A speculative mind

  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...

  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...

  So, I am getting ready to put out another book. It’s been a while. Eight years, in fact (doesn’t seem like that long) since my first book came out. This time I had it professionally edited, and now I can’t imagine what I was thinking with the first one. I had gone over it many, many times as had my wife and my friends. I thought it was about as error free as it could be. It was not. Feedback was eye-opening. So, this time I spent the money. I probably spent more money than I will make back from the sale of the book, but I don’t want to produce something to be embarrassed about. And who knows? Maybe I will sell enough books to make a profit. It could happen. So, getting my edits back from the editor meant I had tasks that now needed to be complete. Yeah, a whole lot of tasks. Getting the edits back meant now I had to get serious. First, I had to go through all those edits. Most of the time I accepted the editor’s suggestion, but it was not 100%, so I had to go through them one by...

  Having decided the next phase of my college would be at Idaho State University, I had to say goodbye to my friends and move to Pocatello. I coordinated this move with my parents. I got rid of stuff including my car as I didn’t fancy the idea of driving around in the snow in my Datsun 1200, and I could use the money. What I did not get rid of but couldn’t take with my I stored at my parent’s house (thank you, parents). Then my parents agreed to drive me the twelve-hour trip from Eugene to Pocatello (thank you again). My parents got a hotel room for themselves, but I would be staying at the track coach’s house along with the other incoming track and field refugees. My parent’s hotel was called Bidwell’s and it was just off campus. They noticed that the owners of the hotel also owned an adjacent building that had apartments that they rented out. They told me about it. We checked them out and decided to take one. I was able to get out of my coach’s house fairly quickly then, but my...

  I have a guilty pleasure. I have been reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman, and I am hooked. I read the first book a while back, and now I am up to book five. Okay, the premise may sound a little wild, but here goes. One night (or day, as this event happens all over the Earth at the same time, no matter what time of day or night) all roofs collapse. Any person who is under a roof of any kind gets smashed flatter than a pancake. Instantly. Anyone who is in a car, or a house, or a building, is dead. This leaves only a fraction of the human race left alive. Why has this happened? Aliens did it. Why did they do it? For entertainment. Carl, it seems, had gone outside in the middle of the night to rescue his ex-girlfriend’s cat (named Princess Donut). So now Carl and the cat found themselves in a subterranean labyrinth forced to participate in a game for the amusement of aliens. This game comes with nonplayer characters like orcs and goblins and dragons, but th...

  After two plus years of junior college, I had to decide where to go to continue my education. I was at a gray point in my life. I no longer considered myself a boy, but I didn’t really consider myself a man yet either. Some college done, but not complete. And what was my actual goal in life? What was I becoming? I needed to take the next step, but what was I going to step into? Track was very important to me. I had been accepted to the University of Oregon, but if I went there, I would be a small fish in a very big pond, as U of O had a nationally renowned track and field program. The coaching staff had not really gone out of their way to entice me to go there (no scholarship offer). A friend of mine had a connection with the new track coach at Idaho State University in Pocatello. The coach there (Jerry Quiller) was visiting my friend in Eugene and asked me if I would be willing to come to Pocatello and see the program. I thought it couldn’t hurt, so I said yes. We made arrange...

  Consider the Roman Empire, so vast and “eternal.” At least it would have seemed eternal to a Roman citizen living in it. At its height it stretched from Scotland to North Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean to Iraq. Imagine yourself as a Roman citizen living in the year 200 A.D. You would have considered the Roman Empire (your empire) to be something that would last forever. It had already lasted 600 years, and in fact it would continue on in one form or another for another 1200 years. It was all you had ever known. You would not be able to conceive of a day when the empire no longer existed. It was the world’s first superpower. It was militarily dominant. It exported its art, culture, and values to most of the known world. No one could remember the last time they ever lost a war. They even survived some incredibly bad emperors. I am talking: Nero, Domitian, Caligula, etc. These guys should not even have been allowed to run a tavern, let alone an empire. Yet even with these incompe...

  When I was a kid, my father was appointed as a justice to the state Court of Appeals. Two years later, he had to run for reelection. My father had earlier been elected a state legislator a few times, but this was the first time he would be running for state-wide office. To make matters more difficult, the former state Attorney General decided to run against my dad. Not only that but the former Attorney General had previously run for governor. Everybody in the state had heard of this guy’s name. No one (outside of our former county) had ever heard of my dad. This was going to be a difficult election for him to win. One of the strategies he decided on was to get out and meet people. This included visiting some African American churches in the Portland area. On one of those visits, I went with him. I was twelve years old. I was about as milk-white as a white boy can be, and my family was the epitome of middle-class milk-white. The places I had grown up had very few persons of colo...

  A number of years ago, our theater company had a proposal to do The Diary of Anne Frank. I was not wild about the idea myself. I felt it was depressing and everyone knows how it will end. What can I say, I like comedies. But the other board members felt it was a good idea, and I was not going to stand in the way. We had two casting calls, one for the adults and one for the two girls in the play (Anne and her sister Margot). I got cast as Otto Frank (Anne’s father). I went to the casting call for the girls just to observe. I walked in the room to a plethora of little girls. I had no idea that so many girls in our community wanted to play Anne Frank. I don’t even know how many girls there were, 40? 50? I thought it would be difficult to choose one. But when one girl named Madeline read for the part, I thought to myself, that’s her, that’s Anne. I was not involved in selecting the cast, but I was not alone in my opinion about Madeline. Everybody thought she was perfect. And I hav...

  I recently watched the film Hamnet and I had some thoughts. First, we should recognize that this is a work of fiction. The film was based on a novel by Maggie O’Farrell. Though the big life events are correctly placed (births, deaths, marriage) everything in between those events is speculative. There is very little we know about Shakespeare’s personal life. For example, it has been theorized that Shakespeare did some private tutoring to make ends meet. This is depicted in the film. But we have no direct evidence that he did so. So little is known about his life that people have speculated that the man from Stratford (Shakespeare) did not write the plays and sonnets at all. A variety of other authors have been proposed. Personally, I believe that the man from Stratford was the playwright. None of his contemporaries ever doubted that Shakespeare wrote the plays. There was no theory running around at the time that Shakespeare’s plays were written by somebody else. Those theories...

    Go Go back Go back to the time before Before you did it Before they did it Before it was done to you Before the toast fell on the floor Before the catastrophe Before the mistake Before time’s scars Before   Go Go back Redeem it Rework it Fix it Go back   No you cannot Go back Star Liner

  Sometimes an idea comes to me and then it just sort of sits there, mulling around my subconscious until I decide to write a story. Then I think, ‘hey, you know that idea I had? I wonder if would work for this?' One idea I had was when I was musing about eye color. I know that people with brown eyes have more pigmatic (yes, I made that word up) protection from the sun than blue eyes. They are less sensitive to bright lights. But I wondered if there was more to it. Did people with different colored eyes actually see colors differently? That seemed a stretch, but what if they did? Or, what if it wasn’t eye color, but what if there were genetic differences in cones in the retinas, or if there were genetic differences in the optic nerves that made the color you see as blue look green to me? How would we ever know if red to you looks like purple to me? What if different brains simply interpret colors differently from each other. The answer is, we can’t know. The only way to know woul...

    In the movie Moonfall , an alien entity knocks the Moon out of orbit   In John Scalzi’s When the Moon Hits Your Eye , the Moon is turned into a substance not unlike cheese.   In Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, the Moon explodes, literally on the first page.   In The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber, a new “planet” suddenly appears near the moon and starts consuming the Moon. Seriously, what does science fiction have against the Moon? What did it ever do to these writers? Was it shining too brightly while you were trying to sleep one night? Did something bad happen to you during a full moon? Were you on a drunken bender and the Moon was mocking you while you puked into a ditch? I guess after the Sun, the moon is the most dramatic thing in the sky at least when there is not some temporary celestial event going on like Aurorae, or meteors. So, if you want to make a big impact in your story, I suppose you could do some mischief to the biggest thing in the nigh...

                                                                                                                                               Art by Mollyroselee Way back in ancient times when I was in high school, I had a girlfriend. I lived in Eugene and she lived in a little community, about 10 miles away. Being as we were teenagers, finding places to “make-out” was high on our priorities. This was my first serious girlfriend and neither one of us were very experienced at having a relationship. Just to be clear, our make-out sessions did not advance to the ultimate step. But it was not easy to find a place to have some privacy. D...

  A few months ago I read the intelligent fantasy The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett and enjoyed it. Now I have finished A Drop of corruption which is the second book in the series. The narrator is Dinios (Din) Kol. He works for Ana Dolabra. Together they are the equivalent of a police detective unit. But this takes place in a very different world than ours. They work for the empire of Khanum. It is a powerful empire, but it is beset each year during the wet season with enormous creatures, called leviathans or titans, that wander ashore from the sea and destroy everything in their path. Or they did before gigantic sea walls were erected. These sea walls have to be maintained and armed and manned by the legion to keep the leviathans at bay. The blood of the leviathans is useful to produce drugs and augmentations to the people of Khanum that imbue them with specific powers. Some have heightened analytical abilities, some have increased sensory abilities, etc. Our narrator,...