A speculative mind

  I enjoy playing board games, but I am not really a serious gamer in the modern sense of the word. Serious gamers have their own lore, a catalogue of titles ready in their brain and a community of like-minded folk. But when I was in college my roommate Vern turned me on to SPI war games. Prior to this, my experience with war games consists of Risk, Battleship, checkers, and chess. SPI war games were about five levels above Risk. SPI stands for Simulation Publications Inc. This company was in existence from 1969 to 1982. They produced a great variety of war games which usually consisted of a map (some of which were multiple pages) and chits that represented individual units. Some of the games were based on historical battles and so the chits represented real units that fought in that battle, for example, one chit might represent the second battalion of the 506 th regiment of the 101 st Airborne Division. Sometimes the chits represented even smaller units than that. There were dif...

  Audiences don’t realize how important they are to a play. It’s not just ticket sales. They are part of the show. As I write this, last night we had our dress rehearsal for the play we are about to put on: The Outsiders . After the rehearsal our director told us that even though we have been working at this for six weeks, we have not yet produced “theatre.” He said that tomorrow, after we do it in front of an audience, that will be theatre. He was correct. A play isn’t a play without an audience, just like a song isn’t a song without someone to hear it. A stage play is a symbiotic relationship between actors, crew and audience. The audience draws energy and emotions from the players. But also, the actors draw energy from the audience. Not just in a comedy when they can hear the laughter, not just at the end of the act when there is applause. The energy is there. It is palpable. The actors feed off it. A play performance is a tenuous thing. It only exists once at that particul...

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...