More Friday Adventures

Posted on August 19, 2012 by fsdthreshold

More often than not, Fridays are good and interesting days at Greenstar. This past one, there were lots of problems with the machines — in an eight-hour shift, I think the belts were running no more than twenty or twenty-five minutes. So the company lost money, but we had the adventures!

Before I forget: while the line was running, I got quite a start from a baby doll that came down the belt. I was leaning forward to deal with some cardboard to my right, facing away from the chute. As I started to turn and straighten, my gaze swung to the left, and here was this nearly life-sized baby lying on its side, coming down the belt head-first, its eyes mere inches from mine. I jumped backward, for sure! Ralph scooped it up and initially threw it away, then saw what it was and retrieved it. It’s one of those uncertain objects that we’ll consider for awhile before we (probably) throw it away. Or someone else will. Punkin usually purges our artifacts rack. So for shock value, the baby doll joins the ranks of the rubber snake and the plastic bag that had weirdly-weighted half-full water bottles inside it and thus seemed to tremble and jiggle, as if something were alive inside it.

So the machines were down from the outset, and we started the day with a safety meeting that terrorized us with graphic, true stories about guys who have been killed at recycling plants. I won’t repeat the stories here — I’ll be lucky if I don’t have nightmares, and I don’t want to pass them along to you. But lest you worry about me, I don’t work around the machines that are potentially deadly.

We started the standard cleanup, and Gizmo gave me a great job. He wanted me to use the blower, which I’d never used before. It hangs from your shoulder by a rope, and its barrel directs a powerful jet of air against the ground. Swinging the barrel from side to side, steadily advancing, you can practically remove a layer of topsoil, along with all the loose and even embedded trash, and you can herd it right where you want it. I quickly figured out how to use it surgically, lifting the barrel when I didn’t want to apply the air stream to the ground. What a miracle of technology — to hold the power of a gale in your hands, and to control precisely where it blows! I imagine it was something like having an M-16, except that my work was peaceful. I used it to scour clean the roadway behind the trailer, and Gizmo sent guys to help me scoop the piles into wheelbarrows.

Later, as I was working with some guys to load trash from the steel “caves” into more wheelbarrows, Spider came by and said, “Hey, Fred, what did you do with that leaf-blower?”

Leaf-blower?! That awesome piece of military hardware was a leaf-blower? Leaf-blowers are used by beefy men in the suburbs. I wear a hardhat. Can’t we call what I used an Air Cannon, or a Hellcat, or a Goliath, or an MC-37, or a sixteen-millimeter, or a Sandstorm, or a Thunder Rake, or a Thumper . . .? There’s got to be a better term for it than “leaf-blower.” We don’t have leaves at Greenstar. We have rocks, dirt, grit, mud, and garbage. The leaves are in Frick Park, when I’m writing.

The low point of the day was when the floor boss enlisted me to dump huge cardboard boxes of plastic buckets onto the junk belt. Yum-Yum and another temp helped me. These buckets were from some sort of restaurant and had contained a mixture of honey and garlic. They’d sat somewhere for a while, presumably in the hot sun. Honestly, it’s the worst smell I can recall ever having encountered. It beats out the evil bat guano of Ohsawa Cave between Tagami and Muramatsu in Niigata, which had been the previously reigning champion.

We had a fire drill in the morning: everyone had to go out of the building and rendezvous at the red dot on the back fence. Then for a while, Gizmo sent me, Ralph, and Jeff to pick garbage out of said back fence.

At lunchtime, because of continuing mechanical difficulties, they sent most of the guys home. But our Greater Boss implied that he would like a few of us to stay and help if we wanted to. Ralph looked at me and said, “You wanna stay?” It’s all his fault. I know my days of working with Ralph are limited; sooner or later, one or the other of us is going to go to greener pastures; and I don’t want to miss a minute of this curiously-balanced summer while it’s here — he’s a great work-partner. So I said to the Greater Boss, “How can I help? Where do you want me to go?” He said, “Probably down in the hole, shoveling.”

Um . . . on the way out of the building, I asked Ralph, “What’s the hole?” He said, “I have no idea.” It sounded pretty ominous.

I was about to find out. I ate lunch at the usual time, while Gizmo and his crew (including Ralph) dragged compacted junk out from under the silent behemoth. A light rain was falling, so I put my wool gloves underneath my rubber gloves to keep them drier. (They were still damp from sweat, but that’s how it goes.) Then Ralph got to microwave his Hungry Man frozen dinner, and I got to experience the hole. It’s a metal trench, perhaps three feet wide by eight feet long, and shoulder deep, right before the knees of the residential Engine. Gizmo sent me into it, and I found myself standing in water on an uneven, shifting surface of trash. He told me how to put my feet against the walls, where the garbage was a little higher and drier — but I’m glad my steel-toed shoes are the waterproof kind. I shoveled out the cans, bottles, and muck, throwing them up onto the ground, then dragging them into the trash bay. Gizmo was even more laudatory of my work than before. “You are the man!” he kept repeating. He said he always wants me on his work crew. Give me a precarious high place or a subterranean place, and I’m happy.

So we carted the stuff from the can-and-bottle belt to the mud bay so that the welders could weld the beast back together again. Spider managed to get us paid for a full eight hours for volunteering to stay (the normal day is counted as 7.5 hours — today, they paid us for lunch!).

For the last hour-plus, Spider and Gizmo turned Ralph and me loose to go where we wanted and clean up whatever needed it. “Just keep busy,” they said. I was touched by that level of trust. They know we’re there to work, and that they don’t have to be looking over our shoulders. We swept floors, knocked down scraps from overhead, and hauled load after load to the Great Pile. My Man the Rat put in two more appearances. Once, for all the world it looked as if he started across the yard, saw the Greater Boss, and made a panicked U-turn. Soon enough, it was time to sign out. I drove Gizmo down into the Rocks so he could catch his bus, and we talked about our individual weekend plans.

And there you have it — another Friday at Greenstar. That evening my friend R. commented that I’m looking pretty macho these days — all brown from the sun, and with beard stubble. You know it!

Fire at Greenstar

Posted on August 8, 2012 by fsdthreshold

We had a fire at Greenstar today! No one was injured. It happened while we were eating lunch, so pretty much everyone was already out of the building, sitting in the concrete “yard” between the plant and the office trailer, mostly huddled in the strip of shade made by an overhead belt for transporting garbage (I prefer the sun — I sit there like a lizard with my sleeves rolled up, one steel-toed shoe crossed over the other, absorbing all the summer I can get). We started hearing voices yelling over on the commercial side (we work on the residential side), and then guys came out hollering for Spider, the foreman. Mo bellowed, “THE MACHINE IS ON FIRE!” Spider dashed over there to deal with it.

[Please pardon the edited-but-included colorful language in this post. You cannot fully appreciate the story without it.]

Smoke started pouring out of the building, and we could smell it. Punkin is my line boss, and Dan is the boss of the other paper line. Punkin said, “That’s the commercial side. That ain’t my problem,” and he cackled. Someone kept calling to Dan (“Dan! It’s a fire! Dan! The machine’s on fire!”), and finally he spread his arms and yelled back in his stentorian voice, “What do you want me to do? I ain’t no mother******g fireman. I ain’t gonna crawl up inside that sh**. I am a N*ggro. We don’t roll like that!”

Howard, ever the lucid doomsayer, waxed eloquent on how that right there was thousands of dollars worth of damage, because those machines aren’t designed for direct heat, and how if that cardboard and that plastic caught fire, it would burn for days, and how someone would have to stand right beside that machine and monitor it through the next shift, even if the fire seemed to be out, because there could be fire in there anywhere. Someone said, “I told them rats about barbecuing at lunchtime!”

Perhaps we should have taken it as an ominous sign that, from morning, there was a very large dead rat under the stairs leading up into the trailer. Everyone kept calling everyone else’s attention to it. Spider said, “It must have expired from being around y’all.” Finally Ron threw it into a trash bin with a shovel. May its little rat soul rest in peace.

As we watched the show, some of the guys were talking about their resumes, and how if you did any kind of work in prison, that looks good on your resume: “You was a cook there? You cook twelve hundred eggs, fourteen hundred pieces o’ bacon, an’ all that sh** has to be ready on time — you think that ain’t experience? You put that on there!” Someone asked if we had any fire extinguishers at Greenstar. Ron, a full-timer, shook his head and said, “Not a one.” (I think he was kidding.) Someone said, “We gotta get buckets o’ water from over there.” Someone else chimed in: “Like a birGADE!” No one got up, except most of the guys went over to peer in through the open doorway into the commercial side. Ralph and I stayed put, taking it all in. I kept soaking up sun, glad that the UV rays were saturating my inner gloves a little, which were spread out on the concrete block behind me. Someone said you could hardly see in there for all the smoke.

Finally Spider came back out, looking sooty (the smoke was getting much worse — darker and thicker, and the smell was stronger) and urgently said, “All you temps sign out. You gotta go home.” Someone said, “We gonna get six hours?” Spider said, “No.” He was more abrupt than usual. James accused me of working too hard and setting the belt on fire.

So we left at about 12:30. We dispersed, with ominous smoke rising in our rearview mirrors.

I would imagine it will be business as usual tomorrow, but you never know. At Greenstar, you never know. As I’m writing this tonight, it’s thundering and raining, so if the plant is out there on Neville Island burning, maybe this will help.

So I took James home to Emsworth (James is my faithful paying passenger), and two other guys rode with me all the way down to the Eat’n’Park in the Rocks, where they catch a bus. They talked nonstop, both on their cell phones and to each other, about their (former?) days of selling drugs. I could tell that much, but it really is a foreign language. Someone only “does purple,” and one guy “had to pull a flooey twice” in his career — I gathered that it’s some kind of weapon. Sounds like there’s a lot better money to be made that way than in just about any other line of work, except sometimes you have to go to prison. One guy was seeing his parole officer later today, but as long as he hands over pay stubs and clean urine, the dude is cool. He doesn’t show up at my man’s crib anymore at 5:00 a.m. to check up on him.

I hope you’re all having an interesting week. I sure am!

 

August Moonlight and Steel Caves

Posted on August 5, 2012 by fsdthreshold

I’ve described my summer practice of sleeping in my open balcony doorway. The other night, I woke up at about 4:00 a.m. with the full moon poised in the western sky above me, and its light streaming down over me. The light was dazzling and cool, almost a liquid, almost as bright as daylight. When I lifted my hand, it threw a stark shadow onto my bed. I went right back to sleep, but it was pleasant to be sleeping in a bath of moonlight in the summer air. I wished the night weren’t so short!

A random thought about stories, from a discussion I had with a friend this evening: each time a story is read, it is a new thing, don’t you think? It’s new for that reader (assuming it’s a first-time read). The characters rely on that reader to get them through the perils. The settings depend on the reader to sense and complete them with her/his own memories and perceptions. The plot requires the reader to awaken it. The author’s job has been done for a long time when the story has its life. Its life is its interaction with the reader.

Groink! (The sound of changing the subject with a monkey wrench, for any readers who . . .)

I had some fun at work on Friday. The machines went down in the first stretch of the day. They were seriously off-line for a while, so the line bosses put us all on intensive cleanup. Gizmo found me and entrusted me with the steel rake that he never lets far out of his sight. (There is a phantom haunting Greenstar that devours tools. We used to have several steel rakes; now there’s just the one that Gizmo guards and uses.)

First, he set me to cleaning out a space beneath some machinery that is very much like a cave. You can only enter bent double. He wanted me to rake out the trash, as I’ve done before (I think that’s why he recruited me). Cans, bottles, and bits of other junk lie in a putty of thick dust and grime that resembles soil. The hard pieces glitter in the dark like minerals in a real cave. “Drag it out,” Gizmo told me. “Leave the dirt. Make a line right here.” So I did. In that cave, I left nothing but the rich black grime-soil, with no more glitter.

Then Gizmo set me to dragging out a pile from an even smaller cave. Then he put me to work raking the cans out from behind a steel shield around a belt. I would finish these jobs, and he’d react in happy amazement that I was done so soon, that the places were so clean: “You are the MAN!” (I don’t think he’s used to having hard workers who understand instructions at his disposal.)

The best work of all he found for me was this: I got to climb a ladder, still bearing the sacred rake of steel, and deep and high in the shadowy netherworld, I threw down all the accumulated cans and bottles from a catwalk. But my real job was to clear away the shreds of plastic bags that hung from railings, from girders, from the maws of hoppers, from the sides of the engines themselves. It was very much like clearing away ancient cobwebs. I found among those dim spaces trash that had been there so long it was covered by a full inch of dust, and I saw it first only as outlines. I daresay that catwalk and its surroundings became cleaner than they’d been in years.

Then a whole crew of us worked on removing the detritus I’d flung down. Using wheelbarrows and push brooms, we pushed and wheeled it to the Great Mountain at the rear of the building — the pile of unsorted trash that rises from the concrete floor perhaps twenty feet into the air and covers about an acre. As I was dumping out a wheelbarrow, My Man the Rat jumped out right at my feet and scurried away to my right. I showed him to Ralph.

Gizmo sent me into a very narrow space to rake out trash that hadn’t been touched in a long time. I think that’s where I got into some grease that I doubt will ever come out of my shirt. I hadn’t intended to ruin that shirt, but it’s a work shirt now. As Ralph said, “That shirt is committed.” Punkin came along and called me back out of the space. “You’ll wake up  those rats back in there,” he said. “That’s where they live.” Ralph said, “We don’t want to wake up the cousins.” There are older and viler things than orcs in the deep places of Greenstar . . . things that ought not to be disturbed.

At about that time, the cry came ’round: “Yo! We’re back up! Yo! We’re up!” The machines were fixed, the gears turning again. I found Gizmo, who’s easy to find because of his merry voice and his gesticulating. I presented him with his steel rake and had the pleasure of telling him what he did not yet know: “I guess we’re back up.” He almost bowed to me. He patted me on the back and blessed me and my progeny.

Gizmo, you see, has often called me “the second-happiest man on the planet.” The happiest is a young guy nicknamed Africa, who smiles constantly. A smile is my default expression, but I don’t smile, for example, when the garbage smells vile and the belt is piled deep and running at full tilt. Then it’s hold fast, lads, spray and pray!

Things ran smoothly for the rest of the day. But it was nice having that morning stretch to move around and rake things, to knock on the rats’ doors and clear away the cobwebs.

I’ve been trying to figure out how the three stretches of our shift might be tied to the old canonical hours, but I’m not sure how to do it. We have a 7:00-9:30 stretch, which is by far the hardest to get through. For some reason, it seems interminable. Then there’s the half-hour morning break. Then 10:00-12:00 working, and lunch from noon until 12:30. Then we work from 12:30 to 2:30, when the engines stop. Then we clean up until about 2:45 or 2:50, when we sign out. So are the stretches Lauds, Terce, and Sext? I’m not sure how to work it out. Suggestions are welcome.

Slow progress on the book lately, since a lot has been going on during weekends. But I’ll get there, Lord willing. It’s a great summer. And since I have no summer vacation, this year the summer can follow the sun and stars, and go on and on until the leaves turn, the air crispens, and it’s clearly fall. But now, it’s summer — the dog days are here! Let us bask in the moonlight and brown our bare feet in the sun!

 

Confluence 2012

Posted on July 29, 2012 by fsdthreshold

What an amazing weekend! We tend to underestimate things near us, don’t we? “It’s a twenty-minute drive away, so it surely won’t be very good.” But some people live twenty minutes away from Mammoth Cave or the Grand Canyon.

I just spent the weekend at Confluence, the annual sf/fantasy/horror convention held in Pittsburgh, and WOW! This is definitely (Lord willing) going to be an every-year event for me! It far, far, FAR exceeded my expectations. Yes, everything was on a slightly smaller scale than World Fantasy. But that, I discovered, can be a really good thing. There wasn’t the craziness, there weren’t the obligations . . . I found myself able to relax, sit back, and enjoy what the con had to offer. The quality of the panels was every bit as good as at World Fantasy — tremendous, knowledgeable people talking about fascinating things. The readings were outstanding. There was a con suite to put food in our stomachs on that long Saturday, an incredible art show (I bought a small art print by Kerry Maffeo, a steampunkian image that I fell in love with), and a dealers’ room full of tantalizing books, clothing, jewelry, accessories, calligraphy, and other artifacts. Many thanks to the organizers! A regional con can be extraordinary!

Here are the panels I attended — and I really crammed in as many as I could:

1. a PowerPoint presentation on vampires

2. I Read Your Story (about critique groups and beta readers)

3. Psychology of Horror

4. Keeping Constraints (about when to throw out the rule book)

5. Guest of Honor Talk: Seanan McGuire

6. What Editors Want

7. Cutting Edge

8. Can’t We Get Along? (about collaboration)

9. [Rather unquotable title, but it refers to villains. A fun one!]

10. History of Pulps

11. Readings by John Alfred Taylor and Denise Verrico

12. Where in the World Is__? (a presentation about hunting for missing persons)

13. Not Always Awesome (famous writers talking about early rejections they received)

14. Sub-Genres

15. Geek Culture

Here, in a raw form, are my notes:

Concerning feedback from editors: When they say there’s something wrong with a section, listen to them. If they tell you how to fix it, stick your fingers in your ears and hum. [That rings true to me! With my first novel, the editor rightly pointed out that the climax needed improvement. He had concrete suggestions for how to improve it, which I completely rejected. I did it my own way, and he said it gave him goosebumps, and he whole-heartedly endorsed my revisions to the publisher.] Editors are great at detecting where the writing needs help, but they aren’t writers!

For beta readers, you should use people who haven’t read a previous draft. You need the reaction of someone reading it for the first time.

G. Masterton’s The Manitou — one of the best-paced novels out there!

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting has been called the best horror novel ever written. Look up the first paragraph on Google.

Don’t overdescribe. Allow the reader to participate in creating the horror that most affects him/her in the shape that’s effective for him/her. Sacrificing the child in Salem’s Lot . . . the politician kicking the dog to death in the prologue of The Dead Zone . . . these are marvelously understated, not shown in gory detail, but left to the imagination — and they’re passages that people are talking about years and years afterward. People think the dog scene goes on and on, but it’s two sentences long!

Read Dr. Rat.

Ultimately, terror is an individual, intimate experience, so suggestion is almost always the way to do it.

The “thousand-foot bug theory” quoted by Stephen King in Danse Macabre: If you build suspense, build it, build it, and then finally deliver the payoff, and it’s a ten-foot bug!!! — the reader will say, “Yeah, that’s scary, but I was expecting a 100-foot bug.” If you show it directly, what you show will fall short of what the reader was imagining, if you did the setup right. [Personal thought: It is my favorite Stephen King novel, but he didn’t take his own advice.]

Monster stories don’t focus on the monster. The monster isn’t the point. [Personal: I guess that’s true. Consider Jaws. The shark isn’t really the point. The point is, what do people do when a shark won’t go away? Will they confront their deepest fears?]

Woe, To Live On — depicts atrocities during the Civil War.

Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy) — the violence has always been with us. It’s not a new thing.

House of Leaves is a terrific book! [I’m partway through it.]

“If you’re doing what you love, you should always say yes.” — Christopher Walken [He is my favorite American actor.]

Jacques Cousteau swore unto his last breath that he had seen a megalodon. He specified exactly where he was when he saw it, and it was not a whale, not a whale shark. Cousteau would know.

Footprints of cryptids in history: There’s real-life documentation of “the last unicorn’s head” being presented to the king of France. Soon after, there was a devastating cholera outbreak. Humans had killed off the creatures that kept the water pure . . . [Don’t get me started on the subject of vampires hinted at in the Bible!]

3-D printing could utterly change our society within 10 years. Hagiograph? Your thoughts?

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: All stories must be about moral choice. Will the character do the right thing, despite the consequences? [Jaws fits the pattern. LOTR fits the pattern. Whenever anyone makes a blanket statement about story, I always plug in those two to check it out. Yeah, it’s there in my three finished novels, in one way or another — whew!]

Pulps were named after the new, cheap paper made from wood pulp. (Linen & rags before that.) 1896 — Frank Muncey (sp?) publishes a magazine containing only fiction. (Magazines contained a little of everything before that.) 1913 — Differentiation into magazines containing stories all in one genre: railroad stories, cowboy stories, boxing stories, etc. 1923 — Weird Tales is the first all-fantasy magazine. 1926 — Amazing Stories is the first all-sf magazine. By the 1950s, the pulp era was over.

The Kirkus Reviews said of one of Tamora Pierce’s novels: “Slam-bang tedium.” [Boy, does that comfort me! The Kirkus reviewer hated my book The Star Shard.]

4-star reviews (out of 5) are often the most balanced. Those reviewers aren’t writing out of an emotional state. They’re usually giving a considered opinion, expressed pretty well.

Tamora Pierce’s typically stern, severe editor gave her this mantra when she was weeping over that Kirkus review: “All bad reviews are wrong; all good reviews are right.”

You can get Google to alert you of any references to your book anywhere on the Web.

“Fantasy football: It’s Dungeons & Dragons for people who used to beat up people who played Dungeons & Dragons.” — from the Internet

Tamora Pierce asked this to her on-line followers: “Romantic love between couples lasts about two years. After that, if they haven’t built something deeper underneath it, they’re in trouble. So, after the two years, what do you think Bella and Edward will talk about?” [Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh!]

[Anyone, feel free to jump on any of these points. There should be some good grist for discussion here! Very good convention!]

 

Adventures in Squirrel Hill

Posted on July 15, 2012 by fsdthreshold

Not every summer Saturday is good for being in the woods. (We observed Thoreau’s birthday this past week, and I thought: “I know why I went to the woods!”) Today was a rainy Saturday; and those are good, too, because the rain washes off the thick dust of Neville Island that accumulates on my car during the week.

So with a clean and gleaming old car, I drove to a branch of the Carnegie Library and did something I’ve been wanting to do ever since moving to Pittsburgh: I finally made a library card. Now I have full access to the wonderful world of the Carnegie Library system!

This branch to which I went is located in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, a stately, well-kept, largely Jewish community. (I realized just how Jewish it was when I discovered, in the Giant Eagle supermarket there, a set of toys for teaching children about the plagues upon Egypt described in Exodus! I remember the inclusion of a red rubber ball to remind children how the Nile River turned to blood. I can’t remember the others, but they were equally interesting. Something opaque and black was the Angel of Death.) In the library, which was fairly bustling, I found a highly satisfactory writing niche: a carpeted window well, a ledge about 3.5 feet square, set into the wall. It was obviously intended for people to climb up into and read, since it was carpeted and had a little step-ladder stool directly beneath it. So up I went with my Neo, notes, and manuscript, and I spent several happy hours there, writing away and gazing down through the large window at the street below. I saw an elderly man in a wide-brimmed black hat and a long black coat, his beard full and gray, flanked by two young men (also in black) wearing kippot, and they appeared to be deep in a discussion. I wondered whether it were about some point in the Torah, or about how the Pirates were faring.

To my great delight, I found both my books on the shelves there! The Star Shard is in the children’s area, and a paperback Dragonfly is in the science-fiction and fantasy aisles! What a feeling that is: to be writing fiction in a library in which two of your own fiction works are in the stacks for children and adults to borrow and enjoy! We are strangers and pilgrims on the Earth: but if we have any kind of home on this side of Eternity, isn’t it in situations like this? I’m here; I’m writing; these are my stories around me, the children around my table like fruits of the olive. I couldn’t help introducing myself to the children’s librarian and telling her how happy I was to find my own book there. I didn’t find Dragonfly until I was on my way out, or I might have had to bend the ear of another patient staff member.

As it was, I wrote 1,389 words in that window well, sitting sometimes cross-legged, sometimes with my legs stretched out, with the wall to lean comfortably against. That’s a small Saturday figure, I know, but it’s tempered by two things: one, I had some important errands to run, so I got started late, and the library closed at 5:00; and two, above and beyond those words, I wrote a riddle-poem that’s crucial to a soon-upcoming scene. That took a lot of careful thought and staring out the window. (The poem doesn’t go into the word count yet, because I haven’t yet gotten to that scene.) I count it as a good and productive day, by grace.

I don’t think I have officially reported on the blog yet that my novel has now topped one hundred thousand words! It stands tonight at 101,397. Cheer me on this summer! I’m hoping to arrive at a complete rough draft by about the summer’s end.

These nights, I’m keeping my eye on the Summer Triangle in the sky, which figures into my book. It rises earlier and earlier each night. Its brightest star, Vega, is pouring upon us the light it produced in 1987, which is just now reaching our eyes after a journey that boggles my imagination. To the left is Deneb, bright blue supergiant, the “The Tail” of Cygnus, the Swan. And over to the right is Altair (“The Flier”) in Aquila, the Eagle. Altair is closer than Vega, but less bright. Vega is in Lyra, the Lyre or Harp. I like to take a look at the Triangle before bed. It puts things into perspective. I may be sorting trash for a meager living at the moment, but I’m writing about light that takes a quarter-century to bridge the gulf of space. I’m writing about comets and fairies, about courage and loyalty, about faith and determination and perseverance, and about many other things besides. It all works out. It’s all part of the whole miracle, I feel. Throwing a can down the aluminum chute . . . laughing about something with Ralph, across the belt from me . . . watching Vega rise . . . seeing the sun awaken glorious and pink over the Ohio River . . . sitting in my kiosk in Frick Park to set words on an electronic screen . . . life in every breath. Lately, nothing seems more or less profound than anything else.

While I’m being philosophical: a few days ago, I was writing in Frick Park, and needing to think deeply, I stretched out at full length on my back, on the bench of that little writing house. It was a perfect summer day. I gazed up into the canopy of the woods, where sunlight set the green leaves all aglow. A warm wind pushed everything into motion; I could see at least three different layers of treetop, all swaying independently of one another. I was perfectly comfortable, touched by the somnolent breeze, perfectly at peace. It occurred to me then that when our eyes close for the final time in this life, and then when they reopen in the world to come, this scene might very well be what they see. I have never experienced a more convincing vision of Heaven.

To continue the analogy, I was seeing this only around the borders of the roof over the table. I glimpsed it imperfectly, with the center obscured. That’s the here and now: we have a low, dark roof over our heads. Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now we know in part . . .

This midsummer, I’m essentially camping out. I sleep on a three-folding mattress I brought from Japan, and on these excellent hot nights, I’ve brought it right to my balcony door, which I leave open all night. (Yes, I encounter a few moths and flies in my apartment, but so what? I’ve been encountering them all my life, and my life would be poorer without them.) I lie with my head almost on the threshold, the summer night pouring in through the open door, the air wafting over me. By so doing, I don’t even need my electric fan. It reminds me of one summer in Japan when I was into “verandah camping,” and slept out on a twelfth-floor balcony from high summer until well into October, when dropping temperatures forced me indoors. It was on that Japanese balcony that I wrote, by the light of a kerosene lamp in a single evening, a youthful work called “A Tale of the Moon” which has never been published. I recently re-read it, and yes, it’s juvenilia, more an idea than a story, but it made me think, “This is why I adore Steven Millhauser. He came of writerly age and carried this out. He got it right.”

Lots of thoughts swirling around this midsummer . . . I’d like to believe I’m living deliberately, like Thoreau . . . sucking all the marrow out of life. May it be a blessed season for you, too. Feel free to comment with your own summer reflections!

I’ll close with these (hopefully) humorous lines from my book:

“[Character name] was the strangest boy I’d ever met (I hadn’t known our father when he was young).”

And now I’ll really close with these lines set in stone by Vicino Orsini before the sphinxes in his garden:

Chi con cilia inarcate

et labbra strette

non va per questo loco

manco ammira

le famose del mondo

moli sette

“Whoever without raised eyebrows

and pursed lips

goes through this place

will fail to admire

the famous

seven wonders of the world.”

(I saw the old John Wayne movie El Dorado. Fun!)

That Blue Collar Look

Posted on July 5, 2012 by fsdthreshold

Bandana with panache. (*White shown. Also outfitted with black, red, and blue.)

Reflective safety vest that says, “Don’t run over me, Forklift!”

Rugged beard stubble.

Durable paperclip on the collar to keep track of those ear-protectors when the trash is really flying.

Hardhat built for the pings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

(*Safety glasses, gloves, and steel-toed shoes not shown.)

July 3, 2012

He’s got that Blue Collar look.

 

Writing Statistics

Posted on July 2, 2012 by fsdthreshold

Anyone who knows me will readily agree: I’m not a numbers person. But numbers can reveal some fascinating truths. I took the time to crunch some numbers this evening and have put together a post that will be, to some, of no interest whatsoever — to those readers, my apologies. But this has been, from its outset, a blog about the writing life, and it doesn’t get any more about the writing life than this! I hope it will offer an insight into how one writer works, as well as letting you know how my book is coming along. Here we go, then. Some of you will tune out now, and that’s fine — Happy Fourth of July, and we’ll talk about something more fun very soon!

Writing Statistics for The House of the Worm, May-June 2012

Written during May: 18,947 words

Written during June: 16,766 words

Difference: 2,181 words

Writing days in May: 9

Writing days in June: 8

Average amount written per writing day:

May: 2,105.22 words

June: 2,095.75 words

Difference: 9.47 words

Take a careful look at the above. I had one more day to write in May. The difference in the output for the two months was about one day’s writing. The difference in the average output per writing day was fewer than ten words! That shows a consistency that is both striking and comforting. Of all those thousands of words that go through the machine, in two months during which my life’s schedule was fairly regular — same 40-hour work week, etc. — I turned out per-day word totals that are remarkably close together. That shows that I’m writing like a craftsman, steadily. If I show up and keep my fingers on the keyboard, I’m telling the story smoothly and piling up words. If I can’t be writing every single day, this is very definitely the next best thing!

Greatest amount written in a day:

May: 3,570 words (St. Mary’s Cemetery and home) (physical fight/action)

June: 3,020 words (Frick Park) (quarrel and solving a puzzle)

What does this tell us about conflict? Stories are about conflict. When you get into friction between characters, the words sluice out for the writer . . . yet for the reader, everything goes faster, and the book feels shorter. Interesting, huh?

Smallest amount written in a day:

May: 428 words (Barnes & Noble, Boalsburg) (exploration/description)

June: 396 words (Frick Park) (partial conversation with a new character)

Looking around and talking: necessary for just about any tale, but often not the most compelling parts for either the writer or the reader.

(These small-output days had such low totals because on the first, I was visiting with a friend out of town, and writing was just something we did as one activity during a busy day of visiting; and on the second, I went to a birthday party at 3:00 p.m., so it wasn’t a full writing day.)

Percentage of monthly word total written in Frick Park:

May: 22.3%

June: 100%

Heh, heh, heh. Once I discovered Frick Park, I moved in. During May, I was generally exploring a different park each time.

THOW’s gross total:

Beginning of May: 58,165 words (This more or less represents the part of the book so far written in Japan.)

End of May: 77,112 words

End of June: 93,878 words

Combined output for May and June: 35,713 words

(For perspective: during National Novel Writing Month, participants shoot for completing a manuscript of 50,000 words, which is a very slim novel. To do that, you have to write around 1,667 words a day for 30 days. I did that back in March of 2005, and it was an invaluable experience. It was like physical training for writers: it made me able to produce a lot more in a single session. Back in 2005, 1,667 words seemed like a huge amount and took me all day to turn out. I would start in the morning [during a spring break from university], write until suppertime, and sometimes I’d have to work a little after dinner to finish my quota, and I did nothing else that month. Now, if I have all day to write and produce only 1,667 words, it means something has distracted me.)

So: again, a pretty dry post . . . but it’s encouraging to me that writing finds a way. I may be busier than I’d like just earning money to pay the rent and bills; I may struggle over plotting and character development. But the book is slowly, steadily finding its shape.

Medium tenuere beati.

“Blessed are they who have held to the middle way.”

Dirige gressos meos Domine.

“Direct my steps, Lord.”

 

 

Angels

Posted on June 21, 2012 by fsdthreshold

Summer begins! Last night, the sunset’s afterglow was of that perfect deep hue that only appears on the hottest days. I was delighted to see it. At work, guys are complaining about how their clothes are rimed with white salt from sweat. On the breaks, I guzzle a lot of water from the big water coolers. I have my balcony door wide open in the afternoon and early evening. The little fan is whirring valiantly. At any moment, something magical might happen. Well-loved stories and ones yet unread call to me from the shelves. Those yet unwritten whisper from the warm air. The best season is here again!

For my book, I’m thinking of summer stars, the brightest ones, visible from this hemisphere in June. Does anyone have favorites? Speak now — this may be your chance to have a direct influence on The House of the Worm! I need to pick three good stars. I’m also trying to track down a helpful on-line directory or guide of stars, when they appear, what colors they are, what constellations they’re in, and any other facts and folkloric associations. Any advice, dear readers? I’ve been reading about how, over the thousands of years, the heavens have shifted. For ancient Egyptians, the pole star wasn’t Polaris at all! It was Thuban in the constellation of Draco. Is that not cool?! That name Thuban has been ringing in my mind as I sort trash at work. Summer: the season when stars whisper their names.

Anyway, the theme of this post is “Angels” for two reasons: 1.) I have some graveyard angel photos to show you, and 2.) my guardian angels were working hard today and saved me from what could have been a really serious injury.

Let’s start with some pictures. A couple days ago, a friend asked out of the blue if I’d be interested in going up to the cemetery where I’ve written and taking photos of gravestones and statuary. This was on Midsummer’s Eve, in fact, and I thought it sounded like the perfect way to greet the dusk on that glorious day. The friend isn’t familiar with this neighborhood, so she came to my place, and I drove us up to the hilltop and St. Mary’s Cemetery.

St. Mary's Cemetery, Pittsburgh

I’m sure my friend’s photos are a lot better than mine. All I have is a bottom-of-the-line camera, and I haven’t really felt I was taking pictures since the days of 35mm, which I loved. But I suppose it’s still capturing the way light strikes objects, so we can still call it “photography.” It’s a whole different world now, though.

I like this angel in St. Mary's Cemetery.

So anyway, I should tell my story from work today. The machines were up and running all day, and Greenstar was going for volume, trying to maximize the amount of trash we sorted. That meant the stuff was coming at us constantly and full blast, piled deep on the belt, with no respite.

Well, about an hour before lunch break, I heard a shuddering KER-WHAM! right beside me. Instinctively, as we do whenever we hear the sound of something heavy tumbling out of the chute, I ducked, but there was no time at all to get out of the way. I saw a brownish blur heading straight for me, and at the last instant, it veered and threw itself away in my trash bin, immediately to my left. The impact I’d heard was when it bounced off the belt. The object was so heavy that it sank straight to the bottom of my bin, through all the packed garbage. It was like a meteorite coming down.

Across the belt from me, Ralph just about fainted! He has an uncanny ability to see everything that’s happening on the line. I don’t know how he does it. Heavy, metallic junk can jam up and break the machines, so whenever something like that comes through, we grab it and throw it onto the floor, off of the belt. Later, when we have a free minute, we carry it over to a special barrel for pipes, hubcaps, tools, jagged nondescript items, etc. (The other day, I found an Illinois license plate! I looked to see if I recognized the number — it didn’t seem to belong to anyone I knew. That would have been just the sort of coincidence that you read about.) Well, when heavy stuff crashes onto the belt, Ralph almost invariably sees exactly where it lands and is able to retrieve it from the deep trash. I generally know that something heavy has come down, but I have no idea where it is.

What Ralph saw was a rusty disc, flying upright like a wheel, slicing straight toward me. He was sure it was going to take my head off or cut my throat, and there wouldn’t have been a thing he could have done about it except to pull the cord and stop the belt after the fact. I did catch a glimpse of it coming toward me in one of those frozen instants, like in The Matrix. I thought the thing was a round saw blade.

Well, I fished it out of my trash barrel. My next thought was that it was a disc off a farm implement — you know, the kind that discs the field in the spring. I dropped it onto the deck behind me. When we had time, we examined it and saw that it was probably the base off a lamp or a standing fan — something industrial-grade. I can’t estimate weights, but it took two hands to hold it. Ralph and I agreed that it was eighteen inches across, with a hole in the center.

Since it was vertical, I don’t think it would have injured me in the way that Ralph thought, but it certainly could have given me a nasty gash and maybe broken some bones, and I would have needed a tetanus shot.

About ten minutes after that happened, CRASH! — a lawnmower blade came down right between us. On this rare occasion, I saw it and retrieved it. So it was a wild day at Greenstar. And thank you, guardian angels!

There was also some nice news yesterday: Triad Staffing, the agency that sends me to Greenstar, has decided to name me their first-ever Employee of the Month! The boss has gotten clearance to award me with some gift certificates. He says I have no idea how much they appreciate me, and he wanted to do something to express that. So that’s really nice! All glory to God! I couldn’t be a good employee without good health and a car that runs.

Speaking of my car, I had to get its tire fixed the other day. I finally had time to do it. It’s had a very slow leak for several weeks now. Turns out there was a screw that had impaled it. The screw was in there deeply and tightly, so that just a tiny bit of air was leaking out around it. That’s all fixed now. I hope I don’t run over anything else sharp.

An angel watches over St. Mary's Cemetery, Pittsburgh.

Out at Greenstar, my car gets covered with dust. When it rains, it gets washed off. But now and then on weekends, I like to just wash it, because it’s dusty in the extreme.

This profile is pretty nice, huh? (I mean the one below.)

And here’s a silhouette:

An Angel on Midsummer's Eve

Summer stories from all you readers are still most welcome! How are you kicking the season off? Are the fireflies out in your part of the world?

This small angel is intriguing:

We certainly need guarding from below, too. Maybe this is the sort of angel that keeps us from dashing our feet against stones.

As the summer gets underway for you, whether you’re on vacation or laboring away, may the angels watch over you. And may it be a season of joy, productivity, and enchantment.

 

Ray Bradbury

Posted on June 13, 2012 by fsdthreshold

As most of you know, the Grand Old Man of Science-Fiction and Fantasy, Ray Bradbury, passed away this past week. Very few writers have had such an impact on these genres as Mr. Bradbury. Bios and tributes abound, so I won’t attempt anything like that here. I’d just like to tell you a few of the ways his writing has touched my life as a reader and writer, and maybe, in his honor, we can all share some of our Bradbury memories.

Ray Bradbury was one of the last writers who had been around since the pulp era. He systematically cranked out stories in the fifties, back when you could make a living selling short stories. He reported (in Zen in the Art of Writing) how he would write a story every week. On Monday, he’d churn out the rough draft. On Tuesday, he’d revise it. On Wednesday, he’d do a third draft. By the end of the week, he’d send it off and be ready to start over the following week. Pretty amazing, huh?

I’ve always felt a kinship with Bradbury. We’re both Illinois boys from small towns. His was farther north than mine, but in the same state, and he seems to have found many of the same things magical and wondrous that I do. A friend in Japan once commented that, in our writing, Bradbury and I “move the camera” the same way. I think I would agree, for the most part. Lest you think that’s a pretty grandiose claim, I want to be clear that that style is not always entirely a good thing. Read my early work, and then read Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree. We both need precisely the same type of editing. We get carried away at just the same points.

But anyway, Bradbury memories:

1. Probably my earliest is receiving a wonderful boxed set of Bradbury paperbacks from my parents one Christmas. It’s right here on my shelf now: The Best of Bradbury. It includes Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and Long After Midnight. What a box of jewels! It’s much-yellowed now with age and my parents’ cigarette smoke, but that only gives it more weight of treasured history. These books were my first exposure to Ray Bradbury, except for:

2. The Martian Chronicles. This was my first first exposure, which is what clued my parents in to the fact that I would enjoy the boxed set. I remember reading The Martian Chronicles in the open doorway of our barn’s hayloft, sitting there on those worn boards in a pool of westering sunlight. My bare feet were either crossed or dangling over the edge of the drop down to the ground a story below. This book transported me to Mars. It’s sad, wistful, poignant, and bursting with invention — truly among a great writer’s greatest works.

3. Something Wicked This Way Comes. In retrospect, this delightful book was a huge and direct influence on my Dragonfly. If you want to see how our styles and senses of the numinous are similar, there’s no better place to look than this slim book. It opened my eyes and made me, as a pre-teen or teen, think, “Yeah! These things I love to fear, these things I dream about — these could make a book!”

4. Zen in the Art of Writing. I found this slender volume in Kinokuniya Bookstore in Tokyo, and it’s probably the latest thing I’ve read by Bradbury (except for “The Scythe” in The October Country, which a friend insisted I read after I came to Pittsburgh; she literally sat me down in a chair and made me read the story from beginning to end. Yes, it’s a very good one!) But, back to Zen. I think this book is cobbled together largely (entirely?) from Bradbury’s forewords and introductions to some of his other books. I’m not sure. At any rate, it’s well worth reading if you’re a creative artist of any kind, or if you’re a fan of Bradbury’s, or if you’re a fan of books. The main connection to Zen is that he talks about bending the bow in traditional Japanese archery. Before ever setting an arrow onto the string, novices of kyuudou practice holding the bow and drawing back the string. They do this again and again, learning the tension of the wood, internalizing the feel of it. When, long afterward, they do start adding the arrow, they no longer have to think about the bow. So it is with writing. A writer writes and writes, so that eventually the “muscles” are there; the technique of putting thoughts effectively into words is an unconscious act, like breathing. At that point, when ideas (the arrows) come, the bow is ready for them. I love how Bradbury advises writers not to think so much when they write! But that’s true. Thinking gets in the way. When the real writing is pouring out, we’re not thinking at all.

In this book, Bradbury talks about a method he used that allowed him to generate so many stories on a regular basis. I’m paraphrasing here, but he said he would simply brainstorm lists of nouns that seemed interesting to him — things that triggered childhood associations, tickled fears or fancies — things that seemed they might have stories lurking somewhere within them. He would make a list such as: The Road. The Oak Tree. The Thunderstorm. The Old Man. The Basement . . . stuff like that. Then, when he set out to write a story, he would have no plot in mind, no characters, no idea whatsoever for how it was going to take shape. He would choose one of his nouns from his list and just start writing a description of it — not a story, just a description. After a page or two, a story would usually begin to insinuate itself into the words. Pretty soon, he would know what the story was and who the characters were and what was happening to them. He’d abandon the description and start writing the story.

I can honestly say that I used this technique once, and it worked like a charm. I started with one idea: The Barn. I had nothing beyond that, but I started writing a description of that place we played when we were kids. Just as Bradbury said, after a page or two of description, I found the story . . . or it found me. A ghost horse found me, and the story became “Star,” which Cricket accepted outright, with no requests for revision other than the usual line-edits. Cricket even reprinted this story last year, a good decade after its first appearance, and a new generation of readers thinks it’s a new story! What are the lines by The Rolling Stones? — “It is the evening of the day; / I sit and watch the children play, / Doin’ things we used to do / They think are new.” (I can also honestly say that I think I tried the method a second time, and I couldn’t get it to work. So it may not always yield a story, but I’ll bet it would more often than not.)

I believe the secret of this method is that the list of nouns comes from your subconscious, or your early-conscious (childhood) mind. (That reliance on childhood memories is a huge part of how I “move the camera” in the same way as Bradbury. I don’t think I’d have any material — or at least, it wouldn’t have life and fire — without my early childhood impressions.) When you reach into your magic treasure-box, you find the components of stories.

5. Did anyone use to watch Bradbury Theater on TV, which presented dramatized versions of some of his short stories? Ray would introduce each episode himself. I will never forget the story in which Peter O’Toole plays a roguish, playboy movie producer who has gone a little too far in a lifetime of ill-using women. In a woodland cottage at night, he has a run-in with the scariest banshee you’ll find anywhere.

6. In Zen, Bradbury shares the memory of fire balloons. He was a child some years before I was a child, and apparently in his childhood, people still sent up fire balloons on summer nights. These involved some kind of bag beneath which a lit candle was suspended. The hot air would make the contraption rise, and it would flicker and glow as it drifted higher and higher. Well, I’d all but forgotten this bit of Americana, but just a few days before Bradbury’s passing, I was at some friends’ house on a Saturday night, and we had a pleasant fire in the backyard beneath the maple trees. Someone said, “Look! There’s a fire balloon!” Sure enough, floating above the Pittsburgh neighborhood was a faery light, a silent, luminous emissary of early summer. We watched it until it rose so high it essentially became a star.

Who nowadays lights fire balloons? Who has even heard of them? I hadn’t, until I read Bradbury. Wouldn’t it be fun to think that that mysterious balloon I saw on a June night really wasn’t sent up by anyone living? What if, in neighborhoods all across America, all during the past week, those balloons have been rising around us, so quiet and small that the only people who’ve seen them are those out under the trees, watching for fireflies and shooting stars, gently talking and welcoming the summer? Maybe that winking candle was one tiny part of the light that came into the world with Ray, gone up now to take its part in the firmament. Who knows? It’s possible, as Midsummer’s Eve approaches!

I’m almost certainly forgetting something important that I wanted to write about, but those are my memories of how Ray Bradbury, the writer, has intersected my life and left it richer.

Does anyone else have a story to tell? When, where, or how did you encounter the amazing R.B.? No thought or impression is too small! Let’s celebrate and honor this giant who blessed us with his tales!

June

Posted on June 3, 2012 by fsdthreshold

Here are a couple facts:

1. This is my last brand-new month in the Uncanny City. I moved here last July, so this month, June, is the final month that I have not yet spent in Pittsburgh.

2. I remember 1992 as The Year Summer Vacation Went On All Year. I finished my time in the Overseas Volunteer Youth Ministry program that spring, and I spent a leisurely, happy time with my parents, relatives, and friends in the States, and I went back to Niigata in the fall, where I spent October and November studying like a maniac for the Japanese Language National Proficiency Test, Level 2, which I took and passed in December. Then I found a job with the Apple College of Language and Tourism, which marked a new chapter in my career. Yes, 1992 was a wonderful year.

THIS year, 2012 — twenty years later — is The First Year When Summer Vacation Never Came. I have come to this grim plain of life: the wretched waste traversed by most of the adult world. There is now no C.S. Lewis proclamation of the term’s being ended, the holidays’ having begun. There is no joy in Mudville. All my life to this point (except for the halcyon times from ages 0-4, when school itself was only an evil cloud beyond the horizon), I’ve lived with the school year. But now I have to watch my teacher friends throw down their gradebooks and race out the door, giggling madly. June is here, but it means only beautiful woods and tantalizingly rising temperatures. I see this unnatural schedule the work world lives by, and I do not like it. Not one little bit. It is an abomination, designed by those who have no sensitivity to the rhythms of the year. Be nice to me this summer. I’m eating very bitter fruit. I’m thinking very angry thoughts toward Adam and Eve for bringing this upon us.

Anyway, some pictures (taken today), and some stats:

Life Finds a Way

I discovered this ruined tower, whatever it once was, while taking a new road in my neighborhood the other day. I knew I had to come back and take pictures when the light was right. I tried on Saturday morning, but the sun was too close behind this ramshackle structure.

Trees Growing From the Roof

So I went out there again this evening about two hours before sunset, with the western light striking full on this building’s weathered face and warming its leafy crown. Whatever it was when people had to work there, it’s better now. These are glimpses of Heaven for me. Freedom and joy will come again. God’s design works, though we have to walk hard roads for a season. In the end, the storytellers will be telling stories — as we can now, in our limited gardens . . . but with unending celebration in the gardens to come.

Bricks and Vines

That which is eternal wins in the end. That which is imperishable triumphs over that which is perishable. That which is green and singing has a better end than the clay fired in the kiln, though both, as the photo shows, are together here and now.

Trees and Urban Ruins Along the South Shore of the Ohio River at Pittsburgh

But let’s turn to some cheery statistics:

I wrote 2,519 words in my green office (Frick Park, at that same roofed picnic table) on Saturday — the first writing of June!

During the month of May — are you ready for this? — I turned out 18,947 words! Soli Deo Gloria! For those who don’t have a clear handle on what word counts mean (quite understandable): in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), they shoot for writing a novel of 50,000 words. That’s a very small, lean, but viable novel. At 50,000, it’s not a novella, it’s a book on its own. To do that during NaNoWriMo, writers make a commitment to spewing that out in a month, usually working on the book every day. I, working 40 hours a week for the first time since 1993-5, was able (by grace) to produce almost 19,000 words, writing only on Saturdays and Sunday afternoons. And they’re good words — words that advance the novel well! That’s our bronze serpent on the pole. There is life to come, though we dwell daily with death. Those who love Story will be loving it still when all the meaningless wheels cease to turn.

Urban Ruins, Pittsburgh

Summer comes, no matter what else is happening. Summer comes. I suppose the lesson I must learn is that those who require summer find the way to snatch it out of the jaws of adulthood. Trees, by the way, grow on the roofs at Greenstar, too. And when I walk the muddy-or-dusty path to the trailer to clock in for the day, I always pause to peer in awe into the huge, cavernous storage house, where the light is murky and the roof is chinked. I count rats, because they are ambassadors of the Word over all, the pins anchoring the tent.

Summer is here, and it is magical. Let us seize it in the books we read. Let us snatch it in how we move and speak.

Does anyone have stories of summer’s arrival in your part of the world? Have you done anything wild to lay hold of the season? Do you have plans to do anything? Tell us, tell us!