Category: My Fiction

Here are my own stories. Science fiction and fantasy mostly but other things may be added too.

Tempus Fugit – Part 4

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“McKenzie’s face paled and his eyes were wide.  He said, “Something must have happened at the end of the program.  It got us back to Earth alright but then some kind of power surge must have caused a tachyon overload and shot us back along the time axis.  I need to review the instrument data.  I can figure out a way to send a tachyon pulse in the opposite phase and throw us forward but I need to do some calculations to calibrate the size of the pulse.  This is an enormous time change.  It may take a few oscillations forwards and backwards to calibrate it perfectly to our present day.  So, it may take us a few days to get home.”  I calmed down considerably after hearing this and told McKenzie to take his time and not to get upset.  And he did seem calmer after I said this.

The seven wise men got to work and were buzzing away at the data from the drive instruments for several hours.  And over the course of those hours, I suddenly began to see this accident as an opportunity.  I asked the photographic expert to see what he could do to capture as much data on Earth at 55 million BC.  And when I said this, it was like a switch was snapped on him and he got incredibly excited realizing what a scientific opportunity was in front of him.  And McKenzie lost one of his assistants as this fellow worked feverishly to record everything he could before we left the distant past.

And within a day they had their program worked out.  They even found out what had gone wrong.  Apparently, the drive needed a slower de-ramping at the end of the cycle to completely rule out the overload we had experienced.  McKenzie even cavalierly said it had been a lucky break because now we could add time travel to the capabilities of his drive.  And I laughed seeing him so full of bravado.

We set the time voyage for the next “morning,” whatever that meant, and when the time was upon us, we put on a brave face but I could tell everyone was keyed up.  We strapped in and the drive snapped on.  All the familiar feeling happened and then after what felt like a slightly longer period it shut down.  We cranked back the cover off the viewing port and there was Earth.  And it was awful.  The oceans were gone.  The planet was a blasted airless rock like the Moon.

We were all hit hard.  I said to McKenzie, “What is this?”  He looked even more upset than before but stammered out, “I must have overshot by a billion years.  This must be Earth after the sun runs out of hydrogen and becomes unstable.  But it doesn’t seem possible I could have been off so badly.”  He said he would use the position of the stars to get a read on how far in the future we were.  I said, “Sure, go ahead.”  And I tried to sound casual but I was scared, plenty scared.

The boys got busy figuring out the date from star locations.  After a few hours McKenzie came back to me and said he had the date.  I asked him how far in the future we were and in a flat intonation he croaked out, “A thousand years.””

Tempus Fugit – Part 3

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“When we returned from Pluto we began the planning for the first interstellar trip.  We had about fifty stellar systems that had earthlike planets in what we measured to be the Goldilocks Zones around their stars.  We selected a red dwarf about fifty light years from earth; LHS 1140 whose second planet was believed to be a super-earth well within the habitable zone of its star.  We intended to take a lot of measurements of the planet and its neighborhood and then head straight home.

The crew would be me, McKenzie and a six-man science team that would take the measurements of the exoplanet and the surrounding system.  I also insisted that Bertram train one of his colleagues on his star drive in case any accident incapacitated him before the return.  He started laughing when I told him this, “Afraid I’ll jump ship and go native?”  I told him this was a dangerous mission and we had to have some redundancy for something as important as the astrogation.  He laughed again but he put together a manual for running his equipment and trained one of his “bosses” for the upcoming flight.

McKenzie set up the program for LHS1140 and the ship was equipped for a one-month voyage; oxygen, water, food, medicine.  I even brought some firearms, only because I realized where we were going there was no law in effect other than force.  I kept the locker those were in under lock with me the only one with a key or even knowledge of their existence.  I guess that was a little paranoid but you never know.

Came the morning of the trip everything had been inspected three times and the dashboard was all green lights.  We launched into the upper atmosphere and McKenzie set the program and a display counted down from sixty seconds.  When it reached zero, we felt the strange sensations of the drive for a few moments and then we felt normal again.  When we uncovered the viewing port there was a strange world far below us and the light of a red star was illuminating it.  The whole crew burst into spontaneous cheers.  You never saw seven nerds happier than these boys.  I thought they would never stop slapping each other on the back and jabbering about who had been most right about the planet’s appearance.  I have to admit I was pretty excited too.  That world was a mostly ocean planet with white clouds and what looked like island chains sprinkled across the equator.  There were even what looked like ice caps at the poles.  It was an amazing sight.

The boys spent the next week photographing and taking spectrograms of everything they could see.  I made a decision that for this first trip we would not enter the atmosphere of the planet.  Probably out of an exaggerated sense of caution I wanted to make sure that no microbes from this alien world found their way back to Earth.  The boys were bitterly disappointed but shrugged their shoulders and took it in stride.  After all, even a week flew by shockingly fast because of how busy all the observations and tests kept them.

Finally, I set the return hour for the morning of the eighth day.  McKenzie recalibrated his instruments by stellar observation and as the final minutes ticked off, we took our places and strapped in for the ritual.  Once again, the skin numbness and mental unease hit me but a few moments later it ceased and we cleared the viewing port to see Earth below us.  The rotation of the Earth had us facing the Eastern Hemisphere and so we could see Africa and Asia.  But something was screwed up.  India was floating off shore.  There was ocean between it and the Asian continent.  And when you looked at the whole world all of the land masses were “off.”

One of the scientists explained it to me, “That’s what Earth looked like 55 million years in the past.”  I looked at McKenzie and said, “I hope you brought your tools because we’re a long way from home.””

Tempus Fugit – Part 2

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“Devon, what was your genius’s name?” I asked.  “Bertram McKenzie.  He was originally from rural Maine and all the rest of his family were working class people who labored in the fishing and lumber industries.  But he had always had a mind that looked at things differently.  When he looked at a landscape of hills and trees his mind saw curves intersecting in geometric figures.  Everything was a jigsaw puzzle waiting for him to find the missing pieces.” said Devon.

I could see he had lost focus and was stewing over whatever loss he had suffered.  I said, “Had he made any progress on your FTL drive?”  Devon startled, then nodded, “Yes, yes, he had figured out a way to produce tachyons and use them to freeze time while a vessel moving at normal speed was translated across any distance in almost no time at all.  It had to do with a particular juxtaposition of different atomic environments adjacent to an electron flow.  Very thin layers of complementary metallic elements produced a surface against which time slipped by without aging what was enclosed in the field within the surface.

He had performed thousands of tests to perfect the environment needed.  He’d been sending out orders to a firm that did atom thickness vacuum metal vapor deposition work.  He’d built small test units with a number of crazy metallurgies.  Various platinum metals with layers of gold, tantalum, niobium and several other exotic elements sandwiched between in various geometric shapes.  Finally, he identified the perfect metallurgy.  There were even hollow spaces designed to allow cryogenic liquid hydrogen and helium to be pumped in.  With these as walls he built his miniature ship, about three feet long.  Inside he installed various generators to produce electric current and a control system to run the programs that his machines needed to perform.  It was fascinating.  The test program was to place the ship on a platform at the top of a cell tower and then when it disappeared, to immediately inspect a spot fifty miles away that lay in line with the rotation of the Earth from that spot.  The first fifty-three times the experiment was run absolutely nothing happened.  The ship stayed completely still.  But Bertram doggedly retrieved his test vessel and changed some of the parameters of the equipment or the program.  On the fifty fourth run the vessel disappeared.  It did not show up at the site it was meant to reach.  A careful inspection of the ground in between found it embedded in a tree about half a mile south of the expected line of motion.  The tree had been knocked down and the vessel was a flattened hunk of junk.  But it worked.  The concept had been proven.

Bertram’s budget was expanded asymptotically.  No expense was spared.  We got to work on a prototype that would be a craft one hundred feet long and capable of flight inside and outside of planetary atmosphere.  The work was done under the highest level of secrecy.  But somehow the secret leaked out.  Intelligence agencies around the world were buzzing with news that we had a star drive.  Washington was livid.  But what could they do?

Once the vessel was built and its first few trials to the Moon had been successfully run it was decided that the first exploratory mission would be to Pluto.  After all that was a good tune-up for a stellar mission.  I insisted on being aboard and since Bertram was game, I made sure he would be there too.  And after all, he might be needed for repairs.  The takeoff was a traditional aircraft ascent into the upper atmosphere, no gee force, no rapid climb.  When we reached a cruising height the field was built up and the program was activated.  It was the strangest feeling when the ship energized.  I could no longer hear the rush of the air against the outer skin of the vessel.  All I could hear was the hum of the drive.  But I also felt some strange sensory effects.  It was as if my skin became numb and I had a feeling of depression settle on my mind.  But when the drive shut off all the effects ceased.

When we uncovered the viewing window there was the strange heart-shaped vista of Tombaugh Regio visible on the surface of Pluto!  An unforgettable sight.  I sat there and stared for half an hour before I could believe it was true.  We had a star drive.  I congratulated Bertram and realized he hadn’t heard me.  He was doing some calibration measurements for the journey home and was singing lowly what sounded like the “Ride of the Valkyrie.”  When I floated closer to where he was sitting, I could make out the words, “Death to the Wabbit, Death to the Wabbit, Death to the Wabbit.”  He really was a strange man.  But he was also the greatest genius of all time.”

Tempus Fugit – Part 1

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He was the richest man in the world by quite a lot but he looked like he had seen a ghost.  I had interviewed him several times and had always gotten along better with him than the rest of the journalists around.  Maybe because I had treated him the same whether he was schmoozing the Democrats or the Republicans.  And that was because I found him interesting.  And that was because he actually did stuff that was interesting.  He made personal helicopters and robot servants and had invented a cure for baldness.  He was a Thomas Alva Edison for the 21st century and he was always surrounded by a bevvy of super models.  What wasn’t to like?

But when I showed up at his office for our appointment the man looked stricken.  His face was completely colorless and his eyes were blank.  I had been let into his office and he was sitting at his desk but he was looking past me at the wall behind me.  After an uncomfortable minute I said, “Devon, should I come back another time?”

His eyes slowly shifted to my face and he shook his head, “No, you’re here.  Let’s talk.  What do you want to talk about?”  I said, “Well, I guess I’d like to know what happened to you?  Was there a tragedy in your family or with your friends?”

He thought about that for a bit and said, “Yes, in a way there was.  A very sad story.  But I’ll have to tell you the whole thing for it to make sense.  Why don’t you sit down.”  He opened up a drawer and took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one up and said, “For the last ten years one of my government contracts has been a research project into a faster than light (FTL) space drive.  For five years we looked at all kinds of reasonable and crazy ideas and we found exactly nothing that was even remotely possible.  I hired every physicist that graduated from MIT or Cal-Tech and every single one of them came up with nothing.

But eventually I heard about a brilliant theoretician who was wasn’t working on space travel but instead had been investigating the fundamental basis of time.  He was attempting to find the tachyon, the basic particle underlying the phenomenon we call time.”

I said, “But Devon what would this research into time have to do with faster than light travel?”  His face showed a glimmer of life for the first time, “Because in the general theory of relativity it is assumed that time is just another dimension along with the three spatial dimensions.  If you can control time, you can control the speed at which the other dimensions are traversed.”

I nodded my head with a somewhat confused look on my face and he continued, “This time researcher was a very strange man.  He was in a sense, self-taught.  He had attended a state college as an undergraduate and done exceptional work in physics but he didn’t have the money to continue on as a graduate student so he dropped out and somehow found himself at work in my company as a laboratory technician.  I discovered that one of my labs was using an inordinate amount of electrical power and I traced it back to this fellow.  He was running his own experiments off-hours.  When I told his boss to fire him, he confessed that they’d be lost without him.  He had an astounding collection of skills with the advanced electronic and high energy equipment that was needed for this faster than light research so replacing him would take months and require hiring five or six separate technicians.  I relented but ordered that the pirate report to my office for “orientation.”  I wanted to meet this strange man.

And strange he was.  He was about thirty years old.  He was about six feet tall, brown curly hair and very thick glasses.  He had an intense expression as if he wanted to ask a question but didn’t know how to say it.  This sort of intrigued me so I tried to put him at his ease so that I could delve into his peculiar circumstances.  It turned out he was incredibly well versed in almost every aspect of general relativity and particle physics.  He had a theory about the speed of light and how it related to the “viscosity of time.”  He said that photons were laminar flow phenomena and what he was investigating was turbulent temporal flow.  I at first assumed he was completely crazy.  I later discovered I was wrong.”

Real and Compelling

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For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been smugly telling myself that because of the recent cold weather I wouldn’t have to cut the grass until June or July or something.  But recent walks through the fields revealed the absurdity of this notion.  There were a couple-a-three spots that I neglected to cut at the end of last growing season and those areas were horrendous.  And the rest of it was overgrown to a greater or lesser extent depending on whether those areas get more or less light.

So, when I heard that Saturday would be sunny in the morning and rainy in the afternoon, I resolved Friday night to get up early and cut it in the morning.  Well, of course I forgot all about that because as a special treat, Camera Girl was making pancakes and that along with a good cup of coffee is a holiday to me.  After all, pancakes and syrup are just plain carbohydrates with no redeeming quality other than human joy.  But at a quarter to eleven I realized that I’d forgotten the grass and ran outside and started doing the perimeter with the push mower.  And it was eighty degrees and I was sweating like a pig and my safety goggles (for mayfly prevention) were fogging up and I had to keep stopping to clear them with my handkerchief.  And then I did all the crummy areas that wouldn’t get done right by the sit-down mower and by then it was noon.  So, I had my lunch and then ran out and started around the yard trying to finish it before the rain came.  And I did, but just barely.  Then I took a shower and put on a movie I like watching whenever it’s on TCM; “A Man for All Seasons.”

And this movie always has the same effect on me.  It makes me serenely happy.  Not because the movie has a happy ending.  Because at the end Sir Thomas More is convicted of a crime based on perjured testimony by a former friend and in the final scene he has his head cut off.  And not because the story is exciting or the events change the course of history.  It’s not.  It’s a very small story.

It’s only because the acting and the dialog of the lead actor and several of the other cast members is remarkable.  The conversations between the lead actor (Paul Scofield) with his family, friends and even bitter enemies is altogether compelling.  The character displays a combination of intelligence, compassion, honesty, moral clarity and courage that I find inspirational.  Here is a man who is trapped between an egocentric and possibly unhinged absolute monarch and the toadies and sharks that act as his enablers, but remains faithful to his religious convictions.  As long as lawful means are employed, More is able to hold off a charge of treason.  But his most malevolent enemy (Thomas Cromwell, played ably by Leo McKern) finally employs perjury and this seals More’s fate.

But as interesting as the final duel at the trial is, the real payoff is More’s final meeting with his wife in the prison.  Seeing these two opposites, one a highly intellectual scholar and the other a woman who could not even read, is wonderfully moving.  As she scolds him for his failure to yield and he attempts to placate her we see the enormous affection and love between them and understand just how much he is sacrificing for his beliefs.

And as I was watching this familiar movie it occurred to me that here was a story that had none of the attributes that supposedly make a good piece of art.  It was backward-looking rather than forward.  It was basically a grievance story.  It lacked action, pacing or any of the other characteristics of a book or movie that makes them promising prospects.

What it did possess was human interest.  It showcased the noble characteristics of a man and allowed him to make a stand against the world.  So, in a sense, a book does not have to have the perfect plot and pacing.  What it needs are human beings who can make us believe they are real and make us care what happens to them.

And that way of writing a story seems clearer to me than the other ways of framing the process.  I think I’ll apply that same test to my own writing.  Seems about right.

Vitality and Right-Wing Literature

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I was listening to a podcast by NY Times token “conservative” Russ Douthat talking to conservative publisher Jonathan Keeperman.

Keeperman is a publisher for a press called Passage Publishing.  He has a lot of avant-garde friends like Curtis Yarvin and possibly some of the Silicon Valley folks like Peter Thiel.  He and Douthat talked (a lot) about how the Right is becoming a sort of counter-culture in the way that the Left did back in the 1960s and beyond.

It’s kind of interesting to hear them discuss this shift in the culture in general but one of the more interesting things that Douthat said was that up until now the Right hasn’t produced any real literature on its side of the cultural divide.  Then Keeperman made some offbeat suggestions saying things like Cormac McCarthy’s

“No Country for Old Men” is from the right.  I think specifically he said that the Coen Brother’s movie based on it is from the Right.  Now never in any imagining have I ever equated the Coen Brothers or their movies with anything right-wing.  So, I find this very strange.  And honestly, all the people associated with Curtis Yarvin have always struck me as hipsters.  And I have always ranked hipsters as the most left-leaning of all the various weirdos to be found in New York City.  So, none of this makes a lot of sense.

But I guess if someone interested in literature who wasn’t a Leftist wanted to talk to the New York Times about literature, he would talk to Russ Douthat and try to find some middle ground where they could both make believe that Douthat wasn’t a total leftist.

I was interested to read that Keeperman has published illustrated editions of H P Lovecraft and Robert E Howard and that leads me to think that maybe he’s not a leftist.  The Left despises both of those old authors and would never publish their works under any circumstance.  So, I need to find out a lot more about Keeperman and his press.  It could be interesting.

But he said one interesting thing about the current state of right-wing literature.  He said that the problem with most of it is that it’s mostly just grievance based.  It exists to rail against and blame the leftist society we currently live in and therefore loses the chance to be “vital.”  Essentially, it’s existence is only as a protest against the status quo and therefore only has a negative presence.

And that interested me.  Because my book is in a real way, exactly that.  It is a war being fought against the status quo.  And so, I have to look at what I wrote and see if his criticism of this kind of story is a legitimate case against the value of the story I have written.  In order to do that I will have to look at what gives “vitality” and entertainment value to a story.

Of course, all things are relative and being objective, especially about something I myself wrote is fraught with peril.  Probably the only way to know for sure is to attempt to get it published and see what results.  But it has given me pause and I will think long and hard to see if I think there are any aspects of the story that lack “vitality.”  Whatever that is.  Boy when it rains it pours.

Curses!  Foiled Again!

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Ah, the whiplash sting of rejection.  My manuscript has been rejected by Ark Press (see bold text below).

 

Thank you for submitting to Ark Press.

The Ark editorial team has reviewed your work and given it careful consideration. We appreciate the opportunity to review your treatment and manuscript, however, The Sniper isn’t right for us.

We would, however, love to see another project from you. The writing was quite good and the story kept us engaged. Please do keep us in mind in the future

Best of luck with your writing,

 

If I were a drinking man I’d probably go on a two-week bender and drown my sorrow in 180 proof rum.  But the show must go on!  I will gather up the jagged shards of my dreams and limp off stage to nurse my wounded pride and super-glue my shattered dreams of literary glory back together somehow.

I told Camera Girl of this crushing defeat.  She told me to suck it up and stop whining.  Not the sympathetic shoulder I was hoping for.  In another age maybe I would have run off and joined the French Foreign Legion but I don’t think they allow enough free time for macrophotography and right-wing punditry in the Legion.  Vive la France!

Well, it wasn’t all bad.  They did say the writing was pretty good.  I mean, maybe they were just saying that to soften the blow but I’ll take a positive spin on that and continue to work on finishing the book and then either get it published or self-publish it on Amazon.

Honestly, I was very glad that they got back to me.  And I liked the polite and professional remarks they sent.  I think a lot of publishers don’t even bother to send rejection letters anymore.  So, an honest rejection is actually kind of comforting.  But still, there is a disappointment when you don’t win the prize.  But we know that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.  At least that’s what that crazy atheist said back a hundred and some odd years ago.  And he should know because he went crazy and died!

So, the show must go on and all sadness and chagrin must be pushed aside and efforts must be redoubled.  I intend to memorize a hundred new adjectives every week, take up MMA fighting and try my luck at swordfishing to increase my relatability with the reading audience.  After all Hemingway did some of that stuff and he was very relatable.  I wonder how good Camera Girl is at MMA fighting?  She’s pretty strong and agile so maybe she would be a good sparring partner.  But she is kinda mean and I can’t afford to be injured too badly before I get into the octagon with my real opponents.  Maybe she’ll agree to fighting me blindfolded and with one arm tied behind her back.  That seems reasonable.  But just to be sure, maybe I’ll also tie her ankles together.  Yeah, that would be good.  I could definitely take her then.  Alright, I love it when a plan comes together.

Learning from a Harsh Mistress

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Today was a good day on the novel.  I figured out a plot device to externalize the main character’s decision making.  I’m going to have one or more conversations between him and the AI.  Now this may sound like a faddish decision because of all the AI-associated jibber jabber we hear about lately.  But actually, I can think of a very famous usage of AI friendship in classic science fiction.

In Robert Heinlein’s novel, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” the human protagonist is friend to and conspiracy partner with a self-aware computer named Mike.  The conversations between them are a good chunk of the story and critical to the plot at many points.  Now I don’t need anything that extensive for my plot device but I need a sounding board for my character’s decision making.  I can turn a soliloquy into a dialog and that works better for the dramatic aspect of it.  And since the AI is “female” it provides a different emotional feeling to the talk.  It’s funny, I had added a scene where the protagonist is mediating an armed standoff between two military groups and without realizing it, I had decided that he would follow up by surrendering himself to the US government.  But once I did that, I realized that I had not foreshadowed this move anywhere in the story and no one would have expected it.

So, I decided I needed to build up some of his thought process in advance for the readers to see.  What I’m still working on is the reaction to his “capture.”  I’m thinking about something like a general strike with the Teamsters and other truck drivers shutting down the supply chains for everything and the country grinding to a halt.  I haven’t thought all of that out yet.  I need to up the ante and bring the book to an end on a high note but so far it doesn’t have enough drama and excitement.

Maybe I’ll introduce an external threat to provide a reason for unifying the splintered Americans.  Or maybe I’ll have the protagonist provide a stirring speech to the nation that will galvanize a movement to strip the federal government of its oppressive powers and reassert the freedoms in the Bill of Rights in all of their aspects.

And I have to do all of this without it seeming too much like a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” moment.  And that means I’ll actually have to figure out what practical changes would be made to the current state of the federal government.  Some of the things are easy.  I’ll abolish the FBI.  I’ll cancel the Patriot Act and the FISA Courts.  The CIA will have to be reformed so that it can’t touch American citizens at all.  I’m tempted to eliminate the IRS.  In many ways the second Trump administration seems to be stealing a lot of my thunder.  Maybe I should strike back by eliminating the Education department and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  No, I’ll be big about it and stay in my lane.

So today was a good day.

To Be or Not to Be a Barbarian

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Just when I think Leftists can’t get any more un-American they say, “Hold my soy latte” and show us just how miserably wretched they truly are.  Up here in New England one of the states (it doesn’t matter which one) is debating a bill to mandate 100% voting turnout for all elections.

Now I don’t know the details.  I don’t know how they’ll guarantee that the dying and the late-stage dementia patients are forced to vote.  I’m guessing if you don’t show up the ballot gets filled out for you by the Secretary of State.  I think they’re calling it the 100% Democracy Bill or something brilliant like that.

This sounds like a joke from our side; just a way to make fun of the leftist tendency to dictate behavior for “people’s own good” but this is actual legislation that’s currently under debate.  Actual politicians in this part of the country think this is consistent with the American constitution.  Well, all I can say is these people are insane.

But they’re also running the show up here.  The insanity is baked deep into everything they think and do.  They don’t realize how this looks to people on the outside.  This is so close to North Korea and Sadaam’s Iraq where “free elections” end up with the dear leaders garnishing >99% of the vote every single time.

Well, that’s enough about that.

I was thinking today about the definition of literary science fiction.  I guess it’s any science fiction that has enough character development and enough verisimilitude to the way real people act and talk and feel to convince “serious” literary critics that your story is literature and not entertainment.  I guess it has to be in some sense “real.”

Unfortunately, I understand that what it’s mostly become is racial and sexual grievance screeds very unconvincingly disguised as science fiction.  So outside of a specific population of people primarily dedicated to reading such stuff it’s not going to very interesting to most of the human race.

But putting this political sub-genre aside what is the difference between genre fiction like science fiction and fantasy and actual literary fiction?

Well, I think that’s still quite subjective but I get the point of some of the criticism of some genre fiction.  The story can be so stereotyped that the action feels cartoonish, the characters are one dimensional and the dialog is completely predictable.  I can think of some pulp stuff that seems that way now.  But by the same token, there are literary “masterpieces” that have long stretches of boring plot where nothing much happens.  And even the most widely hailed protagonists can have whole chapters where the story drags and the dialog is meh.

So, what’s the calculation?  Can a pulp story have 95% of the story composed of space opera and still be “literature” if the author gives the hero a scene full of heartbreaking humanity and emotional conflict?  Sure, we’re not expecting Conan the Barbarian to break into a Shakespearian soliloquy when one of his comrades is skewered by a neolithic monster.  But if you write a story that has an interesting plot surely there is no shame in trying to make, some of the characters at least, recognizably and honestly human.

Now, I’m not thinking about Hamlet showing up in any of my stories.  But Macbeth might as well be a medieval urban fantasy story.  It has witches and magic and ghosts.  Just because it’s in iambic pentameter and has “thou” and “thee” scattered around in it doesn’t make it any less a crime drama.  So, who’s to say that a genre novel can’t be legitimate literature?

Just something I was thinking about.

18MAR2025 – How the Week is Progressing

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What’s to say today?  I guess the most interesting news event is Musk’s Space-X stepped in and brought the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station home after Boeing stranded them there six months ago.

There’s something ironic in this situation.  Boeing has been in the news for the last year because of defective aircraft that many have associated with DEI based hiring practices.  And now Space-X; an Elon Musk company that prides itself on merit-based hiring, steps in and solves a frightening situation with a can-do approach to space flight.  It’s like watching the two approaches to hiring compared face to face before our eyes.

I guess the other big story is that lousy judge trying to block the deportation of Central American gang-bangers by the Trump administration.  Afterward Trump said he should be impeached.  And so Chief Justice Roberts opens his big mouth and says that precedent doesn’t call for impeachment on a difference of opinion on a judge’s ruling.

As if that were what is going on.  These slimy leftist judges will stall and block everything the Trump administration wants to get done for the American people.  We will see this for the next four years.  If Roberts wants to be at all useful, he should expedite all requests by Trump’s administration to have these phony judges’ decisions reviewed by the Supreme Court and allow Trump to fix all these problems.  Of course, impeachment will never solve the problem.  We would need a supermajority in the Congress.  What we need is the Supreme Court to provide constitutional review of these awful decisions.

Today I finally got a handle on the impasse I’ve been wrestling with in finishing my book.  What I need is a good crisis/resolution to reach the endpoint.  So here is a situation where you know where you want to end up but there needs to be a struggle to make it feel satisfying.  But I don’t need another physical battle.  I need a popular revolt.  And I think I’ve figured out an angle.  I think I’ll withdraw the consent of the governed.  I’ll have a national guard unit revolt and then let it cascade across a state and then across the country.  Now I have to figure out the dramatic details.  I’ll have the national guard unit refuse to hand over my protagonist then when the Army wants to send in regulars, I’ll have the governors of the four states where Connors people are located close ranks with all of their national guard troops to deny the arrest.  And then I’ll let it swell from there.  That seems pretty good.  After that I’ll let the newly appointed president convene a Constitutional Convention to begin cleaning up the mess that the Deep State has caused.  And that will give me a nice breakpoint to allow my protagonist to be pardoned by the president.  And more than pardoned, exonerated.  And then I can allow him to ride off into the sunset which is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

So that’s what I was doing today.  Thursday will be a long day when I’ll be working on stuff I hate.  But that’s life.  I have one of the grandsons coming over Saturday.  That should be fun.  Apparently, he’s voted for spaghetti and meatballs and mint chocolate chip ice cream.  So, I’d better do some extra time on the rowing machine this week.  But maybe I’ll burn some of that off with a baseball catch.  I hope my shoulder is still functional after a winter of chopping ice.  I wonder what movie he wants to watch?  I hope it’s “The Return of the King.”  I haven’t seen that one in a while.  I think the “Ride of the Rohirrim” is about due.

Well, that should be enough for now.