I’ve always been a fan of monogamy and fidelity, but I have strayed now and have two women to deal with. You see, I have recently acquired a second Alexa. I need to figure out how to rename one of them, because they both respond in slightly delayed stereo when I call their name --or even use it in passing conversation not related to them. I have to whisper quietly in their “ear” if I want only one to respond, and you might imagine how weird that appears if someone is visiting me while I do that. I’ve tried separating them like I did with fighting children. It works to some extent, but inevitably one hears something and wants in on whatever is going on with the other. I’ve looked into renaming them, but there are only two more choices…”computer” and “Amazon.” Both of those words come up in conversation to be ‘overheard’ and responded to more often than even the name Alexa does. I need to name one something like “Rumplestiltskin.” It would also be nice to have a man’s name to choose from so that all this servitude Alexa provides isn’t viewed as a sexist issue. I’d hate to be brought up on some charge of discrimination by a fired up left-wing group of women. So, at this moment I’m stumped and a perfect solution escapes me. I guess whispering in Alexa’s ear is all I can do for now.
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I’d just like to let you all know that we’ve released a new book that is a collection of short stories. Short stories have had an up and down reception over the last fifty years or so. They used to be quite popular and then seemed to be eclipsed a bit by a plethora of novels and then of course the deluge of video games and movies that we’ve experienced. I’m rather happy to see the resurgence of the short story form’s popularity. Short stories take many forms. Some can be rather long even, and can tell quite a tale. Others are often so short that they are more of picture painting exercise. For us in this fiction collection, the short stories mostly are a chance to look at a unique event in detail. They specifically center around the Becker characters we’ve used in our Park Ranger series, and you can look for a new release of a novel in that series soon as well. Happy reading! Often times you will hear authors talk about the details of plots and how to write great ones the readers will love and accept as believable. They cite any number of rules on how to write, and bring up rules of things never to do. While all this can be useful in making better writers, I think the more useful things to talk about are how well you can make the readers connect with your characters, and at the end of the book be able to say to themselves…”gee, I wish I could meet them” or, “I hope things turn out okay for them,” or “I wonder how they are doing?” Writing may be about rules, all well and good, but if you don’t draw the reader into caring about what happens to characters, all the story techniques won’t matter a bit. Can you relate to the character, can you understand their concerns and fears? Formulaic writing works, but almost always, it works best when you come to love the character. It’s why quirky Stephanie Plum keeps you coming back, It’s why Walt Longmire concerns you as to how his life is turning out, it’s why Joe Pickett’s family struggles and frustrations with the government and his love of the environment makes him so much more real to us, and we root for him and come to care about the outcome. It’s why we love Harry Bosch because we know how he feels about his daughter and the agonies he feels over growing up an orphan of a murdered mother. A story without characters you love and identify with on some level can have the greatest plot ideas and still fall flat. I like what Tony Hillerman once said. He gets to know his characters in the deepest ways, and let’s them write the story they want to write. What will your characters say? I spent so many years living in the wild that I still can’t get enough of it. I love hanging out in the pine forest around my home. It gives me a sense of connection and peace every time I spend any time in it. Lately, I’ve been having a lot of discussions with locals who don’t understand forest management or fire fighting tactics and technology. I recently had to disavow someone of the misconception that airplanes that spread fire retardant slurry on the forest ahead of a fire are destroying the forest from ever growing again. It’s amazing the disinformation that gets spread out in the community. We also had a long discussion about fire mitigation efforts that involve removing trees and other ladder fuels. Of course the bias was that the forest was being decimated, when the truth was that removing some of these understory fuels was important to mimic the effect of historically normal and needed fires that we now do everything we can to prevent or extinguish. Preservation and protection of wildlands and parks is important to me, and it is at the core of all the made up stories that I write. It’s amazing to me how little folks know about how that is accomplished, and how much disinformation is out there from biased parties with an agenda.
Today, I enjoyed seeing that my local forest is doing mitigation clearing efforts along one of my favorite hiking trails along Aspen Creek. I fell in love with reading in the fourth grade. Mr. Sobel let me read one of the Hardy Boys books, that later were made really famous by Walt Disney, and I was hooked. He cared enough to bring them to me from his home library. That’s just the kind of teacher he was, and I will be forever grateful, even if he couldn’t spell Antarctica (that was my first experience in learning that teachers are human, too.) So, I lived with getting it wrong on my spelling test even though I knew it was right. I didn’t challenge him, because I didn’t want to embarrass him…and he might not bring me anymore Hardy Boys books to read! I was thinking the other day about what a challenge it is when you are involved in a long distance move that is delayed. For many months I was dealing with that and so found myself managing two separate lives. As I contemplated that, I realized that I was really managing four separate lives in four different places, because I was in the process of writing two novels during all this physical move process...
I am sitting here with the realization that I am a child of the Turn Signal Generation. We were the last to know the thrill of ever sticking your arm out of the car window straight for a left turn and up for a right turn in freezing rain and snow. Yes, people used to do that cupcake! We had to learn that in order to get a driver’s license even though turn signals had been invented already. Our ancestor’s hands weren’t filled with a cell phone to text or talk on while driving, so they could still hold the steering wheel and use the other hand to keep people from crashing into them when they decided to make a change in direction in traffic. I have spent a lot of time in the Navajo, Hopi and Ute reservations and have become acquainted with police officers who work for those jurisdictions. One thing I noticed is how little they often have in the way of resources and manpower to effectively and safely do their job.
Yesterday, I ran across a Navajo Law Enforcement Park Ranger. Among enforcement agencies, parks and game enforcement even has fewer people doing the job under adverse conditions and without any back up. Often their radio channels are not even monitored by concurrent jurisdictions, so when true need for help happens, long delays occur. I could just imagine this lone ranger working the sandstone canyons of the Monument Valley relying on his own skill at self-preservation. The Navajo nation has a traditional problem with its police officers not having help sometimes within even a hundred miles of where they are, and I imagine this ranger had even less help available. I’ve taken a liking to coffee breaks in Starbucks. One of the things I’ve enjoyed about it is the friends I have made there. Heck, I thought I was just going for coffee, but inevitably it turned into a social event. One of the people I met was Chester.
Chester had worked for court Justices doing various chores, and I had mentioned how I did legal editing part-time. That unleashed a bunch of stories and eventually over the years I learned about his family and of his experiences in the Army and WWII as well. Chester walked slowly from his room at the nursing/assisted living home about 6 blocks from the Starbucks every day, so we developed an interesting friendship when we met. He liked to write poetry, limericks and short stories. We eventually were on the same venue at an open mic night. I was singing blues with a friend, and Chester read his poetry. His eyesight wasn’t so good, and he had a hard time finding the microphone, so we missed a lot of it due to his quiet, raspy voice. Later I managed to read some of his works and really enjoyed them. He always put himself down and minimized what he had written, but I liked it. Sometimes less is more. I listen to a lot of writers (and instructors) talking about how a book needs more imagery and description. Constantly writers will bring up how “you have to have lots of character development and description, or I won’t finish a book, because even if the plot is good, I just won’t care about the people.” What is the truth? I have a slightly different take on the subject. I believe the reason people read books rather than watch movies is that books actively involve the imagination. A writer’s job in a book is to trigger that imagination. It is not a writer’s job to word paint every detail in such a way that the reader sees everything down to the last detail. To me, that is what “active reading” is about. The reader gets put in a scene and fills in a lot of the details with his or her own experience triggered by the things the author puts in to start the process. |
Greg
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