Wrapping Up

Actually, a new school year just started last week, so really it's a new beginning, but it feels like the summer is wrapping up, and I'm attempting to condense the summer's experience into a short space here.

What to say? It was an odd duck of a summer. It was a delight to have a summer without teaching and to be able to devote so much time to the writing. I got to go on more trips and spend more time with the family than in past years, so that was fantastic.

I was reminded, though, in rereading some of No Plot? No Problem!, that Chris Baty suggests that what we really need is a "friendly but firm" deadline to make writing go. With too much time, we simply poke about at the writing and make a thousand excuses to do other things. And he was right. I never set myself anything more stringent than, "Get a novel written over the summer." I gave myself all kinds of leeway and outs so that I didn't have to commit deeply, afraid I would muff it if I set a date in stone. And, of course, because I didn't have that deadline, I whiled away my time. I did get quite a bit done, which is gratifying, but much still remains and I'm trying to figure out how to work the writing into my schedule every day, because gol durn it, I still want this to be my labor, my "tent making," my vocation. Slater continues his invaluable service as cheerleader and taskmaster (though he kind of slacked off by not making me stick to that deadline; give the guy some massive project of his own—like building his own house—and he just runs off and leaves you flat...), and perhaps I'll be trying to work out a definite series of deadlines with him (or anyone else on here willing to take up that onerous task). And NaNoWriMo starts up again in just a few months: I want to see some of you onboard this year.

Speaking of writing, I got through King's Everything's Eventual and am happy to report that much of it was good. Some of the writing still felt like the man was just paying the bills, but a few stories were very good (including a few non-horror outings, like one about gangsters in the 1930's)—and not only was there a story in the early style of The Gunslinger, but, by golly, there was actually a story about Roland himself! Hallelujah! Good stuff.

On a last note, I've got a ton of pictures from the various camping and hiking expeditions this summer. Were I a good person, I'd have downloaded them and put them up here as they happened—but I'm not, so I didn't. Instead, I picked one or two from each outing and I'll put them up now:

First, from my desert hike back in May:



This was the huge dropoff I was not expecting because there's no sign it's coming up until you stumble on the edge and just about fall off and kill yourself. Though I wouldn't have suspected it, there are some starkly beautiful views from out there.

Next up, the Great Journey up to Thousand Island Lake in the Sierras:







The first image is of Legolas and Gandalf just in front of Thousand Island lake itself, at about 10,500 feet. It was a gorgeous day, though they didn't join me in my swim in the lake itself. The others are just two of almost a hundred photos I took during the 20 or so miles and 3 days we were there. It was just so beautiful that it made my heart hurt. For those of you who still think I'm crazy to want to do the Pacific Crest Trail, does this at least give you some idea of why I want to do it?

A week or two later, we were up in Mammoth with the family. We were in the condo much of the time (much nicer than sleeping next to Legolas in the wee tent... though he was cuddly...), but we went out into the wilds quite often, including a nearly five-mile hike with the kiddos.





The first image is of the family in front of Devil's Postpile (Joanna was taking the picture and could not add her beauty thereunto); the second is of Rainbow Falls, the goal of the journey. A fine time with the fam.

Last but not least comes our most recent foray, up to Sequoia National Monument with some friends and their kids:







Picture one of this set shows one of several cabins set right among the sequoias themselves; I wanted to get one of the eponymous trees in a photo, but they were all to big to fit into a single image. Awe-inspiring stuff.

Picture two, hard as it may be to make out, is all six of the older kids and their catch on our fishing day. They were all worn out and we were about to give up when the Forest Service men came down to stock the stream we were on; once they tossed three buckets of stunned trout into our pool, every kid caught at least one fish (as did Joanna, her first!). It was fantastic, though we've decided we can never go fishing again because we'll never have that kind of success.

Picture three is of our warrior princess, Born Dancin', who looked this way every second from the moment she woke until she got a bath and was carried into her sleeping bag for the night. The kid loves dirt, and there was not a thing we could do to stop her. She'll be my hiking buddy one day.

(I have, at a conservative estimate, a bazillion more photos of these events, should anyone be interested.)

To finish up, a couple of photos of our trip to Legoland for the boys' sixth birthday. (It wasn't camping, I know, but it was an epic journey, and I was just about as worn out at the end as I was after three days of Sierra hiking.) The first is another of Born Dancin', who may be the cutest child of any kind ever, and the second is of the three men of our family, doing what we do best: goofing off. Enjoy.

Book Update

I've got a great deal to put down here, but since the volume is overwhelming, I'm going to break it down into individual posts. So here's the latest on the reading front.

I finished Kushner'sThe Privilege of the Sword. It became more compelling the further I got into it, and Kushner always has a deft touch with dialogue and detail, and the characters were fun to watch—though Kushner switched between first and third person narratives with abandon, which always feels something like cheating, as if she couldn't get the story told from a single perspective, which she could have easily. Thomas the Rhymer employed shifts in point of view as well, but it was only among three characters, each in first person, and each of the three voices had their own section of the book, so it worked more smoothly. PotS also caused the cognitive dissonance in me that always occurs when I'm reading about characters with a very different moral compass from my own. I'm all for reading the stories of characters different from myself, but some are easier to sympathize with than others. Here, the characters seemed to have very flexible morality simply from convenience (as opposed to, say, necessity or difficult upbringing or the like). So it was readable; I liked it but didn't love it. I still highly recommend TtR as one of the better fantasy novel's I've read.

I curse Stephen King, and not for the first time. I plowed through The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon in two days and, in Garrison Keillor's words, "I couldn't put the sucker down."

King is just a brilliant storyteller. Let's get over whatever snobby resistance we have to that fact (if, in fact, you have any). He is not a brilliant writer, but he tells a story like gangbusters, which would be plenty for me if I could master it. His language is often lazy and/or out of character (his nine-year-old narrator uses words even I would never use); for a guy who so strenuously recommends avoiding adverbs, he uses them constantly, perniciously, and often unnecessarily; and while having minor mental tics—like the repetition of commercial jingles—is realistic, it's also often quite annoying. And he, too, loves to switch perspective: this can work sometimes (as with The Stand), but here it's applied so inconsistently that it just feels random and, again, lazy. And yet, darn it, I couldn't stop reading the thing. His deft touch with specifics, the honesty of some of his passages, and his pacing are superb.

Because of that, I went ahead and picked up Everything's Eventual, a short story collection. I'm more interesting in his storytelling techniques than the horror aspects of his works, so I thought I'd stick with the short and sweet. To date, I still believe that his best work is The Gunslinger (and not his "revised" version, either), which was brilliantly terse and mysterious. I'm hoping to catch more of that along the way. By the way, if you're looking for a good book about writing, you could do much worse than King's On Writing, a combination of autobiography and instructional guide. I don't agree with all of his advice, but it's a good read.

I haven't cracked the King again, though, as I'm just finishing up Beagle's The Line Between, another short story collection. I'm enjoying it much more than his last, The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances, though I did like that. The stories here are more in the mode of my favorite Beagle book, The Innkeeper's Song—in fact, one of the stories is set in that world. In this collection, Beagle ranges into a lot of historical fiction and even a mystery with Sherlock Holmes as a supporting character. He's got a couple of preachy "parables" included, but overall it's a really nice collection. I'm on the last story now.

I also picked up Robert Howard's The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane which Devin pointed out to me long ago and which has obsessed me ever since. Anything with a subtitle like "The Adventures of the Legendary Puritan Swordsman" is a winner in my book. Howard also wrote the Conan stories, of course, and I haven't gotten beyond a couple of pages yet, but I'm looking forward to some old-school fiction.

The final book on my list, An Autobiography of Fireflies, you won't find over at Amazon.com because it's a manuscript written by our neighbor, Debra. I was fascinated to learn that our neighbor also has aspirations as a writer; I was shocked and terrified to learn she'd already written four novels which she has never done anything with. We finally convinced to her let her work see daylight, and she gave me a copy to peruse. I won't really report on it here, because manuscript reading is a different monster than that of published novels, but it's fun to be on the reading end of a manuscript for once. In related strange news, it turns out there's half a dozen aspiring writers in our neighborhood and circle of contacts, which I never suspected. I'm hoping we can get together and commiserate from time to time, and maybe I can get them to sign up for my creative writing class up in Big Bear come January.

I hope you enjoy reading about books, and you must if you've made it this far. Normally I don't enjoy such a high turnover of reading, but with classes starting up in a week, I'm cramming in all I can. As for my writing? I'll report on that next week or so.

Goodnight, all.