Tag: My Fiction

Grammata-Euphoria

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All this Charlie Kirk media madness and the manhunt have depressed the hell out of me.  We live in a madhouse surrounded by awful, depraved people.  So I needed a break.  So I’m writing about something lighthearted instead.  My apologies.  I’m sure on Friday more horrible things will occur to drag me back into the madhouse.

Publishing a book.

Step two complete!  I sent off my manuscript to the one traditional publisher that I’m confident isn’t ideologically opposed to the political position of my protagonist.  Now I’ve got to write a “query letter” and send it out to a bunch of agents to see if any want to represent me.  And I have to make a list of publishers that will take submissions without agents.  Once I’ve done all that, if no one bites then I have to self-publish it and then I have to market it (advertise, announce it on social media, run a Kickstarter, hire a skywriter to put my message over Manhattan, and get a Superbowl commercial).

Well anyway, that will keep me busy for a while.  Based on all the advice for new writers that I’ve read, I intend to disseminate my story for free to all of my friends and try to get as much good word of mouth and favorable reviews as I can when it’s ready to launch.  After all, I don’t want hundreds or thousand of readers and dollars.  I need millions and billions!  Like the holy texts, my book should be in every home in the first and second world.  And dammit why not the third world too?  Surely, I can squeeze the little bit of hard currency that they would normally buy food with and divert it into my coffers.  Yes, yes.  That sounds right.

Well anyway Larry Correia started a monthlong Kickstarter for his new book on Ark Press and within about 24 hours he had $150,000 collected.  And what has he got that I haven’t got (beside thousands of devoted fans)?  Unfortunately, that is exactly what he has that I don’t.  Ah, the trials and tribulations of the unknown author.  There should be a “Tomb of the Unknown Author.”  It could be right past the colonnade of heroic sculptures of Homer, Moses and whoever wrote George Burns’ jokes.  It should have an eternal flame that’s a large hibachi using charcoal brickettes as fuel.  Some residue and aroma from a nice porterhouse steak would be fine and possibly a meat thermometer somewhere nearby.

You know I did learn that writing a story really is just for yourself.  I found parts of the work where I said, “Now that’s exactly how it should be.  Dammit, the writer nailed this perfectly.”  And of course, I know I’m talking to myself but it’s immensely satisfying when the words evoke exactly the emotion you’re reaching for.

Of course, the tricky part is knowing (or hoping) that the scene will elicit that same response from someone or better still, many someone-s who will let the world know just what a genius the author is.  I guess the definition of a great writer is when the whole world (mostly) is moved by what you write in the way you wanted them to feel.

Alright, that’s enough grammata-euphoria.  I’ll only report back when something interesting (publication or a book deal) is imminent.  Until then we can concentrate on the latest hideous atrocities on the streets of our cities and Trump’s latest poke in the eye to the Left and its minions.

Bogita!

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A good friend of the site kindly put me in touch with a published author this week and I had a very edifying and encouraging discussion.  He provided me with the kind of practical advice that I’ve been looking for.  And it’s not that his information differed from some of the things I’ve been reading but rather that he provided reinforcement for some of the things I had been leaning toward but agonizing about.  I will take a page from Camera Girl’s book and as she famously said (and as she claims Nike plagiarized her by saying), “Just do it!”

So, I spent a couple of hours doing a clean up of a copy of the manuscript that I want to send out to a medium sized publishing house that I know is friendly to folks of my political and cultural leanings.  Who knew that em-dashes are not welcome everywhere?  Well potato/puhtatah.  When in Rome do as the Romans do.  Tippecanoe and Tyler too, I guess.

Yes, I’m now on the manic climb of the manic/depressive roller coaster and all things are possible and everything is easy.  Soon I’ll be crashing down into the abyss of hopelessness and despair.  Well …, actually not.  There’s a medicine in actually finishing anything.  The whole “beginning, middle and end” thing is not just a concept.  It’s a part of human nature and there is salvation in typing that last word and hitting the period key. Bang!

So, tomorrow is work and maybe more work.  There are new systems at work that have to be learned and used.  And people to train and all kinds of boring and stupid things to do.  But even that doesn’t daunt me right now.  So, I’m looking ahead to sending the manuscript out in the next few days and then I’ll see if there are any agents that I might want to contact.  For that I’ll have to put together a query letter which sounds like a goofy thing.  It’s a kind of sales pitch to inspire the agent to want to handle your book in discussions with publishers.  I imagine Don Draper of Mad Men standing up at a blackboard pointing at a sketch of something inspirational and gesticulating wildly while saying incredibly persuasive things about my creative genius.

But from what I’ve heard it won’t be Don Draper because most agents, editors, publishers and probably everyone else in the publishing business are all women.  And probably not fun women like Camera Girl who has a great sense of humor (most of the time) but serious and really annoying women who say “they and them” instead of “she and her.”  Well, what can you do?  The world is made up of all kinds of folks and as that famous philosopher Rodney King once asked, “Why can’t we all just get along?”  So, I must do my best to struggle and survive regardless of my instincts and early training.  I will put on my best smile and put my best foot forward and step into the future.  But no matter what, there will be no girl-boss in “The Sniper.”  Bogey cannot be Bogita!

We Have to Change with Them

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I watched a YouTube video that described how a book that was struggling to sell a few hundred copies suddenly caught fire and ended up selling 1.5 million copies.  Well, the secret was that they gave away 150,000 copies of the book for free.  And then enough of those readers loved it that they got their friends excited enough to buy it.

Now I’ll have to say, on the face of it, this sounds insane.  I’m not even sure how you would go about giving away 150,000 copies of a book.  I guess you’d set the price to zero on Amazon and then e-mail 150,000 people to let them know they can have the book free that week or something.  But where do you even get an e-mail list with 150,000 science fiction fans?  But then again, I have read a lot in the last few weeks about how even traditionally published books mostly only sell a few hundred copies altogether.  That can’t be considered success, can it?

This has really got me thinking about how limited my little world of friends and family is in the larger scheme of things.  Even on the web I only communicate with a few hundred or maybe a few thousand people at most.  I guess these proverbial “influencers” may have a reach that extends into the hundreds of thousands and possibly a few million people but I’m not sure how much this translates into marketability.  Of course, I don’t discount the youth market and how suggestible teenagers are.  But that’s not a market that I’m currently interested in.

But it was fun thinking about my book reaching millions of people.  Hordes of adoring fans lining up on the highways leading to Dunwich all with the single fixed idea of having me sign their personal copy of “The Sniper” so that it would become an heirloom that they could pass down to their children and their children’s children unto the eighth generation.

It kinda gets you, … right there.

Well, anyway, I definitely have a lot to think about in anticipation of actually publishing this magnum opus.  I still think I’ll look at traditional publishing first because that is the traditional thing.  And I am a traditional guy.  But it’s tempting to think of trying to break out into the big bold beautiful world out there and get as much feedback from the readers out there as I possibly can.  After all P.T. Barnum was successful because he knew how to catch the public’s attention.  Possibly a lurid cover that has little to do with the plot of the book may be part of how you attract the great unwashed.  Then again, covers cost money and maybe I’m better off spending that on a huge e-mail list of science fiction fans.

So, as you can tell I’m staring out into the abyss and finding it abysmal.  When I was a young fan of science fiction, I assumed that finding readers was not a problem.  I thought getting published was the trick.  Times change, priorities shift and we have to change with them.

Complicated and Annoying

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So, the great retreat has begun.  On Friday the pool guys showed up and closed it down for the season.  Of course there was some drama.  I had asked the guy in charge to tell his crew to patch three liner holes that had developed above the water line.  He warned me that one of them boded ill and meant I might soon need to install a new liner at a cost of gazillions of dollars.  I told him okay, but have them patch the holes anyway.  So of course, he didn’t tell them and so they had to go back to get more glue or something.

And Camera Girl’s house plants needed to come back inside soon.  So, I moved them into one of the decks in advance of dragging them up to the top floor.  This may sound trivial but some of these things are taller than me, awkwardly shaped for the stairs, covered with huge needle-sharp spines and incredibly heavy.  So, it’s always a ticklish chore.  One day I assume it will be the cause of my death.  What I should do is set up a temporary pulley system on the top balcony and let mechanical advantage do the heavy lifting.  But I’m too lazy to design it.  Maybe next year.

I also have a bunch of plants that I need to transplant outside.  Then it will be time to stow away all of the outdoor furniture and begin the winter-proofing of the exposed wood.  To be honest, I’ve never done a decent job of this but I’ve sworn a horrible oath to do it this year.  And then I have to winterize the lawn mowers.

And finally, the biggest chore I have to shore up about eighteen posts on the pool fence.  I’ve got a few kits and I’ll buy the rest but it will be a load off my mind to have that damn thing completely reinforced.  There are also two gates that need some work but those can wait.  A gate’s not much use if the fence around it is on the ground.

So, there’s plenty to do and things will be getting busy at work soon, so I’ll be stressed and agitated while I try to publish and market my brand-new book.  But that’s what life is all about; conflicting priorities and humans choosing priorities.  It’s what separates us from the Neanderthals and Denisovans.  We choose wisely.

I have a feeling I’ll be self-publishing the book.  I watched a video where the guy said that most trad-published books get an advance of only about $5,000 – $10,000 and since the publisher doesn’t market your book for you most of the work (other than putting a cover on it) still has to be done by the author.  Well, if I’ve got to drum up the buyers myself, I might as well keep 70% of the profits instead of 10%.  And that way I have the discretion to use deceptive sales tactics like increasing and decreasing the sale price whenever it suits my devious and even diabolical plans.

Well, I need to start making a Gantt Chart of this publishing and marketing process.  It sounds complicated and annoying.  So right up my alley.  I wonder if Donald Trump has any time available in his schedule to market my book.  After all, I’ve been of invaluable help to him in his campaigns.  But how quickly people forget.

Writing’s Easy.  Selling is Hard.

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As I mentioned a day or two ago, I’ve finally finished my story about the sniper.  Of course, it still needs a spell check and another read through for errors and any “infelicities” of style that I may find.  But for the most part I’ve brought it to a close.

But now comes the really hard part.  Self-publishing versus traditional publishing.  And for me it’s especially difficult because the story is unacceptably “right wing” from the point of view of anyone in the traditional publishing industry except for one or two houses like Baen Books who cater to stories from our side of the great political divide.

I have just begun doing my research on some kind of order of operations to maximize my chances to publish the book so that the largest number of people will hear about it.  And my level of knowledge of the whole publishing process is pretty darn close to absolute zero.  I’ve only reached out to one guy I know of who writes in the same general universe with me but I think I’ll have to feel my way around by reading and watching content that is meant to educate the public about trad publishing vs. self-publishing and then get a better handle on what writers on the right generally do.

So far all I’ve read makes the whole process seem incredibly slow and painful and chock full of interactions with gatekeepers and unsympathetic literary agents who will never return any of my correspondence but will dismiss me as a talentless hack.

But maybe I’m completely mistaken and instead I’ll be embraced by the publishing world as the next Cormac McCarthy and be showered with accolades and surrounded by business agents fighting one another to get me to sign book and movie deals.  Within months I’ll be quoted by millions of readers who will flood my website with messages of delight about my brilliant writing and demands that I “take their crowdfunding money” for my next writing effort.  The millions of dollars will pile up in Camera Girl’s sewing closet (she likes cash) and I will become a recluse and start wearing outlandish clothes to reflect my new status as a global phenomenon.  I can hear it now.  The crowds chanting at DragonCon, “photog, photog, photog!”

Okay good.  Now I’ve got that out of my system.  I’ll go back to finding out whether the “hybrid” publishers I’ve read about that cater to right and libertarian authors are legit or really the infamous “vanity press” scam artists that take all your money and ship a few boxes of print-on-demand paperbacks and tell you to, “Go market the damn things yourself!”

Well, I wanted to try writing a book.  Now I’ve done it and I better find out how to get other people to know it exists without spending a million dollars doing it.  And that’s another thing.  Now that AI can draw covers maybe I can save some money by using it.  Of course, I understand that I’ll anger all of the artistic community that does book covers for a living.  Hmmm.  Maybe I should find out what it costs.  There are already so many people mad at me in the world, adding to that number sounds like a bad idea.  Well, we’ll see.

Does Fiction Publishing Still Exist?

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Selling intellectual property has changed radically in the last thirty years.  We used to buy books at a book store.  We bought music at a record shop.  And we rented or bought movies at a video store.  And then we bought all these at a Walmart or an electronics store (well, maybe not the books).

Now we stream movies and pay by the minute or the month and listen to music more or less for free and books are just this thing that exists on Amazon as a free service or a minor expense.  And the marketing and advertising of these works is some inexplicable algorithm that somehow links up people to the things that would appeal to them.

Now, the only way a musician can make any money is by live concerts that people pay to attend.  But no one would pay to attend a reading of a chapter of a book.  So maybe very soon books will cease to exist as a commodity.

And I guess that’s just the way it will be.  Now I’ve been trying to finish up a novel (and fixing the last ten percent of the book has been much harder than writing the first ninety percent).  And when I attempt to market it, I’ll try it on some traditional publishers and if that doesn’t work, I’ll probably self-publish it on Amazon.  I have noticed that lately some authors try to start a “go fund me” campaign to drum up the support for the book before it’s released.  But I’m not sure how that would work for a new author.

I guess pretty soon I’ll know as much about it as anyone else.  But isn’t it interesting that now that technology allows for avoiding all the obstacles that the “gatekeepers” of traditional publishing provided, that the real problem would be the “needle in a haystack” reality of many millions of self-published books thrown together in an endless slush pile with no way to stand out to a jaded reading public.

Well, they say that Americans have always made the best salesmen.  It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that self-promotion is the real talent behind entertainment.  Hollywood was successful because they could get millions of eyes on their product.  I’m sure the same applies to selling books, movies and music.  It’s just that it’s a field I never got involved in.  Engineering is product that has to be sold but I was always just the product.  I was never one of the sellers except when I would be sent out with the marketing team to convince the buyers that we knew what we were doing and could provide them with the services and hardware that they wanted.  Books on the other hand need fancy covers with somewhat-undressed women and weapons of war and starships to attract the buyer’s attention and get him to plunk down his electronic money.

I’ve seen some marketing going on by some of the people I follow on X and YouTube and it all feels very tiring but maybe that’s because at heart I’m a very lazy guy and hawking product is hard work (at least for me).

And maybe this is all a transitory situation and eventually some more efficient way to link readers with new books that match their tastes will appear among the AI gods.

Well, just some musings.

Maybe He Wasn’t Ready for His Own Show

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So, the First Selectman heard about Stephan Colbert losing his gig with the Late Show and somehow got the idea that maybe he could end up as a replacement on CBS.  He called me into his cave and said, “Listen Appetizer, I want you to get on the blower with Bill Paley and tell him I have a great idea for a late-night comedy show.  I’ll call it “Late Night Selections.”

I said, “Sir I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but William Paley died in 1990 at age 89.  And currently the parent company of CBS; Paramount Studios, is being acquired by another entertainment company Skydance Media and they have decided that the old-style late-night show is outdated and unprofitable.  They have not only not renewed Stephen Colbert’s contract; they have ended the whole Late Night production company.  They’ve effectively fired two hundred people in order to save $100 million.”

This outraged the First Selectman, “Who ever heard of anyone dying at 89.  Why I’m in excess of a trillion years old and I’ve never felt better in my life.  Sure, I eat healthy and stay away from fatty food like Mexicans and Italians but last time I saw Bill in 1948 he was the picture of health.  He was smoking a cigar, drinking a martini and pinching his secretary.  You don’t get much livelier than that!”

I interjected that notwithstanding his fond memories of Mr. Paley it was unfortunately true that new management was in place at the Tifanny Network and perhaps this was not the time for a new late-night show.  This got me nowhere and so yesterday I was assigned the task of putting together a stage for this dynamic new production.  As luck would have it, I read an ad for Colbert’s extra furniture going up for sale and picked it up for a song.  I think it was being sold hot by the disgruntled stage crew.

Well with a little alteration to allow the five hundred foot tall First Selectman to interact with human sized guests on the stage we had it up and running this morning in time to go through some try-outs.  As luck would have it Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren were all hoping to get some extra face time during Trump’s problems over the Epstein case so the First Selectman was able to book all three of them for his trial run.

Well, there were problems.  During the first segment Schiff began banging the drum about Donald Trump being a fascist.  Now the first Selectman used to be a close personal friend of Mussolini so he innocently said, “What’s wrong with being a fascist.”  Well, Schiff went ballistic and started going through his talking points about Trump assaulting women and being a felon and starting an insurrection and before you know it, he was calling the First Selectman a reactionary.  Well, this didn’t sit well with the First Selectman so he ate Schiff.  And when Pelosi and Warren saw this from the wings, they came running out screeching at a very high pitch.  As it happens the First Selectman is very sensitive to the particular frequency so in self-defense, he quieted them by eating them.

Well, the booking agency was very upset and said they couldn’t provide any more guests, except maybe AOC and Mamdani because nobody likes them anyway but the First Selectman said Puerto Rican and Middle Eastern food gave him the runs.  So, he’s given up on the whole show idea.  It’s all very sad.

Lost Histories

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Lots of fantasy and science fiction authors have used the rediscovered history theme.  I think maybe Robert Howard used it for Conan and maybe some of his other sword and sorcery stuff.  Tolkien sort of used it for the Lord of the Rings.  The Red Book of Westmarch is supposed to be the source from which he wrote his books.

So, the conceit is usually a scholar is searching through old manuscripts and suddenly finds stories that somehow no one has ever read before.  I guess maybe a case could be made that an existing manuscript might have a palimpsest layer that couldn’t previously be seen or read and now because of advances in sensing techniques it can.

But usually, this kind of text underneath text is limited to at most a few pages of written language.  But as anyone who has been a religious reader of this site knows, the Roman papyri from the ruins of Herculaneum are slowly and painfully being deciphered using a form of x-ray tomography.  These charred and unopenable papyrus scrolls are being read right through the other layers of charred plant material by an artificial intelligence that can scan the three-dimensional surface of the scroll in its rolled up and damaged condition.

Currently the progress is glacially slow.  And this is even though a million-dollar prize has been announced for the tech genius who can take the scans and turn it into text.  Currently the part of the library being examined contains the works of an obscure stoic philosopher which has extremely limited popular appeal.  But there have been claims made that the total library was an extensive collection of Graeco-Roman literature and history.

If this turns out to be true and the scanning technology becomes robust, there may be many lost masterpieces of ancient writing to be found.  Lost plays by Sophocles and histories of ancient peoples like the Etruscans.  Every classical scholar has a wish list of what would be wonderful to recover.

But what comes to my mind is what a perfect place to find some lost history with fantasy or science fiction elements.  Now exactly what they would be is something that will require careful thought.  As I said there have been a lot of stories somewhat in this vein.  The trick would be to allow this history to tie into the present day in some way.  There could be detailed information of something that’s been buried and could be retrieved.  Or maybe it’s something that’s hidden in plain sight and possibly still operating in the present day.

So, this is the vaguest of outlines and needs lots of thought but while I was out watering the vegetable patch and photographing half-grown preying mantids it occurred to me.  And since I never have an undocumented thought, lo and behold; here it is.  It occurs to me I’ve never written a horror story.  Mostly I just make fun of H.P. Lovecraft but a two-thousand-year-old Etruscan demon might be something I could get interested in.  And since we know next to nothing about the Etruscans, I could make up anything I wanted and no one could definitively call me out on any of it.  What could be lazier?

Yellowstone Summer – Part 2

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Patricia (Pat) Tollens’ first week in Boghadair had begun less than smoothly.  Her first encounter with her new supervisor could best be described as a train wreck.  Tanner Carrero had encountered her when she attempted to hike in the mountains.  But instead, he had to rescue her from a marauding grizzly bear that she had incited by leaving her bear transponder in her car.  Things had started poorly.  And then they got worse.

From her point of view Tanner was a hopeless throwback to the stone-age patriarchy that no longer existed in her world.  Back at UC Berkeley if he had yelled at her the way he did on that trail, she would have had him brought up on charges; verbal assault, hate speech, and any number of micro-aggressions.  In fact, he pretended that she was the one at fault.

And now she had to work for this caveman.  She called up her advisor at Berkeley and requested that a grievance be opened up against Carrero by the school.  But she was advised that Typhon Industries didn’t work that way.  In fact, they didn’t even have an HR department.  They had something called “Personnel” and basically, they handled payroll and insurance paperwork and handed complaints over to local management.  If she wanted to lodge a protest, she’d have to talk to Carrero’s manager.  When she attempted this, she found an even older, more sexist man than Carrero who told her to stop making trouble or she’d be sent back to California by the next plane.  And just to make things completely transparent she was cc’d on an e-mail from his boss to Carrero telling him what she had done and recommending he straighten her out right away or send her packing.  Pretty bad.

So, on her first day of work she showed up at the small frame building that housed the survey team.  There was an office list and she found Tanner’s name and walked down the corridor to that room and saw him setting at one of the desks and approached with the bleakest expression that her face could produce short of actually being caught by a grizzly bear.

Tanner was sitting working on a spreadsheet but caught sight of Pat as she approached his cubicle.  His expression turned to a mixture of anxiety and embarrassment.  He had never liked “supervising” people.  He was an “individual contributor” down to his boots.  There was nothing he hated more than “onboarding” employees.  And now he had a problem that threatened to drag him into a world of paperwork.  Terminating an intern sounded like a nightmare of paperwork and he would avoid it by almost any means possible.

Tanner had booked a conference room for her first day to allow her to come up quickly to speed on the project by working one-on-one with him.  He asked her to follow him to the conference room and they sat down opposite each other at a small conference table.

Tanner coughed nervously and started, “Ms. Tollens, we’ve started off badly but we can move past the problems we’ve had if we concentrate on the work at hand.  My boss is sort of upset.  He’s probably more upset with me than with you but we have to show him that we can work together efficiently and hit our deliverables on the schedule.  If you think we can work together then I’m going to meet you in the middle.  But if you feel that I’m as bad a person as you indicated in your grievance then we should end this today and not waste any more of your time or this company’s.”

He stopped talking and waited for her reply.  Pat had listened with interest to his words.  Apparently, he wasn’t the monster she had assumed.  He sounded almost reasonable; confused but almost reasonable.  She thought, “Maybe this won’t be horrible.”  She wanted badly to get Typhon Industries on her resume.  Everyone in the mining industry knew they were light-years ahead of the competition.  She had heard they weren’t a progressive company but this Carrero guy might be honestly trying to work with her.  She decided to give it a try.  She said, “I think we can work together.”

Tanner let out a sigh and managed a half smile, “Good.  I’d like to have you go over our field work manual today and we can break that up by having you begin to attend the project meetings so you can meet the team and become familiar with the way we work.  In the afternoon I’ll meet back here with you to go over a field study I have planned for tomorrow.    I’ll provide you with the itinerary and also the gear you’ll need.  We’ll take three other interns along to get them trained too.  They’ll be at the meeting today so you can get to know them too.  The four of you may find some benefit to spending some time together to help acclimate yourselves to a new locale together.”  Pat nodded her head and said, “That sounds good.  Is there a laptop I’ll be using?  I’d like to take notes on the manual and figure out your e-mail system and other onboarding tasks.”  He said, “Sure, it’s the one on that side of the table.  There’s a folder with the onboarding information, including initial passwords and other IS gobbledygook.”  She looked a little anxious when he used the term gobbledygook but she didn’t say anything.

And so, they began.  Maybe not a ball of fire, not “Astaire and Rogers” but no one had been brought up on charges and neither of them had raised their voices a decibel over cubicle normal.  A new beginning!

Yellowstone Summer – Part 1

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Tanner took a break from his mineral survey to drink some water and get out of the sun.  He was in the Beartooth Mountains and recent discoveries of rare earth metals had provided him with some summer employment to help him pay for his coursework in mining engineering and mineralogy at Yellowstone University.  He was a 23-year-old graduate student and between his gigs as a teaching assistant and driving a snow plow in the winters he kept himself almost fiscally solvent.  But this survey work was more what he wanted to be doing with his time.  Typhon Industries employed most of the population around the town of Boghadair and technically Tanner was already an employee with an equity account but he’d have to wait until his schooling was completed to get his hands on any of the credits accruing in that account.  So, this survey work meant the difference between hamburgers and pizza a couple of times a week or just cheap noodles night and day.

He was standing on a rocky slope that descended onto a flat highland covered with wildflowers.  There was a small lake and woman was at the water’s edge washing her face.  But what caught his attention was past the woman in the distance was a large grizzly bear and it was running directly toward the woman.  He approximated her distance from the bear as half a mile and his distance from her as a little more than a mile.  He screamed a profanity, dropped his water bottle and started running toward the woman as fast as his legs would carry him, screaming to her as his breathing would allow while running.  The bear was moving at about twenty-five miles an hour and Tanner might be doing ten but his repeated screams of, “Bear!” finally caught her attention and she looked around to see the bear and began to run directly away from it.  Unfortunately, this was not toward Tanner but at almost a right angle from him.

Tanner gave a cry of frustration at this unfortunate circumstance and tried to figure out how he could run to end up between the woman and the bear.  In his confusion he just ran after the woman.  When the bear was only a hundred yards from the woman it suddenly spasmed in mid-stride and tumbled to the ground.  Tanner was only slightly closer to the woman than the bear but luckily the bear’s receiver had finally registered the signal from his bear protection transponder.  The bear saw him running off at an angle and according to the algorithm in his controller ran off as fast as he could.  He wasn’t running directly away from the woman but pretty soon the diverging tracks would put Tanner between the bear and his former prey.

Pretty soon Tanner caught up to the still running woman and told her she was now safe.  It took her a few minutes to catch her breath and get over the terror she had experienced but when she seemed calmer, he starting yelling at her, “Lady what the hell are you doing in grizzly country without bear protection?  If I hadn’t seen that bear charging it would’ve gotten you!”

The young woman was shocked to hear him so angry, “I have bear protection.  It’s in my car.”  He was confused, Where’s your car?  She pointed east and said, “At the road.  I wanted to climb up the slope to see the lake.”  He was stunned, “That’s two miles away.  The transponder only has a range of a mile.  You would have been killed.”

She began to cry and Tanner started to notice that she was probably about his age and he felt guilty for yelling at her.  And he also noticed that she was very pretty and this seemed to make him feel even worse about yelling at her.  He said, “Look I’m sorry I yelled I guess I was just scared for you and I got too excited.  I’m sorry, okay?”

She pulled out a handkerchief and dried her eyes and nodded her head, “Okay, it’s alright.  I guess you did save my life.  Thank you very much.”  There was an awkward silence while both of them tried to figure how this meeting would end.  Finally, Tanner said, “Look I need to walk you to your car so you’ll be safe.  And from now on please carry the transponder wherever you go outside of town.  Are you staying in Boghadair?”

She nodded again, “Yes, I’m working on a mineral survey project and have to start work tomorrow.  I was just enjoying a little sightseeing before starting work.  Tanner’s brain clicked through all of this and he said, “Are you Pat Tollens?”  She said, “Yes, how did you know?”  He replied, “I’m Tanner Carrero.  You’re my summer intern.”