Some Notes on the Trip to Santa Fe

I don't sleep well even at home - away from home at best I get microsleeps - and apparently 7000 feet is enough to bring on altitude sickness and even the professional archeologists, better-prepared than me for absorbing stuff about sites and dates and geology and genetics and weather modeling, were complaining happily that their heads hurt with all the new information acquisition going on at the conference, so it's not surprising I'm crashing now I'm home. But, being who I am, I had a notebook with me, so let's see if I can put together a blog post from the scribbles I made in it on the way home (taking notes during sessions is hopeless; I just open my eyes and ears, let everything flood in, and let my backbrain sort it all out).

If nothing else, this example of the kind of random jaggedy prose that gets put into authors' notebooks should cure you of any romantic notions you may have about them. Notebooks are for notes. Any poetry or greatness in them is accidental, I don't care if it's my notebook or Hemingway's (or even DWJ's, who surpasses Hemingway in all things).

Ahem.

I don't know whether it was the car or the road but I slowed down coasting downhill.

Santa Fe is uphill from Albuquerque. My ears never popped. (This is significant because normally flying is like being under psychic attack - the air pressure changes assault my ears as if they wielded ice picks. But not this time. Apparently my ear doctor's advice to snort Afrin before flights is good.)

Petroglyph National Monument is inside the city limits or at least the exits were. I never saw these exists on the way north when I might have taken advantage of them.

The mountains have scalloped irregular edges like a pressure-worked chert flake.

My feet cracked badly at the tendons. Dryness I presume.

The automatic faucets waste water in the convention center.

Everyone I met was pleasant and relaxed, and helpful. I have not heard a cross word here.

I have not seen as many brown faces as I would have expected. Nor kids!

The last two nights the room breathed hard, like a giant coffee maker.

I could not ID an accent.

Stan Lee was in charge of the parking lot I used the first night. (It was uncanny - same voice! A little shorter. I expected him to say "Excelsior!")

Scant birds. The ones in Santa Fe all seemed to be black and vaguely hawklike. Only thing I ID'd was a house sparrow.

The Gringo Market. (This was a joke a man on the city bus - a satisfyingly dark brown man - made about the tents in the plaza on Saturday, the Gringo Market as opposed to the Spanish Market.)

The people at the bus stop talking at length about a scheme by which the city could take some of the desperation out of homelessness and reduce crime committed in order to find a place to stay the winter. Schizophrenia not considered in the discussion. Also, how to deal with dryness cracks. Liquid Vitamin E extolled as the best.

The woman in the next seat as I wait in the airport is on her phone and I'm finding out far too much about her life. Never seems to leave any time for an answer. She says she's a wreck but she maintains a flat, almost monotonous tone.

Pick-ups pulled onto the shoulder at regular intervals all the way SF to ABQ this AM.

Flying over the desert you can see the drainages, more than you'd ever imagine there were, the textures on the ground, the parts between, the desert, like painted concrete just washed with color and the roads the cracks between the slabs. Fields agribusiness all squares and circles, half circles, pie charts, PacMan, green and dust in squares on the flat land, and the drainages black and furry between, reservoirs and ponds flat and in the light it can be hard to tell if they have water in them or not, whether the color is the dust color because of the light or because they're dry or because - and there was a reservoir like this - because the water is silty. You could see the water in the deep part the color of water and then it turned silty in one part and then you could tell where the beach was through it was the same color as the water; next to each other you could see the contrast in the textures.

Some other day when I can type coherently and at length I will discuss the cool things I saw at the conference. I did like Santa Fe, altitude sickness and all; and if you're going I recommend the Burro Alley Cafe. They don't salt their fries and they took excellent care of me when I stumbled in fighting a migraine the first day.

First Times at Fifty-two

Off to Santa Fe tomorrow morning. I'm not nervous, exactly, but it occurs to me that there's a number of things on this trip I'll be doing for the first time.

I've never been to Santa Fe.

I'll be renting a car at the airport - I've never done that. On previous trips when I was by myself, I either couldn't drive and had to arrange alternate transportation, or was going somewhere that alternate transportation was easier than renting a car and having to look after it for the duration.

I don't know anybody at my destination, not even to the extent of having professional contact.

It's not a professional convention, or a fan convention. It's a professional convention to which I'm going as a fan.

And I'm not obsessively making lists and double checking them and trying to get everything packed the night before. Damon is driving me to the airport, we don't leave until ten - if I forget something, I'll forget something, but I bet I don't.

I've been traveling since before I can remember. When did I hit "mellow?"

Is 52 the age when mellow kicks in?

It also pleases me that I have done things for the first time often enough before that when it's time to do new things again, I'm not stressed about it. I know how to do new things. It's not a big deal.

I hope I'm still doing new things when I'm 104. Because if I'm not, being 104 won't be any fun.

The laptop I have doesn't turn on reliably so I'm not bothering to take it, so I won't be logging on till I get home next Sunday, or the day after. See y'all around.

Or, if you happen to be in Santa Fe, track me down at the PaleoAmerican Odyssey Conference. Unless you're that damn stalker, of course. I'll be wearing either something with variations on cave art or a "save the woolly mammoth" t-shirt.

Because I'm going as a fan and there's no need to hide it.

Idea Garage Sale: You Know Who You Are

You have a character in your head. At least one. You know you do. Somebody you enjoy contemplating, putting into different situations, pairing him up with your favorites of fiction; picturing her in various situations. A daydream protagonist who is recognizably not you.

You haven't written about her - or you have, but they were awful Mary Sue stories - or you don't feel ownership of him because he's too closely based on (and may even still have the face and name of) somebody else's character or a real person - or she resembles you too much (see "Mary Sue" above) - or you're embarrassed to do anything formal with him because he started as your fantasy lover way back in seventh grade - or you keep recycling her in your avatars and RPG characters and what not, so she doesn't feel like a fictional character to you - or bits of him keep cropping up in the stuff you do write but he's never a suitable protagonist and anyway as a character he's a total failure, too idealized or too sketchy or too - something.

But this character is part of you and it behooves you to understand him.

So take her out and play with her in the privacy of your own head. What is it that makes this character live in your head so much? This character is mercurial by nature, but certain things are constant and defining. And you may think this is a pure fantasy too-good-to-be-true person, but I promise you, he has a few flaws that are as essential to him as his virtues. Maybe more so.

It may be that while you think of this character as an ideal, when you examine her honestly, you'll find that she is built around a core of dearly-treasured faults.

So. What is the worst thing you could do to this character?

How does that change him?

And how does she learn and change and grow and become as real to an audience as to you - and remain the essential character of which you are so fond?

Play with that.

You don't have to show what you get to anybody. You don't have to finish it. You don't have to ever put this character into a work you plan to publish. Just let them do their jobs and lead you to That Story you've been walking around without noticing. They're trying to tell you something important. You should listen.

I thought one of mine had died off. He's a charmer, and I dislike and distrust charming people, so it embarrassed me to have him around in my head at all. I more or less banished him. But he sneaked back in recently, with a small name change, and now he's laughing at me for taking so long to recognize him. But he's a lot older now, as am I; we've both learned a lot.

I knew the other was still around - I've been using her for RPG characters for the longest time, and she has quite a lot of flexibility for a woman who's all about repression and control of an interior life that would scorch the earth around her. It's tempting to get them together, but that would be a Romance novel and I don't do those; don't even like them, though I like love stories just fine.

And anyway, they're the same at the core; it's just that they guard the world from themselves with different exterior coping mechanisms. I don't know where we're going. I don't have to. Neither do you.

Take some time off and just chase after this person down the corridors of your mind. He'll take you where you want to go.

Yeah, the garage sale's a bit disorganized today. Some days are like that.

I am a Bad Citizen of the Consumer Society

How is it possible that anybody ever, anywhere, thought the "Capitol Collection" make-up was a good idea?

Who, exactly, wants to dress up as the decadent rich folks who tune in night after night to watch children locked in gladitorial combat?

All marketing connected with The Hunger Games disturbs the heck out of me. Which is fitting, but I have a hard time believing that the marketing folks who come up with it were going for that response. I think if I were Suzanne Collins I'd be lobbying to have all proceeds go to children's charities or something, to reduce the squick of having enabled it. But I suspect there's nuances I'm missing.

Eight Days

In eight days I leave for the Paeleoamerican Odyssey conference.

And I'm crashing hard every day.

And it would be good to get one more query out.

And that is all I have to say today.

Idea Garage Sale: A Life in the Woods

Current events having proved yet again this week that fiction writers are hampered, as real life is not, by the necessity of making the behavior of characters believable, let's haul out the good old Fortean Times for another excursion into the land of Free Fiction Ideas, that only need to be toned down and fleshed out a bit in order to use them.

I am on page 10 of issue 306 before I find it, but there it is, big as life and twice as natural: Father and son hermits are 'rescued.' A Vietnamese man went a little wonky after his home was bombed and his mother and two oldest sons killed in 1972. He dropped out of the North Vietnamese military, assaulted his wife, and then carried his one-yer-old son into the jungle. He came back a few days later and his neighbors lied to him, saying his wife and youngest son had died, and he returned to the jungle.

This summer, two local people went 25 miles into a forest in the Tay Tra district of Quang Ngai province, apparently in search of firewood. (This is puzzling to me in and of itself, but if everybody in Vietnam accepts it, who am I to quibble?) These firewood-gatherers did not see or speak to the pair themselves, but saw their tree house and reported it to authorities, presumably suspecting that anyone building houses in trees this far from anywhere was probably doing something illegal. The two men, 82 and 41 years old respectively, were "rescued," the old man being carried out on a stretcher to be treated for malnutrition. They wore bark loincloths and had a number of homemade tools, including an ax and a two-chord fiddle. In addition to hunting and trapping small game and farming a good variety of food crops, they made wooden statues, had saffron and citronella for spice, and cultivated luxuries like tobacco and tea. They had bamboo plumbing, a stockade of sharp stakes to deter predators, and a little copper bell used in religious rites.

This was not the first time they were ever discovered. Someone at some point appears to have given them the seeds for the saffron and citronella; and the youngest son, having been told about his father and older brother on his mother's deathbed, actually went looking for and found them twenty years ago; but could not persuade them to come out of the forest.

The son, Ho Van Lang, can apparently speak only a few words of his family's minority group's dialect, and the father no longer speaks at all. The father was placed in a medical center for treatment of malnutrition, and the son is living with his nephew, who says he doesn't want to eat or even drink water and is clearly looking to escape back to the familiar forest. And after forty years, this is not surprising.

Feral children always tickle the brain. In real life they challenge our collective human identity, as after a certain point they are never able to adjust to normal society or behave in ways we find fully, convincingly human. But Ho Van Lang is not a feral child. He was raised by another human, with almost all the necessary human environmental factors - technology, religion, a parent, work; even language, art, music, and luxuries. All he lacked was society. He had no peer group, no elders, no one younger to take care of; no one to love or trust, or compete with, or learn from, but his father, who apparently was unstable and capable of violence.

If his father had died of sickness or disease before the youngest son came looking for them, would he have chosen to go with his brother to explore the world outside, and found his place in it?

What exactly did his father tell him about the world?

It is easy to project fantasies into a life like that, and in order to make a satisfactory work of fiction you'd probably have to. If nothing else, his contact with the outside world would need to be at a younger, more flexible age, in order to render his interior states and behavior sufficiently familiar for the reader to identify with. The Robinsonade elements - homemade plumbing in a treehouse! - make it a particularly appealing framework on which to erect a coming-of-age rebellion story aimed at adolescent boys.

Which also makes it easy to turn into a pale imitation of Gary Paulsen's immortal Hatchet, or a silly macho fantasy of self-reliance, or something equally unsatisfactory. But with research and awareness, it could be a nuanced exploration of human development, too, without losing the Robinsonade.

You know what strikes me most strongly?

The neighbors. They were sufficiently afraid that the father'd hurt his wife and youngest son to lie to him about them; but they made no attempt to follow him and rescue the one-year-old. The father got the seeds he cultivated from somewhere. Society could have found them out and extracted the boy at either of those points. But they did not. Why not?

And what was the practical affect of the war in all this?

That's where I'd start. If it were me.

The Black Hole in the Center

Why hadn't they taken her, too? What was the point of making her, if they didn't want to see her, too? You didn't do an experiment, and then go off and never look at the result!

That's the crux of the alien/faery child trope. The interest of the story lies in the alien child's interaction with the familiar environment, which is the story of all our alienated selves; but the key to satisfactory resolution lies in the question, Why is the child not in her native environment?

Answer that well, and all other difficulties in telling the story become trivial and soluble. Don't answer that well, and no virtue the story has can overcome the gravitational pull of the black hole in the center.

It is possible the reader and characters won't know at the end of the story. But it is essential that the author do so.

I recommend that you not commit to the story till you know that. But you'll do what you have to do.