The Little Bird

The Wild brings me gifts.

Sometimes the gifts are great ones; a long, deep snow whitening the darkness of Winter, my Brother Orion striding across the skies.

Sometimes the gifts are small ones; bright green buds announcing Spring’s arrival, the first web of a spider awakening from a long winter nap.

Sometimes the gift is a small bird curious as to the boundaries of one world and another, human and not-human, inside and outside, wild and tame.

Given my druthers, give me The Wild. There the rules are clear, the rules are known. They are not subject to whimsy, to one or a few people’s whim, to last night’s bad piece of beef or undercooked potato.

I appreciate the tame warmth when The Wild is cold. I appreciate the tame light when The Wild is dark.

But I do not appreciate the undecisive future of the tame. There are many factors determining the path of The Wild and even the most extreme are known, recognized, and understood.

The tame’s path’s undecisiveness is uncalculable by all but the most advanced mathematics using tools few tame understand or can wield, effectively making The Wild the safer bet for natural longevity.

So if push comes to shove, look for me in The Wild. All are predator, all are prey, …

And all are welcome.

 

An Experiment in Writing – Part 23: Into the Mythic

Long, long ago…

 
(the video’s way down at the bottom of this post)

Transportation Devices
Consider stories as transportation devices. Fiction’s purpose is to take you out of your reality and put you into the story’s reality. Ever read something and lost track of time? I’ve had readers tell me they missed their bus stops, forgot to make dinner, stayed up all night reading, dreamt scenes, and more while reading my work.

Kudos to me, right?

The reason readers have those experiences is because the writing (not just mine. Read Charles Frazier or Craig Johnson or…) provides so rich, complete, and fulfilling an experience the story’s reality subsumes the reader’s normal reality.

Into the Mythic
One of the ways this transportation happens is because the author invites the reader “Into the Mythic,” meaning into the story’s reality, and there are many ways to do this.

In a land far, far away…

 
And here’s the thing about going Into the Mythic (did I mention “Mythic” means the mythic reality of the story?); you have to get the reader back out when the story’s finished.
Continue reading “An Experiment in Writing – Part 23: Into the Mythic”

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 5 – Men Who Stare At Goats (rewrite)

Aside from a new title, that is.

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 5 – Men Who Stare At Goats

 
Commander Tom Knox sat on one side of a large oak conference table in Naval Station New York’s Reagan Boardroom. His duffel and backpack were on the seat and floor beside him. An athletically thin, middle-aged woman with thick, flowing, hip-length blonde hair sat across from him in a sharp black suit with lapel pins, a service patch he didn’t recognize, and neither a name tag nor an obvious place for one on her suit jacket. Two younger men, both sandy-haired, both clean shaven, both dressed as she sans the lapel pin, sat on either side of her with their briefcases open and facing them on the table.

They stared into their open briefcases and she stared at him.

He stared back. “What department are you with again?”

She ignored the question. “The San Jacinto is equipped with the latest Aegis, that’s correct, isn’t it?”

He looked down at the highly polished table top for a moment. “What’s on the ship’s manifest?” His eyes caught Transport IDs on the bottom of both men’s cases – 717521 and 717522 – and kept moving.

The man on her left pulled a stapled, much handled report from his briefcase and slid across to Knox. It stopped right in front of him.

“You learn how to do that in school?”

The woman nodded at the paper without taking her eyes off him. “Is that the paper you submitted directly to the Joint Chiefs?”

He scanned his name under the title The Need for Confirmation of Objective Sans KeyHole, ALWYS, and Related Systems. “You reading other people’s mail again?”

“You subverted the Chain-of-Command on purpose?”

“You here to slap my hands?”

“Is your laptop available?”

He pulled it from his backpack. One of the woman’s aides reached across the table for it. “May I?”

“It’s government property. Go for it. For that matter, so am I. What do you want it for?”

The aide reached under the table to a network hub and ran a cable from the hub to the laptop. Tom could see the glare of the screen on the aide’s face as it came to life. The aide nodded at the woman and she nodded back without taking her eyes from Tom.

“You don’t blink much, do you, Miss…?”

“Are you familiar with MK-Ultra?”

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Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters

Hot Fun in the Summertime

(showing my age, here)

I loved Sly and the Family Stone. Many of their songs became personal anthems over many summers.

End of the Spring and here she comes back.
Hi, hi, hi, hi there.
Them Summer Days.

Just listening to it now (it’s short at 2m40s) fills me with scents and sounds and tastes. The sound of the ball hitting the strings and bouncing off the court playing tennis with Denny and George and Any and Mark. Ice cream at the Puritan and Greek subs at Sabo’s.

Wondering if Sarah would find another.

I understand the neural mechanisms of memory and why some memories are stronger than others.

To feel the same joys and pains. To remember a last, final kiss. To know before our lips parted there would not be another.

The scent of her room. The scent of her. Laughing. Holding. Planning great things which would never be.

She went to college somewhere in Maryland (I think). Andy to Tufts, George and Denny to UNH, Mark I have no idea where.

I applied to many schools, visited quite a few, was accepted at some. My PSATs and SATS put me in the 99th percentile. My grades put me near the bottom. Colleges and universities sent me congratulations on my scores, ignored me because of my grades.

And switching musical genres but not periods, they took off to find the footlights, I took off to find the skies.