Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

The word for the day is journal.

No, this isn’t one of those words that you have to learn to pass some standardized test. If you play any kind of adventure style games, you’re probably familiar with the term and its many uses already, but bear with me for a moment.

The humble journal is a gold mine, not only for historians and gamers, but for everyday people as well. It’s the cheapest form of therapy you’ll ever find, and the only known side effect of daily use is writer’s cramp. If you seriously OD on your journaling over a long period of time, I suppose carpal tunnel is a threat, but not likely.

Words have power. We know this instinctively, know that choosing the right word at the right time can make all the difference.

The act of physically writing a word has even more power than speaking one.

Although this is a principle of some fields of magic, I am not diverging into the wild wood right now.

You see, words convert our jumbled thoughts, feelings, and experiences into a concrete organized thought. They cause us to focus, to eliminate the extraneous, and to solidify what we think into a non-fluid form. Having to choose these words may well kick us off whatever fence we’ve been sitting on, because it forces us to really look at how we think and feel.

Writing the words is more than just recording a moment in your life, more even than just stimulating another area of your brain. Not that those factors aren’t important, it has been proven that physically writing your notes improves retention of the subject matter by more than twenty percent, which is kind of a big deal.

The bigger deal is that the journal isn’t for anyone but you.

So when you write those words, they are effectively a contract with yourself. No one will read them, at least not while you are alive. No one will judge your run on sentences, that comma splice, or the fact that you have never been able to accurately spell ‘separate’ . You don’t need to worry about another person’s feelings, or waste energy on that mask we all wear in public, the one that makes us appear ‘normal’.

You can, in short, figure out what you really think.

I know, that sounds simple. I assure you, however, that it isn’t always easy. Our worlds are full of noise, and all of it tells us what we should think, how we should feel, and all the myriad ways in which we suck and some product or procedure would make us suck just a little less. Bombarded with enough of this, it can be difficult to find what tiny part of the chaotic din is actually our own voice.

Failure to listen to our own voice, failure to act in line with how we really feel, that causes pain, frustration, avoidance, anger, and even depression.

The journal isn’t going to eliminate these things altogether. It isn’t snake oil that cures everything from thinning hair to cancer. It is just a tool, and one that as its name implies (Jour is French for day), should be used daily.

If you are not sure where to start, or what to say to yourself, there are a number of guided journaling resources available online, many of which are free. Which one is going to be most helpful to you depends entirely on where you are now, and where you want to go. Like every other journey, the important thing is to keep going.

Cheers,

Michelle

I’ve just spent the last three weeks teaching STEM classes to disadvantaged students in a summer program all throughout the Tulsa metro area. I have to say, it was equal parts incredibly awesome and incredibly sad.

For those that don’t know, STEM classes are Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathmatics based classes designed to give students a good basis in the technical fields and encourage them to pursue future classes or careers in the hard sciences. Since I volunteer for the Nature Center, the classes I teach are basic Biology, and revolve mainly around the actual birds, plants, and animals that are common to our area.

On the awesome side, most of the kids were very interested, willing to take risks answering even when they weren’t at all sure their guess was correct, and they were quite observant.

The bad side?

The vast majority of these students are profoundly ignorant of even the most basic science.

I had numerous fifth graders, in different schools, ask me when the beaver pelt I brought with me would “be alive again”.

Really.

Unfortunately, they were not talking about decomposition- where the creature’s bodily nutrients return to the soil and fed other living things. A disturbing number of them actually believed that the beaver hide I held, a skin that has been on display since their parents were in grade school, would return to life.

Nearly all the students believed that ducks and flamingoes were not birds. I never figured out what they thought these creatures were, if not birds. Frankly, I was afraid to ask.

According to the kids, deer use their antlers to hunt for meat. Bird eggs take an hour or two to hatch. Reptiles don’t breathe. You will get rabies from touching a snake skin, or the preserved hide of a deer. All bats are rabid and eat blood, but they were divided on whether bats were reptiles or not. Several children told me bats weren’t even real. They also informed me that you can’t touch frogs because they are poisonous, and that the Amazon is near Oklahoma City. They couldn’t identify even the common robin or cardinal, most had no idea what a mountain lion was, and nearly all thought the chupacabra was as real as a coyote.

I’m not making this up, nor am I making fun of these kids. They are intensely curious, and want desperately to know the world around them. It is not their fault that they have been starved for knowledge.

They need to spend time in the actual outdoors. Even just a few experiences camping and hiking with informed adults would help these kids a lot. For those that can’t get out to see the real thing, they need good quality books, realistic nature programs without all the ridiculous hype, and trips to zoos or museums.

Honestly, I don’t know what the whole answer is, but I do know it is a problem.

How can people value a world they know so little about? How will they know what is important, or how to conserve what we have if they don’t even recognize it?

Most troublingly, how can we expect them to value life if they do not realize that life is a fragile gift, here one moment and gone the next?

I’m still working on those answers, one child at a time.

Cheers,

Michelle

Backstory is one of those hot button topics. You know how you don’t want to mention politics around your uncle Joe, or religion to those nice young men in suits riding their bicycles through town? Well, you should probably avoid mentioning backstory in a room full of authors unless you really enjoy being stuck in the middle of a long and heated argument.

I can sum up the camps for you pretty quickly.

The first group of writers is of the opinion that backstory is, well, boring. They want to concentrate on the action, the fights, the invading aliens, or the current heart throb. To them, the character’s past is just deadwood that gets in the way of them moving their story forward.

Your second group of authors is more middle of the road. They figure nobody exists in a vacuum, so they put some kind of skeletal story in place to flesh out the character. Often, there are only one or two pivotal moments in a character’s history that come into play, events that explain why the characters hate each other, or whatever. For them, the backstory is usually the justification for current attitudes and behaviors.

Then there is the third group. For these authors, back story is what makes a character whole. A lot of the backstory they generate won’t ever end up on the printed page, but they need it to decide how their characters will behave, what they will think, and how they feel. I’ve known these folks to draw up astrological charts, or fake college transcripts for their characters. Though the reader may never know it, these writer’s know what vegetables their characters hate, their deepest fears, and their 2nd grade crush.

Personally, I fall somewhere between the second and third group. I can’t say I have ever even thought about what astrological sign my characters are, but then I barely pay attention to my own. (That might be because I’m a Taurus, so all the columns ever say is what a stubborn sensualist I am. Accurate, perhaps, but not all that informative.) How far I am willing to go depends on what kind of story I am writing.

Romance novels only allow about 80,000 words, so there isn’t all that much room for backstory. This is especially true if you are writing dark or paranormal romance, where in that time you need to build a believable world, develop two characters, and throw in a ton of danger and skin. Given those constraints, backstory almost has to be minimal.

Fantasy novels tend to run in the 120,000 word range, and those extra 40,000 words give you more room to explore the characters and the world you’ve designed. Naturally, being a long winded kind of person, I prefer the longer format.

The core of the issue I can’t resolve for you. It is true that a person’s past often informs and to some degree controls their future, but it is far from absolute. The thing about the past, for a character or a living person, is that it is written in stone. It doesn’t change, because it can’t. The future does not yet exist, so like the element of air it is impossible to pin down. The present, though, that is a liquid that does not take solid form until a person acts. Whatever their backstory, they are free in that moment to make any available choice.

At least living humans are. Characters are stuck with whatever foolish course of action their author chose for them.

Cheers,

Michelle

The player piano was once the mechanized entertainment wonder of the world. Despite the fact that it had neither strobe lights, nor a disco ball, and that it cost a small fortune in the money of the time, everyone wanted a player piano.

Modern people probably wonder why they even bothered. After all, the thing could only play the delicate paper reels you’d bought for it, and each boxed song was larger than a waiting wand at Olivander’s. Plus the machine itself weighed…well…a lot.

The MP3 player is an improvement, don’t get me wrong. For one thing, it is far easier to carry around. Then of course, there is the huge variety of music available, and the ease of finding and ordering new music. And the cost. We mustn’t forget the cost.

There is something deeply elegant about the player piano, though.

Like most people, you won’t know how very cool they are if all you see is the surface.

Seventeen of the engineering marvels, most in advanced stages of disrepair, ended up abandoned in a storage facility belonging to a friend of ours. Fortunately, he didn’t have the heart to simply burn the remains, so we’ve been slowly dismantling the worst of them and salvaging what can be salvaged.

For one thing, all the keys are covered in thin sheaths of actual ivory harvested well before 1926. While I wholeheartedly embrace the ban on trading in ivory, salvaging this to repair antiques is very useful. Since each batch comes with the serial number of the piano it was taken from, plus photos, its origin as salvaged material can be easily proved.

While I find the ivory to be tragically beautiful, it is the interior workings of the pianos that are so amazing. Hand carved wooden hammers, clad in dense sheaths of felted wool once struck the strings within. Most are powered pneumatically, with a bellows motor powered by air forced through it by the person pumping the foot pedals. A few sport intricate clockwork motors that translate the same foot action into mechanical movement, and look like something out of a steam punk fantasy.

Each individual key requires one of those hand carved hammers, several specially made leather washers, and yards of intricately arranged articulated wood to produce a single note.

It is a wonder of engineering, and even to my nature preferring eyes, quite beautiful.

Then, there are the unexpected treasures that lurk within. We’ve found a lot of dust, of course, and leaves. Abandoned mouse nests, ancient mud dauber nests, and the glistening remains of long dead beetles. We’ve also found perfectly preserved mummified mice, one in an improbable upright position, with each impossibly delicate bone in its tiny paws preserved. A lone milky blue-white marble, undoubtedly the possession of some long ago unwilling piano student, had lodged itself inside one decaying hulk, while we found a lovely 1926 penny laying amid the strings in another.

So far, only three have given up their secrets. I can’t wait to see what the others hold.

Cheers,

Michelle

Value is a very funny thing.

We love auctions and estate sales, partly because we love all the interesting and quirky things that people have collected over their lives, but also because we love a good bargain. Part of the fun of auctions is that no two people see the same thing as a ‘bargain’.

Box lots are often the most interesting.

The boxes are arranged in great long rows, interspersed with the occasional small plant stand or vacuum cleaner. You can stroll up and down the aisles before the sale starts and peek into boxes, decided what you feel like bidding on, but only a few take advantage of that.

Dishes and glassware may be jumbled up with the squares from an unfinished quilt in one box, while the next one is loaded with all the assorted screws that the builder of the family always meant to sort out, and never did. Common boxes are stuffed with things like romance novels, Tupperware, and old trophies.

My favorites, naturally enough, are the books.

Not the romance novels, although I have read my share, but the old ones. The cool old textbooks from the late 1940’s or the cooking guides from the 20’s are always great finds, but once in a while, you find something truly spectacular.

And on your worst auction days, you miss that spectacular box.

This last auction was one of those days. Nearly a hundred degrees by the thermometer in my phone, in near-liquid air, standing in direct sunlight. They’d just started on this area of box lots, and I’d already bought a ‘clean up’, where they sell all the remaining stuff between two auction folks for ‘one money’ as they put it, for the princely sum of a dollar.

I hadn’t expected the next group of stuff to have so little interest, so they had ‘cleaned it up’ to another buyer while I was distracted by my new goodies.

For the rest of the auction, I kicked myself about the box of clearly antique books that I’d missed out on. I got some more good deals, but that loss annoyed me to no end.

Loading out, though, taught me something about value.

The man that bought that load poked through it, clearly too hot to really want to haul all his winnings away. Still feeling slightly jealous, I congratulated him on his old books. His response? “Take ‘em if you want ‘em, they ain’t no use to me.”

So I did.Quickly, before he changed his mind.

Getting them home, we discovered one was a very rare SIGNED book from 1880, entitled The Masque Torn Off, by T. DeWitt Talmadge, valued at over 175.00. Two more were early 1900’s accounts of the great San Francisco earthquake, valued at more than 50.00 each. There are still about thirty books from the same era I have yet to research.

The fact is, that man couldn’t see their value.To him they were dead weight to haul in the heat, and they probably wouldn't sell at the flea market he buys for.

Failure to see something’s worth does not mean it is without value, though. An open mind, and a willingness to see possibilities are often what you need to find the spectacular deal. Yeah, auctions are a metaphor for life. Go figure.

Cheers,

Michelle

Summertime brings a lot of things to a farm, but one of my favorite things is the giant piles of vine ripened tomatoes. I can eat them plain, dry them, turn them into salsa, and a ton of different tomato sauces pretty much until Summer drifts right into winter.

Rarely do I think much about the plant, though.

Which is weird, because I love herbs and alchemy, and tomatoes come from a truly remarkable family.

First off, tomatoes are closely related to deadly nightshade, which explains why the awesome fruit was not initially well-received. Pretty much everyone assumed that tomatoes were just as toxic, perhaps even more so. Hardly surprising, red is often a warning coloration in nature, and it is far more flamboyant than the yellow fruits common to most of the rest of the nightshade family.

In fact, it was so strongly believed to be toxic that a rash of attempted assassinations featured the fruit. The most famous of these attempted murders was on George Washington while he was president. Obviously, that attempt was completely unsuccessful, and in retrospect kind of entertaining, but at the time it was taken quite seriously.

And it should have been. Nightshade, tomato’s kissing cousin, has had a strange love-hate relationship with humanity. As with many other toxic substances, nightshade was once popular in beauty treatments, in particular one that led to ‘sparkling eyes’. A tincture made from nightshade and appropriately diluted would be dropped into the young woman’s eyes daily.

Sure, this is just as bad an idea as it sounds like. In reaction to the tincture, the girl’s pupils would dilate, widening to their fullest. Her eyes would also tear excessively, not to the point of sobbing, but to the point of shimmering. This ‘look’ was highly sought after in the middle ages, an ethereal waif-like look, with wide shining eyes, and girls paid dearly for it.

At its best, the tincture caused eye irritation, and due to the pupil dilation serious discomfort in daylight. If the tincture was too strong, actual and permanent blindness could result.

Of course, this is little different from any modern medicine.

Foxglove is the flower that provides the modern drug digitalis. In small doses it can control some heart issues. Too large a dose will stop the heart. One of the scariest to me lately is the blood thinning drug warfarin, which you may see advertised on any television channel. You may not remember that warfarin is also rat poison, which advertised that it killed rats and left them odorless. The odorless aspect resulted from the drug micro-perforating the rats’ intestines and allowing their thinned blood to drain out into the abdominal cavity. Blood loss like this encourages mummification, especially in a creature as small and streamlined as a rat.

To control life-threatening blood pressure issues this might not be such a bad plan. I have to say it seems like an exercise in idiocy to play with known poisons just to possibly get the attention of some guy. Lifetime of blindness risked over a guy that couldn’t see you were worth his time without ultra-sparkly eyeballs.

Oh well, at least the tomatoes turned out to be deliciously non-toxic.

Cheers,

Michelle

It is 105 degrees outside with a heat index hovering somewhere above molten glass.

This isn’t really anything new, just the joy of high Summer in Oklahoma. As far as my reading list goes, it has had its influence, though. I didn’t break out Dante’s Inferno to re-read, but I have started reading a non-fiction account of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression entitled The Worst Hard Time, by.

What it mostly has me doing while I work here at the Nature Center is thinking about world building.

How creatures in our world have evolved to deal with the heat is amazing, especially given that this is one relatively small planet.

Some creatures estivate to escape the heat, which is quite similar to hibernation. A few are capable of being dehydrated completely and springing back to life when the rains come, like water bears and good old fashioned sea monkeys. Others choose to live their lives in the dark or near dark, where the heat can affect them less, like bats, raccoons and armadillos.

There are desert Darkling beetles with deeply ridged carapaces that stand on their heads atop dunes and harvest the morning dew as it condenses along those lines. Sidewinder snakes minimized contact with burning desert sands by changing the entire way they move.

And camels, well, we all know about them.

So why in the devil are so many literary worlds populated by creatures that make no sense?

Most recently it was Star Trek’s attempt at an ice monster on the planet where young Kirk was marooned that raised my ire. Why would a giant land-hunting crustacean/spider thing be hanging out in a mostly barren ice-wilderness? What in the heck is it eating when it can’t snack on Star Fleet personnel? And if that weren’t enough, there is a SECOND giant predator within panicked fleeing distance of the first.

Seriously.

If your fauna are not created and/or maintained by a rogue magic user or mad geneticist, then you need to take a little time to think about how these creatures fit into the world you’ve designed. Are they carnivores? Omnivores? Ill-tempered vegetarians?

Do they feed on land or in the water? How plentiful is their food source? What temperature are they surviving in? How do they stay warm or keep cool?

If you run out of ideas for plausible adaptations, do not panic. Mother nature has been working on this far longer than you have. A quick Google search of ‘cold weather adaptations’ will probably give you a host of ideas, which you can feel free to mix and match at will.

Remember that it isn’t so much whether a creature could actually exist that is important, it is whether the reader or viewer can believe that such a creature exists. So even though there are no four armed Snow Apes on the planet Earth, I could believe they lived on your planet if you made them fit the environment they are supposed to be hanging out in.

Anything less is like finding a pink elephant in the gas station bathroom. It kind of makes you forget about everything but how much that doesn’t belong.Find that, and you won't talk about anything else for the rest of the trip, guaranteed.

Cheers,

Michelle

Although I tend to digress more often into interesting finds of science and archaeology, I actually intended to primarily write book reviews on this site. Obviously, what I intend, and what ends up happening, often don’t even bear a passing resemblance to each other, but that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned the idea entirely.

Top of my list of ‘old’ books to review is Richard Adams novel Maia.

Richard Adams is probably best known for his tales of rabbits in Watership Down, or you might know him from The Plague Dogs, or Traveller. Although I am a die-hard Watership Down fan, I have to say Maia is my favorite of his novels.

Before you leap in, I do have to warn you that it isn’t full of charming animals trying to survive, at least not in the traditional sense. It also probably isn’t suitable for young audiences, as it contains some fairly ‘mature themes’ as they say in the movie ratings.

What you do get is an epic adventure, with truly believable characters that don’t really seem to fit any of the expected molds. It is the story of a woman-child, caught up in a family squabble and sold into a life of slavery, true, but it manages to tell this tale without being maudlin or trite, and without undercutting the strength that young Maia and her peers possess.

The pace is fast enough to excite, but still slow enough to enjoy the scenery and the company. The characters are rich and varied, with all the history and intricacy you’d expect in breathing companions.

If you read fantasy for the world-building, then you’ll enjoy this book as well. Well-developed climactic regions, each with their own political systems and idiosyncracies interact on a grand political scale, each attempting to wrest from the others what its rulers most desire to enrich their own lives. Against this backdrop of political intrigue Maia dances, seemingly helpless in her slavery, and completely ignorant of the grander plans forming around her, yet somehow a key player in many of them.

It isn’t a light or fast read, but Maia is well worth the effort. Since I get far less time to simply read than I would like, I rarely re-read a novel. There are just too many on the ‘waiting to be read’ pile. Every couple of years, though, I dust off Maia and lose myself in her world for a while, simply because I can’t resist.

Cheers,

Michelle

One of the most iconic cinema moments of my childhood was the moment E.T., the mislaid extraterrestrial, taps his friend Elliot on the chest with a glowing finger, admonishing the child to “be good” before he steps back onto his spaceship and heads for parts unknown.

That phrase has been used by parents on their offspring for generations. Loving parents, neglectful parents, abusive parents, teachers, preachers, and even alien scientists have all told us to “Be good.”

Not one of them has told us what the hell that really means.

I’m honestly not sure they even know.

One parent may really mean “study hard, get good grades, and become a doctor”, another may mean “be healthy, and happy and don’t hurt anyone”. A less than stellar parental unit may mean “I don’t care what you do, just leave me the heck alone”.

Funny thing is, somewhere inside, we all still want to please those people, even the ones that weren’t really worth the effort. We all want to be good, we just may not even know what good is any more.

Once upon a not necessarily better time, society had some pretty rigid rules in place. You knew what was expected of you, even if it was ridiculous. Things have changed so fast, and in so many ways, that it is little wonder many of us suffer from a vague but nagging belief that there is something deeply wrong with us.

Let’s face it, if you really want to be good, but you have nothing to measure your success against, you will probably never feel like you’re succeeding. This leads to feelings of sadness, poor self-image, low confidence, and even depression. No, I am not a psychologist, just a human being with the same host of issues everyone else struggles with, and this is one of them.

To be perfectly frank, I might never have understood it if I weren’t a writer. You see, even the ‘bad guys’ have to view themselves as good for a story to usually work. Fully evil characters, while possible, are rarely as fun for the reader as a character that we can understand, so their motivations, while twisted, have to be understandable.

One night, while rather fruitlessly trying to figure out the motivations of a ‘bad’ character, I decided in frustration to simply write down what I thought of as ‘good’ and use the opposites. There may, or may not, have been a bit of alcohol involved.

That’s when I discovered that my concept of ‘be good’ needed some serious work.

I could list some things that were pretty obvious, like not killing people, but the majority of that concept was really fuzzy to me. As I wrote down the things that popped into my head, I realized that I didn’t even agree with a great many of them, yet they still hung out somewhere in my subconscious.

Some of the more annoying things I found in that file? ‘Don’t speak when the men are speaking. Always go last. Never get angry. Obey’ and the list goes on.

To say I wasn’t thrilled by this discovery is a bit of an understatement, but it was a very helpful exercise. As young children, we take in everything we see, read, or is said to us as if it is the truth, because we lack any structure to compare it to before the age of seven or so. After that, it is much easier for us to decide if we want to keep something in our worldview or not, but those first entries remain, often unchallenged throughout our entire lives.

I’d like to invite you to do a little weeding of those mental rules for ‘being good’. Sit down and actually make a list of everything that pops into your head when you say that phrase, whether you agree with it or not. I suspect you will find a few items in your list that you never knew were there, and that are about as welcome as an infestation of roaches.

After you’ve taken out the trash, so to speak, you may also find that you need to replace the outdated things you pitched with some newer, more appropriate measures. Again, actually writing them down goes a long way to making them ‘stick’ in your head.

Keep at it, and eventually you will have what you consciously believe makes a ‘good’ person, and what your subconscious believes actually being the same thing, which eases the frustrations and guilt that you feel.

Whatever else you do, remember that you are the only one that can be you. Keep at it, we need you.

Cheers,

Michelle

There is something universal in the hoarding of treasure. Of course, the image that leaps to mind is a dragon, curled around its mountain of questionably attained gold decorated with only slightly bloodied armor, one emerald eye cracked open to guard against intruders.

Hoarding though, isn’t just about the gold. In fact, we hoard some pretty weird stuff.

I knew a lady in a nursing home that kept a rather hefty stash of spoons, and another with at least thirty red crayons, but not a single other color. When I taught school, I saw kids collect everything from rubber wrist bands to empty energy drink cans with surprising fervor.

I have to admit, I myself have a huge stash of craft supplies, including half a freezer full of unworked rabbit skins. Weird, I know, but it is my stash, and you can’t touch it. That’s the nature of hoarding, after all.

The scary television series aside, hoarding isn’t all bad, at least not for scientists.

Several animal species rely on hoarding, mostly of seeds and nuts, to survive the bitter winters. So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that they’ve been doing this since before the ice age. Which is kind of cool, because as the stashes of some of the long defunct ground squirrels in Siberia are revealed due to the retreat of the glaciers, a few of these seeds have proven to still be viable. Which has let some very excited botanists and paleo-botanists actually grow plants that have been extinct since before the glaciers even formed.

Similar hordes, this time formed by the grieving followers of expired pharaohs, have led to uncovering other viable seeds preserved within tombs for the afterlife, right alongside the decaying chariots and stacks of carved ushabti servants. Again, some of these represent plant species that have been gone for hundreds of years.

On a slightly more disturbing note, many serial killers victims are only identified because keeping a hoard of ‘trophies’ is common among those that are addicted to murder. Sad and disturbing as that is, it can lead to answers for grieving families, or to justice.

The fact is that for good or ill, hoarding is as much a part of the human psyche as it is part of the squirrel brain. Some of us hoard wealth, studying investments like they held the secret to eternal life. For others it is photographs, or a collection of antique dolls that we can’t help but add to.

This isn’t a terrible thing.

The impulse that drives squirrels to bury nuts plants forests actually grows the forests themselves. For us, the desire to hoard and preserve creates National Parks, libraries, and museums. As much as I enjoy looking at a pretty golden trinket, if I were a dragon, that’s not what I’d collect. I doubt that books and works of art would form a comfortable bed, but what could be more worth preserving than beauty and knowledge?

Cheers,

Michelle