Alaska

I'm in Alaska now and enjoying it. I am struck by how vast the space is between people. There is no doubt it is beautiful and I wish I could hang out here longer but the winter! Can you imagine being trapped in a small cabin for an entire winter with no transportation? There are places here where that happens. It might make for good research, you know, people travling to a new world would not walk into one where there are millions of humans. I just don't think I could handle that. I'll leave that research up to speculation.

There are some other things that make for interesting additions to a story, the fact that it is always light here. Would a New World have sunset and sunrise? What does this do to our human rythms? Maybe she should have some kind of crisis where her rythms are off and she wants nothing more than to be back home where a day lasts 24 hours and has familiar things like night and light.

Since I'm on vacation most of my writing has been limited to this type of thought, nothing serious, or deep, or even just lots of words for later editing.

I see birds I need to photograph for you to see.

Perspective

My son was the one who spotted the beauty of putting his arm outside the frame and thereby adjusting the perspective of the photograph.

In the meantime I'm still reading this book on the Powhatan Indians and Pocahontas. I'm a slow reader. What strikes me most about this is the different perspective. She insists on calling John Smith Chawnzmit which would be how the Indians perceived his name and that Pocahontas only became famous because John Smith liked to exaggerate as was the custom of his time, though I have to say that custom lingers today, at least in my family, because my Aunt Laura (who I am named for) is infamous for her exaggeration. I love run on sentences. They're a lot like stream of consciousness.

Back to perspective. So this woman tells the Jamestown story from the view point of the Powhatans (no she isn't one) and I keep thinking that if I were to go to a fantasy world it would be different like this. You see what is familiar from outside the frame. It is as if an alien dropped into our world and we study him cautiously and yet without a great deal of fear for he is only one and we are many, maybe his technology is more advanced but that does not threaten us because we have hundreds of arrows and he has but one gun.

So the question is: Should my pioneer be captured so that she can learn about their world from their perspective (thus seeing Earthlings differently) or should she stay with her Earth group and struggle to survive?

Fantasy Government

I am reading a book about the Powhatan Indians that lived at the time of Jamestown. One of the interesting things I learned was that their government worked this way. You could only inherit the chiefdom through the mother's lineage but it was always the men who inherited. I'm thinking here's something unique enough to make for an interesting government in a fantasy world. You wouldn't even have to invent it. There it sits in the history books. Pocahontas would have never inherited her father's chiefdom even if every single one of her hundred and some odd siblings died. Her cousins would have because her father had two sisters. Even though one of the sons was to inherit the chiefdom. Also when Pocahontas's father died it was his brother that became the ruler, then the next brother, the next, until it was the sister's time. After she died it was her son's. If she died before her brothers then it went right to her son.

Helen Rountree explains this. Men always fought in wars and knew a lot about battle. So the brothers inherited first because they had battle experience. By the time women inherited they had learned enough from living through these wars to know what decisions to make.

For a professor type Dr. Rountree writes an interesting story.

Writing

There's an author whose blog I enjoy and she asks, what causes you to procrastinate? At the moment I can only say I've lost faith in myself. I used to write two hours a day. Now I don't write at all. Yet my mind is constantly turning over a story. Since the whole scaffolding incident (we've hired someone to finish it by the way) another story has presented itself to me. It's the back story to the one I've been writing.

I wonder about myself, whether other writers are like this, I wrote more profusely before I learned how to write and I completed my projects. I didn't start the back stories until after the first novel was finished. But this one fascinates me. A pioneer. I wanted more than anything to be Laura Ingalls Wilder and I don't mean as a writer, I wanted to live her youth. Later I wanted to be Grizzly Adams, Heidi, and finally I created this world in the Rocky Mountains that was wild and isolated. That was my dream. I only wanted to be rich enough to buy land and a home where no one else wanted to live.

The thing is when I got out there and realized what isolation meant, I was shaken. I didn't like it half as much as I thought I would. I wonder if I could recreate all those expectations and then how they failed to fulfill me like I thought they would. It would be a story of character development and I wonder if I can do that? You know those literary character stories are so hard to write. The story isn't really about me because the truth is my experiences didn't have anywhere near the depth that a story would need. I would have to research many different things which would be fun actually. Most of all I would have to believe in myself. A literary story? I've never even tried. It seems presumptuous to me. How could I write something like that?

Time Travel

If you could go back in time would you? Or would you chose to explore a new world?

Overwhelming Project

My husband and I took on a project that is to say the least overwhelming. Before we even considered this we spoke to other people who had resided their homes, the housewife at church, the computer geek at work, and some other acquaintances that like us are more familiar with indoor work than outdoor. They said it was easy. It never once occurred to either one of us that they have smaller homes.

Believe it or not this monster was at bargain basement price. It cost less to buy it at 9 years old than it cost when it was brand new and this was in 2001 as the bubble was expanding. It's comparable say to walking into a dealership when gas was $2 a gallon and saying I want a fuel efficient vehicle. He walks you past the Hummers with several clients checking them out to the back lot to where there are some mid-sized vehicles that get 40 mpg. You buy one, three years later the Hummers are gathering dust and your car is worth twice what you paid for it, but repairs! Everyone says, if you own that car you must be rich, oil change $85.

So we launched this project. At some point all I could think of was, what it must have been like to be a pioneer and you've traveled into hostile territory where there are all kinds of disasters from storms that leave you without food to grizzly bears eating you for their food. How must they have felt? Because this is just a project, our lives do not depend on it's success but I wonder how many times some pioneer thought to himself or herself, what have I done? What have I dragged my family into, they're going to die because of my choice. Even now I finally feel sympathy with my father for the choice he made that was a very bad one and nearly cost him his marriage etc. I can sympathize with him feeling trapped, he's made a choice to buy a pleasure resort in Tenn and discovered his business partner is an alcoholic, and it's sink or swim...etc. Our lives did depend on him making a success of that project and though we never went hungry we went wore hand-me-downs, and such.

Experiences like this build character, I remind myself of this as we struggle to build the scaffolding in 100 degree heat. It certainly created a new character in my novel, now I have a pioneer trapped by her choice, unable to say I want to go home, and now her three year old son might die. This is how he ended up with foster parents.

This isn't a historical novel, it's science fiction. There is a New World and space travel is so expensive (when it is available) that there is no returning to Earth.

The Raven by Poe

Last night my 12 year old daughter had a friend over to spend the night. I went downstairs at 10:30 pm to tell them it was time to go to bed and discovered that my 13 year old son was reading The Raven to them. The tv was not on and the game of Life had been finished. Who says today's children are addicted to electronic entertainment? I certainly didn't train my kids to be like this because I didn't even know we had Poe's Collected Works in the house.

My second favorite poem

My favorite is too long for a blog. I had to learn this in 7th grade and even though I don't care for dogs there is something about this poem that moves me every single time I read it.

Rags by Edmund Vance Cooke

We called him "Rags." He was just a cur,
But twice, on the Western Line,
That little old bunch of faithful fur
Had offered his life for mine.

And all that he got was bones and bread,
Or the leavings of soldier grub,
But he'd give his heart for a pat on the head,
Or a friendly tickle and rub.

And Rags got home with the regiment,
And then, in the breaking away --
Well, whether they stole him, or whether he went,
I am not prepared to say.

But we mustered out, some to beer and gruel,
And some to sherry and shad,
And I went back to the Sawbones School,
Where I was still an undergrad.

One day they took us budding MDs
To one of those institutes
Where they demonstrate every new disease
By means of bisected brutes.

They had one animal tacked and tied
And slit like a full-dressed fish,
With his vitals pumping away inside
As pleasant as one might wish.

I stopped to look like the rest, of course,
And the beast's eyes leveled mine;
His short tail thumped with a feeble force,
And he uttered a tender whine.

It was Rags, yes Rags! who was martyred there,
Who was quartered and crucified,
And he whined that whine which is doggish prayer
And he licked my hand -- and died.

And I was no better in part nor whole
Than the gang I was found among,
And his innocent blood was on the soul
Which he blessed with his dying tongue.

Well! I've seen men go to courageous death
In the air, on sea, on land!
But only a dog would spend his breath
In a kiss for his murderer's hand.

And if there's no heaven for love like that,
For such four-legged fealty -- well!
If I have any choice, I tell you flat,
I'll take my chance in hell.

When you love an animal, it changes who you are, how you see the world, and in the end makes you more human.

pictures of Writing Show

In the first picture on the left is Phaedra Hise. She was one of the original people who formed James River Writers back when it was just the "festival" in the fall, which became the first conference. The other people in the photographs are guests. I debated about putting a picture of Miss Verbose on the website. We had one person during Q&A who spent five full minutes ranting against poetry that was incomprehensible and how 20 years ago at UVA there was this poetry conference... you get the picture, well not visually. I didn't post her picture.