until I do. It seems that calling up the Terminal forces it to run BASHRC, thus invoking the keyboard. Okay, that’s easy enough to do. Meanwhile we have been struggling to get our new Windows 7 system to handle email. We downloaded Thunderbird, but it wasn’t suitable for our need. But it turned out that the Windows email program that came with the system does suit our need, so we set up with that. Sometimes Windows does do something right. So we moved the new system into the place where the old one was, and connected the printer―and it can’t recognize the Brother printer we’ve been using all along. Sigh. That means another hassle. Nothing is ever as easy as it should be, with computers. We’ll get there eventually.

Now on to Xanth #36, trusting that life and computers will allow me to write in peace.

Well, I turned 76 and the world did not screech to a halt. Longtime fan and collaborator JoAnne Taeusch sent me a card showing male and female bare backsides: “Thought you might expect a couple of cracks about your age.” I responded that I assumed the female one was hers. Daughter Cheryl sent me a happy birthday text on my cellphone, and I succeeded in answering it, briefly, hunting and pecking on the letters, my first such effort. So already I’m learning things about this century. I’m not sure I’ll be fit to handle the next century, however; I’m barely catching up to this one, having originated in the prior one.

Every so often an entry in my ongoing Electronic Publisher & Services Survey gets more complicated than that listing can handle, and I bring it here for deeper discussion. In this case it’s the entry on Class Act Books, at www.classactbooks.com/. In July I had a highly negative report on them. Then in August I ran the publisher’s refutation, and they seemed to be vindicated. But that triggered more responses from disaffected authors. I try to be fair, but it can be hard to know the exact truth. The publisher impressed me because it named my anonymous reporter, something that an outfit that wrongs many writers can’t do. Well, now the gloves are off, and that person, with her permission, is revealed as Rebecca J Vickery. Rebecca is evidently not from Sunnybrook Farm; the publisher was able to name her because she’s the one with the balls (so to speak) to speak out. Here is what she says:

There are actually 6 of us who left at various dates for pretty much the same reasons. Poor communications, failure of the publisher to answer questions, hidden fees, and poor royalty statements in spite of our books being ranked highly at distributors, refusal to give any sort of accounting of expenses, and that contract with the word NET sprinkled all over it which gave them the right to deduct their dog food and fingernail polish from the royalties. [Neither] I, nor most of the others, will make that mistake again.

They have ads titled “where dreams take shape” for the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. We have not attended and don’t plan to, interesting as it may be; such excursions are beyond our present convenience. But they run a small picture of one of his sketches, the backside view of a young woman. She has the most phenomenal buttocks I’ve ever seen. Intrigued I checked my library to see if I have a volume of his art, as I have a small collection of art books. I was a hopeful artist before I was a hopeful writer, and retain a certain interest. I did not have such a volume, but did have his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, which I had bought in 1993 from DOVER. That’s one great publisher for books that are of lasting interest but ignored by the obscenely best-seller-hungry traditional press. This is a solid 400 tight pages, illustrated by his line drawings, and it covers his life only through age 37. Still, it’s some book, embarrassingly candid, stylistic even though it is a translation. The man was halfway crazy throughout his life, yet with that crucial current of genius that made him famous. He speaks of masturbation, of his intention to kill his common law wife Gala (she asked him to) and―well, let’s give some examples. As a child, walking with a smaller boy, he got a notion and abruptly pushed the child off a bridge. The boy survived a 15 foot fall to rocks, badly injured in the head, but no one blamed Dali, who suffered no remorse. Another time three teen girls took him for a walk. When they suggested he run off and play by himself he caught on that something was up, so he went, circled around, and spied on them. They hoisted their skirts, spread their legs, and pissed on the ground, apparently just to see if they could do it. But the resulting mud splashed on their shoes. He was it seems fascinated by girls throughout, especially slender ones; he got lasting crushes on them, but was awkward in his association with them. Maybe that’s one root of his cubist eroticism: the intensely sexual nature of some pictures is not apparent to the casual eye, but blatant when you do fathom it. When he encountered Gala, the love of his life, she was married to another man, but the two of them hit it off immediately and she was Dali’s from then on. He attributes his sanity, such as it was, to her; she made him whole. There’s a famous painting titled Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea, which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (that’s its full title), and that’s exactly what it is. Up close is Gala’s lusciously shapely bare backside facing a melange of colors. At a distance it is clearly the bust of Lincoln. Another painting shows nuns on a stage, but at a distance they form the grim head of a human skull. He says “I had to go through cubism in order to get it out of my system once and for all, and during this time perhaps I could at least learn to draw! But this could not appease my avid desire to do everything. I still had to invent and write a great philosophic work, which I had begun a year before, and which was called ‘The Tower of Babel.’ I had already written five hundred pages of it, and I was still only on the Prologue!” Dali knew that other great Spanish artist Picasso and on occasion they compared notes. “Picasso had seen my Girl’s Back in Barcelona, and praised it.” If that’s the one that brought me to this book, I agree, though that one is a 1926 painting titled “Girl With Curls.” But Dali had some fabulous misadventure too. When he slept in a hotel in Paris he woke to discover something fastened to his back, just out of sight. Thinking it was a bedbug he reacted with horror. He couldn’t pull it off, so finally he seized a razor blade and hacked it off, getting blood all over himself and the room. It turned out to be a birthmark he had had all along. Another time he was bothered by a piece of mucous on the wall by the toilet he used. Finally he ripped it off with his fingers, but it had hardened, and the sharp point of it wedged under his fingernail and could not be dislodged. He hesitated to seek help, because he would have to say “That blackish thing which has pierced the forefinger of my right hand is a piece of snot!” It finally turned out to be a flake of dried paint or varnish. Then there was his trip to America. He signed up for passage for him and Gala, but lacked the money to pay for it, so he had to raise the money within three days. “…after three days of furiously jerking fortune’s cock it ejaculated in a spasm of gold! After this I felt as if I had made love six times in succession.” He was impressed with New York. “The poetry of New York is Persian digestion, sneezing golden bronze, organ, suction-grip trumpet for death, gums of thighs of glamor girls with hard cowrie-shell vulvas.” A department store asked him to make an exhibit for their front window, and he agreed providing that he have a completely free hand. They agreed. Then he discovered that they had almost completely changed his exhibit without telling him. He demanded that they change it back, or remove his name from it. They declined. Why had they changed it? Because it was too successful, attracting too big a crowd of people. So he went to the bathtub full of water, which was about the only part of the original scene remaining, and overturned it, breaking the plate glass and spilling water all over the store floor and the adjacent street. He got arrested, but there was a considerable groundswell of support for him. Finally an artist had acted to preserve the integrity of his art! But I suspect those same executives went on to become today’s publishers, because the attitude is unchanged. In 1939 came the Spanish Civil War, a prelude to World War Two, and it seemed expedient in 1940 to get out of Spain and Europe as the fascists overran Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and more. So he and Gala embarked on what appears to be the same ship my family did, the Excalibur, which also took the Duke of Windsor, the former King of England. It was the last passenger ship out before the war shut nonmilitary travel down. So the Duke came to govern the Bahamas―I remember seeing his car winched out of the hold in Bermuda―and I came to America at the age of six to stay, and Salvidor Dali came and wrote his autobiography. I remain uncertain how much of it is fanciful. I’ll conclude with this Dalian image: “…bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on each side of me as I passed, like rows of organ pipes of angelic flesh with cowrie-shell sea vulvas.” As I said, Dali noticed the essential aspects of women. Cowrie shells? Maybe I just never looked closely enough, or the panties got in the way. There is surely magic there.

I read The Salvation of Tanlegalle by Tim Ahrens. This was sent to me by the publisher, Lucid Style Author Services, www.Creative2aT.com. I wrote the Forward for it. You see, this is a collection of stories phrased as a novel, which can be a challenge when the stories are not related to each other and are of different genres, like science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mainstream. I liken it to life, wherein we all have an assortment of different experiences we must integrate into our mature outlook; we are what we have experienced, pleasant, unpleasant, neutral or seemingly irrelevant. Who among us would banish even the most painful memory, knowing that such banishment would delete it from our character? Very few, I think. The actual stories are interesting and sometimes weird. In “The Cave” a werewolf rescues a lovely shadow elf from abuse and perhaps death, simply because it seemed the right thing to do. She takes him to her cave, where she says he will be on his way on the morrow. So he settles down to sleep. That’s it. Not even a kiss. I wonder whether that’s really the case, or whether in the morning she, having ascertained that he’s not simply out for sex, will decide on a bit more of a relationship. It does seem warranted. Another story is “Choices,” where a man and his daughter go to a wood where they meet his wife. Man and wife die together and the girl becomes a super woman. Another is “The Ferryman” where the soul with this job once fell in love with a lovely girl, but five enemy lords killed her. Now he waits to intercept the last lord, who must at some point cross the River Styx. I wouldn’t care to be that lord, who well might prefer Hell to that encounter. There’s “That’s What Sisters Do,” wherein a young man is about to kill himself, but his informally adoptive older sister dissuades him. Here’s the key: she died over a decade ago, returning to stop him from making a bad mistake, because that’s what sisters do. I love that. And my favorite “Sassafrass One Seven Four,” wherein a space pilot is delivering a female humanoid robot to a client, but the ship is attacked and crashes. She rescues him, but expends so much of her reserve power doing so that she expires as they are falling in love. That’s painful. I have written of female humanoid robots, notably in the Adept series and the ChroMagic series, and know they can fall in love and be very good for their partners. Some might say even better than the real thing, as robots don’t have moods or times of the month. The day may come when such machines are granted equal status with living folk. So this is an interesting collection/novel, and I recommend it to those who are interested in slightly different things.

Songs constantly run through my cranium, especially the folk songs I grew up on. Readers can find them referenced in a number of my novels. Back in 1953 I practiced my two-finger typing by writing out the words to my eighty five or so favorites from memory, and I still have that record and refer to it every so often. Recently it was “Abdullah Bulbul Ameer,” whose actually spelling I’m not sure of as I learned it verbally. I thought it had 12 verses, but I remembered only 9, so I looked it up, and sure enough I had forgotten 3. Got them back now. Half a century can be wearing on memory. Bulbul was the leading warrior among the Turks, when Turkey was a major European power; in fact it was the one that finally destroyed the Eastern Roman Empire. He ran afoul of Ivan Petrofsky Skovar, the leading Russian warrior. They had a terrific battle and both died. It’s a nice song. “Then infidel know you have trod on the toe of Abdullah Bulbul Ameer.” Both men were more than ready for a fight. You know how warriors are. It represents a peek into geography and history, which I like, and is a fun song, like “The Frozen Logger.” Remember, in my day the Internet did not exist, electronic games did not exist, hell, TV did not exist. We found other ways to entertain ourselves, and did not feel deprived.

Personal shit: I needed to produce fecal smears so they could check whether I had the supernatural occult blood. No instructions came with the kit, but I figured out how to do it. Then it turned out I was supposed to exclude radishes, Vitamin C, aspirin and such. I hadn’t, and got a false positive reading. I had to it over, properly, and this time was clean. Which reminds me of a remark made by G Legman in his monumental Rationale of the Dirty Joke: it is shit that is clean, and the pure white powders that pollute. Because shit composts and recycles, while those powders are medicines, insecticides, cocaine, female hormone emulators and so on, doing continuous subtle mischief to man and beast. More on that later in this Column.

My dentures have gradually gotten shaped up, and I am using them now, though there are still adjustments to be made. My weight has recovered, with the better chewing, and I eat significantly faster. I learned that the thing about partial dentures is they don’t need adhesive; they stay in place on their own.

I played the card game Baker’s Dozen in off moments, unwinding, and it strikes me as about the best card game extant, as it’s all out there for you to see and you can generally win it if you play well enough. I won over 40 games in succession, then struggled for an hour and ran out of time, losing one. Then I won a string of 100, then struggled for three and a quarter hours but was unable to win. Enough, I decided, and stopped playing it with 148 wins of 150 played. I do have other things to do. At the moment I’m playing the old standby Klondike, which I don’t like as well, so it’s less addictive.

My wife is a registered Democrat, and she gets solicitations to contribute to the party. I’m a registered independent, and have been throughout my voting career, and am spared much of that. In this pre-electoral season she got calls, too, for surveys and such. We noted the number of one: 555-0000000. It really was. I thought 555 was a prefix used only for fake numbers on TV, and I didn’t realize that a string of seven zeros could be a viable number. I do keep learning things.

My mundane life is pretty, well, mundane. I make the meals, wash the dishes, and such, mainly because I can stand on my feet longer than my wife can. Socks exist to fall on the floor, and they do not like to pair off. When I fold shirts, I fold forward, while my wife, resuming the laundry, folds backward. It must be a male-female thing, males tending to be forward, females backward. Lint is fascinating stuff; they could make blankets of it. Outside I tend my plants. Last year we planted variegated jasmines, and they did well. Then a deer ate one off, so I caged it completely in chicken wire, and now it is doing well again. Others spread out like ground cover, but then started disappearing. It seems wild rabbits like them, and one of our gopher tortoises grazes on them and our lawn. So I fenced off a bit more. We like the wildlife, we just don’t want to lose our decorative plants.

I am a commercial writer, which means I write the kind of fiction the average reader likes to read. But it can be tricky to please every reader. I continue to hear from those who are annoyed by naughty references to panties. I lost at least one because of Two to the Fifth; Princess Rhythm invokes a spell to age her to 22 before she makes out with her man, but there are those who don’t believe in that kind of magic and figure I’m writing child porn. Then there’s the gay reader I lost because I wouldn’t have a gay protagonist in Xanth. Regular readers of this blog-column may remember how I surveyed readers about this a few years back, and the vote was overwhelmingly against it, not because of prejudice (please―I don’t have prejudiced readers) but because they felt that light fantasy like Xanth was not the place to explore the issue of homosexuality. So I honor their preference, though in this case it alienated a fan. For the record, again, I believe gays are as God made them and are entitled to their persuasion without being hassled by others. If I put one in Xanth, he or she would be a sympathetic character. But the time for that is not yet.

My wife finally got the Windows 7 system working, and is doing email on it. I believe I have discussed this before, but the doubt evinced in email I receive makes it bear repeating: my wife downloads and prints out emails to me, and I read them and pencil my answers. Remember, I don’t have my keyboard on Windows, so avoid it as much as I can. There is a Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator that would probably solve my problem, but when we tried to get it, we learned that it required other programs including one with a four hour download for their .NET Framework v2.0. With our dial-up system and uncertain reception, where things are apt to be interrupted halfway through, and the risk of fouling up our system, as has happened before, that’s more of a hassle than we care for. So Microsoft isn’t all that interested in my business, and I’m staying clear. So I pencil my answers, and she transcribes them and sends them. I do read and answer my email, as briefly as possible. Should a movie come and increase my traffic tenfold, we might have to change our system, but at present it is as directly personal as feasible.

I read the newspaper comics. Candorville had a fun series wherein their protagonist was on a panel with author Steven King, marvelously caricatured, their man mentioning how the founding fathers valued freedom and liberty and their right to own slaves. Baby Blues mentioned how their little boy peed in the swimming pool. “Did anyone notice?” “When you do it from the diving board, they notice.” And Classic Peanuts reran one I remember from 1963, where Lucy is about to knock Charlie Brown’s block off. He says that with the world filled with problems, it behooves children to learn to solve their problems peacefully. She clobbers him, saying “I had to hit him quick…he was beginning to make sense.” And Rose is Rose, one of my favorites, this time with the little boy tossing a coin into the Wishing Well, then rushing to take his bath, not afraid of the Drain Monster today because he wished the monster’s GPS would misdirect him. The last picture shows the big green monster stuck in the Wishing Well, trying to figure out where the GPS took him. This reflects a reality of our day: just as the lion goes after the baby wildebeest because it’s easier prey, monsters go after children. Adults who are not at similar risk prefer to pretend that there are no monsters, leaving the children to protect themselves. No wonder there are so few adult children. This child found a way.

SCIENCE NEWS had a long article on music, concluding that whatever it is, it’s a basic part of being human. I agree; that and the other arts. Man is distinguished from other animals by his art.

E-READS is doing e-book editions of my five novel Cluster series, an early favorite of mine, complete with my added Author’s Notes. So if you have missed or lost this series, long out of print in paper, now it’s available, along with novels by other genre authors. Http://ereads.com/. PAIZO PUBLISHING is issuing Before They Were Giants: First Works from Science Fiction Greats. My first published story was the fantasy “Possible to Rue,” included therein. I am curious how other writers first broke into print, and presume other readers are too, so this promises to be an interesting volume. I will probably read and review the book in due course, when I receive a copy. Http://paizo.com/. Or http://www.amazon.com/Before-They-Were-Giants-Science/dp/1601252668/

Periodically we get Privacy Notices, all about how hard the banks, or in this case Pay Pal, try to protect the privacy of their clients. These notices annoy me, because I know they’re lying through their teeth. The notorious Patriot Act gives the government the right to snoop on any private information it wants, and the banks and others are not allowed to tell their clients they’ve been snooped on. So these notices are works of fiction, and I wish they’d stop spreading it.

PARADE had an article on the hidden cause of disease: inflammation. They recommend detoxing it by six steps: Eat small fiber-rich meals, exercise, take Vitamin D, Omega 3, Antioxidants, and try to reduce stress. I do, getting my Omega 3 from flaxseed oil capsules rather than fish oil, being a vegetarian. While my health is hardly perfect, I seem to be relatively fit for my age.

NEW SCIENTIST review mentions that the only cure for persistent hiccups is a rectal massage. I’m gad I don’t suffer that malady. Another article covers what I wish I had caught on to before I completed my Geodyssey historical series: it was cooking that enabled mankind to separate from the apes and ultimately conquer the world. The control of fire seems to go back two million years. Assorted articles elsewhere, such as in The DISH, establish that puberty is coming earlier, with some girls doing it at age 7 and some babies growing breasts. Too much estrogen in the food, from those polluting pure white powders. They point out that an 11 year old girl who looks 15 or 16 will have adults and peers interacting with her as if she is that age. Translation: sex. Child porn is rapidly expanding. More than 20 million different IP addresses exist for it. Documented enticement of children more than tripled from 2004 to 2008, and complaints of child prostitution rose tenfold. The average age of a child targeted for prostitution is 12-14 for girls (who may look 16-18), and 11-13 for boys (who I presume look their age). Considering the several trends, it seems likely that those ages will drop in future. I have to wonder: why such sexual attraction to the young? Is this indicative not of the twisted fringe but of normal taste now being more freely expressed? What about when age 11 looks 16 so it doesn’t seem like child sex even when the age is known? There may be real mischief in the offing. Possibly related: we watched part of the Miss Universe Pageant, and found it dull. Theoretically this is global, and most folk of the world are shades of brown skin, but the finalists were pretty much white, with cookie-cutter uniforms and figures and features so that I could not really tell them apart. Same routines, same poses; they might as well have been synthetic or robots, stamped out from the same mold. How soon before eleven year old girls look exactly the same as these, complete with cowrie shell vulvas? I hope their minds vary more than their bodies.

Possibly related: item in THE WEEK about guys who cheat on their famous wives. It seems that the larger the income differential in the woman’s favor, the more likely the man is to cheat. They figure it’s the man’s insecurity, making him want to prove he’s manly. I wonder. What about Tiger Woods? He’s hardly low income, yet he cheated freely. What about the sultans with harems? I suspect that the limiting factor is not so much economics but opportunity. A stay-at-home husband sees more of the neighbor’s wives and daughters, some of whom may be bored and looking for excitement. Another item: there is now a 500 Euro note that has become the underworld’s currency of choice. They keep printing up more, serving this market, though the indications are that regular folk have little use for this denomination. So as with cheating men, banks cater to criminal money, given opportunity.

We read of the brutality of man toward man around the world. Here’s one I noticed: Uighurs in China are being oppressed, their language exterminated, books on their history and culture banned or burned. Why do I notice? Because the protagonist in my novel Steppe is Uighur, and I learned about them from him. They were one of the central Asian peoples, like the Huns and the Mongols, who later settled and became civilized, in fact literate. They should be encouraged, not suppressed. But dictatorships know that literate folk are harder to fool or oppress than ignorant ones.

I received a mail-order catalog, SORMANI CALENDARS. We already have plenty, thanks, but it’s interesting. They have calendars for the Alps, Switzerland, Germany, England, Scotland, Old English Pubs, Ireland, Egypt, Africa, France, China, Mexico―just about any country. Also Tractors, Barns, Gold, Fishing, Native Americans, Nuns Having Fun, Marilyn Monroe, Mark Twain, John Wayne, Trolleys (in Xanth the trolls run these), Volkswagen Bus, Jet Planes, Trains, all the States, Mars, Moonscapes, Galaxies, Sea Shells (including cowries?), Waterfalls, Baseball, Ballooning, Golf Courses, Soccer, Sailing Ships, Yoga, Trout, Skiing, Dogs―one for every breed―Cats, Horses, Humming Birds, Chimpanzees, Ladybugs, Turtles, Cougars (feline), Giraffes, Jackasses, Rats, Goats, Cows, Pigs―well, there’s a fair variety.

And excerpts from my monthly Family letter to relatives, of possible interest to readers:

Cheryl showed us a fun book, CAKE WRECKS When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong, by Jen Yates. Mostly when the cake makers misconstrue the instructions. Such as Best Wishes Suzanne Under Neat that We will miss you. It was supposed to be “underneath that,” not a middle line. One family ordered two cakes; one said Congrat and the other ulations, with the name similarly divided. Another said I want sprinkles, instead of having the sprinkles. Some are divorce cakes, with messages like Go Die in a car fire, or Ben Went Poopoo. There’s a photograph of the wedding couple cutting the cake, with a nude male statue behind so it looks as if he is urinating on it. One heart-shaped one says HUGE ME. Another Best Wishes Melissa, The Bribe To Be. A cake for a seminar on sexual harassment has a picture of a man hitting a woman, the whole crossed out in highway warning sign style. Only the actual picture looks as if he has his hand up her posterior, and she is lifted a foot off the floor. That would certainly be harassment, with the accent on the ass. One was intended to be in the shape of a gavel, saying 2009 Moot Court, but it looks like a penis and testicles. And one saying We doubted you, with a carat and the word Never inserted after the first word, correcting the omission. And one saying Heppy Bertty CAROLINE 7. Another says I am Pregnanet. I wonder whether we should mail this book around to interested Family members? It really has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

Cheryl also forwarded excerpts from a book titled Disorder in the American Courts, containing things actually said in court. Such as “What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning? “He said ‘Where am I, Cathy?’” “And why did that upset you?” “My name is Susan!” ATTORNEY: “Are you sexually active?” WITNESS: “No, I just lie there.” ATTORNEY: “The youngest son, the 20 year old, how old is he?” WITNESS: “He’s 20, much like your IQ.”ATTORNEY: “Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?” WITNESS: “All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.”ATTORNEY: “So, then is it possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?” WITNESS: “No.” ATTORNEY: “How can you be so sure, Doctor?” WITNESS: “Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.”ATTORNEY: “I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?”WITNESS: “Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.”

We expect finally to listen to the recording of the Memorial Service for our late daughter Penelope Jacob, on the anniversary of her death, September 3. I will surely have something to say about this next month.

Our first surviving child, after a decade of stillbirths, was almost named Pamela. But I was then writing the collaborative novel The Ring, with Robert E Margroff, and there was a young woman named Pamela therein who turned out to be a bad girl. (Characters sometimes follow their own courses, thumbing their noses at authors.) We didn’t want that association, so went for Penelope instead. The names of our children followed ours, being P or C; my wife liked Christopher for a boy, but was afraid it would happen on Columbus Day and everyone would think he was named for that. So we had a girl instead, born on Columbus Day, OctOgre 12, 1967. Had she been born a decade earlier she would have been named Maple Irene, after the woman in my original, unpublished novel The Unstilled World. But we have always been satisfied with Penelope, or Penny, as the name. Penny for your thoughts…

On SapTimber 3, 2020, the one year anniversary of the untimely death of our daughter Penelope Carolyn Jacob, we finally listened to the recording of her Memorial Service. The recording was made by her friend of an identical age, Joana, who sent it to us nicely tied with a blue ribbon. Penny moved to Oregon in significant part because Joana went there, and it seemed like a wonderful place to be.  When Penny made friends with Joana, she insisted that Princess Ivy, patterned after Penny, discover a twin sister, and thus Princess Ida came to be. So Joana too is in Xanth, though she does not have a little moon orbiting her head. We felt guilty not listening to the recording before, but there was too much emotion in the way. Now at last we have done it, hearing ourselves with our recorded messages, as we were unable to attend the service physically. For this occasion I wore the lovely Jacob Sheep shirt Penny gave me. Long ago I learned of this four-horned breed, and told Penny about it, and when she set up to farm she got some Jacob sheep, which seem to be rather goatlike. That’s a credit, as I was raised on a goat farm. We sound reasonably lucid in the recording, and our sentiments remain valid. I ran the text of mine a year ago in this HiPiers column, along with my pained thoughts on my daughter’s demise. That pain has eased in the course of a year, but of course will never be entirely gone while we live. Daughter #2 Cheryl was with us for the listening, so she got to hear herself on it too. It was two hours and ten minutes of the outpourings by Penelope’s wider family, friends, and associates, a considerable tribute to her. It is apparent that she made a new life when she went to Oregon in the spring of I think 1999, and the child Penny we had known metamorphosed into the adult Penelope, soon a mother in her own right with a new circle of friends. We did visit once in 2001, but could not manage it again. She did visit us, notably in the year of her death, in April when we stored some of her things in her room, and in July when we went to the Homosassa Springs park, a delight for Granddaughter Logan, what with the hippopotamus and all. We were in regular touch by phone and email, and there was her Dreams and Bones Web Site. That warrants its own note: back circa 1995 Penny and I visited my father Alfred in Pennsylvania, and while driving between sites we put in a Pete Seeger tape she had gotten. Penny’s taste in music and folk songs echoed mine; she was my girl. And we heard “The Garden Song,” whose key line for us was “Pulling weeds and pitching stones; we are made of dreams and bones.” We were both enchanted. I made reference to it in my GEODYSSEY series, and she made it the title of her Web Site. That song concluded the recording of the service, and that got me, taking me back to that pleasant memory. Then after listening, normal life resumed. I had letters to answer, so I took a pile of them upstairs to my computer, not using the stair hand rail because my hand was occupied with the letters. No problem; I balanced well enough. But that reminded me of the time when Penny was less that a year old, learning to balance and walk, and I saw her walk about 20 steps without ever quite touching anything for support. She was making real progress! And that pleasant memory reminded me in a different way that my little girl was gone, never to return, and the pain was back. It’s the unexpected reminders that get through your defenses and really hurt. Every so often I go into Penny’s room, which she never actually used other than for visits, because by the time our house on the tree farm was built, Penny was in college and forging into her own life. But that quiet room, with her dolls and dresses, is like a minor monument to her memory. It was essentially that way for twenty years before she died, but somehow now it seems as though she just left it, a score of years condensed into the blink of an eye, and the pain is fresh. We really knew her as a child, not as the adult, so our memories are of her youth. Ever thus, with parents. Her time in Oregon was only a decade, but in the period she forged her mature identity, making many friends, impressing many others, as their voices on the recording show. Unfortunately she also developed health issues. As as child she had dyslexia and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), but these we handled. We knew about the melanoma, but not how bad it was; we thought it had been abolished, until that awful last year when it re-manifested with a vengeance, metastasizing to her brain and lung. Even then we did not know how bad it was. She did not want us to know; she minimized it, always cheerful, not telling us her secret terror of it, her tears. I wish I could have been there for her! She had excellent reason to fear it, as it turned out. We also knew about her fibromyalgia, responsible for a number of previously undiagnosed complaints. We did not know that she had also been diagnosed Bi-Polar, which in my day was called Manic-Depressive. In pained retrospect, that explains some problems. Had we known, we might have better understood, though I understand that Bi-Polar can be a mis-diagnosis of ADHD because of similarity of symptoms. So her adult life was complicated and ultimately tragic. How I wish it were not so!

I was passing through the living room, where my wife had TV football on, and paused to watch one play. It was a phenomenal pass and shoestring catch for a touchdown, surely the play of the game. But wouldn’t you know it, the officials couldn’t let that happen, so they ruled it incomplete, and that team lost the game. The receiver had leaped to catch it, dropped to the ground holding the football, and the last part of his body to hit the ground was the hand holding the football. Obviously the play was long since dead. The ground blasted the football out of his hand, but that hardly mattered, as the ground can’t cause a fumble, and he was already down anyway. But they said they were judging by the Process, apparently the process of having the ground cause a fumble. I think those rules makers need to be sent back to school to learn basic football and fair play. I don’t watch much football these days, partly because of nonsensical decisions like this one, where wins and losses can be determined not by the quality of the play on the field but by obscure authorities with another agenda. Was that team scheduled by odds-makers not to win, and forgot?

I heard part of a radio program on dealing with the Common Cold. Sure enough, it disparaged Vitamin C. I suspect that many of these supposed experts actually believe the ignorance they repeat. This one mentioned that a daily dose of 200 mg of Vitamin C had only a marginal effect on colds. That is a lie by omission. 200 mg a day has only marginal effect―but 1,000 mg taken every hour has huge effect. That’s what the conventional folk make sure never to test. Similar case with Omega 3, a truly beneficial supplement; a study reported it ineffective, without advising that it used margarine, which can be responsible for a number of serious maladies, along with it. That’s like mixing your vitamins with arsenic, and reporting that vitamins are bad for you. The vested outfits do have a lot of money to make from continued illness, so do their best to discount any natural remedy that works.

I read A Plethory of Powers by Gerald Costlaw. This is a kind of prequel to The Weaving, which I reviewed before. This is two novellas featuring Rose, the Witch of the Woods. The first is “The Case of the Missing Succubus,” wherein one of twin succubi disappears and the university is desperate to find her before she eats a man. You see, these succubi lure in rapists, and eat them, leaving only bones. This does marvels for reducing crimes of passion in the neighborhood, but is apt to reflect badly on the University. Those bones in a closet, you know; the parents of students could get the wrong idea. There are magic barriers galore; the succubus couldn’t have departed her room unobserved. So where is she? Rose has to find out. So it’s a murder mystery with a twist. The second story is “Conference of Powers,” about a convention where everything goes wrong, sometimes humorously. Standard stuff, anyone who has attended a fan convention will agree, except that its attendees are witches, wizards, a small dragon, and other magical personages, some with more power than common sense. Well, maybe that too is standard. This is light entertainment rather than hard-hitting adventure, but okay as a diversion. Www.pillhillpress.com.

Radio discussion: the concentration of wealth in the top echelon is at the greatest extreme since 1928, just before the great Depression, by no coincidence. A newspaper article confirms it: America’s top 20% receive almost 50% of all income. The gap between the richest and poorest is the widest on record. This even seems to affect marriage; marriages fell to a record low, I presume because folk can’t afford to commit. The theory is that the wealth that the middle class lost is thus no longer available to power the economy, and so it crashes, or at best becomes anemic. The rich don’t need to spend more proportionately for food, clothing and shelter, so the goods and services the nation can generate are not sold to capacity. I see it as like cancer, which actually diverts blood vessels to serve itself, depriving the rest of the body, and in time this is fatal. The cancer will not give up on its own; it has to be cut out or poisoned. I think it is similar with the greedheads who cling like leeches; they will never loosen their hold voluntarily, though the nation perish and they with it. They will continue until we become a plutocracy, a nation ruled by the wealthy; in fact we are already perilously close. It also could become a feudal system, with lords and vassals. I am old and wealthy, so probably will not suffer much personally, masquerading as a lesser lord, but the remaining 90% of you should be concerned. A Robyn Blumner column endorses that, pointing out that under Democratic presidents there was a flattening of income, and real incomes increased faster for all. Under Republican presidents real income slowed for all but the wealthiest. If you want to be a feudal serf, vote Republican.

Perhaps related: newspaper article on whether money can buy happiness. The verdict is yes, and the ideal figure is an income of $75,000 a year. Below that, you are proportionately less happy; above that you aren’t any happier. So it seems the super rich are probably not super happy, and that seems to be the case; indulging greed just makes them greedier. So did my happiness peak and level off as I passed that figure three decades ago? I think it did. Certainly I am not exuberantly happy, as the death of my daughter tears at me; there are other things than money. I get my satisfaction from helping people, from writing good novels, and maintaining my physical and mental health to the extent I can. Even little things can bring me transient joy. In the past week a cute little green frog I know, the kind that can perch comfortably on the tip of your finger, was on my targets as I wheeled them out for my archery session. I feared it would never find its own way home to the outdoor thermometer where it lives, so I took it in my hand and brought it back. It didn’t jump away; I think it knew I was helping it. And when a little variegated jasmine plant got nipped off, I put wiring around it to protect it, and now it’s doing well. Such things are as emotionally important to me as my six figure income. Above the key level, freed from the wolf at the door, a person can indeed pause to smell the roses. I do.

Here is a discussion adapted from a recent Jenny Letter. I still write weekly to my paralyzed correspondent, remarking on anything I think might interest her. In this case, a naughty song.

Something reminded me of a song I heard in college. I may Google it. Well, hell, I’ll Google it now. It’s “Fascinating Bitch.” There were these two girls in college, one a cute blonde, the other a cute brunette. They were always together. Then the brunette discovered sex. Wow! She went from boy to boy. The word was she had sex with one boy six times in one night. Once I was waiting in a lounge for my girlfriend―yes, the one I married―and the brunette came to stand beside my chair, a bit too close, and the sexuality fairly steamed from her. I think she was looking for another notch for her panties. I ignored her, but I felt the heat. The other girls of the dormitory were alarmed that she’d get pregnant or VD, as she took no precautions, and they sought to have a session on contraception in a dorm meeting, but the faculty member, ignorant as they tend to be, vetoed it. And the blonde went around singing the song, which I just recovered via Google: “I wish I were a fascinating bitch/ I’d never be poor, I’d always be rich/ Once a month I’d take a holiday/ And drive my customers wild!/ I wish I were a fascinating bitch/ Instead of an innocent child.” It was so painfully true.

Eddie Fisher died. He was a popular singer of my day, of some note. I was hitchhiking circa 1954 and was picked up by a man whose pitch I realized was for a boy or young man; he would provide me with a nice night at his house, if. I declined, and he did not push it. Much of gay sex, as I understand it, is that way: unforced, in contrast to some hetero sex. On his car radio was a song whose words I still remember: “I’m glad I kissed those other lips, before I kissed your own; if I had not kissed those other lips, I never would have known.”Years later I heard that song again, on TV, and this time identified the singer: Eddie Fisher, singing it, I think, to Elizabeth Taylor. I believe its title is “So Very Young.” The curious thing is that though I bought what I thought was a complete collection of Eddie Fisher songs, that one was not among them, and it isn’t in my big book of all popular songs; it seems not to exist officially, though I know I didn’t imagine it. Is it in the process of being delisted? I remember how Fisher dumped Debbie Reynolds, whom I had seen in a movie; she was the most delicious of creatures and I couldn’t understand how he let her go for such a relatively slutty creature. Then their daughter Carrie Fisher was a star on Star Wars. So it’s a half way illustrious lineage, one of the few I have been aware of, because I’m mostly tuned out of the celebrity scene. Anyway, Eddie was born six years minus four days before me, roughly my generation. The old order passeth.

I received a letter to my mundane name, meaning they had no idea who I am, which starts “Piers, please forgive us, but we have just taken a closer look at your profile. It turns out you’re more special than any of us imagined! Did you know that you possess some very rare, hidden traits? In fact there’s a famous person (someone you would instantly recognize, he’s on TV every night) who possesses these same rare and often hidden traits. …It turns out that people who possess these same rare and often hidden traits that you do are some of the most famous and successful people on this planet! Piers, you are indeed blessed! I know those around you don’t know this yet, but they will! Down deep, you sense it, too. Right? I’m so excited for you!” I had three days to respond by sending in the statement that begins “I, Piers, feel that something astounding is about to happen in my life!” Sigh; I hope they aren’t too disappointed that I didn’t respond. But here for what it’s worth is my public answer: I do believe I am more special than any of you folk imagined, not to mention ornery, and I am already one of the better known and successful fantasy writers extant. Had you known anything about me, you would never have sent me such a sucker solicitation. I am largely anonymous in my mundane life because I choose to be; it’s how I protect my personal privacy, and I would not care to have it compromised. As for having something astounding happen in my life, I’d settle for a blockbuster Xanth movie, but I doubt that’s what you had in mind. Go stick your head up where the sun don’t shine, and take a good bite of what you find there, instead of expecting me to eat it.

Possibly related: victims of Alzheimer’s Disease are doubling every 20 years. After age 65, the chance of developing it doubles every five years. At age 85, people have a 50% chance of developing it. I’m 76, and getting older every year; that makes me nervous. But an article on USA WEEKEND says that 25% of us have the Alzheimer’s gene, which may indicate that the rate will level off once all of them succumb. Meanwhile, if you have the gene, exercise physically and mentally, drink apple juice, and take plenty of Vitamin D.

At the University of South Florida (USF) they are working on the promise of true solar innovation. This is Solar Window, that can be sprayed on regular glass windows to transform them into efficient energy generating devices using natural light. Thus the prospect of affordable alternative renewable energy. I agree: this is big.

Internet circular: let them build the mosque near ground zero. Then right across the street put up a topless bar, a gay bar, and a pork rib restaurant with big advertising signs soliciting business. Anyone can build anything they want, anywhere, right? Tolerance: It’s what America is all about. But about the association with 9-11: I understand that the terrorist radicals bear about the same relation to normal Muslim belief that the Ku Klux Klan does to normal Christianity. The lunatic fringe is not the religion.

From DISCOVER magazine: our brain is shrinking. Has been for the last 100,000 years. Are we getting stupid? Not necessarily. It may be that our larger, more integrated society makes it safer for people, so we don’t have to possess complicated defensive skills and don’t need the brain power for them. We may be less aggressive―a good offense being the best defense―so can save on that aspect. My private theory is that it’s like math: it takes a lot of effort and memory to count up a thousand tubers for the tribe’s big bash. But we found a smarter way to do it, by arranging them in patterns ten by ten, and counting ten of those. Multiplication takes less brute memory force than addition and is a lot faster. So we learned to handle social skills by similar adaptation. Neandertal man may have been an adder; we are a multiplier. So we get more bang from less brain.

I read Mountain of Whispers by Keith Robinson. The first novel in this series was Island of Fog, a good solid children’s novel that adults should also like, featuring eight twelve year old children who were developing the ability to change into other creatures. The sequel was Labyrinth of Fire, where the children completed their abilities in hard-hitting action. This is the third, and it too is compelling. There are serious problem on the world to which they have been taken, and they must seek answers on the dread Mountain of Whispers. It turns out that the whispers are because there is a constant wind blowing into the mountain. How can this be? They explore, though warned that there is a terrible demon therein. That turns out to be just the beginning, and the framework expands. Mysteries are finally resolved. There is also the hint of the beginning of a romance; Abigail likes protagonist Hal, and starts doing flirtatious things like holding his hand, and he is embarrassed but nothing loath. That’s as far as it goes; this is a children’s novel, remember. I recommend this as I did the other two: read them with your children. www.UnearthlyTales.com.

Newspaper article by Drake Bennett on disgusting things. People who are easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting folk in a foul-smelling fart-sprayed room makes them stricter moral judges. The conjecture is that disgust first arose to ensure that our ancestors steered clear of rancid meat and contagion. So did this lead to the idea that some things are simply right or wrong? What about cross-dressing or whole categories of sexual activity? “Understanding that betrayal or child rape is wrong is one thing, but actually being sickened by it is a more powerful form of social control.” But it can be misused. Moral reasoning may support policies whose true origin and goals are unknown.

Another newspaper article by Jacques Berlinerblau explores beliefs about life after death. “We don’t lack narratives about the Beyond – we lack science about the Beyond. We want something factual, anything factual, to falsify the apparent truth that when we perish we won’t see our children ever again or hear the chuggy groove of a Hammond B-2 organ. God bless nonscientific narratives!” As an agnostic on the verge of atheism I have no belief in the supernatural, and the Afterlife is that, but I do appreciate the desire to continue our consciousness and feelings beyond our mortal span. The fear of death is a powerful constituent of religion. I write fantasy, I don’t believe it, but I love it.

NEW SCIENTIST has an article whose thesis is that stone tools made us human. That is, technology. If you include the controlled use of fire as a tool, I agree. Now those tools include computers and the Internet. But I also feel that mankind is most truly defined by his art, including painting, dancing, music, sculpture, and storytelling. A man without art is a Philistine in the biblical sense of an enemy of God.

Now there’s a new particle, at least new to me: the inflaton. Not inflation; inflaton. It is what made the universe initially expand explosively. There may also be super particles termed sparticles. Well, we’ll see.

A diet trick that is said to really work: drink two glasses of water before meals. I drink a glass of water every hour, including right before I eat; maybe it helps me to stay lean. But now that my dentures are working, I am chewing more efficiently, and starting to gain weight on the same amount of food; I have had to cut back on what I eat, to remain level. I take my health seriously, and that includes maintaining a lean healthy weight. Why does it work for me and not for others? Same reason I can write without having a boss constantly breathing down my neck: discipline.

At the end of the month I sorted and filed the voluminous emails, as I usually do; we have printouts of almost everything. It’s a dull chore, and I put on the disc included with the Penny Memorial Service of her favorite songs, including “The Garden Song.” It’s lovely and meaningful, and it unified us, but it also refreshes the pain of her loss.

A fan Googled a song I mentioned last column, and advised me that the name is not Abdullah Bulbul Ameer, but Abdul Abulbul Amir. I could have Googled it myself, had I the wit. My geriatric nature keeps inhibiting me. But I do learn, slowly, as the “Fascinating Bitch”memory and spot research show.

To finish on positives: There has been a movie contract for Split Infinity for the past five years. That has now been extended, and they expect to have the movie in 2013. It was going to be anime, but may become a regular feature film. We’ll see. There is also serious new interest in Xanth; we’ll see how that works out. I’m sure there will be movies; I just hope to see them within my lifetime.

I read MARAKELLUS MARAKELLUM Rodger’s Folly by Sawyer N Winter. This is self published at Xlibris. As readers of this blog-column know, I support self publishing, because it frees authors from the often arbitrary restraints of publishers, some of whom almost seem to turn down good books in favor of bad ones, just because they can. But it does mean that just about anything can now get published, regardless of its literary or commercial merit. So do I approve publication of bad books? Yes, because literary merit is a subjective judgment, and what one editor or one generation deems bad may be rated genius by others. Consider a novel that starts “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” It gets worse. Who would ever publish that? It’s about 300,000 words long, and requires a 350 page skeleton key just to try to make sense of it. It is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, an allegory of the fall and redemption of mankind, and yes it is said to be well worth the two to four years it takes to properly read it. A work of genius. Alas, it is beyond my intellect; in two to four years I could be dead, and I have less lofty interim pursuits in mind, such as writing my own novels. Today I suspect it would have to be self published. I think of mutation, wherein 99% of the changes may be deleterious, even lethal, but the 1% that survive power the forward evolution of all living things. We would not be here today without mutation. Editors reject 99%, but the 1% they accept is not necessarily the best; natural selection operates imperfectly in publishing. So yes, we need self publishing, even if it is 99% bad, for the sake of the 1% that may otherwise be lost. For the sake of the future of literature, which is now largely governed by the Philistines.

All of which is not a direct comment on Marakellus Marakellum, which means “Never Forgive, Never forget,” and I am not drawing a parallel between it and Finnegans Wake. I am just making a general point in my meandering way. This novel begins with an officer, Rodger, suddenly almost overwhelmed by events such as the appearance of an odd stranger and a kestrel bird in a supposedly secure redoubt. The stranger turns out to be a powerful magician from the past, GolGanth, with his familiar, Beauty. It goes on from there, and I can’t say I properly understand it, but it is a wild story of a seemingly endless war in which male and female soldiers are laboratory grown and trained, and ancient largely-invulnerable horsemen appear and wipe out whole planets. It is probably worth an undistracted reading. www.Xlibris.com.

I read White Chin by Marilyn Edwards, illustrated by France Bauduin. France sent it to me; I have corresponded with her more than twenty years; she dates from before my 1987 hard disk crash wiped out my early correspondence list. She’s a Canadian now living in England, in contrast to my being an Englishman who became American. This is the story of a cat, White Chin, who is dumped in the forest as a kitten to live or die. A girl, Kirstie, sees it happen and wants to rescue White Chin, but he is understandably distrustful of human-type people and flees her. He survives by hunting birds and mice. In time he is taken in by an adult couple, but his feral ways are a constant trial to them. What’s a roll of toilet paper for, if not to spread across the house? Eventually he does connect with Kirstie, and this is happiness for both of them. But this is not a sanitized children’s story. White Chin is a real cat, and the details of survival and killing are not expurgated. There are also some less than wholesome illegal trappers whose mischief costs the leg of White Chin’s girlfriend Adorabelle. Kirstie, being a child, is inconstant, and sometimes neglects the cat, then spends a summer away from home. White Chin winds up with her grandfather, and the two turn out to be ideal for each other, as the cat likes plenty of attention and the old man has plenty of time for it. Then Grandpa dies. In the end White Chin is back with Kirstie, both now more mature and considerate, and we trust this will continue. It’s a nice story, with persuasive details, and the frequent illustrations lend it a special flavor. There are even footprints, human or feline, in lieu of asterisks, signaling whether the next viewpoint is a biped or a quadruped. So though I am not a cat person―that dates from when I saw a cat playing cat and mouse with a crippled bird―I did enjoy this. We once did adopt a feral cat, who turned out to be perfectly housebroken, and I really liked her―until she was killed by an anonymous car, breaking the heart of my then five year old daughter Penny. I thought of that cat more than once as I read about White Chin. So I recommend this novel to cat fanciers and to general readers. This is a cat story largely from the viewpoint of the cat, and aspects are eye-opening. Published by Catnip, www.catnippublishing.co.uk. France Bauduin’s own site is www.thecatsofmooncottage.co.uk.

I finished writing Xanth #36 Luck of the Draw, which means I am a third of the way through the second magic trilogy. That is, 9 of its 27 novels. I can’t be sure of completing the trilogy of magic trilogies, which would be 81 novels, but I’ll do my best. This one features Bryce, an 80 year old Mundane widower who is cleaning out his garage when he discovers a Xanthin box that conjures him to Xanth along with a stray Service Dog, Rachel, who happened to be near him when it happens. He discovers that he has been entered in a Demon contest to find the best suitor for sixteen year old Princess Harmony, who is smart, pretty, and uncommitted. He’s not interested in courting a teen girl and she’s not interested in any Mundane. But he has been youthened to a physical age of 21 and given a magic talent and spelled into love with her. She will be required to choose from among six suitors, so that she can marry and slowly prepare herself to be King of Xanth a decade or so later. Demons don’t pussyfoot when it comes to motivation. So these mutually unwilling participants must play it out, and they reluctantly discover worthwhile qualities in each other. But the story is not nearly ended. Yes, there are puns galore; in fact Bryce finds work helping the folk at Caprice Castle collect puns for storage, so as to reduce the corruption of Xanth. In the future folk will be punished with hard labor: pun duty. It’s groaning work, but somebody has to do it, lest the pun infestation digest Xanth into a nauseous bog. This should be published in 2012.

Which reminds me: Xanth #34, Knot Gneiss, was scheduled for OctOgre, but delayed a month when the orders were more than anticipated. You should see it this month. Is this a signal that interest in Xanth is increasing? Possibly. Or it could simply mean somebody glitched a number, slipped a decimal, so the print order was wrong.

I continue to suffer lesser aftershocks as I am reminded of my late daughter Penny. When I rail internally at the unfairness of this innocent person being taken out early, I remember a song about two brothers who went to war, one for the Union, the other for the Confederacy. One was gentle and kind, but he died. “A cannon ball don’t pay no mind, if you’re gentle or you’re kind, it don’t think of the folk behind, there on a beautiful morning.” Cancer is a cannon ball.

No sooner had I completed one project, then others came to the fore. I am working with Evan Filipek to assemble a volume of my favorite stories, the ones that introduced me to the science fiction genre as such. It is titled One and Wonder, and will be a star-studded anthology of stories dating back fifty to sixty years or more, thus largely unknown today, with my commentary on each. Assuming we can get permissions from long dead authors. I am also collaborating with J Rain, who is currently atop the Kindle fantasy bestseller list, on an Arabian Nights fantasy about the later life of Aladdin of the Lamp. Remember, one of my first novels was an Arabian Nights adaptation, Hasan. More anon, when.

I get piles of junk mail, all of which I check before throwing it out; sometimes it’s interesting. One was a catalog titled PREVAIL SPORT. It consists almost entirely of men’s briefs and thongs, tight on the bottom like women’s panties, bulging in the crotch, sometimes with a hand cupping the codpiece. All the men are young, handsome, muscular, bronzed. It must be for gay men. Sorry, I am locked onto women for my romantic or sexual interest. But I note how much like women the poses are, as if what they really desire, could they but recognize it, are girls.

Newspaper article on wealth: how Americans think it is spread, vs. how they think it should be spread. They think the top 20% gets almost 60%, but should get 30%. In fact its worse: the top 20% gets 84% of the money. They think the bottom 20% gets 4% but should get 10%; the bottom 60% actually gets 4%. America favors the rich with a vengeance. It’s a plutocracy: government by the wealthy. Both major parties are largely corrupt, but the Democrats at least try to give the common man a break. That is actually good for business, but greed trumps that. Other bad things: America has 4% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners. Those prisoners suffer sexual abuse; in fact more men get raped than women.

Last column I remarked on how money can buy happiness, up to about $75,000. Another article says that there are several contributors to happiness, and that wealth, marriage, health, attractiveness and education account for only 10%. 50% is accounted for by our genes. What about the rest? Mainly, relationships: spending time with people we care about. Spending money or vacations. Being grateful for what we have. But increasing numbers of us have less to be grateful for. A chart of the minimum wage shows that it’s not keeping pace with the cost of living, and during Republican administrations like Reagan or Bush it’s a flat line: no increases. I note that when I graduated from college it was 75 cents an hour, moving up to a dollar. I had to search hard to find a job that paid $50 a week, for 50 hours a week. When summer ended I was abruptly let go, with no severance pay; it was a summer job that they had represented as permanent. I wound up in the US Army two years. Life in the trenches: I remember. Today the minimum is ten times as much, $7.25 an hour, and I think buys less. Speaking of Republicans, a column I understand is from the National Journal remarks on how conservatives the world over fully accept the widespread scientific conviction that global warming is real and bringing droughts, floods and other mischief. Only in America is an entire political party in denial, apparently wedded to the polluters and energy wasters who are causing this disaster. Which reminds me: I agree with those who say that political advertising should be vetted to ensure that it is true. As it is, as the campaigns conclude, one day before the voting (but we voted early), it seems that there is little or no concern for truth. Hell, it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court: WASHINGTON SPECTATOR says Chief Justice Roberts lied when he said he would honor stare decisis, that is, precedent, in making decisions, then went on to overturn long-established precedent, such as restricting what corporations can contribute to political ads. Shouldn’t he be impeached? But it seems that lying doesn’t matter, if you’re not President Clinton. What a stench.

Item on author Jane Austin, renowned for her exquisite precise prose. Now it turns out that she was a sloppy writer who owed her reputation to her superior editor. I find that painful. Does this mean that editors, after all, have their uses?

When I die I want to be cremated; no zombie rotting for my remains. But it may be a wasteful used of energy. Now I learn that there is chemical cremation, a more environmentally beneficial process called alkaline hydrolysis: you get melted into goo and can be washed down the drain or used to fertilize your plants. That may be for me.

We are constantly besieged by solicitations for donations. All the causes are worthy, but if we tried to satisfy them all, we would go broke and they will still be after us for more. So we have become highly selective. Sometimes I eliminate one when it gets too pushy, such as by phoning me for three figure payments. I cut off Habitat for Humanity for that, and American Friends Service Committee, though I once worked for them. What do you know; phone solicitations suddenly ceased from all parties. I figured word would get around. I call it tough love. We give what we give, on our own schedule, and that’s it. I may have remarked before that loans tend to become gifts, and gifts tend to become installments. When I came off the bestseller lists and my income dropped, so did our donations, though none of the receiving parties seemed to understand. I remember a friend who tithed to his church. Then he changed jobs and his income dropped. He explained to the pastor why his contribution would be less, and discovered no understanding there; he was required to keep paying at the original rate regardless. I pondered that, and realized that churches seem to be just as money-grubbing as other parties. I do try to tithe not to any church but as a general guide to donations, and I never commit ahead to a particular figure. Anyway, an article in US NEWS & WORLD REPORT titled “How to Donate Wisely” cautions about solicitations, representing themselves as good causes that do exist, but those causes are not soliciting; it’s a scam borrowing their names. Make sure whatever you contribute to is legitimate. The article does not address other problems, such as the way any charity you do give to is immediately on you for more. I gave once to Second Harvest; now I get frequent solicitations for more. In fact I received two on the day I edited this column. As a result I pass up a number of worthy charities simply because I don’t want to be constantly pestered for more, and have them mad at me when I finally balk. I wish they would be satisfied with what I do give them.

Remember the Iceman, Otzi? He was discovered when uncovered by a retreating glacier in the Alps and became an instant celebrity; in fact I made him a character in one of my GEODYSSEY historical novels. Now they conclude that he didn’t just lie down to rest and froze to death, nor was he brought down where he stood by an arrow. He may have been taken there for ritual burial on the ridge after dying elsewhere. So the mystery of his demise is still unfolding.

NEW SCIENTIST review of a book on creativity (Sudden Genius by Andrew Robinson), concludes that creative people are complex individuals who focus on their work to the exclusion of all else. “There is no royal road to creativity.” I am inclined to agree. I have been called a genius by devoted fans almost as often as being considered a dunce by critics, but I merely focus on my writing. When I made it as a writer it did indeed take over my life, and I am happy to have it so. I do regard myself as one of the more creative folk extant. Even in a simple thing like a chess puzzle I am apt to come up with a solution that is different from the given one. I saved out the chess puzzle that was published in the newspaper OctOgre 3, 2010, and will describe my alternate (and superior) solution to any who are conversant. Sure, more often I get it wrong, but I remain original.

THE WEEK had an article about the secret to living past 100, and concludes that there is no pattern. Sure, don’t smoke or drink, do exercise, eat properly, keep your weight down―all this is good advice for average folk, and I follow it. But centenarians freely violate such rules, and outlive the clean livers. Genetics and luck seem to be the keys.

Also in THE WEEK a peek into the bedroom: Americans have undergone a second sexual revolution over the past two decades, embracing a much wider variety of activities. Today it seems that masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, and practices other than heterosexual are common. That confirms the impression I have gotten from erotic literature and movies. The Devil in Miss Jones―The Resurrection has some amazing sex, and is heavy on the anal.

Benoit Mandlebrot died. He was the mathematician who discovered the Mandlebrot set, one of the most phenomenal crossovers between math and art extant, and surely one of the most complicated pictures known. I can get lost in its fascinating recesses. I exchanged letters with him when I was writing Fractal Mode, to be sure I wasn’t impinging on his intellectual property. His answer was weary: go ahead, everyone else is doing it. He was a decade older than I.

SCIENCE NEWS has an item suggesting that it wasn’t marginalization by modern man that wiped out Neandertal man, but volcanoes. 40,000 years ago; some huge ones occurred in his territory, not ours. We were mostly back in Africa after the Toba blast had wiped out our Asiatic colonies, and that may have saved us. I am relieved to learn that.

They continue to learn more about Vitamin D, which isn’t really a vitamin but a hormone precursor. It is one of the vital nutrients. Now that we tend to stay out of the sunlight, we are suffering ailments it can help prevent, ranging from cancer to the flu and the common cold. It does seem to be a miracle vitamin, like Vitamin C. so will there be a campaign against it by the special interests?

Mundania is about to publish Relationships 4, another collection of mostly erotic stories. I am pleased with it. The first story, “Phone Sex,” relates to what I first thought was a really unlikely situation, which made it a challenge: a rich handsome successful young man having an affair with a poor dowdy 50 year old housewife. How come? Well, they discover they share a phone phobia: the inability to make a call out. Yes, such a phobia exists; I had it at one point. That connection turns them on to each other as they work together to overcome it. Then there’s “Off the Record,” a prison story wherein guards and prisoners can communicate off the record without getting in trouble. A male guard handcuffs a dangerous female prisoner and escorts her to her daily exercise session, cameras tracking them, and when they are briefly alone between cells he murmurs “Off the record.” Curious, she says “Okay.” “I want to get into your pants.”Now she’s big and tough and ugly; no man ever desired her. “Joke?” “No.” “Why?” “Because I’m big. No regular woman can handle me. Maybe you could.” Then the lock opens and she moves on. On the return trip she says “Off the record,” and he agrees. “Lemme feel your dong.” So he stands close behind her, where the camera can’t see, opens his fly, and puts his member into her cuffed hands. Very soon she is satisfied that he meant what he said. It goes on from there. The other stories are similarly erotic, as in “Roles” wherein a foursome of 40ish women vacationers in a van pick up a young male hitchhiker and give him the education of his life. Or “Day in the Barrel,” where a man visits what seems to be the perfect sex camp, with beautiful women eagerly giving him all the sex he wants, but then discovers the other side of it, a shocker. I think it’s a great collection for those who like erotic fiction. The difference, as I see it, between my erotica and others I have read is that theirs seems to be mostly setting up for long conventional sex scenes, whereas mine are more imaginative stories laced with sometimes imaginative sex. I write the kind of story I would like to read, whatever its genre.

Ralph Vicinanza died. He was a leading genre agent, and widely praised. One author said that he never once heard anyone say a negative word about Ralph. Well, I as generally outcast from the genre insiders, will give another example why they don’t like me, and say the negative word. I was a client of Kirby McCauley, who once represented Stephen King and became the most powerful genre agent extant. But he had a serious problem that caused me to leave him, with regret, as I believe was also the case with King. Then suddenly all his other clients decamped together, going to his foreign rights agent, Vicinanza. I didn’t like the way that happened, so though Vicinanza figured I’d come to him too, I did not. There were other factors, but you’d have to understand the intricacies of agent/client/publisher relations to properly appreciate them. The essence was that I felt Vicinanza had screwed McCauley and that poisoned him for me. One of the things publishers and some other writers don’t understand about me is that I take ethics seriously, and I try to avoid dealing with those whose honesty is more of a word than a practice. That attitude shows strongly in my ongoing Survey of Electronic Publishing. Vicinanza was surely an excellent agent, where lying becomes an art, but he did not meet my standard.

Column by Clarence Page discusses stuttering. It seems he was a stutterer, and was recently honored by the American Institute for Stuttering. I learn that there may be three million stutterers in this country, and that some have been notable. Vice President Joe Biden, pop music star Carly Simon, Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, Jimmy Stewart, James Earl Jones (the voice of Darth Vader), Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, and many more. They worked to overcome it, and it seems succeeded. I understand that it doesn’t happen when singing, and maybe not when chanting or declaiming. I never had a problem stuttering, but I sympathize; there but for the grace of God go I. I presume a stutterer could be a good writer, as the thoughts and words are there, just not the mechanism for smooth speaking. It’s a physical problem, rather than an emotional one.

Readers often ask me whether I’ll be attending any conventions or book signings. I’m not shy and I have no trouble meeting people or addressing audiences; stage fright, like writer’s block, was something I had early and worked to eliminate. Mostly I stay home, because of my wife’s limited health; I want neither to travel without her nor to leave her home alone. But one event is occurring close enough: the Inverness (Fla.) Festival of Books, at the Citrus County Courthouse, January 28-29 2011, for Citrus County authors, of which there are a number. There will be several seminars on writing and marketing. I’ll be their featured author and will be there, circulating and signing and meeting anyone who wants to meet me. It costs $20 per ticket Friday evening, and $25 Saturday from 9 AM to 5 PM.

About reading: I am a slow reader, so a novel that another person might read in a day will take me three days full time, and longer if I read it in stages. Usually the latter; I do have other things to do, such as making meals and writing my own fiction. If it is by an aspiring writer, chances are it won’t be great, but an honest comment will cost me a fan. Since I refuse to do dishonest comments, it can be an expensive business for me in more than one sense. Any ignoramus can dash off an uninformed opinion, but an informed opinion requires thought. That’s why I’m cautious about committing to read books. Yet I remember the problem I had getting any competent feedback on my own early work. Had I had it, I might not have taken eight years to make my first sale. So I do read and comment some amateur novels. Even so, they threaten to monopolize my time. At the turn of July/August I had entirely caught up with my science, news and opinion magazines. Now four months later I have a 20+ magazine backlog. I am so busy reading for other people that I’m not reading what I want to for myself. I shall have to become less accommodating, which will annoy some folk. Yes, sometimes I discover novels that are real fun, as was the case with Island of Fog, but usually the reads are somewhat plodding. So this is a sort of vague announcement of whatever. I just seem not to be able to keep up with everything.

I read Before They were Giants, edited by James L Sutter, a PLANET STORIES book published by PAIZO PRESS, paizo.com/planetstories. The publisher sent me a copy because I’m in it, and I read it because I wanted to see what company I kept. This is an anthology of the first published stories by authors who later became famous. I regard it as historically valuable. We all had to start somewhere, and this shows where. Of course to me the names in the genre are Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Frank Herbert, Jack Williamson, Poul Anderson, and others who were famous when I came on the scene as a reader in the 1940s and as an author in the 1960s. None of those are here. I presume it’s limited to living authors, because there’s a collection of interview questions each must answer. Even so, where are Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Philip Jose Farmer, Ann McCaffrey, Robert Silverberg, and such? So this is by no means complete, but it will do as a sample. It does have Ben Bova, Greg Bear, Cory Doctorow, William Gibson, Joe Haldeman, China Mieville, Larry Niven, Spider Robinson, and others. In general the stories are competent but not outstanding. My own is a perfect example of that: a brief light fantasy that just happened to be the first that caught the eye of an editor. Some of the stories I had trouble making sense of; others were fine without being memorable. I did however, like the last one, “Ginungagap” by Michael Stanwick. It seems he has won numerous awards, as most of the authors in this volume have, but I never heard of him before this. I will be aware of him hereafter, though, because this story is sharply written and intellectually stimulating. Maybe it’s that it addresses one of my mental hobbies: what really is a life? If a person is dismantled, converted to light, and reassembled elsewhere, as in Star Trek “beam me up,” is he the same person, or a duplicate made with his body and memories? How can he be the same, if he is now made of different atoms? But if he is not, then what about the fact that from moment to moment we are all changing, sloughing off parts of ourselves while incorporating new parts? I remember a wise man saying that you can’t step in the same river twice. Another wise man said you can’t step in the same river once, because the water is constantly changing. Unless the river is the process of water flowing, rather than the particular molecules that pass. In which case we are the same despite our constant changing, being a living process, and a beamed up or otherwise transmitted person is the some even if his old body is left behind. A story that addresses such questions while having a coherent plot and intriguing main character is my idea of a good one.

Of equivalent interest are the interviews following each story. The questions are the same throughout, but the answers differ. What do you think works well in this story? How would you change it today? What inspired it? Where were you in life when it was published? Advice for aspiring authors? Anecdotes? The advice can range up to a page in length. I think mine is the pithiest: “Have a working spouse.” An aspiring author could get a fair education just by reading the interviews. But it is indeed interesting to see how successful authors started. They had to scramble, just as new authors do today. So while I can’t say this is the best anthology, ever, it is worthwhile.

I completed my annual Xanth novel in OctOgre, and figured my time would ease up in NoRemember. Obese fortune! The rush continued unabated. Reading socked in immediately as I read three novels by aspiring writers and proofed one of my own. That was my erotic romance Eroma, you know, EROtic ROMAnce. This is being epublished experimentally, really a kind of self publishing, as I hope to see whether good fiction, good packaging, and good electronic distribution makes for success. You should see it available this month, Dismember 6 or thereabout. It is phrased as a virtual reality sex game, where the players are represented by avatars in a series of erotic challenges, and interact and have sex, and when the man penetrates to full depth in the woman, so that his hard penis touches her trigger where the cervix is normally, both are plunged into an intense thirty second orgasm. Sex is an equal opportunity activity. In some settings they must have sex with different partners to make progress in the game, while in others it is competitive, with the man trying to accomplish it and the woman trying to prevent it, or vice versa. Each has a 50% chance to prevail, and there are devious strategies. All of it is broadcast to tens of millions of viewers, and no detail is spared. They can even see the woman’s avatar body become translucent to show the exact penetration of the penis. So there is a phenomenal amount of sex, with the women as aggressive as the men. But what about the romance? Well, that’s the main point. Some existing couples enter the Eroma game in order to practice safe, mutual-orgasm semi-public yet anonymous sex, as only they know the identities behind the avatars. Some get interested in each other for reasons other than sex. My male protagonist encounters and helps a novice female player who is in it because her family needs the prize money to survive, and they come to like each other. That interest then extends beyond the weekly Game sessions, as they meet in person and fall in love, and feeds back into the Game, where they must compete against each other. I loved reading this novel; it’s original, challenging, imaginative, and sexy as hell. I think my favorite line is when his sensitivity impresses a female player favorably, and she remarks that there must be a woman in his ancestry. Shrewd guess. But this novel is definitely not for children or conservatives.

I also continued with my fantasy collaboration with J R Rain as we alternate chapters. The original Aladdin never had adventures like these. For example, instead of the Djinn of the Lamp rescuing him, he has to go to Djinnland to rescue the Djinn. And work with Evan Filipek on my prospective anthology of my favorite early stories, One and Wonder, continues. They were the stories that most moved me when I was a teen and twenties age aspiring writer. Evan has been doing the brutework of locating, obtaining, and scanning them. You see, I was a collector, and I had maybe a couple thousand magazines, but when we had children we got squeezed for space and I gave away my collection. Then years later when I thought of this anthology, I no longer had the issues with those stories. So it’s being done the hard way. One example will suffice for now: the story that brought me into the science fiction genre, “The Equalizer,” by Jack Williamson. I reread it 63 years later, and discovered that in the interim someone changed the conclusion, and there are ugly details I had forgotten, but it’s still a great idea story. A military mission returns to Earth after 20 years only to discover that the planet has regressed; the moon base is shut down, the spaceports are empty, the cities are deserted. The people remain, happily farming. What happened? Well, the equalizer happened. This is a peculiar twisting of wires that enables anyone to draw unlimited free power from the energy of the universe for any purpose. No one has to work any more, and no dictator can push anyone around, lest an equalizer be tossed as a bomb. Would it work in real life? I doubt it, because energy and its related complications like pollution and depletion of resources is not our only problem. What about overpopulation? Food? But what a dream! I think it was that dream that beckoned me into the science fiction genre, and thus my subsequent career. Later I met Jack Williamson and told him what his work meant to me, exactly as fans of mine do for me today. He was a great writer and a great man. This is just one entry in the volume, and I hope readers will find it to be of historical value even if some of the stories have become dated in half a century.

And I had a cold. My wife got it and passed it along to me. We use mega-doses of Vitamin C to abate colds, and seldom have any. But one thing C does not handle is a fever, and this was a nasty cold with an attendant fever. Mine peaked at 100.1º, and my nose fauceted; it seemed that every five minutes I had to pause to blow out another pint of snot. I had to lean back when making supper or typing lest my nose drip onto the plates or keyboard. At least I was able to read, holding the book over my head as I lay back. But Vitamin C and D did help, and in a few days I was functioning reasonably efficiently for a fogy of my age. It was just another thing that helped jam my month.

We bought a new computer. My present one is four years old and it getting dated. In my day four years was still just a child, but in my day computers existed only in science fiction. Ubuntu is doing the job, but every so often it crashes, and there are constantly niggling annoyances, such as the lack of the thesaurus feature (yes I know: in Xanth that’s a scaly reptile with wordy teeth) and the way it thinks a routine shutdown is a crash that must invoke the recovery process. Maybe Ubuntu fans think this is normal, but I’m ready to try a different distribution. We were simply waiting for a sale on the right machine. Then Office Max had a hundred dollars off on one with a one terabyte hard disk, and we bought it. Of course it came with Windows pre-installed. Ed Howdershelt brought disks with PCLINUXOS and Open Office, but it turns out that PC doesn’t let you install OO from a disk; you have to go online to download it their way. With a system that has no modem, yet, here in the hinterlands where broadband is a blank stare. (Sure we could get it if we wanted to pay a mini-fortune for cable or satellite. We’re too cheap.) Next step was to summon geek help. Brian Smith, who had gotten my present system functioning, came up, and used his geek magic to connect the system to the Internet via his cell phone. He downloaded the stuff that way, and voila! I had PC on a partitioned half of the hard drive. It does have a functioning thesaurus, and it does shut down without thinking it’s a crash. But it lacked two things: a Record Macro key, and my variant Dvorak keyboard. So Brian told me how to get into the guts and add a record macro key, and I did, and now I have my macros, and no, I didn’t have to fend off any fake error message 16 times to get them, as I have to in Ubuntu. Why PC should choose to delete the key entirely is beyond me, but it hadn’t allowed for geek help, so I prevailed anyway. The keyboard was more of a challenge. In Ubuntu I open a terminal, say abracadabra (in computerese that’s xmodmap .Xmodmap) and I have it. PC would not let me set it up. I tried gedit, but it never heard of it. I tried kedit, on the theory that G is for Gnome so K must be for KDE. No luck. The key was kwrite. That brought me three separate error messages. Well, that was progress. So Brian gave me the really obscure magic code, something like “I hereby sell my soul and worship the KDE Flying Spaghetti Monster forsaking all others especially Gnome on pain of being damned forever to hell with no system other than Windows.” That worked, and now I have my keyboard. There are still kinks to be worked out, such as the way it won’t save my defaults, but on the whole PCLinux seems to be my future. We’ll see how stable it is. I’ll keep the old system for things like my ongoing survey of electronic publishing, since I need to go online to update that. Fortunately I can write my stories and novels without going online.

I read Lyam’s Awakening, by Jeramiah Wade (available at Amazon.com). This is a self published fantasy novel. I find no indication where it might be ordered. It is not well written or motivated, but it does have a good story. Lyam is an officer assigned by the King to investigate the mysterious deaths of a party of men in the haunted forest. Soon his own party is similarly decimated. Lyam continues, and the adventure forms around him. Someone is evidently watching him. He does incidental good works along the way, helping people, treating them courteously. They are surprised, as the King’s soldiers normally simply take what they want, whether food or women. More than one young woman gets interested in him, but he is not seeking such interaction. He discovers a horse caught by a trap; he frees the animal, who then joins him as his steed, Midnight. Midnight is no ordinary horse; he’s a carnivore, and partially telepathic. He becomes a loyal assistant. Later Lyam is attacked by a forest cat, kills her, and cares for her seemingly orphaned cub, whom he names Rose. It turns out that the cub is a were-cat, and when she changes to woman form she becomes the one he wants to marry. There is a surprise about Lyam’s own nature as he gradually awakens to it. So I can recommend this novel to those who are not picky about style or taut plotting; there is a fair story there.

I read a major segment of the unfinished fantasy novel Into the Lairby Jerry Bridges. This starts with a listing of the races, kingdoms,  and characters of the setting that I think should be in an appendix. It is the story of the young man Sionn (pronounced Shoon) and the girl Rana, both brutally orphaned as teenagers and subjected to rough lives. The girl was forced into prostitution at age 12 and has some difficulty adjusting to the idea of a man who thinks of her as a person rather than a sex object. They are cared for by a woman of another species, and they start working out the traumas of their situations, and falling in love with each other as they navigate hard-hitting adventure. This is potentially a powerful story, but it is marred by myriad typos and errors. A professional copyediting would improve it greatly. There is nice description and nice characterization, and the background world is quite well worked out. It is well written, apart from the errors, and you can care about the characters, other than one who is a turd, and the enemy royalty, hideously vicious. So I see this as a good strong novel, once it achieves its majority.

I get routine medical checkups, and I think generally impress my doctor with my disciplined health. It is not coincidence that I remain lean and fit in my seventies. But my body isaging, and I can no longer do what I could when younger. Every so often I get another little reminder. This time it was my shoeless height. They measured me at five feet nine and a quarter inches. My height has always been five ten and a half inches. There had to be a mistake. So I checked it at home: five nine and a quarter. Next morning I checked, and it was five ten and a quarter. But soon it settled back down. Sigh. I no longer stand quite as tall as I used to. Probably the same thing is happening to my mind. Age is a female dog, but I refuse to indulge in denial. I am notas good as I ever was.

My daughter the Newspaperwoman — I may have remarked before how we worn out old fogies tend to live through our children — attended a convention and picked up some European advertising in the form of a hardcover book. It seems they are a bit sharper on such things in Germany than here in the States. This one is a catalog of slides made by the company Atlantics. Not just any slides; there are play slides, water slides, and evacuation slides. It is that last that intrigues me. These are gleaming steel tubes that emerge from the upper windows of houses and wriggle down the sides of the buildings to the ground, like giant worms. If there’s a fire, you jump in and slide down to safety. An emergency evacuation that might take half an hour conventionally because the exits are blocked or jammed can be done in half a minute. Meanwhile they can be fun for children. It makes sense. If I lived in a high-rise apartment, I’d feel safer if it had one of these. From inside the house it looks like the opening of a round drying machine. It might be fun to jump into one and see where it leads. Maybe to Germany or some other realm? The water slides have pretty girls in bathing suits to show them off, but I don’t think the girls are included in the price of installation.

I get on the darndest mailing lists. I received a small package of books and a DVD from he Most Holy Family Monastery in Fillmore NY, that says the Bible Proves the Teachings of the Catholic Church, and givens the life history of Padre Pio, a Catholic priest who worked miracles and bore the wounds of Jesus Christ on his body. The disc promises to reveal the Third Secret of Fatima, and the End of The World. Alas, Philistine that I am, I’m not much interested. The world will surely end, in due course, but I don’t believe these folk have any serious insight. Which reminds me of the beginning of the universe. NEW SCIENTIST article says that the sudden inflation that started off our universe is not justified mathematically, unless you assume that a prior universe collapsed to a pinpoint in a big crunch, and bounced back as our universe. The math works for that. So now we know: the Big Bang was not the creation, but the continuation of a cycle. Then end of the world may not be the end after all though you might not like passing through the eye of that needle to achieve the New Universe. But the more immediate prospect is for global warming to make half the world uninhabitable, because it would be too hot and damp for mammals to survive. Hot and dry allows effective sweating for cooling, but hot and wet doesn’t. Heat waves already claim more lives than do hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods.

Stray other notes: Happiness may not be locked in the genes. A study suggests that it correlates with the neuroticism of your partner. The wrong partner can make you miserable. For women (not men) being overweight costs happiness. Bullying: it was always bad, but now the Internet can make it worse, with cyberbullying. Yes, I have felt all along that it needs to be dealt with. One study shows that 60% of boys who were bullies in middle school had criminal records by age 24. A bully is a baby criminal. The roots are complicated, but the moment one child starts pushing another around, I feel the pusher should be taken out of circulation. It isn’t limited to children; it seems that workplace bullies can ruin lives. Ignoring them and the harm they do seems foolish. I wonder whether there should be a Wikileaks-type organization set up, that reports on bullies wherever they occur, publicizes them, and publicly shames them? If they persist, sets them up for legal action? We’d be a happier society without them.

Someone suggested that I add a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) tap to my website. I have been pondering it, but in the constant rush have never gotten down to it. Well, at such time as the rush eases, maybe I’ll do it.

Couple comics: Candorville suggests that we’re angry nothing’s changed so we vote for those who have spent two years blocking change. “Is America the only country that votes sarcastically?” And how Democrats reduced taxes, but Republicans convinced voters that taxes had gone up. The health care reforms will reduce the deficit, but they convinced voters of the opposite. They got unemployed people to vote for the party that blocked the extension of unemployment insurance. So now they will have bonuses for all their operatives. Pretty sharp comic; pretty stupid voters. You doubt? Consider how the Republicans just swept Florida. The prosecution rests.

Yet another survey on sex suggests that Baby Boomers are unhappy about it as they age. 72% of the men have fantasized about having sex with someone other than their present partner. I’m pre-Boomer, but I wonder whether my novels and stories represent such fantacizing. If so, I do a lot of it.

US NEWS & WORLD REPORT is folding, physically at least. We’ve subscribed for decades, but recently it seemed to lose its will to live. It went from weekly to bi-weekly, then monthly, and was no longer much of a source of news. We have replaced it with THE WEEK and are satisfied.

Two years ago Susie Lee of the Ferret & Dove Sanctuary sent me several crocheted angels, so I formed them into Angela Angel in Knot Gniess, which has now been published in hardcover. Angela, like the dolls, has a skirt but no legs. Her quest is to obtain enough mass to fill out her body, so she can settle down and marry her lover Beauregard Demon. They were giving visitors guided tours of Heaven and Hell, and accidentally stepped in a love spring. Truly forbidden love. She was horribly ashamed that in the passion of the moment she let him see her panties. Truly a fallen woman. Naturally in the course of the novel, which is about Wenda Woodwife, Angela finally manages to win her mass and become a woman of substance. I listed the Sanctuary in the Author’s Note,  But in the interim Susie Lee’s husband died, and she has had to shut down the Sanctuary. Now the place to go is www.angelfire.com/theforce/ferret_rescue/index.html, or http://ferretanddovesanctuary.petfinder.org.

I continue to break in my new computer, with help from geek Brian Smith, and as it shapes up I conclude I like PC Linux OS very well, and it bids fair to be my permanent operating system. It has those niggling little features that Ubuntu lacks, such as providing the date and size of the file I am replacing when I back up, the paragraph exchange where I can switch the places of paragraphs up or down in the manuscript or my letter list, automatic correction when I forgetfully leave the caps lock on so that I don’t wind up with fOULEDuP words, it does not think that routinely shutting down my system for the night represents a crash that must be recovered from, it does restore all the files I had in memory when I shut down, on their proper desks, it provides my variant keyboard without my having to open a Terminal each time, dialog boxes appear where they are supposed to be, instead of being hidden on Desks where I am not currently working, and it allows me to assign keys that move me from Desk to Desk so I’m not locked to the Mouse. (In Linux you can have any number of Desks, each with its own papers, so you don’t have to pile them on top of each other, which works for me and my multiple working files.) I did have a problem with it balking erratically about backing up my files, but that stopped when I made Konqueror the default file handler instead of Dolphin. It has the Thesaurus, which my edition of Ubuntu does not, and control F7 conveniently calls it up. It makes macros without 16 challenges. It is straightforward about making new Directories/Folders, and is better about copying files into them instead of dumping them elsewhere. So far it has not crashed, though sometimes it backs up a file corrupted; I have to watch closely, because a corrupted backup file is useless. With Ubuntu I get the impression that its proprietors don’t actually use it for constructive work, or care about those who do, while with PC Linux they do seem to care. I do note that they list but don’t actually have one of my favorite card games, Grandfather; it seems no one at PC HQ actually tried to play it. But the others work, and they have good statistics. So I am increasingly comfortable with it, though my main backup flash drive likes to change my files to 0 content after saving them correctly. My wife guesses that the content is still there, but the program loses the address of the content, maybe from some 32 bit 64 bit confusion. We’re trying smaller flash drives. I’ll also quit using the .rtf format, because that has been doing erratic things, like changing the font in a paragraph or inserting half page blank headers I can’t shrink or eliminate. There is one other significant exception: we bought a printer and connected it, and the computer correctly identified it and says it is ready to use, but that it is turned off, not accepting projects. So I tried going to the Windows aspect, and it says the same thing: printer not accepting jobs. So maybe it’s the printer. But how do I switch it from No to Yes? It has no menu. It is the HP LaserJet Professional P1606dn, no installation required. It will print a test page. When I try from the computer it blinks three times and does nothing. Apparently they made it with a default of not printing, for what reason I can’t fathom. That seems like a car with a default of not driving. I suspect that programmers of any stripe are only marginally this side of sanity; they think it’s funny to make ordinary users bang their heads against walls in frustration. So if there is anyone out there who knows how to make a printer do its job, let me know, even if it does violate a trade secret. We’re checking online for Linux drivers, just in case this printer doesneed one. Once I am able to print, I expect to move to this system as my home base. In fact I’m moving to it anyway, and backing up my files and printing them at Ubuntu. PC Linux doesn’t go online—this system has no modem–but I don’t need it to; I’ll save the Ubuntu system for that.

I finally caught up with my reading for others, and started in on reading for myself. Four novels in Dismember, the first an amateur fantasy I won’t review here. The second was Relationships 4, read after publication, and I did spot a couple of typos the copy-editor missed. I enjoyed it, but since I have commented on it before, won’t go into detail this time. I’ll just mention one story that struck me, “Mother Love,” which I suspect is unlike anyone else’s erotic fiction. A young man seeking to take out a pretty girl of a different culture is required first to be interviewed alone by her mother. The woman promptly opens his fly, takes out his penis, and stimulates it into ejaculation into a little cup she has. It turns out that he must fill the cup with semen before going on his date. That requires several ejaculations, and by the time it is full, he has very little remaining sexual interest or capacity. So he is now safe for the date, and she has a cup of plant food. Each date is the same; it’s their way of keeping their young women pristine despite the typical lechery of potent young men. Then on the date other young men, who know what’s what, rib him about my cup runneth over, take this cup away from me, etc., while the young lady pretends not to know what they’re talking about.  That’s the beginning…

One of the projects I’ve been working on is One and Wonder, an anthology of the stories that first turned me on to the science fiction genre. It’s just about ready to be marketed. The first story is Jack Williamson’s “The Equalizer,” about the discovery of a limitless power source available by the mere special twisting of wires, and the way it revolutionizes Earthly culture. Reminded of the author, I sought to check his novel The Humanoids, which was originally serialized as the novelet “With Folded Hands” and novel …And Searching Mind. I checked for my copy of the book, but it was gone from my shelf. I know I had it, because I indexed it, as I do all the books in my library so I can find them when I need them. Also, I had read it to my daughter Penny when she was nine years old, because the girl therein is nine. So my wife ordered it from Amazon, and that turned out to be the edition TOR republished in 1996. It does not admit the lovely title “…And Searching Mind” existed; now it’s all just The Humanoids. But I suppose a publisher with literary taste is an oxymoron. At any rate, I reread it, over 30 years after my second reading, which was almost 30 years after my first reading. And discovered I remembered virtually none of it. How could I forget so much of a novel that meant so much to me? I almost suspect I’m getting old. Anyway, it begins with the arrival of the humanoids, sleek humanoid machines whose Prime Directive is “To Serve and Obey, And Guard Men from Harm.” As I read I thought of Isaac Asimov’s robots, and of the machine culture in my own ChroMagic series. We each have different takes on the subject; maybe some day someone will do a doctoral thesis on the parallels. My machines have no nonsense about obeying; they are well on the way to systematically extinguishing life throughout the galaxy, unless somehow stopped by the galactic coalition of living organisms. Williamson’s humanoids do serve, but have their own take on it. For example, they guard men from harm by forbidding them knives; they can’t even cut their own bread. They make men happy by drugging them. It’s like a padded cell. Anyone who fights this obviously is unhappy and must be rendered happy, even if this requires brain surgery. It’s a frightening utopia. Meanwhile, in the course of this project, Evan Filipek procured a copy of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION for March 1947 and sent it to me as a Christmas present. This was the issue that launched me into the discovery of science fiction as a genre and changed my life, as my writing career illustrates. Ah, what emotion, seeing this magazine again over 60 years later. Others thought I was wasting my time on this junk. Today only critics do. Have I commented lately on critics? To repeat: a critic is finely crafted from fecal matter. Thus a critic is a turd that walks and talks like a shit. Ask any writer.

Then I read the sequel, The Humanoid Touch, published in 1980. This shows an intriguing human culture at the fringe of the civilized galaxy, late in getting the humanoid service. The humanoids don’t even make an appearance until halfway through the novel. But then they make their impact felt. It turns out that their Prime Directive does not require them to tell the truth, and they lie like politicians, no falsehood too big to avoid. They are also good at imitating living people. At one point the protagonist’s former girlfriend interviews him seductively, until he catches on that she is a humanoid. Then he manages to disable her and escape, but they are hot on his tail, warning everyone that he’s a killer and must be killed on sight. It becomes a tense thriller. It seems to me that the humanoids claim to want to serve man, but actually want to assume complete power over him. They do have some points; man in his natural state is a warlike creature suffering many maladies. But the cure is surely worse that the ailment. I enjoyed both novels; Williamson was a great adventure writer with some significant themes to explore, such as the price of lasting peace.

We also progressed on the Aladdin Relighted novel, and that is just about ready to market. I will proofread it first thing next month/year after posting this column. J R Rain and I largely alternated chapters, following the later life of Aladdin of the lamp, after serious mischief cost him his beloved wife and son. He had become sort of a private eye, concealing the fact that he used to be king. A beautiful woman hires him to rescue her son, who is to be sacrificed. That begins a wild adventure. J R Rain is a bestseller on Kindle with his Vampire PI novels, and I was a bestseller in my bygone day. It will be interesting to see whether we can do it again.

Incidental notes: I got a new pair of Crocs, those light all-purpose shoes, and wore them for all purposes pretty much the whole month. They don’t look great, but they are cheap at $30, comfortable, and convenient. I also got a liquid lead pencil. I use pencil a lot, to make notes in answer to emails that my wife then transcribes to the computer. I get sick of pencil leads that get sloppy, break, run out or simply don’t function. The liquid can be sketchy on the first word, but then settles down and performs well. You can erase it, but if you leave it for a day it becomes permanent. Okay; I like it, and it is now my official pencil. I planted a radish. It had been a while in the bag when I took it out to make salad for supper, and had several green sprouts. It was trying so hard to grow that I had mercy on it, and planted it in our garbage garden, and it is becoming a fine plant. I believe in giving living things their fair chance when I can. A hole appeared in a Tampa Bay landfill, maybe five feet across. Next day it was 80 feet across and 60 feet deep and still growing. And it stank. Probably all the watering they did to try to save crops during the freezes—we had a really cold month—drew down the water table and opened a pit. It was a sink hole. Or perhaps more properly, a stink hole. We’re not teetotalers, but my wife can’t handle much alcohol because of her medications, and if she’s not drinking, I’m not drinking. But this Christmas we had wine. It’s FRE, assorted wines from which most of the alcohol has been removed. Looks the same, tastes the same, I think, but has only half of one percent alcohol, or one proof. Their site is www.frewines.com/. I may have seen the Lunar Eclipse, in my fashion: I woke at 3:30 to go to the bathroom—the high water diet I’m on means I can’t make it through the night—and remembered that was the time of the eclipse. It was cold and I didn’t want to go outside in my pajamas, so I simply looked out the window. I saw no moonlight. It was a clear night, so the eclipse must have blocked it. Does that count? And a new study suggests that there are triple the number of stars in the universe as we thought: about 300 sextillion. So now they know the size of the universe? At least its a sexy figure, sextillion.

Amazon seems to be removing incest-related erotica titles from their store and Kindle. That is their right. But where will it stop? Someone is bound to object to anything that is published. Censorship starts with egregious examples, then spreads as certain folk try to control the reading habits of other folk. Award winning books can get banned. It is, ultimately, a power trip by prudes. I say, if you don’t like incest, don’t buy or read such books; let the market decide. But don’t try to tell others what they may or may not read. How far can it go? I understand that in some countries the Bible is illegal. There is, after all, incest therein.

Back in NoRemember SCIENCE NEWS had a long article on the weirdness of quantum physics. (I got wa-ay behind on magazines; now I’m trying to catch up. That’s why I want some free time.) Even Albert Einstein had a problem with it. Things like Schrodinger’s Cat, neither alive nor dead. Like things being undefined until somebody looks at them. It all could be dismissed as nonsense, except that there have been some sophisticated experiments that do tend to vindicate it. So over the years I have devised some egregious simplifications to make it all intelligible, and maybe these can help others. What about things being random on the minute quantum scale, and not in the real-life scale we live in? Think of a coin being flipped. It will land Heads or Tails, but you can’t predict which until you actually flip it, so it is undefined until you look. But if you flip it a million times, it will come up Heads half the time and Tails half the time; you know that without looking. There’s your quantum scale versus the macroscopic (that is, ours) scale. Probability governs the scales: 50-50 for a single flip and for a million flips, but it seems uncertain on the single flip because it’s all or nothing there. What about being able to measure either the position or the velocity, but not both? Think of the coin again, while it’s still in the air: you can measure the rate of its spinning, but not its heads or tails position because that is undefined until it stops. Once it does stop, you know which face is up, but it’s no longer spinning, so you can’t measure the rate of that. So that uncertainty makes sense after all. What about something not being defined until looked at? How can just looking without touching change reality? Here I think the scientists are fooling themselves. Here’s why: flip your coin, then take a flash photo of it in the air. That picture will determine which face is up at the instant of the flash. That’s what scientists are doing, in effect: taking flash photos. But the coin is turning, and the photo defines only an instant, not the complete story. The coin is what it is, regardless how many photos are taken. Reality is what it is, regardless how many spot looks scientists take, thinking each look defines it. We are not defining reality, we are only catching glimpses of parts of it. I’m sure those scientists will take this as evidence of my abysmal ignorance, but I leave it to my readers: am I making sense?

I was forwarded an article on several items of science. One of them was the discovery of a vegetarian crocodile that lived 80 million years ago. What’s peculiar about that? There’s a vegetarian spider that exists today, and even some human beings are vegetarians. In fact I suspect that the entire human species will in due course become vegetarian as the food runs out, because twenty times as many can be fed that way. A December NEW SCIENTIST has an article on the evolution of birds. It seems a number of dinosaurs had feathers, originally used for insulation; the birds were the ones that adapted the feathers for flight. A November article in that magazine discusses how human beings were shaped by a truly challenging environment, such as the tectonically active Great Rift Valley in Africa. Yes, that was a case I made in the GEODYSSEY series, and I’m glad to see science catching up with me. Rough terrain, earthquakes, volcanoes erupting—you had to be alert to survive and prosper there. Of course mankind was far more advanced early on than science has liked to admit, but now they’re finding evidence of cooking 400,000 years ago, which means control of fire. The explosion of cave art and other things 50,000 years ago probably means not that these things were invented then, but that a new migration from Africa brought them to new territories. Peripherally related: I remember when writing was discovered in an Asia Minor site, and a SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN article said it could not be writing because it was in the wrong place and time. What idiocy! It was obviously a precursor to writing, occurring long before the final form evolved. Writing did not burst full-fledged on the Eighth Day of Creation. None so blind as those who will not see.

Did Neandertal man mate with modern man? We can be sure the two had sex, because the moderns will fuck anything they can tie down, but it had seemed that the species were too different to breed. New it seems that a few matings did result in offspring; it shows up in the genetic record. Okay; I’m glad the Neandertals weren’t entirely extinguished. There is evidence that it wasn’t our doing; they ran afoul of a killer volcano in their area. Still, they were an intriguing subset that deserved better than it got.

The #1 health newsletter in my estimation is ALTERNATIVES, by Dr. David C Williams. I learn some of the darnedest things therein. For example the January 2011 issue discusses aging. It would be nice, he says, if we could stop the aging process, but that is not feasible. However he mentions four people who seem to live very slowly. One is an 18 year old girl who is 30 inches tall and weighs 16 pounds, in good health but aging only one year in 20. Another is a 27 year old man who looks 8 or 9. Another is a 40 year old man who looks like an adolescent. They all seem quite ordinary, apart from their slow aging. If we could just fathom their secret, who knows how long we might live?  I suspect these are merely extreme examples of a more common phenomenon: different people age at different rates. I was always slow, not in the sense of stupid, but in the sense of looking 13 when I was 16 and looking 60 when I’m 76. I never looked my age. It was hell in youth but is pleasant in age. Whether that will translate into a longer lifespan I don’t know, but it’s tempting to think that it will. There must be others with slower thermostats. Yes, I do my best to live healthy, and I trust it helps, but the root may be genetic.

The last Luann comic strip for 2010 shows her at a party with the Australian Quill. Midnight comes and everyone else is kissing. They say Happy New Year. Then suddenly they are kissing, apparently surprising each other. That’s a nice conclusion. I like Luann. I also like Susan in Candorville, and Alter Ego Biker Girl in Rose is Rose. Maybe I have eclectic tastes in fantasy women. As for us, here in Mundania, after 54½ years of marriage we just turned in. We’re well into dullness. This is of course one thing that makes romantic fantasy interesting; it lends excitement to those of us who sadly lack it.

As usual I have other clippings and other thoughts, but also other things to do, so this is it for this month. I will attend the Festival of Books in Inverness, January 29. They canceled the January 28 session, making it a one day event at the courthouse. I will try to meet and talk with anyone who wishes to interact with me. I’m not much, but I do my best to accommodate.

J R Rain and I completed Aladdin Relighted, and I proofread it for marketing. It’s fantasy set in the Arabian Nights milieu, wherein Aladdin is older and sadder, having lost his beloved wife and son to foul play and resigned from being king. Now he’s a sort of anonymous private eye using the name Niddala (Aladdin spelled backwards) specializing in finding things, helped by the ifrit bound to his ring. He is not using the Lamp, with its far more powerful djinn, partly because he doesn’t want to be dependent on such help, but mostly because the djinn no longer answers, having evidently been imprisoned in Jinnland. A lovely woman, Jewel, hires him to rescue her son, who is to be a human sacrifice. Aladdin soon realizes that to accomplish this he must first enter Djinnland to rescue the Djinn of the Lamp, who can then help him rescue the boy; no lesser force can hope to do it. So Aladdin and Jewel enter Djinnland, and it is some adventure. Fast moving, often lighthearted, by no means deep, but I think a lot of fun. One example: when attacked by two charging warriors on horseback, Aladdin makes a peculiar hissing sound and the horses immediately rear and dump their riders. Why? Because it is the sound of an annoyed basilisk, one of the deadliest creatures of mythology. Aladdin fights as much by cunning as by the scimitar, though he is good with that too. Jewel is no slouch either; she guts any man who tries to force sex on her. Thus Aladdin is interested, but cautious.

I read Coming From Nowhere, by Pembroke Sinclair, published by eTreasures Publishing, www.etreasurespublishing.com. This is adventure science fiction featuring the young woman JD, standing for Jane Doe because they don’t know where she comes from and she had no memory. She is a warrior woman who fights like a man and heals fast when beaten up, as is often the case. It turns out that she was laboratory produced, a kind of retread made from a human woman who was killed or wiped out, and improved to be stronger, faster and maybe smarter than normal. There’s a hint of romance, but no sexuality; she’s attractive but never uses her feminine wiles. There’s a plot to make many more like her, to serve as a superior fighting force to take over the human realm. Whenever she balks or fails in a mission she gets brutalized as a lesson for the future. But of course she does come to realize that she is on the wrong side, and strives to stop the ugly project. Roger, her vicious supervisor, always seems to be a step ahead of her and the others who try to resist. Until intelligent alien creatures enter the picture. It gets complicated. I find this novel to be imperfect, but it does have imagination, violence, and human feeling, and I think many readers would enjoy it.

I read The Ghost in the Water by Andy Kaiser. Http://LeagueOfScientists.com. This is pitched for sixth grade level, but don’t let that fool you; it’s a very nice story. Five bright six graders form the secret-membership League of Scientists to solve supernatural mysteries by explaining them in natural terms. It reminds me of the old radio program, circa 1950, House of Mystery, that did something similar, only for adults. I remember when the head of a cursed castle had to go down in the dungeon overnight to face the malignant spirit of a criminal ancestor whose body was shackled in chains; prior men had done this and been found dead in the morning, unmarked. Indeed, the spook was expecting him: the coffin stood upright facing the door. What a manifestation! It turned out that the tide came in and flooded the dungeon, drowning the poor men locked there. The coffin was standing because the chains around the ancestor’s feet weighed down that part, and the water lifted the rest up. Okay, Ghost in the Water is not as ugly, but you get the idea. The school’s leading swimmer is attacked by a green ghost in the water and doesn’t want to swim any more, meaning the rival teams will win by default. Time for the League to step in; there has to be a natural explanation. Doesn’t there? The protagonists are realistically described; one is being pursued by an implacable bully, complicating his existence, because of course the school authorities are oblivious. I loved this novel, and believe most readers of any age will too. It’s one great adventure with an educational theme, with luck the first of a series.

I watched via DVD Mrs. Henderson Presents, a 2004 movie sent to me by Robert Katayama, featuring Judi Dench as a widow with a theater in England prior to World War II who wants to make something of it. Dull stuff? By no means! She hires a manager and they put on a popular series of shows, but then other theaters copy their formula, dilute the market, and they are failing. What to do? Ms. Henderson gets a bright idea: do the shows nude. Well, of course they have a problem with the authorities, who finally compromise: any nudity must be stationary, like living statues. How can they put on an animated show that way? So they do regular shows with a background of living statuary featuring some of the most esthetically sexy nudes I’ve seen. At one point a mischievous man in the audience puts a live white mouse on the stage. Then suddenly the statuesque nudes are very much alive. I love it.

I read AngelWing Cove Prophecy, by Lora Goodnight, published by PublishAmerica, www.publishamerica.com. This is a contemporary fantasy set in a seaside village with a supernatural history. There had been a peninsula marked by a vertical stone formation resembling wings, thus the name of the cove. An ancient Chieftain had grown too hungry for wealth and power, and finally been imprisoned there. A fierce storm separated the peninsula from the mainland, making it a haunted island. No one dared go there, until a wealthy man, Jedidiah, buys it and builds a mansion there despite being warned of the danger. Then things start getting ugly, as the curse manifests, killing a number of the workers and finally Jedediah himself. His sister Phoebe inherits and comes to take possession. Then they get really ugly as the evil spirit of the island does its worst to prevent her from foiling it, which the prophecy says will occur when two powerful family lines are joined to produce a woman with the ability to do so. Phoebe must not marry, because that will produce the prophesied woman, and when she tries to, a phenomenal storm develops that threatens to wipe out the entire village, while the spirit tries to kill her via possessed agents. It’s an interesting story, and one hell of a storm, marred by mediocre writing. Fans of the supernatural should like it regardless.

I moved to my new PCLinuxOS system as of Jamboree 1 and am generally satisfied with it. Except for printing. If I want to print I have to back up my file, then crank up the old Ubuntu system and print there, or reboot into the Windows half of this one and print. The printer works perfectly in Windows, just not in Linux. Two readers of this column have advised me on the matter, but so far no luck. It says it is sending to printer, than that it is printing, then that it has printed. Only it hasn’t. One thinks it is a problem with the spooler. Okay, how do I tell the spooler to spool? It seems its one of those dread Known Problems that others merely get fixed online. Since this system doesn’t go online, I have a problem. I’m working on it. Meanwhile, I have tried their card games and come to like the “This game is winnable” feature, as it can tell me when I am going wrong. It doesn’t say what is right, just what is not. But once in a while in Free Cell I come to a place where it says it is winnable, but I can find nothing to do to make progress. So I think it may actually be unwinnable, without admitting it. Once in Klondike it said the game was lost, but I made a move and won, so had simultaneous Lost and Win notices onscreen. Not, it didn’t give the computer a fit; it pretended to ignore the conflict.

I don’t pay much attention to the continuing solicitations from my old high school; I figure if they wanted my goodwill late in life, they should have treated me in a manner that earned it. But I do glance at passing news of the Class of 1952, which consists often now of deaths. In a recent issue they caught up with last year’s deaths of Ernest Kalibala and Nancy Horsefield Hoskins. Ernest was one of the first token blacks in this white school, perhaps THE first. He was a nice guy and a good athlete, as I recall, and got through okay. Nancy was my first and only date. It was set up as an introductory measure by the school; I was assigned to attend a function with this girl I had hardly seen before. She was, even in ninth grade, a very well endowed girl, while I was a boy still four years shy of puberty. We sat through the program, not touching, and that was it. I never formally dated again, not even in college; I just sort of associated with the girl of my choice, and finally married her. I guess I simply was not socially apt.

Christmas day Daughter #2 Cheryl lent us her iPod and showed us the game Angry Birds. It was fun. It seems the green pigs were robbing the birds’ nests, so the birds are determined to get rid of the pigs. They do this by catapulting bombs at the pig house. You aim and let fly; you see the trajectory, and the bomb hits and does more or less damage to the log structure depending where it strikes. When fails to get the hiding pigs they chortle evilly. That’s about it. But it’s a lot of fun to play, simple yet challenging. A newspaper article says it cost $100,000 to make, and in a year 50 million copies have been downloaded, and it’s Apple’s bestselling app of 2010. I don’t like Apple, dating back to their early predatory marketing, but have to give credit where due. They did well on this one. I haven’t played more after Christmas, but remember that half hour fondly. I wonder if those birds could drive our pigs out?

Theoretically writers exist in a rarefied atmosphere, heedless of mundane pursuits as we coax our creativity. Would it were so. I was making lunch for my wife and me—I do most of the meals, because standing on her feet tires her too soon—and put two bowls of frozen soup in the microwave oven. And they didn’t melt. It turned out that the microwave was delivering only fractional power. It had been fine that morning, but now was defunct. We can’t blame it; it’s about 23 years old. We bought it for my wife’s father, circa 1987, and inherited it back when he died in 1988. So we tried the newfangled contraption, and it worked; we liked its rapid convenience, and we have been using it ever since. But machines don’t live forever any more than people do, and its time had come. Since now we can’t live without a microwave, using it for every sort of thing from slightly heated water for my denture cleanser to frozen vegetarian dinner entries, we headed into town and bought a new one at Walmart, reduced from $150 to $130. We always shop the sales. It has push-buttons instead of dials, but we are struggling to learn the 21^st century way of doing things, and it works well enough. But the afternoon was shot. Our second refrigerator is also 23 years old, laboring faithfully in the garage; I fear it too may suffer a heart attack and die, one day. I do tend to personalize machines as I do animals, plants, and people; you have a problem with that?

I went to the Inverness Festival of Books on Saturday Jamboree 29. My wife accompanied me, and we brought the wheelchair. She can walk well enough, but could not afford to be caught stuck on her feet for an extended time, and the wheelchair guaranteed her a comfortable seat. I was the featured author, but there were about 30 others, and they had some interesting books displayed for sale. I’m a slow reader, and my time goes mostly to writing rather than reading, so I did not shop for books, but my wife bought some, and some were given to us. For example, Gay Courter is a successful Citrus County author; she was there, and so was her daughter Ashley, who has become an author in her own right. She was a child whose natural mother could not support her, and she spent nine years shuttling between 14 different foster homes. That would have been one hell of a disruption even had all of them been good, but not all were. Finally she was adopted by Gay Courter. She tells the story in her book Three Little Words. I have not yet read the book, having just gotten it, yet I can see that she was not an easy girl to take in, but it did work out and she went on to college. This is surely worth reading, and I will probably have a book report in a future column. I was also given a copy of the huge Environment by one of its authors Linda R Berg. This is an illustrated 7^th edition published by WILEY, 2004-2010. Again I have not read it, but I can see that it is comprehensive, with clear discussions of every aspect of the problem of environmental sustainability. My guess is that if you know nothing about the subject and want to learn, and can afford only one book, this is that book. It has questions or discussion points following the sections, as would be useful for a class; indeed, it’s a textbook. Don’t let that turn you off. For example, checking randomly, I find a clarification of thermodynamics, in this case the distinction between energy potential and kinetic: the first is a man with a drawn bow. The second is the arrow being loosed. That gives you a mental picture that enables you to grasp the underlying material. I also am reading a short autobiography by E J Glover, now 97 years old, who came to the Festival. He was a prominent restaurateur, but there’s more than that here. For example, back around 1930 he had a job as a waiter, and when he delivered a tray to the actress Alice Fay he found her drunk, running around the hall naked. He managed to get her back into her room, where it turned out the steak was for her dog and the hamburger for her. Anyway, I met many people, signed many books, and it was a good event, as you can see by these examples. They may do it again some year.

Stray notes: The Sunday supplement PARADE had yet another discussion about the common cold, and as usual says there is no cure, but doesn’t mention Vitamin C, which can stifle a cold so that it feels a lot like a cure. The local newspaper, the CITRUS COUNTY CHRONICLE, had an end of year summation of the best from their Sound Off feature, where readers express themselves anonymously about whatever is on their minds. Sometimes they make sense, as defined by my liberal bias. One says that if President Obama barehandedly saved a small child from being mauled by a rottweiler, FOX News would report it “Heartless president murders family pet.” Another says that folk who protest being checked before boarding airplanes should quit their stupid griping or take the bus, because the personnel are trying to save their life. Another says that in countries with universal health care, patients sometimes have to wait for appointments. In this country, in contrast, do you think it’s okay for 45,000 people to die every year so that you do not have to wait for an appointment? And about mandated health insurance being unconstitutional: what about auto insurance and home insurance? What’s the problem?

I maintain my ongoing survey of electronic publishers and related services for the benefit of aspiring writers, and try to state each case fairly, though exposed publishers can get nasty. Sometimes a situation gets too complicated for my minimal entries and I tackle it here in the Column. Here is one. The publisher EIRELANDER changed ownership, because the former owner, Belladonna Bordeaux, got cancer and faced a bone marrow transplant and possible death; she simply couldn’t handle the business any more. But it seemed she is still getting blamed for whatever goes wrong. As readers know, last year I lost my elder daughter to cancer, and in the past adversaries lied about me, so I may overreact here. But to phrase it politely, Belladonna seems to have enough problems without suffering an evident campaign against her. I NO LONGER OWN ANY PART OF THE COMPANY she says. That seems clear enough. I think those folk should leave the poor woman alone.

Meanwhile, of interest to other writers: Congress changed the law, and now publishers can’t hang on to an author’s rights until 70 years after s/he dies. The new Copyright Act allows authors and their heirs to terminate contracts 35 years after the contract date and “recapture” the books, regardless whether they remain in print, beginning with contracts dated 1978. All my books are on license, meaning I can get my rights back after about ten years, except for 17 at Random House/Del Rey. Now, year by year, I can start recovering them. Other writers should check this out, because their publishers will not tell them. Publishers are anal-retentive by nature. Details in the Summer 2010 AUTHORS GUILD BULLETIN.

The nearly extinct whooping crane is being gradually restored in Citrus County Florida. Each year a light plane leads a new small flock north for the summer, and then south for the winter. But sometimes things go wrong. One crane, dubbed Romeo, lost his mate and was out of sorts; they mate for life. In due course he found another, but she got killed by a bobcat. Then he lost his pride and went slumming. He took up with Peepers, a tame female crane not part of the wild clan. The proprietors moved him out, because it just wouldn’t do to have one of the special ones associate with a commoner. He returned, and they moved him out again. Six times. Finally they gave up and let him go tame, clipping his wings. Now he’s with Peepers. Isn’t love wonderful!

Probably not related: in Arkansas on New Year’s Eve, nearly 5,000 red-winged blackbirds fell out of the sky, dead. They say it’s unrelated to the death a few days earlier of 85,000 fish in the Arkansas River. It may get interesting when thousands of people similarly drop dead for no apparent reason. This wasn’t the way Hitchcock’s movie The Birds told it.

There are folk who say they died, then returned to life, and recount their journey through a dark tunnel back to the light. They may see it as a signal from God, but NEW SCIENTIST has a more mundane explanation. When the heart stops beating the body isn’t yet dead, technically, but it is in trouble. No blood flows to the eyes, so the brain may be aware but can’t see. Then with the recovery the eyes resume activity, and the mind emerges from the darkness as the transmitted light expands. Thus the seeming tunnel. It’s all in your head.

Another NEW SCIENTIST article describes some interesting ways creatures have of defending themselves from predators. Lizards may let their tails be detached, and they flop about, distracting the predator while the lizard escapes. Sea cucumbers can eviscerate themselves, shitting out their sticky intestines to gum up the attacker. One of my all-time favorite stories, “The Girl Had Guts,” by Theodore Sturgeon was inspired by this. Bombardier beetles can shoot out red-dot pulses of caustic liquid, and they have good aim. Texas horned lizards shoot out jets of poisoned blood from their eyes: looks that kill.

More odd notes: Some folk have trouble with their digestion because they lack the proper bacteria in their gut to digest their food. This can be cured by fecal transplants. For some reason neither doctors nor patients are eager for this procedure. If shit will save your life, why not? And Mark Twain’s famous novel Huckleberry Finn is having censorship trouble again because it uses the word “Nigger” 219 times. Apparently the censors don’t care that the author used it to make a point about bigotry; they just can’t get by the word. I guess this is liberal censorship; I don’t like it any better than I like the usual conservative bigotry. And now it turns out that music acts on the brain in much the way sex does, releasing the pleasure chemical dopamine. Sex to music must thus be the ultimate. So will the pleasure-hating censors try to eradicate music?

Article in NEW SCIENTIST on invasive species. We know about them; the wild pigs hereabouts will clean out everything and make the land uninhabitable for the natural wild life, if we let them. The pigs descend from those brought here by Hernando de Soto for food; some escaped and thrived. They are the only hunting we allow on our property, and we’d be happy to be entirely of them. But the article makes the point that not all invasive species are bad. Some settle down to become supportive members of the local community, like perhaps the armadillos here. When you think about it, most species that travel at all become invasive where they go. Consider the worst one of all, mankind. We’re doing more harm to the environment than the pigs are. Newspaper column by Robyn Blumner reminds us that at some point infinite expansion of the human population will be an unsustainable economic model. Do we try to deal with that before wrecking the environment, or do we speed on over the cliff? I suspect the latter, as there are no hunters to limit our population. We are causing the sixth mass wipe-out on Earth; they call it the Anthropocene extinction. Something about the first part of that word that seems familiar; can’t think what it is. Anyway, once we eliminate ourselves, life should recover, though it may consist mainly of roaches, rats, and weeds. Ah, brave new world.

Item in THE WEEK about a mysterious green blob in space 650 million light years distant. I have heard about that before; one reader asked me whether it could be God. Well, the Hubble space telescope focused on it and now we know: it’s a massive galaxy-sized cloud of gas that probably once had a quasar. The quasar has faded, but the green afterglow remains.

Column by David Brooks says that intelligence, academic performance, or prestigious schools don’t correlate well with fulfillment or outstanding accomplishment. Yes, I was nothing in school, but became perhaps the most successful member of my class; how come? Luck, of course, but also what the column says: the traits that do make a difference are the ability to understand and inspire people, to discern underlying patterns, to recognize and correct one’s own shortcomings, to build trusting relationships, and to imagine alternate futures. That last is my business as a science fantasy writer; I’m working on the rest.

I read somewhere—can’t locate the clipping now—that they secretly photographed an audience watching a show, and found that one third of the people were picking their noses. That suggests to me than nose picking is natural, but maybe should be done in private, like other toilet functions. With that snotty note, I conclude.

I have been working to get more of my novels published electronically, and now at last it is happening. March 1—today–is supposed to be when a package of up to ten of my novels appear on Kindle and/or other electronic platforms. If not all of them make it now, well, they’ll be along soon. That’s my sexy erotic romance Eroma, and my children’s fantasy Pandora Park, both new. Also my World War Two novel Volk, which was first self published at Xlibris, Realty Check, which has had only brief small press publication (both publishers went out of business, coincidentally I think), and the six Bio of a Space Tyrant novels, five of which were published by AVON, the sixth, The Iron Maiden, only at Xlibris. So it’s a fair assortment of new and old, including erotic, fantasy, historical, and science fiction. All are worth reading, depending on your taste; I do different things. I’m hoping for nice success here, but if they fall flat, well, I tried. Meanwhile, Amazon has big plans for Kindle. They plan to make every book ever written, in or out of print, in any language, available to a reader within a minute. That’s good for readers; my wife, who is the reader in our family, loves that virtually instant service. They give self published authors there a 70 percent royalty rate, compared to the 50% that is standard for electronic publishers and 15% down (often way down; my first such publication in 1967 was 4% and they cheated on that) for traditional print. I am the writer in our family; what’s not to like? I am among those successful authors seriously considering leaving traditional print behind in favor of electronic, especially Kindle. They are now selling more Kindle books than hardcover books, and expect soon to outsell all print books. They are indeed transforming publishing. I have had as much trouble with arrogant, dishonest, or just plain stupid publishers as any writer. Now there is somewhere else to go without necessarily losing my shirt. I will be reporting more on this in the future, as I test these waters of the Amazon river directly.

This is a book review, but first some personal background. When I was four years old, in England, one day they told me and my sister that were were going to Spain. “Will you be there?” I asked the young woman I thought of as my mother. “No,” she said gently. “Then who?” She indicated two other people I knew vaguely as peripherals, a man and a woman. “Oh.” That was the beginning of my odyssey that, in pained retrospect, I see as the moderate hell my life was to be for the next decade. During that siege, I rationally assessed my situation, and concluded that I would have preferred never to have existed. I wasn’t abused or mistreated, and we never went hungry, merely poor and emotionally isolated. Probably my later success as a writer stems from it; I have read several accounts that indicate a happy childhood followed abruptly by an unhappy interlude is a gift that keeps giving, in the form of imaginative writing. The woman was my nanny, whom I never saw again but still miss over 70 years later; the peripheral couple were my parents. The full story is too much to detail here; my autobiography Bio of an Ogre covers it. In severe summary, we went to Spain where my folks were doing Quaker relief work, feeding starving children after the Spanish Civil War. Then my father was arrested without reason by the paranoid Franco regime and expelled from the country, and we came to America on the last ship out as World War Two engulfed Europe. I had a problem learning to read, and it took me three years to make it through first grade. Then my parents’ marriage foundered. The uprootings and tension caused me for several years to wet my bed at night, and to twitch my head and hands every minute or so, and to be so phenomenally afraid of the dark and the world that Fear was the transcendent emotion of my youth. No one understood why. I date the onset of my recovery from when I realized that the pressures on me were not of my own making, but came from outside me. I had to shield myself emotionally from those destructive forces, which meant learning to manage without family commitment. I have been an independent cuss ever since, with a long record of trouble in college, the army, and as a writer. But I was always right, as I believe any objective assessment will verify; I was fighting corrupted systems. It was a great day when I discovered science fiction, which gave me better realms to inhabit; sometimes escapism is vital for survival. I labored slowly to remake myself, and finally emerged into an adult life that was well worthwhile, with a long-term marriage and considerable success as an author. Some don’t make it through; I was a lucky one.

Not that marriage was innocent heaven. I didn’t like traditional work; my dream was to be a writer despite having no success. After a decade and three miscarriages we considered adoption. But we knew they would never let an agnostic vegetarian science fiction writer have a child; they had standards. How laughable this is will soon become apparent. But because we had no children, my wife was able to go to work so I could stay home and make my utmost effort to break into print. That was when my career got its start. We finally managed to have two children of our own, fortunately, with all the attendant travails as my writing efficiency was cut in half, and the grief as our elder daughter died halfway through her life. I’m wearing a shirt she gave me as I type this. She never lived in this house, but reminders of her are everywhere. But that is not really relevant to this review; I simply get caught up in the emotion as I pass within haling distance of it. The point is that adoption is not necessarily a matter of what is best for the child.

All this came back as I read Three Little Words by Ashley Rhodes-Courter, published in hardcover by ATHENEUM in 2008. And here I need some spot specific background. Circa 23 years ago we visited compatibly with Phil and Gay Courter, then got so caught up in the complications of building and moving to our present house on the tree farm that we were never able to reciprocate. I have felt guilty ever since. Gay Courter is the other established commercial traditional print writer in Citrus County, Florida, and we have been in touch sporadically, having a certain common interest in the business of writing. Now via her daughter’s book I have learned a good deal more of her personal life in the interim. Gay gave the book to my wife, who read it and passed it along to me.

Ashley’s family was fragmented, and she wound up in the Florida foster care system, with 14 “homes” in nine years. She always longed to be reunited with her natural mother, but it was not to be. The foster homes ranged from decent to appalling, while the authorities seemed not to know or much care which was which. The worst foster parent was a grim woman who freely punished the children for real or imagined infractions, forcing them to squat uncomfortably or to eat hot sauce. One meal was so bad that Ashley ran for the bathroom, didn’t make it, and vomited on the floor. The woman pushed her face in it, training her in the manner of a dog. Yes, there were complaints galore, but the authorities were willfully blind; at one point Ashley was rebuked for “lying” about the finest foster care mother in Florida. That reminded me of when I protested getting cheated by a publisher, and was similarly rebuked by an officer of a writer’s organization for maligning the finest publisher in the world. Yeah, sure. So today I don’t protest to corrupted organizations, I get a lawyer and have always made my case. And yes, when she was able later on, Ashley did sue that woman, who was convicted, then given a slap on the wrist as punishment. Florida it seems is not much interested in cleaning up its act.

It wasn’t all grim. At one home Ashley wowed the other children by demonstrating with two teddy bears her observations of how adults have fun: tightly face to face, or front to back, or face to crotch. For some reason the adults were Not Amused. Later when Phil and Gay Courter took her in and went through the legal process to adopt her, she was asked whether she agreed to the adoption. Because she was an older child, she had to consent. “I guess so,” she said grudgingly. Those were the three little words of the title. Gay comes across as near saintly in her patience and persistence. Ashley did not like the way Gay was always on her case, wanting her to eat wholesome food instead of junk foods, to help wash the dishes, to wear proper clothing, to be a responsible family member. So she figured out little ways to get back at Gay, doing things that could not be pinned on her, like peeing in her favorite rosebush or slicking the rim of her travel mug with dish soap. Children who have been abused by the system do not emerge as sweet innocent personalities; they can have issues, which is one reason fewer families are interested in adopting them. Ashley seldom ate the excellent meals Gay prepared, and seemed not to much understand, then, the marvelous life the Courters provided her. For example, pictures in the back of the book show Ashley with J K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, and shaking hands with President Clinton in 2000. These were merely highlights of the travel and privilege she experienced as she was encouraged to flower to her full potential.

So why did the Courters adopt Ashley? They traveled a lot, and at one point the engine quit on their small plane and they crashed. They concluded that there must be something remaining in life for them to do. Ashley was a bright child, talented, motivated, expressive, with genuine promise. She was worth saving. The Courters did that, tiding through the difficult stretches until, slowly, Ashley came to believe it was true. Until at last the three little words did become “I love you.” I think in the end she did appreciate the phenomenal effort the Courters made, and the support they provided her. Ashley wrote up her story, and it was published, surely thanks to the knowledge Gay had of the publishing system, which is no easy matter. Ashley does have writing talent. This is a nice, readable book, apart from being a savage indictment of the system. It moved me, as this discussion shows.

So is anything being done about the sad state of foster children in Florida? No. Article in the ST PETERSBURG TIMES February 27, 2011 is titled FLORIDA DEADLY FOR KNOWN AT-RISK KIDS. Florida leads the nation in the number of such deaths. When they know there is a problem, yet it just keeps getting worse—197 deaths in 2009—what are we to make of it? As Ashley shows, deaths are by no means the whole problem; they are just an extreme example of a larger ailment. Prospects are not bright; you can be sure the current administration will be more interested in cutting the budget than in improving performance. There are some dedicated people in the system, and one woman in particular helped steer Ashley toward successful adoption, but I suspect the bureaucrats in control hardly care about these. It’s too bad.

I read Unveiled, by Francine Rivers, because a minister correspondent sent it to me. This is about the biblical Tamar, Canaanite wife of a son of Judah, an Israelite with his own issues. The abusive son died without getting her pregnant, so she was passed along to his brother Onan, who practiced coitus interruptus to avoid getting her pregnant, so he would not have to share the inheritance with his brother’s family. But he too died. She appealed to the father to impregnate her, so she could fulfill her duty to provide the family with an heir, but he sent her home to her family in shame. Finally she dressed like a temple prostitute, waylaid him, seduced him, and thus got pregnant by him. Thus did she finally achieve her duty, and become accepted. This short novel shows the grim state that was the lot of women in biblical times, with really no rights and destined for household drudgery and the birthing of babies, no more. I did not enjoy it, but of course wasn’t meant to. So is this I justification of technical incest? I say technical because she never had sex with a blood relative, only members of her husband’s family, for the express purpose of producing an heir. In that culture it seems justified. It’s the demeaning of women in every other respect that depresses me.

Chris Ceranski sent in an anagram of Piers Anthony: Horny Panties. Hmm.

I am now writing a new science fantasy series specifically for original Kindle publication: Trail Mix. The first novel is Amoeba, wherein Tod, an ordinary contemporary man, discovers a trail leading into the unknown. He follows it, and soon discovers it is no ordinary path; it leads to weird landscapes and to other hikers who make a remarkable mixture of characters. Yes, the trail mix. One is a woman from 50,000 years ago. Another is a BEM, you know, Bug-Eyed Monster, except that it has no eyes, just a light-sensitive band, and it is an advanced civilized creature who views human beings as primitive. Another is a sexy female vampire, who changes to bat form almost as often as she seduces Tod. No, she doesn’t prey on the blood of friends. The fifth is a genuine wizard who can do magic. They were summoned here by the Amoeba, who spans all space, time, and alternate reality, to perform a challenging mission. If that works out I’ll do the sequel, Beetle Juice, with a slightly different trail mix and a different mission. So far it’s fun.

I continue to use my new PC LINUX OS system, and like it, despite its inability to print being a Known Problem with no solution for me. At the end of the day I have to back up my material, switch over to Windows, call up the files and print them out. Sometimes Windows reformats my files, such as one word per line; I’m not sure why, unless it’s trying to discourage me from using Linux. It’s tedious, but until there’s a fix I’m stuck with it. I had trouble with the file handler Dolphin, so switched to Konqueror, until one morning it called up dead, absolutely refusing to either handle files or be abolished. So I switched back to Dolphin, which worked fine. Then after about ten days, Konqueror restored itself, and is operative again. So I’m using both, to be ready when one fails. Someone mentioned another Linux distribution, Mint; I wonder whether that knows how to print? All I want is something that will work comfortably and reliably, indefinitely. Is that too much? Linux keeps laboring to drive me back to Windows, but I’m foolishly resisting.

Sunday supplement PARADE had an article on the myths of living longer. It turns out that marriage does not guarantee a longer life. Married men live longer, but married women don’t. That’s better news for me than for my wife, though I like to think that my promotion of a healthy lifestyle has added years to her life. Taking it easy doesn’t help either; continually productive folk live much longer than those who retire and relax. That’s more good new for workaholics like me. Can you worry yourself to death? No, sensible worry such as being prudent, well organized, and persistent extends life. People tell me that vegetarianism is unhealthy, but I pay attention to what I eat and see that I get what I need; in short I don’t just worry about my health, I act to promote it, and I expect to outlive most of those who disparage my diet. Does higher education mean a longer life? No, persistence in the face of challenges does. That’s yet more good news for me, though I am college educated. Do friendly outgoing optimistic people live longer? No, the realists survive better. Do jocks outlive nerds? Not if the jocks don’t keep up their physical activity. I was neither jock nor nerd, but started my physical exercise program at age 40, and I have the impression that I am, despite bad back and knees and teeth, the healthiest person my age my doctor sees. If I die tomorrow, I’ll take that back.

Interview in NEW SCIENTIST with Physicist Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe, a bestseller on string theory. “Is there any question that keeps you up at night?” He has two. One is why is there something rather than nothing? The other is, what is the nature of time? You and me both, Brian; great minds are said to run in similar channels. (Before my illustrious critics detonate into outraged nothingness, that’s oblique humor.) Actually the three things that chronically bug me the most are the origin of the universe, that is something rather than nothing; the origin of life from non-life; and the origin of consciousness. I suspect that the third could be solved in my lifetime, when they find the key feedback circuit that gives a robot consciousness. I’m also interested in Dark Matter, which I’m not sure really exists, and the Higgs boson, ditto, and any trim young woman who walks by, though considering the surgical enhancements available today, she may not really exist either. She remains interesting, regardless.

Couple of interesting articles in DISCOVER. One clarifies that the two hundred trillion microbes that live in the human gut are 20 times as many as there are cells in the body. We might be considered walking talking containers of gut flora and fauna. When you use antibiotics, it’s like dropping a bomb on that community, as likely to do harm as good. And another threat to the world’s environment is acidification of the ocean, which is getting rapidly worse. At some point it will wipe out marine organisms, seriously depleting our food chain. You don’t see much about this in the news, but you should; it’s a real danger.

The Green Bay Packers won the Superbowl. I was rooting for them. How come, since I’m a vegetarian? It’s because they alone, of all the major league football teams, are owned by their community, rather than some reclusive money-minded billionaire. I approve the principle. They became a publicly owned nonprofit corporation in 1923. And they don’t pack meat anymore. So is this socialism instead of capitalism? I like it regardless.

We read our junk mail too. The Hammacher Schlemmer catalog has the Light Cycle, a kind of motorcycle featuring hubless wheels. That’s right: no axles. You can see right through them from one side to the other; they are hollow. The machine looks like one huge burrito with doughnut holes. It seems it was inspired by the movie Tron Legacy. So how does it power those wheels? It seems to have a connection that reaches in from the side of the top, though maybe that’s the brake. There must be clock-like gearing inside the wheel housing to make it go. 6 speed manual transmission. You can buy one for only $55,000.

You con find disturbing things in comics. “Doonesbury” had a discussion purportedly by a radio commentator pointing out that nine years ago on 9-11 we were attacked and almost 3,000 people died. In response we started two wars and revved up our military efforts into the trillions of dollars. In the intervening years 270,000 Americans were killed by gunfire at home. Our response? We weakened our gun laws.

Newspaper article on kissing says that when humans walked upright, women’s genitalia became less visible, but lips came to mimic them in shape and color. So when a man kisses a woman’s lips, its something farther down that he’s really interested in. I also note that women tend to wear clothing that mimics the cleavage of their nether region, and men’s formal attire has a penis symbol hanging from his neck, the tie. Or bow-tie; guess what that emulates. Nothing like symbolizing what the clothing covers.

My wife and I make sensible decisions and we don’t waste money. So I have a certain awkwardness explaining this. In early Jamboree we were shopping at Office Max when they had a 20% off day, and I saw a video that intrigued me, La Femme Nikita, so I bought it. The sale brought it down to $8.79. When we got home we discovered it was a Blu-Ray disc that we were unable to play. So we started checking out portable Blu-Ray players so that we could watch videos without being chained to an existing TV set. None were available locally. Amazon has them from about $250 up, but we weren’t sure. Then we saw another sale at Office Max for a laptop computer that also played Blu-Ray, about $850 reduced to $650. We pondered, and concluded that $400 for the computer and $250 for the player made this feasible, as my wife was wanting to upgrade her system. So we bought it, and the computer works for her, and the last afternoon FeBlueberry I took off from work and watched Nikita.Too violent for my taste, though of course in the 20 years since it was made violence has only gotten worse; I glanced peripherally at The Cape on TV that evening and all I saw was gruesome violence. They censor sex out of TV, and it seems to sublimate to violence. Teen boy has sex with his teen girlfriend, but you can’t show that on TV. Teen boy shoots her to death, TV will show every gout of blood in superfine detail. No wonder America is the land of violence! I don’t like the way any nut can get a gun and blast away at innocents, so our gun death rate is horrendously worse than that of civilized nations, but I suspect the real problem is the violence that motivates these freaks. They are immersed in it on TV from infancy on; no wonder they think it’s okay. But if the Second Amendment guarantees the right to buy guns, the First Amendment guarantees the right of TV to show what it chooses, and both those rights are sadly abused. Anyway, Nikita was interesting as this 19 year old girl is required to become an assassin. It ends indifferently, with the implication that she’ll have to continue killing people until she gets killed herself, while the folk who set her up for it escape untouched. But with luck maybe in future there will be better Blu-Ray offerings. I suspect it’s too much to hope that we get better values.

The folk who are setting up a number of my novels for Kindle publication have also set up a blog site for me, trying to drag me reluctantly into the contemporary scene, and I have been writing assorted blogs to fill it, when. Most of the material will be familiar to readers of this column, but this is trying for a different audience, and is more of a promotional effort. When self published newcomers can become bestsellers in months, what happens when an old-timer tries it? Well, we’ll see. Those interested can check it at http://piersanthonyblog.blogspot.com/. Meanwhile the sales of ebooks are rising rapidly, and are now passing the sales of print books. In the process they are rendering old-line publishers largely obsolete. I, having wrestled with those publishers for decades, am not sorry to see it happening. Whether the new order will be better than the old order I can’t be sure, but I think it has more promise, especially for writers who were largely shut out by the old system. It seems to be more democratic. The latest name in this respect is 26 year old Amanda Hocking, shut out until she self published on Kindle and within a year earned over a million dollars. She’s not the only one. She says she just wanted to write books, have them read, and make enough money to live. Exactly; that’s how it was with me when I started, and remains so. It took me eight years to make my first sale, and longer to be able to earn my living from writing. That’s a long apprenticeship, and I was lucky to make it at all.

Two years ago we bought three pots of variegated jasmine plants, with pretty green and yellow leaves. They did well, until just after a freeze a deer ate one down to the ground. Ouch! We like deer, but those plants were not for eating. So I built a cage of chicken wire to protect that plant, and in due course it sprouted from the roots and, this time protected from molestation, prospered. Later in the summer I noticed that the other two were not doing as well, and realized that the gopher tortoises and rabbits were grazing on them. We like our tortoises and rabbits too, in fact they are characters in my children’s novel Tortoise Reform, but again, we had to protect the plants. So I put up little wire fences, and that helped. The plants had spread out, and rooted in a widening arc, becoming new little plants. Now I have little wire cages around each, about 40 mini plants, and I hope they suffice. I value pet plants as I do animals, and try to protect them from the ravages of the forest environment without doing harm to that environment. After all, it was here first. So if you wonder what I do when I’m not writing my novels, this is one thing: I’m caring for plants, with imperfect success.

I read The Edge, self published  by Jacob Wenzel, whose  leMort d’Arthur: an Epic Limerick I reviewed here five years ago. That one told the story of King Arthur entirely in limericks, a remarkable exercise. The current one is a regular novel with only a few pages of verse; nonetheless it has its points. It is the story of two people’s excursion to the edge of the universe, or rather the Macroverse, which encompasses all possible universes, so is a fair piece larger. There are many time-lines and many types of universe, some of which overlap. So a person in one may travel to another and meet himself, or several other himselfs, without the nuisance of paradox. Those from a later time-line may offer advice to those from an earlier time-line, saving them some mischief, such as getting killed by a lurking monster. (I think that in America the monsters would pay off the politicians to get news of their lurkings suppressed, so they could feed in comfort.)  Sally is a cave woman with a pet tiger called Fluffy, who speaks too candidly about her culture’s primitive supernatural beliefs and gets banished. However, if she travels to the edge of the world and learns the error of her ways, maybe they’ll let her back. She encounters an odd thing that tells her it’s a Winnebago. The speaker is competent computer called Bob who guides the craft through the myriad time-lines for the owner, William. She joins them, and they head for the edge of the Macroverse, getting to know each other along the way and doing a number of good deeds for others in trouble. Sally is actually a very smart and pretty girl, and soon is a worthwhile companion and lover for William. This provides a notion of the unusual nature of this story; you never know what will happen, partly because anything can happen if you just get into the right universe. It’s fun, and I enjoyed it.

There have been many explanations for why women tend to outlive men, at least in the more advanced cultures where things other than brute strength count. Women smoked less then men, and the number of years men lost to tobacco neatly matched the differential in lifespans. But now I think as many women smoke as men, and the habit is slowly declining, yet women still outlive men. Other explanations are similarly fading. I have a bright notion: exercise. The more they learn about it, the stronger the case becomes for bodily activity promoting healthier, longer lives. Folk don’t have to be bodybuilders or marathon runners; they just need to be doing things. Consider retirement: the men typically settle back into their reclining chairs and watch football on TV as they tank up on beer, while the women continue to make meals, do laundry, shop, garden, and visit with neighbors and family. They are more active. Maybe that’s the secret. I am a man who has a rigorous exercise schedule and who makes meals, washes dishes, shops, etc., as well as consciously keeping my weight at the level it was in college. I should live a long time, if my theory is correct. If I don’t, you won’t be able to come to my grave to say you told me so, because I won’t have a grave. So there.

I seldom comment on news events here, this being a more personal column. But Japan’s tragedy warrants at least a passing mention. They suffered a 9.0 earthquake near the coast, from a subduction zone, one of the strongest in recorded history, and it made a horrendous tsunami wave that blasted the coast up to five miles inland. Now the damage to their nuclear plants is further complicating it. I have a correspondent in Japan; she lives near Tokyo. I was relieved to learn that she wasn’t washed out. I am tempted to comment on the folly of living on a coastline subject to such dangerous events, but when push comes to shove, few areas of the world are truly safe. I could comment on the danger of nuclear power, but again, compared to what coal and oil are doing to our environment, including global warming, nuclear is relatively safe. I favor solar and geothermal power, and believe that if they had put the money and effort into these that they put into nuclear and coal/oil subsidies, we’d have a better world today. But I don’t run the world.

Which perhaps leads into an email promo I received from DL Tolleson, for his book How To Save America. This tells of a country that was pretty much in the dumps but then managed to change everything and improve its lot considerably. In the mid 1980s its per capita income had sunk to 27^th in the world, unemployment was 11.6 percent, it had suffered 23 years of deficits, and had a debt of 65 percent of its Gross Domestic Product. It had wage and price controls, import controls on goods (we call that protectionism, and it’s not healthy), and massive subsidies to its local industries just to keep them afloat. (That’s one reason protectionism isn’t healthy: other countries retaliate, and inefficient local outfits are not winnowed out by a free market.) 30 percent of its school children were failing, and there was a mass exodus of the ambitious and talented young. In 1984 a reform government took power and concluded that there were three problems: too much spending, taxing, and government. So it essentially privatized government functions, cut its expenses by about half, and used the surplus to pay down the debt while also cutting taxes in half. They eliminated all Boards of Education and turned the school over to parents and teachers. Students performance improved significantly. They did something similar with social services, and drastically simplified environmental laws. And the nation prospered. The country is New Zealand.

Okay, assuming that this presentation is fair—I would need to study the country to verify that—would a similar reform program work in America? On the surface it reads like a libertarian dream, the essence being to eliminate most government and let everyone prosper. Another term for it could be anarchy, and that can be ugly mischief. With no government restraints, it can become a kind of wild-west arena, with the unscrupulous strong folk running roughshod over the weak or decent folk. My mental image is of the bully in the schoolyard: get rid of the teacher, and he rules the roost. He knows no law except power: his own. We hardly need to guess where that leads; we had eight years of “conservative” political power in America that in the name of smaller government and lower taxes ran the country into the ground. It has become pretty much a plutocracy, government by and for the wealthy, while the rest suffer. Today the richest 5 percent have close to two thirds of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 80 percent have under 13 percent. The largest corporation, General Electric (GE), had profits of over $14 billion, about a third of it made in the US, but paid no US taxes last year. So what about New Zealand type reforms? Obviously cutting taxes is meaningless for GE, and in any event the special interests would never allow genuine reforms to occur in America. They will not give up their power short of an effort like the French Revolution, where the heads of the royalty rolled, literally. And if we actually had that, we might end up with Napoleon. As Robert Taylor Coleridge put it in France: an Ode: “The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain,/ Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game/ They burst their manacles and wear the name/ Of Freedom, graven on a heavier chain!” So I am a skeptic. Bad as things are now, they could be worse, and worse will surely come in the name of reform. But for those interested, the site is www.dltolleson.com/commentary/howtosaveamerica.php.

Perhaps related is an item THE WEEK ran from THE WASHINGTON POST on how to cut spending yet increase the deficit. Republicans are trying to make dramatic cuts in federal spending for enforcement efforts by the IRS, food inspectors, and fraud investigators for Medicaid and Medicare. The thing about this is that each dollar the IRS spends going after tax cheats brings in $10, while cutting food inspection will lead to more outbreaks of food-borne illness, running up our health care costs. Similar story on medical fraud, which is already rampant. So it is evident that the Republicans are not really interested in saving money, but in promoting expensive anarchy as the rich get illicitly richer. I remember the report from the bad old days decades back, when it was revealed that the big grain storage warehouses had a problem with rats, so put out rat poison. But the janitors didn’t want to be bothered, so when they found a dead rat they simply tossed it and the rest of the poison into the hopper for a big flour grinder. With no inspectors, and a safely ignorant consumer base, who cared?

Remember Chernobyl? A quarter century ago Reactor 4 blew up and a region of about 1,600 square miles was dangerously polluted by radiation. It remains unsafe, so is largely deserted. This has made for a renaissance among animals there. Gray wolves, brown bears, elk, roe deer, and wild boars are there in greater numbers than have been seen for more than a century. In the canals are catfish up to ten feet long. They may not be completely healthy inside, but outside it seems like the Garden of Eden. All it took was to get rid of the humans. There is surely a lesson here, had I but the human wit to fathom it.

Exactly what is the difference, genetically, between apes and human beings? How come we got so smart and they didn’t? Scientists have been struggling to find out. Now they are getting a clue, according to an article in NEW SCIENTIST. It’s not so much what’s there, but what isn’t there. For example, some apes have penile spines, so that the first male who gets the female leaves her in no condition to entertain other males. The human line lost the genes for that, and as a result were able to make sex halfway comfortable for women, and even have repeat sessions without hurting them. Another is the genes that limit the expansion of the size of the brain. With those gone the brain went hog wild, just about busting out of its cranium, and incidentally providing greater intelligence.

This may not be in the same league as penile spines, but you know a man’s penis does have to harden somewhat to facilitate sex. Old as I am, I still like sex, but age has diminished my capacity to, um, stand up for it. My doctor prescribed Viagra several years ago, and that works. I cut each tablet into eighths and those fragments work well enough. But the price has been rising, and a single pill now costs about $20. That bothers me; they have a captive market so are jacking up the price. I hate to be screwed like that. So I have been looking for an alternative. One promising prospect is L-Arginine, an amino acid. Theoretically it promotes sexual function. Just take several grams 45 minutes before sex. Well, I tried it, and bombed out, frustratingly. Call it a soft, rather than hard, lesson. Maybe it helps others, but it doesn’t help me rise to the occasion. So I am caught in this dilemma: whether to pay exorbitantly for Viagra, or give up penetrative sex as a matter of principle. That really gripes me, but it looks as if I’ll have to go the latter route. Unless I happen to find something else that works, at a reasonable price. I also learn via a newspaper item that daily use of aspirin is associated with a 22 percent increase in erectile dysfunction. I take a baby aspirin a day, doctor’s orders, and do suffer ED. Well, easy enough to stop and see if that helps, though I am doubtful. I need more than a 22 percent stiffening of resolve.

I use OpenOffice for my word processor, and like it well enough. This month I learned of another open source suite, LibreOffice, whose Writer word processor looks very similar to what I have. It says its roots go back 20 years. Odd that I never heard of it until now. Since I am satisfied with what I have, I won’t be changing, but it’s good to know that an alternative is out there.

NEW SCIENTIST article says that stories are part of what makes us human. To which I respond Duh! It says that stories act a social glue binding people together. They encourage empathy, which is a significant human aspect. They transmit information for social and literal survival. And I believe that stories are a prime mechanism for teaching language itself. Just as reading increases vocabulary, so does the use of verbal language, and this would have been the main way for prehistoric children. I feel that writing fiction, which is printed storytelling, connects to the very essence of being human. So when I write, and you read, I am not just entertaining you, I am encouraging and facilitating your humanity. No need to thank me; I do it for a living.

Lovely quote from Vladimir Nabokov run in THE WEEK: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” I have this mental picture of two masses of blackness, like dusky oceans, and where they meet is the thin sliver of light that is the life of each of us, doomed to glow only briefly before being extinguished. It’s tragic yet wonderful that it exists at all.

There’s another discovery of mankind living in Texas between 13,000 and 15,500 years ago. That’s before most experts figured, because of the ice blockage, but of course I know and wrote in GEODYSSEY how they used boats to get around the ice, duh. So why wasn’t there evidence in the genetic traces? Because the later invaders wiped out the earlier ones. Now you know.

Do you suspect politics is crooked? Be reassured, because now in Florida they are arranging for special interest payoffs to be done openly and legally. They have what they call leadership funds that special interests can openly pay into to get the legislation they want. Florida typically leads the way when it comes to corruption. You thought Florida politicians represented their constituents? Of course they do! Their constituents are the special interests, not the voting public. Again, duh.

I read Shot of Tequila by J A Konrath. The service that is setting up my novels for electronic publication sent this novel as an example of a POD book printed by Amazon. I am long familiar with Amazon’s publication process, because of my ongoing survey of electronic and self publishers, and my association with Xlibris; their books are of the same physical quality as those of traditional print publishers. So I read it, essentially random reading. You never can tell what you’ll find in random samplings. The author specializes in liquor type titles, with a female police detective name Jack Daniels, with titles like Whiskey Sour, Bloody Mary, Dirty Martini, Cherry Bomb, Shaken, and Stirred. This one features a mob enforcer named Tequila. He’s a little guy, and halfway nice if you like that type, but as tough as they come. Then someone frames him for stealing a million dollars from his mob boss employer and things get interesting. By the time it settles out, the bodies are piled high. It’s fast, violent reading, not deep but not dull, and Tequila is well characterized; he’s a killer but you have to like him. Not my normal reading, but I did enjoy it, and recommend it to fans of the violence genre. The author’s web site is JAKonrath.com.

I received an email notice for the late Robert Rimmer’s birthday. He authored the remarkable The Harrad Experiment about a thoroughly co-ed education before it became fashionable, and one of my favorites The Rebellion of Yale Marratt, about a man with two wives. I corresponded with the author prior to his death, and we exchanged books, mutually impressed. He should not be forgotten.

Speaking of authors, I used to be in touch with historical fiction author Kristina O’Donnelly, who lived in Inverness but was much into the history and culture of Turkey. I expected to see her at the Festival of Books in Jamboree but didn’t. I checked her web site, and it could not be found. The latest Google has of her is a 2008 interview. That makes me nervous. Is she still with us? If anyone knows, please let me know.

Newspaper item says that if you raced a Neandertal man, you would win; our ankles and feet are better built for speed. That’s reassuring, because if you didn’t outrun him, you’d probably be dead.

Spring is normally the dry season here in Florida. Sometimes we get no rain at all in Apull. We weren’t getting much in Marsh. Then came the last four days. We got six and a half inches here on the tree farm, and other parts of Florida got more. That’s great preparation for the dry season.

Music constantly runs through my head, sometimes dating back fifty or sixty years, sometimes songs I have not thought of in the interim. The past few days one such song surprises me. It wasn’t a great song; what surprises me is how it was ever recorded and promoted. It was “She’s Too Fat For Me,” popular in the 1950s. I remember hearing it on the Arthur Godfrey show. Some of the words are “I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me. She’s too fat, much too fat, she’s too fat for me. I get dizzy, I get numbo, when I’m dancing with my jum-jum-jumbo.” Today you can’t mention a woman’s weight at all without risking a dressing down for insensitivity. Times certainly change.

I have mentioned my horror novel The Sopaths here before. It was too horrible for me to write for decades, and then too horrible to sell. But maybe, if there happened to be a publisher that liked the really edgy stuff, and was braced for the inevitable reaction of outrage, maybe then it could be published. Well, I found that publisher: Eraserhead Press. They are launching a new science fiction and fantasy imprint, FANTASTIC PLANET PRESS and like work that is weird and dark. Well, now; I just happen to have something that is really weird and dark. They queried me, I described The Sopaths, one thing led to another and they will publish it. So readers with strong stomachs and retarded scruples will be able to read it. But I don’t recommend it to my Xanth readers, and it should not be sold to children at all.

I was setting up for my twice-weekly target practice, always a disaster but I do it for the exercise, and found some leaves and moss on my main target. That means the wrens were thinking of building there. I cleared it off, as this was not a fit place for them. Then by evening there was about five times as much nesting material there as before; the wrens had obviously worked hard all day. What could I do? If they wanted that site that badly, I’d just have to shut down archery for a couple of months and let them have their family. There were other chores I could do in that time. Thus I went out to gravel the long drive, filling in the last of the swales that had developed over the winter. Next time I went out to clip a channel across a bad curve so that we can see an oncoming car before we crash into it at the apex of the curve. And of course I suffered a chain of thought; I do that constantly. Here I was cutting down saplings who were only trying to find their place in the sun. I hate that, yet we had made the drive to drive safely on and they were filling in the space we had cleared when we put in the drive. If we did not maintain it, in due course there would be no drive, just the forest, and we would have no access. So my need trumps theirs, mainly because I have the power of action that they lack. But it bothers me. My very existence means that the lives of others are terminated or seriously compromised, when they never wished me any evil. This is of course the problem of mankind in microcosm; the existence of every human being is rough on other life on Earth. Few seem even to notice, let alone care. Meanwhile the wren’s nest that started this chapter of activity remains complete and unused. Apparently they made more than one, and are using the other. If there is no activity there in a couple of weeks I’ll remove it and resume archery.

Vaguely related: there used to be a hawk’s nest in a tree along our drive. Every year or so there’d be a new young hawk coming on the scene, and like any teenager, figured he owned the region and would scream at us as we passed. Last year he must have landed before the house and a predator was lurking; I found his feathers in a mass, and there was silence on the drive. So this year the hawk family moved to a safer site: a tree in our back yard. Okay; they’re welcome. Also related: in Apull the Chimney Swifts arrived. Years ago we were going to cover our brick chimney to keep the birds out, but then I read that with fewer chimneys being built the swifts are having a hard time finding places to nest. So we left the chimney alone, as we don’t use the fireplace anyway, and provide the summer home for the swifts. We moved into the forest for the forest environment, and now encourage it in the little ways we can.

In Jamboree, as I may have mentioned before, I got out a radish to add to our evening salad, and the little thing was leafing out desperately in the darkness of the refrigerator. I figured if it was that eager to grow, I should let it, and I planted it in our garden. It grew wonderfully, becoming a fine many-leaved plant. Then something ate it off. Ouch! But I continued to water it, and protected it with chicken wire, hoping, and in due course it put out new leaves and prospered. This month it flowered. Success! I had enabled it to fulfill its life mission. Whether it will start new radishes from seeds I don’t know, but at least it had its chance.

On a sadder note: our pendulum clock died. Back in 1977 Wards had a nice hexagon or octagon shaped pendulum clock we liked, so we bought it, but it didn’t work and we exchanged it for another. That one didn’t work either. After three clocks they determined that a shipment of them had been dropped, breaking them all. So we gave up on that, but the idea of the clock remained, and we stopped at a clock store and bought a more conventionally shaped one. That lasted over 33 years, but finally when I wound it it refused to run any more. I guess it was just plain worn out. I care about machines as I do about animals and plants and, oh, yes, people, and am sorry to see it perish.

Last year at the end of Marsh my wife tripped and fell, getting hairline fractures in her arm and leg. She was out for weeks, recovering, and I hated being alone. But this is not about that; it’s about the bedsheets. When she was away, I washed only my own sheets; when she returned we resumed with both sets. But now they were out of alignment. We have two sets of sheets: a flower pattern in two colors, and a squares pattern in two colors. We matched the patterns, and she got the brown-eyed sheets, I the blue-eyed sheets. But because of the interruption they no longer matched designs. What to do? We finally figured it out, and after the laundry I put one of the just-washed sets back on while shifting the other set as usual. Now they are back matching. That’s a relief. We don’t like dissonance in bed.

Grocery shopping is routine. For decades my wife did it alone, then for months I did it alone. Now we do it together; I remain paranoid about things like falls. I pick out the best head of lettuce while she picks out the best tomatoes; I fetch the milk while she fetches the yogurt, I go ahead and locate the shortest checkout line and signal her so we don’t get stuck in the slowest one, and so on. We’re efficient. One day as I was weighing packages of bell peppers I saw a buxom store attendant carefully arranging a display of fruits a couple of aisles down. She was facing me, concentrating to get that display exactly right, leaning forward. Her decolletage was a little loose, and I got a marvelous line of sight. So when the time comes for nominations from the field, I’d like to nominate her for best display.

I’m a workaholic, especially when writing. But between sieges of writing I like to play computer card games as a sort of change of pace. I’ve played many, many games of Klondike and others. About the best game was Baker’s Dozen, wherein all the cards are laid out face up in four rows and you have to move them about to clear cards to build in the aces. But it had a couple of faults: it did not allow blank spaces to be used for anything, and sometimes two or three kings would get piled up and could not be moved. I wished they would allow blanks spaces to be used, if only to unpile kings. I had tried FreeCell twenty years ago, which fixes the flaws in Baker’s Dozen, and recommended it to my wife, who played it a lot, but I did not because it required too much attention and I wanted a low-attention game. But since I moved to PCLinuxOS I tried it again, and discovered that in twenty years they have improved things. Now they have Hints, so you don’t have to search forever to discover the one stupid move you can make, and an Undo for when you make that stupid move, and a This Game is Winnable/Unwinnable message that alerts you when you’re going wrong. With those three features I can navigate the sometimes difficult labyrinths and win. There were no instructions (PC has some holes) so I had to figure out the rules by hit or miss. I lost three, then caught on and now have a win streak of over 250. The thing is I don’t quit a game until I win it, whether it takes four minutes or over an hour. I conclude that FreeCell as it is here is indeed the best computer card game, with the right level of challenge and assists. I even used it as an analogy of life in Trail Mix: Amoeba.

On Sunday mornings as I scoot out to fetch the newspapers—for those new to this column, I use an adult scooter, the kind you push with your foot, as it works almost as well as a bicycle and I have no trouble balancing on it in the near darkness of pre-dawn—and while I scoot along I have a mental/emotional routine I started when my mother died in 1991. She had requested that lines from the poem “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke be read at her memorial, and I did read them, and subsequently memorized the whole poem. It begins “If I should die, think only this of me, that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.” My mother was English, and I was born in England, so it’s relevant. Then I sing to myself—not aloud, as my singing voice has been torpedoed by age—a song I heard once on the radio in 1956, in the first year of our marriage, and loved but couldn’t find. Decades later fans identified it for me “Remember Me” or “The Girl in the Wood.” I memorized that also. It’s the story of a boy who met a maiden in the wood, a lovely sprite who fascinated him then disappeared. When he became a man he could not find any woman to match her, so was doomed to celibacy. That song has been echoed in my first published novel, Chthon, and in Xanth, and remains with me. So I sing it after reciting “The Soldier,” remembering my mother. As the years passed, and my father died in 2002, I added him to my litany. Then when my daughter Penny died in 20009 I added her. So now it is a time for memory and grief for the three of them, my private memorial ritual. Of the three, the worst was the last, because it was out of turn, cutting off her life halfway. Oh Penny!

Songs constantly go through my head, some dating back 70 years. Some are fragments I may never have known completely. One of these is “Dobre.” It starts “Dobre from a cliff of marble, took aim at a gray dove. Woe is he, the mark he found was his own true-love’s dear heart.” I have wondered over the course of 50 years whether maybe the dove was perched on the wall of his castle, and he overshot it and scored on his true love inside, or whether he scored on the dove, and it turned out to be his shape-changing true love in an alternate form. Who was Dobre? Was he maybe a historical character? I remain sorry for Dobre, his true-love, and the dove.

A reader, Rudy Reyes, sent me a number of corrections of typos on the 5^th ChroMagic novel, Key to Survival. I posted them, and sent them to the publisher, and the edition will be updated in due course. I had a complaint from a female reader that there was too much sex in that volume. I replied that ChroMagic is billed as sexy fantasy, and it is. But that alerted me, and when I posted the corrections I randomly sampled the text, and there is indeed a lot of sex in it. In fact I think it is fair to say that sex is to ChroMagic what puns are to Xanth. Some readers love those aspects, some hate them. I do write different kinds of fiction. But I remember how Robert Heinlein, arguably the premiere science fiction writer, got older and the sexual content of his fiction increased. Some writers orient or immortality as they age. That’s not good or bad in itself, but bears watching. My fiction does tend to be sexy, and while it is not in the league of pure erotic fiction (except then I write erotica), it is a good deal more so than is standard fantasy. I may ease off on that aspect, in the interest of staying in the central vein. But for curious readers: yes, as I age, my sexual capacity diminishes, but my interest remains keen. It’s the curse of senescence.

In the course of writing the second Trail Mix novel, Beetle Juice, I had reference to the Mandelbrot set. This is a mathematical plotting of a fractal formula where a complicated boundary line has to be calculated point by point. Fractals are self-similar elaborations of basic designs. For example, you might draw a triangle, then draw small triangles on each side, making it a six pointed figure. Then draw yet smaller triangles on each of the new sides, and so on. Soon you’ll have a pretty intricate illustration. In 1980 mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot devised a formula whose graphic plot (that is, lines drawn on paper) became an amazingly complicated shape whose basic form resembled a squat bug. Since then computers have calculated endless extensions, and while the smaller bugs built on the main one are similar, they are not identical. In fact the greater the magnification, they more intricate the designs become. When colored they become beautiful. Is it art? Without doubt. So I got lost again in the marvels of it, as I did twenty years ago. I recommend contemplation of the Mandelbrot set to anyone who thinks math and art don’t overlap.

Last column I mentioned some things readers picked up on and provided valuable feedback. One is LibreOffice, which I thought looked very similar to OpenOffice, the word processor I use in Linux. It turns out they are the same. Oracle bought out the company that had OpenOffice, and is abandoning it, so the OO crew declared liberty and carries on the tradition in the form of LibreOffice. I will be changing to it, in due course, as a matter of principle and expedience. I mentioned Kristina O’Donnelly, fearing she was no longer with us. Readers informed me that her husband had a bad setback and she gave up writing so as to tend to him. I know how that is; my wife’s reduced capacity prevents us from traveling much beyond Citrus County, and when she fell a year ago and fractured bones in arm and leg I was seriously disrupted. We do need our significant others. Kristina should be writing again in due course. Another thing I mentioned a few months ago was my satisfaction with the new liquid pencil. I love it, but have discovered that one lasts only about a month for me, and the lead can’t be replaced. So I have three expensive dead pencils and am returning with regret to the old fashioned refillable kind. And my present Linux distribution, PCLinuxOS, is very good, but has some flaws. It won’t print, so I have to back up my files and go elsewhere to print out each day. Sometimes it closes my files without asking or saving. A couple of times it has done so with the one I was typing in, and I found myself typing into a blank screen. I do make frequent typos, some of which get me into obscure territory, but never had that particular problem before, so I think it’s a hole in PC. I wish I could turn off the Alt key when I’m not using it, so that an accidental touch on it doesn’t send me into fantasy-land, but of course programmers don’t like to provide truly useful options. So while I like PC, just as I like the liquid lead pencil, I am still looking for the Perfect Linux. It seems to be as elusive as the Perfect Woman, who turns out later to sweat and snore. Ed Howdershelt, who has helped me before, says Puppy Linux seems great. I’ll take a look at that.

I don’t review everything I read. In Apull I proofread the galleys for Xanth #35 Well-Tempered Clavicle, and believe it is up the the Xanthly standard, with an interesting story and squishes of puns, beginning with the title, a pun on Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. It’s the story of Picka Bone, the walking skeleton, who discovers he can remove his clavicles—shoulder bones—and play music on his ribs. He gets good at it, so good that when Princess Dawn hears him play, she falls in love with him. That’s bad news, because she’s simply not his type; she has all that meaty flesh on her nice bones. But Princess Sorceresses are not accustomed to hearing the word “No,” if they even understand it, so Picka is in for a siege unlike any he has experienced before. Yes, he’s a commoner, but on rare occasion royalty does marry commoners, as a recent British wedding suggests. The novel was written just as my elder daughter Penny died, so was in deep shadow; perhaps that accounts for the greater violence in it, as Picka battles the dread Music Monster. Music becomes more than sound; it can conjure fireballs, mesmerize people, and shake the ground. There is also the traveling Caprice Castle that contains Pundora’s Box, which they need to get to pack the excess puns of Xanth into. It will be published in hardcover in OctOgre 2011.

Climate of Change, the conclusion of my GEODYSSEY series, has now been published in mass market paper by TOR. This is my serious fiction, long-range historical, about a hundred thousand years, carrying up to the year 2050. It follows a seeming family through a number of historical events, my view of history being other than standard. It concludes on a positive note: they have finally solved the problems of overpopulation and destruction of resources, but perhaps not in a way most folk would like. The alternative, of course, is global destruction, which is where I fear we are headed. Along the way the legends of Roland and King Arthur are effectively debunked; the first is based on nothing, the second on tales of the Alani in Asia. This is fiction for thinking readers.

I read All My Husbands by Susie Lee, which I believe she has self published on Kindle. She used to run the Ferret & Dove sanctuary before the death of her husband made it infeasible, but she still loves animals. She had five husbands, and some of them were real characters. One turned out to be gay, another was a possible child molester, another seemed to go slowly crazy. Susie is a character herself, with strong opinions, a tender heart, and constant brushes with the supernatural. It is easy reading.

Newspaper article on where language began indicates that it originated in southwestern Africa and spread from there, simplifying as it went. Maybe, but my take on it is that it developed as mankind did in the course of a couple million years in the Lake Victoria region, the original Garden of Eden, and that the patterning of the last hundred thousand years represents merely its most recent spread. Perhaps related, article in NEW SCIENTIST suggests that fire was not the catalyst for mankind’s shrinkage of gut, growth of brain, and colonization of the world. They figure that controlled use of fire dates back only 300,000 to 400,000 years. But many others feel that fire dates back at least 1.6 million years. I’m with the latter. I suspect fire generated man more than man generated fire.

A column by David Brooks on a book by James Geary indicates that people use a metaphor every 10 to 25 words. A metaphor is a figure of speech wherein a term is applied to something it isn’t, like “He’s an ogre” or “The ship of state.”  It appears that metaphors in speech are like puns in Xanth: remove them and you impoverish it. Makes sense to me. As a writer I freely use metaphors, similes (he looks like an ogre; government moves like a ship) and other figures of speech. I’m all for it; communication would be pretty dull if we were limited to straight narration. Metaphors lend imagery to otherwise sodden expression. There’s another: how can words be sodden? A marsh is sodden. But use of the word conjures a background image of trudging through a foot-soaking marsh rife with leaches, making it seem objectionable, and that’s what I want. To make things seem prettier or uglier than they are, without actually saying so. It’s an art. I did it when I referred to a female publisher who had attacked me as having foam at her muzzle. I didn’t actually call her a rabid bitch (which is another metaphor), but I suspect the message got through, thanks to the unsubtle metaphor. The traditional portrayals of the major American political parties are metaphors: the donkey and the elephant. So when I note how Pinocchio’s nose grew every time he told a lie, establishing the principle, I’m not actually saying anything directly when I remark on just how long the elephant’s nose has gotten. So why should Republicans get mad? Just because I’m a liberal commenting on a well-known property of the elephant, nothing personal. Ah, metaphors…

Friday the 13^th I went out at 8 AM to fill the birdbaths, as I do every morning, using the cold hot water (that is, it takes time for the hot water to run hot, so we save that water in used milk gallon jugs so as not to waste it), when I heard in the near forest beyond the fence a loud BA-AA-AAA! followed by a threshing in the brush. Startled, I looked, but saw nothing but silence. Then within a minute it happened again, louder, BA-AA-AAA! followed by a wilder threshing I feared would crash through our fence. Then complete silence again. I never did see anything. What could it have been? My guess is that I was an auditory witness to a bobcat taking down a deer. Pounce from ambush, grab onto throat, deer struggles, then realizing that it is doomed if it doesn’t escape, makes a second wild effort to throw off the attacker but fails. Had the deer escaped I would have heard it bounding away. I think of this with horror, yet this is nature, red in tooth and claw. I would rather it happen this way than via a poaching human hunter. If there were no predators on deer, deer would soon enough overrun the planet. There are few predators on man, and man is overrunning the planet. I wonder whether that was the deer who ate off our variegated jasmine plant, or who drank from our ground-level bird bath? If so, I knew that deer indirectly, and wished it no harm. The bobcat may have caught on to the deer’s route, and ambushed it this time. So maybe it was not coincidence that it happened nearby. Sigh.

I read The Muse by Levi Citrin. This is a curious yet intriguing thought piece, phrased as a collection of essays forming into a novel, as yet unpublished. It is subtitled How I Learned to Hate Inspiration, and is really a commentary on the creative process of writing. It starts “I have an affliction.” What is it? “I am a writer without inspiration. I am tinder without flint. I have lost my muse.” The Muse is a lovely evil female spirit who constantly teases the writer with promises of genius that are not delivered. She leads him astray with seeming greatness that is false. “I have been told that freedom comes in the form of writing an uninspired, yet finished, novel.” That of course accounts for the majority of published novels you find cluttering bookstore shelves and ebook listings. They may not be inspired works, but they do pay the room & board of their uninspired authors. But what if the writer wants more? Wants actually to write something worthwhile, something that will in some manner benefit the cosmos? Wants to create a genuine Work of Art? Then he must come to terms with his Muse, and she can be a harsh mistress.

The whole book consists not of a plotted story line so much as a series of thoughts on assorted subjects. Such as Clocks, Barking, Writing Boards, a Watch, a Nightmare, Nocturnal Music, Graffiti, and so on: the peripheral aspects of a dull life. Meanwhile the Muse teases unmercifully with the Perfect Idea that vanishes before it can be written. Genius seems to have a very short half-life. Sometimes he thinks he has it, and writes desperately for days, only to realize belatedly that the vision is false, and he shreds it. As in a dream, when you dream of waking up but are actually still in the dream realm, the more fool you. Actual capture of the Muse is usually illusory. The end, of course, is madness. So this isn’t exactly a novel. But I suspect many novelists will relate. It is interesting throughout, with many pithy thoughts, and the frustration is familiar.

We saw a movie: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which I think is the fourth in that series. This time they seek the Fountain of Youth, with various rivalries along the way. I got sleepy and didn’t follow it perfectly until they came to the mermaids. These were truly lovely girls who talked and sang to the men in the boat, lured them into the water, and then bared vampire type fangs and chomped them. They bombed the mermaids, but saved one alive because they needed a tear from her, part of the formula for prolonged life. Naturally she wasn’t interested in obliging. But she did get interested in one of the men who showed her some kindness, and in the end hauled him out of there, presumably for a more romantic setting. It was a nice sub-story, as there was no romance in the main story. In they end they found the deviously hidden fountain, whereupon two other groups of men pounced, apparently having had no difficulty locating it themselves. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but sense is not the point of this series. It was wild and fun; that was the point.

One day I saw in a store a bin full of DVD movies on sale for $4 apiece. That’s my idea of a good buy, so I selected half a dozen that looked interesting, hoping for the best. Six weeks later when I got a bit of slack time between novels I pigged out on videos. They weren’t much but what do you expect for that price? I rated them as I watched them, purely for my own taste. Weird Science, about two high school boys who can’t get dates, so they computer generate the perfect woman, who turns out to be a lot more savvy than they are and does solve their problems in her magical fashion; for example she turns bully big brother into a sort of scaly frog until he promises to lay off = C; Haunted Forest, about going into a forest where people don’t come out; the idea that forests are scary turns me off, here on my tree farm; it’s city streets that are dangerous = D (that was actually from a prior batch, $6); Bring It On wherein competing teams of cheerleaders vie for victory, complicated by romance between boy and girl of opposing teams; some really perky girls there, and it’s a conscious emulation of Romeo and Juliet, and West Side Story, which is fun = B; Deliver Us From Eva, where Eva is this lovely smart black woman—it’s a black movie cast—who is organizing the lives of her sisters and friends to the point where the men realize they have to get rid of her, so they hire a handsome man to make her fall in love and depart; it becomes a nice love story = B; Children of Men, a grim future America story of a world without babies, until one young woman turns up pregnant, and the protagonist has to somehow get her out of the country before rapacious others get hold of that baby; he’s white she’s black, and it’s no romance, just trying to do the right thing as everyone else seems to be gunning down everyone else in burned-out streets, not much pleasure to watch but it’s a good and thoughtful story = B; Land of the Dead, where zombies are taking over, complicated by a greedy banker (a conscious parallel?); zombies eating human flesh never did make much sense to me = C; Something New, another mostly black cast, lovely black businesswoman meets her perfect black man but finds herself falling for her rather ordinary white gardener whom she’s trying not to date; it does address the issue of interracial marriage = B. I will probably watch Bring it On and Children of Men and Something New again, in due course, for the bouncy girls, the rationale I didn’t catch of why no babies, and the nuances of racial relations. I have an order of $7 videos in process to watch first, however. In fact after writing the above we were at Biglots shopping for something else, and they had whole bins full of assorted new and used videos at dirt cheap prices; I wound up buying 14 at prices ranging from $3 to $1. I hope I find more slack time to watch them! One that really intrigued me described a man who discovered he could relate to the lovely woman of his dreams only in dreams, where apparently they could interact. But when I got home it wasn’t there. I had thought it was White Noise 2, but that turned out to be about a near death experience that enables a man to anticipate someone’s death. That intrigues me too; I wrote about it in On A Pale Horse. Could there have been a White Noise 1, and I got them confused and put it back? Sigh. I’ll look when I get the chance, but chances are I’ll never see it again, and no one will ever have heard of it. You have to grab the will-o-whisp when it offers, or it ceases to exist.

We try to practice environmentalism by economizing on water despite having a well, and our waste water returns to the ground whence it came; economizing on power by things like having heat exchangers to help heat our hot water; and recycling our garbage. Last column I mentioned the sprouting radish I planted; that continued to flower all Mayhem. It was joined by a volunteer tomato plant, which grew and flowered and started making tomatoes. Until I went out one morning, and discovered that something had cut both plants to pieces, not eating them, just leaving the pieces lying on the ground. Apparently just passing mayhem, for no purpose other than destruction. It didn’t touch the weeds, of course. Human beings can be bad in that respect, but so can animals; humans are not worse, they just have more power to do their mischief. I put the kitchen garbage in a basin and cover it with dirt, and each Sunday morning I take out the basin and bury the garbage. I had trouble with creatures digging it up, so I spread chicken wire on the ground and that stopped that. But in Mayhem something started raiding the basin, pushing off the cover, turning over, dumping it out on the floor. A couple years back we had a raccoon that did that; we tried putting hot sauce on it, but nothing worked well. This was similar; was our rogue raccoon back?. Until one night I went out and there was an opossum in the basin. That was our marauder. Okay, we changed to a closeable litter-box; that should take care of the problem. We don’t want to hurt forest creatures, but neither do we want them messing up our projects.

I’m a slow reader, and reading tends to put me to sleep, which is mischief for a professional writer. But I do a lot of reading, so I find ways to cope. Sometimes I walk around the house while reading a book, to keep me awake. Sometimes I stand at the computer. Sometimes I take a break, do something else, then return to reading. Because reading truly is worthwhile, whether it’s a book, a magazine, a newspaper, or something else. I notice things, and I am constantly learning, even in my septuagenarian dotage. Sometimes I pause to admire a nice turn of phrase. For example, columnist Danial Ruth once referred to a public figure as never being shy about fondling his ego in public. What illicit connotations that evokes! Another columnist commented on a certain actor/politician whose marriage is breaking up because of several children he fathered outside of marriage; she called him the Sperminator.

At one point I had thought the summer of 2011 would be slack time for me, when I could catch up on things other than writing. (Yes, Virginia, there are things other than writing. Not many, not important, but a few do exist.) That quickly filled in with three short novels to write in six months. So in FeBlueberry and Marsh I wrote Trail Mix: Amoeba, and in Apull and Mayhem I wrote Trail Mix 2: Beetle Juice, and in JeJune and Jewel-Lye will collaborate with J R Rain of the bestselling Vampire P I series on the sequel to Aladdin Relighted, this one tentatively titled Aladdin Sins Bad. Not the most serious stuff, but fun. Anyway, in Beetle Juice the project is to save a rare precious scarab beetle in the Betelgeuse region of space from extinction. It it beautiful, so that its shell can become jewelry, and its juice promotes health and longevity, so there is high demand. It is a protected species, but poachers raid anyway and that’s what’s driving it to extinction. If this seems parallel to what rare animal or ivory poachers do on planet Earth, its deliberate. The beetles are telepathic, which helps them avoid predators, but it isn’t enough. Our protagonist Wetzel is telepathic, and when he connects with a beetle he calls LadyBug they really hit it off. He’s a were-unicorn with a thing for virgins, and she’s a virgin. LadyBug looks just like the basic outline of the Mandelbrot set. So you can see this is not exactly your standard cheap adventure. There’s more, much more, but you can catch up on it when the novel is published on Kindle in due course.

I like PC LINUX OS, but may have to go to another distribution, because PC has some bad habits. For example, while I was typing this column, and was just to the word “LadyBug,” somehow it dumped all my text since the last save and I found myself typing Bug at the beginning of the file. I tried to back up; control Z eliminated “Bug” and stopped, claiming that was all I had typed. My last two paragraphs were gone and could not be recovered; even the auto-backup had reverted. No save query, no warning; it just dumped my text in the middle of a word. This is hardly the first time PC has done this, and I can’t afford it. I need to know that my text is secure. Next time it could be worse than losing my last 300 words or a frustrating hour of my time; I can’t risk it. I need reliability. Part of the problem may be that I typo a lot, and this can lead to foul-ups. If I could turn off the Alt key and just use F10 it would help greatly, but naturally that’s not an option offered. Linux, like Windows, is great for offering a myriad options you don’t need, while skipping the ones you do need. Obviously the programmers have never tried writing novels. It is evident that if I really want the perfect Linux I’ll have to hire a geek and design it myself. I’m tempted.

Newspaper item says that an Adult firm is amassing 1-800 lines, using them to solicit for sexual sites. Don’t I know it! When we shut down the original HiPiers 800 number that’s where it wound up, and irate readers thought I was trying to corrupt their innocent children. We complained to AT&T, who had sold the number, but they wouldn’t do anything. So they solicit my fans and I get the blame and have no legal recourse. There oughta be a law. Maybe related: Another article says researchers found ways to get people to talk honestly about their sexual experiences. They graphed the results, showing that men and women were roughly parallel. Close to a hundred percent had had vaginal intercourse, ninety percent oral sex, forty percent anal sex, and ten percent homosexual sex. Things sure have changed since my day, when oral sex was considered daring and anal sex was only for gay men. Still, more folk are staying married longer, maybe because of liberalized sex. The median time of broken marriages is eight years, but more than half of current marriages are over 15 years, and 45% have gone 25 years. Six percent have lasted over 50 years, as my wife and I have.

You know the problem of obesity? Now it turns out that it messes up brain function too, increasing the risk of Alzeimer’s. Folk just can’t keep the pounds off, and some go to surgery to do it. A study shows that even that is ultimately ineffective; liposuction removes the belly and thigh fat, but then more fat cells grow beyond that area, and the fat returns. It seems the body savagely monitors and defends its fat quota and will maintain it regardless. Interesting; I mean to keep the fat off my body, but as I age, and as my dentures enable me to chew better, I am finding it a battle. I get hunger pangs when I cut my meals back, and I don’t like that. But I will find a way.

Newspaper article by Rebecca Catalanello says that school bullying is widely under-reported. For sure; schools prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist. But it does exist, and does much harm. A school bully is a baby criminal. Some parents are considering suing, if that’s what it takes to get the schools to act. My answer is simple: be alert, and remove the bullies from the school. I know there are complications, and those who have been bullied tend to become bullies when they get their chance. But I don’t think schools need to go into psychoanalysis. Anyone caught bullying another is removed, same as anyone committing any other crime, and sent to a school for bullies. Those who straighten out could return on probation. Those who don’t will wind up in prison where they belong. The bullying would soon be minimized, and everyone would be better off. Article six months ago by Susan M Swearer discusses five myths about bullying: that most of it now happens online, that bullies are bullies and victims are victims, that bullying ends when you grow up, that it’s a major cause of suicide, and that we can end it. No, she says; most bullying remains traditional, victims can become bullies, it exists in the workplace, it’s only one of many causes for suicide, and while it can’t be stopped it can be reduced. Yes, and I think my suggestion, if implemented, would reduce it in a hurry in the schools. Maybe tougher in the workplace. Maybe there should be an independent listing, like my survey of electronic publishers, that tells the truth, blowing the whistle on bullying companies. Then at least people would be able to avoid bad workplaces before getting committed, and bully bosses might be shamed into better behavior.

A reader, S Wayne Hendry, forwarded a lovely Miss Airport 2011 Calendar, showing all the girls as skeletons with only faint shading for flesh, the way they would appear when being scanned. It concludes: “If you can’t afford a doctor, go to an airport—you’ll get a free X-ray and a breast exam, and if you mention Al Qaeda, you’ll get a free colonoscopy.”

Article says the state of Vermont is moving toward a Canadian type public health care. Good for it. I came from Vermont where I grew up, and retain a liking for the Green Mountains. Few today remember that Vermont was an independent nation for a number of years, then became the first state to join the new United States as #14. It continues to show its independence in good ways, in contrast to the descent Florida is making. So why didn’t I stay in Vermont? Because I couldn’t stand the cold winters. I remain a Vermonter in spirit.

I have seen references to the “cloud,” and wondered what it was. Gradually I am learning: it is at array of electronic storage devices sponsored by Google that ordinary folk can use. With Google’s Chromebook computer the storage and software is online. I gather this is like tuning in to a radio or TV station and getting your word processor and whatever else you need. You can’t lose it by crashing; the cloud is too big to crash. That’s interesting, but I think I’ll pass. Privacy would be a mockery; I’m sure they would promise it, but with Patriot Act spying by the government—where they aren’t allowed to tell you that they gave away your information—and hackers who spy just because they can, you’ll have none. And when the Internet goes down, so does your access. And if they raise the price, you’ll have no choice but to pay it, or lose your data.

The End of the World came an went with nary a flicker. So the nuts postponed it for five months. What they’ll say when that passes without incident—who cares? I did learn something from this foolishness, though: the Rapture they speak of doesn’t necessarily mean delight, but merely a carrying away.

I do the newspaper chess puzzles, but sometimes they annoy me, because they are wrong or incomplete. Here’s an example: for Mayhem 22 the challenge was White mates in 2. Okay, they do have a two move mate. But my answer is mate in one. Isn’t that preferable? For those who care to research it, my move is f3 mate.

Column by Frank Farley asks why so many politicians stray. Indeed, they are notorious, even the home-values conservatives who breed outside marriage just like the others. And provides the answer: they are thrill seekers, taking risks, and that makes them more successful than those who never gamble. They want to lead exciting, interesting, challenging lives. They tend to be independent and creative, to be impressive personally: chick magnets. When they get successful they tend to be surrounded by acolytes who exist to please them. That makes it easy to take what is offered, especially when it is sexually attractive. I never had any political ambition, but I am pleased that when I achieved some measure of success it did not break up my marriage. Success of any type can be hard on marriages, because it opens up options that unsuccessful folk never had before, so they have no natural resistance to temptation.

There is news of a picture book that is a bestseller before being published: Go the Fuck to Sleep. Apparently it has become uncouth for parents to desire any life of their own, once a baby arrives. Oh, don’t I remember! My writing efficiency cut in half when our first surviving baby arrived, and it didn’t recover completely until she went to college. It seems this book echoes that frustration. How can parents watch TV, make out, or just relax when the baby refuses to go to sleep? Our baby was an education in what the baby expert of the day, Dr. Spock (no relation to Star Trek) didn’t know about babies. I remember when he said to put the baby down alone to sleep; it may fuss for a few minutes, then nod off. I tried, and listened tensely in the next room for an hour and a half while she screamed. Then I heard a choking sound, and rushed in to find she had vomited dull red on the bed. No, not blood, as I thought in that instant; she had had cherries for desert. So much for that effort. I had in effect tortured my baby until she vomited. Never again. Dr. Spock, go the fuck to Hell.

It seems that 61% of Americans believe that Osama bin Laden is in Hell. I don’t, because I’m one of the 5% who don’t believe in Hell. But surely he deserves to be there. If there should one day come the sound of roadside bombs going off way down below, you’ll know he is there.

Interview in NEW SCIENTIST with Simon Baron-Cohen, known for his autism research. As a child in a Jewish family he learned of the cruelties the Nazis practiced on Jews. He concluded that the Nazis, by no means unique in this respect, lacked empathy, that is, the ability to feel the feeling of other people, to hurt when they hurt. His new book is titled Zero Degrees of Empathy, addressing the question of whether low empathy necessary leads to cruelty? He wants to replace the term “evil” with “lack of empathy.” He says empathy is a complex phenomenon involving the understanding of and relating to other people’s states of mind. It seems the US edition is retitled The Science of Evil. What further evidence do you need that American publishers notoriously lack empathy? They hardly understand or care about the sensitivities of their authors or their readers, and thus are constantly surprised by both their successes and their failures. At any rate, I’m glad to see empathy getting recognized; I believe it is a vital key to what makes us human, and those who lack it, typically on the political/religious right wing, are degrading the grace God gave them. The greed-heads, who care more about money than the welfare of man or the health of the planet. Jesus would have rousted them from the temple.

DISCOVER MAGAZINE had an interview with Lynn Margulis, a noted biologist. I knew a girl by that name in college, and wonder whether that could have been her. She views symbiosis as the central force behind the evolution of new species, a notion regular biologists don’t much like. She calls it symbiogenesis, viewing life as one giant network of social connections. I will summarize it here as well as I can, not promising to have it down accurately; I’m not a biologist. New species emerge through symbiotic relationships between two or more kinds of organisms. This is possible because every known life form is a combination or community of bacteria. Bacteria can exchange genes; they don’t have to evolve them themselves, just trade with those who already have useful things. The mitochondria are an example: long ago an amoeba swallowed a creature that had a more sophisticated manner of handling energy, and that creature remains today in all of us, processing energy for our cells. That original collaboration was an enormous breakthrough, giving the paired organisms a significant advantage, and they took over the world. Similar collaborations are constantly happening, driving the evolution of new species. For example, we tend to think of bacteria as things to get rid of, but they are very much the basis of our existence. We could not digest our food without the enormous community of bacteria in our gut working tirelessly on our behalf, and those bacteria would have trouble surviving if we did not provide them with a home and the raw materials for them to process . It really is a symbiotic relationship. I can see it, and it makes sense to me, however heretical it may seem to the established order. Scientists notoriously resist accepting new things, which is a shame. Fortunately I’m not a scientist.

I did the daily chess puzzle, and suffered a chain of thought. Why is a castle called a rook in chess? It’s a noble piece, while the word rook has some unsavory associations. So I looked it up in my collection of dictionaries, winding up in the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, the ultimate authority. None of them gave a reason. I learned that it derives from the Persian rukh,as does the big bird roc and maybe the smaller crow-like rook. Could it be that the rook bird is the descendent of the roc, and the chess rook is from the enormous flight capacity of the roc, moving instantly across the board? Maybe now I’ll like the name better, thinking of the roc. Words are fascinating, even if the finest dictionaries in the world can prove to be inadequate.

I read Gatehouse: The Door to Canellin, by E H Jones, self published in hardcover with the help of the folk as www.kickstarter.com. This is the first in a series of Gatehouse novels, with the promised sequel later this year being The Door to Justice. The Gatehouse is the central station, from which many doors lead to other realms. Contemporary teenager Wes stumbles upon it, not understanding its nature, and winds up in Canellin, where there is magic and a fearsome dragon he must slay. That may seem standard for fantasy, but it’s actually an original story, well written and reasonably compelling. When Wes’s father Ryan discovers what has happened, he goes in after the boy, determined to rescue his son. But of course he gets caught up in his own adventure, becoming a swordsman with an apparent connection to a fabled sword in a stone. He may be able to draw it out of the stone, but not yet; it sends him reeling with what feels like an electrical charge. Meanwhile Wes, translating a book on magic, tries out its spells and becomes an increasingly potent magician. The story moves on from there. There are powerful forces gathering to conquer the kingdom, loyal friends, dangerous spies, and a couple of talented girls who are more interesting than they are allowed to be here; there is no romance, though possibly that will develop in a sequel. I enjoyed the novel and believe others will too.

I got more DVD videos and watched them on off days while writing a collaborative novel. I didn’t expect much, but some were better than others, and satisfied my desire for a change-off. I will tally them briefly, as I did last month. The first was one I meant to buy at BigLots and somehow didn’t; I described it during a family gathering, lacking the title, and my sister in law Jane had the wit to look it up on the internet: The Good Night. So I want back and found it and bought it, along with several others while I was at it, for $3. A man caught in a dead-end life, bad job, marriage fading, gets into lucid dreaming, where he meets the Girl of his Dreams. Then in waking life he sees her picture on a vehicle: she’s the star of some kind of show. That must be where he got her image. That makes him think, and he decides to work on his marriage. Grade B. Another was The Ruins, wherein five college kids go with a guide to see an unlisted Mayan ruin. It soon becomes a formula horror, with one after another getting gruesomely killed, mainly for the benefit of carnivorous plants. Not my type of thing. D. Sinbad, a cartoon feature theoretically based on the Arabian Nights legend, but so loosely that it might as well be its own story. On that basis, not bad; there are nice effects and pretty girls and much action. B. Left Behind, wherein suddenly many people disappear. Turns out that the missing folk are the Chosen, and are now in Heaven; the rest are those left behind, left mainly to their own devices. Will they succeed in reforming the world, or will the greedheads take over completely, having cornered the world’s only food supply? The issue is in doubt, but it has one hard-hitting conclusion. B. The Human Contract, another dissolving marriage story, intriguing extramarital affair that becomes painful to watch. The Other Woman turns out to be married, but does care. C. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, featuring Sophia Loren in three stories. I am generally wary of pretty girls playing the part of pretty girls and calling themselves actresses, but I was reasonably impressed by this 46 year old presentation. Sophia is six weeks younger than I, and this was before the days when figures came from surgery more than from nature. In one she has to stay pregnant so she can’t be arrested; seven children later her husband is worn out and we haven’t seen much of her maiden figure. In another she cares more for her fancy car than for her boyfriend. In the third she’s a goodhearted prostitute who helps point a young seminary student in the right direction. C. Blade: House of Chthon, a vampire story with much pointless violence but also a female lead with nicely displayed breasts; Blade is a sort of anti-vampire vampire, and at the end the lady, converted to vampire, will join him in fighting the bad vampires. They pronounce Chthon “Ka-thon” as some do, not knowing any better; the ch is properly silent. C. White Noise 2: this is an ugly story of a man who sees his wife and son pointlessly shot to death. Then the man suffers a near-death experience, after which he can see rays of light around people who are about to die. He intercedes to save some, but then they become killers; it seems that Lucifer takes them over for evil purpose. Trying to thwart fate only brings worse mischief. C. Dangerous Liaisons is the story of upper class deceit and romance over 200 years ago, when it seems high class women had to make their breasts bulge out of their corsets, wherein a predatory widow arranges for a notorious handsome rake to seduce a young bride as a challenge. He does so, but it ends in tragedy that wipes out all participants. Not my type of thing, but worthy nevertheless. B. Secret Diary of a Call Girl is about a London whore who rises to become a courtesan, that is an elegant paid girlfriend for wealthy clients. Along the way she encounters good men, bad men, a client who wants two girls together, and a married couple who want to make it with two others; it seems that seeing their partners have sex with others turns them on and then they really get into it with each other. It’s an interesting three hour presentation that isn’t actually very sexy. She works for a living as an escort, and outside the bedroom she’s a normal woman. She has everything, yet does not seem to be happy despite having the kind of job she likes. B.

I also bought some some disc packages, with multiple movies for low prices. For example, GIRLS, GUNS AND G-STRINGS, 12 movies for $6 plus S&H, so the whole thing cost me $7.11, or 59 cents per movie. Hard to go far wrong at that price. So I watched Malibu Express, a 1985 effort featuring, well, girls, guns and G-Strings. The acting is fair to poor, the story line is mishmash, but there are more luscious bare breasts than you can shake a phallic stick at. So it’s nothing critically, but fun to view. C. Hard Ticket to Hawaii, better acting, better plotting, more extreme violence including a deadly giant python but overall the same formula, fun but minor. C. Savage Beach, wherein several groups scramble to find gold buried on an island by a World War Two treasure ship; again much violence, some breasts. C. Picasso Trigger, wherein three pretty girls use explosive toys to take out the criminals. Some toys are fun, like a remote controlled little car. C. Guns, this time the girls are trying to foil gun smuggling by criminals who target and kill anyone who gets in their way, leaving playing cards by the bodies. Some nice Las Vegas girls dancing, but mainly bikini-clad girls blowing bad guys away, literally. C. Do Or Die starts interesting, with the evil man making a game of killing two good girls, sending pairs of killers after them. But it quickly becomes formula, with the girls in effect drawing bigger guns and blasting the men, the action sequences interspersed by superfluous soft-core sex scenes. It never rises to greater tension. Once the last bad team is dead, it’s done. C. I will watch the other 6 hereafter.

Then there’s FEMME FATALES, a collection of six black/white movies from the 1930s to 40s. Those women are not in a league with today’s sirens, but considering the limitation of those times, actresses like Ava Gardner and Hedy Lamarr are appealing enough. Mainly, they pose for lingering face shots. Whistle Stop has a lovely women return to her old stomping ground, arousing the interest of more than one man, but the action consists of a couple of fist fights and a conspiracy to frame someone. For me, too dull to linger on. D. Algiers has interesting background on the Casbah in Algiers, a kind of lawless enclave. A handsome master thief is there, and can’t depart lest he be arrested. Then he falls for a pretty tourist and foolishly steps outside, is betrayed by his jealous mistress, and is thus doomed. C+ or B-. I’ll try to view the remaining four movies next month. It’s not that I’m surfeit, but that necessary work got in in the way, such as writing this column.

Maybe related: I was paging through a video catalog and read about 20,000 Years in Sing-Sing, a 1933 movie featuring Bette Davis about a woman who murders to protect her honor, and then her criminal boyfriend takes the rap for her. Interesting, but I did not mark it for purchase. Then, curious, I sought to recheck it, and it was gone. My wife checked the catalog: no such movie. My theory is that because I am an absolute disbeliever in the supernatural, the supernatural does its best to mess me up, such as by vanishing a listing I know was there. I wasted over 20 minutes futilely searching before I got smart, looked it up in one of my old 800 page movie catalogs, and got it, starring Spencer Tracy. Sure enough, in the new catalog it starred Bette but listed it under Spencer, so we had missed it. So I outwitted the supernatural, this time. But it will surely try again; it really hates a nonbeliever.

And we saw a “real” movie, Cars 2. Reviewers found it less than great, but we enjoyed it, though it proceeded at such a breakneck pace it was hard for slow-thinking old codgers like me to follow. No human beings here, and everything talks, including ships and airplanes. It starts with a James Bond type caper where a car is spying on a secret fuel refinery, is detected and chased by thug cars, plows into the sea, is then chased by missile-firing cars, sinks, and we see its tires float to the surface: obviously it’s dead. Except that it isn’t; it makes like a submarine and escapes. Then we go to our hero car, who gets into a race with a special racer, except the bad guys think he knows something and mean to kill him, while the good guys try to foil the bad guys. The intricacies of the action are impressive but confusing. A bomb is planted on his toothy friend Tow Mater the wrecking truck, which leads to further complications. There are a couple of lady cars I would have liked to see more of. So it’s hectic fun, which is of course the point.

I read Waking God III, The Second Coming of Humanity, the conclusion of a trilogy by Philip F Harris and Brian L Doe, published electronically by ALL THINGS THAT MATTER PRESS. Like the prior volumes it has heavy action interspersed by the religious theme. It begins with a dense summary of the prior volumes, then gets to the continuation. The essence, if I understand it correctly, is that the child, Adam, has been conceived, who when born will herald the new order. Naturally there are those who wish to prevent this child from being born and who don’t hesitate at murder; the minions of Evil don’t pussyfoot. His parents have to travel deviously to Jerusalem, avoiding killers. At one point a woman who looks like the mother runs to intercept the bullet meant for the mother, giving her life for the child. The novel concludes with alternate endings, and a series of maxims from the Da Vinci Prophecies from the Codex Atlanticus, such as “OF CRUCIFIXES WHICH ARE SOLD: I see Christ again sold and crucified, and his saints suffering martyrdom.” I don’t pretend to understand all this, but it’s interesting, and I think exactly what would happen to Jesus Christ if he came again and tried to thwart the special interests who govern our society. Religion, the opiate of the masses, is fine as long as it doesn’t interfere with business; that’s as true in our day as it was in his day. So I recommend this for those who are more into adventurous religion than I am, who may be more competent to relate to its nuances. The authors obviously take religion and prophecy seriously.

Newspaper item reporting on an article in the journal NATURE: two million years ago, a study of fossil teeth indicates, men remained at home while women traveled and made families elsewhere. That prevented interbreeding. Was it really so? I am among the skeptics. The sample of 19 teeth was too small to be definitive, but even if true, I suspect that men raided foreign tribes for women, dragged them home and mated with them, starting their families. If a woman protested, she might get her teeth knocked out, grist for the fossils. They didn’t fool around with women’s rights in the old days. As a liberal, I don’t pine for the good old times.

I remarked last month on my wish to be able to turn off the Alt keys so I wouldn’t risk miskeying and getting in trouble, such as losing my last hour’s work. Naturally programmers don’t offer useful options like that. Patti Smith came to my rescue: why now simply remove those keys from my keyboard? Duh, I never thought of that. So I tried it, and quickly discovered that F10 does not substitute for Alt; it substitutes for Alt F only. When I want to switch lines or paragraphs there seems to be no substitute for Alt-Ctrl up/down Arrows, for example. So I compromised, removing the right Alt key and leaving the left one. My disasters have diminished. It would be better if I could temporarily turn them off, but this helps. Thank you, Patti.

There are indications that Solar is already cheaper than Nuclear power, and it’s a good deal safer. I doubt we’ll see many desert solar arrays washed out by tsunamis, and they are essentially nonpolluting. More power to you, Solar!

I am of course resisting the temptation to call a certain Florida governor Pick Snott, though he seems determined to outdo a prior Republican governor, Fraud Quirk, in damaging the state. A newspaper article describes the way he is trying to destroy education here. As a former Florida teacher I notice. It was bad enough in my day, and I was glad to leave it for full time writing. I don’t see much choice for good teachers other than to depart for states where they are valued, letting Florida sink slowly into an intellectual as well as a physical swamp. Too bad for our children. I think conservatives don’t like education, because it tends to liberalize people. They even come to believe in Evolution, rather than what the Bible says, and in Global Warming rather than what Pollution Profit Incorporated says. They might even grow up to try to do something about the latter. Can’t have that, now can we?

A map in SCIENCE NEWS shows the geography of age. In large sections of Africa the average human lifespan is under 50; in Canada, Australia, Japan and parts of Europe it is over 80. The rest of us fall in between. Why isn’t the United States at the top? Because, in significant part, we let the special interests govern our health care, charging more and more to a public that has less and less. So we have to pay about twice as much, or die sooner, and many have no choice but to die. Even the anemic attempt to reform this is derided as Obamacare, and that will be abolished the moment Republicans have the votes.

TrustGauge sent me a sample report on HiPiers.com, ranking it 398,483. That suggests that 398,482 other sites are doing better. Ah, well. I wonder how many are doing worse? I’m maintaining this site for information for my readers, who I trust will find me regardless of its ranking.

Email circular says this is not a scam or hoax: the racist UN has ordered the murder of 13 billion people in order to depopulate the globe. That should be effective, considering the present global population is under 10 billion. “They are also responsible for global warming, swine flu, AIDS, El Nino, and various other disastrous occurrences world wide.” Wow; I had no idea. But if this nefarious plot is already in progress, how do we stop it? The flier doesn’t tell us that. Did they forget that detail?

Item I somehow missed before: it seems that Israel discovered a huge source of natural gas 50 miles off its coast, the Tamar field. Israel will become an energy exporter instead of importer. The surrounding hostile neighbors want in, and they’re not the kind to tread lightly. This could get interesting, soon.

Carol J Adams has an excellent article titled “Five Myths About Vegans.” Veganism is a subset of vegetarianism, wherein no animal products are used. I am an ovo-lacto vegetarian, meaning that I do eat milk, milk products,  eggs, and honey; I don’t use leather, do use wool and silk. Things like soap and gelatin-based capsules are borderline cases that leave me uneasy. The rule is that if it hurts the animal to take it, I don’t want it. Vegans hew to a tougher rule, and I admire their constancy. So what are the myths? 1. Vegans have trouble getting enough protein. No, they can get enough from plant sources, like chickpeas and tofu. Eating whole plants, instead of refined ones, seems to be much of the answer. 2. Vegans have countless rules about what can be eaten. No, their essential rule is trying to do the least harm possible. They need to check the ingredients of commercial products, as we do, because meat products can show up in odd places, but that would help meat eaters too. 3. Veganism is emasculating; real men eat meat. Depends how you define “real man”; if you believe he doesn’t eat quiche and cusses continuously maybe you have a case, but otherwise it’s sexist fantasy. There was a theory that converting to meat eating propelled mankind to prominence in the world, but probably it was the use of fire and cooking that did it, meat being just one of the foods fire made available. In any event, meat is hardly necessary to manliness now. And yes, I’m ready to debate any idiot who thinks I’m effeminate. 4. Vegans care more about animals than humans. No, many vegans care more about the salvation of mankind than ignorant meat eaters do, knowing mankind will survive longer if he doesn’t continue the ruinous cost of running food through animals on the way to humans. 5. It’s expensive and inconvenient to be a vegan. Hardly. Today there are vegetable-origin meat substitutes that can barely be distinguished in taste and texture from the real thing. Once you orient on the change it becomes as easy to follow as the meat diet, and a lot more animal-friendly. I speak as a vegetarian of 58 years. Veganism would be more difficult, but by no means impossible. And let me add one I have encountered: 6. Vegetarians (Vegans) are unhealthy and don’t live as long. To which I say that’s not true for smart ones. I expect to outlive the majority of stupid meat eaters, if I haven’t already. I won’t outlive the smart ones, but that’s the true distinction: a smart eater will do better in the long run than a stupid eater, whatever the food.

Local Sunday supplement column by Georgi Davis can have interesting thoughts. She remarked on tumbleweeds. “You can tell from this article that I really don’t think tumbling is a bad way to go through life. You have to have a little faith before you can tumble. I’ve tumbled into other things, like my husband…” See what I mean? He tumbled her and now they’re married. I once observed a plant growing in our yard, couldn’t figure out what it was, and when it died and dried up I realized it must be a tumbleweed. There’s also a very nice folk song “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” Much of life is essentially random, another term for tumbling, however we may try to organize it, and you never can tell what will turn up.

It seems a gray whale has been spotted in the Mediterranean Sea. The problem with that is that it lives in the north Pacific Ocean. It must have navigated the Northwest Passage to get past the continent. Some plankton has also migrated to where it hasn’t existed for 800,000 years. Blame global warming, thawing the northern ice, opening the channel. Take that, warming deniers; there’s a whale in the room.

DISCOVER magazine had a feature on “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” describing how anonymity allows folk to express their real interest in searches. The leading sexual search was for free non-nude teen videos; the next was for young naked waitresses; the third for “My friend’s hot mom.” More generally, the leading category was Youth, followed by Gay, MILFs, and Breasts. Men like sexy pictures, women prefer erotic stories. They needed anonymity to discover those interests?

NEW SCIENTIST says that the Inca success in South America was powered by domestication of the llama, whose dung facilitated growing maize (corn). Seems analysis of pollen and dung proves it. I might qualify that: the Inca were relatively recent, inheriting a civilization developed over the course of over two thousand years by prior cultures. But the Llama remains. Another article makes the case that the human-animal link extends back two million years and is responsible for the growth of three of the most important human developments: tool-making, language, and domestication. I suspect that is exaggerated, and that domestication of animals was more a corollary aspect, but surely they were connected. It says that humans devised an evolutionary shortcut to becoming a predator instead of a prey species by turning blunt stones into sharp stone fragments to use as knives. True, but this omits one huge discovery: the control of fire, so that cooking became possible. That enabled man to eat meat and formerly inedible tubers and grains. Hunting without fire would not suffice, whereas fire without hunting might. Similarly, language has more to do with communication and social interactions than with animals. So I think this article is worthwhile but incomplete.

Another interesting article relates to sexual pleasure. The female author masturbated while being scanned so that the process of her arousal and orgasm could be tracked. They are getting a better notion of the brain pathways involved, and of the body’s reward system, orgasm being a prime example. Fascinating. And one in DISCOVER about how human biology reorganized itself to cope with the punishing burden of an oversized brain. I have remarked before how we developed the animal kingdom’s most efficient cooling system, because that burgeoning brain had to be air conditioned. Also how women made breasts things of attraction instead of repulsion, because they needed help with slow-developing babies. (Interesting that most restaurant chains are hurting for business, in this recession, except for the “breastaurants featuring nubile girls as waitresses.) This ties in also with the importance of fire and cooking, to provide sufficient food for that brain while shrinking our guts. It was a convoluted interplay of diverse elements that finally made us what we are.

I still practice my archery, and it is still abysmal, but worthwhile for the exercise. The arrows tend to go where they choose instead of where I aim them. One day I lost three, and didn’t have enough left to do my regular 12. So I cast about, and discovered a perfect set of carbon shaft arrows I bought years ago but didn’t use because their heads are larger than their stems and tear up my targets. But now I use a different type of target, that stops the arrows by friction between layers. So I tried them, and the targets can handle them. I’m still zeroing them in, but because they are undamaged they tend to be more consistent and my scores are better. Meanwhile one of those three lost arrows showed up across the drive, bent at the tail end; hard to figure how that happened. I found another buried way downrange; I think rain uncovered the fletching so I could find it. The third still hides. So my archery remains its own little adventure, twice a week.

Enough; I have novels to write.

Jewel-Lye was another busy month. I proofread the second collaborative Dragon’s Gold series novel, Serpent’s Silver, for electronic publication, and you know after 22 years since publication I had forgotten practically all of it. In my dotage my memory for the story lines of my own novels is less than ideal. I did not reread Dragon’s Gold because that’s already online, listed under my collaborator, Robert E Margroff. So it was like starting a new series with the second novel, bound to be confusing. And it was, slightly, but in due course I got into it and it has its points. I noticed the magic gauntlets, which are like none I know of elsewhere; when a person puts them on, not only do they fit perfectly, they make him/her competent with weapons and sometimes with words. At one point they were hurrying a person breathlessly along, and then the cave tunnel collapsed just behind: they had known it wasn’t safe to dawdle. Wouldn’t it be nice to have gauntlets like those!

I also proofread a far more recent novel, The Sopaths, catching typos the copy-editor didn’t, as is usually the case. It had been only a year since I wrote this novel, so I remembered most of it. I loved it, ugly as it may be, finding it lucid, innovative, and effective. This is horror, and the horror is mainly in dealing with savage children who have to be killed, not coddled. I expect some outrage by reviewers as they discover that these conscienceless little monsters will not only freely kill, they will actually use s*x to waylay adults. It seems that killing is okay in fiction; child sex is not. So I am bracing myself for the storm. So you are warned: if this is not your kind of story, stay the hell away from it. I believe it will be published by the end of this year.

I answer my fan mail to the extent appropriate. That is, I give a detailed answer to a serious question about writing, focusing on what I deem to be helpful, and a canned appreciation to a I Love Your Books note, even though I do like that latter kind. Some folk seem to be dedicated to taking as much of my time as possible, so my answers may become curt. Some well-meaning readers, knowing I am agnostic with no belief in the supernatural, seek to convert me to Jesus. More on Jesus in a moment. I try to be polite, but when they persist I become sharper there too. Here is an excerpt from a recent one:

You also inquire about my belief in reincarnation. I have no belief in it, or in the soul, or in life after death, or in Heaven or Hell; I merely use them as fictive devices. You ask whether I have read the Bible myself. Oh yes; not the whole of it, but portions. When I wrote Tarot I had Jesus as a character, and I studied him in the Bible, and was satisfied that He existed and was a good man. Thus in my fashion I believe in Jesus, if not in God.

Your earlier letter inquires what I believe. I believe that life needs no supernatural presence or guidance. I try to do what is right simply because it is right, not because of any hope of reward or fear of punishment in any afterlife. I believe that if Jesus came again to the mortal realm, He would respect that, probably more than He would respect the religiosity of politicians cynically angling for votes from the Religious Right. In fact I doubt He would like the Religious Right at all; they would be Pharisees to him, and money-changers in the temple, stirring His utter disgust. As for making war in His name—He would be revolted and outraged by such blatant hypocrisy, for He truly believed in peace. And of course they would crucify Him again, rather than suffer His justified criticism. No true believer in Jesus could stomach the Religious Right.

So, as I told my correspondent, I believe in Jesus, though hardly in the way religious folk do. But increasingly there are indications that Jesus did not exist, at least not as a living person. The August/September 2011 issue of the Humanist magazine FREE INQUIRY has an article discussing that, the essence being that there are no indications of any historical person of that description in the contemporary Roman records. Later records seem to derive from the beliefs of early Christians, hardly the same thing. The New Testament was composed well after that time, based on hearsay. So the historicity of Jesus is doubtful. A newspaper column by Robyn Blumner titled “Goodness without God” has another take: the belief by religious folk that the godless can’t be moral, and that irreligious societies are inherently depraved. In fact the evidence, she says, referring to the book Society Without God by Phil Zuckerman, points the other way: the fear of God is not what keeps people on the straight and narrow. Countries like Sweden and Denmark, where only ten percent believe in Hell compared to 75% of Americans, are comparative models of compassion. They have universal health care, practice mercy, charity, and goodwill toward others, foster generosity and honesty, and care of the sick, elderly, poor, and infirm. Contrast that to religious America, where a fifth of children are raised in poverty, tens of millions of people are without health insurance, and the mentally ill are often condemned to homelessness while Greed Triumphant governs the nation. Maybe it’s just as well that Americans believe in Hell, because otherwise too many would have nowhere to go when they die. So if Jesus existed, and returned today, where do you think He would prefer to be: in Sweden or America? Try to give an honest answer, because you know God is listening, don’t you? Don’t you?

At the turn of the year I moved from Ubuntu to PC Linux OS, which a found I preferred in many ways. It did know how to close files without crashing, it did have a thesaurus, it had paragraph switching, it did post macros without a fight, it provided relevant details when overwriting backup files, it made new Directories without hassle, and so on. But it had its own torpedoes, such as randomly closing files without necessarily saving, sometimes when I was in the middle of typing in them. The screen saver didn’t work; I would set it up and it worked for only that day and then was lost. When it prevented me from backing up my files by covering up the related dialog boxes, which files I had to back up in order to move them elsewhere for printing, I had had enough. Now I was ready to try another distribution. Not to go to Windows; I am wedded to Linux, harsh as she may be as a mistress. So my geek Brian Smith came up and installed Red Hat’s Fedora and LibreOffice. OpenOffice is no longer supported and the open source future is with LibreOffice, which is really the same thing under another name. I had not been partial to Red Hat, dating from a decade back for a reason I now don’t remember—creeping senescence in my dotage, maybe—but Fedora impresses me very well. It has the features I liked in PC Linux, plus an operative screen saver, and it has not yet trashed a file. Sometimes it refuses to write a specific file to a flash drive, or to read one, but will for other drives so I can get around it. I can’t use the thesaurus on its assigned place, Control F7, because the function keys seem to be reserved by Fedora, overriding LibreOffice. So I put it on Control 7. Then we addressed the printing, as my new system would not print unless I moved across to Windows; where the same hardware worked. This turned out to be complicated, and after hours of copying in printing files Brian said that the Hewlett-Packard Linux printing protocols would not work on the new HP printer. It was an HP fault, shame on it, not a Linux fault. But we tried my old HP printer and lo, it worked on the new system. So now I had printing back. I can’t go online, as it balks at a modem same as it does the new printer, but I can survive that. This looks to be my permanent setup, but we’ll see.

Well, let me amend that. For three days I had printing back. Then one morning I printed out a letter, discovered that it had an error, corrected it, and tried to print it again five minutes later—and the printer refused to respond. No error message, no sign of trouble, just no printing. Just like before. So I switched out the two printers again, and now they work, sometimes a bit oddly. Maybe some time I’ll try the old printer on the new system again, just to see if it has changed its mind. But this is not the kind of reliability I crave.

J R Rain and I wrote a sequel to Aladdin Relighted, titled Aladdin Sins Bad, featuring Aladdin’s adventures with Sinbad the Sailor. It seemed that Sinbad’s wife, who he had thought died, had actually survived; it must have been a near-death experience. So Sinbad begs King Aladdin for a ship to garner enough treasure to ransom her from her captor. Aladdin decides to do it, and to go along himself along with his adopted son Duban, who is potentially a powerful wizard and likely heir to the throne, but who really would rather play music. Maybe this will help the boy get his priorities straight. They run afoul of zombies, cloud maidens—that is, maidens made of cloud stuff—sirens, and more dangerous things. So it’s another rousing not too serious adventure, and we hope two or three million readers snap it up, in due course.

One morning as I went out to fetch in the newspapers I saw the sun just above the horizon. What was odd about this? It was that it was still twenty minutes before dawn. I go out as early as I can see to scoot or run, which is about half an hour before down. Yet there was the golden ball right where it should have been twenty minutes later. How did this happen? Had the sun gotten confused and come early? That seems unlikely. I conclude that it was a mirage, the appearance of the sun reflected around the horizon. I have heard of mirages including buildings, trees, camels and whatnot, which are evidently reflected distant scenes, so why not the sun? Maybe this is a common occurrence. It just surprised me; I never saw it before. A solar mirage.

I’m always busy with something else, so don’t pay much attention to TV when my wife has it on. They say the true boss of the household is the one who controls the remote control, and that’s my wife; I have trouble figuring out how to operate the thing when I need to. But I do pick up peripheral impressions. One show I think would be worth watching if I had the time is “Harry’s Law,” where Harry as a middle-aged woman who takes on awkward cases that can have social significance. Another is “So You Think You Can Dance,” wherein amateurs are tested and culled, and soon the survivors become proficient. Granted that modern dance seems to consist largely of well-formed girls seeing how widely they can spread their bare legs toward the audience, as a male who appreciates such views in the name of art I like it.

I’m not a phenomenal fan of Terry Pratchett, dating from when I blurbed his clever novel Mort for the American fantasy market, which features Death as the main character somewhat in the manner my earlier novel On A Pale Horse does. Then in a subsequent interview he suggested that my approach just didn’t work, in effect panning my novel. That was bad form. Pratchett went on to phenomenal success in England, but two years ago was diagnosed with a form of early-onset Alzheimer’s. That’s horrible. If I got something similar, knowing that I would slowly lose my mind and could not prevent it, I would seriously consider suicide, to be accomplished before I became too much of a vegetable. Why saddle my daughter with a senile old man who would no longer even recognize her, while my estate, her inheritance, leached away in medical costs? I once worked at a mental hospital and saw mindless states; that is emphatically not for me. So I would find a way to cut it short. I think just about any rational person would. Well, Pratchett faces that choice, and I applaud his take on it. He made a film Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die. “I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.” He favors the system of voluntary euthanasia in Oregon, Death With Dignity, where a terminal patient can take home lethal medication to use when he’s ready. I agree; it should be universally available. How about some of these conservatives who want the government to stay out of personal business standing up and pushing for this? What could be more personal than deciding to end a wretched existence on one’s own terms? Is there anything noble about pointless terminal suffering? As it is, we do have a commonly available suicide device with considerable political support: it’s called the gun. But there are those of us who would rather not have to spatter blood and brains all over the furniture. I’d like to see a pill you could take, and near the point of no return it delivers a jolt, and at that point you can change your mind and take the antidote, as I think many would. If your decision remains firm, you let it pass, and sink on into painless oblivion.

Incidentals: the Zits comic strip for July 4 showed the wife sitting on the couch, presumably watching TV, between two whoopee cushions going Ffraap! Pweet! Blort! Bbblt! Hornk! Blaat! Putt! Putt! Putt! She gets up and says she’ll go read in bed. Then we see husband and son where the whoopee cushions were. Hubby says “You’re the one who made beanie-weenies for dinner, not us!” Hilarious. Every so often the New York Mint sends me a coin catalog. I’m not into coin collecting in my dotage, but they do have a marvelous variety. Even some paper money, such as some “Godless” dollar bills that lack the “In God We Trust” motto, making them collectors items. I think all coins and bills should be without it, as America is supposed to be a secular nation. A fan once asked me whether America is a Christian nation, and I said no, it’s a secular nation where most citizens are Christians. That’s a vital distinction most folk don’t seem to understand. Then there’s the $5 gold eagle piece with the Liberty woman standing with torch and branch. I realize she is wearing a sort of sling pouch to hold cannon balls or something, but because they are flinging around her chest it looks as if she really really needs a competent bra. Ed Pegg has a program that makes anagrams, and sent me some. Such as “Honey in Traps” as an anagram of my name. Well, I guess that’s better than “Horny Panties.” I received a mailing from the Saint Matthews Church, praying that I would return their Bible Prayer Rug with a list of my needs, and testimonials how folk have profited as much as $46,000 after doing this, or been miraculously healed. Forget it. If Jesus had wanted people to be able to get rich merely by asking for money, he would have said so. This demeans the very idea of religion. Does it require an agnostic to point that out?

There has been a case making the local news. Casey Anthony—no known relation to me—had a cute two year old daughter Caylee who mysteriously died. Her mother did not report the death, and indeed had a fling once free of the responsibility. The indication is that if she did not kill the child deliberately, she did so through gross neglect, then buried the body, saying nothing. Well, the jury did not convict her, and folk are outraged; jury members got death threats. So what’s going on here? Well, the jury was disgusted with Ms. Anthony, and thought she was guilty, but the prosecution did not provide sufficient evidence to exclude some reasonable doubt, so they could not convict. That, ugly as it is, is the way it should be. I served on a jury decades ago, and we hashed it out and came to a verdict. When I returned to work a co-worker who had not studied the facts told me we had decided it wrong. Then he remembered that the defendant was black. “Oh, all right then.” Apparently it was racism that governed his opinion, rather than the facts of the case. You find that sort of thing out in the unwashed general public. It’s so easy to be sure of yourself when you don’t know anything and operate on prejudice. So I don’t fault the Anthony jury; they studied the case, held their noses and came up with the decision they had to. I think she was guilty too, but I can’t blame the jury for doing what I probably would have had to do if I had been on it.

As this column goes to press we are on the verge of a government shutdown. Oh, yes, I have ignorant man on the street opinions, not being part of the jury that will decide that issue. But here’s the way I see it. With President Clinton, whatever you may think of his peccadillo foolishness, we had a monetary surplus. Then the Republicans cheated to get in power, by putting a state, Florida, that actually voted for Gore into the Bush camp, and for a dizzy spell Republicans had effective control of all three branches of government. They used that power to drastically cut taxes, mostly for the richest, and generate at least one expensive war of choice. As a result, America is now hurting for cash and is in what feels like a continuing recession. The stock markets are plunging, gold, the haven of uncertainty, is rising to record highs. They know there’s mischief. So are they realizing the folly of their choices and reversing them? No, they are absolutely refusing to allow any increase in taxes other than those on the poorest, in the form of cuts in social security, medicare, and medicaid. They are playing “Chicken” with the welfare of the nation. They will shut down the government rather than do the sensible thing. This is Greed Triumphant, government by and for the billionaire people and corporations. They don’t care how badly the people or the country suffer as long as they get theirs. I am disgusted not so much at them—as poet Sidney Lanier said, swinehood has no remedy—but at the idiots who voted them into office. Oh, those folk will suffer from their folly in due course; the problem is, so will the rest of us who never supported this nonsense. In sum: they cut taxes on the rich, ran the country into a ditch, and now want to fix it by cutting services to the poor who did not make this mess. Even our endangered gopher tortoises are suffering, because the feds, suffering budget cuts, don’t have the money to protect them. We try to protect them on our tree farm, and they graze right around our house, but that’s not enough. All in the name of giving yet more money to the billionaires. I suspect it was greedy irresponsibility like this that reduced the Roman Empire to ineffectiveness. Now it’s our turn. Others have commented. Susie Lee relayed comments by photojournalist Bob Church, who says that the old adage was that reporters and photographers were liberal and editors were conservative; that reminds me of my impression that writers are imaginative and editors are mentally stifled. Church also says that the ethics of Fox News do not even require retractions for misstatements. “I’m used to politicians having zero ethics. I’ve met hundreds and the vast majority are deep-fried poop nuggets smothered in caca-sauce who would rigorously impeach another politician for a limited affair while impregnating their own mistress and lying to cover it up. There’s not a single one I would trust to not steal my toilet paper if they used my bathroom. But when I see journalists without ethics, I’m honestly enraged.” Yes, he describes New Gingrich well enough, and the man is running for president. Former Texas newspaperman John Young says the Bush tax cuts did not spur investment; job growth in the Bush years was only one seventh that of the Clinton years, and wages also fell. The last time the economy was doing really well was on the heels of Clinton’s tax increases. And Paul Krugman says that one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dithering over the size of the ransom. Some say well, both sides are at fault; he points out that this is not the case. “The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism.” Indeed. So at the last moment a deal may be in the making to save the country the agony of running out of money and defaulting on its obligations, but it’s a shameful business regardless. The Tea Partiers don’t seem to care who gets hurt, as long as the billionaires pay no taxes. They are true politicians, in the caca sense. Caca, as I remember from my childhood year in Spain, is shit.

A few more odds & ends: Today CEO pay runs 300 times what the average worker makes. I read of a nice solution to this unfairness: have a flat tax on income that is multiplied by the CEO-to-worker pay ratio. So those CEOs would pay 300 times the income tax the worker does. That would likely bring reform in a hurry. And the Internet is a monument to intellectual freedom—that unscrupulous pirates are using to steal authors blind, downloading copyrighted material without paying for it. Don’t I know it; all my books are being pirated. So should we encourage Internet freedom, or suppress it? And NEW SCIENTIST had an article on the hardest problem extant: does P = NP? It seems this is highly significant. Maybe some day I’ll be able to understand it well enough to form an opinion. As yet I don’t even know what the letters stand for. And a water crisis is looming, while we busily flush potable water down the drain at the rate of a hundred gallons a day per person, thanks to flush toilets and such. What do we do with valuable pure water? We shit in it. That is more idiocy that will have to stop.

The month of Jewel-Lye was crowded as I worked on the collaboration, proofread books for e-publication, and tried to keep up with the email. My wife suffered a reaction to her Boniva bone-thickening treatment, like mine with Reclast but not as bad; still it gave her a fever for ten days and made her feel bad. She is doing better now, if not great. So some things I simply had to postpone to next month, when I hope to have more time. Meanwhile I am wrestling with publishers over exactly who controls e-rights to my earlier titles; my lawyer is negotiating for me. I hope I don’t have to make a global legal precedent to win my case, but will if I have to. A number of titles are in limbo until this is settled, but in due course I hope to have all them published electronically, including especially with Kindle. This is my answer to those who query why they can’t find some of their choices on Kindle.  Meanwhile also my agent is negotiating prospective television deals for both Xanth and Letters To Jenny, two rather different projects that also require lawyer involvement. Did I mention that the month was crowded? There will surely be news on several fronts in future months.

I read Aladdin Sins Bad for proofing. That’s the sequel to Aladdin Relighted, both done as collaborations with J R Rain of bestselling Vampire For Hire fame. In this novel Aladdin travels to sea with Sinbad the Sailor, also of Arabian Nights fame, as they go to rescue Sinbad’s captive wife. They have wild adventures, including cloud maidens made entirely of cloud, zombies, and a session with the Sirens, whom they manage to balk with a spell making themselves temporarily tone-deaf so the Sirens’ magic song can’t enchant them. They wind up making an alliance with the Sirens, and taking one of them along on the rest of the voyage, in the form of a ring shaped like a lovely nude woman. So you can see this isn’t exactly classic mythology. This is light entertainment, not Literature. Read it for slightly naughty fun.

I read Red Dragon, Green Dragon, by Tony and Virginia Chandler, to be published by DOUBLE DRAGON PUBLISHING. This is fitting, because it’s about two dragons, a red one and a green one. I can’t say the authors are fully polished writers, but this is one rousing dragon-fighting story, with a thin slice of romance along the way. Owain is hired to kill a red dragon that is ravaging crops and killing domestic animals in England. He does so, but it is one bruising battle, because dragons are tough, they can fly, they can breathe fire, and they have huge appetites. Then news comes of a worse dragon: a larger green one. Owain joins a small band of dragon hunters and they orient on this new menace. This dragon is about sixty feet long, and has a thing against human beings. I can’t blame it; they mistreated it when it was small. At one point they are hiding from it in a forest, and the dragon urinates on them, not realizing they are there. It takes days to wash off the stench. I sort of wish they could have found a dragon haven where they could have left a few dragons, far from human regions, so as not to extinguish such a formidable species. The world is surely a duller place without them.

We saw the movie Cowboys and Aliens. Reviews have been mixed, but I loved it. It’s a western, with a deliberately standard western story line, tough rancher, spoiled half crazy son who makes mischief with impunity, stranger coming into town who doesn’t much care whose son the boy is, he needs discipline, townsmen who don’t like the situation but lack the power to do much about it. Boy shoots a deputy, gets arrested, father brings a posses into town to break him out. At which point it changes. Aliens with flying machines resembling ten-winged dragonflies raid the town, lassoing a number of people and hauling them away. The people realize that they have a bigger problem than a spoiled rancher’s son. Meanwhile, one man wakes in the desert without a memory, and a large weird bracelet on his left arm that he can’t get off. He’s tough; when three riders decide to dispatch him, he quickly bashes them and takes their horse, clothing, and gun. He’s in town when the aliens raid, and lo, the bracelet comes alive and blasts an alien flyer out of the sky. It’s a weapon! Things proceed from there, and I admire the way the aliens are not just green monsters, but creatures with appropriate technology and an ugly plan for Earth. Their spaceship is a marvel of alien-ness. Cowboys, villains, townsfolk, Indians all have to get together to deal with the aliens. There’s a kind of romance, too, as a woman who is actually a different alien is here to try to stop Earth from being destroyed the way her world was. We know she’s not remotely human, but she looks attractively female, and there is a kind of romance developing. After all, in a western, who cares what’s inside a woman as long as she looks good? This is really my kind of junk.

I had my 77^th birthday. It was a routine day, with cards from my wife, sister, and a couple of fans. We celebrated by buying a New York Cheesecake and having small slices. Small, because since I got my dentures I chew better, and I started to gain weight on the same food I’d been eating all along, so now I have to watch what I eat. I drew a line in the sand, 145 pounds nude after my exercise run, before breakfast, and when I nudge over that I cut back more. A big piece of cheesecake would have put me over. Weight control requires constant discipline, and some hunger pangs. But discipline is one of my qualities, along with imagination. I wanted to have a good run in my new age, but the first one was right after a rain with high humidity and puddles, and the second was a drenchpour that delayed me half an hour and soaked my feet as I splashed through puddles, some hundreds of feet long. The third one was ideal. The morning temperature was a hot 77°F, which meant it would be slow, but it was dry. I moved well and knew I had a good run in the making. Then, a bit before the halfway point, my right toe snagged on the ground and suddenly I was down on my face, my first bad fall in 20 years. I picked myself up and ran on, spitting out gravel, blood dripping from my right hand, my forehead, and my knees, but my bones were sound, the wounds superficial. My right knee looked a mess, and my forehead, which dripped blood for hours, and my lower lip. Somehow my nose escaped with only a few small scratches. It could have been worse. Actually it was a good run in terms of time; maybe the pain goosed me to better performance. When my wife fell last year the injuries hardly showed, but she was months in recovery from bone fractures. I looked a bloody mess, but was essentially okay. For those considering it, my advice is don’t fall on your face at age 77; it’s not much fun even if you’re not really hurt, and it probably won’t improve your appearance.

I proofread the third Dragon’s Gold series novel, Chimaera’s Copper, a collaboration with Robert E Margroff first published in 1990, for republication electronically. The chimaera here is a huge beast with three heads: human male, human female, and dragon, who regards human beings as inferior life forms, fit mainly to be eaten. But I rather like it. You see, the three heads have quite different personalities, with the male being gruff human who likes mayhem, the dragon being, well, a dragon, and the female being Mervania, a rather winsome, practical sort. All are telepathic. When our hero Kelvin first sees Mervania’s head he assumes that the rest of her is human too, similarly shapely. That is emphatically not the case, but Mervania enjoys flirting with him a while before revealing herself. See what I mean? She’s fun. There’s a whole lot of other action in this novel, with a rousing conclusion, but it’s mainly Mervania I remembered twenty years later.

I read The Frostbourne Chronicles Book One / A Fool’s Errand by Samuel J E Trawick, self published at BOOKLOCKER.com; the author sent me a copy. This is typical amateur fiction in one sense: ideas galore, but not great on spelling, punctuation or typos. It is the story of a young man who somewhat inadvertently organizes the resistance to the conquest of the land by The Empire. The enemy’s program is simple in essence: they march into a village, and the villagers must either join or die. But it turns out that some villages are able to defend themselves. There are Dwarves, Elves, crossbreeds, warriors, and some folk with obscure magical powers. Daenar is a young barbarian who is guided into leading the resistance, joined by assorted others. They try to fight a huge bear, and to make a deal with the Elves to fight the Empire, but the Elves are arrogant and prefer to go it alone. It is evidently setting up for the larger campaign to come, with Daenar strongly  influenced by his magical girlfriend Teppia, who has secrets she has not yet shared with him. Fantasy adventure with occasional brutal violence, and sex.

Two weeks and two days after my fall, I fell again, worse. I was on the scooter, just at the top of our slight hill, not going fast, and didn’t see a newly fallen branch. It was about four feet long and three inches wide. My scooter smacked into it and I went over and landed on hand, knees, and left shoulder. The back of my right hand was horrendously scraped, blood all over, and my right knee was re-scraped worse than before, with lesser scrapes on left knee, ankle, elbow, and a bruised left thigh and big left toe. I wore a helmet and goggles and suffered no head damage, but what didn’t show was what hurt: that shoulder. My wife took me to the emergency room, the same one I took her to last year, and they X-rayed my shoulder and left ribs. They concluded that I might have some faintly fractured ribs, nothing serious. But even a non-serious fracture at my age is mischief. I am in pain as I type this, largely unable to use my left arm. I type by resting the heel of my hand on the base of the keyboard and using my fingers. I make typos, but it works. I sleep sitting up in my study easy chair, as it is agony to try to lie down. Getting off the chair or off the toilet can be a struggle; I have to hunch forward, lever my weight over my feet, and lift without using my arms if possible. My right arm has full mobility, but if I use it to brace my body,  the tension impacts my ribs and shoulder and I get jolt of pain. I can’t cough to clear my lungs, because of the pain. So I am not in good shape, hoping mainly that things will heal enough to allow me to function more comfortably. My exercise program has been wiped out. Putting on pants one-handed requires a balancing act, and donning a shirt is a contortionist challenge. Ever try pulling on socks one-handed? For sixty years I have eaten left handed; now, perforce, right handed. I must use my right hand for almost everything, and somehow the scrapes on the back of it constantly bang into things, delivering jolts of pain. When I wash my hands I no longer put both hands to the towel to dry them; I take the towel down with my right hand and bring it to my left hand. Sometimes I pick up my left hand with my right and place it where it needs to be. All to avoid more pain, to the extent feasible. The emergency room doctor prescribed pain pills, but I take them only at night so I can sleep; I don’t like to risk clouding my mind at other times. Correspondence is suffering, and of course my current novel, Esrever Doom, (that’s Mood Reverse spelled backward) has slowed to a crawl. Routine things take twice the time they did before. I still make meals and wash dishes, slower.

So the rest of this column will be abbreviated; I simply don’t have the time or energy. I saw a podiatrist about my painful right foot, between falls, and learned that it was a clogged sweat gland with the sweat backing up. I sent contracts and payments for my anthology One and Wonder, my favorite early SF and Fantasy stories; whole lot of paperwork there. And as noted above, at mid month I started writing Esrever Doom, Xanth #37. Fan mail is constant, as are routine household chores. I updated the ongoing Survey of Electronic Publishers and related services. I have the usual pile of clippings and things to comment on, but this time will give them really short shrift. Deon Duke sent a notice reminding women to walk naked Saturday August 20 to freak out Muslim men, thus abating a terrorism threat in America. I’m not sure how many did walk or freak. In Sandy Ego a teenager was throwing rocks at cars, and someone in a car shot him with a crossbow arrow. Naturally I don’t approve such violence, yet in my secret heart I’m suppressing a serves-him-right chortle. Dear Abby refers to a V triad, wherein a woman has open sexual relations with her husband and a live-in lover but the two men do not have sex with each other. Wow! Things have liberalized since my day. “Luann” comic strip has a meeting between the man’s mean-spirited but sightly boss Ann Eiffel, formerly of Borderline Books, and his girlfriend Daytona. It seems compatible, and he says “Guess she’s not upset you are here.” Daytona says “Oh, she’s way past upset.” I love that. Women know women as men don’t. As I child I knew the song “Pop goes the Weasel” but never knew what it meant. Turns out the weasel was a wool spindle whose mechanical counter went Pop! when a certain number of turns were made. And an Internet circulated picture of Jesus with I think the woman of ill repute who anointed his feet, urging me to relay it widely because those who do, get good fortune and those who don’t, suffer ugly things like deaths in the family. Speaking as an agnostic who knows Jesus, I say Jesus would not approve any such circular. He did not believe in physical threats and rewards, but in spiritual enlightenment. So many folk speak in Jesus name who seem to know nothing about him.

Our daughter rented us the video True Grit that my wife wanted to see. We saw it, after a half hour struggle with players that decided not to play, or that played but refused to heed the
Play button when it was time to see the main feature, leaving us on perpetual previews. I get annoyed at self-willed machines that do what they choose to do, instead of what you want them to do. Similar is true with my Fedora system now; it’s good and I like it, but for two weeks it refused to close properly and I had to recover from a crash each morning. Finally it decided to return to properly loading my files, but then it decided not to recognize any backup drive. I had to reset to clear that. Anyway, Grit is not my kind of movie, but there was one sequence that struck me. This fourteen year old girl is determined to avenge her murdered father, and at one point a Texas Ranger has had enough of her attitude and decides to spank her. He hauls her off her horse and whams her repeatedly on the backside with his hand, then gets a branch and starts in with that. At that point her companion, a man with an unsavory reputation, draws his pistol and points it at the ranger. He doesn’t say anything, but the ranger gets the message: enough is enough. He gives over, and the man puts the gun away. Nicely nuanced.

Other items: new study shows that the taller you are, the more likely you are to get cancer. In the course of a lifetime almost all of the substance of your body is replaced, so you are not the same person you were. Newspaper editorial essay of advice to President Obama—I am wary of such things, as it is way easier to give advice when you’re not the one who will reap the consequences, but this one has points—saying that stories were how our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values—I agree emphatically, of course–and that Obama should tell the story of the recklessness and greed of conservatives, who claimed that if we just rewarded such things all would be well. But of course it wasn’t well, and never has been. So he should stop trying to placate these greed-heads and get on with helping the nation. I agree with the sentiment, but doubt that either the greed-heads or Obama will pay attention, as the ship of state slowly sinks lower in the icy water. Some folk just have to go to hell in their own fashion. The tragedy is that they are taking us with them.

So I have succeeded in having a shorter column, the hard way. I hope that next month I am in fitter fettle.

We passed the second anniversary of our daughter’s death with quiet reflection. I still rail at the cosmos for depriving her of half her life. Our cancer memorial wrist bands, black for melanoma, are beginning to wear thin and may in time break, so we are experimenting with other bands. So now I am wearing the original one, plus a broad PEACE band that I know she would have liked. She was a peace activist and sometimes used the nickname Peacy, for her initials P C, Penelope Carolyn. We’ll always wear our hearts on our sleeves, in this respect.

My recovery from my falls continues. In the first week, I was barely able to do light exercises, and to walk out to fetch the newspapers, left arm clamped to my chest. After two weeks I was able to sleep lying down, to do heavier exercises, and to jog out for the papers. After three weeks I resumed running, faster each time, and was able to draw the right- and left-side bows again. The bashed shoulder was the left one, but it was the right-side bow that gave me more trouble. It seems that my left arm could pull better than it could push. By four weeks my run speeds were back up to par, and I resumed archery, albeit haltingly. I still feel the shoulder when I lift my arm over my head, but it’s only discomfort rather than pain. In the first week, on pain pills so I could sleep, I got constipation and gained two pounds. Once I got off the pills my normal rhythms returned and the weight dropped back down. So I am essentially well again. I appreciate all the well-wishes I received.

I’m 77, but I still like sex. The problem is that once I quit with Viagra, because I refused to be price-gouged any more—I mean, $30 for one pill?–I had difficulty achieving and maintaining a firm erection. That makes sex awkward. The desire remains, just not the ability. I could do it, and did do it, but it’s a bit like driving the highway with tires inflated only fifty percent, sort of a drag. So I checked out other things. To condense my experimentation somewhat, all the non-prescription remedies I tried have one thing in common: they don’t work, regardless of grandiose claims. That’s why Viagra and its prescription competitors get away with gouging: they know they’re the only real games in town. But I thought maybe if I could rev up my whole body, that would restore my erectile function too. So I tried the hormone DHEA, which stands for such a complicated name that it’s much easier to stay with the initials. The body makes it naturally, but with increasing age that declines considerably. That’s one reason young men are more studly than old men. It has a slew of potential benefits: it can facilitate loss of weight, stimulate the immune system, protect against cancer, improve brain function, enhance sex drive, protect against diabetes, prevent osteoporosis, improve mood, ease symptoms of menopause (I don’t actually need that), and prevent heart disease. I am interested in all those benefits, especially, at the moment, the sex improvement. I got 50 mg pills, and tried one a day for a week. No discernible effect. So I upped it to two a day for a week. Still no effect. So I tried three a day for a week. Still nothing. Finally I tried four a day, and stayed there for a month or so. Still nothing. Except that one day as I looked up in a tree to check something, when I brought my head back level I suffered a bout of dizziness. Dizziness is dangerous; I certainly don’t want to take another fall. One of the side effects of DHEA can be dizziness. So I eased off, and also finally got the blood test that my fall had delayed. And got a call from my doctor’s office: get the bleep off of DHEA!! Normal is something like 75. I had something like 450. So now I’m off it, for now, to allow it to sink to its natural level in my body. Then we’ll see what dosage would be in order for me. It is surely worth getting it right. But I already know that this, too, is not the answer to softening erections. Sigh. I know most men my age lose interest in sex, so their incapacity doesn’t bother them, but I remain keenly aware of women, especially young shapely ones, as I window-shop in public. It’s like bird watching: look, appreciate, but don’t touch. But I like to think that I could touch, were it appropriate. To have the interest, the desire, but inadequate ability is a serious frustration. It’s not what I call a subdivision of Hell, the way a death in the family is, but maybe it’s a subdivision of Purgatory. But unless Viagra prices come down ten-fold, I’m not buying.

I read The World in Six Songs by Daniel J Levitin. There’s a story behind its acquisition. An acquaintance had some software for me, and said to send him a 4MB flash drive and he’d put it on and send it back. There was a sale on BigLots on 4M flash drives, about $8 per, so we went there and I think got the last two. Then nothing came of the software, so now I’d using the Kodak 4M drive to back up my current Xanth novel as I write it. While there we browsed, and I discovered used DVDs on sale for one to five dollars per. So I bought a bundle, a number of which I reported on in a prior column. And my wife found hardcover books on sale for as little as fifty cents. She relayed one to me. Originally it was $25.95, reduced to $3, then reduced to .50. Thus I got and in due course read Six Songs. I tell you, this volume is worth a lot more than half a dollar. The author is a musician who believes, as I do, that what distinguishes human beings from other animals is art, and music is a prime art. So is storytelling, but that’s my thesis, not his. Not only does man have the capacity to appreciate art, it is central to his existence; wherever man has gone, art has gone with him. Art makes it possible for man to gather in larger groups without being fragmented by quarrels, and thus to displace other creatures, including Neandertal man. When it comes to song, he lists six fundamental types: Friendship, Joy, Comfort, Knowledge, Religion, and Love. There’s a chapter on each, with many relevant thoughts and many songs listed and quoted. “What we call emotions are nothing more than complex neurochemical states in the brain that motivate us to act.” “The message that death is just a portal, not the end, and you will live on afterward, is more comforting than the alternative, that death ends everything definitively.” “The most elaborate and largest illusion evolution has given us concerns consciousness itself.” “This yearning for meaning lies at the foundation of what makes us human.” “No one of us alive today had an ancestor who died in infancy.” “It saddens me so deeply what we, the Woodstock generation, have done to our planet. And nobody listens! We keep trashing it, ruining it, there won’t be anyone left fifty years from now and it’s purely our Tower of Babel arrogance that has brought us to this.” Amen.

This book came at a time, coincidentally, that I was noting some of the songs that constantly run through my head. There always seems to be something, and it can be from one I just heard, or something I heard as a child. Some I can identify, some I can’t. Some examples: the “Sheep May Safely Graze” theme, which I understand Bach wrote. “I only know when he began to dance with me I could have danced danced danced all night” from My Fair Lady. “For the banks are made of marble, with a guard at every door, and the vaults are filled with silver that the people sweated for.” “Meadowlands, meadowlands, meadows green and fields in blossom” a lovely song that we don’t hear much because it is I think the Russian national anthem. “And the whale gave a flounder with its tail, and the boat capsized, and I lost my darling man, and he’ll never never sail again, Great God! He’ll never sail again.” “Irene goodnight, Irene goodnight. Goodnight Irene goodnight Irene, I gets you in my dreams.” That was I believe the original Leadbelly version, later sanitized to “I’ll see you in my dreams.” “I feel pretty, oh so pretty…” From West Side Story. “Cheer up weary traveler; after darkness comes the day.” “Once upon a time I was falling in love; now I’m only falling apart.” “I wish I were a fascinating bitch…” “Where’s that jolly jumbuck you’ve got in your tucker bag? You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me” from the Australian “Waltzing Matilda” with its fabulous dialect. So was Matilda a girlfriend who didn’t want to dance, and it became a way of saying a person had to do something he/she didn’t want to? “It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry…” “I joined the navy to see the world, but nowhere could I find a girl as sweet as Cindy, the girl I left behind.” “Early one morning just as the day was dawning, I heard a maid cry in the valley below: ‘Oh don’t deceive me, oh never leave me, how could you use a poor maiden so?’” “My favorite pastime after dark is goosing statues in the park; if Sherman’s horse can take it why can’t you?” “Oh sinner man, where you going to run to, all on that day?” “Glory glory what’s it to ya, I run around the house with nothing on at all!” “I want a beer just like the beer that pickled dear old dad. It was the beer and the only beer that daddy ever had. A good old fashioned beer with lots of foam, took ten men to carry daddy home…” “Load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.” “All day we faced the barren waste without the taste of water, cool clear water.” “Everybody loves Saturday night…” “If you miss the train I’m on you will know that I am gone, you can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.” “You put your right hand in, and you shake it all about.” “Now dragons live forever, but not so little boys” from “Puff the Magic Dragon.” “Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume, spells a life of gathering doom; suffering, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in this stone cold tomb.” “I resolve not to yell ‘Take off that hat!’ I’ll remove it gently with a baseball bat.” “Walk beside me oh my brother! All for one and one for all.” “A cannonball don’t pay no mind, if you’re gentle or you’re kind…” “In Plymouth town there lived a maid (bless you young women!) and she was mistress of her trade.” “But I loved my hurricane, Donna was her name…” That’s my version of a once popular song fitted to a once devastating hurricane we saw in Florida circa 1960; you contemporary pantywaists haven’t seen one like that. “Ah, ay, ay, ay, come to your window. Ere moonlight pale and the starlight fail, come my lovely Ceilito Lindo.” (I think I messed up the spelling.) “Young girl inside of me just had to learn, that the woman inside of me must have its turn; what meant so much to me before has no importance anymore, it’s true, since I met you.” “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saves a wretch like me.” “Papa’s going to shoe my pretty little foot, mama’s going to glove my hand, sister’s going to kiss my red ruby lips; I don’t need no man.” And on; they just keep coming. Some I hear snatches of but never complete, leaving me forever wondering, like “Me oh my I love him still…” Who loves whom? There’s surely a story, and song, there.

Two of my novels are being published in OctOgre. One is Xanth #35 Well-Tempered Clavicle, About a walking skeleton Princess Dawn decides to marry. He uses his clavicles to play lovely music on his ribs. The other is quite different, the horror-shocker The Sopaths, about the way overpopulation causes the world to run out of souls, so babies start getting born without them, and thus have no capacity for conscience or other finer human traits. They are utterly vicious children, and the only way to stop them is to kill them. This story is ugly in a way Xanth never is, and I expect to encounter a backlash against it, maybe efforts to censor or suppress it. I am not sure a novel quite like this has been published before. We’ll see. The horror anthology What Fears Become has also been published by IMAJIN BOOKS. My short story “Lost Things” is therein, so Anthony completists can find it there. It’s not horror, actually, but was written for THE HORROR ZINE. Editor Jeani Rector busted her bottom assembling and promoting this volume, and I understand there is good material therein. At the moment I’m too jammed to read a tight 373 page volume, but maybe I will once I complete my current novel.

We saw the movie Dolphin Tale, our first 3D experience. They gave us glasses to use, and I switched constantly between the glasses and bare eyes, studying the difference. Actually it’s not a lot, maybe a 15% enhancement of effect, except that without them background lines tend to fuzz. The movie itself is a fairly standard family-type boy and dolphin story that takes place in Clearwater Florida: boy sees dolphin stranded on the beach and injured, and helps alert the authorities, who take it in for treatment. The dolphin likes him, maybe because he cut the tangled rope off her, and that enables him to become involved in her treatment. But she loses her tail fins, which makes swimming a real problem. Until they manage to make an artificial tail and get her to use it. Then she is healthy and happy again. It ties in with others who lose limbs, notably human beings: there is increasing hope. Well enough done, and worth seeing.

News item: soon there will be another option for disposing of the dead: melting. Dissolve the body into liquid, pour it away, or whatever. It’s called bio-cremation, and is surely environmentally friendly. Will I want to take that option myself, when my time comes? Maybe; I’ll think about it. I understand the average American man lives 76 years; I have beaten that, but my time is surely diminishing. Oh—and the average American woman lives 80 years. They still really don’t know why women outlive men on average. Perhaps related: the world is now hitting seven billion in population. There’s a national campaign 7 Billion and Counting, trying to point up the way we are crowding animal and plant species to extinction. They plan to distribute 100,000 Endangered Species Condoms. I fear it will take a bigger effort than that. My novel Climate of Change shows one way, and The Sopaths shows another. Essentially, make universal contraception available, so that women have to opt out to nullify it in order to conceive, or provide hormones that make women breathtakingly sexy but also sterile until they quit using it. How many would? Maybe as many who don’t eat fattening sweets.

From THE WEEK: An editorial. “The average American carries more than $6,000 in credit card debt; about half of all retirees have saved less than a quarter of what they will need; and our elected leaders convince the gullible it’s possible to balance budgets while preserving their benefits and cutting taxes.” To which I add: why do we keep electing these so-called leaders? Is our voting public really made of morons or the willfully ignorant? Or are politicians liars who don’t practice what they preach? Or are the elections rigged? Or all of the above? A report says that 25 of the top 100 corporations paid their CEOs more than they paid in taxes, and 20 spent more in lobbying Congress than in taxes. Maybe that explains it. From a column quoted: “College is supposed to teach you how to think, not what you must think.” I find that seemingly minor distinction to be major. And from the same magazine’s Wit & Wisdom section: “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man a more clever devil.” C S Lewis. But how does that align with the prior statement? Maybe college should teach some what as well as how. And comment on smarts: raw scores on IQ tests have steadily improved over the past century. Are we really getting smarter? There is doubt. Some evidence shows that meanwhile creativity is declining. I’m not really surprised. IQ is good at measuring the ability to memorize and parrot back information, but truly creative answers are apt to lower a person’s score. I, as a lifelong creative thinker, have been there. I had to get out of the box and do my own thing to make my mark. I did, though of course I get neither the money nor the critical acceptance less ornery writers do.

Newspaper article on Erotic Capital as presented by the book of that title by Catherine Hakim. She says why not use it to get ahead? Why not indeed. Smart folk use their brains to get ahead, strong people use their muscles, rich people use their money, sociopaths use their unscrupulosity. So why shouldn’t sexy people use their sex appeal? Is there any other reason those empty-headed women are running for president on the Republican ticket?

I haven’t had much use for DOW the big chemical corporation. But they ran an 8 page ad that impresses me. It says they are working to make lighter and more durable blades for big windmills, encouraging trees on rooftops, a huge Tower of Power that utilizes solar energy by heating air, which then rises up the tower, where turbines generate power, and releases clean air. Growing curved bamboo to make natural-substance bikes. Designing a universal flu vaccine that may be available in five years to wipe out that plague. Working on a General Motors self-driving electric pod car. I am impressed.

Robyn Blumner column: “Republicans would rather see the full faith and credit of this nation destroyed than close tax breaks for oil companies. If there is any silver lining, it’s the revelation for all to see that one political party will capitulate for the good of the country, and one won’t. For those biblically inclined it should remind them of the judgment of Solomon.” That is, the woman who preferred to lose her baby rather than see it hurt. That was true love. But for “conservative” Republicans it seems that greed trumps patriotism. Better to reign in Hell…

They are narrowing down the hiding places of the Higgs boson. It won’t be long before they either find it or prove it doesn’t exist. The idea is that Higgs brings mass to all other matter, so if there’s no Higgs there’s a problem. Personally, I don’t see why mass has to be hand carried to every item; I think it could be inherent in matter. But I’m not a scientist. Possibly related: Now there’s a theory that dark matter may consist of trillions of stellar-mass black holes. The problem is, these things are difficult to see, since they don’t give off light. But astronomers are looking. And buried deep in the newspapers an item of potentially phenomenal importance: evidence the neutrinos travel slightly faster than light. Can this be true? Stay tuned.

We watched the first presentation of Terra Nova, wherein folk from the future travel to the dinosaur age for living room. It was hard to follow the dark complication of the future, but the dinosaur sequences were fun. Maybe copying Jurassic Park, but my kind of junk.

Oh—and just in case anyone has not yet caught on, I am of the liberal social-religious-political persuasion, and this is where I vent.

I read Lake of Spirits by Keith Robinson. The is the fourth novel in the author’s Island of Fogseries, intended for young readers; the nine major characters are twelve years old. Don’t let that fool you; as with the others, this is a hard-hitting story that may actually be more suitable for adults than children. This time the children are joined by a shape changer who is one of the miengu water spirits, Jolie. She is seventeen and absolutely gorgeous; all the boys are instantly in her thrall. So far so good. But as the cover summary says, “This is a tale of paranoia, betrayal, and impending doom.” yes it is. Jolie leads them into a series of misadventures which are not necessarily innocent. For example, she gets one shy boy to read his not-very-good poetry aloud to villagers, who promptly laugh him offstage, as it were. He is humiliated. Was it an accident, or is there a broad mean streak in Jolie? The girls see her as ugly and don’t like her at all. Then one critical girl disappears. Jolie pretends innocence, but they suspect her, as it turns out with good reason. I don’t think it is giving away anything to say that Jolie is not at all what she appears. But what she is, is the point of the novel. It’s tense, ugly, and makes absolute sense. You won’t completely enjoy reading it, but this is another good one, well worth your attention. If I may lapse into a broader discussion (and who can stop me?) I suggest that this whole series is the kind of thing traditional publishers have foolishly shut out. Thank fate for new options, such as self publishing and electronic publishing, notably Kindle, that enables some excellent writers to bypass the closed shop that is Parnassus and reach their readers directly. There’s a revolution occurring in publishing, and I’m glad to see it. www.UnearthlyTales.com

I generally go with my wife on routine shopping, so as to be there when she needs me. I don’t make a big thing of it, but I don’t ever want to not be there when she needs me, whether it is to carry a grocery bag or help her if she falls. So I was there in Kmart while she looked at books. She reads way more than I do. I saw a bin of remaindered hardcover books, $5 per. I glanced at one, and recognized the name: David Benioff. He is reputed to be one of the better Hollywood script writers, and he was going to do the movie adaptation of Xanth, before the financial crunch that wiped out that and many other projects. He even sent me a fan letter, about seven years ago, so he is by definition a good guy. Apart from that, the book looked interesting, as it related to the siege of Leningrad during World War Two. As it happens, in my GEODYSSEY series I have a 50,000 word chapter on the siege of Stalingrad in the same war; both were part of the German-Russian front. It has been said that if World War Two was the greatest war in the history of mankind, the German-Russian front might well be the second greatest, by itself. We in America tend to think that the war was about American involvement, but it was a hell of a lot more than that. We never suffered the truly awful consequences of it. So from my vantage of having researched and written about one part of that front, I felt I could form an opinion on another author’s treatment of another part. All of which explains why I bought the book at one-fifth cover price. It did not prepare me for a far more powerful emotional experience that I anticipated. I’ll say it outright: I never got the chance to see what kind of screenplay Benioff could make from my fiction, but now I have sampled his fiction, and he’s one hell of a fine writer. This book put me back in World War Two and held me fascinated to the end, and when it was done I felt separation pangs. The story seems simple enough: the introduction explains how his grandfather told him of a week in the siege of Leningrad, allowing him to novelize it. Then commences the story of that week in 1942. Lev is required to find a dozen fresh eggs for an officer’s daughter’s wedding cake, when there are no eggs to be had. He and a cellmate who became his friend, Kolya, set out to accomplish that, and have some horrendous adventures along the way. Hunger and terrible cold haunt them throughout. For example, a suspiciously well-fed man says he has eggs, but it’s a trap: the man is a cannibal, with human bodies hanging like animal carcasses from his chamber. They barely escape. Later they come to a house where Russian girls are kept for German officers’ entertainment. Why do they do it? Here’s a hint: when one 14 year old girl tried to walk away from it, they caught her and hacked off her feet. When the Germans come this time they are killed by sharpshooting partisans, including a young woman, Vika, who can score from 400 yards. Lev rather likes her. Later they are captured by Germans who tell them that anyone who can read will have a relatively cushy job as a translator of Russian documents. Vika quietly warns him, and Lev pretends illiteracy. Sure enough, all the literates are summarily shot. The novel is filled with details like this that provide a real feel for the horror of the situation. I was painfully moved when Kolya is hit by friendly fire. “It’s not the way I pictured it,” he says as he dies. Ouch! At the end they get the eggs, and Vika goes her way. Only to return three years later, after the war, her red hair grown out, beautiful, to be with Lev, who never stopped loving her. “No one looks that good by accident.” So she becomes the author’s grandmother, who never talks about the war. That was wondrously satisfying. The novel haunted me for days after I finished reading it. That’s the mark of excellent writing. So I’m glad I found this book; it truly moved me. Benioff is a fan of mine? Now I’m a fan of his.

I still ply my archery, still with abysmal scores. But the score is not the point; I do it for arm exercise, right side and left side, and heaving the targets into place. I score it only to keep it interesting. Sunday OctOgre 30, the day I wrote most of this Column, was typical: Right side I scored in the center with one arrow, and missed the target with 10 of the remaining 12, for a score of 1-10 = -9. Left side I scored with 1, and missed with 8. So the left side did better than the right side, this time. I saw one arrow veer left but never heard it hit; sure enough, I couldn’t find it. After searching I realized that it had found the one inch wide gap between the main target and a baffle target and sneaked through; it was about 50 feet beyond. But another one I couldn’t find. However I did find one arrow I had lost a prior day, and one I may have lost a prior year, because it was buried underground in the forest with no fletching left; the metal detector found it. So I retain 12 arrows, ranging in condition from good to awful. If I had better equipment I’m sure I could score much better, but I’m ornery and will stay with my battered instruments as I do in other aspects of my life, notably sexual. We aging fossils must stick together.

60 Minutes had an interesting item. I usually miss this excellent program because it’s on at the time I’m making supper, but my wife called me over and we just had to have supper late. It made the case that artist Vincent Van Gogh did not commit suicide, and its case was persuasive. For one thing, he painted several pictures after the supposed last one. For another, he shouldn’t have had access to a gun. And why shoot himself in the gut, instead of in the head? It seems more likely that local teens, who liked to tease him, pretended to shoot him, and the gun was loaded. So they bugged out, and he chose not to blame them. A sad story. After his death, of course, he became perhaps the most famous artist ever, with paintings worth millions of dollars. We have one that I may have looked at for more time, cumulatively, than he took in painting it, and after 20 years I’m still finding new aspects in it.

Personal: my recovery from my falls continues, and I’m about 95% back. I still get shoulder twinges and my strength is not quite what it was, but I should get there in due course. On another problem: Folk ask me why I don’t just pay the price of Viagra so I can rise properly to the occasion for sex. It is that I can’t stand getting gouged $30 for a pill that may cost the company $3 to make. I do continue to have sex; it’s just more difficult. Like working with bad arrows in archery, or imperfect programs in Linux. If I always took the easy route, I would not be the writer or the person I am. I seldom take the easy route, and I often pay for it. Which reminds me: I received an email inviting me to link with SexDatePersonals.com for xdating. Sorry, folks, you’re over 55 years too late for that. I delight in viewing esthetic women, but I touch only one. I also saw an ad in the newspaper for Trivaxa, which supposedly is better than Viagra, but they don’t say what it costs. If it really worked and was affordable, they’d give the price in their ad. It describes how utterly thrilled the wife is that now her man is performing so vigorously. Uh-huh. The quiet truth is that the average wife would be satisfied if her husband had less, not more, interest in sex; she’d rather be shopping or sleeping.

I mentioned songs that run through my head. They still do, but readers had some feedback on one of them, “Waltzing Matilda.” Keith Younger advised me that a Matilda was a bedroll carried by the Swaggy (hobo), and to go waltzing with your tilda was to go on the tramp looking for work. In the song the tramp steals and kills a sheep (jumbuck), then jumps into the waterhole (bilabong) and drowns rather than be captured and hanged for livestock poaching. Next day Alma had a similar clarification: to waltz matilda was to travel alone with nothing more than you could carry in your bedroll. A few days later Jerry Bridges said much the same: the matilda was the rucksack, and waltzing matilda was hiking alone. The song is a sad one, especially when properly understood, but still beautiful.

I get fan mail, and I try to answer it responsively. Many readers thank me for writing novels that they actually like to read. (I pity all those other authors who write books folk don’t like to read.) But Valerie had a new one: Xanth helped her quit smoking. Whenever she craved a cigarette, she read Xanth instead. She has now been smoke free for 7 years. Wow! My wife has been smoke free for a similar time, after smoking for 50 years. It was illness and prescription medication that enabled her to stop. Just think: if I had introduced her to Xanth, she might have stopped decades earlier. Ah, well. Anyway, I recommend this smoking cure for those who care to try it. Which would you rather be addicted to: life-shortening cigarettes, or life-escaping Xanth?

Interesting newspaper column about empathy by David Brooks. I’m a fan of empathy, which in simple terms is the ability to feel the feelings of others; I think it is one of the fundamental things that separates human from animal, and I see its power everywhere. Such as why does it take over a decade on average to execute a convicted murderer? Because the horror of dying is embedded in our nature; there by for the grace of God go I. This is apart from the merit of the death penalty; I’m against it for substantial social, economic and personal reasons. But if we have empathy, if we truly feel for other folk, why then does evil continue unfettered? This column may clarify that. It seems that empathy provides a moral orientation, such as the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. But that it doesn’t put much horsepower into that orientation. You know that folk across the world are starving, but you’re still putting on weight eating food you don’t really need. You may suffer a bit of guilt, but you don’t change your actions. How come? Well, I can see a reason: in the old days, circa half a million years ago, empathy helped tribesmen in their hunting. If I were a jumbuck, where would I be grazing now? Where would I flee if surprised by a swagman? So, having a notion what the jumbuck will do, the hunters plant an ambusher at the likely escape route, and he spears the fleeing animal, and everyone eats hearty tonight. (No, I don’t think vegetarians existed then. But I suspect it is empathy that makes me a vegetarian.) So empathy helped mankind to survive and prosper. But if he identified too closely with the jumbuck, as I do, he wouldn’t be able to kill or eat it. So there had to be limits: understand, but don’t take it too far. Thus this limitation is not a weakness but a necessary qualification, to get the benefit without the liability. Nature cares mainly about what works for survival, not about what’s nice.

Speaking of executions: I suffer from what I suspect is a common anomaly, being against the death penalty in general, yet applauding it in some specifics. Such as Oba Chandler. He lured a tourist family, a woman and her two teen daughters, onto his boat, where he mercilessly bound, raped, and killed them. When caught three years later he was defiant and unapologetic. He seemed to be sorry only that he was caught. No need to go into the details; I’m satisfied that this man did not deserve to live, and am also satisfied that he was finally executed. Another case remains unsolved: that of Jenny Odom, a pretty and talented Florida girl who was twelve when someone abducted her, molested her and killed her. She lived about 20 miles from us, so it was good and local. It’s been over 20 years, now, I think, and obviously her murderer does not feel sufficient remorse to step forward. I think I could pull the switch on him, if I had the opportunity. I have been sensitive to the situation of girls since raising two myself.

Flier from Harry Dent pushing a doomsday newsletter says the DOW will plunge as low as 3,300, there will be chaos, deflation, and the Next Great Depression. I don’t automatically dismiss such warnings; sometimes they are correct. It’s like the stopped clock being right twice a day. This one makes a fairly persuasive case. It even gives a time-line: between late 2012 and late 2014 for the bottom. It won’t happen in one day; the descent will start around July or August, 2011, certainly by October or November. In short, it’s supposed to be happening now. As for gold and silver, the traditional hedges in bad times, get out of them now, as they will drop. The man who predicted the end of the world was wrong again, but the stock market is more subject to seizures. A different flier from Porter Stansberry predicts hyper-inflation with our national monetary system collapsing. Everything will immediately get much more expensive. The stock markets will plummet more than 40%. Gold may rise to over $5,000 an ounce. So these two reports are opposite in most things except the stock markets, and we’ll be in deep trouble if we don’t heed both of them immediately. I am heeding neither, but I am waiting and watching somewhat nervously.

THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR, one of the small newsletters that publishes what you generally don’t see in the big sponsor-run efforts, has an expose of money in politics. The Republicans are generally richer, as money seems to be their Prime Directive, but this shows that the Democrats are trying. Members of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, DCCC, are asked to contribute $125,000 in dues and raised another $75,000 for the party. Subcommittee chairpersons must contribute $150,000 and raise another $100,000. More powerful committees must contribute $250,000 and raise $250,000. The chairs of top committees must contribute $500,000 and raise one million. All the way up to Nancy Pelosi who must contribute $800,000 and raise $25 million. (Could that be a typo for $2.5 million? That would be in line, but I’m not sure it’s the case.) Now you know the price of the Democrats. You can bet the Republicans will be raising more money, less openly. And of course the best congress money can buy is not a very good congress. And from Democratic National Headquarters (for some reason now the Democrats think I’m a Democrat; in earlier years the Republicans thought I was one of them. I’ve been a registered independent since I first registered in Florida in 1959, after becoming an American citizen in the US Army in 1958) came an appeal for money, showing these statistics: $165 billion = GOP cuts to Medicare. $172 billion = subsidies for Big Oil, tax cuts for millionaires, and tax breaks for offshoring companies. That is, the Republicans are cutting health for the common man and giving it to the richest outfits. And while we’re at it, I noted that the newspaper for OctOgre 28 showed oil prices the highest in two months, Exxon profits jumping to over $10 billion, and the DOW rising 339.51 on the same day. Any questions? Well, the same newsletter describes the Occupy Wall Street movement, OWS. It started September 17 with 150 people turning out. Before long there were 20,000 and it was spreading to other cities. It has no leaders, no real organization; they are simply united by the common desire to try to hold Wall Street accountable for its mischief. One percent of people control forty percent of the wealth, with almost one in five Americans on food stamps. The other 99% want to change that. Can they succeed? Probably not, but it’s nice to see the effort. We are heading toward a feudal society, with a few rich barons and many powerless serfs. It’s a de facto plutocracy, government by and for the wealthy. But I very much fear that as with the notorious French Revolution there will be no way to redistribute resources without wholesale bloodshed. The greedheads are in control now and they simply will not let go voluntarily. With luck I won’t live long enough to see the horrors we are heading for.

Local newspaper article says the chimney swifts, which look like flying cigars, consume more than 12,000 flying insect pests per day, including mosquitoes and biting flies. Wow! I used to be pestered mercilessly by both when I went out, but today not so much. That change could date from when the swifts colonized our unused chimney. We’re glad to have them. Another newspaper item for OctOgre 30 has pictures of some of the world’s most treacherous highways. Those things scare me. A road on Norway has 11 hairpin turns as it wends up a slope. One in Morocco looks worse. One in China, the Guoliang Tunnel Road, threads along vertical cliffs, alternately tunneling and at the edge with no guard rails. One in Bolivia has about 26 cars go over the edge every year, killing 100 people. Maybe the greedheads cut the guard-rail budget in the name of fiscal responsibility. Not for me; I’m staying in safe dull flat Florida with the alligators.

Columnist Robyn Blumner had to have a breast biopsy, which caught her cancer early enough to handle. But she wanted to know exactly what the charges would be for what procedure, understandably. She tried to comparison shop for the MRI she was told to get. One outfit said it would cost her $625. Another said it would be $3,000. So she went for the cheaper one. Then she learned that it charges the government $2,450; she might be on the hook for more. But there’s a network of insurers involved, and the discrepancy was proprietary information: they would not tell her. Then she had the procedure itself, to remove the cancer. For that they billed $12,016.58, but that was not the whole of it; the total was more than $16,700. She sought a justification for these charges, but what she got was opaque. She could not get an understandable breakdown. Be a sensible client? “I tried. It can’t be done,” she reports. There will be more in due course. Welcome to America, the home of private enterprise medicine. Other countries, evidently more backwards than we, cover all their citizens, providing better care at much cheaper rates, and their people live longer than ours. Why? Because in America the greedheads have control, and are fighting to protect their privilege of making the rest of us pay far more than we should, and dying when we go broke doing it, so that they can get ever-richer. We have the most expensive health care in the world, but not the best.

NEW SCIENTIST has an article on meat without slaughter. That is, growing it in the laboratory, any kind you want. Synthetic meat is far lower in greenhouse emissions, land use, and water use, and on a par with pork for energy use. So it seems to make great sense. So would I eat steak grown in the laboratory? Since my objection is to the mistreatment and slaughter of animals for food, theoretically I could eat synthetic meat. But I suspect my gut would recoil. I would far rather have synthetic candy that does not rot teeth or contribute to obesity. Wholesome food, economically produced. Leave the artificial meat to those with the stomach for it.

I haven’t been on Twitter directly, but the folk who run my Blog site put my Tweets on for me. I have done what I hope is a new wrinkle: telling a science fiction story in 121 twenty word Tweets. This completely dull ordinary man suddenly starts suffering narrow escapes from death. What’s going on? There’s even some romance. So if you know where to go to find it, you can start reading the story at a Tweet a day. I hope you enjoy it. If enough people do, I may write another. I’d love to start a new genre, Tweet stories. Maybe it will make me famous, and everyone will be doing it. (A dull writer’s dream of glory…) So why haven’t I gone on Twitter myself? I have tired, but all I get is a blank screen. The address as I understand it is http://twitter.com/piersanthony, but the program puts in #!/ before my name and leaves me in limbo. I think those on phones need to put @ instead of / before my name. Have I mentioned that the Internet doesn’t much like me, so I get jinxed? Maybe there’s a critic hidden in the works. But if you’re not jinxed, go read my story.

An experiment suggests that neutrinos travel slightly faster than light. That could wreck Einsteinian physics, so they are searching for some mistake in the data. And not finding it. Now I’m not into esoteric physics so this may be a stupid question: why can’t neutrinos go faster than light? Light goes faster than sound without concerning anyone; different things go at different speeds. Maybe light is just the fastest traveler known in Einstein’s day, so he thought that was the ultimate limit. He didn’t have the chance to time the speed of neutrinos. He just got the wrong traveler, so set the wrong limit. The universe will survive nicely if that is corrected. No?

More evidence that human beings interbred with Neandertal man, also with the newly discovered Denisova man who lived in central Asia. We know that humans will have sex with just about anything they catch, so it’s not surprising that some of those unions were fertile. Stories of man/horse and man/bird crossbreeding are fantasy—centaurs and harpies—but it’s not for want of trying. It also seems that some of those “foreign” genes really helped mankind survive the rough world.

Folk interested in my novels should be able to find Xanth #35 Well-Tempered Clavicleon sale in hardcover, Knot Gneiss in paperback, and the entirely different The Sopaths. Happy reading!

Oh—and just in case anyone has not yet caught on, I am of the liberal social-religious-political persuasion, and this is where I vent.

My mind wanders everywhere, and sometimes I think of things that have been buried a long time. Like this one from 60 years ago that I don’t think I have mentioned in this column before, though these days with my senior-moment memory I can never be certain. I was playing tennis at high school, strictly grunt level with the other peons, dead balls and dirt court, when one of the teachers got in his car nearby and turned the ignition key. There was a long whistling sound as of a missile flying in, then a loud Boom! and dense black smoke poured out from under the hood. The car was okay; it was a practical joke. I suspect the teacher was not completely amused, but it makes me laugh in distant retrospect.

I read 7 books in NoRemember, catching up to a degree; you’ll have to skip over several pages here to avoid the reviews. I also counted up and found that I had nine new books published in 2011: two collaborative (with J R Rain) Aladdins, two Trail Mixes, the generally erotic story collection Relationships 4, the erotic romance Eroma, the children’s Pandora Park, the horror The Sopaths, and Xanth #35 Well-Tempered Clavicle. Electronic publishing, notably Kindle, allowed me to gain on the backlog. Completists take note. No they’re not stinkers; anyone but a critic should be able to read and enjoy any of them, though conservatives should stay clear of the erotic ones and the shocking The Sopaths. More is in the pipeline, and we are working to get my older tiles electronic too. Meanwhile my wife reviewed my bibliography, and discovered that through 2011 I have had 154 books published. That includes collaborations, electronic, and self-published titles, but not omnibus volumes or anything shorter than novel length. That’s more than I thought; I hope there aren’t duplications. Some beady-eyed fan may catch me there. No, I’m not the most prolific author in the SF/Fantasy genre. Yet.

We saw a theater movie. As you know, Wife and Daughter set our movie agenda, which explains why I don’t report much on hot sexy adventures, but we do see some interesting ones. This time it was Puss In Boots, a seeming spinoff from the Shrek without giving the ogre any credit (for shame!). Puss has somewhat scattered adventures and does a lot of lovely dancing as he interacts with a talented lady cat and Humpty Dumpty Egg. It was fun, but didn’t keep me completely awake. Yes, I tend to fall asleep when reading or viewing; its not boredom, just senescence.

I read What Fears Become, the 375 page horror anthology edited by Jeani Rector on a shoestring budget. Horror is not my genre, and doesn’t turn me on, but Jeani told me that she will also publish science fiction, so I wrote “Lost Things” for her, a science fiction story about a blind boy, a quietly intelligent dog, and an invisible tiger. It’s the only straight SF story in the volume. Reading the other entries reminded me how decades ago I write a short story, “Spellroid,” for Lester del Rey at an SF magazine, but he rejected it because the young woman did not deserve her fate. The man had gotten these glasses that showed others as they really were, and when he looked at his girlfriend she was a monster and he struck her and killed her in horrified reaction, only to discover that the glasses had lied, pretending she was a monster. That story would have been right at home here, as there are horribly killed innocent victims galore. I was simply in the wrong genre. These stories are well written but almost universally downbeat with horror occurring or threatening; some are graphically ugly. There are generally downbeat poems too, and pictures. The only picture I really liked was, you guessed it, of a nude young woman. So I’m a loss to this genre; I don’t properly understand it or like it. My story was unpaid, as I think all of them are; the quality is remarkable considering that. So why did I participate? Because I approve of new markets and exposure for new writing, and THE HORROR ZINE from which this anthology derives is that. I try to encourage them what ways I can. So I contributed a story, and I paid for author’s copies for all the contributors, as the editor couldn’t afford it and I believe the authors should have them. Horror fans should find this good reading, as the same horrors that turn me off will turn them on. www.imajinbooks.com www.thehorrorzine.com

I read The Go-Cart Trick by Jared Brame. This is a fanfiction novella for children, and a good one. It was written as a sequel to a series by Scott Corbett; when the stories ran out, Brame needed something for his children, so he wrote it himself. Kerby is a typical school boy with friends and enemies and generally insensitive adults endlessly complicating his existence. They decide to enter a go-cart race, which turns out to be an exciting challenge on multiple levels, as cheaters cheat, competitors cooperate, magic is involved, and the winner is a surprise. This is a great story, the kind that both children and adults should enjoy. Brame did it for his family, but it should appeal to a wider audience. He is not publishing it, but will send a free electronic copy to whoso requests it. I’ll bet you will agree with me; let him know. Find him at jbrame5@yahoo.com.

When I completed Xanth #37 Esrever Doom I took a break to catch up on accumulating chores and reading. There are always more of both than I can comfortably keep up with, because any spare time I get inspires me to write another story or novel. One chore was labeling and shelving the new books received in the past three years. There were about 75 of them, piled on the study floor. I go through each and figure out its Library of Congress number, which can be complicated because the LoC changed its system since I started the process 20 years ago, and many publishers ignore it anyway. But in the course of over ten hours I got them labeled, and I discovered some I really want to read. I mean why buy a book if I don’t want to read it? That’s the pitfall of the process. Once I had them labeled, I had to put them on the shelves, and that was another challenge. My library of 3,000 plus books is jam-packed; I had to make space. The worst jam, of course, was in the fantasy section, PS220. I decided to clear off the space above the shelves, in effect making a new shelf, and redistribute the existing books to make way for new ones in their proper places. I got a stepladder and started clearing, winding up with a wheelbarrow of junk to take to the barn. So I had to get out the pump and inflate the tire, and take the clippers and clip the vines off so I could open the overgrown gate to the barnyard, then barge through the thicket to the barn, where I looked for places to store yet more junk. Then I started moving books. Then I placed the new ones. In four and a half hours I got the job done.

So what about the books I discovered during this exercise? One such was a fantasy volume A Kingdom Far and Clear by Mark Helprin, which I paid $40 for a year ago. I have more fantasy books to read that I get free than I can keep up with; whatever possessed me to pay that much for one? Well, it intrigued me. It’s a beautiful volume with 42 full page color illustrations, published by Dover, comprising the Swan Lake Trilogy, with only one typo in the whole thing. I had never heard of the author or the trilogy, though the cover material says Mark Helprin is one of the world’s most celebrated living writers. That may be, but exactly how good any writer is is something I have to determine for myself; not every celebrated name actually is competent, just as not every unknown is incompetent. Well, my verdict is mixed: the whole first story is told as dialogue narration, almost every paragraph in quotes, which is a tedious mechanism; the celebrated author hadn’t learned better than that? It is a very standard fantasy tale set in medieval west Asia with hardly any magic but a lot of coincidence, of a usurper stealing the kingdom from the rightful heir, and the quest to get it back. The rightful kings and queens are handsome, beautiful, smart, decent and altogether wonderful, while the bad guys are marvels of mental and physical ugliness. It is almost unremittingly downbeat, as the bad guys mercilessly kill the good guys, except by accident a baby, the royal heir, survives and is spirited away to be raised in secret by loyal retainers. When she is grown, a prince discovers her, and they have a baby, just before the bad guys catch up and drive them over a cliff, but their baby girl is spirited away to be raised by another loyal retainer. This girl child returns at the age of ten to reclaim her kingdom, coincidentally comes upon the very men who can and will help her, and immediately the loyal citizens rise up in her support. In a series of bloody battles they throw out the usurper as she grows up, marries, and has a baby son—when the usurper’s forces strike again, over a million strong (how did he get that many soldiers in exile?), and kill her along with the decent supporters the reader has come to care about. But her son miraculously escapes, and at the end the indication is that he was rescued by the Golden Horde and will march to reclaim his rightful kingdom from the Usurper with more horrendous bloodshed and destruction. I think we already know how that cycle goes.

And yet, and yet. This thing is beautifully written and developed, with some truly wondrous descriptions and imaginative details. For example the central palace is the size of a city, with 17,500 rooms, some big enough to hold thousands, indoor hunting preserves, and a whole suite of rooms just to hold the keys to all the doors. When the ten year old princess has to cross the bakery, riding on a suspended bench, it takes four and a half hours just to get to the other side. There is incidental humor. The illustrations are relevant and lovely. Page by page it is a pleasure to read. The message here is that no matter how standard the outline, nice writing can make it worthwhile. So yes, I recommend this book as one worth getting and reading, though it is on the whole unhappy. Not for children, however; this is a fairy tale that would frighten them in places.

Another was The Tain, a new translation of the Iris epic. That’s pronounced Toyn, and I gather it is a place in Ireland where much of the adventure takes place. I bought it early in 2011 because I was curious about Irish legend, and because it was on sale for $6 instead of $25. My impression is mixed. There’s a feisty story there, but it is almost buried in page-long lists of places, people, and battles that really don’t advance the plot. It is not possible to track the amount of largely pointless slaughter that occurs in it. It’s hard to pronounce the names; I had to look them up in the pronunciation directory. And it is riddled with footnotes, some of which are paragraphs long. So it’s not easy reading. But there are intriguing elements in it. The story starts when the royal couple Ailill (pronounced Alill) and Medb (Mayv) engage in pillow talk, trying to determine who is wealthier. They discover that they are evenly matched, with one exception: he has a prize bull, she doesn’t. So she sets out to borrow a bull, offering its owner in Ulster worldly riches “as well as the friendship of my own thighs.” In sum, wealth and sex. The owner is about to accept when his butler reminds him that what he would not give the queen willingly, she would take by force. That annoys him, and he says in effect “Oh yeah?” and refuses to send the bull. So Ailill and Medb muster a great army and march to take the bull by force. The rest of the story concerns this military campaign. It seems that nothing can stop the invasion, until a remarkable hero appears, Cu Chulainn, who single-handedly destroys whole troops of warriors. He constantly harasses the army so that they can’t make much progress, and great is the bloodshed thereof. One warrior, mortally injured, is checked by a doctor, who says “You won’t last long.” “Then neither will you,” the warrior says, and strikes him so hard with his fist that his brains spurt out from his ears. In the end there is a truce, the two bulls get together, fight, and kill each other. Medb needs to relieve herself, having evidently forgotten to do it at home, and the process leaves three great trenches, each big enough for a cavalcade, so the place is now known as Fual Medba, or Medb’s Piss Pot. And it is some time before war returns to Ireland.

Another was Still Doing It, by Deidre Fishel and Diana Holtzberg, also bought for five bucks instead of $25. This is about the sex lives of women over 60; some of them are over 80. Actually it’s about not giving up as you grow older. Some women take stock, realize that they don’t have a lot longer to live, and decide to damn well enjoy the time they have left. Some are pretty sour about the attitudes of conservative people and institutions that seek to deny them that pleasure. “These people are not having any fucking fun and pleasure in their lives, and they’re going to see that you don’t either…They really want to wage war on sex. That’s the whole religious approach. You know, make something prohibited and people are going to do it anyway, and now you’ve got them by the short hairs. Guilt. Manipulate them with guilt and fear.” I see that as an excellent summary of the religious agenda, trying to control the private lives of others. This book suggests that the literal witch hunting of historical Salem was to suppress sex. “Older women were still being hanged as witches largely because of their overt sexuality or positions of power.” At any rate, the book traces a number of women who do like sex and refuse to give it up just because they are senior citizens. There is a dearth of men their age, so they have to get imaginative. They may share men, or date younger men, try lesbianism, masturbation, whatever, so as to remain sexually fulfilled. Actually its about more than sex, which is not detailed other than the fact that they’re having it; it’s about personal fulfillment at an age when they are expected to shrivel up and fade away. Many here are professional woman, sports competitors, going for higher education, new experiences, whatever, staying active. It’s a celebration of expressive life that I, a man with a similar attitude, definitely relate to; anyone should profit by their examples. They do have problems, such as handling cancer or broken bones or the loss of their families, friends, and romances simply by outliving them. They suck it up and go on, determined to live well until the end. But it should be noted that these women are different in two ways: they are physically fit to the degree possible, thus reasonably attractive, and they are looking for sex. Most older women, in my observation, are neither. More power to these exceptions. If I were alone—and chances are that if I live long enough I some day will be—I’d love to have such a woman in my life.

I read the electronic version of The Scarecrows of Stagwater, by Brent Michael Kelley, also titled Chuggie and the Desecration of Stagwater, in a Kindle edition. You might think with such titles that this is a children’s book. Oh, no, never! This is a literally gut-wrenching horror story, in the sense of guts being wrenched out of living bodies and eaten by little monsters. I’m really not a fan of horror, as mentioned above, but this one held my morbidly fascinated attention to the end. Originality sparkles throughout, and few things are quite what they seem. Chuggie is so named because he is always thirsty and likes to chug liquid. In fact he represents Drought. Usually he keeps his thirst under control, but sometimes he loses it and soaks up a whole lake plus all the fluid in the bodies of anyone near it. He doesn’t say that folk wouldn’t like him when he’s angry, but it is emphatically true. Usually he’s an amiable traveler just trying to get along, but he encounters odd friendly and unfriendly folk. He defends himself from attack with a remarkably effective anchor on a chain. The rulers of Stagwater intercept him before he gets there and tell him not to try to enter it; he can bypass it to the north. As it turns out, we later discover, the townsmen practice torture on a professional scale, mainly of innocent children, and are served by Steel Jacks, robotlike aliens. Chuggie doesn’t quite trust this advice, so bypasses the town to the south, where he encounters an old witch who likes him and becomes younger the longer he is with her, until she’s a truly fetching and seductive young woman. She says she was imprisoned here in the wilderness by an enchantment the nasty townsmen put on her; to escape she needs the goat-faced purse. Meanwhile she fashions animated scarecrows out of whatever is at hand, who act as servants and protection. Chuggie really likes her and wants to take her with him when he moves on, so he goes north of the town to find the purse. That’s when he discovers what the malign townsmen tried to route him through. There’s a desecrated graveyard there with phenomenally ugly monsters. One horror is piled on another without remission, and this continues when he returns to town. So though the reading made me want to take a thorough shower to wash off the gook, I call it an excellent novel of its kind, and believe horror fans should like it very well. It reads like a segment of a longer narrative, and I can’t help wondering what other horrors Chuggie will encounter as he wends his way on.

I read Tagalong by Brian Clopper, author of Graham the Gargoyle and Paul the Pillow Monster, reviewed here before. This is a children’s fantasy for ages 9+ published by Behemoth Books, and is a harder-hitting narrative. Dylan, the class geek, is harassed by bully Mitch, who actually follows him into his house. A portal opens in Dylan’s bedroom and sucks both of them into the fantasy world of Myriad, where the gremlin Grimble tells them he is their tagalong, or guide to the adventure. What’s odd is that it seems that Mitch, rather than Dylan, is the fantasy protagonist. It also seems that their adventure is scripted, and Grimble is there to see that the script is followed. It is cynical Mitch who catches on to this. There is also a bad power that means to use them for its own ill purpose, so the faked up challenges start becoming real ones. Thus they have to deal with their personal dislike for each other while navigating the horrors of the evil power. Not your ordinary children’s tale . All in all, adventure that will surely hold the attention of its target audience.

We were at BigLots looking for something else, and I paused to check their cheap videos, one batch of which was on sale for $1.88 plus about .11 tax: call it two bucks per. For that price I’m willing to gamble on junk. One of them was Watchmen, a generous two and a half hour movie. That makes it under a dollar an hour. So I watched it. I think I saw a big comic book a few years back by that title; that may be where the characters are drawn from. It’s not the wild action no-content thing I expected; it takes time to explore the human side of its several superheroes as they struggle with the unknown enemy who is killing them. There are interesting effects, of course, and even a sex sequence. A great movie it is not, in my judgment, but I did find it interesting and worth the price. At least it allowed me to test my new little RCA DVD player I got on sale because my old system stopped working. The nine inch screen is fine when I have it perched on my desk, though the sound is a bit tinny.

Then I watched a set of movies I got from a sale catalog at about $7.50 per, in a private experiment: one was one I have been wanting to see for years, ever since Wife & Daughter declined when it was in the theaters. As I have mentioned, they control my theater agenda, but then I buy ones that interest me and watch them as DVDs on my own. Are my choices better than theirs? No, because my tastes are more eclectic, with quality only one consideration among several. But in this case I wanted to see whether one I chose because I really wanted to see it was actually better than one I chose more or less at random. So these two were Pan’s Labyrinth, a highly rated film, and Limits of Control, an unremarkable thriller. Both, coincidentally, are set in Spain, a country I lived in for a year before coming to America, though I was only five at the time. Both are about two hours long, and have Spanish spoken, with English subtitles, though that’s a sometime thing in Limits. Both relate to guerrilla-type opposition to a noxious power. That’s about it, for similarities. Pan is a fantasy where a girl encounters a fairy and a faun who tell her she’s the reincarnation of a long-ago princess who will join her father after she performs three tasks. They are intriguing, but the film becomes darker as it progresses, until finally the girl is killed. It says she will reign as a queen for centuries in her father’s realm, but that is not the realm of life. Not the kind of conclusion I like. Limits is curious, with a man sent to Spain to do something, guided by a series of contacts he meets via signals: two cups of espresso, exchanged matchboxes, largely irrelevant dialogue with bits of incidental philosophy. One young woman is lusciously nude and clearly available, but he doesn’t take her up on it because he is focused on his job. Farther along there are hints that there is serious opposition, such as one of his female contacts being hustled unwillingly into a car, and the nude woman turning up dead in his bed. It is obviously deadly dangerous business he is so quietly involved in. In the end he makes his way to a heavily guarded compound, somehow gets inside, throttles the occupant with a guitar string, and departs. Justice, it seems, has been served. So it seems he was an assassin. A thriller? Depends or your definition. The scenes were intriguing, such as the nude in a transparent raincoat, but I can’t say I properly understand the movie. So in the end I was not thrilled with the conclusion of either movie, however much I enjoyed scenes along the way. The one I wanted to see, and the one I was unsure about both left me somewhat unsatisfied, though I will surely remember aspects, especially that nude. So how did my experiment turn out? It think it demonstrated that my considered choices are just about as good as purely random selections. What else is new?

I have the usual pile of clippings to sort through. As regular devotees of this column know, I comment on many things, but the focus is really me: how do I personally feel about it? In short, its a blog. This time a passing reference to another genre writer: Anne McCaffrey died, age 85. I knew her personally, long ago when neither of us had yet scored big. She was a friendly, hearty woman who later had considerable success with the dragons of Pern. But she forever alienated me when she wrote a letter to my friend writer Perry Chapdelaine, which he showed me, telling him that she would lie under oath to protect the writer’s organization SFWA if he publicized the truth about it. I was one who had suffered grievously because of the machinations of its officers, so I think would have been part of that truth. That spoke volumes about her and the organization, decades ago, and thereafter I wanted nothing to do with either. So I’m sure there will be peons of praise for her, and that things like this will never be mentioned elsewhere. They never are. We exist in a malign fantasy where wrongdoers prosper and whistle-blowers are punished while the average person is ethically indifferent. Just like the larger world. It is one of the reasons I have a chronic chip on my shoulder about publishing. Had I had the resources then that I do now, there would have been a devastating lawsuit.

The world has passed seven billion people, and is paying a price for this overload. Global warming is only part of it. The sheer depletion of resources means our descendants will have to scratch in order to survive, and there will be wars for food and water. We should stop it, and could, but won’t; whole religions and political parties oppose any effort to fix the problem. The future is all too apt to be surpassingly ugly. My horror novel The Sopaths is based on the assumption that overpopulation makes the world run out of souls to recycle, leading to totally unscrupulous children. That’s fantasy, but the reality will be as bad.

One huge problem is energy. Fossil fuels are poisoning the environment, and nuclear power has problems; the nuclear plant near where I live is out of commission because the company made a boneheaded repair decision and it may never function again. But geothermal, wind, wave, and solar powers are gaining, and soon solar power may become cheaper than fossil. Too bad the Republican party is wedded to fossils, while the rest of the world passes America by.

One nagging question for cosmologists is why is matter mostly terrene instead of contra-terrene? Matter instead of anti-matter? Now there may be an answer: the universe was born spinning, and that spin lends a bias. They hope to have confirmation in another decade or so. Similarly, why is time one-way? It moves forward, not backward, but it seems that theoretically it should move either way. Could that spin account for that too?

Nice notion in Classic Peanuts for NoRemember 13: a little girl had an awful headache that no one could help until her little brother said maybe her ears were too tight. So he loosened each ear one turn back, and her headache vanished. Makes sense to me.

Couple catalogs have a Skatecycle, which consists of two hub-less wheels connected by a bendable rod that folk can skateboard with. I’m too old for that sort of thing, but it does look like fun. There are also Optimal Resonance Audiophile’s Speakers, which look like three- or four-eyed rampant snails. What won’t they think of next?

Robert Stewart explained to me that the neutrinos traveling faster than light problem is not feasible. For one thing, supernovas emit both light and neutrinos, so if they traveled at different speeds, we’d received the neutrinos first, but we don’t; they arrive at the same time. Light in a vacuum travels at a fixed rate regardless of the motion of the observer, as do all electronic emissions; it’s not like a footrace. So you really can’t have anything revving up to a faster speed than that. I may still have it garbled, but I think that’s the essence. As usual, my readers know more than I do.

Notice from The Authors Guild: Amazon approached the six largest trade book publishers, soliciting their participation in the Kindle Online Lending Library, so that Amazon Prime members who pay $79 a year could download a limited number of books free. Its part of their promotion of the new Kindle Fire. The publishers replied Fuck That Noise, in politer language. So Amazon enrolled many of their titles anyway. Huh? Well, Amazon twisted its interpretation of its contracts with those publishers, sort of like fudging the definition of “is.” There appears to be another doozie of a battle coming up. I applaud the Kindle and am glad to have my titles there, because it offers all writers and readers an affordable alternative to the pitiless province of Parnassus, but there are ways in which Amazon is the bully in the schoolyard, and I think it needs to be curbed. There do need to be fair and reasonable standards.

Item in THE WEEK describes how in Ghana they have personalized coffins that are in the shape of cars, airplanes, fish, bananas, cell phones, bottles of pop, chickens, whatever, your choice. When I croak I plan to be cremated or melted, and won’t be buried, so have no personal use for say, a casket in the shape of a paperback fantasy novel, or a bottle of boot rear, but the notion is intriguing.

From The Douglass Report, one of the health newsletters I subscribe to: chicken farmers are feeding the birds arsenic to protect them against infection, but then it is excreted in their droppings and winds up in the soil and groundwater. Thus arsenic enters the human food/water chain, and there are clusters of cancer occurring as an apparent result. So if you eat a lot of chicken, or vegetables grown from their manure, beware of the possible consequence. No I don’t think my vegetarian daughter got cancer that way, but I have to wonder.

Here’s a difficult subject, for me. I oppose censorship, feeling that each person or family should have the right to choose what they will read or not read. I also oppose pirating, where thieves steal the work of writers like me and sell it to others, diminishing my right to earn my living. Now the two are colliding. Censorship News, published by the National Coalition Against Censorship www.ncac.org, has constant horror stories about conservatives who seek to impose their views on others, on the grounds of obscenity. This is actually a power play: you can read only what they approve for you. I remember a comment Playboy magazine made decodes ago, saying that the Roman Empire made a law banning obscenity, and it then became obscene to criticize the Emperor. Today’s censors have a huge list of classic novels they want banned because some of them have four letter words or talk seriously about sex. I do not want these freedom-disabled people to dictate what I read or write. Now they are trying to censor the Internet, including Facebook and Amazon, and those outfits are starting to go along with them. Shame on them! Meanwhile there are sites that make it their business to steal every book published and cut off the authors and publishers from control or payment; it’s a constant struggle to try to extirpate these bloodsucking weeds.

Now I am told Congress is debating whether to grant themselves the power to turn off parts of the Internet, such as YouTube, Wikipedia, or MoveOn.org. If they enact this, they could block websites that any corporation suspects is doing something contrary to that corporation’s interests, such as telling the truth. I see how this could enable publishers to stop pirating by shutting down the pirate sites, and I’m for that. But I also see how any free speech could be seen as criticizing the Emperor, and stifled aborning. For example, I would no longer be able to relay news about the chicken farming industry poisoning the landscape with arsenic, or review a sex novel, or mention an organization’s willingness to commit perjury, without risking getting shut down. So I am afraid that the evils of anarchy that presently exist on the Internet would be replaced by the evils of economic, political, and religious censorship, with no appeal. In fact I am also told that a related bill authorizes indefinite detentions of Americans. That’s a hideous constitutional violation, but the Constitution doesn’t seem to have restrained our government before. I hate getting pirated, but I think I have to oppose this measure. Corporations already pretty well run the world, to the detriment of the common man; the Internet must retain at least the semblance of freedom.

I have not played any of the electronic video games. That’s partly because being on dialup I lack the connectivity to properly participate, and partly because all my life I have loved games and fear I would disappear into one and never emerge to handle the rest of my existence. I saw a newspaper review of Skyrim, describing it as one of the most ambitious ever developed, a whole other universe in itself, with dragons, zombies, vampires ghosts, demon gods, and myriad Quests. I mean, what’s not to like? The article says that once you move in, you won’t want to leave. Exactly.

Possibly related: interview in NEW SCIENTIST with biologist Robert Trivers, who says the human capacity for self deception knows no bounds. It is a survival trait. We persuade ourselves that we are better than we are, more deserving than others, and that positivizes (can you find a better word?) our outlook. Most folk believe they are above average. “At one extreme you could say religion is complete nonsense, so the whole thing is an exercise in self-deception.” That makes sense to me. Of course I am more rational than most…

Page in THE WEEK on pedophilia. I have readers of every stripe, including pedophiles, so I try to understand their situation, as I do with everyone else. This is not to say I approve of it; there was a case we encountered that made us go immediately to a lawyer. I have not ignored it; it is central to my novel Firefly, and figures in The Sopaths. It seems that pedophilia, which is by definition the sexual preference for children below the age of puberty, is not a mental aberration but part of the broad sexual spectrum that includes heterosexuality, homosexuality, and assorted specialized sexual preferences like bondage or foot fetishism. About 4% of the population has the pedophilic urge, compared to about 5% for homosexuality, but the general aversion to pedophilia is I think stronger. Recently an online message board was busted where about 70,000 folk exchanged child pornography and justifications for their behavior. Obviously it is a persistent segment. Why does it remain? How does it contribute to the survival of the species? There is the mystery. I suspect it is a corollary to some species advantage that outweighs the liability, the way the human propensity to choke is because of the way our throat was restructured to enable more facile speech. They don’t mean any harm to children; they truly value children, and want to have full romantic and sexual relations with them. Do I have a solution? I sort of wish that there were a kingdom where pedophilia is accepted so that pedophiles could go there and leave innocent children in our world alone. But I think this will never happen.

There may soon be a breakthrough in medicine: human blood manufactured in the laboratory. Thus no more blood drives, no more need to search desperately for a particular blood type; the right kind can be made and used to save lives. Now if they can similar generate replacement organs so that no one will die waiting for a kidney transplant, or be blind for lack of functioning eyes, or stupid for lack of a good brain—um, maybe not, as sometimes it seems that the brainless who are already in power would never go for it.

Newspaper article about how the business giants achieved their success. Was it luck? When readers ask me about the secret of my more limited success as a writer, I freely credit luck, but that’s not what they want to hear. They want to think that intelligence and application being decent will do it for anyone, in any endeavor. No it won’t; you need luck too. But some folk are lucky enough to win big lotteries, and they still make messes of their lives. So this study targeted folk like multibillionaire Bill Gates of Microsoft: how did he do it? They call it Return On Luck, or ROL. Gates was not the only person with computer resources. Thousands of people could have done the same thing he did, at the same time. Why didn’t they? Well, it is that when he got his break, he really ran with the ball, so to speak. He dedicated his life to achieving the most he possibly could, exercising considerable discipline others would consider fanatic or obsessive to get the maximum ROL, not letting bad breaks stop him. “Resilience, not luck, is the signature of greatness.” I can see it; that’s what I did in my writing, thus passing by many who were as lucky and talented as I, just not as dedicated.

The Frog Haiku site is back, at http://cliffordroberts.tripod.com/bashoki11.htm. My wife wrote “Tree frog on window/ Indoor lights attract the bugs/ Suppertime is here.” This time I made a rhyming haiku: “Tiny, green, at rest/ I wonder what is its quest?/ Pretty tree-frog guest.”

I couldn’t connect to Twitter to verify whether my Tweets story really is being run. Then my wife remembered that I had turned off the picture-loading aspect of my Firefox browser, so that I would not have to wait twenty minutes per site to check hundreds of Electronic Publishing Survey entries. So I turned pictures on, and voila! got the Tweets. They seem to have been interrupted for the holiday season; the actual story has about 70 more chapters to go. If it turns out to be popular, I’ll write a sequel. If no one notices when it ends, I’ll let it be. I trust readers will let me know, one way or the other. When I checked, only about 20 chapters were there, through #51; I hope there’s a way for new readers to get the prior ones, but if there isn’t, I may in due course run the full thing here at the HiPiers site, or on the blog site. I’m still finding my way, limited in part by new-fangled 21^st century technology that my creaky 20^thcentury background struggles to keep up with, and in part by the lack of broadband access, here in the hinterland.

Theoretically boys don’t play with dolls and girls don’t do violent sports, but if you call the dolls action figures, then they’re okay for boys. It’s all a matter of nomenclature. As an adult I have a doll, one Franklin Mint made of Rapunzel with the long hair, which they gave me when we did Xanth figurine business. But I don’t play with her; she merely overlooks my study, now ironically reminding me of my similarly long-blond-haired daughter Penny, though hers was only about a yard long. As a child I had a little cloth dog doll I called Boss, not knowing then that this is generally a cow name. I liked it so well I took it with me one day as we played in a distant forest field, setting it at the base of a central tree. And forgot to pick it up when we returned to the house. I hurried back out to fetch it, but it was gone; some animal had taken it. It was one of my painful early lessons in responsibility: don’t leave your treasures unattended. Decades later, when we had two daughters, there were dolls galore. One of them was mine: a figure of a two year old girl set in a frame, titled Portrait of Penny. I liked it because it really did look like daughter Penny at that age. But then Penny grew old enough to reach things, and got that doll and stripped it nude and washed its hair, and it was ruined; we had to throw the remnant out. I wish I could have kept it out of her reach, just as I wish I could have kept the living Penny out of cancer’s reach. Sigh.

We went to an auction. Not for gimcracks; this one was for parcels of land. We have lived here on the tree farm for 23 years, and its sort of like a peninsula in Lake Tsoda Popka, with the adjacent property taking up the other half of it. So when it was put up for auction, we were interested. We have about 93 acres here, and the parcel we wanted was about 70 acres that would perfectly fill out our holding. So we checked it out, driving through it one day, and another day I walked the length and breadth of it. Part of it is dense old-growth oak forest; part is planted in slash pines, same as ours is. It nicely completes the circuit of the pond, half of whose shore is ours, never mind that in this drought you can walk across the baked mudflat it has become. It was just ideal. We talked with other interested parties, one being the pastor of a local church who wanted land his children could enjoy, another who wanted to make a homestead with access to the lake. So we signed up for the auction, hoping to pick it up cheap. My wife and I discussed it, determining exactly how much it might be worth and how much we would be willing to pay for it, which is not the same thing. Land values have taken a beating here in backwoods Florida, as they have everywhere in this recession, so the idea of getting a bargain price was not far-fetched. The recession is like the drought, making cheap and ugly what is normally precious and beautiful. We got disabused on several counts. We expected sober straightforward bidding on each of the three parcels. Since we wanted #3, we’d see how it went on #1 and #2 and be guided accordingly. What we didn’t expect was the carnival atmosphere. They had a man playing loud spirited music on a keyboard as if it were a revival, hawkers whooping it up, fake good humor complete with jokes, and almost unintelligible deafening loudspeaker communications. Then instead of straightforward bidding for each parcel, they had bidding for the price per acre, and the winner got to choose which parcel he wanted at that price. Imagine that system at the grocery store: this product is nine point three cents per ounce, and you have to figure out the price of the twelve and a half ounce package yourself, assuming another shopper doesn’t get it for nine point four cents, or be unpleasantly surprised at the checkout counter. The auctioning itself was of the sing-song mmm-mmm-mmm-mmm do I hear two fifty? Two forty nine, two fifty? Mmm-mmm-mmm two fifty one? variety. Fortunately we had done our homework, and knew that our limit was about $2,500 per acre for the land we wanted, or about $175,000 for the parcel. We were looking for land to keep as forest acreage, undeveloped, where the deer and the gopher tortoises could roam unmolested, as they do on our present tree farm. They started at $2,000 per acre and went rapidly up to over $4,000, I think all the way up to $7,000, so neither we nor any of those around us ever put in a bid; we were already priced out. Evidently those other bidders were of the pave-it-over, make-a-million persuasion, willing to pay much higher prices. In Florida they try to tax based on “highest and best use,” which doesn’t mean pristine, it means putting a city on it. One of the sideline cheerleaders asked me didn’t I want to bid? And I replied “Not in this price range.” Their whole object seemed to be to confuse the suckers into bidding more than they intended, not realizing the full amount they were committing to. So it was a disappointment on several fronts. With luck it will take a century for them to pave it all over. Maybe longer, if the drought-recession doesn’t end.

I watched another pair of videos: Rebel Without a Cause, and The Bridges of Madison County.  I had Rebel for years on a cassette, but when I tried to play it it turned out to be a bad cassette, not playing at all. So it was my frustration and being balked that made me get the DVD when it was on sale for six and a half bucks. I knew the main actors had later died in dramatic ways. I had read Bridges the book and later seen the movie, but fell asleep before it ended, so wanted to fill in what I had missed when it too was available for six and a half. Thus my irrelevant reason for pairing them off: prior balks. Rebel has been exalted as one of the great movies of all time, showing the enormous acting skill of James Dean and the potential of Natalie Wood. Well, he was handsome in a sultry way, and she had the remarkable ideal figure of the time, impossibly thin with outstanding conic breasts. I confess I did like looking at her. The story itself is of a high school gang and a “chicken” contest where one boy drives over the brink and is killed, and the consequences thereof. Dean and Natalie, similarly misunderstood by their parents, slowly come together and even kiss. A good story, I think, but not a great one. The actual rebel without a cause, who dies at the end, seems not to be Dean but a supporting actor. Okay.

Bridges started with the book, of course, a surprise super bestseller. I read it mainly to study the art of it: what made this routine illicit affair so compelling? I concluded that it was the verisimilitude, the seeming reality of it. It was so easy to believe in it happening just that way. Forbidden love, always intriguing. The affair was exhilarating, the conclusion painful. I remember a critic ridiculing the stars in the movie as miscast for this story; well shove the critic, as these actors turn out to be perfect for this story. The movie is essentially true to it, punctuated by the virtual participation of the lady’s two children as after her death they read the notebooks that detail the affair and slowly come to understand. Briefly, this: a traveling photographer encounters a lonely housewife, and they fulfill each others’ needs, she for some romantic adventure, he for the love of a good woman. Sex is perhaps the least of it; what counts is the nova explosion of desperate love. A four day affair, frustrated feeling forever after. They must separate, and do, with mutual heartache. They ironically can’t find each other later when her husband dies, and the photographer dies alone when he didn’t really have to. That’s the simple tragedy of it. The children learn from the retroactive experience and improve their own difficult relationships; it has not been entirely in vain. So the two movies are parallel in their intense human feeling. Both are well done, well acted, emotionally powerful. Both cover the events of just a few days. Lives can change significantly in days, even if they don’t outwardly show it much. Of the two, Bridges affects me more strongly.

I watched another set of two dollar videos. The Fog and The Learning Curve. I expected junky horror and junky sex/violence, respectively, and wasn’t really disappointed. The Fog turned out to be a well crafted mystery, with an eerie glowing fog rolling in, deadly pirate spooks in it, killing innocent folk. Turns out the pirate treasure was stolen a century ago and they want it back. The gold is in the form of a huge cross at the church. When the priest realizes this and gives it back, the fog recedes, sparing the town further mischief. Makes sense on its terms. Then at the end the fog returns to take out the priest. That doesn’t make sense; there was no longer a motive. So it was a nice set-up with a blown ending. Too bad. The Learning Curve is a Bonnie and Clyde type scheme wherein a young woman lures men into attempting sex, then screams rape, and her partner comes to her rescue and gets reluctantly bought off. That’s how they get money from chumps. Then they try it against a pro, who knows how to do it better than they do, and get brought into larger scams. It is sexy; watching that shapely girl running ahead in a bikini is something. But she has second thoughts as she sees the harm to an innocent shopkeeper and wants out. Thus she is not on the scene when the FBI tries to arrest them. Then it dissolves into sheer mayhem with wholesale killing. All except the girl, who rides off on her scooter. So how do the two movies compare? I think they are similar in that each could have been better than it was. I liked the sinister fog in the one, and the shapely girl in the other; apart from that they are pretty much average efforts. Maybe there’s a reason they were on sale dirt cheap.

I watched La Femme Musketeer, which picks up a generation after The Three Musketeers, featuring their three sons and one daughter, Valentine, all similarly trained. She wants to be a full musketeer, but there’s never been a woman in that role. The Cardinal is plotting to take power from the King; the musketeers support the king but get framed for murder as the plot complicates. I expected swashbuckling junk, but this turned out to be a cut above that. It’s a solid story with nice scenery and costuming, good acting, and, yes, plenty of swashbuckle. Of course the plots against the king are foiled in the end, and Valentine is admitted at a musketeer. I enjoyed it despite the absence of sex or any romance for the Femme. She’s merely a pretty girl impossibly wielding a sword.

I watched The Omega Man featuring Charleton Heston in a Los Angeles decimated by germ warfare. By day the streets are deserted; by night The Family spooks who can’t see in daylight emerge to burn whatever they can. He sees a live young woman, but she flees. Later they get together, and she takes him to her group of refugees who survive. They develop a serum from his blood that may cure the Family, but it turns out the Family doesn’t want to be cured, it just wants to kill the last uninfected folk. In the end The Family gets them, and he dies while the refugees escape to maybe start a new day. Downbeat, but it could be close to reality if the world should ever come to this pass. After all, we are seeing the disaster that global warming is bringing, and yet an entire political party is fighting to ensure that the disaster proceed on schedule.

I read Stupid History by Leland Gregory. This is a fun volume, detailing the idiotic decisions and confusions through history. Paul Revere didn’t ride into Concord to warn “The British are coming!” He was captured along the way and it was another member of his party who got through. Magellan didn’t circumnavigate the globe; he was killed in the Philippines, and only one of his five ships made it back home, with 18 of its 50 crew-members alive. Lizzie Borden didn’t kill her parents. Lincoln didn’t write The Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope on a train; he started work on it eleven days before the event, and there are five known drafts of it. William Tell never shot the apple from his son’s head, because William Tell never existed; he was a mere story. Why can’t you buy cashews in the shell? Because they have no shells; they are seeds. The Greeks did not set up bare statues; they were painted with clothing, or if nude, flesh tones and pubic hair. The Puritans were not saintly livers; they indulged in the same evils they condemned in others. What they wanted was power for themselves, not others. And so on, hundreds of items. I have a quarrel with a couple: it says the great Chinese Wall can’t after all be seen from the moon. Well, sure, but it omitted a relevant reason: there is not now and never has been a 3,200 mile Chinese Wall. It always consisted of sections of wall interspersed by hundreds of miles of gaps guarded by troops. And it says it is not true that half of all marriages end in divorce; that it would be correct if each person married only once and divorced once, but in fact some folk marry and divorce several times, so the true figure is one in four marriages divorcing. Huh? Elementary math suggests that who marries how many times does not change the statistic. What the author is thinking of is how many people divorce, and if some folk marry and divorce many times while others don’t, the true rate may be one in four. People, not marriages. So if three couples marry for life, and the fourth house on the block sees three divorces by the same occupant, that looks like as many divorces as stable marriages, but is really only one quarter of the people there. One made me wince: Jean Baptiste de Chateaubrun spent forty years writing and revising two plays, his life’s work, only to discover that his housekeeper had carelessly used the manuscripts as wrapping paper, and they were gone. Or this: Socialist Eugene Debs ran for president in 1920 while serving a ten year sentence for publicly criticizing the government’s questionable use of the Espionage Act in prosecuting people. This was America? Yet today we have the Patriot Act… And this: in 1864 Paraguay declared war on all three of its neighbors, and lost an estimated 90% of its population. I have read of that elsewhere, understanding that they lost 90% of their men, but re-populated so industriously that in a generation they were back to the normal male-female ratio. Amazing! But here’s the math: since boys and girls are born about evenly, one generation is all it takes. No miracle. There also lists of bizarre books that were actually published, like The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber, Sex After Death, How to Cook Husbands, How to be Happy Though Married, Games You Can Play with Your Pussy, and Old Age: Its Cause and Prevention. In 1767 a ship was exploring the Tahitian Islands and the crewmen discovered that the lovely young native women would trade sex for iron nails, which were very useful there. But soon the ship was falling apart because the men were taking all its nails. The author conjectures that this could have been the origin of “getting nailed” as a synonym for sex. In 1972 the Oregon Health Department discovered that the chunks in Hoody’s Chunky Style Peanut Butter were not peanuts but rat droppings. So the government acted. Now it requires no more than 50 insect fragments per hundred grams of peanut butter. That is so reassuring! But what the book does not mention is the earlier scandal of the Depression era, as I remember, where it turned out that when a flour company put out rat bait to control the rats, the workers were less than diligent. In one case a worker found a dead rat, so he simply tossed the rat and the rest of the poison into the huge grinding hopper where no one would know. And companies still object to regulations that inconvenience them by forbidding this sort of thing. Tort “reform” is sometimes their effort to abolish bothersome health regulations, “Tort” being a wrongful act not specifically covered in a contract, such as dumping poison into commercial flour. The book picks up on something I have always suspected: “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast” not “beast”; it was a typo. I believe it was a similar typo that turned a camel’s hair rope into a camel in the Bible, making it a camel trying to pass through the eye of a needle despite all common sense. Jesus often spoke figuratively, but not that figuratively. It says that farting contests were held in ancient Japan, with prizes for loudness and duration, and are today returning there. Hey, let’s bring that back as an Olympic sport! I remember back in 1959 we bought our first house, and one cupboard was painted over. So I pried it open, and there inside was a single old-fashioned record. We played it, and it was a “crepitation” contest, with Lord Windesmear being challenged for the championship. They had names for every type of fart, from cute little Freeps to elaborate Follow-up Bloopers. Unfortunately it was a two-record set, and all we had was the first one, but a co-worker told me how the second one went. Lord Windesmear made a phenomenal winning effort, only to be disqualified at the end because, well, he shit. I wonder whether that recording is on DVD today? On and on; you get the picture. Oh, one more? Okay. The city of Des Moines was named after an Indian word for the region. Only three centuries later did a researcher check the language, to discover that the literal translation was “The shit-faces.” As I said, it’s a fun book I bought from Hamilton, the remainder bookseller, for about four dollars.

I read The Five and Twenty Tales of the Genie, by Sivadasa, translated from the Sanskrit by Chandra Rajan. This is part of the voluminous mythological lore of India. I bought it because I am a fan of the Arabian Nights tales, and this seemed to be related. 25 genie tales? That could be fabulous. It turned out that these were not tales about genies, but tales told by a genie. The framework is weird. The essence is that a king finds a corpse hanging from a tree in a forest. He cuts it down and carries it back to town so it can be properly buried. As he carries it, a genie possesses it and talks to the king, telling him a tale. When the king arrives in town the tale is finished, and the body disappears, to be re-hung on the tree. He has to start over, and hears another tale. The 24 tales plus the framework tale make up the story. Each ends with a question by the genie. For example, #21: four brothers got to four places to get educated. When they get together again they demonstrate their new abilities. One found a dead lion in the forest. He assembled the bones into a skeleton. Another brother clothed it with flesh, the third added blood and hair, and the fourth brought it to life. Whereupon the lion ate them all. Then the terminal question: which of the brothers was the biggest fool? The king answered that it was the one who gave the lion life. That was correct, and the corpse vanished, to reappear back on the tree. Many other tales relate to young love, where handsome young men and lovely young women merely see each other in passing and are instantly smitten with undying love, and they will die of grief if it is not requited, and some do. There is magic, but mostly it’s about relationships and the ethical questions that result. When all the tales have been told and correctly answered except the last, which I think had no answer, the king was approved to go on to bigger things.

I watched My Own Worst Enemy, a TV series that we never got to watch, having neither cable nor satellite. I picked up the first season, 9 episodes, as another $7.50 DVD. This is a story of two men, Henry the family man, and Edward the James Bond type killer. Totally different types, except for one thing: they both occupy the same body. Henry is really a created identity for when Edward is off duty, with a wife and son, and never the twain shall meet. Except that they have become “broken”–they change back and forth randomly, so that Henry winds up on an Edward mission, and Edward can find himself making out with Henry’s wife. Henry is not completely pleased with that, especially when his wife tells him fondly that what they did last night was so illegal it shouldn’t have a name. So now the two facets know of each other, and exchange messages by recording them on their cell phone. This is necessary so Edward can clue Henry in on a mission, so that Henry in his ignorance doesn’t get them both killed. Even so, those missions are dangerous, and death constantly threatens. It’s a fabulous fast-action series with nice human interactions along the way. I shall have to see if there was a second season, and whether it’s available on DVD.

I watched The Remains of the Day, an Anthony Hopkins movie. I regard Hopkins as a consummate actor, though it is possible I am being influenced by his first name. In this movie he is the head butler at a wealthy estate, constrained to keep his personal opinions private in the face of upper class bigotry. He falls in love with the head housekeeper, but neither of them can afford to admit it, and she reluctantly marries elsewhere. There’s also the background of the British willful blindness to the vicious deceptions of Nazi Adolf Hitler, who claimed to want peace while planning war. “Peace in our time” was always a costly illusion. How could they have been such fools? So I found it depressing. I was born in in England and lived there at the time period of this movie, but never related to the upper class. It’s just not my scene.

I read Sequence 77 by Darin M Preston, published by Lucid Style Author Services www.Creative2aT.com. This novel ranges from the 1930s to the near future, and if I understand it correctly concerns a scientist’s work to develop a virus that will cause babies to be born with random races rather than those of their parents. That is the scientist’s effort to eradicate bigotry: how can you hate other races if your own children may be of those races? Whether this would work I can’t say, as bigotry is not limited to race, but it’s an interesting notion. The narrative is mostly from the view of two government agents investigating a biological oddity that someone is trying to conceal. It could be a fast paced thriller. Unfortunately for me indifferent writing spoils it. A good editor could have helped a lot, eliminating pervasive “saidisms”–that is, using words other than “said” for dialogue, thus attracting attention to identifiers that should be inconspicuous—and distinguishing between “may” and “might” and cleaning up spot spelling errors like “miniscule,” which is sometimes correctly spelled but not always. There is good characterization and description, and the author evidently knows his settings, but the errors spoiled it for me.

We celebrated Christmas Dismember 24, because Daughter had to work Sunday. We were busy with gifts and such, and Tofu Turkey (I don’t miss meat, but don’t object to its imitations), and then I had a pile of dishes to wash, but I caught passing snatches of The Sound of Music on the background TV. I understand Julie Andrews was the star of the stage production of My Fair Lady and did a great job, but the numskulls who govern movie-making thought she wasn’t well enough known to do for the movie and replaced her. Then she starred in The Sound of Music, which is surely one of the greatest movies ever made, and she’s perfect in it. So it’s over-familiar, yet it caught me again, and I watched one of my favorite sequences, wherein Julie is trying to teach the eldest boy to dance, but can’t do it well because he’s not tall enough, until the father cuts in. Then it becomes a beautifully mannered dance, with Julie showing up to full advantage, a lovely young woman, until the flirtatious nature of it gets to her and she breaks off. He is, after all, engaged to another woman. I just love it. I may have to get it on DVD so I can watch that dance over and over; I am enamored of it. Music and dance—two of the arts that lifted mankind out of the animal state, along with painting, sculpture, acting, and storytelling. One by one the qualities that distinguish mankind from other animals are falling, as apes and birds use tools, dolphins communicate, others have crude language with syntax, problem-solving intelligence, etc., but as far as I know we remain the only species that appreciates art for art’s sake.

I read The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian. My wife gave it to me for Christmas, knowing that I was organizing for my next novel, To Be A Woman, about a female humanoid robot who becomes conscious and of course wants to become completely human. There have been many humanoid robots in science fiction and fantasy, some of them mine, and the matter of machine consciousness has been explored before, but this will be my more considered take on it, a serious effort. The book is subtitled “What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive,” and it explores many interesting bypaths. It focuses mainly on the Turing Test, which is essentially a five minute dialogue with another party via typing, and deciding whether the other party is or is not a machine. Given world enough and time you should have little trouble telling, but in five minutes it can be difficult, because of sophisticated response programs. They even put in typos. One person flummoxed the machine by typing utter nonsense, that would make any real person draw a blank, and the machine went on with its program, unruffled. I’m sure that error was quickly fixed. The book inquires “Where is the keep of our selfhood?” and that certainly relates; if we are conscious individuals, why can’t a machine be the same? I have felt throughout that consciousness is an emergent quality of a feedback loop, thinking about ourselves thinking, and a machine should be able to do the same. I suspect it’s a fairly simple thing, once we catch on to it. Then comes the question whether a conscious humanoid robot, virtually indistinguishable from a living person, is a person. But that’s not the thrust of this book; the author is exploring how we can tell machine from person, and that leads to devious questions. Such as what about the two halves of our brains? Cut the corpus callosum, the cable that connects them, and the hemispheres seem to be two different people. The one we know best is the left one, which controls the right side, the logical one; the hidden one is the artistic one. (This is phenomenally oversimplified.) So why do we even need the artistic side? Three R’s conservatives seem to feel we don’t, and try to cut the arts out of schools in the name of fiscal responsibility. But the book gives an example of the pitfalls of pure logic: give a person the choice of two equivalent pens to take, and the pure logician can’t make the choice because neither is clearly better; there is no “rational” or “correct” choice. But the artistic mind has no trouble; one pen may be a pretty green, and that’s the one. Its outer color is irrelevant to its function, but relevant to the mood of the user. Similarly pure logic lets us down when we consider life itself. The book quotes a line from the poet Yeats: “Sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal.” That succinctly describes us all; we’re pretty much in Hell, and can only dream of Heaven. As I put it in a novel: life has no meaning unless we live for meaning. It is that “silent” right hemisphere that provides the meaning. We are dying from the moment we are birthed, but maybe we can accomplish something if we try. My whole livelihood as a creative writer is based on that effort, which, ultimately, is artistic rather than rational. The book remarks on the traditional fairy tale ending: they all lived happily ever after. That really means that nothing interesting happened to them thereafter; they lapsed into dullness. Is that really the goal of life? I like to think that my own life did not lose interest when I married. So this book gives me many things to ponder, as I try to craft a machine that will effectively come to life. At what point does the appearance become the reality?

Darrell Sweet died. He was close to my age, and wound up doing the great majority of the covers for my Xanth novels. We were “introduced” via Judy-Lynn del Rey. I understand when she saw him walking along at a convention she hurried up to ask him to do a cover, and it went from there. Later she solicited me for a novel, and I said “But Ballantine is blacklisting me!” because I had protested getting cheated, and she said no longer; they had a notion of my case because Lester del Rey had been similarly cheated. I wrestled with the notion of giving the six-year blacklister another try and finally decided to do it, and that turned out to be about the best decision of my writing career. I suspect signing on with them was similarly significant for Darrell Sweet. I never met him personally, but certainly he was a competent artist, and our careers were thus linked.

I reviewed the copyedited manuscript for the simplified language edition of A Spell For Chameleon, the first Xanth novel. I set up that edition twenty years ago, but was on the outs with the publisher, so it had nowhere to go; now we have a deal and they are publishing it electronically. It’s the same novel, merely with simpler words, easier to read. This was an experience, because the copyeditior’s changes—and there were two and a half slews of them—were marked in Revision Mode, and I had to go into a special mode to make any changes of my own. But once I got past the learning curve, I concluded it’s a good system, and saves cumbersome mailing back and forth. So keep an eye out for that electronic edition, especially if the deliberately complicated vocabulary of the original was a problem. It was that way because the editor feared it would be taken for a children’s novel; Xanth is and always was an adult series, though children do read it, thus learning about naughty things like panties and bleeps that scorch foliage and freak out maiden aunts.

I completed Relationships 5, the ongoing series of collections of mostly erotic stories and sent it to its publisher. I also sent in One and Wonder, my anthology of favorite stories from when I was a reader over half a century ago, to its prospective publisher. So folk who are curious what impressed me when I was a teen will be able to read those stories, which are by many of the names in the science fiction field like Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn, and Jack Williamson. Do they stand up to today’s stories? Maybe the readers will judge.

I value plants as I do creatures, and each has its history. Maybe a decade ago we had a Christmas Cactus in a pot, but when I went to transplant it outside, I discovered it had not waited on me; its roots had extended out the bottom of the pot and anchored on the tile beside the swimming pool. Okay, so I left it there. The pot crumbled away and it was left on the bare surface, but it endured. In fact it thrived and bloomed before Christmas each year, sometimes as many as a hundred flowers. Last year it had about fifty. Then something ate it off. So I put little plastic domes over the bare stems, trying to protect it, and in due course it grew back. This year it was starting three flowers, with more in the offing—when the predator struck again, eating off everything outside the domes. Now I have a notion what’s doing it: an opossum raids our pool enclosure, which is highly porous. Sigh. We don’t seek to hurt the native creatures, and do suffer their ravages. Raccoons raid our garbage, gopher tortoises graze our grass, as do rabbits; in fact last year they ate it all and we really have none left. I had to enclose some plants in chicken wire to stop the deer from eating them. I’d like to find a harmless spray that would discourage the animals without hurting them.

Our daughter found a good sale on Z-Coil sandals and bought several pairs, giving some to us. These have strong spiral springs on the heels, so they feel bouncy. They look weird from behind because there are no heels, just the springs. I’m wearing mine now, cautiously, because I don’t want to trip and fall. They’re supposed to be good for the feet. I haven’t noticed a difference, but they are reasonably comfortable to wear.

Newspaper column by David Brooks remarks how European countries like Germany and the Netherlands played by the rules and practiced good governance, living within their means, while Greece, Italy, and Span did not. Now the responsible countries are expected to bail out the irresponsible ones. Even today many in Greece are not willing to pay their taxes. Is this fair? I think of the story of the ant and the grasshopper, with the ant being condemned for not bailing out the grasshopper. But the USA is no model; the people who caused our financial crisis were never held responsible and are still raking in huge bonuses while the great majority of folk suffer privation. So what’s to be done? Whatever it is, it won’t happen without a thorough political housecleaning. That seems impossible; we are too far corrupted. I fear for the future. THE DISH has some recommendations: eradicate the Bush tax cuts. That may be feasible, because if nothing is done they will expire the end of 2012. Require that all Americans pay the same Social Security tax on all earnings. Investigate the Crash of 2008 and bring to justice those who committed any crimes. Join the rest of the free world and create a single-payer, free and universal health care system that covers all Americans all of the time. Reduce the carbon emissions that are destroying the planet, finding ways to wean us from fossil fuels. Establish voting reforms that, among other things, eliminate the legal personhood of corporations. (Maybe some day machines will develop caring and conscience, but don’t count on corporations ever doing it.) There’s more, but you get the idea. I’d love to see any or all of them happen, but it’s a pipe dream.

A reader advised me that December 23 is the day of Festivus, celebrated by putting up an annual pole and airing grievances. “During the past year, you have disappointed me in the following ways…” I would start with the politicians mentioned above.

The Ask Marilyn column often has something interesting. But sometimes she goofs. The Christmas Day column posed a reader question that if an organization with 400 employees randomly drug tested 100 every three months, so the chances of being tested was 25% per quarter, and those 100 are returned thereafter to the pool, what are the chances for a year? Marilyn said they remained 25%. That strikes me as wrong. If you have one chance in 4 of being tested, each time, for a year you have 4 such ¼ chances, or an extreme likelihood of being tested. Duh.

David Brooks—I am beginning to notice that name as one of the sharper newspaper columnists—discusses the annual Sidney Awards for the best magazine essays. One of them intrigued me because it echoes my own thinking: when you check the universe, the likelihood of life existing seems so remote that one is led to one of two conclusions: there is a God who designed it, or there are an infinite variety of universes of every type, among which is ours. So it’s not coincidence, merely one of the very few that clicked. We are here to observe it because it is the one in a squintillion to the googolplex power that is right for us. That doesn’t answer the deeper riddle of why anything exists, instead of nothing, which I should think would be the default state. My best theory there is that the very concept of utter nothingness is flawed—can nothing be conceived without a conceiver?–so that inherent stress causes the cosmic carpet to crack or wrinkle, and that wrinkle is the multiverse.

Interesting graph of the ongoing GOP Iowa caucus poll results shows six of the eight current candidates leading at one point, and the seventh, Santorum, rising fast, late. The one halfway decent one, Huntsman, has always been last, of course. Republicans don’t want decency, they want a winner.

Item in THE WEEK says multivitamins do more harm than good. That women who take them are more likely to die of any cause than those who don’t. It concludes that you should eat as many vegetables and fruits as you can. Well, I’m a male vegetarian who does take supplements to make up what I would otherwise get in meat. I say the healthy thing to do is to pay attention to what you eat and avoid deleterious substances like high fructose corn syrup and salt overload. And do exercise and get enough sleep. Life is like driving in a thunderstorm: be constantly careful and watch out for the idiots who aren’t.

Why are we warm bodied? Article in NEW SCIENTIST addresses that. The liabilities are obvious; a warm bodied creature has to eat nearly 50 times more frequently than a boa constrictor. Okay, so those big snakes spend much time in torpor; still reptiles get along well enough without self-generating body heat. Why did mammals and birds choose (figuratively) heat? There has to be a survival benefit. The answer, suggested here, is fungi. Fungi are everywhere, including on plants and animals, including insects. Everywhere except mammals and birds. Because we maintain a body temperature just above what fungi can handle. Even so, we can get infected on our fringes, with things like ringworm and athlete’s foot, maybe because our feet can dip below the limit. It would be far worse if we let our overall temperature slide. So we maintain the furnace despite its energy cost.

Here in Citrus County, Florida, we value our rare birds. The celebrated whooping cranes winter here, but there are other less threatened species. Among these are the sandhill crane, a handsome bird that makes a call as it flies sounding like winding a rusty grandfather clock, letting the world know. We have them on our tree farm, and sometimes see them standing by a road. A larger cousin migrates to Canada. Well, now the shits in Kentucky have decided to start hunting them as they pass by. These lovely big birds are just crossing over the territory, not looking for trouble, and they’re going to get shot. Way to go, bang-for-brains.

On the last day of the year I received my author’s copies of The Sopaths, probably my most shocking novel. It looks good, with the sexy bare-breasted teen sopath called Autopsy, Topsy for short, on the cover, more mischief than almost any man can handle. In due course we’ll make the novel available electronically too, but for now you can find it via regular channels and www.eraserheadpress.com. It’s a horror story that is bound to arouse some book-burners, but I doubt anyone will be able to claim seriously that it’s inferior fiction. For one thing it poses the question just which side are the be-fruitful-and-multiply-or-else  folk are really serving, knowing that overpopulation is leading to the sure destruction of the world as we know it: God or Satan?

Another item in THE WEEK: a number of luminaries were asked to write letters of advice to their 16 year old selves. One of them started “Dear Piers.” That got my attention. It turned out to be Piers Morgan. I like to think that the category of Piers is a rare but superior one, like a pretty bird, so I’m rooting for something special here. He quotes several family members, such as Mother: “Ambition knows no bounds.” Also public figures like Donald Trump: “Think big and kick ass.” And himself: “Don’t take anything too seriously.” So what would I say to my younger self? Remember, I was the one who rationally judged his life and concluded it wasn’t worth it. In fact, at that age my closest cousin, with everything to live for, died of cancer, while I, the one without prospects, unhappily survived. What kind of a God would be so sadistic? But as it turned out, God may have known what He was doing, devious as the course was for a lifelong nonbeliever. So I would say “Hang on, Piers; it does get better.”

I try not to belabor this, but I do think often of my lost daughter, in part because so many things remind me of her. This time it’s my Xanth month. When I was figuring them out for the calendar, I lacked one for February, and Penny suggested FeBlueberry. I laughed, dismissing it, but in the course of the next minute realized that it would do, and now it’s one of my favorites. FeBlueberry, when the Redberries are blue with cold; what could make more sense?

We saw the current Sherlock Holmes movie, A Game of Shadows. I found it loud, violent, and generally confusing. I got the gist, that Sherlock’s worst enemy had a dastardly plot to destroy the world and had to be stopped, and that this somehow connected to Watson’s wedding. Holmes finally takes the man out in a mutual drowning, but reappears at the end, so all is well. Then I saw Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. As usual there were confusing jumps and not all the sound was clear; I fear my age is showing. But it had some remarkable action sequences, including one of our hero climbing with sticky gloves on the world’s tallest building, and of course a glove malfunctioned, so he dangled a hundred stories over the street. Also a sequence where the leading lady needed to distract a bad guy, and wow, did her displayed breasts ever distract. I generally prefer slender women rather than cows, but she could distract me anytime. Not much substance that I could see—I am referring to the movie, not her bosom—but an enjoyable thriller.

I read The Uncanny Valley by Gregory Miller, whose Scaring the Crows I reviewed here two years ago. He remains an effective writer with nuanced characterizations and eerily intriguing settings. But mainly he has a wild imagination that takes you in unexpected directions. The unifying theme is that all the stories are set in the same obscure town, each told by a different person. These stories are brief, sometimes more like fragments, and few have really solid conclusions; they are more to make you wonder. Secret trysts, odd deaths, eerie mysteries. They range from the gruesome to the nice, with many in between. For example there is “The Fourth Floor,” wherein children in a fix-up house, living on the lower two floors while the upper floors have not yet been refurbished, hear a nightly pounding for two hours every night. The parents won’t talk about it, so finally the kids investigate on their own. They find a woman in a tattered dress walking into the the wall, the thud coming when her head hits the plaster, over and over. She has no eyes, just empty sockets, so can’t see to avoid it. Who is the noisy ghost? What is her history? What is she trying to accomplish? We don’t find out. The family learns to use ear plugs, and all is well. I find that intriguing but frustrating. Then there’s “Don’t Tell,” with a nine year old boy coming to know a nice neighbor woman who gives him lemonade. She shows him a picture of her, but it’s dated 1654. How can that be? She says stand beside her and look in the mirror. The story illustration shows what he would see: her reflection as a centuries-old hag. Magic keeps her alive and looking young. Would he like to join her? He ponders, and decides he would. So he drinks her special potion, and in due course he will join her, living a very long time, and she won’t be lonely any more. So if you want your imagination nervously tweaked, these 33 stories will surely do it.

I read The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived, put out by the WatchTower Bible and Tract society. You know, the folk who come to your door to persuade you to reform before the Second Coming. I am a life-long agnostic with no belief in the supernatural, and that includes God right down to bad luck on Friday the 13^th. But I try to keep an open mind, and I do believe in Jesus, in the sense of a man trying to reform an erring world, and getting crucified for it. The world has never been much interested in true reform. This is a beautiful volume, with full color illustrations throughout, complete with lesson-plan type questions following every chapter. It is written in clear man-in-the-street English. I do fault it grammatically for using “he that” instead of “he who” throughout; a truck is a that, a person is a who. I also question the way it repeats the story of Jesus saying that it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a sewing needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. I take his point, but I believe it’s a mistranslation: the Aramaic symbol for a camel’s hair rope is similar to that for a camel, and they got the wrong one, as any proofreader with common sense should have realized. Apart from such minor things, how is it? It does seem like a good review of the life and death of Jesus, which I find depressing: the naysayers are so steeped in their bigotry, and Jesus’ death by torture is not fun reading. It is heavy on interpretation, much of which I disagree with, turning the Bible to an argument in favor of the WatchTower’s agenda. I wonder: how many WatchTower folk are there in the world? Because they believe that only the best 144,000 will be saved when the crash comes, and the rest will be eternally sorry. If there are more than 144,000 of them in the world now, as I suspect there are, not all of them will be saved, and trying to recruit more is surely mischief, especially if any of the new recruits are more pious than the existing ones. Of course I, as a rock-solid unbeliever, am not affected; there is no Afterlife for me of any nature. But I do wonder. As for the constant miracles of healing and resurrection Jesus performed: a miracle is pretty much by definition magic, and I don’t credit this at all. But I note with a certain disgust that people apparently crowded to Jesus not so much to heed his message as for private greed: to be touched and healed. Why did he bother? He must have been a generous man, or determinedly hopeful.

I read The Ghost in the Crystal, by Matt Posner, the first in his School of the Agesseries. This is about Simon, a thirteen year old boy interested in magic. He sees an classified ad beginning “If you can read this advertisement, you may have what it takes to be a student wizard at School of the Ages.” It turns out that the ad is invisible to those without magic potential. Simon follows up, and is recruited to attend the school. It goes on of course from there. This may seem to smack of Harry Potter and Hogwash, but it is its own story. There is a strong Jewish and biblical current, but it’s about magic rather than religion, and the magic is impressive. I got the feeling I was attending the school by correspondence, and that the magic was authentic. A seemingly dull curriculum turns out to be otherwise. For example “Seminar in Memento Analysis” has them contemplating mementos. A memento is an object, anything from a ring to a brick that is associated with a spirit. Pick one up, and commune with the spirit. But you dare not trust the spirit, because it is out for its own advantage and will trick you and take over your body if you are foolish enough to let it. If you are careful, you can get useful information or power. Some spirits are more dangerous than others, so new students are limited to the easy ones, sort of the way a ski school would limit novices to the gentle slopes before letting them try Mt. Everest. It takes time and diligence, but in due course you may indeed scale the heights. Well, a dangerous spirit persuades Simon to take his memento; that’s the ghost in the crystal. Before it is done, one of Simon’s party of friends dies. This ain’t beanbag. There’s more, of course, serious and light; I liked the sequence where they encounter a hat that keeps jumping at them, and every time it collides it becomes two hats, until they are waist-deep in hats and have to figure out how to stop them. Simon has friends and enemies and aspires to romance as he struggles to make his way. This is good reading. It’s available on Kindle.

I read Finding Oz, by Evan I Schwartz. This is a biography of L Frank Baum, the author of the original Oz series of fantasy novels. It traces the likely sources of the elements of Oz, showing that Baum drew pretty much from familiar things in his own life. I was interested to note that Baum as a child was abruptly sent to a military academy for two years. He was not a healthy child; he had a heart condition, and this life was brutally rough on him. He was finally returned home when a disciplinary beating with a cane drove him into a heart attack. He had been caught gazing out the window at singing birds. This is the sort of thing that makes a writer, unfortunately: abrupt separation from the familiar and time spent in relative hell. It seems to be true for many writers, and I relate well, having experienced similar, though without cane beatings. But, again like many writers, Baum spent many years not succeeding well at other employments, until finally he started penciling fantasy and found his emotional home. The Yellow Brick Road existed where he was, literally; there were such roads made from left over ship ballast bricks. People he knew may have become principle figures in the story, though masked. Ironically he chose Kansas as the starting point because he regarded it as the dreariest place on earth, something well worth escaping from. Then the movie made it a sappy homecoming. I learned also that the movie directors wanted to cut it, believing it was too long, so they eliminated the tribute to Baum’s original book, so that many viewers never knew there had been one, and only a battle prevented them from yanking out the evocative theme song “Over the Rainbow.” Producers are still doing that sort of thing, being as insensitive as ever. Oh, and the original slippers were silver, not ruby. Ruby shows up better against yellow bricks.

I read Hollenguard by S Arthur Martin. This starts out with Kamil, the young innkeeper’s assistant, being intrigued by overnight travelers, one of whom is a lovely young woman. After they leave, a bad storm comes up and Kamil runs after them to warn them, only to find three of them dead and only the woman, Elysandria, surviving. It seems that the storm is a cover for deadly creatures who are out to destroy all people. They have to flee the inn, traveling north to avoid the storm and its minions, but there turns out to be few places to hide. They join with others, but the beasts attack and drive them out too. In the end they make a stand at the old fortress of Hollenguard, but even there they are about to be overwhelmed. This is adventure fantasy with almost unremitting action and little hope of redemption; the monsters are plainly dominant, and the main question is how long anyone can survive the onslaught. This is self published but well worth reading; you can find the author at www.sarthurmartin.com.

For Pete’s sake, look what’s happening to recycling. It used to be so complicated that it was hardly worth it, but now they allow you to put all recyclables into the same hopper: plastic, glass, metal, paper. This has cut our weekly garbage down to about a quarter. I note that the little triangles on plastic have different numbers and words. For example, #1 says PETE. I wonder who Pete is, and trust he’s a nice guy for setting up this recycling deal. Pete would be short for Peter, which means Rock. It’s a version of Piers, Pedro, Pietro, Pierre—there are a dozen or so variants, surely all good folk. Jesus told Peter that he was the rock on which Jesus would build his church. That’s a pretty good credit. So maybe now Peter is expanding operations and doing recycling. Other triangles have different words. #2 says HOPE, a nice sentiment, except that when I looked closer I realized it was actually HDPE, which could stand for Heavy Duty Penis Envy. Maybe a movie editor changed it. #5 I think is PP, maybe Past Participle. Maybe it’s a secret language that only the initiate comprehend. Ah, well.

Last Column I mentioned how Ask Marilyn had fouled up an answer. If the chances of being selected for a test are 25% a quarter, what are they for a year? Marilyn said 25%. I got confirmation from two readers, saying that the true annual odds are about 68.4%. The odds per quarter don’t change, but that was not the question. Then Marilyn ran a correction herself. Good for her; she’s not stupid.

Bizarro cartoon for Jamboree 28, 2012: two old codgers playing chess with bottles of medicine. “Lipitor takes Prozac. Check.” Makes sense to me; I’m an old codger. Lio comic for Jamboree 18 has Lio hooking up a snowblower for his fun, only to discover that it was set not on SNOW but on SNOT. Ugh! His expression indicates it ‘snot funny.

An item made the local news when a 67 year old man struck a woman with his shopping cart for having too many items for the ten item checkout line. Why do I note this? Because it happened at the very Publix shore where we shop. Reminds me of the time, decades ago, when I absentmindedly headed for an open checkout spot, and someone reminded me that I was over the limit. Indeed I was; I hastily changed lanes. Then I and the rest of the store had to wait while the clerks pooled their resources to try to make change for that man’s high denomination bill. Mister self-righteous didn’t care how he inconvenienced others.

Newspaper item on workplace bullying. Most of my life I have been self employed, so the only bullies I had to deal with are publishers, some of which I took to law; it’s the only language some seem to understand. But I remember how it was before, and it reminds me yet again how glad I was to get out of that rat race. This article says that if you haven’t experienced it you’re likely to believe it doesn’t happen, but it does. It’s not physical violence; it’s more situational, and sometimes the only escape is to quit your job. Today with the job market as tight as it is, that may not be an option. I suffered deterioration of my health when caught in a situation not of my making that nevertheless cost me my job. I suspect similar is happening to many folk today. The article suggests that victims try to persuade the boss that this sort of thing is bad for the bottom line. If the boss is not the bully.

Charles Krauthammer—the name ironically makes me think of beating up on Germans—is a conservative columnist who can normally be depended on to find the wrong side of a political issue. But he had a column that interested me. If there are so many planets in the galaxy—the indication is there may be hundreds of billions—chances are that life is common, and intelligent life not uncommon. So how come we have seen no evidence of it? He refers to Carl Sagan’s thought that it is because advanced civilizations destroy themselves. Ouch! Yet look at ours; if it doesn’t do it via nuclear war, it may do it via pollution and resource depletion. We are well on the way to destroying ourselves, while the greed-heads prevent reform that might diminish their profits. If that is typical—and it may be—then we have our answer. We may be alone because the prior civilizations have suicided and we’re next. Because of our own folly.

Sunny Florida is the ideal place to live, at least until it gets entirely paved over by expanding population. But there’s a problem with another type of immigrant: Burmese pythons have taken over the Everglades, and now 99% of the raccoons are gone, 98% of the opossums, 94% of the deer, 87% of the bobcats, and close to 100% of the rabbits. Even alligators are prey to the pythons. The question is, as the prey runs out, what will the pythons eat next? They grow to an average of 16 feet long, and breed copiously. They may not care to migrate north, because we do get some winter freezes; In Jamboree we had a low here on the tree farm of 21°F, later followed by a high of 81°. The serpents won’t like the freezes, so I suspect they will move instead into human territory in the south, eliminating wild dog and cat problems before they start in on stray humans. Then it may get ugly.

Speaking of ugly: Author’s Guild reports on the struggle among the titans of the publishing industry, with Amazon increasingly bullying old-line publishers. I never liked getting pushed around by those publishers, and fought back, which is why I got blacklisted and badmouthed while other writers achieved success denied me; I don’t owe the old order much. Later I did get my own success, but I did not forget. I like seeing real competition develop, such as electronic publishing and now the e-readers like Nook and Kindle, and there is a private satisfaction seeing the old bullies get pushed around by the new one. But I am wary of the fresh master, Amazon, even though Amazon has been courting me. I am aware that I am a mouse running among elephants, and will prosper only as long as I can avoid getting stepped on. I love doing business with Kindle, which provides a real alternative to the closed shop that is traditional book marketing, and I encourage new writers to go there. Amazon has done the world a significant favor by offering alternative publication anyone can afford, and I applaud it. But once Amazon puts the old publishers away, and becomes in effect the only publisher and bookseller, we regular writers may, like revolutionary France in Coleridge’s poem, find ourselves wearing the name of freedom, graven on a heavier chain.

Thomas Friedman had a nice newspaper column, spelling out the ideal political candidate. That would be one who advocates an immediate investment in infrastructure that will create jobs and shore up our highways, airports, schools, mass transit, as well as fixing our fiscal imbalance. Who will reform taxes, so that everyone pays fairly. Who has an inspirational vision, like Kennedy’s drive to take us to the moon and beyond. And who supports a minimum floor of public financing for presidential, senate, and house campaigns, so that big anonymous corporate money will no longer buy elections. Okay, I would tweak that agenda here and there, but I agree. Yet I fear nothing like this will happen. The greed-heads are already in control, a cancer on our culture, and they will not let go short of something like the French Revolution mentioned above, that cuts off their heads. That dooms us all.

I saw an ad in PARADE for the Nicotrol Inhaler, the quit-smoking prescription device. That pleases me, because I know that, unlike most others, it actually works. My wife smoked for fifty years, and I was resigned to losing her eventually to lung cancer, but Nicotrol got her off cigarettes. It’s been five years now, and chances are it won’t be lung cancer that takes her out. If it worked for my wife, who was a heavy smoker, three packs a day in her prime, it should work for just about anyone. What it is is a thing like a cigarette with a cylinder that provides nicotine when sucked on, so that craving is satisfied without the smoke pollution, and the hands are kept occupied so that a person can’t smoke a cigarette as some do while using a patch or chewing gum. Simple and effective.

Newspaper column by Naomi Oreskes made a point that got my attention. She said when she had jury duty, the judge asked the jurors before the trial how they expected to vote. A few expected to vote guilty; a few expected to vote not guilty. Half of them said they didn’t yet know enough to decide. Understand: this was hypothetical; they expected to hear the evidence then decide for real. I would have gone with the agnostics, of course. But it was the wrong answer. Why? Because in the American system of justice, there is a presumption of innocence. So if you don’t know enough to decide, your verdict should be Not Guilty. Okay, the columnist went on to say that open-mindedness can be the wrong answer in science and public policy too. This business of being undecided about global warming is wrong, because for the last decade the scientific consensus has been overwhelming; climate change is happening, is caused by man’s pollution of the atmosphere, and is dangerous to our future. Our default should be to save the world, and if there is any possibility that current trends are dangerous, we need to change them. If by some faint chance there is not that danger, changing the trend won’t do any harm. I see it as like playing Russian roulette: so there is only one chance in six that the operative chamber has the bullet. Would you put the pistol to your head and fire? What we actually have is more like five chances in six. You want to be open-minded and gamble? Then pull the trigger, idiot, somewhere else.

THE WEEK had an item on Internet piracy of music, books, and movies, and efforts to stop it. I have discussed this here before, but it bears repeating: pirates are thieves who are destroying the ability of creative artists to make a living, myself included; a LOT of my works are chronically stolen. The pirates need to be stopped. The problem is how to do it without censoring free expression itself. I think there does have to be a law, but one carefully crafted to shut down only the pirates.

I plan ahead, and generally know what I’ll be working on each day. I allow four days at the end of the month to update the Survey of Electronic Publishers and Related Services, and to write this HiPiers Column. Plenty of time. Except for the unexpected. Jamboree 30 a leak sprang in the water tank that processes out the radon gas in our ground water, so we don’t get slowly poisoned. We had to call the man, and this morning, FeBlueberry 1, he replaced the tank with a new three thousand dollar plus purification system. So instead of editing this Column then I spent two hours on that. Jamboree 31^st my wife had a routine blood test. Oh yeah? We lost two hours to that. I say We because I don’t like to let her go out alone, lest something happen. And there were special IRS forms that had to be completed and mailed before the month expired (we have complicated finances); we wound up driving to town at night to mail them. Then I made supper and served it at 9 PM. The fact is, life really does tend to get in the way of whatever I’m trying to do. This HiPiers column had to be abbreviated. Yes I know: I tend to talk too much anyway. Still, it annoys me.

Book review of A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss in NEW SCIENTIST echoes my conclusion: why is there something instead of nothing? Because “nothing” is an extremely unstable state from which the production of “something” is pretty much inevitable. But what accounts for the laws of physics that govern us? We exist in a multiverse, where a seemingly infinite number of universes have their own varying rules, and we are in the one that made us feasible. We surely would not like it much in one of the other universes. Another article clarifies that the multiverse is not eternal; it had a beginning. Ours may be a multiply-derivative bubble, but there was a beginning. Another article clarifies that quantum physics requires that fermions (in this case, electrons) can not occupy the same quantum state. Each demands its own territory, as it were. That means that when too many electrons come together in an atom, they have to separate, occupying positions farther and farther away from the nucleus. That leaves them with only weak attraction to the protons in the center, so they are free to play around with the electrons of other atoms. Oh, the scandal! This enables chemistry, and without it we would not exist, because everything would be compacted in the center of the atom. Maybe in other universes this separation and illicit flirtation is not the case, so matter as we know it does not exist.

From DISCOVER we learn that Otzi the Ice Man had a good meal of goat meat and bread shortly before he died. He must have been ambushed. We still have not brought his murderer to justice. This does mess up my characterization of him in the GEODYSSEY series, where he was leading the enemy astray so as to decoy them away from his beloved daughter. Or does it? Maybe the enemy was closer than he thought, waiting in ambush. I dread the think what they then did to the daughter.

It seems there is a restaurant in Beijing, China, named the Shit House, which serves Asian dishes inspired by the bathroom experience. They are served in replica toilets and bed pans. It is fabulously successful. Say, do you think if I wrote a novel titled The Magic Fart it would be fabulously successful? Naw.

The month of Jamboree I wrote a 28,000 word novella, To Be A Woman, that I may publish separately. It’s about a female humanoid robot crafted for sexual purpose, a sexbot named Elasa for Electronic Associates, who is so well designed that she can’t be told physically from a living woman, though the fact that she never says No may offer a clue. She achieves consciousness, and that makes her an order of magnitude more personable. She can pass the Turing test, fooling folk into thinking she’s a person. Indeed, she sues for personhood, so that she can marry the man she loves. Then it gets interesting. I find I like the novella length, and may write another, of a completely different nature. With Kindle self publication, this length is feasible; no longer is there a need to conform to the Procrustean wordage requirements of traditional publishers. Procrustes, you may remember, was the man who put visitors on his bed, and if they were too short he stretched them to fit, and if too long, he cut them down to fit. He had particular notions about size. For some reason travelers did not like that, just as writers don’t much like it today. I like to write a story to the length that best suits it, rather than the length that suits a theme-challenged editor.

More, anon, when. Happy FeBlueberry to all.

Many folk speak disparagingly of horse opera, which surely bears little relation to the historical exploration of the American West, but is entertaining on a superficial level. Similarly they sneer at space opera, which is horse opera translated to space. Bat Durston jumps into his spaceship and warps to Planet X where humanoid monsters are terrorizing the colonists. He whips out his blaster and goes after the monsters. Bang bang, you’re dead. The colonists are grateful.

Okay, I have trouble doing anything conventionally, so when I set out to do space opera, I started from the plight of the Vietnamese and Haitian Boat People in the 20th century, so that was my historical basis, and went from there. The refugees in the space bubble encounter the same sort of pirates and most are brutally slaughtered. But a few survive, one of whom is Hope Hubris, who goes on to become a naturalized Jupiter (America) citizen and finally comes to rule Jupiter. He is the Space Tyrant, in the sense of one-man rule, not evil. It’s a pretty wild and gritty and often sexy adventure. Critics never liked it, being too dull to understand what I was doing, but readers, being smarter, loved it. Why don’t you sample it and see what you think?

They are having a special 3-day promotion at .99 per volume, February 4,5,6: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_4?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords;=bio+of+a+space+tyrant&sprefix;=bio+%2Cdigital-text%2C363

We live in the forest, and are surrounded by wild creatures: deer, gopher tortoises, dragonflies, rabbits, rattlesnakes, squirrels and all. We like them, and try to live in peace with them. But we don’t like it when the rats come in and chew up our car wiring; we have had more than one several-hundred dollar repair. Or when raccoon or opossum dig out our buried kitchen garbage, which we are trying to compost. So we tried a repellent, Shot-Gun Repels All. Sigh. It doesn’t work. Not on our raiders, even when they have to nose through a solid disk of it. So I have had to return to the only thing that does work: chicken wire, weighted down with logs.

I watched Tom & Thomas, wherein twin boys are separated and don’t know of each other’s existence, except that they suffer occasional telepathic connections. One has been adopted, the other is in a nasty Boy’s home. Then at age nine they meet, and sometimes wind up in each other’s places. There is a plot to abduct boys and ship them away for illegal adoptions, which they manage to foil in a close call. A fun movie, not deep but enjoyable.

I watched The Dept, a thriller about an abduction of a Nazi war criminal for trial in Israel. One novel aspect: the young woman is getting a gynecological examination, when suddenly she wraps her bare legs about the doctor’s head and stabs him with a sedative. What a way to go! But he manages to escape, so they say they killed him, knowing he won’t tell. Then 30 years later he is found again and the woman, Rachel, now about 55, has to go after him again. Lovely remark in passing “Truth is a luxury.” These people are torn by the conflict between their mission and their ethics. She does get him, though I think dies in the effort. A thoughtful, ugly story.

I read The Folk of the Fringe, by Orson Scott Card. I have not read a lot of Card’s work, but I have seen struck my by its similarity to mine. No, no one is copying anyone; it’s that his style is compatible with mine, and he’s not afraid to have some substance along with the entertainment. Readers of my works would probably also like his works. This book is a collection of stories formed into a larger story featuring Mormon characters and custom. My reading was coincidental to the present political scene, where a Mormon is running for president, but it did provide insights. The setting is post World War Three or equivalent, with mankind in remnants. Some hang on in cities; others are the “mobbers” who prey on anyone caught in the unprotected countryside. It begins with a loner deciding to guide a group of Mormons west toward Utah, where an organized community exists. He winds up marrying one of them. Other stories cover other aspects, concluding with the unlikely liaison between a fifteen year old boy and a 42 year old native woman, to generate the savior of the Mayas. I found the Authors Note especially interesting, in part because I am known for my Author’s Notes, which critics generally hate and readers generally love. Now I could see how it looks from an independent perspective. And I liked it; the details of the author’s activities as he struggled to write the stories are interesting. I saw that he attended writer’s story-critique gatherings much like the Milford Writer’s Conference I attended in 1966. There I gave an accurate critique of the abysmal piece by celebrated writer and critic James Blish and thereby destroyed my own standing in that group. It seemed they were not so much interested in accuracy as in-groupism, though I’m sure that statement would infuriate them. So would my observation that the way to get nominated for an award is to participate in such events, because activists nominate what they read and they seem not to read much; thus the awards process is degraded and less meaningful than it appears. My contempt may have showed. I am a serious writer, not a social writer. It’s not entirely chance that I went on to become a loner and a bestseller, while few of them did. Card flirted with similar interactions, but is more polite about it.

I attended the 2012 Citrus County Festival of Books. I was the featured guest last year; this year the featured author was Nancy Kennedy, author of inspirational books, who interviewed me last year, and I merely dropped in for half an hour. There are many published authors here, and there were many books on display. I talked with science fiction author Dick Hrebik and bought his novel The Warrior Among Us, published by Windy City, www.windycitypublishers.com. The protagonist is Deke, who comes from the planet Sarnificus, which was destroyed in warfare. Deke wants to make sure Earth does not do the same. This, ironically, means participating in a fair amount of warfare on Earth, to eliminate those who would destroy it. Much of what we of Earth see as the past seventy years of history is actually the struggle to eliminate the malign force that will otherwise doom Earth.Unfortunately the book reads more like an extended summary than a novel. The author, a retired Marine, certainly knows his weapons and settings, but lacks the sense of immediacy necessary for effective fiction. Read this for an interesting take on recent world history, not as a thriller.

I read Metatron The Angel Has Risen, by Laurence St. John, published by ImajinBooks, www.imajinbooks.com/. Tyler is a 12 year old boy in Las Vegas who wishes he has super powers, so he could change the past, when his father was killed in an accident, and get back at his tyrannical babysitter Rebekka, and win the game Metro Assault. A reasonably typical boy, in essence. Then it complicates. Tyler falls into a cesspool and swallows some green gunk that might be poisonous. Then he develops super powers. It goes on from there. The new powers are wonderful but erratic, failing him when he needs them most, but he manages to recover them and go on to a hazardous adventure. This is a wild wish-fulfillment juvenile romp that should be great fun for 12 year olds of any age.

Is Jamboree I wrote the 28,000 word novella To Be A Woman, which will be duly published on Kindle. These days I don’t worry much about traditional publishing; it is dying, and I always did feel shackled by its constraints. Now I am relatively free to do it my way. In FeBlueberry I wrote the 31,000 word novella Shepherd, a kind of sequel. That is, I thought it was a separate piece, but when I needed a character for a particular role, one of the characters in Woman, not the robot, volunteered, and made such a good case that I had to accept her. So it became a sequel, though it’s a different story. It’s about a young man who gets into a student exchange program, only this exchange is to another planet. It would take 20 years to travel there, so instead the exchange is of minds, and he is in the body of a local man. He intends to study local culture, as his major is planetary administration, but he gets co-opted by a small flock of sheep to be their shepherd for a difficult journey. He is not pleased, but these sheep are telepathic and precognitive, as well as being dangerous when crossed, and he is obliged to do it though he knows nothing about sheep or shepherding. They also recruit a vulture, a python, and an Elf girl, actually human, just of slightly smaller stature. Thus commences a remarkable excursion. By the time it is done he is in love with the elf girl, and marries her. Then his exchange semester ends and he transfers back to Earth. His wife also exchanges, and that’s where I needed a host on Earth for her, and Mona of Woman did it despite knowing that she would find herself in the body of a woman five months pregnant, while her Earth body will be sexually used by the husband. Mona’s a pretty feisty woman in her own right; she wants to study practical precognition, and this is the way. And they discover that their mission for the sheep is not yet over. These are incidental points; this story has remarkable elements that might not have gotten by traditional publishers. One example may suffice: when man and elf have a serious disagreement about procedure, she challenges him to physical combat to settle it. She’s only half his mass, and not muscular, but more than his match, because it is a holddown, as in judo or wrestling, but of a special nature: she puts him in her, and he must escape without leaving anything in her, if you get my meaning. The moment he tries, she clamps down evocatively, putting him near the brink. It’s like a pain hold, only the opposite. Maybe old writers are supposed to cantankerously fade away, but such involuntary retirement can’t be forced on me and I’m sure as hell not going. And there are enough loose ends so that I may have to do a third novella. Could you let practical day-to-day precognition just hang there unfinished?

We were a two car family, with the small Prius for routine things and the larger Town & Country van for larger chores. Then things came together, and we sold the van and traded in our 2005 Prius for a 2012 Prius V, the same car in a larger size. We’re still getting used to it, and to the spot problems of becoming a one-car family, but it seems to be working out. It’s a nice car.

Age is a Female Dog Department: things mess up that didn’t have the nerve to mess up before. I drink a lot of water, to prevent another kidney stone like the one I had in 1992—one of those is way more than enough—so I have to use the bathroom in the middle of the night as the water clears my system. So in the darkness this pile of books my wife has read—she’s the reader in our family—reaches out and stubs my toe. I get a bruise and 50 books tumble down across the floor. O joy. Then there was the cap for my flash backup drive; I heard it fall off my desk and land somewhere, but it was nowhere to be found. Frustrating. Days later it showed up—hiding behind my keyboard. It hadn’t made it to the floor but dodged to the side where I never thought to look for it. Then there was the salsa dish: Picante salsa is too liquid to stay in a lump on the plate, so I used two little plastic cups to hold it for our burritos. I dropped the two cups into the dishwater, but only one came out. I drained the sink and looked everywhere, and so did my wife: no cup. How was that possible? Next day it turned up under a regular milk-drinking cup. It had hidden inside the other cup, held by water surface tension. Sigh. So what of the things that mysteriously disappear and never show up again? I lost a pair of hand clippers that way, and once even a book contract. They are there, and then they are not there. It’s the perversity of the inanimate, constantly probing for weak points as I age. I’m sure other old fogies will confirm the experience.

Bizarro cartoon: a Muppet mother has just given birth. “Congratulations,” the doctor says. “It’s a hand!” That must have been one hell of a feel for that hand. Mark Trail comic about dragonflies, some of which fly thousands of miles across the sea from southern India to Africa in their annual migration, then back again, a round trip of over 11,000 miles. Wow. So what about the common wisdom that a dragonfly lives only 24 hours? Either it’s a hell of a fast flier, or that common wisdom is nonsense. I believe our local dragonflies live about two months. Yet you see that 24 hour business all over the place. Nobody fact checks?

Sunday feature on Charles Dickens, called a rock star writer in his day. I note that his early years were happy, but when he was 12 his father was arrested for debts and went to prison. “The boy who had hoped to go to Cambridge University found himself pasting labels on shoe polish bottles” in a boot-blacking factory. He was humiliated. Here, yet again, I note the common thread of successful writers: that unhappy interim in childhood. I attune because that was my case too. Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers. So if I could travel back in time and change my childhood so as never to be unhappy, would I do it, knowing that I would forfeit my later career as a writer? I suspect I would not. I like being different and ornery, and my writing career has spanned 50 years, while my difficult childhood was more like 10 years.

Assorted newspaper items: on how they are on the verge of growing meat in the laboratory. So would I eat a test-tube hamburger that did not hurt or kill an animal? Philosophically I could, but in practice I suspect I would not. On John F Kennedy’s sexual dalliances. He was the first president I voted for, when I got my US citizenship, and I always liked him, but it seems he was a rake in private life. Another illusion bites the dust. A wild Mystery Monkey has been hiding out in Tampa Bay, avoiding capture. Now it turns out he has a retreat, dropping in on an old St. Petersburg couple who feed him Oreo cookies. They’re sort of his family, and they aren’t turning him in. I guess he’s smart enough to know whom he can trust. Remarkable local obit on a 94 year old woman: “She is survived by her son, ‘A.J.’ who loved and cared for her; Daughter ‘Ninfa’ who betrayed her; and Son ‘Peter’ who broke her heart.” Families do have quarrels, and not all end at death. More on Nothing: the total energy of the universe might actually be zero. Makes sense to me. Just as 4+5 = 10-1 cancels out to zero, existing only when unresolved, so the universe may be a complicated equation that when solved is nothing. Thus we do not have something from nothing, we have an unfinished process, and completion would be doom. Article in SCIENCE NEWS on consciousness: “You and I are mirages that perceive themselves.” In other words, Nothing, again. And from THE WEEK, quoting Steven Pearlstein in THE WASHINGTON POST on a modest proposal for elections: let the big money interests openly bribe the voters. By legalizing bribery we can finally bring “the magic of the free market to the electoral process.” We do seem to be well on the way there.

Paul Krugman, the liberal commentator whom conservatives hate because he makes so much sense, points out that the most conservative states receive more of their income in government transfers than the most liberal states. Also, 44% of Social Security recipients and 43% of those receiving unemployment benefits and 40% of those on Medicare say they have not used a government program. These voters send severe conservatives to Washington. “But those voters would be both shocked and angry if such politicians actually imposed their small government agenda.” And of course by the time those idiots realized their folly, it would be too late to undo it. Once you let the evil genie out of the bottle…

Interesting item on the Catholic Church’s position on vasectomy. They oppose any interference in the generative process, so are consistent when they ban abortions, contraception, and most other means of having sex without having babies. But here’s my take in it: their position, if honored, leads inevitably to further ruinous overpopulation and thus the earlier destruction of the world we know. Unless what they really mean is that folk should not have sex. And maybe that is their real agenda. I think of how a painting of Mary nursing Jesus got banned. If they believe in natural motherhood they should like that painting. But if they are so anti-sex that they can’t stand to have even a nursing breast exposed, then they are consistent in that negative way. There was a Catholic Bishop Robert S Lynch of Tampa Bay who wrote an open letter on Why Obama Is Wrong to require Catholic institutions to provide insurance coverage including contraception. Well, that got some pretty emphatic responses. Roy Peter Clark, a local Catholic, asks what moral authority remains to the Catholic Church after the sexual abuse scandal within its own ranks? He says nowhere in the holy lessons does he see “Blessed are the Babymakers, for they shall avoid contraception.” He asks where was Catholic activism when a Republican president led us into a senseless war? “Your moral silence during the previous administration was deafening.” And columnist Robyn Blumner says “Since it is unconstitutional for government to fund the practice of religion, Catholic hospitals and universities must be claiming to be doing something other than that to qualify for billions of dollars in public money.” In sum, if the Catholic Church accepts government money to do public services, it must honor public policy; it can’t try to impose religious restraints. If it insists on those restraints, all it has to do is give back the money. In THE WEEK there is a summary saying the bishops seem to care about only one thing: sex, and to stop women from engaging in it. Why don’t they ever go to war with Republican politicians who ignore its teachings on the death penalty, war, or aiding the poor? Good questions, which I think remain unanswered. I would say to the Catholic hierarchy “First remove the beam from thine own eye…”

Which brings me to Mormonism. Mitt Romney is a Mormon, and I support his right to run for the presidency. But I regard his faith as based on fantasy and a pirated historical novel, with a history of racism and polygamy. Since there should be no religious bar to holding public office, that hardly matters. But for those who do vote their religion, and claim the Mormons are not Christian, hogwash. The very title gives that the lie: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Book of Mormon shows Jesus coming to America and haranguing the natives. Column by David S Reynolds suggests that the real reason many evangelicals oppose Mormonism is that it is poaching on their territory; they don’t like the competition. There are 14 million members globally and it is rapidly growing. And no, I am not anti-Mormon any more that I am anti-Catholic; Mormonism today is a far cry from its dubious origins, is no longer racist or polygamous, and has solid redeeming qualities.

I received an email from eXcessica, a daring electronic publisher with which I have done business, asking me to contribute a blog about the virtues of erotica. Okay. I have always defended freedom of expression, and erotica tends to be a focal point for censorship. If there are folk who don’t like sexual fiction, let them read something else; the moment they try to prevent its publication, they are indulging in a power play, trying to make their preferences govern others. That’s a no-no in a free country. I like sexy fiction, and I have written a fair amount of it. I think that like any fiction it can help educate the ignorant and entertain the cognizant; it can liberalize the bigoted and amuse the interested. To the extent it serves as a lightning rod for censorship, it also serves as a warner to whoso would be warned: after they abolish erotica, they may come after your own favorite fiction. What other fingers will they cut off next, if they get away with it here? So even if you don’t like erotica, it surely behooves you to defend its right to be published.

This was another “off” month as I worked on the backlog of books to read and videos to watch. I am also engaged in a third Aladdin collaboration with J R Rain, Aladdin and the Flying Dutchman, wherein he sails the cursed ship on a quest to save mankind from the likely horrors of the doors to Hades being unlocked and flung open: a literal hell on earth. We surely wouldn’t want that to happen; we have enough problems already.

I read Attic Toys, edited by Jeremy C Shipp, published in Marsh by Evil Jester Press. I got an electronic copy so as to proofread my story therein, “Living Doll.” The story requirement was simple: there had to be an attic and a toy, and that is the case with most of the stories herein. My story concerns a doll found in an attic that comes seductively to life, but needs to be returned to the Sorceress who made it, lest she be angry and destroy the town. But the doll is not sure she wants to be returned, and tries to persuade the young man to keep her for his own satisfaction. The other stories are widely varied, mostly horror, wherein dolls come to life and eat their finders, or similarly unpleasant themes. The one that impressed me most was the last one, “The Tea-Serving Doll” by Mae Empson, wherein the doll comes to life and really helps the poor girl who invokes him, and not just with tea; it has a marvelously mannered flavor. At any rate, horror fans should like this volume. I’m not a horror fan, so while I recognize the quality of the stories, they don’t generally turn me on.

I read Slave Girl, A Story of Triumph Over a Controlled Life, by Jacqi Fromaeux. This is actually an autobiography of a woman my age who was determined to achieve control over her own life instead of being a slave to circumstance. Her father was brutal, constantly beating and whipping any child who messed up in any way or tried to show any independence. She was one a hundred pounds when grown; she got whipped anyway. But she made it through school and then college, then got married without knowing anything about sex or contraception. Her husband was a decent man but incompetent managing money, so they were constantly in financial trouble. She finally divorced him, which annoyed his family. Meanwhile she taught school, until she finally retired. She got cancer, had to have mastectomies, but it kept returning. She survived it. She was finally running her life her own way, no longer a slave. Finally she wrote her personal history and published it. It is an interesting life.

I Watched The Walking Dead, a video my daughter lent me. (Clarification for sometime readers of this column: we had two daughters. The elder died. The younger is a zombie fan.) I’m not especially partial to zombies, though they have appeared in my fiction. But this is one taut, compelling narrative. A sheriff’s deputy gets shot, wakes in the hospital, and discovers everyone gone and dead all around. The zombies have raided, and taken over the city of Atlanta. They can be “killed” with shots through their heads; otherwise they eat any living flesh they catch. He finds some survivors, but the zombies are in pursuit, and the escape is harrowing. It continues, showing also the stresses within the groups of survivors. Some deserted vehicles still run, at least until their gasoline runs out. Guns still fire while the ammunition lasts. It’s one hell of a story, with an occasional peek into a nice halter. And it works its way into one hell of a climax. I don’t know whether there will be another season; presumably the survivors will carry on regardless. But this was one zombie story that riveted me.

I watched The Mask of Zorro, one of a set of three Anthony Hopkins movies I got on sale for about $11 for the three. I’m not sure whether I’ve seen it before; I think it was a sequel I saw, because I really didn’t remember it. A fun movie, full of impossible action and effects, plus one lovely girl. What more does a viewer want? I also watched the third movie in the package, Legends of the Fall, a grim family history of a man with three sons, all of whom loved the same woman. The one she was engaged to died in World War 1; then she loved his brother, but he was wild and left for years, and she married the third. In the end many are dead, but the two surviving brothers are friends again. I can’t says I enjoyed the movie, but I respect its power. And I watched one of five Stanley Kramer videos I got in a set for $15.64, or about three dollars per movie; I like bargains. This one was The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, story and screenplay by Dr. Seuss. It’s a juvenile romp, a musical, with a boy required to take piano lessons dreaming of his music teacher enslaving 500 boys—that’s 5,000 piano-playing fingers—to play on a piano 500 yards long to realize the music master’s ambition. The lad’s mother is captive too; the master plans to do her the favor of marrying her after the performance. That would doom the boy to a lifetime of piano practice. Ugh! All non-piano musicians are relegated to the dungeon, and we have a sequence there where they make phenomenal music. It is just the kind of thing a rebellious boy would imagine, nicely choreographed. I note that there is only one woman in the cast of hundreds: the boy’s mother, with no hint of any impropriety.

I read The Legend of Rachel Petersen by J T Baroni, published by Damnation Books www.damnationbooks.com. This is a story within a story, wherein an executive is bypassed for a promotion he deserves and resigns in a huff, then has to struggle to make a living. He decides to try writing, and finds it not as easy as expected. Then he comes across the grave of a twelve year old girl who died during the American Civil War, and decides to write about her. She is Rachel Petersen, a pretty child in a red print dress, and the legend says she brutally murdered her family then hanged herself in remorse. But what was her motive for such a crime? And how could she have strung up the rope over a beam too high for her to reach? Was she murdered? Then who killed her family? Then the story flows, as the facts are teased out, and they hardly match the legend. This is a ghost story, with the spirit of the girl released from her grave after 90 years and signaling for help. The legends are lies. Finally they get it straight: she was brutally raped and murdered, innocent of any crime. The ghost, exonerated, is finally able to rest in peace. That’s the inner story. The outer one, of the first time author, shows his best-selling success, but also a hint that the ghost story is becoming real, perhaps to be replayed in the real world. Is this a great novel? No. But it’s fun in its fashion.

I watched The Wild One, another Stanley Kramer film. I wasn’t overly impressed. Other than the lead, Marlon Brando, the actors seemed to be reading their lines. Actors today are much sharper than they were in the 1950s. It’s about a motorcycle gang that rides into town and stirs things up, with a bit of interest between Brando and the police chief’s daughter, that amounts to some dialogue and a kiss, which it seems was about as far as movie romance could go in the 50s. I continue to be amazed by what they regarded as appealing female costume in those days, with a fully covered torso and impossibly conic breasts.

I read The Pun Also Rises, by John Pollack. I don’t regard myself as a punster, really; my readers send them in and I use them and credit them in the Author Notes. The pun tends to be disparaged as the lowest form of humor, but this book makes the case that it is a high form; indeed, that it helped make man mentally superior. Sophisticated language is the hallmark of our species, and the nuances of words that have two or more meanings can be grasped only by folk with sophisticated minds. Quick decisions have to be made about what the meanings are and how they relate; context is vital. It also covers related humor, like Spoonerisms, the reversal of first letters. Spooner is reputed to have seen a couple kissing in a punt (small boat) and was outraged. “Young man, cunts are not for pissing in!” That reminds me of some my grandmother told me as a child, such as the professor bawling out a wayward student: “You have hissed three of my mystery lectures. In fact you have tasted the whole worm!” It is said that humor and creativity stem from similar mental processes. “Puns reveal a mind free to ream frontiers of possibility, without shame or fear of being wrong.” It makes a pretty good case. It also says that people who prefer order to ambiguity may hate all puns, which they take as deliberate and disruptive nonsense. In short, they don’t get it. It also explores the development of language itself. Making words for things is fine, but humans developed a revolutionary new system, syntax, with abstract words like To, Of, Which, Because, and Why that don’t correlate with things in the natural world; they enable us to manipulate words and concepts to make complex interactions. How did this happen? Almost a million years ago humans crossed significant bodies of water, as documented paleontologically; they must have made rafts or boats and learned to sail, and that would have required more sophisticated language than just “Big water ahead.” By half a million years ago man had mastered fire, with the host of changes that brought about, including cooking and eating flesh. They were able to go into cold climates, colonizing the rest of the world. 150,000 years ago they achieved their modern anatomical state. We know they had puns, because there’s a 35,000 year old figurine that is a naked woman one way up, and an erect penis upside down. That’s a physical dirty joke; we may be sure they had verbal equivalents. I have remarked that my magic land of Xanth is made of puns; now it seems that mankind itself is made of puns. Well, good for us.

I viewed the third Kramer film, Ship of Fools. This one I had real hopes for, as I have heard of it. Alas, I was disappointed. It’s not a bad movie, just not the huge significant adventure I had somehow anticipated. It’s just about several people aboard a ship traveling from America to Germany in the early 1930s, that small segment of their lives. One is the ship’s doctor, who treats a woman for insomnia, and they develop a relationship. She will be imprisoned in Germany; he could get off the ship with her before they arrive and thus spare her that, for he falls in love with her, but in the end he doesn’t. There are references to the antisemitism of the Nazis that extends quietly through the community of the ship. One man remarks on the foolishness of thinking anything really bad will come of it: there are a million Jews in Germany; what are they going to do, kill them all? That’s a chilling foreshadowing of what will happen, while fools refuse to see it coming. Every person in the ship is a fool in some manner. But aren’t we all, as we sail through life? I think my favorite part was the Flamenco dancing, done by the ship’s entertainment staff, very sharp, though I’m not sure how it relates to the Fools theme.

In Jamboree 2012 Richard Black-Howell responded to my comment on hearing part of a recorded Crepitation contest, providing me with a link to it. Because we are on dial-up a 14 minute recording would take us hours to load, literally, so I bided my time. Then in Marsh my wife connected via WiFi at the local library and downloaded it for me, and after 50 years I finally got to listen to the whole of that recording. It is The Great Crepitation Contest of 1946, beautifully done, describing the world championship farting contest, with every fart named. The challenger, Boomer of Australia, makes a record-breaking effort; then Lord Windesmear matches it and is about to win when he disqualifies himself by shitting. O, tragedy! But I’m glad to have it at last. It is called the granddaddy of all party records. I’m sorry I wasn’t at that party.

Frustration: my Linux computer program one day decided not to automatically restore my prior session any more. I spent an hour struggling with it, and it has that feature checked, but no longer does it. No error message, it just treats a normal shutdown as if the system crashed. So that’s that lost hour, plus ten minutes each day as I set up my files again. Then when I was doing my monthly Electronic Publishing Survey update I threw away another hour because I had marked last month’s checking to the letter E when actually I had done through E. Dial-up files are slow loading, even with the pictures turned off, and I don’t mark a spot update unless something changes, so it took me that time to realize. I’m old, but I have a lot of stuff to do, and every lost hour hurts.

I read Flame And Fortune, by Brian Clopper, published by Behemoth Books last year. This is a fabulous story, full of imagination. It features the fire elemental Flame, whose mere touch burns what he touches, and his friend Fenris Fortune, a were-elf, and a will-o’-wisp Maleeka, a tiny girl who lives in a lamp. This unlikely trio is good-hearted but tends to blunder constantly into trouble. Maybe one example will do to illustrate the tapestry of magic here. At one point they are trekking toward their destination when a storm comes up and they must take shelter in a house with an odd old woman; she is hospitable, but says don’t even look at the papers on her desk. Naturally Fenris is curious, so he waits until the others are asleep then starts reading the letter on the desk. And it starts Dear Stranger, I hate that you have decided to read my words… What’s going on here? Well, it seems that whoever reads the letter to the end will get trapped inside it, and that last victim doesn’t want to do that to him so is trying to dissuade him. But he can’t stop reading. I love the imagination of that sequence. To my mind, Clopper is emerging as a significant fantasy writer, not just for children.

Sometimes I catch snatches of TV that my wife may be ignoring while I’m making supper. (We both have definite preferences about what is in the TV background while we are reading books or magazines; the wrong programs are jarring.) This time it was Phantom of the Opera, which we saw years ago as a stage production and were wowed; this was a movie version, less impressive, but it has its moments. The music is absolutely beautiful in places, such as the Music of the Night: “Turn your face away from the garish light of day; turn your face away from cold unfeeling light, and listen to the music of the night.” That really puts a new face on night versus day. What caught me in passing was the heroine singing sustained single notes, one after the other, strong, clear, amazing in their power. I presume she was required to practice her scales or something; I don’t remember it from the stage version. I was really impressed by the evocative effect of such notes. Later, when supper was served, I watched a sequence I remembered with mixed thoughts, when the phantom was demanding that she choose between him and her handsome normal boyfriend, who was about to be killed if her answer were wrong. Such forced choices are spurious; if you take someone because of a threat, you are unlikely ever to truly love that person. Well, she said she had chosen. Then she kissed the Phantom, no token peck; it was a full-fledged passionate effort that evidently knocked him for a loop. Then he freed the boyfriend and got out of her life. That’s where I have a problem figuring it out. Such a kiss should normally mean she had chosen the Phantom, but it evidently signaled to him that she had not, and he had to bow to her will. Was that it? Or was she ready to give herself to the Phantom in order to save the life of her boyfriend, and he realized the futility of that? Or was it simply a farewell kiss? I wish I knew. Maybe I missed a line of dialogue.

Political/Economic comment. Bear in mind that I am arch liberal, and this is my blog, where I speak without much hindrance. Newspaper article by Eduardo Porter: Was there an alternative to the Obama Stimulus package? Remember, eight years of Republican administration had converted a prosperous economy with surpluses into what threatened to be the next Depression, and Obama bailed it out. We are still slowly recovering from the Bush disaster, hoping the pit can be escaped despite Republican opposition to any salvation. They prefer to follow Hoover’s example, and let the nation wallow in the depths indefinitely; you will remember that it was Roosevelt who finally pulled the country out, years later. Why? Because what is bad for the nation is good for billionaires. They would like to see the feudal system return, with a few fabulously wealthy plutocrats and a great majority of serfs helplessly serving them. Of course that’s not what the Republicans claim, because if regular folk understood their real agenda, no Republican would ever win political office. So what do Republican alternatives offer? Fiscal austerity, for one thing. They don’t want the rich to be taxed, they want the poor to get by on less. The article says that after trying government stimulus in 2009, many European countries reversed course and slashed their budgets, per the conservative mantra, thinking this would bolster the economy. But so far, these policies have proved to be an unmitigated disaster. Britain tried it, for example, and shot its recovery in the foot. The Obama stimulus, in contrast, is leading to slow recovery in America. The fact is, if you want to stimulate the economy, giving money to the rich has little effect, while giving money to the poor has much effect, because the poor will spend it immediately and it will surge through the economy like a rising tide. Economics is complicated in detail, but that’s the essence. But you will never hear that from a conservative.

More on how doctors die: they tend to eschew heroic measures to preserve life, having seen its futility in their patients. They know the limits, and they generally do go gently into that good night, focusing on family and personal satisfactions rather than trying to fight the inevitable. I can see it. My daughter Penny had been a slender young woman, but the treatments for her cancer boosted her weight up to maybe 350 pounds before she died. If she had it to do over, would she have taken those treatments, even if they did extend her life somewhat? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure that if I ever face a similar situation (and at my age, that may not be far distant), I’ll be wary of heroics.

Perhaps related: Essay my surviving daughter the Newspaperwoman passed along to us: “You Want a Physicist to Speak at your Funeral” because he will talk about the conservation of energy, so your energy has not died. The photons that bounced off you will continue to bounce off survivors. Not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

A researcher asked me to verify a remark I am said to have made: “When one person makes an accusation, check to be sure he himself is not the guilty one. Sometimes it is those whose case is weak who make the most clamour.” I don’t remember, but I agree with it and could have said it, though I would have spelled the word the American way “clamor.” I say a lot of things, being an opinionated sort, as readers of this column may have noticed. So I could not identify precisely where or when or by whom this was said. If there are any of the type of fan who know more about my words than I do reading this, maybe one will pinpoint this one for me. I seem to be ignorant, even about my own utterances.

Article by Laura Sanders in SCIENCE NEWS about a new theory of consciousness. Consciousness is one of my pet interests, one of three things I hope to fathom before I die, existence and life being the other two. Why does consciousness exist? The author suggests a prime reason may be predictive powers. It allows us to understand the past and predict the future. That really helps in a dangerous world. Then the author suggests that any system, whether made of nerve cells, silicon chips, or light beams, could be conscious, but that it requires a sense of self. That is my assumption in my novella To Be A Woman, where the female humanoid robot Elasa becomes conscious. I do the best I can with any piece of writing, but some affect my feeling more than others, and Woman is one such. Another is The Sopaths, my horror novel, which has its own questions about the nature of the human condition. The author of a related study of free will in animals no longer eats them, something I understand perfectly. A related article indicates that the path from the outside world to the interior of the brain is not a straight line; a whole lot more is going on. “What is now clear is that the brain is not a stimulus-driven robot that directly translates the outer world into a conscious experience.” For sure.

Several brief notes in THE WEEK: a study indicating that wealth breeds selfishness. “The rich really are different: they’re more likely than other folks to lie, cheat, and steal.” They have less empathy, and feel entitled. That explains a lot. I’m rich, for a writer, but my focus is on integrity, compassion, and facilitating things for other writers. Maybe I got rich too late to mold my character. What I have observed of other successful writers suggests I’m an exception; few seem to care what happens to those who follow after. Next note: Why do women wear red? Because men assume that women in red want sex. This may date from chimps, where female faces get red when they’re in heat. Hell, what about the monkeys whose bottoms become bright red at mating time? That’s about as obvious as you can get. So human women, lacking bare bottoms in public, put on rouge and lipstick to convey the same message. I may have noted before how we emulate our genitalia, with men wearing phallic ties and women showing breast cleavage suggestive of flesh closer to home base: the buttocks. Next note: Do names matter? Yes, they are badges bearing information about our class, education, and ethnicity. But they are not destiny; a picture counts more.

I read the Advice column in the newspaper; never can tell what you might learn there. Tell Me About It, hosted by Carolyn Hax, can be thoughtful. It seems a woman complained about her husband going to strip clubs or watching pornography and finally got him to stop. But there’s a response that puts another face on it. A man’s girlfriend made him stop going to strip clubs. Then she had a problem with any restaurant with scantily clad women. Then any sports bar with female servers. Then he had to stop talking with female friends. Then he had to stop attending his relatives’ holidays; only hers were allowed. Finally his brother interceded with common sense: The original girlfriend simply wanted to control his whole life, whatever the pretext. Now he is with a woman who has no problem with his interests. I read that, and naturally considered its relevance to my own life. I know when I’m well off. I’ve never been to a strip club, but if there came a reason to attend, I suspect my wife would attend with me. I have erotic videos; she doesn’t care to watch them, but doesn’t mind if I do. I’m not much interested in her knitting magazines but don’t mind how many she has. Sometimes she gives me books of erotic art. She got together with our daughter to download the Great Crepitation Contest for me. We have different interests, but don’t seek to restrict any of them for each other. Mutual tolerance is a great virtue in marriage. Ours is coming up on 56 years. And yes, we still have regular sex, though the interest is mine rather than hers. It’s more of a challenge without Viagra, but can be done. We don’t travel much or do conventions, but this is because of her health concerns, not a controlling attitude.

Zits comic for March 28, 2012: at school lunch one says he’ll try the fried rat brains, while the other wants the steamed leeches. For some reason the server is not amused. They conclude they are comedically ahead of their time. Then the second says “Wait—I think I got what I ordered.” Lovely.

Leonard Pitts’ newspaper column remarks on color. The big local news in these parts of Florida is how a white man confronted and shot to death an unarmed black teen and wasn’t even arrested. This sort of thing happens and many folk don’t even consider it racism. I think now that the incident is making the news, that may change. The white man said he was using the stand-your-ground law, where you can resist an intruder with force, even killing him. I think it’s a bad law, and that too may change because of this case. Stand your ground? The white man was in effect stalking the teen out in the open. The teen was just going home, talking to his girlfriend on a cell phone. Exactly what led up to the shooting is as yet unknown; the shooter says the teen jumped him and bashed his head repeatedly into the pavement, though nothing like that shows in the police video. Anyway, Columnist Pits was rebuked by a letter writer for inaccuracy: the killer was Hispanic, not white. Really? Pitts makes the point that Hispanic is white, duh. And of course there are experts who believe that race itself is a fraud, that there really is no such thing. I’d like to see that sorted out too. You can kill a man because of his race, and race does not exist?

Paul Krugman remarks that large numbers of Republicans firmly believe that global warming is a hoax. And how Rush Limbaugh and Fox viewers believe that Obamacare just doubled in cost. It’s a lie, but that doesn’t seem to bother such folk; any lie will do if it forwards their agenda, which is to put their kind in power. I remember when I was in school, and a teacher said the reason he opposed the Communists was because they spread lies to achieve their purposes. I appreciated his point. Now we have conservatives and Republicans doing the same. They should be similarly opposed until they mend their ways. I don’t want liars in power, and can’t think why anyone not a conservative or a liar would. And it’s too bad that conservatism no longer stands for integrity and old-fashioned values like hard work and fiscal prudence. How about preserving the environment, a good biblical stricture? Since there seems to be profit in pollution, they pretend it has no consequence. Thus no global warming, a faith-based support of greed. NEW SCIENTIST remarks that climatologists have to recognize that they are in a street fight. They sure are; they think that the facts should prevail, when they are up against dishonest fanatics. Meanwhile, about Rush: THE WEEK’s gossip section says that his wife threatened to leave him after he called a female birth-control advocate a slut and a prostitute. He will reform his big mouth to that extent, or else. The fact that you want to plan your family does not make you a whore. But what about the fact that you will say anything without regard to the truth to forward your agenda? What does that make you?

Also from THE WEEK: a new study shows that eating just one serving of red meat per day dramatically increases your risk of premature death. That’s one risk my vegetarianism avoids.

Continuing the Stanley Kramer video collection, I watched The Member of the Wedding, set in 1952, featuring a twelve year old girl who falls in love with her big brother’s wedding and want to be included in it. This is in black/white, phrased like a play, with three main characters: the girl, her younger cousin, and the black mammy cook who takes care of them. It is pretty much all about the girl’s unrealistic dreams and illusions, which she expresses freely, and the mammy’s attempts to be realistic. When the girl does not get to go on the honeymoon she runs away, but soon discovers that’s no answer, and returns to discover that her cousin has died. But she moves on to other dreams, being, in my view, essentially shallow. Well enough done, but not my type of thing.

Then I watched Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the last because it was 107 minutes long and I needed to find a time slot to watch it, and because my interest in fancy dinners is slight. I had no idea what it was really about. But the moment it started playing, I was hooked, and it is my favorite of that collection of movies. It’s a star-studded effort; even I recognize names like Sidney Poitier and Katharine Hepburn. A black doctor and a white girl meet, talk, and fall abruptly in love. It’s fully believable. They want to marry, but this was when legalized racism was established in much of America, with interracial marriage forbidden in 16 states. Both sets of pseudo-liberal parents are appalled, but in the course of the day they come around, with a fine concluding speech by the girl’s father, who decides that love must conquer all. It’s a great love story, and a great stride forward for the liberalization of this country. The producer received death threats—bigots are ugly any way you see them–but the movie was highly successful. More power to them both. I never much cared what Stanley Kramer did, but this one truly impressed me.

I did an interview for Jorge Aguirre, and he sent me a copy of his graphic novel (that is, done in pictures) Giants Beware!, published by First Second, a division of Roaring Book Press, a division of Holtzbrink Publishing. This is clearly directed to children, but I found it fun reading. The pictures are by Rafael Rosado, and he’s some artist; they were clear, well framed, competent, sometimes beautiful, and often compelling. The story is about Claudette, who looks to be about six years old, who is determined to go out with her wooden sword and kill the giant who has terrorized their town. It seems he has raided the region and eaten the feet of babies. Now the townfolk stay within the walled fortress of the town. Claudette’s own father lost his legs and one arm (first time shown as his right, but thereafter as his left) and uses a wooden wheelchair. She persuades her friend the aspiring princess Marie and her little brother Gaston, an aspiring chef who actually is quite a good pastry maker, and they head out into the grim forest with their little dog Valiant to slay the giant. When they get snatched up by a carnivorous tree, Claudette puts out her stinky feet and the tree spits them out, retching. Did I mention this was fun? The dangers seem overwhelming, but they find similarly unusual ways to survive them until they catch up with the giant. Who, it turns out, likes to tickle feet, not eat them; he has been badly misrepresented in town. All ends well, of course, thanks to Claudette’s ingenuity. I recommend this book to anyone; I got giant enjoyment from it. There is a quality of imagination here to be admired.

I read A Moon Called Sun by Christopher Cobb. This is intriguingly different science fiction/fantasy/horror, R-rated for language, wildly ranging, sometimes hard-hitting, not for maiden aunts; I must simplify considerably to make any sense of it here. Andrew “Trace” Jackson and his dog Skiff are out fishing in 2010 when they encounter something like a storm and get sucked into it and wind up in another realm. At one point they meet Hialeah, a lovely young American Indian girl of 1818.  Josette Legard is a 24 year old woman with the French Resistance fighting the Nazis in 1942. She ducks through a random door, and winds up in another realm, associating with a lovely but odd alien ruler. It seems that aliens are trolling through Earth’s history to pick out people useful for their purpose, caring nothing for the welfare or feelings of those people. That makes Josette’s Nazi-fighting experience relevant; the aliens are like Nazis, albeit rather more complicated. The two main story threads don’t directly intersect until the end, as the alien machinations play out. I was intrigued by the special use of adapted language, such a “pedal,” which seems to mean a thing of value or feeling; it felt odd at first but became more comfortable as the novel progressed. The aliens are more alien than they initially seem, and reality is ever-elusive as friends or relatives, some of whom were dead before the story began, appear and interact, conscious of their current states but trying to be helpful. So this is a strange one, and I am not sure I properly understand it, but it is interesting and well told, with a considerable range of imagination. Oh, the title? One of the artifacts of translation, as the aliens try to find a term for their world that human folk will comprehend, without getting it quite right.

My Sony Reader expired just as I was about to read the foregoing novel. That gave my wife a pretext to shop for something she had had her eye on, and we got a Polaroid Android Tablet Computer on sale for a hundred dollars. As I like to put it, I’m an old codger from another century, and slow to catch on to newfangled dinguses, but I rather like this one. Its Adobe Reader handled the .pdf manuscript, oriented the page to be upright regardless of my orientation; sometimes as I let the device tilt the page would spin around to re-orient. I can show the pages as they are, in assorted type sizes, or have them reformat and wrap to remain always on the page. The print is beautiful, easy to read. But I am unable to jump to my place in the book, or to return directly to the beginning when I complete it. So I had to page backward through the 373 page manuscript, one page at a time. This gets old fast. It does hold my place if I keep it in ready mode, but loses it if I turn it all the way off to save power. It will play songs, and I can read with musical background; it seems to have a fair roster of popular songs to start with, and we added more. But it can be a federal case to make it stop playing, and we have not found out how to make it play our added songs. It acknowledges their presence, lists them, but won’t actually play them, instead playing only its own songs; it seems to think they are on the Internet. Would it be too much to ask that you be able to play a listed song by clicking on it? Or that there be an On/Off switch? If there is a Hell for programmers, it may have an On/Off switch for the tortures they undergo—that doesn’t work. It will handle WiFi, but as yet I have not caught up with that 21^st century stuff. So it’s a novel experience, and I like it despite its frustrations. As I like to say, computers are like the opposite gender: can’t live with them, can’t live without them. The opposite gender is born that way; what excuse do computer have?

Last column I asked whether anyone could verify a quote I am credited with, “When one person makes an accusation, check to be sure he himself is not the guilty one. Sometimes it is those whose case is weak who make the most clamour.” I agreed with it but didn’t remember saying it. Well, James A Long identified it for me: it is in my autobiography Bio of an Ogre, page 174 of the American paperback edition or page 166 of the hardcover. I did spell it “clamor.” It related to someone accusing me of something of which he himself turned out to be guilty, breaking into lines. So a minor mystery is solved. It seems there is more than one way to use Google, and different ways can produce different results.

The candy Skittles was in the news, in the case of an unwarranted killing, and I was curious, as I was not familiar with it, so we bought a package. It turns out to be M&M shaped pellets filled with fruit flavors. Okay, but it does have that bad association for me..

As I mention every so often, I practice archery, for the exercise, not for accuracy, as my aim seems to be abysmal. I have a right side bow and a left side bow, both compound. That is, when you draw the string, the 55 pound draw weight lessens to under 20 pounds so I can hold my place without straining; then when I loose the arrow, the full 55 pound force is exerted. Yes, some magic exists in Mundania, facilitated by the leveraged pulleys. Well, one day I did the right side, then went to the left side, loosed eight arrows, drew the ninth—and the bowstring snapped, giving me a smart sting on my gloved right hand. That’s why I wear goggles, so as to be sure a such a loose string doesn’t take out an eye. The arrow vanished; I thought I heard it tumbling through the tree foliage, but it never came down and I have not found it. What to do? I want to exercise evenly, right and left. The local archery store shut down, so it’s not convenient to buy a new left hand bow. So—I practiced to use the right side bow left handed. That was a challenge. These things are designed for their purpose, and it is not easy to circumvent it. The handle section is shaped to the right hand; the left hand finds it all wrong. The strings are propped to the side to stay clear of the arm; left handed they are in the way of the arm and I can get a string burn on my arm. In addition, I have a problem with the arrow-rest; when I draw, the arrow typically falls off it, and I have to nudge it back into place with a finger. But my right hand is facing the wrong way, when I use it to hold the bow instead of draw the string; I don’t have a finger where I need it. So when I drew the arrows were not just falling off the arrowrest, they were flying out and dropping to the ground. On the left side bow I used a circular arrowrest that held the arrow so it could not fall off our out; the problem with that was that it fouled up the release so that a given arrow could strike five feet to the side of where I aimed it, either side, or plow into the ground or loop over the top and be lost. Thus the process of securing the arrow for the draw also messed it up for the target. Then I got a brilliant notion: I’m doing this for the exercise, not the accuracy, right? I get the same exercise when I draw the bow regardless where the arrow lands. So I stood there and drew the bow twelve times. And wow, twice the arrow actually stayed perched on the arrowrest. I loosed both arrows and scored on the ground before the target. Next session—I do my archery twice a week—I got smart and tilted the bow to the side as I drew so that the arrow was more likely to stay in place. Sometimes it still flew out with such force it landed on the ground beside me, but seven times it stayed in place, and I loosed it. I never hit the target, but it was progress. The following session I managed to loose it twelve times; eleven arrows missed the target, but one hit it and scored half a point. So I had one-half minus eleven, but it was significant progress. Why it is that an arrow loosed from the same bow using the same sights that work for the right side can’t find the target left side I don’t know, but in time I’m sure I’ll get it zeroed in.

I like Linux and the LibreOffice word processor, and am comfortable with them. But every so often they pull a stunt. I was typing my contribution to the collaboration I’m doing when abruptly I had a blank screen. My file, and indeed the whole word processor, had vanished. I went through the process and recovered the files, but I had lost what I had just been typing. I suppose the programmers find this sort of thing amusing, but I am not amused. My best guess is that along the way I typoed, hitting the Control key when I hit the letter Q, invoking the Quit command, and since I’m typing and not watching the screen, its menu waited until I hit the D in Quid pro Quo, meaning Discard, and shut down unsaved. I experimented and discovered that once I hid Control Q it’s going to dump my files; hitting the CANCEL option does not cancel the command, it invokes it. What a crock of spit! This sort of mishap could readily be avoided, if only I had the option of turning off the Control and Alt keys when I don’t need them, or at least the Control Q option. They typically offer options galore, but do you think they’ll let me have anything that practical? It is to laugh. I repeat: I am not amused. Yes, I tried to turn it off, but it turns out not to be a LibreOffice function so I can’t just nix it. It has to be fixed via Fedora, and I am not a programmer.

I am chronically busy—that’s a state of workaholicism—and things that aren’t in the forefront tend to get squeezed out, especially when I’m writing a novel. I subscribe to LIBERAL OPINION WEEK, which is a 32 page weekly compendium of all the liberal columns. Our local newspaper, THE TAMPA BAY TIMES, calls itself liberal, and conservatives regularly lambaste it for its far leftist output. But this is fiction; it’s actually a centrist paper that runs conservative Krauthammer more often than liberal Krugman, and its staff is as close-minded as you are likely to find elsewhere. Yes, I speak from experience. So few, very few, of the liberal columns are run there, and I pick them all up in the weekly collection. But this is one of the things that gets behind. So I set aside time and went through 22 back weeks and saved out what I wanted to comment on here. Do I subscribe to conservative periodicals also, to be fair-minded? I’m glad you asked. I tried NATIONAL REVIEW years ago. When the first issue arrived I sampled it at random, and it said that all the charges against Newt Gingrich were either false or irrelevant. That was of course a bald-faced lie; soon thereafter Gingrich, a remarkable piece of work even for a Republican, had to leave Congress because of his misdeeds. (This is oversimplified; the details are juicy but not essential. I do thank Gingrich for one thing: he clarified for me the first name of the Grinch who Stole Christmas: Newt, of course.) I sampled it randomly again, and again, and each time encountered virtually complete indifference to reality. This came across as a radical right rag, not a sober presentation of the conservative case. So I dumped it. If a cause has to lie to make its case, it’s not much of a case or cause, and the rightists of today seem to have little regard for the truth. I repeat what I have said before: there was a time when conservatism meant fundamental honesty, cherishing historic values, fiscal responsibility, and caution about untested ventures. I do appreciate such tenets. Now it seems to mean greed, arrogance, ignorance, religiosity, hypocrisy, and covert racism. I should think original conservatives would be disgusted by the evident perversion of their creed. So I am left with LIBERAL OPINION, which at least has some sensible commentary. More on that below.

A reader asked me what my favorite quote was. I pondered briefly, and the first one that came to mind was “Beware of the man whose god is in the skies,” from The Revolutionist’s Handbook, a supplement to the play Man and Superman, by George Bernard Shaw. I discovered that in high school, when Man & was in our book but skipped over for assigned reading; I had learned that adults generally disapproved of the most interesting reading, so I read it, and verified my suspicion: great stuff. Shaw was one fine smart liberal vegetarian writer; can’t think why I like him so much. But about favorite quotes: Had I pondered longer, I might have thought of lines from a poem “What the cloud doeth, the Lord knoweth; the cloud knoweth not. What the artist doeth, the Lord knoweth; knoweth the artist not?” by the American poet Sidney Lanier. He was a fine southern flutist and poet, interned in the Civil War, where he got TB and slowly died from it, not quite living to age 40. I knew his distant collateral relative Sterling Lanier, a fine fantasy writer, who had a daughter the age of mine.

Okay, I have a huge pile of clippings I will have to boil down to smidgens. I’ll start with LIBERAL OPINION WEEK for last NoRemember and move forward. E J Dionne Jr. “Here is a surefire way to cut $7.1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade. Do nothing.” Because when the Bush tax cuts expire, that will do it. It won’t undo the trillions of dollars wasted in the Bush wars, but at least will stop the hemorrhage. This is one the supposedly balanced-budget supporting Republicans can’t stop by filibustering. With luck, Obama will not again make the mistake of extending the tax cuts, trying to placate the implacable. He’s thrown too many pearls before those swine already. David Rothkopf gives ten reasons Obamba will be re-elected, the essence being Barak is a nice guy, the economy is recovering,  and the Republicans come across as a passel of extremists. Mauer & Cole discuss five myths about incarceration, such as that crime has fallen because we have thrown more people into prison. No, Canada’s incarceration rate is about one seventh ours, yet it has less crime. Much of it is drug related; blacks are twelve times as likely to be sent to prison as whites, yet both use drugs at about the same rate. That may not be proof of racism, but there’s one hell of a smell. Paul Krugman says that up to 2005 almost two thirds of the rising share of income went to the top 0.1 percent, the richest thousandth of Americans. “Extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy.” We are coming to resemble a third world nation in that respect. Gene Lyons suggests that one reason wealthy Republicans are not comfortable with Social Security is that “…over 75 years Social Security has provided a measure of dignity, security and freedom to working Americans that just annoys the hell out of their betters.” Charles Blow asks whether income inequality is becoming the new global warming, with many Americans preferring to believe it’s not a concern. “If denial is a river, it runs through doomed societies.” Paul Krugman says that we were supposed to start regulating mercury 20 years ago, because it is really unhealthy to have in the environment. Now at last it is happening, expected to deliver huge health benefits at modest cost. “So, naturally, Republicans are furious.” Nicholas Kristof says that two Swedes are serving an 11 year sentence in a filthy Ethiopian prison for committing journalism. That is, they sneaked into the Ogaden region to investigate reports of human rights abuses. Dictatorships really don’t like having their dirt exposed. Another blogger there called on the government to allow free speech and end torture; he faces a possible death sentence. Bill Keller says it would be folly to bomb Iran, as some politicians urge, as it would unify the people around the mullahs and provoke them to double their nuclear pursuit. Clarence Page says that a report found that almost a quarter of all Internet traffic infringes on copyright laws, but a law to stop it may actually promote censorship. Yes, those are concerns of mine too; I don’t like either theft or censorship and would hate to have to choose between them. Nicholas Kristof says that now pimps are using the Internet to sell girls. There’s another tricky choice: freedom of speech, or sexual slavery. E J Dionne Jr. says that the Citizens United decision tore down a century’s worth of law aimed at reducing corruption in our electoral system; the conservative court majority set out to remake our political system by strengthening the hand of corporations and the wealthy, entrenching their approach to governance. That is, they’re reproducing their kind. Paul Krugman asks “But why do regions that rely on the safety net elect politicians who want to tear it down?” Because they’re confused. 44% of Social Security recipients say they have not used a government program. “But these voters would be both shocked and angry if politicians actually imposed their small-government agenda.” Their education may come hard. Robyn Blumner says that the numbers show that the national deficit is the result of wars and Bush tax cuts, not any liberal spending spree. Yes, and those who try to blame the whole deficit on three years of Obama are idiots, liars, or both. Donald Kaul asks “If you really and truly believe that abortion is the ultimate evil, how can you be against contraception, the great enemy of abortion?” Well, you can if you want to keep women barefoot and pregnant for the crime of having sex. I think that’s the hidden agenda. Paul Krugman comments on the Paul Ryan phenomenon. Not Ryan himself: “He’s a garden-variety modern GOP extremist, an Ayn Rand devotee who believes that the answer to all problems is to cut taxes on the rich and slash benefits for the poor and middle class.” No, the phenomenon is the cult that elevates Ryan to an icon of fiscal responsibility. Joe Nocera remarks on the Chevrolet Volt, a different kind of hybrid car that gets around 40 miles per charge before the gasoline engine kicks in. An eminently sensible car, if they can just get the $40,000 price down. It’s American designed and made. So the conservative propaganda machine is trashing it and trying to blame it on President Obama, who actually is not connected to the Volt. “It is inexplicable that the right would feel the need to tell lies about the Volt to attack the president.” No it isn’t; the Volt saves fuel, so the gas-guzzler industry is against it, and conservatives, having no valid case, have to make up lies instead, such as the cars bursting into flames, as no Volt has ever done.

Now that I have caught up the LIBERALS for now, on to other clippings. Students have invented phone-friendly lingerie, the JoeyBra, with a pocket for keys, credit cards, cell phone, etc. Now women can go purse-less and still function. They will not absentmindedly leave their bras on the counter. It might be fun to date such a woman: if the phone rings when she has her hands full, she might ask you to answer it for her, so you’d have to fish for it among the soft hills. Robyn Blumner column in the newspaper (some liberals do slip through the net) commenting on the book The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt that explores the differences between conservatives and liberals. He asks them tricky questions, like what would they think of a brother and sister who experimented with incest while using birth control? Of a family that, after their pet dog was run over, ate it for dinner? I don’t have ready answers, so don’t know how mine would distinguish me from a conservative. But I think I would be repelled by both examples.

Now the battle between traditional publishers and Amazon his hit the news. The Justice Department has sued Apple and publishers about the Agency Model, which establishes that traditional publishers can set the retail prices of books. This is to prevent Amazon from setting prices so low that publishers might be run out of business, while Amazon, with deep pockets, survives. But is this price fixing? The suit may settle that, legally. I suspect it is more about who fixes the price: the publisher or Amazon. I have an interest, but am not taking sides, in part because I have feet in both camps, and in part because I’m just not sure where the right of the case lies. Maybe the author should set the price of his book, as is the case with self publishing.

Political cartoon: What life is like for the CEOs of Rush Limbaugh’s remaining sponsors. Remember, Rush called a woman a whore when she argued the case for contraceptives being covered by health care insurance, and his own wife told him off. Cartoon shows a man bleary in the morning finding a note on the refrigerator saying “Make your own breakfast! Hope you enjoyed the sofa.”

Lovely story circulated by Monica Parish on the Internet; she has good taste in relaying things. So I’m agnostic; I still appreciate a good religious joke. Digested down, it is that a Jewish businessman sent his son to Israel for a year, and the son returned converted to Christianity. So the man asked his Jewish friend what to do, but the same thing had happened to him. So they asked the rabbi, and it had happened to him as well. What was going on? So the three of them prayed to God, asking what to do. And God replied FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK. I, TOO, SENT MY SON TO ISRAEL…

You know those virtual worlds on the Internet? I’ve never been to one, being on slow dial-up, but I’m sure I would love them. Well, now it seems crime has discovered them. What do you do when your virtual home is broken into and smashed up and robbed by a monster?

For every US soldier killed on the battlefield, about 25 commit suicide. That’s painful.

Items in THE WEEK: The American TV show Toddlers & Tiaras has paved the way for children’s beauty pageants in England. Even three year olds wear makeup, teased blonde hair and looking like little sex dolls. To what market are they really appealing? Child porno? Maybe not related: some women experience sexual pleasure though exercise, sometimes leading to orgasm. Usually that occurs during an abs workout, but biking, running, or hiking can also do it. Even weight lifting. They call it “coregasm.” My guess is that the flexing of the pelvic region is what does it. It does not seem to work on men. Ah, well. Google is testing self-driving cars; they are already out there, quietly behaving in traffic. 90% of accidents are caused by human error, so this could contribute to safety. When there start being road-rage incidents between self driving cars, we’ll know that that process has arrived. They have discovered that mild electric shock to the brain can contribute to better performance. The female author of the article tried it, and became a good marksman, because her mind was clear of extraneous thoughts. So the key seems to be focus. Remember the P does or does not equal NP proof I discussed in a prior column? P is the class of easy-to-solve problems; NP is the class of easy-to-check problems. Are the two categories the same, or different? Most logicians believe they are different, and that is my belief. All Ps are in NP, but are all NPs in P? Consider modern secret codes: designed to be almost impossible to crack, but when you have the key, it is easy to verify your message. So NP is definitely not P in that instance. But they feel that it will take a century or more to formally prove it. (They probably don’t read my column.)

And one from NEW SCIENTIST: a review of a book titled Free Will by Sam Harris. Free will is everywhere in law, politics, relationships, morality and so on; we are constantly making decisions, for good or ill. Yet it is an illusion. “We either live in a deterministic universe where the future is set, or an indeterminate one where thoughts and actions happen at random. Neither is compatible with free will.” The author concludes that it really does not make much of a difference. I have a problem with that; as a general rule I don’t like either/or extremes, because in my observation reality is generally a shade of gray. But since I can’t distinguish between true free will and the illusion of free will, I have to grudgingly agree that it probably does not make much of a difference. Maybe it is illusion that fills in those shades of gray.

I aim for about 3,000 words in these columns, and as usual I have seriously overshot it with this 5,100 word effort. I still have a pile of things to do that had to be bumped into next month; I’ll be writing about them then. So let me finish here with a comment about the flowers of spring: April is a month of flowers here in backwoods Florida. I’m especially pleased that our star jasmines, that usually display one or two star-petaled flowers in a season, this time had up to 25 per day despite getting frozen back by the freezes of Jamboree and FeBlueberry. They evidently have a can-do attitude.

I read Stomper Rex, by Brian Clopper. Bradford, nicknamed Stomper, is a fifth grader who has issues at school. He lives with his mother, his father having walked out. His mother is understanding but firm about his need to shape up. She gets him a tutor, Wanda, a teen girl he has a crush on, so he does pay attention as she reviews the material. This setting is competent, as the author is a fifth grade teacher; the secondary characters are well rounded. Then two odd men descend from his bedroom ceiling to take him to a fantasy land where he is needed. They are Ruffloon and Strivelwunk, who put him on a ladder which then flies into the land of Crawlspace, where there are many monsters, and much of the magic is made by figures of speech. Yes, the very thing he is having trouble with in school. I suspect this novel was a female dog to write, because coming up with relevant figures of speech when you need them can be a challenge, as I have found in my own writing. For example, when he is threatened by multiple snakes, he says “Fake snake!” and they merge into one pretend snake. That’s pretty simple, but others aren’t, such as “Try knocking loose those lox.” That’s homophone magic to make locks give way. It seems he has been summoned to defeat the cruel mistress of this realm, Stigma, a girl who visited but then decided to stay and rule, and they need to be rid of her. They have many adventures, requiring different figures of speech. Naturally there’s a climactic showdown, and strange things happen as they fight with whatever figures of speech they can think of under pressure. This novel represents a kind of course in figures of speech, and fifth graders who read it will surely develop a better understanding and possibly become better students. That may be the hidden agenda. This author continues to be a writer who deserves better attention in the literary world; this novel is anything but mindless.

I read Lance of Earth And Sky, by Erin Hoffman, published by Pyr, an imprint of Prometheus Books, so you know from the outset it’s not junk. This is a sequel to Sword of Fire And Sea, which I reviewed here last year, and just as full of magic and action. The author has a phenomenal imagination, and there’s always something happening. But in my dotage I am having trouble remembering as much as I used to, and wasn’t sure of the situation left by the first novel, as I dived into this one. It would help if there were a list of at least the major characters and a capsule summary of the prior novel, so that its complications are not lost on forgetful readers like me. There are multiple characters, each with his or her special powers and motives, making a rich tapestry. It took me a while to catch on that the protagonist, Vidarian, had taken a very serious action to save the life of his girlfriend, which alienated her. Women can be that way. But the story came to life when he rescued an orphaned thornwolf pup and adopted him as a pet. That pup turned out to be a ferocious shape-changer, one of whose shapes was a telepathic dragon; fortunately he was also ferociously loyal. There’s palace intrigue, betrayal, and finally war, with violent magic galore. The reader can never be sure what will happen next. It leaves off with the next adventure incipient.

A minister asked me about my position on gay marriage, as he has a problem with it. Me advise a minister? Chances are that this is no incidental question; there is bound to be real passion behind it. I would be well advised to stay clear. So naturally I plowed in: “Gay marriage vs civil rights. I do seem them as different issues, though there may be parallels. I have always thought, as I think you do, that marriage is naturally between a man and a woman. But I remember the schools for whites and blacks, supposedly separate but equal, that turned out to be separate but vastly unequal. If gays are limited to a civil service theoretically equal to marriage, would it really be so? My concern is that it would not. So I think I have to come down on the side of marriage for gays, same as for heteros. I remarked once that I would not want my daughter to marry a gay, and now some readers take that to mean that I don’t approve of gay marriage. No, it’s that for a straight woman to marry a gay man is a likely exercise in heartbreak. Were my daughter gay, I’d support her marrying another gay woman.

“But I think for you it has to be more difficult. For one thing, you have serious religious constraints that I don’t; your denomination’s stance on gay marriage has to have force, regardless of your personal position. I don’t know that stance, but assume it is against gay marriage, as I think yours is. As long as you align, you have no problem, as I see it. But if you believe in it and your church doesn’t, you have a problem, and if it accepts it and you don’t, you have a problem. If your church asks you to perform a gay marriage, could you override your personal sentiment? But regardless, the harder question I would pose to you is is this really a matter of conscience for you, that gays should not have the same rights as heteros, or is it personal bias? I would ask what would Jesus say? I think of him saying impatiently to let the dead bury their dead, and thus to let the gays marry gays, imperfect as the parallel may be. So I think he would approve it, as a matter of humanity; God accepts all kinds, including sinners, including prostitutes, including gays. But what counts is not what this agnostic thinks, but what you, committed to Jesus in a way I will never be, think. If you should see Jesus as supporting gay marriage, or as opposing it, I think your course will come clear.”

I read The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus by Peter J Gomes. He is a black preacher who has surely experienced discrimination in and out of his religion, but evidently risen above it. I picked it up in Jamboree for a dollar at Dollar Tree, remaindered from $24.95. It can be amazing what value you can still get for a dollar. Now I’m agnostic, which means among other things that I neither love nor hate religion; I like to think I can treat it with objectivity. I admit, though, to a certain profound cynicism sponsored by spot experiences, such as when I was in the US Army, being trained for war, and I went to the chaplain because I doubted I would in conscience be able to kill another man, even on the battlefield. He said “I’m sorry your patriotism isn’t better than that.” I saw before me a husk who thought murder was simply patriotism. But I trust that chaplain was not typical of all religious professionals. So once I got a smidgen of free time, I read this book, prepared for the worst. But I find I rather like this man Gomes. No, there’s not a lot of scandal; I think that’s a title the publisher put in it to sell copies. But there is sensible thinking. A few quotes from it should make the point. “It still shocks some Christians to realize that Jesus was not a Christian, that he did not know ‘our’ Bible, and that what he preached was substantially at odds with his biblical culture, and with ours as well.” Right: how could he know the New Testament, assembled long after his death? “One of the reasons that religious people are often cultural conservatives and that cultural conservatives take comfort in religion, is that religion is seen to confirm the status quo.” Something that Jesus emphatically did not do. The author makes the point that Jesus lived in times that are not our times, so there may be no direct connection between what he faced and what we face. “The question should not be ‘What would Jesus do?’ but rather, and more dangerously, ‘What would Jesus have me do?’” Which is really the question I am asking my correspondent above. Gomes mentions how theological students passed by a person in obvious distress on the way to the lecture hall for a class on the parable of the Good Samaritan; obviously they did not relate to that message. He remarks on how the war on terror became as much about resuscitating the political fortunes of the Republican administration as about bringing terrorists to justice. He mentions how William Sloane Coffin got the attention of his audience by mentioning David and Goliath: “Hey, kid, whatcha got in the bag?” He makes the point that if God is the author of the universe, how can a Christian leader say, as one did, “God does not hear the prayer of Jews.” That man’s God is too small. He quotes what he calls doggerel: “How odd of God to choose the Jews…/But not so odd as those who choose/A Jewish God, but spurn the Jews.” He makes the point that Jesus had nothing to say about homosexuality, so the scriptures can’t be used as a basis for discrimination, yet many are adamant in condemning it. Right; they are ascribing their own bigotry to the Bible. They should be ashamed, but they seem to be shameless. But there may be hope: “…the Church, we know from experience, will eventually do the right thing once it has exhausted every other alternative.” There is much more, and I recommend this book for those who want a serious look at religion by a surprisingly objective preacher.

One of the things that accumulated while I was busy writing—I’m a writaholic, so other things do get neglected—was a series of DISCOVER science videos I subscribed to. 24 had piled up, and another came as I pondered. So my assigned chore for the month of Mayhem was to view these educational efforts. I viewed them one, two or three a day, and they turned out to be worth it. I will mention only the highlights. One was on Hawaii, showing how this chain of islands is atypical of other volcanic regions because it’s not from plate tectonics, wherein one place slides under another and the buried land heats, melts, and boils up in the form of rim volcanoes, but from passing over a hot-spot. The spot is a channel down deeper in the world, and a tube of lava rises and forms a mound where the lava overflows the surface. Since the plate continues to slide across the hot-spot, new mounds keep appearing, forming a chain. Because erosion keeps wearing down the soft rock, these mounds disappear into the sea after a while, but remain below it. Thus the main island of Hawaii, actually the biggest single mountain on the globe, is but the most recent example of a chain that extends back to Asia. Fascinating! Then there’s Loch Ness, where brown sandstone is the same as is found in eastern North America, formed the same time. How could that be? Because long ago America bumped into Scotland, then later separated, taking half the sandstone with it. And the Loch Ness Monster? Could it be a surviving plesiosaur from the time of dinosaurs? No, because the loch filled with water only with the melting of the glaciation ten thousand years ago, while the dinosaurs passed 65 million years ago. One on Fractals, including the Maldelbrot set, always a fascination to me. It turns out the whole world is fractal in nature, or self-emulating; it governs how plants branch, how blood vessels divide, how math operates. The modern marvels of the Potato and Corn. The driest place on Earth: the Atacama Desert of Chile in South America, with only one fiftieth the rainfall of the Sahara Desert. The Great Lakes, whose greatest, Lake Iroquois, no longer exists; it drained some time ago, and great was the carnage thereof. The Sphinx: who really made it, carving it out of the rock of the desert? Extreme Cave Diving, where fabulous paleontological treasures can be found in oxygen-free water, but they have to hurry to find them, because global warming makes the sea rise and soon it will flood out those regions, destroying them. The geologic formation of the region New York city is built on, animating the continents as they drift and collide. Today’s Rockies are pikers compared to the mountains that once existed in this area. The Cuttlefish, related to the Octopus and the Squid, king of camouflage; its skin can be like a movie screen in its instant changing, and it’s pretty smart too. The San Andreas Fault, its mischief not at all finished; but one section produces no quakes. Why not? Because it is composed of gypsum, which is like talcum powder, slippery. So the Fault continues to move, but quietly. Hummingbirds, amazing feisty little fliers. And Krakatoa, one of the most violent eruptions in recorded history—and now that volcano is building again, swelling by a dozen feet a year. This is mischief.

Caught up on chores, for the moment, I watched some movie videos. The Road is about a disaster that wipes out most of humanity, the survivors scrounging what little they can from the barren world remaining. A man and his son struggle through, trusting almost no one, for good reason, until the man is injured and dies; then the boy is taken in by another family. That family turns out to be superior to what he had; it’s a meagerly happy ending. Seems simple, but it has verisimilitude; it’s one realistically ugly story. Red Riding Hood, wherein a huge werewolf terrorizes the town. When he corners the heroine, lovely Valerie, he asks her to come away with him. But others hear only growls; how is it she can understand him? The villagers think they have managed to kill the wolf, but they haven’t; he is among them in man-form by day. A fine, tense story, with a surprise conclusion that makes sense. Hugo, wherein a city boy of circa 1930 is trying to repair an automaton — that is, mechanical man — he has found, hoping it can tell him what happened to his father. He is befriended by a girl who helps him, but it gets to be a pretty wild adventure before the automaton is fixed and the mysteries are resolved. Naturally, adults don’t understand anything; it’s up to children to accomplish anything. All fun movies.

J R Rain and I completed the third Aladdin novel, Aladdin and the Flying Dutchman, and it is available now on Kindle and such, and will have a POD edition. It’s amazing how easy it is now to do without traditional publishers of any stripe; their monopoly has been broken and they are headed inevitably for a silver or copper or brass age following their golden one. This time Aladdin and his companions have to rescue their allies the Sirens from an attack by a Kraken, then go on to prevent the evil sorceress Medea from opening the Gates of Hades and wreaking Hell on Earth. But Medea is no easy creature to deal with, especially for a man like Aladdin who is smitten by her savage beauty. It’s as wild and fantastic as the others, not at all authentic mythologically, with twists and turns you won’t see coming. How could you? We, the authors, didn’t.

Monica Parish sent another Internet circular, this one on student answers. I was once a teacher, so such things resonate. Name the four seasons: salt, pepper, mustard, and vinegar. In a democratic society, how important are elections? Very important; sex can only happen when a male gets an election. What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty? He says goodbye to his boyhood and looks forward to his adultery. How are the main 20 parts of the body categorized (e.g. the abdomen)? The body is consisted into 3 parts—the branium, the borax, and the abdominal cavity. The brainium contains the brain, the borax contains the heart and lungs, and the abdominal cavity contains the five bowels: A, E, I, O, U. Which leaves me wondering Y.

Couple of newspaper comments on a new book titled Breasts: A Natural and unnatural History, by Florence Williams. Breasts utterly fascinate me, and I look at them at every opportunity, whether in pictures or the flesh; I’m obsessed, which is to say I’m a normal man. Yes I know that many of the best ones are artificial, whether by padding or surgery; I still can’t get enough of them. No, it’s not size; I prefer the middle range, C cups, and I am most intrigued by supposedly accidental peeks down inside a halter. I like other parts of a woman too, of course, especially when the wind blows up a dress or they cross their legs in short skirts, but those other parts are less frequently on display. Anyway, the author saw a news article about toxins in breast milk, so got her own milk tested, and was horrified to learn that it was an arsenal of baby-harming poisons. This was what she wanted to feed her trusting baby? She studied breasts, and wrote the book. Human beings are the only mammals with permanently enlarged breasts; other animals shut them down after weaning their offspring. Why? To attract the attention of men, of course. As I have remarked before, breasts would have been a turnoff to men in the early days, because a lactating female is not breedable, and males normally have little interest in females other than in breeding them, whatever else they may pretend. So females signal when they become breedable, by smell, pheromones, brightly colored genitals or whatever, and then the males congregate. But when our species rose to walk on two feet, women had to carry their babies, and could not run, fight, or forage well enough to compete on their own. They needed the help of men, and of course the readiest way to get it was via sex appeal. As has been wisely said: the average woman would rather look good than seem smart, because the average man can see better than he can think. So the great conversion occurred: women hid their true fertility so as to fake it all the time, and breasts became attractants instead of repulsants, never shut down between nursings. Then men with better eyes than brains were constantly attracted and constantly trying to breed, helping to protect and feed the women to make them more amenable, and the result of this seemingly wasted effort was that their offspring survived, while those of men who would not touch breasted women did not. Viola! We are all descendants of those who made the change. But there’s a price. Those breasts form more tumors than do other organs, and breast implants mess up both lactation and sexual response. “Well, at least your breasts won’t spontaneously ignite,” the author’s typically thoughtless husband jokes. But I suspect they came close to doing that when he laughed. I picture her saying “Honey, let me hold you close to my bosom” just before the fire flares. Meanwhile, given that breast feeding is supposed to be superior to bottle feeding, how about cleaning up those breasts? Who wants to feed her baby a cocktail of flame-retardants, foreign hormones, and toxins that may mean her daughter develops her high-potency breasts at age nine or ten and has a 50% increased risk of breast cancer, the effect possibly persisting through three generations. O joy! But it will take a thorough reform of environmental pollution to accomplish such a cleanup, unless we really want to have the trend continue until children are bearing and nursing children and dying before they become adults. Article in the June 2012 DISCOVER magazine makes the point that breast feeding is not just for nourishment; there are countless other compounds to shore up the baby’s immune system and facilitate its digestion. Some are indigestible; why? So they will pass through the baby’s system and reach the gut, where good bacteria can feed on them and prosper, eliminating bad bacteria and contributing to better health. So breast fed infants tend to be healthier, and fewer become obese later in life. The formula companies are interested, and in time bottle milk may have these additional compounds, but at present they don’t.

Stray items: cartoon shows the Pope speaking to US nuns, saying “I’m very upset with you for not speaking out against homosexuality! Same goes for your friend.” That friend being Jesus Christ. In Orlando, Florida, there was a foul stench coming from a broken package from Yemen with tubes and wires and a viscous brown substance coming out. The supervisor moved the package outside, but his throat was burning and he had a headache. The package disappeared and the incident was not reported to the Department of Homeland Security. Meanwhile the supervisor fell inexplicably ill, his symptoms suggesting neurological problems consistent with toxic exposure. He’s in serious condition, unable to work, unable even to take care of himself. But the doctors can’t adequately treat him until they know what was in the package — and the Postal Service refuses to investigate, claiming it never happened, despite witnesses who testified (at the risk of their jobs) that it did. The Justice Department may finally be getting ready to do something about prison rapes. It’s a fact that more men are raped than women, but they don’t make the news because it happens in prison, victimized by other men. There are five conservative members of the Supreme Court who don’t much like the idea of a mandate for signing up for health insurance, saying it’s not what America’s founders intended. But it turns out that the founders did establish similar mandates. So whatever the Justices’ objections, they are not based on the historical record. Were they ever? Privacy: you think you have it online? Hardly; you might as well be parading naked, as everything is on record and there are outfits busily collecting information on everyone. But there are services to help you anonymize your input and erase your tracks. Still I’m skeptical; I suspect that if you go online, you are known. Article by Harold Meyerson on economics: “This recovery differs from its predecessors because it is concentrated among the affluent, and almost entirely among the very rich.” They are verifying why so many folk are so seriously running for exercise: runner’s high. I run for exercise, but have never experienced that. Ah, well. THE WEEK reprinted an article from The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt, making the case that your genes may account for the way you vote, more than your environment. Interesting, though my skepticism hovers nearby. NEW SCIENTIST has another article showing how wealth corrupts folk; they start awarding themselves bonuses rather than paying fair wages. We see the evidences of this in our largely corrupt political system, where rich folk in effect buy their offices, as Governor Scott did here in Florida; I think the governorship cost him $72 million, and of course he means to recover that investment; he’s a businessman. Certainly he shows no sign of caring about the poor. NEW SCIENTIST also has an article on phytoplankton, tiny plants in the ocean on which much of the rest of life is based, but they are being decimated by climate change. If the food pyramid crashes, we’re going to be very sorry; that could be what brought on the world of The Road. And one more: Immortality, The Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilization, by Stephen Cave, whose title I suspect pretty well summarizes the book. Our instinct of self preservation means we don’t want to die, yet chances are we will die anyway. What to do? Plan A is to stay healthy and forestall death as long as possible, meanwhile reproducing so that at least our line carries on. Plan B is to come back to life somewhere, the basis for monotheistic religions and cryonics. Plan C is the Soul, carrying on regardless of the body; all major religions perpetuate this view. Plan D is legacy, putting our names and faces everywhere (I remember the ditty: “Fools names and fool’s faces are always seen in public places” as well as “A boy’s ambition must be small, to write his name on a shit-house wall”), creating music and art, writing books. Suddenly that gets personal. I suspect it also applies to writing long monthly blog-type columns.

Charles Krauthammer is a conservative who seldom makes sense by my definition. But in a column in the newspaper for May 14 he wrote something that made me take notice. He reviewed the Israel/Arab war of 1967, which is one of my private interests, wherein the Arab nations, in violation of previous truce agreements, ordered UN peacekeepers out, blockaded Israel, and marched 120,000 troops up to the border, pledging the final destruction of Israel. Only the horse blew first: Israel made a preemptive strike, spooked the Arabs, and sent them fleeing home with enormous losses. Why is this an interest of mine, when I’m not Jewish? Because I see it as a loose analogy. When I was blacklisted in 1969 for protesting being cheated by a publisher—they could not stomach the very idea of a writer demanding an honest accounting, and were out to teach me a lesson–it was rough going for a time, but I fought back, mainly by hanging on, and in the end something funny happened: the blacklisters lost out, and I think none of them had much success thereafter if they even remained in business, while I went on to become a bestselling author. (My message to publishers: don’t shit on a future bestseller, because he will remember even if you forget, and make you regret it if he can. But, you protest, you don’t know who the future bestsellers are? Then maybe, heretical thought, you should try treating all authors fairly.) I saw Israel as the model I coincidentally followed. I remain militant, as does Israel, and I privately root for its continued success, as I do for my own. The Arab nations remain hostile to Israel, as do certain aspects of Parnassus to me, and continued vigilance is required. You can see the figurative lines of battle around Israel’s borders and in my projects such as my ongoing survey of electronic publishers, helping writers to bypass Parnassus, and there is more warfare going on that doesn’t show publicly. Okay, that’s why I watch Israel, and no one else needs to care; it’s just an analogy somewhat like my comment when I had a cracked tooth whose sides ground against each other and caused me pain: I likened it to the San Andreas Fault, where tectonic plates collide, only the toothtonic plates were smaller. This is known as hyperbole, humorous exaggeration to make a point, something critics are apt to miss. (I try never to miss a chance to mess up a critic; they too should clean up their acts.) But Krauthammer has his own point to make, and it is frightening. Now the Arabs are gathering again, notably Iran, who is developing a nuclear weapon it all but promises to use on Israel. Israel is not going to sit still for that literal annihilation any more than it did in 1967, and it does have the nuclear option. So it is organizing its political forces, becoming internally unified so that it can act decisively when it needs to. Other nations can tut-tut or try to deny the threat, as England did while Nazi Germany was arming itself in the 1930s, but Israel can’t afford to wait on them. Imagine the subsequent dialogue: “Oh, you naughty boy; you shouldn’t have A-bombed Israel! It will take decades for that hole in the ground to lose its radioactivity. Don’t do it again or we’ll be annoyed.” If you were Israel would you wait on that? Krauthammer says there are about 18 months before Iran is ready to move, and if the world does not act to stop Iran in that interim, Israel will. I believe it. That’s nuclear war, which may or may not remain limited to that region. That scares the hell out of me. This ain’t beanbag, and that’s no hyperbole.

About war, nuclear or otherwise: DISCOVER has a set of articles on it, one making the case that war has existed seemingly as long as mankind has existed, and the percentage of adults who died in war was worse in the past than it is today. In southern Ukraine an ancient burial site indicates that figure was 22% 11,000 years ago; in northern India 3,000 years ago it was 30%. All across the world it has been like that. Even chimps make war raids against other chimps, so war may date back millions of years, to before the human line separated from the chimp line. But the companion article say no, chimp killing chimp is rare, and may even be a response to human encroachment on their territory. Monkey see, monkey do? Evidence of human war goes back only 13,000 years, and may occur when human tribes overpopulate a region and run low on resources. If your choice is between fighting or starving, you fight. I read elsewhere that when the hunter-gatherers settled down to agriculture, they had to defend their territory. That’s not the same as wanting war. So war is not necessarily inevitable.

Columnist Todd Farley says that standardized testing can’t be trusted. “There was no statistic that couldn’t be doctored, no number that couldn’t be fudged, no figure that couldn’t be bent to our collective will.” Yes, I tend to distrust standardized tests, being an independent thinker whose correct answers don’t necessarily match the programmed ones. Today in Florida there’s a flap about the FCAT test; they changed the scoring, too many students flunked, so they changed the scoring again to have the right number pass. In Xanth the F Cat is a feline whose purpose is to make people fail, in contrast to the A Cat, B Cat, C Cat etc. Maybe related: there is an Integrity Report on the several states, and Florida is 18^th with a grade of C-. New Jersey is first, Georgia last. It seems that the average state government is not very honest. Duh! I’m surprised Florida isn’t lower; we have freakishly poor government here now.

From RESIST, a publication of an organization giving grants to less-favored charities. Corporate food production, more interested in profits, may actually be poisoning people. But the big outfits have the ear of the government, and healthier organic farming has a rough time. Only 2% of the food consumed in the US is organic or sustainably produced. But there’s a glimmer of hope for the future, as people start to catch on.

New research, says Jonathan Gottschall, shows that fiction molds us. The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent is its influence. Fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction aimed at evidence and argument. When we read nonfiction our shields are up; we are properly skeptical. But when we read fiction our shield are down; after all, its just entertainment. We are moved emotionally, and that is another matter. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people, even strangers. Thus storytelling has always shaped culture. I knew that! Storytelling is fundamental to the nature of our species. I am a storyteller, thus I define our nature; I am the center of the universe. Too bad the universe doesn’t know or care. Sigh.

DISCOVER magazine has a nice article on Postapocalypse Condominiums. Larry Hall, a former software engineer, bought a hole in the ground for $300,000 and is making something of it. Evidently he does know his assets from a hole in the ground. The hole was left over from a cold war nuclear ballistic missile silo. It’s 174 feet deep and buttressed by concrete walls up to 9 feet thick; it’s pretty secure. Now it is being filled in with eight disk-shaped luxury apartments stacked like pancakes, plus six other floors for hydroponics, machinery, storage, community center and such, a potentially self-sustaining community for up to 70 people. This is a science fiction type concept, so naturally it appeals to me. Would I actually want to live there? I am wary of planned communities, having been part of one as a child; all is not necessarily sweetness & light. But if the alternative were to struggle in a world such as that depicted by The Road, remarked on above, I would be interested.

We saw Men in Black 3, as a kind of joint birthday celebration for Wife and Daughter. Reviews said it was indifferent, but movie reviewers are like book reviewers: they may have an agenda other than what the average viewer wants. It was wild and full of weird aliens, and actually the overall plot did make sense. A bad guy was set to travel back in time 40 years to kill a good guy, Agent K, before he could arrest the bad guy, as he did before, so a good guy, Agent J, had to go back to just before then and kill the bad guy first. Along the way were things like alien creatures who could live in the body of a man and assist him, people with heads like a nest of scorpions, and a lovely motorcycle that consisted of a single big wheel; they rode inside that wheel as it rolled along. That just might work, with gyroscopic stabilization. The time travel bit was well handled, given the danger of paradox, with a nice surprise conclusion. So it had everything, not phenomenally well organized, but it was there, and we did enjoy the movie.

Now, with a month of chores done, I am ready to return to my natural medium: writing. I will start on what I think will be a novella, Odd Exam, about an unusual college entrance examination. It is in the form of a multi-player online game, semi-virtual reality, with portals to other worlds, alien monsters, and something like magic. For those who qualify, board and tuition will be free; can this be serious?

Once again I have missed my target of a 3,000 word Column; this one’s 5,850 words. Sigh. I just always seem to have more to say than time or space permit. It must be the legacy thing.

I watched the movie Prometheus. My wife wasn’t interested, so I saw it with my daughter Cheryl. The graphics are excellent, and the story is comprehensible; I enjoyed it. It starts out like a mainline science fiction adventure, with hints that aliens may have visited Earth 35,000 years ago and generated the human species, as a seeding experiment. Then a private enterprise space ship sets out for a distant planet that may relate, looking for the secret of eternal life, with a lovely female archaeologist (what else?), a robot man, and assorted other intriguing characters. They land on a barren world, near a kind of pyramid, and of course explore it. I love this kind of story, before it turns to horror. A dust storm smashes them back, but after that they continue, finding assorted artifacts. There is a bit of life left, and it infects some of the humans. Then things get interesting. One of the infectees is the archaeologist. When she realizes she is pregnant she knows this is mischief, and demands an immediate abortion. She’s right, but of course they don’t understand. She fights her way to the surgery facility and has the fetus cut out of her while she’s conscious, showing guts in more than one sense. It turns out to be an octopus-like monster. See, they should have listened! She tries to kill it and thinks she has succeeded, but it survives and grows enormously despite having no food. So this is actually science fantasy, as I think most such movies are. There is a series of horrors as aliens and monsters take form and fight each other and people are gruesomely killed. One alien about to take off in an alien space ship for Earth, to spread its kind; they succeed in stopping that by crashing their own ship into it. It’s delightful the way the alien station slowly activates, and the way the monsters interact. In the end only the pretty archaeologist survives, along with the talking head of the robot, and they head out to discover who made the aliens who in turn made humans. I will be interested to see how that turns out.

I read my own novel, Luck of the Draw, #36 in the Xanth series, proofreading the galleys; it was relatively fresh for me because I have already written the one following it, as it were erasing some mental traces. This is the one featuring an 80 year old Mundane man with a year or two left to live who gets brought into Xanth, youthened to age 21, given a magic talent, and assigned to court 16 year old Princess Harmony. This is not his idea or hers, but it’s set up by Demons for one of their bets, so there’s no choice but to play it through. There are six suitors sponsored by different Demons; which will win? In the end they do develop some respect for each other; the Mundane is level headed and realistic, if locked into his somewhat archaic mindset, and Harmony is the most sensible and motivated princess of her generation, destined one day to become King of Xanth. I enjoyed it, and trust readers will also; I found a number of nice touches, such as the way the princess conspires to recover her freedom to choose for herself, despite the Demons’ directive. Some of the puns are sickeningly egregious, another plus for a Xanth novel. Look for it in hardcover in Dismember, 2012.

I read Shadow Dragon, by Lance Horton. This is a science fiction horror thriller self published at iUniverse, and is another example of the inadequacy of Parnassus, the traditional publishing establishment. Because this is a fully worthy novel. The author couldn’t get an agent? Couldn’t get a publisher? No wonder sales are declining! The author wrote to me thirty years ago, and I described the closed shop that traditional publishing tends to be, designed more to keep newcomers out than to locate and promote the best fiction. As old-timer Robert Moore Williams told me maybe 40 years ago, the fat hogs have their snouts in the trough and they’re not about to let any piglets get any swill. Nothing much has changed in the interim, except for this: the advent of electronic publishing and affordable self publishing is bypassing the limited trough and letting everyone else in. There are those who hate that, but I am convinced that this is good for publishing, because the readers want the best, not the best that’s on paid-for shelves by fat hogs. With the Internet a reader can find just about anything, ranging from abysmal to excellent, and this is a novel that needs finding. The author says that the monster herein was inspired in part by my mantas in Omnivore, and I can see bits of that inspiration, but that’s not the reason I like this novel. It’s that it is well crafted, well developed, and supremely compelling. Kyle is investigating multiple savage homicides in the Montana backwoods. Carrie goes there because her beloved grandparents are two of the victims. Neither is satisfied with the official explanations, and indeed it turns out that the monsters of the forest are complemented by the corporate monsters of the boardrooms, who are as ruthless in covering up their awful errors as the monsters are in shedding blood. It seems that a corporate plane crashed and something got loose, and innocent residents are paying the price. By the time our protagonists come to grips with the deadly forest monster, the corporate killer is on their trail. It’s a nice interweaving of the elements, with a hint of romance. If you want a story that will keep you nervous until the end, this is the one. It’s slightly out of my genre, as I’m more into humorous fantasy, but this one held my attention throughout. It is available electronically, Kindle and such. Look for it.

And I read my own 30,000 word novella Odd Exam, developed in the month of Mayhem and  written in the month of JeJune. Ike is an extremely bright high school graduate who’s never been really challenged academically, and lacks motivation. Felony is a conflicted girl, smart and motivated but prickly about her ordinary appearance and her conjectured origin as a child of rape, hence her name, so that she has trouble getting along with others. Naturally they meet and interact. Noting that Ike likes pretty girls, she borrows magic to make her body stunning. That gets his attention, even though she soon reverts to ordinary, by his preference. The college admission examination is in the form of a virtual reality game: get killed therein, and you won’t be admitted. That’s part of what’s odd about it. They have to get familiars, that is animals to work with; his is a flying blue snake, hers an intelligently talking but dull-colored parrot. That’s another part of the oddity. But, as they gradually realize, there is reason. So, with the help of the familiars, who know more than they are allowed to tell, they struggle to figure it all out. This one should be posted on Kindle by year’s end. I’m still playing with the novella length; so far it seems ideal to tell a more-than-incidental story.

Let’s talk about the weather. Early in JeJune our power failed and was out all day, 13½ hours. I went out on my morning exercise run, and when I returned, no lights. The power company folk finally dug up our cable in three places and replaced the big transformer and got our lights back on by evening, to our relief. Its amazing how incapacitating lack of electric power is, considering I was brought up on a farm without electricity. But that was a long time ago, actually about 67 years, and I have gotten soft in the interim. At any rate, we had the repaired cable and transformer, and that was just as well, because it surely would have gone out when the weather came. As it was, we survived Tropical Storm Debby with not even a blink. Debby bumbled up from the south as a mass of clouds, reached the Gulf of Mexico to our west, and formed the circular wind pattern that indicates a tropical storm. She had sustained winds up to 60 miles per hour, short of hurricane force, but brought in a lot of rain. The idiots who predict storm paths, including several computers, kept saying she would go west to Texas, but I said there’s a high there; she’ll go the other way. I could see that she was looking around, trying to find us; that’s what the eye is for. Every storm looks for us, but most get lost along the way. Sure enough, she moved east, not west, crossing north Florida. We track our rainfall, so I know our record for a single day and night was seven and a half inches, and in recent years of drought we seldom come close to half that. But on Sunday, JeJune 24, we got 9.8 inches, shattering our record. Others got more, so it was no anomaly. And Debby moved on into the Atlantic, dissipating as she went; her job was done. But would you believe, our water table is still below par; one day does not a drought abate.

My wife and I had our 56^th wedding anniversary on the 23^rd, conscious that at our septuagenarian age each one could be the last one. We remain in good health, considering. We celebrated by having some cheesecake for dessert. Yes, at our age that counts; we lead dull lives by choice. I tease her that she was nineteen when I married her, but then she didn’t staynineteen. I mean, look at her: she’s at least 29.

The Supreme Court finally decided on Obamacare, largely upholding it. What do you know. I suspect that they made the right decision not entirely because it was right but because they feared that if Obamacare was overthrown, and the grasping insurance companies reverted to business as usual, stiffing policy holders in myriad ways, there would be public outrage that could wash Republicans out of office next election and give Obama a filibuster-proof mandate that would enable him to put in many more worthwhile reforms, and to appoint liberal justices that would end the gang of five’s reign of horror. So they backed off as a matter of political expediency. Obamacare is imperfect, thanks to retards in Congress who torpedoed key provisions like the public option, but still far better than what has been. I’m liberal, of course, but my position is essentially endorsed by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who makes the case that the swing vote, Chief Justice Roberts, had other concerns than the merits of the case. That he knew that if the Court made yet another regressive decision like Bush vs. Gore or Corporations are People and can spend all they want to buy elections, it would sink even lower in public esteem. He wanted to rescue the Court from that ignominy. So he crafted a decision to uphold Obamacare on the narrow technical ground that the individual mandate is actually a tax, something that is within the purview of Congress. And maybe he will be remembered as presiding over a Court that was not the cesspool of the country. That’s evidently his hope, according to Krauthammer, as interpreted by me. Could be. But I can’t help missing the time when merit rather than politics or personal foible was the overriding consideration.

For men only: I am 77, going on 78, and though I do my best to take care of my health, age slowly encroaches. I’m not nineteen any more either. One symptom is ED, erectile dysfunction; I’m ready for sex, but my member rises only to half mast and doesn’t last, making penetration and culmination difficult or impossible. This is frustration, as my interest remains keen; I am intensely aware of the female gender and its attributes. Yes, Viagra works, and I suspect the other leading ED dregs do too, but it costs $30 a pill. I don’t like being gouged like that. I cut the pills into eighths, but even so, that’s over three dollars per time. So I quit using it. I tried herbal remedies, like L-Arginine, L-Carnitine, Horny Goat Weed, Maca, and too many others to track. None of them worked, though L-Arginine may have helped. What to do? Well, in the past month I tried a different approach, a mechanical one, what I call the Penis Pump. There are a number on the market, ranging from $25 to over $200, essentially using vacuum to inflate the penis to full size. That worked, but when I removed it my penis deflated, losing half an inch and softening. Then I added the ring, colloquially known as a cock ring. Use the vacuum, then immediately put the ring on the base of the penis, and it constricts it and holds the blood in place, maintaining the erection. It’s not close to rock hard, but let’s face it, it doesn’t need to be; it just needs to be hard enough to do the job. No, the ring does not hurt, though it is advised not to leave it on more than half an hour. All I need is five minutes. And it works, solving my erectile problem. I paid $30 for it, the price of one Viagra pill, and it costs nothing additional for future times, so in effect becomes cheaper with every use. Of course sex is not just the erection; you need to climax and ejaculate, and at such time as age takes those away from me I may be finished. But that time is not yet, and not soon, I hope. So if other men chafe as I do at the exorbitant cost of Viagra and its cousins, this is worth trying. And for that naughty woman who peeked at this paragraph (for shame!), if your man has an ED problem you want to abate cheaply, suggest this.

I still do archery for exercise, loosing arrows with the right-hand bow, both right and left sides. The problem is I keep losing arrows, and damaging them. So when TS Debby blotted out my archery day, I set about repairing them instead. I wound up fixing 31 arrows, 26 by fletching repair, 6 with new nocks. (One required both, hence the overlap.) That should last me a while. They still don’t go where I aim them, which is frustrating, but I do get the exercise. It’s amazing how an arrow can miss my target array and disappear in the forest. There’s only a limited area it can be, but it’s not there; I have a metal detector. I don’t know how they do that.

Ray Bradbury died. He was 91, living from 1920 to 2012. He was not my favorite science fantasy author, but he was a good one, author of The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451 and others. What I admire about him is that he never renounced his origin, the way, for example, that Kurt Vonnegut did, gaining the applause of ignorant critics who condemned science fiction without ever reading it. Bradbury was a genre writer to the end. I remember that as a novice, Bradbury was said to have written a huge amount of fiction, much of which was very bad. But he kept trying, gradually improving, until he cracked through to pro publication and kept going, right up to movie scripts such as Moby–Dick. That’s a model anyone can follow; you don’t have to be good at the outset, you just have to keep going until you get there. It took me eight years to make my first sale, and I don’t blame the editors for that, much; I slowly improved and oriented until I got there, like Bradbury, and kept going. Bradbury lacked money for college, so sold newspapers and wrote furiously in his spare time. In short, he worked at it. More power to him.

From an article in DISCOVER magazine I learned the names of prior super continents: 100 million years ago there was Pangaea, and billion years before that was Rodinia, and 700 million years before that, Nuna. Plate tectonics keeps moving the pieces around, forming them then breaking them up. A hundred million years hence there will be Amasia. I just thought you’d like to know, in case you need to update your address stickers. NEW SCIENTIST has one on a flying squid. It really does; it has a body shaped like a torpedo, and it forms its tentacles into an air foil and jets into the air for 15 or 20 feet. In SCIENCE NEWS an item on a paralyzed woman who guided a robotic arm with just the power of her thoughts. I hope this research continues; I know my paralyzed correspondent, Jenny, could use it. Item in THE WEEK on a proposal in Sweden to ban male government employees from urinating standing up while using government restrooms. It seems that makes for cleaner toilets. I believe it. In NEW SCIENTIST article on how weight-loss surgery can change people’s taste; they lose interest in rich foods, and some seem to improve their minds. But there are negatives too: they can have cognitive problems, trouble concentrating or finding the right word, and short term memory issues. SCIENCE NEWS has an article on mystery neurons found in monkeys, ones that people have too: von Economo neurons, that may contribute to empathy and self awareness. Lose those neurons, lose your self awareness. An essay by Michael Wolff republished in THE WEEK about keeping people alive as long as possible: “My mother is trapped in a broken body and demented mind. Is it cruel to keep her alive?” He concludes that he plainly would not want what long-term care insurance buys. He is working out a do-it-yourself exit strategy to be sure he is never caught that way. “As should we all.” Amen. Another by Jane E Brody in the Jewel-Lye 1 newspaper, just catching this Column (lucky it!), remarks on not wanting to prolong your life after a marked decline in cognitive powers, or if forced to live with severe, distracting pain. But you need to take steps before you get there, because you know your doctors won’t heed your preference any more than they did with your terminal grandparent. And in DISCOVER, article on great floods of the past, including the probable origin of the biblical flood: over 7,000 years ago the Mediterranean rose and flooded into the below-sea-level valley that is now the Black Sea. There is evidence that the inhabitants of that region then spread north and south into Europe and Mesopotamia, generating civilization there in due course.

I was cleaning up some old papers—those abound at my house—and ran across an article by Deb Price in 2005 on the damage of bullying. She said that 65% of teens say they have been bullied in the past year. That the reason is their size or looks, or if they are thought to be gay, or how masculine or feminine they are, or their ability at school, or their race/ethnicity, or family income, or religion. Or, as I see it: if they are different in any way from the approved common mold, and in a minority, they are targets. I was a small boy, so learned about bullying from the bottom, and I think bullies should be identified early and removed from normal school for retraining until they change. The columnist says that sixty percent of boys who were bullies in sixth to ninth grades were convicted criminals by age 24. That’s just the ones they caught. As has been said elsewhere, a bully is a baby criminal. As with other illnesses, tackle this early and it will save greatly later on. A more recent column is by Nicholas Kristof, who sponsored an essay contest for teenagers about bullying. Many of the essays argued that adults were either oblivious or turned a blind eye, and that it seemed that students themselves had to take the lead in dealing with bullies. That was true in my day too. The prizewinning essay was by a 17 year old girl, Lena Rawley. “Teenage girls are cruel super-humans from a distant galaxy sent here to destroy us all…” One even sent her an email titled “Fifty Reasons Why We Can’t Be Friends With You,” with the 50 listed. Knowing no more than that, I’m pretty sure I would not want to be friends with the author of that email.

Column by Dahlia Lithwick commenting on an incident in the Michigan state legislature. A woman made a statement about proposed abortion regulations, during which she used the word “vagina,” and Republicans were so offended that they banned her from speaking there for a day. One Republican said later that he didn’t even want to speak that work in front of a woman. Now the columnist facetiously proposes a bill to require any woman who seeks to use the word vagina in a floor debate be required to wait 72 hours after consulting with her physician before she may say it. I wonder how they would have reacted if she’d said cunt? Will men be barred from saying the word penis?

And it seems the US military is building a stink bomb. “It combines the reek of sewage with pungent rotting meat. It is so intense that you rush for the door.” I think they are considering it for crowd dispersal. I don’t think it would work well on the battlefield, because the enemy could use gas masks. But I’d rather see stink bombs be used than deadly grenades. I have a lot of fun with the stink horn in Xanth: step on it and it makes a foul smelling noise and emits a filthy brown stench that no one can stand. And yes, of course a critic could suggest that they just read one of my columns aloud to sicken the enemy.

Twenty five years ago at my house in the pasture I received a surprise visitor: a fifteen-year-old boy who had run away from home and come to live with me. I brought him inside and talked with him, expressed sympathy, and managed to persuade him that it was better for him to return home, hunker down, and endure until he reached a legal age and could escape an unkind situation. I phoned his mother to let her know he was all right; she had been beside herself with alarm. He stayed the night, meeting my wife and daughter Cheryl who was close to his age. Next day we drove him to the Tampa airport and saw him off on the plane home. That was about it, until this month when I did a phone interview for NPR’s This American Life as a favor for another fan. Suddenly I’m getting a slew and a half of appreciative responses, mostly from folk who didn’t read me or never heard of me before. So it is turning out to be good publicity, though I had not had that in mind. I just did what I felt was right at the time, as I would hope anyone would. They seem to feel I’m a very special man for what I did, but I don’t see it that way. One frequent question they have relates to something I said once that I had forgotten — that happens to old fogies like me — that resonates with them. So finally I looked it up, and here it is, from the Author’s Note in the second Mode novel, Fractal Mode. “One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not: we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs or seem to seek them, who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic, and above all survivors — we are not that way from perversity, and we can not just relax and let it go. We have learned to cope in ways you never had to.” I resolved as a child never to forget what it was like, and to try not to pass along the unfairnesses I saw adults rendering to children and each other. I tried to maintain a secure and loving home environment for my own children, and I did not make them eat things they detested; I still can’t stand raw celery or sweet potatoes, having had them forced on me as a child. I can’t say I was the perfect parent, but I tried my best, learning sometimes too late from my mistakes, as is the case with so many of us. I also decided that if I ever got rich, to use my money for good purposes rather bad ones. I have done my best to honor such resolutions, as I hope my various endeavors demonstrate, and I don’t take any shit from bullies or ignoramuses who try to interfere, being no longer helpless to oppose them. I made memorable waves in college, the US Army, and as a writer, as I refused to back down in the face of ignorance, wrongness or outright illegality, and I think none of my opponents are eager to make their cases today, and not just because I always did have the right of the case. I have enormous sympathy for whistle-blowers. So I am a very bad enemy to make, as some wrongdoers in Parnassus have discovered, but also can be a good friend to those in need. That runaway teen was hardly the only case, and the sudden publicity in that incident surprised me. I never was a go-along, get-along person; I orient on honor as I see it, and enforce it where I can in my sometimes subtle, sometimes in-your-face manner, depending on how obnoxious my opponents are. I can be like a mirror, reflecting back what they give me. Now maybe you know why. The broadcast for This American Life #470 Show Me The Way originally aired 7-27-2012 at www.ThisAmericanLife.org. You can get a printed transcript or an MP3 podcast, which I believe are free.

I read The Mysterious Planet by Lester del Rey. I saw a coral snake during my morning exercise run and didn’t pause, because I time my runs and don’t like to dawdle. Corals have some of the deadliest poison extant, but aren’t dangerous, because they are shy and their teeth are barely enough to penetrate human clothing; leave them alone and they leave you alone. We are glad to have them with us, and don’t see them often. But I wanted to verify that it was a coral snake, and not a scarlet king snake or some other imitator. So I checked for my reptile book — and couldn’t find it. It’s a rule: whatever you want offhand isn’t there. In searching for it I discovered a paperback book, out of place; we bought it in 1982, the year it was republished, maybe for a daughter, as they were then 15 and 12, and it must have gotten lost in a shuffle. So I read it. I have a history with Lester Del Rey; he lifted the six year blacklist the publisher had against me, because he had been similarly cheated, and bought 17 of my novels, not only establishing me in the fantasy genre but with the considerable help of his wife Judy-Lynn putting me on the national best seller lists. Then he got old and started what I call meat-cleaver editing and I had to leave to protect my novels. I think he never understood why; that’s one of the problems with age, sometimes: denial that you are the cause of the rejection of others. That’s another route I am determined never to go: denial. I prefer to alienate people because I choose to, not because I don’t understand their positions. So anyway, this novel of his was first published pseudonymously in 1953, then republished under his byline in 1978, and this was the third printing in 1982. I was curious just how good a writer he was in his thirties, before he became perhaps the most successful book editor the genre has seen, before he destroyed it by alienating a number of writers like me. Now I can report that he was average. This is a decent novel, but like science fiction of that time, is stronger on technical details than on effective action and human interaction. It’s about three teenage boys who get involved when a planet from another star comes barreling into the solar system, with weapons way ahead of any the human forces have. Will there be war? The boys sneak off in their small spacecraft to check an alien ship that crashed on an asteroid, only to discover it’s a set up to lure idiots like them. They become captive of Thule, the alien planet, whose folk are very similar to humans. They are well treated, as the aliens want peace; they’re not looking for conquest, just a decent orbit to park in, since their own star messed up. Things finally muddle through, war is averted, and all is well. I think much more could have been made of the notion of a traveling planet, and it’s a cop-out to have them coincidentally very similar to humans, with all their women in storage, but it will do. It satisfies my incidental curiosity: del Rey was a medium, not a superior, science fiction writer, at least in this intstance. He was a better editor, before he slowly lost it. He was said to be the most successful SF/Fantasy genre editor ever, thanks to his ability to discern good fiction and the promotional efforts of his wife. I regret their passing; they helped put the genre on the big map.

I read Birth By Fire’s Embrace, by Ashleigh Galvin. This is a fantasy about a teen girl, Sharrlette, who suffers nightmares of being attacked. Meanwhile her father brings in a house guest, the handsome Billeaphrin, who treats her with contempt. Gradually it becomes apparent that he is from a magic realm, fighting an enemy, and is here on Earth to locate something important before the enemy does. That, as it turns out, is Sharrlette herself, who has the potential to become a person of magic power like Billeaphrin, if she can just learn to use it. By the end, Sharrlette and Billeaphrin must go to his realm to wage that war. The version I read was in serious need of copy-editing, which diminished my appreciation of the whole. There are scenes of intense action, such as when Sharrlette is pursued by the cynical enemy man, but much of the story lagged. It has, however, set the scene for the continuation, which I suspect will be more dramatic. This is the first of the Amethyst series.

And I read my own novella, Flytrap, the third in four novellas relating to Elasa, the conscious female robot. The first was To Be A Woman, the second Shepherd, and the fourth will be Awares. The first was supposed to be a singleton, but Elasa’s living friend Mona Maverick co-opted it by volunteering to exchange bodies with a five-months pregnant colonist for a six month stint. I can’t think why there was a shortage of women who wanted to be there on a primitive colony for the pregnancy and birthing, then return to Earth alone. So this is Mona’s story, as she tries to study the precognitive sheep of the colony. She gets more than she bargained on, as she has to deal with vampires who threaten the sheep. Then it turns out to be more than vampires. Stay tuned.

Also my own story collection, Relationships 5, proofing the galleys that arrived from PHAZE. These are eleven stories, all but one erotic. I try to write the kind of fiction I would enjoy if someone else wrote it, and I did enjoy this volume. They are all stories, with plots and conclusions, with plenty of sex along the way. Story and sex, not one or the other; that’s my formula here. I feel that both traditional fiction and erotic fiction tend to miss the mark by being one or the other. I don’t want to spoil it for the two or three readers here who might want to read it, so will summarize only one of the stories. “Beast Wife” is about a Realman woman in trouble; her man got killed, and she can’t get another because she refuses to kill her baby by her first mate and no man will raise another man’s child. Life is rough and the rules are firm; she and her baby will starve when winter comes. Then while picking berries she hears a hunting party of Thinmen coming. She ponders, and gambles: instead of fleeing she remains, letting them surround her. She sets down her baby, removes her weapons and clothing, puts her hands against a treetrunk, and proffers her bare bottom. She is young and well fleshed, and men are men, whatever their tribe. Enemy men don’t usually kill women who give sex without resisting. They have at her in turn, then give her something to eat, per the protocol. Then she nurses her baby, sets her down again, and lies on her back on the ground, arms and legs spread. They have at her again, while she makes no hint of resistance. Liking what she offers, they take her home with them. Of course their woman are unlikely to want her there. But there is a man injured in the head who lacks civilized restraint, constantly grabbing at any woman in reach. She takes him over, giving him sex often, in private or in public, so that he no longer bothers other women. That is the service she provides for the tribe in return for her and her baby’s food and shelter. The women do appreciate that, and tolerate her and her child. Unlike Realmen, Thinmen take care of those of their number who are injured and don’t demand that the children of widowed wives be killed; this is something she can understand. And in due course she is pregnant with the first Cro-Magnon/Neandertal crossbreed, explaining how there came to be about a one percent mixture of Neandertal genetics in our heritage. Romantic? No. Practical? Yes. It could have been like this. Slated for AwGhost 2012 publication.

I still practice archery, as part of my exercise regimen. My aim remains awful, though some time I’d like to see what a pro archer would do if he used my equipment; I suspect he would say “No wonder you can’t hit a barn door! Nobody could, with this.” When my left-side bow broke, I learned to use my right-side bow for right and left side archery, but it got so I couldn’t even draw an arrow without it flipping to the ground. Finally I got smart and checked the arrow-rest. What do you know: it had rotted away so there was only a stub remaining. So I put on a plastic circular arrowrest I gave up on years ago because it tended to fling my arrows randomly to left or right. Since they were now doing that anyway, what was there to lose? And you know it’s working; no arrow falls out when drawing, and when loosed it does head in the right direction. My scores are still awful — counting +1 for each bulls-eye and -1 for each total miss of the target, my last scores for a 150 foot range were 0-8 right side, 0-9 left side — but I’m not losing so many arrows in the forest. Some do still mysteriously disappear, though. One mystery: on the same setting on the same bow, arrows loosed right handed tend to go high, and arrows loosed left handed tend to go low. It seems to me the laws of physics say that should be impossible, but it happens.

They think they have finally spotted the Higgs Boson. That’s one of my hobbies, but I’ve always had trouble understanding it. The notion of a particle that carries mass to other materials seems ridiculous; I picture a little cartoon character named Higgs rushing madly to catch up to every bit of matter to deliver its mass. Is there a big box of mass it carries from? But gradually it has clarified: it’s not the particle but the Higgs field that does it. In fact I think the old concept of the Ether, a substance to push against, has returned, renamed Higgs. Think of it as like water, that resists the passage of other things through it. Needle-shaped things have little resistance, while broadside paddles have much. Things push against the Higgs field, and the resistance they encounter is defined as their mass. That makes more sense to me. It also makes the Higgs field fundamental to the nature of the universe; without it there would be nothing but radiation. So what about the particle? As I dimly understand it, if you bash at the field with sufficient force you may be able to knock out part of a thread (string?) of that universal tapestry, and that’s the particle. That’s what they’re doing at the super collider in Switzerland. It’s not natural to separate it, and it disintegrates immediately, and I presume the field fills in where it was, like water when you remove a globule of ice. But spying it confirms the existence of the field, and that’s what counts. There may be even more exotic particles in the offing, as they bash harder. I’m interested. Because this may be only the beginning. What about Gravity, that the Standard Model does not address? What about Dark Matter? If they start finding bosons for those…

A female columnist for SLATE, Emily Yoffe, has come out of the closet about her own history of molestation. I applaud her candor. Mostly victims seem to hide it, often for good reason: they get blamed instead of the perpetrator. I was never a sexual victim, but I remember the way I got badmouthed and blacklisted because I protested getting cheated by a publisher, so I know this sort of thing happens. You’d think those who blame the victim instead of the perpetrator would have trouble looking at themselves in the mirror, but apparently it’s standard practice. Why? Because victims generally have less power than perps, so it’s safer to blame them. It’s disgusting. Anyway, she tells of when she was 9 and a 14 year old boy would not stop feeling her up. She protested but he held her down and put his hand between her legs and under her underpants. She got away and did not tell, because she feared she would be called a liar and he hadn’t actually done much before she escaped. Which I suspect is typical. Boys figure girls are fair game, and parents are typically in denial. The second time was when the father of a friend she’d done homework with gave her a ride back home, as it was late. She was fifteen. He pulled up short of her house, told her that men have sexual needs and when their wives won’t put out they are frustrated. Then he lunged for her, hands on her breasts, pressing his face to hers. She pushed him away, got out of the car, and ran home. Again she didn’t say anything, fearing that her father would commit mayhem on the perp. In following years he tried to get her alone again, but she was too smart to be caught. Then when she was 18 or 19 her congressman, a Jesuit priest in his 50s, gave her a ride, and he talked about men and women, lunged, grabbed her breasts, put his tongue in her mouth. She struggled free, escaped, and didn’t tell. Until now, commenting on the Sandusky case: why more victims didn’t tell. Because, with our society’s warped values, it was better not to tell. Let’s face it, it will be the man’s word against hers, and there can be false accusations; how can a third party be sure of the truth? I have a policy of never being alone with a young female fan, so there is never any question. I think my daughters thought I was being foolish, until they encountered stuff elsewhere. Another writer was once annoyed when I declined to drive his teen daughter somewhere. Probably it would have been okay, but I didn’t care to gamble.

I’m a humanist; they stand for the things I stand for. I’m not an activist, but if I needed compatible company, I’d seek a humanist. So it’s painful to see a fracas in the Humanists of Florida Association. A former executive director authored a petition “Withdrawal of Support from the Humanists of Florida.” The full thing is too voluminous to cover here, but points in the rebuttal are worth noting. “Humanism, at its care, is anti-bigotry.” That’s in answer to the charge that it is “anti theist.” There are theistic humanists and they are not rejected. “The primary enemy of Humanism is dogmatic religion.” That is, we don’t hate religion, just the oppressive kind. I married a Unitarian-Universalist minister’s daughter. “We seek equal treatment for gender and sexuality minorities.” Like gay marriage. “What is atheism? It is a single disbelief…of all gods.” I’m actually an agnostic, because while I don’t believe in any god, indeed in anything supernatural, I accept the right of others to believe without belittling their faith. I am not aware of any humanists belittling the faith of theists, that is, those who do believe in God or gods. This seems to be a point of contention, however. At any rate, I hope this schism is settled without further ill-feeling. It’s like angels quarreling in Heaven.

Stray notes: Walmart and Publix are battling for domination of the local grocery market. Walmart is a much bigger corporation, but in central Florida Publix has 42.9% compared to Walmart’s 26.3%. We shop mostly at Publix, liking it, no doubt accounting for the difference. There have been five Catwomans in the Batman movies. I think my favorite was Eartha Kitt; she had a sinuous purring presence that seemed dynamic and apt. But I haven’t seen the 2012 movie. I do find Catwomen fascinating, regardless of the actresses. The mystery of existence continues, with a book titled Why Does The World exist? That’s a pet mystery of mine, but I don’t think there’s an answer yet; Higgs is only a little part of it. Also whether Life is inevitable or a fluke. And the development of mankind’s intelligence may have been a series of flukes. Fracking is the fracturing of deep underground rock to get the natural gas out. Natural gas is an improvement over coal or oil, but fracking is dangerous to our welfare; there may be small earthquakes, and sometimes flames come out of water taps. Poverty is predicted to plummet by 2030. That would be nice, but I don’t believe it. Does God’s mercy account for crime? A University of Oregon study comparing crime data from 67 countries with beliefs in the Afterlife shows that there is more crime where they believe in Heaven but not in Hell. Makes sense, doesn’t it? And they may finally be addressing cyber-bullying, creating software to identify the bullies. Elimination of their anonymity is half the solution. There are places for anonymity, like voting or telling the truth about vindictive publishers, but using it to drive teens to suicide needs to stop. Article in the AARP BULLETIN says that belly fat is the most dangerous fat. Oh? I would have thought fat in the head was. It’s not inert; it actually secretes hormones that are harmful to the body. It may trigger inflammation that causes heart disease, and can cause colon cancer. Diet and exercise can reduce it, though I know from my own experience that it’s just about impossible to get rid of all of it.

I got my driver’s license renewed. I showed my birth certificate, naturalization papers, US Army discharge, Social Security card, and two bills with my name and home address on them, took a spot eye test and got a current mug shot that makes me look bald. Okay, I did it, and am good until 2020. My wife, in contrast, renewed hers by mail earlier this year. Why the difference? Because of a change in the law. They are making it harder for folk to qualify for voting, knowing that most of the “lower class” tend to vote Democrat. Republicans in state after state, including Florida, are doing it in the name of eliminating voter fraud. The Doonsbury comic strip has a savage expose of that; there has been practically no voter fraud. They figure this will turn swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania Republican, simply because many Democrats won’t be able to vote. That’s the real fraud, as I see it. I am and have always been a registered independent, free to vote my conscience, but the present day Republicans have nothing for me. Apparently the Democrats are unable to stop this theft of their support. The liberal columnist Eugene Robinson put it nicely: “Voter ID states have, in a sense, passed laws that will be highly effective in eradicating unicorns.” “The problem seems to be that too many of the wrong kind of voters — low income, urban, African-American, Hispanic — are showing up at the polls. Republican candidates have been vowing to ‘take back’ the country. Now we know how.” Liberal columnist Charles Blow makes the same point: “Make no mistake about it, these requirements are not about the integrity of the vote but rather the disenfranchisement of voters. This is about tilting the table so that more of the marbles roll to the Republican corner.” So what do the Republicans say about such charges? The Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Mike Turzai, put it frankly: “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania — done.” Ditto for Florida, per my experience. Now that the real reason has been exposed, will the courts act to restore fairness? I’m not holding my breath.

I received a different kind of solicitation from a fan. How about a Piers Anthony credit card? It would be one of a number of celebrity cards that people could choose when the mood hit them, and I would get some income when mine is used. “If you have 100,000 people following your app, you will make roughly $5MM a year.” I don’t know what those letters stand for; the Roman one thousand? So I would make a thousand thousand dollars a year, that is to say, one million? I find this difficult to believe. Probably it would be more like a thousand pennies. But more important, I’m not sure it’s ethical. So I did not answer the solicitation, having nothing kind to say about it. If fans have input on this, positive or negative, let me know.

The Olympics are running now. I’m not paying a lot of attention, because by day I have writing to do and in the evening I’m busy making supper, washing dishes, and falling asleep over supper. I’m sorry I missed the girls in their skimpy suits doing volleyball on the beach. But it seems to be a good show. I wish all the contestants well, not just the Americans.

We have what I call our Garbage Garden, dating back over two decades from when our garbage disposal unit broke and I started burying garbage in the garden square for compost. Parts of that garbage are alive, and they grow. I like the idea of recycling the seeds of what we eat, so that we are actually contributing to the life cycle instead of destroying it. Over the years we have had potatoes, tomatoes, squash, a radish, and avocados. They don’t produce much fruit, if any, and no avocado has lasted long enough to make a tree, but at least they get to have their brief place in the sun. I think anyone deserves that, whether human, animal, or plant. This year two kinds of squash are growing, and there are also half a dozen plants of a kind I didn’t recognize. Probably weeds, but they weren’t doing any harm, so I let them be. They grew up to about waist height and had little round white flowers. Then in AwGhost I spied what I realized was a green bell pepper. I thought the pepper seeds were infertile, but maybe not. Glory be! So far there is only one, but summer is not over.

I had my 78^th birthday. We bought a cheesecake to celebrate. Birthdays don’t mean as much to septuagenarians as they do to younger folk. The average American man my age is three years dead; don’t rush me. Mainly I’m trying to live long enough to get done whatever I want to accomplish in my life, whatever that may be. That reminds me of a story about Abraham Lincoln: when asked how long a person’s legs should be, he said “Just long enough to reach the ground.” How long should a person’s life be? Just long enough to complete his term. But the local newspaper, the CITRUS COUNTY CHRONICLE, listed me first on that day, I think because I was the oldest for my date, AwGhost 6. My daughter works for that newspaper; do you think she had something to do with that? Naa…

I received word from the California Center for the Book, which runs an annual contest Letters About Literature, that eighth-grader Ian Tindel won top honors this year for his letter to me about my novel On A Pale Horse. They sent me a copy of their booklet containing all their letters from grades 4-12, including Winners and Honorable Mentions, and Ian’s is of course a nice essay. “… your book made me realize how precious life is.” Thank you, Ian; I’m glad my novel helped you, and that California is encouraging its students to widen their horizens.

We saw the remake of the movie Total Recall. Herein lies a story. The original movie was more than twenty years ago, developed from the story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick. They wanted a known writer to do the novelization, and I wanted experience of this kind, so I did it. In the process I learned things about Hollywood, such as their ignorance of basic physics and their tendency to eliminate the best rather than the worst sequences. For example, they had instant radio communications between Earth and Mars, when there should have been ten-minute delays, and they thought that vaporizing a Mars glacier would make breathable air. I did my best to patch these up in the novel, but have no evidence that they even read it. Perhaps my favorite scene was when the protagonist, Arnold Schwarzenegger, (named Quail in the story, renamed Quaid when a certain politician was vice president) was taking a break with fellow workers from his rock-breaking job, and there was a dancing girl entertaining them in the middle of the circle. Then Arnold got up and walked right through her. She was a holo! He had known it; we had not. You don’t remember that scene? No wonder; it was cut. I had to eliminate it for the paperback edition, where the publisher decided editorially to enhance some of my scenes, but did not take out the original scenes, so we had things happening twice. They also cut the print order, so that though the movie was a bestseller, the book was not, because there were not enough copies available. Both the movie folk and the author were annoyed by that; I understand that the movie folk gave the publisher money to double the print order, and the publisher took the money then reneged. Readers may wonder why authors get cynical. I got some fan mail saying that the book was better than the movie; I love that. I did fill in two chapters of missing background, and spliced back in as much of the original Phil Dick’s memory rationale as I could, to be true to that author. Dick was a character in his own right, largely unheralded while he lived, much recognized after he was safely dead; par for that course. I remarked once at a convention how I’d like to find the secret of progressing from recognition as a hack to a genius without having to die in between. But the current movie is a different creature, and I have no connection with it; I don’t know if it even has a novelization. It is based on the same original story, and there are some similarities, but you could watch #1 and #2 consecutively and not suffer much deja vu. I believe Sharon Stone was in the first; different actresses are in the second, and Arnold is gone, as is any reference to Mars. No matter; the actors are competent and this is a fast-moving romp. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the only survivors are the British sphere, including part of France, and Australia, the suppressed Colony. Essentially, the protagonist is suffering confusions of memory, so he goes to Rekall to have a nice memory implanted, but it goes wrong and he winds up shooting a bunch of police. He turns out to be a notorious revolutionary whose memories were suppressed and new ones implanted, together with a sexy wife to keep an eye on him. When he tries to get a memory implant, that interferes with the prior implant, and really messes him up. Wife tries first to console him, then to kill him when he doesn’t fall in line. As she asks him, did he really think a man like him could get a woman like her if it wasn’t her assignment? That should make every newly married man uncertain; just how did he manage to rate such a doll? He escapes, but she pursues, aided by the robot police. Those robots reminded me of the ones in Star Wars; maybe they were out of work and available cheap. He meets up with his real girlfriend, whom he doesn’t remember other than as a dream, and they struggle to avoid the constant pursuit. I have a taste for shapely brown-haired girls — in fact I married one — but when they were fighting each other and their hair got all mussed up I couldn’t tell them apart. I’d have preferred more contrast there, as it’s frustrating not being able to tell which one to root for. I loved the hi-tech background of the cities, with a subway called the Fall through the center of the Earth connecting Britain and the Colony, so they traveled in free-fall and buildings that seemed to sink into the ground (though maybe that was the Fall station) and elevators that went up, down, or sideways with marvelous precision, reminding me of working a Rubik’s cube. It really is quite a set. Those layers of implanted memory are also impressive, as he gradually uncovers his original identity. I was reminded of the Bourne movies in both that and the way he handled himself when attacked; my wife was reminded of the James Bond movies. Obviously the studio was aware of the current fashion in futuristic adventure. Anyway, I recommend this one for largely mindless fun. And no, it is surely not nearly as good as the book I would have written, had I been asked to novelize it.

Finding myself unexpectedly caught up on reading for the moment, I read a couple of books of my own choice. I don’t get to do that routinely. One was Erotic Fantasy Art, edited by Aly Fell and Duddlebug, that my wife gave me in 2008. This is a series of over a hundred paintings of lovely, mostly nude, girls. For some reason artists seem to prefer shapely girls to BEMS—Bug-Eyed-Monsters, though I suspect that BEM artists would would have different priorities. No actual sex here, at least not that you can see, just tempting displays. Nice art throughout, some of it pretty sexy. I noticed how wild and ethereal their hair can be; I’ve always been a fan of nice hair on women, even when it isn’t brown, and it gave me an idea for the next Xanth novel I’ll write, #38 Board Stiff.

And I read Twins, by Lawrence Wright, that I bought in 1998; it can take me a while to get around to some things, which perhaps gives a hint of how jammed my time tends to be. We are learning things from identical twins, one of which is that they are not identical; one can be healthy while the other has a wasting disease. How much of us is genetic, and how much environment? It’s really hard to tell, as the two factors interact. “Genetic traits for behavior are best understood as inclinations, not as mandates.” Yet when identical twins are raised apart from each other, there can be startling parallels. In incidental fact: “The younger a woman is when she has her first period, the higher her chances of developing breast cancer in the future.” With girls maturing earlier and earlier these days, that bodes ill for their health. Twins tend not to be as healthy as singletons, maybe because they tend to be born earlier as the womb gets crowded. 35% of identical twins are left handed, twice the rate of others. And there is a report of observing twins in the womb: one punched the other, and the other looked surprised. Twins have also been observed kissing each other in the womb. And what do identical twins indicate about self, the unique center of every individual? Where is your identity if another has it too? It does make you wonder.

I proofread my own novella, Awares, with Elasa, my lady robot taking on the dread menace of the Maggots: telepathic creatures with spaceships that are coming to literally eat all life on Earth. They take over the minds of key leaders who then go about building slaughterhouses intended for human beings, with the general population none the wiser. Elasa, being a machine, is immune to telepathic takeover, so it’s her challenge to save Earth. So the Maggots set out to nullify her, of course. Fortunately she has the help of a precognitive Lamb, and a Venus Flytrap plant capable of projective telepathy, and the specially talented Awares. Even so, there’s no certainty of success; it’s a sort of David vs. Goliath situation. This concludes a series of four novellas, To Be A Woman, Shepherd, Flytrap, and Awares. All will be available as e-books.

I also saw a bunch of videos. Some were junk that I bought because they were cheap, like two or three dollars per. I saw War of the Worlds 2 and Invasion of the Pod People on a two-movie disc; neither was close to the impact of the original movies, though each had its moments. Mega Piranha was fun if you accept the notion that a fish can double its size every few hours. The idea was that an experiment got loose in the wild, and soon these vicious fish were attacking everything else, and even leaping out of the water to catch folk on the beach. Then I viewed one my daughter lent me, Gamer, and that was distinctly higher class. The idea is that people can play violent games using real-life avatars, mostly death-row prisoners, gunning others down in a kill or be killed competition. Or a player can animate a shapely woman, sending her into sex. But what does this technology mean for the larger population? Right: there may be no limit, and the whole world could find itself locked into just such gaming with ordinary folk the puppets. It had to be stopped, and a death-row criminal turned out to be the one to stop it. I watched Super 8, borrowed from a correspondent. That starts out as children, maybe 7^th graders, trying to make their own zombie horror movie. Then a couple of things happen that compelled my rapt attention: the girl they got turned out to be a born actress so she seemed really to be the part; it was startling to see real talent emerge from the kids’ clumsy ideas. And there was a train wreck that they coincidentally filmed because they were there. I’m not sure I have seen a more dramatic train wreck in the movies; it was spectacular. And it freed an alien monster, leading into a different kind of adventure. The human interactions are well done, too. This one is well worth watching. And Fracture, also borrowed, wherein Anthony Hopkins — an actor with a first name like that is bound to be good, no? – in the role of a clever murderer outsmarting the police, does his magic. It’s a sort of quality murder mystery, with the mystery being how could the gun we saw him use turn out to be an un-fired weapon?

A reader sent me a transcript of a post on Facebook, “Talking to God,” which seems to be by Jordan Lejuwaan. It’s some story. Seems the narrator is riding the train and another man joins him. Then the other asks “Why don’t you believe in god?” For indeed, he is an atheist. It turns out that his companion is God, and is happy to converse with someone who is not afraid of him. In the course of the dialogue he becomes satisfied that this is indeed God, who wants to optimize intelligence and feeling in the universe but has to let most things play out in their own fashion. On rare occasion he intervenes, as when the dinosaurs got locked into their emotionally stultified way and finally had to be eliminated to make way for creatures with better prospects. Thoughtful throughout, and worth reading by deist and atheist alike. (I’m agnostic.)

Facebook, again: it seems there is a Piers Anthony fan page there. This is just to let you know that I am not there personally. I have never been to Facebook, partly because we’re on dial-up and have to limit our online activities to email and my survey of electronic publishers. I don’t object to the fan page, but if you want actual contact with me, HiPiers.comis the place.

I am liberal, because that’s where reason, compassion, and common sense seem most in evidence. The August 1 issue of THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR, a liberal newsletter, describes how the House Republicans have gone wild, targeting the environment, banking regulation, and taxes on the rich. “Anti-environmental bills are the largest single category of cosponsored Republican House bills filed since the GOP House landslide in 2010. Which makes sense, because dismantling environmental protections is where Republican members of Congress can provide the largest savings for their corporate underwriters.” Right; they want to pollute air, earth, and water and let others have to clean it up or suffer loathsome maladies from it. They are filing tax cut bills almost as frequently, so they can keep even more of their ill-gotten lucre. They also have a bill to cut off funding for study of the causes of climate change, so they can continue pretending global warming does not exist or is not caused by industrial pollution. Also to expand gun rights, restrict rights for union members, cut funding for the United Nations, and so on. They have voted 33 times to eliminate Obamacare, falsely claiming it is costing our society money instead of saving it. (The Congressional Budget Office, said to be objective, concludes that Obamacare adds 30 million people to the insurance rolls while cutting the deficit by $109 billion over 10 years.) It is, in general, a shit agenda. How could any sensible person support it? Ah, there’s the rub: these folk are not sensible. Another leftist newsletter, THE HIGHTOWER LOWDOWN, remarks on the minimum wage, which has become disgracefully low. Raising it to $10 an hour would help the economy by putting more money into the hands of the lowest paid workers, who are guaranteed to spend it promptly. The only groups who oppose it, by slight majorities, are the Tea Party, and those who get their news from Fox TV. Studies show that, contrary to business claims, a higher minimum wage does not eliminate jobs.

How To Be A Woman, by Caitlin Morgan: “Do you have a vagina? Do you want to be in charge of it?…Congratulations! You’re a feminist.” I also like the way she takes off on high heels. I believe that women who use footwear that cripples their walking and gives them ten times the foot ailments as men are crazy. They think it makes them look better? They are warped by the fashion magnates. If I were looking for a female companion — I’m not — I’d look at her feet to judge how sensible she is. Meanwhile the harassment of women continues. Liz Gorman was walking when a cyclist came up behind her, stuck his hand under her skirt and sexually assaulted her, then pulled his hand out and rode off. Or to rephrase it, he goosed her, which I regard as a lesser crime than grabbing, raping and killing, but it’s still something that women should not be exposed to. Her report resulted in many other women coming forward to report their similar experiences. To be a woman is to be a sexual target. I’m a man, and I like the look and feel of women, but I also respect their right to go about their business unmolested. I would not want strange women goosing me on the street. So why do so many men think they have the right to do it to women?

Nice article in the local CITRUS COUNTY CHRONICLE by Tom O’Hara on dying. He agrees there are slippery slopes, but he wants to die in his own fashion. “I really don’t want to endure those months of wasting away … I would much prefer to spend a few weeks getting things organized and saying my goodbyes. Then I want to take control of the dying. It’s my life. It’s my body. If I want to spare myself and those I love months of useless pain and sadness, then I should be allowed to kill myself without a lot of legal debate and secrecy. And I’ll get the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve saved the taxpayers a nice piece of change.”

The Thom Hartmann Blog often has interesting material. “In one day, Big Oil earns $342 million in profit, pays their CEOs $60,000 in salaries, spends more than $160,000 lobbying, and dumps a billion pounds of carbon pollution into our skies. All that in a single day. And what do we get out of it? Rapid climate change that’s threatening to destabilize the entire planet.” Also: “Republicans in Congress passed a poison pill piece of legislation forcing the Post office to pre-fund retiree health benefits 75 years out into the future.” No other government agency has ever had to do this. This is running the Post Office broke and it is defaulting on payments and shutting down services. Without this burden it would be in balance. Why this corrosive legislation? Because it has hundreds of thousands of unionized workers. So Republicans are hurting unions by bankrupting the Post Office, and fuck those who depend on snail mail.

Stray notes: They experimented with speed signs one one of the roads we regularly use. They simply flash your present speed back at you, so that you and everyone else knows whether you are within the limit. When a real speeder charges ahead, the sign says SLOW DOWN. It’s working, too; traffic slows right down. But the last few days the signs have been intermittent or dead. That’s too bad. Voter fraud: Item in THE WEEK says that the biggest source of fraud is in absentee ballots, not personal voting. So why aren’t the Republicans addressing that? Because those tend to vote Republican; it’s only Democrat fraud they object to. And they have discovered a fifth moon of (demoted) planet Pluto, named P5, maybe ten miles in diameter. The others are Charon, Hydra, Nix, and P4. A state record-breaking python was found in the everglades, 17 feet, 7 inches. I’m just hoping those big snakes don’t get hungry and start moving north, into our territory. And according to the Republicans, this is the dirtiest presidential campaign ever, and they blame Barack Obama. Most of what we see here in Central Florida is smear ads against Obama. So what’s going on? According to columnist Bill Press, telling the truth about your opponent is not a negative ad, and that is what Obama has been doing. If I have an conservative readers who want to challenge me on this, well, make my day. I have been challenged before, and those folk, when refuted by the facts, don’t apologize, they just disappear. They don’t seem to be much interested in the facts, just ideology, however flawed. And it seems that quantum physicists are finally coming around to the obvious truth: that the universe exists regardless whether you measure it. NEW SCIENTIST article by Marcus Chown says that taken to its extreme, the old view implied that the universe did not exist until we observed it. And how did we come to observe it, if we did not exist before the observation? Monstrous paradox, to which they seem to have been blind. And one more: a new study indicated that a starvation diet does not extend the lives of animals. Makes sense to me; the longest and healthiest life should come from eating not too much or too little, but just the right amount. As I try to do.

Our garbage garden bell pepper, reported on last column, grew to its full size, then gradually turned brown, then red. We figure that as the red coloring infused it, that mixed with the green to make brown, but more red finally did the job. I harvested it because I feared an animal would steal it otherwise. It weighed a generous two and a half ounces, and tastes like a green pepper, rather than sweet. Maybe it takes longer for the taste to change. We have a second one growing; maybe I’ll leave that one on the plant longer. I remain pleased that we succeeded in giving the pepper another generation. I think the plants stem from a red pepper that started rotting in the package before we got to it, so I put it in the garbage whole; maybe that’s what it takes to make the seeds viable.

My Public Radio interview—the one about the 15 year old reader who came to live with me—garnered about 50 letters, and the attention of FLORIDA TREND magazine, whose associate editor came to interview me. Naturally I talked too much and too emphatically — it’s my nature — so I don’t know what kind of an impression I made, and hope I am not chagrined when the interview is published. But this is not about that; it’s a lead-in to a completely different subject. Their interviews come with pictures, and their photographer had a cold, so naturally three days later I felt it coming on. So I used Vitamin C to stifle it. This is something the medical profession, evidently influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, refuses to acknowledge: that Vitamin C will stop a cold. I’m not a doctor, I just know what works, from decades of experience. What it takes, for me, is one gram an hour while awake for three days, until the cold gives up. I never got a sore throat, runny nose, or cough; all I got was that faint grungy beginning in the throat that warns that a cold is starting. For others it’s apt to work faster; my mother could abolish a cold in one day. So why haven’t there been double blind studies to verify this marvelous treatment for this everyday plague? Well, they have been careful. They have limited it to something like four tenths of a gram per day, and report that this does shorten the duration and severity of a cold but is not a cure. Duh! So why don’t they try the full dose? Well, there’s a perhaps apocryphal story about that. They tried it, but immediately the subjects could tell who was getting the vitamin C and who wasn’t, because of the pattern of developing colds. So they said the cover had been blown, and canceled the study, and still claim C doesn’t work. Why such obvious cheating? Duh again: BECAUSE C WORKS. Think of the billions of dollars the pharmaceutical industry would lose if folk had a cheap easy way to stifle the common cold. Well, folk do have it, had they but the wit to use it; you can verify it for yourself by trying Vitamin C next time you feel a cold coming on. There are two classes of people in the world: those who knew C doesn’t work, and those who have actually tried it. A doctor once said to me “If Vitamin C stopped your cold, you didn’t have a cold.” Of course he’s not my doctor. This is faith-based medicine, and it’s enormously detrimental to the health of the world. I judge health newsletters on this issue; if they disparage C I drop them. The better ones do recognize C, and Vitamin D for prevention. But having said that, some cautions: not everything that starts out like a cold is a cold, and C won’t help those others. It won’t stop the flu, for example. And a gram an hour is a very high dose, that can disrupt your digestion and give you diarrhea. I take it in liquid form, and I rinse my mouth out with milk to neutralize the remaining acid so that it won’t make my gums recede. The moment the cold is gone, ease up on the C; I normally take about a gram a day, between colds. So that’s my diatribe about Vitamin C; don’t get me started on fluoridation, which I oppose with similar reasoning and experience.

There is something even better than Vitamin C for general health, of course and its free: exercise. Article in NEW SCIENTIST by Andy Coghlan documents this, though I have known it all along. Low fitness is a far better indicator of death than obesity, smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or diabetes. Two and a half hours of moderate exercise a week can make an enormous difference. As I remarked last column, the average American man my age has been dead three years; what’s my secret? Apart from genetics and diet, I take my exercise seriously, getting in four to five hours a week of running, cycling, scooting, or archery, all duffer level, noncompetitive. All good moderate exercise; you sure don’t have to wipe yourself out to gain the benefits. All it takes is willpower to stay with it consistently, as I have for decades. Considering the alternative, it’s worth it.

Newspaper item: maybe a third of online book reviews are bogus, because they are done by the authors of those same books, pseudonymously, or by paid promotional services. I hate that, but have no reason to question it. Even legitimate reviews can be problematical because of private agendas by the reviewers or publications, pro or con. I have felt from the outset that reviews are a good and necessary thing; I even once compiled a book-length index of SF genre book reviews, but after suffering agenda-driven unfair ones I have to wonder whether corruption has not severely reduced their value to the average reader. The reader’s best bet is to sample a number of authors and orient on the preferred ones, ignoring reviews. I liken it to the rhetorical question would you drive a car whose brakes worked ninety percent of the time? Would you trust a review venue two thirds of whose reviews were legitimate?

I don’t watch much TV; even when it’s on in front of me I’m too busy catching up on science and news magazines. I am passionately interested in what’s happening in the world. My wife is the one who watches, while reading a book. But I do get some peripheral glances. One is of the Regis and Kelly morning show. He was affable and fun, and she was pretty and showed nice thigh under a short skirt as she sat and crossed her legs. Oh, come on; you think that exposure is accidental? It’s pitched directly to louts like me. Remember the adage: the average woman would rather look good than seem smart, because the average man can see better than he can think. Then Regis retired and they tried a number of other co-hosts, and finally settled on the best, Michael Strahan. I knew nothing about his football career, I simply saw that he was a fun person, with a nice verbal and physical presence. So I think they picked the best man, and I continue to like the fleeting seconds of the Kelly and Michael show I see on my way by. It’s an interesting contrast, the huge man and the petite woman, sort of like an ogre and a nymph. I like both ogres and nymphs, of course.

Newspaper item by Harvard professor Howard Gardner titled “Why Kids Cheat at Harvard.” It seems the students admire good work and want to be good workers, but they also want to be successful. If they don’t cheat, they will lose out to those who do. Sigh. I did not cheat in high school, and graduated in the third quarter of my class, then went on to become one of the most successful members of that class. Was I stupid, then became smarter in life? No, it was that I did not fit well in that restrictive environment. (My college had no grades: one huge reason I chose it.) Cheating was hardly the only issue and I think not the major one, but in my experience it is true that honest folk tend to lose out to dishonest folk. Children—and adults—tend to be results oriented; they do what works. You see this in a huge way in politics, where the honest candidate tends not to be elected. I think it is too bad, but I see no ready solution. One thing I like about free lance writing: it is difficult for a writer to fake talent. Oh, yes, marketing, sales, reviews, and awards are rife with elements other than writing merit, and that debases their coin; you can’t trust a bestseller or an award winner to be readable. But when you read a book you truly enjoy, you know it’s not because anyone has somehow bought your favor. That much honesty, at least, exists.

In the past two years we have seen some of our trees mysteriously die. Not our slash pines; they are our tree farm crop and are okay. For folk who ask how many trees an environmentalist writer destroys for his books, well, I hope I’m growing as many as I destroy. No, these are some of the incidental leafy trees around the edges. Weed trees, if you will, but they are living things too and I don’t like to see them suffer. Their leaves wilted and died without dropping off. They would grow new stems, only to have those fade also. What was going on? Now at last I have the answer: a tiny bug, pinhead size, is going after three species: swamp bay, red bay laurel, and avocado. I think ours are swamp bays. The red ambrosia beetle hails from Asia, landed in Georgia, and spread to neighboring coastal states including Florida. The beetles carry a fungus that interferes with the trees’ vascular system until they finally die. What the beetles do thereafter I don’t know. We grow some avocados from fruits we eat, but they don’t lost long, and this may be why. Damn.

Newspaper item: bumper sticker that reads “2012 Don’t Re-Nig.” A Republican officeholder calls President Obama “uppity.” Well, I’m a registered independent and have been since I first registered to vote in 1959; I’ll vote for the best candidates as I see them. But recently I have not seen much worth supporting among the Republicans, where racism is at times thinly veiled. I voted for Obama before and will again, not because he is black but because he is the best man among those currently offered. But there’s a more personal aspect. At one point, talking with a literary agent interested in representing me, I used a feisty analogy to show my attitude toward publishers who cheat or otherwise show their contempt for authors. I said that there are white racists who don’t like uppity niggers, and there are publishers who similarly don’t like uppity writers. We’ll, I’m an uppity writer. To a racist, an uppity nigger is a black person who thinks he/she deserves to be treated like a human being. I’m a writer who thinks he deserves to be treated fairly by his publishers. I’m politically liberal and fiercely protective of my rights, whatever the venue; my sympathy is for both oppressed black folk and mistreated writers. It may be an imperfect parallel, but I used it. I lost that agent. Now I see the same language being used more openly in the current political campaign. I understand it perfectly and I detest it. How can anyone not detest it? It seems that while Romney’s ads are not racist, they appeal most strongly to racist viewers. That’s interesting.

I have commented before on the Republican campaign to disenfranchise folk likely to vote Democratic. That campaign continues. Here’s the hypocrisy of it: there is extremely little personal voter fraud. Ineligible people seldom walk into a polling place and vote. There is voting fraud, but it occurs mostly in absentee voting. Why doesn’t that bother Republicans? Because those votes go mostly to Republicans. If they truly cared about voting fraud, they’d go after absentee voting. Don’t hold your breath. Here in Florida they are doing their best to cover up those records. They stole Florida and the election in 2000, and evidently hope to do it again. Meanwhile having blocked Obama’s 2011 job creation bill in Congress they are blaming him for not generating more jobs. Par for that course.

Fracking is in the news. That’s hydraulic fracturing, cracking deep rock to release the natural gas in it. My feelings about it are mixed. It is seriously improving our fuel situation, cutting down what we have to buy from overseas, from countries that hate us, and that’s good. But it can play hell with the local terrain, generating small earthquakes and fouling some aquifer. I think the best answer is to make damn sure they do it carefully. Sure they don’t like being regulated, but public safety demands it.

Eye-popping incidental news note: In Russia in 2010 a member of the band Pussy Riot was filmed stuffing an entire frozen chicken into her vagina, in front of dozens of slack-jawed onlookers. I’d be slack-jawed too.

I read On the Edge of Twilight by Gregory Miller. This is the third collection of his eerie stories I have seen, and it continues the process. There are 22 short stories here, and weirdness and death are never far away. Some are not enjoyable, which is not to say they aren’t effective. I can’t claim to properly understand all of them, but they can be thoughtful. What is our place in life, or in the universe? In one case, “To Be,” a man lives forever as a ghost, until even the other ghosts are of alien creatures. Can’t blame him for being frustrated. What use to endure forever if the world ends? I think my favorite is “Shells,” wherein a young shell-collecting girl encounters a boy collector. They get to know each other, sharing this interest. Then there is a storm, and they have to flee to her home, though she has misgivings. It turns out that her home is a cave where she and her parents were killed. She is a ghost, her body just as empty shell. Unfortunately the boy is spooked and runs away. All she wanted was some companionship. I think I would not have run away; ghosts have feelings too.

Meanwhile I’m a month into writing Xanth #38 Board Stiff, featuring a young woman who goes to a wishing well and wishes for adventure, excitement and romance—and gets changed into a stiff board. Actually she gets all three of her wishes, in that form. Exactly how that plays out takes a novel to explain. And you thought Xanth is all puns and rehash? Not exactly. I had to interrupt it to write another Tweet story, as the old one had run out. I’m doing tweets as chapters in the stories. If you’re interested, visit my Twitter site. This one’s about a curious incident on Dull Street, where nothing ever happens. So why won’t anyone talk about it, or even admit that anything happened? Well, that’s the story.

And on the last day of the month I got a new computer system. My geek Brian Smith brought up a new System 76—that’s the brand name–and installed it and I started the head-banging-into-wall process of zeroing it in. Its default is Ubuntu, but that lacks the features I want, such as KDE, so I’m using Fedora on it, same as I have on my prior system. You’d think it would be easy. You’d be sadly mistaken. Brian set up my special keyboard and after hours of struggling got the system to go online via my modem, and to print, though I can’t use my newer printer because it turns out that Hewlett-Packard software does not work with this HP printer. You’d think they’d have fixed that by now. You’d think. So I’m on the old printer, which is good enough but slower. Okay, I wanted to set up my working Directories — Folders, if you insist — but discovered they have deleted the directory creation option. I finally found one they had missed: in Save As there is a Create Folder option that works. I wanted ta make my macros, but they have deleted that option too. In the old Fedora I go to Tools, Macros, Record Macro, but that’s gone, and I found no alternative way to do it. You can run a macro but you can’t make one; isn’t that a nasty tease! Macros are so useful that I can’t think of any legitimate reason to ban them. This makes the new system significantly less useful that it should be. They do have nice new features, such as the way they present the file date and size information when you are backing up a file, instead of making you have to ask for it. And I love the ongoing file wordage information. Select a portion and it gives you the selected wordage, while still showing it for the full document. I am wordage obsessed, and this is perfect for me. One option it still lacks is the ability to turn off the Alt and Control keys. I make typos all the time, my fingers straying to the fringes, and I can discover myself amidst a screen-full of dialog boxes, then have to go back and retype. Worse is when I accidentally hit Control A which selects the whole file, and go on typing with my new material destroying my old material.  Yes, I can use Control Z repeatedly, but it doesn’t always work, and wind up losing my text. I want an easy way to turn those keys off when I’m not using them, and on when I need them. Obviously that will require special geek programming, since the word processing outfits are oblivious. But overall this promises to be a good new system and I expect to be using it to complete my current novel. I did write this paragraph and edit this column on it. It says this Column is 3067 words.

Every so often we here in Florida send a hurricane north, just so you folk up there can share the experience. I trust you enjoyed Hurricane Sandy. But seriously, she was a minimal hurricane, with 85-mile-an-hour winds, but a big one, a thousand miles across. Even a mere tropical storm can make an impression if it sits on you, as we found with Tropical Storm Debby earlier this year and got a record one-day’s rain. So the Northeast got it, and there are maybe 100 people dead and tens of billions of dollars damage done, and it will be some time before things are fully back to normal. The weather is not always dull.

I continue breaking in System 76, and overall I like it, but there are some hangups. I finally found the way to turn on the macro recording, cleverly hidden in another drawer, so was able to make my Date, Time and Degree ° macros, but I remain perplexed why they don’t seem to like macros. Linux is supposed to be open source, so that users can have it their own way, but sometimes it seems as anal-retentive as Macrohard Doors. Normally it loads LibreOffice with my files correctly placed on my ten assorted desktops, but it places them one line below where they were when I closed, so that there is a space left at the top, and the bottom file doesn’t show its Status Bar because it is off the screen below. So each day I have to haul my files back up one line, a nuisance. But sometimes it doesn’t load LibreOffice at all, and then refuses to load it when I specifically call it up; it just chugs away for thirty seconds and gives up. The only way I can get it is to reset the system, and then it thinks it has crashed, and all the files are piled up squarely atop each other (they evidently haven’t learned about offsetting them slightly so you know there’s more than one) and have to be sized and placed where they belong, another nuisance. One morning I had to reset twice to get it. My wife thinks it thinks it has loaded the word processor so won’t do it again. If so, where is it? Not on my screen. But apart from such things, it’s fine. I have it set up so that Control F1 puts me on Desktop 1, ^F2 on Desk 2, and so on up to 10, and ^F11 and ^F12 take me respectively down or up one desk. So I can constantly jump around desks as I do this & that, each desk having its files laid out without disturbing others. I’m editing this Column on D#1, card games live on D#2, letters on D#3, file handlers on D#5, Ideas on D#6, my novel notes and text files on D#8, Electronic Publishing Survey files on D#9, and my personal notes and records on D#10, with others dedicated to peripheral files like reader suggestions for Xanth and spot projects. I still love the ongoing wordage indication for files, though this version gives 5% fewer words than the prior one; I learned this when I copied my novel chapter files here and found they had shrunk. The prior system counted initial quotes as words, presumably to allow for the extra space taken by dialogue in fiction; this one doesn’t. Since there’s a lot of dialogue in my fiction, this makes a significant difference; I’m not yet sure how to allow for it. I used to use calculated wordage, which represents how much space the text will take when print published, but for that I need a fixed font like Courior 10 pt, which this doesn’t have. My system is my working space, and I know where my assorted tools are. Oh, those card games? I am a workaholic, but I do take breaks scattered through the day, playing mostly Free Cell, which I deem to be the best of the card games. Every card is visible, and every game is winnable, but some are a challenge to play correctly. So the element of luck exists only in the deal; skill counts thereafter. I have won in as little as four minutes or as much as 40 minutes; 10 minutes is typical.

My minister correspondent sent me information he wanted to promote. As a very general rule this column is my blog-type opinionation, not a promo for anything other than my own books, and I don’t push them much. I’ve seen the web sites of other writers which are essentially BUY MY BOOK and little else. Of course I want you to buy my books, but I figure you will when you’re ready, and you’re more likely to be ready if you are entertained or edified by my remarks. Anything I comment on here is likely to include my personal take on it; I’m really talking about myself, as will soon be evident. Anyway, the subject of thus paragraph is Hidden Choices, Inc., www.HiddenChoices.org, a non-profit outfit operating since 1999. “Hidden Choices affirms life choices by providing resources that assist children and families in crisis and need. We believe all human life is significant in every dimension. Hidden Choices is committed to preserve, protect, and educate by supporting the pro-child, pro-family movement in all respects of social justice and stage of life.” Their web site is an online clearing house directed to individuals in crisis looking for assistant parenting, career and financial help, affordable and safe healthcare, housing, education and legal matters while supporting community professional/leaders with critical information needed in working for the welfare of society. It started by helping young women and families facing crisis pregnancies so they could choose alternatives to abortion. Have I presented my stance on abortion recently? I am a liberal who doesn’t like abortion. I wish there would never be another abortion. If there is anything truly innocent in this world, it’s an unborn baby, and if there is guilt there, surely it is of the parents. So the guilty are killing the innocent, and that bothers me. Even in the case of rape, the fault is surely not with the baby. So I would like to see a world in which there is never an unwanted baby. That means in turn universal, affordable, convenient, effective contraception for all women and men. This is where I diverge from the conservative “pro-life” crowd, who tend to try to suppress contraception too, though it is the single most effective way to reduce abortions. Which side are they on? Studies show that when women (and a girl who can get pregnant is a woman regardless of age) are given free contraception of their choice, they go for the most effective, and it does significantly reduce abortions. An item published in OctOgre says that in 2010 there were 34 births per 1,000 teens, but those given contraceptives had a rate of only 6.3 births per 1,000. That’s a reduction of over 80%. So I hope Hidden Choices not only helps pregnant teens place their babies, but also admits that in some rare cases abortion may the best choice, and that contraceptive information is vital even for grade-school girls. Otherwise it is not doing the full job. So what is the real agenda of the anti-abortion anti-contraceptive, anti sex-education folk? Is it that they consider sex itself to be a sin and want to punish anyone who indulges in it, especially any female? The one who gets punished, mostly, is the girl who didn’t have a choice, because of rape or incest or forceful peer pressure (try notgoing along with the crowd and see what it does to your status and your life), or the fact that she’s unlikely to have a man in her life if she doesn’t give him sex, or economics (sometimes sex is the only viable way for a girl to get money to survive), or sheer ignorance, and gets pregnant. Where was the help she needed before she got pregnant? Which brings me back to contraception. I can’t make every family treat its children the way it should, and I can’t stop every rapist from going after any unguarded woman, but contraception could at least prevent pregnancies from resulting. That would not solve the whole problem, but it would help a lot. Now if there were only universal protection against VD, and a way to stop sexual bullying…

Here on the Sun Coast we have our own news items. Such as the Mystery Monkey. A wild rhesus macaque escaped from the preserve four years ago, and hid out in the wilds of St. Petersburg, Florida, where the natives protected it. Then it bit a woman who was sunning herself. My guess is that it had gotten used to food handouts, and when she didn’t provide one, it sought to rebuke her for her error. That’s one reason why you shouldn’t feed wild animals. That blew its cover, and the authorities learned where it was. It evaded many traps, but finally got caught by anesthetic darts and was hauled away. Had it not gotten greedy, it might have survived free indefinitely. But the incident did give me a notion, and I wrote it into my current Xanth novel, #38 Board Stiff. Only in this case the escapee from the zoo is a human man, who has to evade the baited traps aliens set out for him, including a banquet when he’s hungry, and cage with a lovely amenable woman. Which maybe ties in with my text item: in Spring Hill, which lies between us and St. Pete, a nude woman walked around the neighborhood. When she pulled a gun on two policemen, they shot her to death. That was tragic, because it was an antique firearm, unloaded, she had taken down from the wall; the police were too damn quick to shoot first and ask questions later. She was Inga Marie Swanson, age 42, by all accounts generous and kindhearted. She was deeply religious, and became concerned about some church members’ financial problems, discussed at Bible study. But something more was wrong. “My brain won’t shut off,” she said. Then she got naked and went out among the people. What she clearly needed was psychiatric assistance. What she got was bullets. It can be a cruel world.

CENSORSHIP NEWS reports that according to a Harvard Business School study, the highest per capita consumption of pornography occurs in those states with the most restrictive laws regulating access to adult content. Makes you think, doesn’t it? I understand that similar is true for conservative communities and sexual abuse. Sex is another nature-programmed instinct that can’t be turned off by law. “Government suppression of information is thought control — and censorship.” Amen. I believe that pornography should not be restricted at all. Using the pretense of trying to project children, the censors try to censor it for us all. But what is pornography except depictions of sex as a spectator sport? Children would not be much interested in it, and what harm would it do them? (I am speaking of regular adult sex here, not child porn, which is something else.) If they learn early what it is that adults do with each other in bed, is that so bad? It might even save some of them from sexual abuse, because they would recognize it when it threatened them. If there is anything that should be restricted, I should think it would be the extreme violence children get to watch on TV, that perhaps encourages them to think that violence is the way to solve social problems. America is a far more violent society than those where more sensible policies govern.

NEW SCIENTIST issue for September 29-October 5, 2012/ is dedicated to the question “What is Reality?” That is one of my pet interests. The discussion gets complicated, with a chart of the fundamental particles: quarks, leptons, bosons which define the four percent of the universe we know about, with the other 96% consisting of Gravity, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy. It asks whether matter is real. I forget the ratios, but I read somewhere else that if you made a proton the size of the Earth, the nearest electron ring would be about two and a half times as far away as the sun. Something like that. That’s a remarkably diffuse. Yet if you kick a rock made up of such diffusivity, your toe will know it’s real. There is the abiding question why is there something instead of nothing, and the answer may be that in the quantum realm things can spontaneously pop into existence, and that may be how our universe came to be. The Big Bang might be a tiny evanescent blip in the larger scheme, important only to us. There is the question whether the reality we think we know could be illusion. “It is difficult to refute the idea that consciousness is all there is.” Yet it seems to me that there has to be a physical reality to make that consciousness. So I don’t think we have the answers yet, but we’re getting closer. I’d like to live long enough to see those answers.

Another item in that issue says not to believe the American presidential polls. “Barring a political earthquake, Barack Obama will be re-elected at a canter.” The gist is that the news media like to generate excitement, such as by describing neck and neck horse races, but that the dull fundamentals say Obama has always been well ahead. I hope that is correct. As far is I can tell, the Republicans are motivated primarily by greed and want power so they can suck more blood from the body, and to hell with the welfare of ordinary folk. I am and always have been a registered independent (that’s No Preference, not a party), ready to vote for whomever I feel is best, but recently the Republicans have been the worst. The Thom Hartmann Blog summarizes how the Florida Republican Party had to cut ties with Strategic Allied Consulting after it was caught changing addresses on numerous voter registration forms to block newly-registered Democrats from voting in November. The scandal is spreading to at least ten Florida counties. “This is blatant election fraud committed by the Republican Party … in an effort to rig the elections.” Exactly. They don’t care how they win, and surely would not have cleaned up that act had it not been discovered. I guess they had reason to say that Florida would go Republican: they were making sure of it. Meanwhile an Internet thesis that arrived here the day I was editing this Column: when a company has a problem, it reduces its staff and workers. Why not apply that to our government? Reducing congressmen, senators, and their staffs could save eight billion dollars a year. Congresspersons should be required to serve up to 30 years to earn retirement benefits, like everyone else, and have the same medical and retirement benefits as we do, and not be allowed to raise their own pay. This does have its appeal, though I’m not sure it would really eliminate corruption. For one thing, much of the problem lies in the supporting bureaucracy that does not answer to the voters.

My wife has a Kindle account, which serves her reading needs fairly nicely. I have, I believe, remarked before on my dismay at store bookshelves being filled by multiple copies of the same books, rather than proffering a four-fold wider variety of titles. She would buy more titles if they had them, but evidently they are not much interested in paying customers like her. Kindle, in contrast, like other electronic formats, offers everything it can, and she is buying much more there. Well, Amazon sent out a letter to Kindle customers, applauding the recent court decision that imposes limitations on publishers’ ability to set e-book prices. That means Amazon can cut their prices if they want to. They say that’s good news. I’m not so sure. Amazon cuts prices below the level that the publishers can match without going broke, and is taking over most of the electronic sales. That’s good for customers right now, but what about when Amazon drives regular publishers out of business and takes over publishing? What will their prices be once they have no competition? We may rue the day. It’s not that I like the old order; I don’t. But I’m not sure the new order will be an improvement in the long run.

DISCOVER magazine had a feature on the Permian Woods. This was a while back, 298 million years, before the heyday of the dinosaurs. What caught my eye was the painting of the Sigillaria trees, like standing green paint brushes or feather dusters up to 80 feet tall rising out of the swamp. Vegetation has changed in recent millennia, but those trees were striking. The issue also discusses consciousness, theorizing that it is an emergent property of a complex physical system. Maybe; my theory is that it results from a feedback loop, so you can see yourself thinking, as it were. The article conjectures that a sufficiently complex machine could be conscious. Yes, and I think a machine with the right feedback circuitry could be conscious. I have mentioned my novella To Be A Woman, wherein a fembot does become conscious and sues for personhood before moving on to other challenges in ensuing novellas.

Item in THE WEEK speculates that the male hormone testosterone seems to weaken the immune system and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, thus accounting for men’s shorter lifespans. Castratos lived between 14 and 19 years longer than average men. Ouch! I’d like to live longer, but my appreciation of the female form is a significant part of what makes my life worth living. Talk about getting screwed! Perhaps related newspaper item says that boys are now reaching puberty up to two years earlier than previously reported: age 9 on average for blacks, age 10 for whites and Hispanics. Girls too are getting there earlier. So how long will those boys be living? I hit puberty at age 18 and I never looked my age; maybe there’s a real advantage in that lateness. Also in THE WEEK is a discussion of the gold standard. It has a superficial appeal: make our currency equivalent to gold, so at any time you can trade it in for gold at a fixed rate. That should abolish inflation. But it is also a straitjacket. The government can’t print money to abate a recession, and we’d return to the Boom and Panic economic roller coaster of yore. We are having enough of a taste of that today to appreciate why we don’t want it permanently. And a page on circumcision, which may have started as a religious ritual. Now it appears to protect against AIDS. I, as an uncircumcised male, object on principle to cutting the penises of boys who are not part of the religion that requires it. In fact I don’t like indoctrinating children into particular religions before they reach the age of consent; they should get to decide for themselves. We try to protect children from early sexual experience, but not from sexual mutilation? So what about the health benefit? I think it would be better for men to avoid having sex with those infected with AIDS, or to use condoms. Amputating foreskin is an extreme measure. Consider where the logic leads: Women could avoid breast cancer by having their breasts cut off at puberty. Anyone could avoid headaches by having his head cut off. There needs to be some sense of proportion. And a newspaper item has a good take on health: perhaps the single best thing you can do to protect your health is to wash your hands. Repeatedly, after any contaminating contact. It seems that communicable diseases can be cut by 50% by doing that. I do it. I remember once being in a rest room when a barber came in. He washed his hands before urinating, which I can understand, because he has been touching the dirty heads of countless customers. But I noticed he didn’t wash them afterward. That is possibly one reason I no longer have my hair cut. My wife did it for years, and when she became too ill to do it, I stopped cutting it and grew it long. I also notice whether doctors wash or don’t wash; the article says that a leading factor in health-care associated infections is the lack of hand-washing by medical personnel.

Article in NEW SCIENTIST by Laura Spinney conjectures that lethal weapons could have been the driving force behind the evolution of human civilization. That got my attention, because it always seemed to me that weapons and war are essentially uncivilized. The idea is that developing weapons that can kill at a distance made it impossible for any one person to rule by strength alone. I think of how the gun has been called the equalizer, because a small man who is good with a gun can kill a big man before he gets close. But doesn’t that just change the person of power? But if anyone can kill from a distant ambush, maybe not. It is said that an armed society is a polite society. So maybe the gun nuts have a point: if everyone is armed, there is more interest in getting along. Also in NEW SCIENTIST a comprehensive feature on Death, way too much material for me to cover in any detail, so just a couple of points. It conjectures that our awareness of our own mortality may be the civilizing factor. Why try for wealth or fame if we’re doomed anyway? So we might as well focus on worthwhile things. And the thesis that we should not fear death, since it is inevitable. But that ignores an overriding aspect: we are programmed to fear death by the instinct of self preservation, and that can’t be reasoned away. Despite our awareness that immortality would be a curse, not a blessing. We simply are not properly rational on this subject, by nature’s design.

I read the daily comics. “Zits” had a nice series on mealtime talks with your teenager. Tell us about your day? He’s a giant clam. Routine questions? He’s a big tap offering only drips of answers. Stories of high school? He’s a stone faced Easter Island statue. How are things between him and his girlfriend? He’s a locked and chained safe. Thoughts about college? His head is a giant Rubik Cube. But when the parents plan to go out to an event, he’s an open fire hydrant spewing questions and demands.

And on Column Editing Day we went out and early-voted. No fuss, no muss, no line, and it’s done. No secret: for the Democrats from Obama down plus one independent, against all 11 (Florida) state amendments, for retention of three judges targeted by the Republicans because they are doing their job instead of yielding to corruption, and for better funding of schools. So what are your priorities?

I finished writing Xanth #38 Board Stiff, the one where she wishes for adventure and romance but gets changed into a board, and used my brief slack time following it to catch up on some backlogged reading and video watching. I don’t do much else when I’m writing a novel, and things can accumulate. I watched Inception, as dreams within dreams are my sort of thing, with its phenomenal visual effects. A Serious Man wherein an ordinary Jewish man’s life and family pretty much come apart. His wife wants a get, which I learned is a Jewish divorce, and while fixing the antenna on the roof he sees his new neighbor sunning herself nude and has fantasies about her. The Hanging Garden, wherein a troubled gay teen returns a decade later to attend his sister’s wedding. He is now a balanced gay man, which is more than can be said for his family. That wedding is the wildest I’ve seen. A Clockwork Orange, a shocking feast of violence, sex, and black humor, wherein a completely amoral young man who beats up people, rapes women, and finally kills a woman (with a statue of a penis) is rehabilitated by aversion therapy so that he can no longer contemplate any bad acts. That makes him helpless, and he finally tries to suicide. The theme reminds me of my collaboration with Robert Margroff, The Ring, wherein a criminal has to wear a ring that shocks him when he tries to do wrong, and the conclusion is similar in that it shows that this kind of treatment, however promising, is ultimately not fair or feasible. This is one great movie, with truly lovely music. I love the frequent bare-breasted women, such as in the demonstration of the effectiveness of the programming when a well formed woman in panties comes to him, and he is unable to touch her. The audience applauds, and she takes several courtesy bows for her performance. Hilarious! There is a commentary that is as long as the movie, two and a quarter hours, that is also interesting. Seems Stanley Kubrick received death threats in England, where the movie was made, and had to withdraw it there. The main character of course is a severe mixture of good and evil. So are other characters, including his parents, friends, victims, and the police. Only the pretty young women seem entirely innocent. Is this a work of genius? It may be.Blade Runner, said to be the fourth best movie of all time. I doubt it, but it is a good one. Several very sophisticated androids — not robots but living flesh made in the laboratory, superior to normal humans — have returned to Earth, where they are forbidden, and they have to be hunted down and killed, or “retired.” It is the protagonist’s job to do that, and each one is a formidable challenge, male and female. Since they don’t live long anyway, I am not clear why they have to be killed. Testing for them is interesting; a series of questions designed to evoke emotions that humans feel but the androids theoretically don’t, such as “Tell me about your mother.” The androids don’t have mothers. Are they really unfeeling? It seems that they are starting to learn to feel, so they really may be becoming fully human. All they want to do is live their limited lives in peace. My sympathy is with the androids.

I read FUTUREDAZE: An Anthology Of YA Science Fiction, edited by Hannah Strom-Martin and Erin Underwood, for blurbing. This is to be published by UNDERWORDS PRESS http://underwordspress.com in February 2013, both print and ebook. YA stands for Young Adult, what in my day was called juvenile. I vaguely expected somewhat sanitary, simplified stories, the kind that parents, teachers, and librarians approve. The hell! It turned out to be aimed and young readers, yes, but these are hard-hitting pieces with alternating poems. I don’t properly understand poetry, so will pass on that; it seems competent here. The stories are something else. They don’t hesitate to tackle significant issues like ambition, desire, and mortality. There are too many to cover completely here, so I’ll mention some. “Clockwork Airlock” is really a competent retelling of “The Lady or the Tiger” transposed to SF. “Spirk Station” has future teen lingo in an alien culture and danger that only alien contact can bring; I might subtitle it “Beware of Aliens Bearing Gifts.” “The Stars Beneath Our Feet” is perhaps my favorite, wherein on a sneak space trip the boy suddenly kisses the girl and she complains about his trying to suck her face off, but actually she likes him as they work together to save themselves from probable doom, and winds up sucking some face herself. I like that girl. “Powerless” shows a boy who is allergic to electricity. He can’t use any electronic device, and it could kill him if he tried. That really isolates him. He loves a girl who understands, but she’s part of the electronic culture. “A Voice in the Night” has the novel idea of recovering a space traveler’s lost last words by intercepting a message 40 light years downwind, as it were. “The End of Callie V” shows Death calling courteously to terminate a fifteen year old android girl; her time is up, but he’s really nice about it. “String Theory” has a 17 year old girl involuntarily exploring alternate world versions of herself, trying to find her way home; many are unpleasant. “Hollywood Forever” shows that stardom in the future is not necessarily any better than it is today; the stars may look a lot finer and happier than they are. “The Cleansing” depicts mass euthanasia to extend limited resources; I told you, these stories don’t pussyfoot. “Over It” tells of a girl who gets raped in virtual reality; since nothing physical happened she’s supposed to just get over it. She doesn’t, and I don’t blame her. Rape really is more emotional than physical, forced pseudo intimacy. “Me and My Army of Me” describes a plan wherein a boy who must fight a bully will summon multiple copies of himself from the future to reverse the odds. Overall, this is a fine assembly of science fiction stories that are provocative, entertaining, and sometimes nervously mind-stretching. They should appeal to teens, and to their parents.

I read Roads of Madness by Keith Robinson, www.UnearthlyTales.com. This is the fifth novel in the Island of Fog series, featuring shapeshifting twelve year old children. This time four of them, Hal (dragon), Abigail (faerie), Robbie (ogre), and Emily (naga) have been stranded off the island, without their magic. That means that they can’t assume their fantasy forms; they are stuck as they are. Worse, Emily is deathly ill. Worse yet, there are people in the vicinity who have been reduced to zombie-like savagery they call scrags. A deadly virus has crippled those it did not kill. The four are desperate to get back to the Island of Fog, where they may recover their magic and be safe, but how can they get there when hunger, thirst, and a helpless girl prevent them from even walking there, let alone getting across the water to it? They try their best, managing to more or less hijack a supply truck, until the scrags get the truck and burn it. The scrags have a teenage prisoner, Ryan, who is immune to the virus, therefore worth something in trade for experiments. Hal foolishly risks himself to free Ryan, who later joins their party and is a considerable help. The five plow on together, but somehow it just keeps getting worse. This is a tough, harsh, brutal story, compelling in its ugliness; nothing is easy here. It is nevertheless well worth reading, as are all the novels in this series. I think there is one more to go. I hope that an intriguing character, the lovely evil Queen Bee, turns out not to be dead; more needs to be known about her.

I read ALMOST UTOPIA: The Residents and Radicals of Pikes Falls, Vermont, 1950, by Greg Joly with photographs by Rebecca Lepkoff, published by the Vermont Historical Society in 2008. This put me through an emotional wringer. What do I care about pictures of people in Vermont 62 years ago? Well, I was there, and I am referenced several times in the book. It is possible I am in one of the pictures, as there are some crowd scenes, though I doubt it. But I can prove I was there. In AwGhost 1950 my father, my sister, and I attended a community picnic in Pikes Falls. I had spotted a foot-wide fungus on a tree in the forest along the way, the kind you can write on, so I harvested it and took it to the picnic and got everyone there to sign it. I still have that fungus, and the names are still mostly legible. It says SUNDAY AUGUST 27, 1950 WENDLAND’S PICNIC, and then there are 50 names filling it, including most of the folk pictured in Almost Utopia. So it’s a perfect complement to the book. Susan Leader, who sent me the book, was born a year after the date of that picnic; she was checking with me to verify our family’s involvement in the utopian community effort. A friend is researching a biography of the radical leftist vegetarian Scott Nearing. Then my wife, whom I had not yet met at that past time, remembered the fungus. We photographed it and sent pictures. Scott and Helen Nearing are on it, and Susan’s father Herbert Leader, and so many others, just as their pictures are in the book. Most are long since dead, of course. I was just 16, and I’m 78 now, which gives perspective. And that’s part of what hit me with a bomb of nostalgia, because these were people I knew, and now all that’s left of them are the pictures and the fungus. It feels almost as if they died yesterday.

Let’s move back a step, going to yet more distant and perhaps fallibly memory. My folk were doing relief work during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, feeding the hungry children, and after the war General Franco’s minions did not much trust foreign do-gooders. There was supposed be be a trainload of refugee Jews coming through Spain from Germany, and we knew they would need food on the way. So my father, Alfred Jacob, went to the station with a lot of money to buy local supplies for them. The train never came, but I think it was the time when Germany’s Hitler was going to meet with Franco in an effort to win Spain to the Axis, and security was sky high. So they picked up anyone who was remotely suspicions. And there was my father, with a passel of money. To spend on Jews? Ha-ha, sick joke. So they took the money and put him in jail, denying that they had done so; he had been “disappeared.” But he managed to smuggle out a post card, and with that proof my mother was able to secure his release. Rather than admit error, they let him go only on condition that he leave the country. That was how we came to America in 1940, on just about the last ship out, the Excalibur, the same one the former King of England was on as he went to govern the Bahamas. But what to do in America? My folks were emphatically pacifist Quakers, and World War Two was burgeoning, and they wanted nothing to do with it. Thus we wound up moving to a farm in the Green Mountains of Vermont in 1941, which was coincidentally adjacent to Pikes Falls valley where Scott Nearing lived. We immediately got to know Scott, and he was an excellent neighbor. My family knew nothing of homesteading in a New England winter; we had no electricity and a wood-burning stove for cooking and heat. Chop wood for it? They discovered that green wood does not burn well. So Scott appeared one day with a truck full of seasoned firewood, saving our first winter. On my birthday, I think when I was 8, I walked to Scott’s to buy some of his maple sugar. “It’s my birthday,” I explained. “Mine too,” he said. So it was, 51 years before mine. We got along. Scott lived to be 100; I’m not sure I’ll match that, though I’m trying. So we liked Scott Nearing, and he was a fine intellectual fit for my father. He is the author of more than 50 books, notably The Conscience of a Radical, and a host of “Good Life” books such as Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World. He practiced what he preached. I have a myriad memories of Pikes Falls, and not just the frigid swimming hole there at the Falls or the three-foot-deep snow of winter that my sister and I trudged through two and a half miles to school; let’s give just one sample. We bought a 60 pound keg of honey, which we shared with neighbors. Another boy and I carried it to Marshall and Lois Smith’s house, where Lois tipped it over and let the honey pour slowly from the spout into a smaller container. The honey was thick and a bit uneven, and it sort of dribbled and oozed. Just as a larger segment was pushing out I made an urgent grunt as if it were defecating, and the other boy burst out laughing. Lois glared at him. I had gotten away with one. Lois is one of those shown dancing and smiling in the pictures. Now I know how difficult her life was, and that she later died of cancer in her 40s. That hurts.

Others were attracted to Scott and to my father, and a modest community built up in Pikes Falls. They are in the book and on the fungus; I won’t go into all the names here. Some refused even to register for the draft, and a number of them were imprisoned for that. More than one stayed with us between prison sessions. I mean, these were dedicated pacifists and back-to-the-land fundamentalists. The pictures show them in all walks of life, some dancing with apparent abandon, as mentioned above. Oh, I remember! But here is the dark side: there was mischief in paradise. One war-resister, Cliff Bennett, painted a beautiful mural-size picture of our farmhouse on the kitchen wall, with the inscription “Let not the seeds of war be found on these our premises.” Later those words were painted over, having proved to be false. One of those supposedly happy marriages began with a rape. There was a four year affair between one husband and a neighbor’s wife. My mother could not stand the primitive isolation and left, in effect breaking up the marriage that was already in trouble. Economics gradually separated the community; there just wasn’t enough money to live on. It was also the time of McCarthyism, a blot on America, where there were constant witch hunts for supposed Communists. That made it increasingly awkward for Scott Nearing, who was not a Communist but an outspoken leftist — he had been tried for treason in earlier years, defended himself, and won acquittal – and finally he moved to Maine and started over. For me it was a subdivision of Hell, with cold, fear, and emotional stress that made me wet my bed at night and twitch my head and hands uncontrollably by day. I had to get out of that situation, at first emotionally, later physically. I remember Norman Williams’ jaw literally dropping when I registered for the draft at age 18; he couldn’t believe that the son of Alfred would do such a thing. Well, I was my own person, then and now; that was my deliberate route to emotional salvation. I had concluded that time in the U.S. Army would do my conscience less damage than time in prison, knowing how incarcerated conscious objectors were treated, and I stand by that as the proper decision in a difficult venue. The U.S. Army was no picnic, but I did get my American citizenship there. I am no pacifist, having seen the underside of that; neither do I practice subsistence farming, having experienced poverty. It wasn’t all bad; I retain a love of the forest, and I am solidly liberal and environmentalist, and a vegetarian. Can a person really be an environmentalist without being a vegetarian? But my childhood was not happy, and I am amazed by the power of the heartstrings pulled by this memory of it. Yet as I see it, even Hell is not entirely bad; there are good aspects, just as there surely are bad aspects in Heaven. Not that I expect to go to either.

I listened to The Book of Mormon. I had had it six months, gift of a reader with a mind, and it’s a remarkable presentation. I’m sure the legitimate Mormons would like to A-Bomb it, because it’s an intemperate parody of their religion. The music is lovely and the pictures are sharp; I looked at them and read the lyrics while listening, and it was like attending a living presentation. But it is sacrilegious. “Baptize Me” makes it seem as if he’s having sex with her. Then there’s “Joseph Smith! DO NOT Fuck a Baby!” So he fucks a frog instead, to get rid of his AIDS. Remember, Joseph Smith was the founder of the Mormons. How would Christians like having the same lyrics applied to Jesus Christ or the Apostle Paul? Actually, Jesus is referenced: “Shit come out de butt, Jesus says fuck fuck Mormons!!!!” And of course Jesus is very much a part of the Mormon religion. Those who claim that the Mormons are not Christian have not looked at the real Book of Mormon. Nothing is sacred here. There are lines like “When God Fucks you in the butt, Fuck God back right in his cunt!” But apart from the dirty lines, it’s quite a show, and songs like “I Believe” are lovely in their fashion. So I am intrigued and amazed.

I use a recumbent bicycle and an adult push-foot scooter to fetch in newspapers and mail, since it is a 1.6 mile round trip on our long driveway. I regard it as supplementary exercise. The bike front tire went flat, so I took it down and patched it — and it went flat again in the course of 24 hours. Ouch! The patch was in an awkward place, near the nozzle, so I figured I had botched it. But when I took it down again I discovered it was a new puncture. I have a hard plastic tire lining to prevent punctures, but this was just in the half inch where the lining didn’t quite reach. Before I got to it, the front tire of the scooter also went flat. That turned out to be a tire casing that was so worn out I could put my finger through it. So we bought a new tire for the old patched tube. It was a struggle to locate the invisible holes and cover them with the patches, because we had nothing to mark the place with while I dried the tire. I put the tires in water in the sink to locate the leak, but you can’t patch it underwater. It was such a relief when both tires held their pressure for 24 hours! The new tire is larger than the old one, a consequence of metric not being available here, and would not fit within the V frame of the scooter fender. We tried to bend it into a U shape, but lacked the muscle and tools, so finally removed it entirely. I will simply be careful how I splash through puddles. I think many folk today don’t get the simple frustrations and pleasure of doing a low-tech job right.

America had an election. In case any of my readers aren’t up on the mundane news of the day, Barack Obama retained the presidency. The TAMPA BAY TIMES listed seven tossup states, and Obama took them all. Florida, which could have been pivotal, has a Republican governor who did his best to exclude likely Democrat voters. He did not succeed; instead they piled up past midnight in many polling places, and Florida was four days late in determining the victor, by which time it was irrelevant; Obama had won without it. I understand that key Republicans were astounded; they had believed their own nonsense and thought regular people favored them. They may still be in denial. Next up is the so-called fiscal cliff, engendered by Republican obstructionism. Well, let’s go on over that cliff; I suspect the disaster will turn out to be as illusory as the Republican presidential prospect. Remember, when the tax rates were higher in the Clinton era, we had boom times; it was the Bush era tax cuts and invasion of Iraq that contributed significantly to the monstrous deficit and financial crash, and lax financial regulation did the rest. Newspaper column by Rick Outzen says that in GOP/Tea Party World, the rich pay no taxes, people don’t want Obamacare, women don’t have privacy rights to their bodies, but oil and coal should be unregulated. Paul Krugman wrote that the GOP is so obsessed with taking down Obama that good news for the nation’s workers drives its members into a blind rage. “It is, quite simply, frightening to think that a movement this deranged wields so much political power.” And a newspaper article by Harold Meyerson says that we must credit gerrymandering for the GOP control of the House despite a majority of the voters favoring the Democrats. They hardly care what the voters want.

Songs constantly run through my hollow cranium. One was “The Keeper.” “The keeper would a hunting go, and under his cloak he carried a bow, all for to shoot a merry little doe, among the leaves so green-o.” One doe crossed the plain, and he fetched her back again, and where she is now she may remain, among the leaves so green-o. Another crossed the brook, and he fetched her back with his crook, and where she is now you may go and look. But there was another deer, and I could not remember where she went. So finally after years of wondering (I’m a slow learner) I Googled it, and discovered she also crossed the plain, and his hounds fetched her back again. Oh. That’s why I couldn’t get it; it was a retread. Maybe if she had hidden in the forest she would have escaped. My sympathy was always with the deer.

Random House and Penguin may be merging. I have dogs in this fight, I mean books with both, and am watching warily. Meanwhile I am moving my books to electronic editions. It’s a huge chore, as I have had more than 160 published and am not even close to retiring, and some electronic rights are entangled; I have spent thousands of dollars in legal fees trying to clarify mine. If it comes to a choice between Penguin House or Amazon, I’m uneasy. Regular writers are like fleas on mice running around the feet of the elephants of Parnassus, in constant danger of getting squashed unnoticed.

I received three notices, I think from three different outfits, informing me that the domain name hipier.com (like hipiers.com without the S) is becoming available soon. I presume they want me to purchase it. No thanks; I’m satisfied with what I have. This is just to let the public know that if someone mistypes and gets that site, and gets a porno ad, don’t blame me. I’ve had more than enough trouble with the old HiPiers phone number that is now porno, with fans blaming me for corrupting their children though it was AT&T that sold it there and gave me the runaround when I protested.

RESIST www.resistinc.org is an outfit that funds social change, contributing relatively small amounts (what they can afford) to organizations that don’t get much notice, such as in the current issue  that promotes Hawaiian rights and culture;  that helps farm workers in Vermont get justice; helping LGBTQ youth, women, victims of AIDS, and low income folk gain social justice; and The Interfaith Alliance of Iowa stand up to the Religious Right. You never heard of any of those? That’s part of the point; your charitable contributions are more likely to go to widely publicized charities that probably don’t need the money as much as these little ones do. The July-August-September 2012 issue makes some good points, such as that Big Energy is going into solar power by bulldozing wilderness for huge arrays of solar panels. Solar power is great, but it’s better if individual homes can do it on their own, in an environmentally favorable manner. Also how West Eugene, Oregon is badly industrially polluted, being on the wrong side of the tracks; Latinos living there are largely helpless to stop the unhealthy conditions generated by industry wastes. But there is a new movement that may be effective: a big polluter will receive a Notice of Intent (NOI) that lists all the violations, and if it doesn’t clean them up within 60 days it will be sued for each one. That is apt to be expensive. Corporations generally don’t understand decency as well as they understand losing money. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Essay by Thomas Friedman Why I am Pro-Life clarifies my own attitude. I don’t like abortion, therefore I support contraception. Friedman takes it farther. “In my world, you don’t get to call yourself ‘pro-life’ and be against common-sense gun control…” Or shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures clean air and water, biodiversity, and combats climate change. Or oppose programs like Head Start, that provide basic education, health, and nutrition for the most disadvantaged children. Pro-life, he says, can mean only one thing: respect for the sanctity of life. If it starts at conception, it can’t end at birth.

Remember Hurricane Sandy? Paul Krugman points out the difference between the Obama response and the Bush administration’s response to Katrina. The Republicans gutted FEMA so that it couldn’t effectively help New Orleans, and that city was pretty much wiped out. Obama restored FEMA and it was there to help the victims of Sandy. What a difference! Orrin H Pilkey remarks on a corollary aspect: folk who insist on rebuilding exactly where they were before getting wiped out by a coastal storm. This is madness, he says. Rebuilding should occur in a hurricane-safe area.

I live in Citrus County, Florida, pretty much a backwoods area. Now there is a problem: Duke Energy, which bought out local Progress Energy, has decided that its property is appraised too high, so they won’t pay $16 million per year in taxes. If the county doesn’t like it, well, they can sue. That will take years to resolve, and meanwhile represents a major shortfall in the county’s income. This is a tactic this company has used elsewhere; they decide what their holdings in a given area are worth, and that’s all they will pay tax on. They figure they can push a small county around. Nice work if you can get it. We, at the edge of the county, use a different electric company, but we’ll be affected as county services are curtailed.

Article in NEW SCIENTIST says a person’s place in the political spectrum is largely determined by biology. Conservatives prefer white people, straight people and high-status groups. Liberals are more comfortable with ethnic and sexual minorities, and are more creative, curious, and novelty-seeking, while conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and organized. Or putting it negatively, liberals are motivated by deep-seated psychological needs to manage uncertainty and threat, while conservatives are rigid, fearful, and intolerant. So maybe it’s not coincidence that I am a liberal fantasy writer; it’s biological, my dear Watson.

Bill Keller comments on How to Die. The idea of preserving a life despite the patient being in pain with no hope of recovery, at great expense and use of facilities that would be better used to treat folk who can recover, is noxious. Better to let the subject decide sensibly when and how to end it. That’s what I want for myself, when my own time comes. How about you?