A speculative mind

The only formal theatre training I ever had was in a high school drama class. I was a shy, unconfident, insecure kid. The thought of standing up in front of a class and speaking made me physically ill. I never would have signed up for this class if it weren’t for the fact that two of my friends were doing it. I had been in a couple of school plays in grade school and I liked those experiences. But a drama class, as I was to learn, was very different. About 90% of the class was improvisation: you are thrown into a situation, and you have to figure out how to get through it. The teacher was very good at his craft and later went on to found his own theatre company. But he put us through our paces. I was nowhere near my comfort zone. When you are an insecure kid, the last thing you want is to look foolish in front of the class. Being thrown into an improv situation with no idea how to get through it, made for plenty of opportunities for looking foolish. In addition to improv training, we s...

  This book is about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. That being said, except for a few anecdotes, you don’t actually get to the earthquake until you are halfway through the book. That is not a bad thing. I can imagine that some people might be put off by the discussion of Geology and plate tectonics, and history. But I was not. If you are going to talk about the most destructive earthquake that ever hit the United States, I for one, would like to know how it happened, and what came before it, and what came before that. It was not the biggest earthquake ever to hit the United States, but it was the most destructive, especially when you include the fire, which was the direct result of the earthquake. Winchester starts by taking us on a personal journey he made when he decided to traverse the entirety of the North American tectonic Plate from the eastern edge in the middle of Iceland to the western edge in California. Along the way he stops in at sites of famous earthquakes incl...

  When I am writing science fiction, sometimes I have to do research to make sure what I am talking about makes sense scientifically. With fantasy, you can pretty much make up any rules you want as long as they are consistent. With science fiction, you should be grounded in the real world as much as you can be. It is about getting the facts right. You should follow the laws of physics. Or, if you are going to break one (it can only be one) there has to be a logical reason for breaking it. It has to be scientifically plausible. My soon-to-be released Novella The Methane Sea takes place on a planet with methane ice (solid) and methane lakes (liquid), and methane in the atmosphere (gas). I had to look up the freezing point, melting point and boiling point of methane (at something like standard pressure). Even though I didn’t talk about those values in the story, I do talk about temperature changes, and the methane does change from one state to another, so I had to know what those v...

  Once upon a time I was going to become a teacher. I did all the training and earned a teaching certificate, but other than some stints as a substitute teacher, I did not use it. I had a hard time getting a full-time job, and by the time my certificate had expired, I had moved on to other things. Every teacher has undergone the transition from student to teacher. I did my student teaching at Highland High School in Pocatello Idaho. All in all, not a bad school to be doing your student teaching. I remember that I was not much older than the kids I was teaching, but to them, it was like I was from another planet. I was an adult. I was “Mister Branchfield.” I had never heard myself referred to as that. I had to stop myself from laughing the first few times I heard it. It’s like somebody was joking, only they weren’t joking. I was going to be forever Mr. Branchfield from that point on. Teachers remember what it was like to be sitting in the students’ shoes, but I doubt students ev...

  I can remember when the transistor radio was the coolest tech device on the planet. I did not know what a transistor was. I just knew that I could have a radio that I could carry along with me. Prior to the transistor, radios, TVs, and computers had vacuum tubes. They were appliances that were large and had to be plugged into the wall. When you turned the device on, you had to wait a minute for the tubes to warm up. If you looked into the ventilation slits you could actually see the glow from the filaments in the vacuum tubes as they warmed up, exactly like the filaments in a light bulb, except they took longer to start glowing. When the radio or TV had been on for a while you could feel the heat coming off it. You could even see the heat shimmer. But the main problem for the old tube radios was that they were fixed in place. The new transistor radios encapsulated a new word “portable.” The old devices were heavy and produced a lot of heat, a lot of waste heat. That is wasted e...

  I had a good experience last week at the Willamette Writers meeting in Newport. The guest speaker was Philip Margolin, a best-selling author who has written 30 books. He writes “legal thrillers’ not to be confused with mysteries. He said when he started out, the term legal thrillers did not really exist. If you had a lawyer taking on a murder case, the story was usually classified as a murder mystery. Authors like John Grisham (and himself) turned legal thrillers into its own genre. Two of his stories have made it on screen, The Last Innocent Man , and Gone but not Forgotten. He graduated with his law degree from NYU Law School. He said that he already had a job lined up when he graduated, that being, a law clerk for a justice on the Oregon Court of Appeals. When I heard that, my ears perked up and I went, “I wonder . . .” The rest of his presentation was interesting. He went into private practice. He loved Perry Mason when he was growing up, but he said Perry Mason’s clients...