Category Archives: Writing

On Having Four Seasons

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It’s about to start snowing again, which means it’ll be time to clear the walk, car, and driveway (again), so basically it’s a typical winter in central New York state. After so many years in my home state of Mississippi it still feels a little odd to have the actual four seasons I’d heard so much about. I mean, up here things close “for the season.” This is a new concept to me. Down South, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, we only had two real seasons: Winter(ish) and summer. Blazing. Hot. Summer. There was a sort of spring, but it lasted a week or two, tops and by the time you were sure it was there, it was gone. There was a sort of autumn too, but likewise. It was soon blended into winterish, and you couldn’t really tell where one ended and the other started.

Up here, You Can Tell. Fall is when the leaves turn colors, not just die and fall off from heat exhaustion. The maples in the woods behind and to the side of us really put on a show. It’s rather striking. There’s a brief peak time, but the show itself lasts for weeks. Last year and strictly by accident we managed to be in Vermont for peak season. It was dramatic, to say the least.

One trick to recognizing spring in the South was when the wildflowers bloomed. It’s pretty much the same here, but except for a few hardies like clover and the like, wildflowers were pretty much gone by the time summer was well in. Here, it’s different. Wildflowers last all summer long. Not the same ones, of course, but it’s sort of like a relay race: first the daffodils and tiger lilies bloom, and that lasts for several weeks. Then the wild chicory takes over, and it doesn’t stop until winter, and not even immediately then. Plus there’s the cottonwood season, and later milkweed, and sprinkled in between things I’m not even sure what they are. But they’re there, flowers of some sort, for the duration. The heat doesn’t kill everything, or hardly anything. It gets over 90 degrees but seldom stays there, unlike in MS, where 90 degrees in summer is a cold front. That’s compensation for shoveling all that snow. Not to mention the flowers, which I just did.

Another difference here from there is the type of snow. It did snow, now and then, down south during winterish. This year there was a fairly hefty band of it from Texas to Georgia, so remarkable that it made the news even up here. Saw pictures of maybe 4” accumulations, so of course there were pictures of snowmen. You don’t see so many of those up here, mainly because a lot of the snow we get is lake effect snow from Lake Ontario. It’s light and fluffy and doesn’t stick together at all. Good for skiing, I’m told, but I’m never going so far as to strap two planks to my feet just to find out. I’ll take their word for it. Being light and fluffy it’s relatively easy to shovel, for which I am grateful. If you ever had to shovel the wet slop that falls in the south (which you don’t, or didn’t where I lived. There’s not enough usually. Maybe in Tennessee or North Carolina), it’d break your back in short order.

So far the snow is holding off. We got maybe an inch last night, which doesn’t require drastic measures, so I’ll try to knock out a writing assignment due on Wednesday. In the meantime, the snow shovel is by the back door, on call, for the inevitable.

 

 

 

 

Story Time: Crows

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Today’s Story Time is “Crows,” originally published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination in Summer, 2000, and later collected in Our Lady of 47 Ursae Majoris and Other Stories in 2011. It’s not exactly an optimistic story, depending on your point of view, but…well, there aren’t really any “buts.”

Sometimes you just have to let the Dark Side out to play.

Story Time: Drowning My Sorrows

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To make up for being so late with Story Time today, I’m uploading a piece of original flash fiction, “Drowning My Sorrows.”*

Also a brief announcement: Two books, Ghost Trouble: The Casefiles of Eli Mothersbaugh and The Collected Tymon the Black are now available through Google Play. I’ll be adding more as time allows.

As always, “Drowning My Sorrows” will only be available until next Wednesday, December 13th, and then the story changes.

 

*Edited to add: Actually, this is the story’s second appearance. I did an earlier version as a blog post some time ago and completely forgot about it. To make up for it, I’ll be adding one more Story Time this week, probably Friday**. I’ll keep both up until next Wednesday, when we’ll start over and try not to repeat that mistake.

**And done. The second Story Time Story is also up now on the same page as the first. This one is “The Queen of Diamonds.”

Story Time: The Beauty of Things Unseen

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Today’s Story Time is “The Beauty of Things Unseen,” originally published in 1999 in Quantum SF, edited by Kurt Roth. As I mentioned previously in my post on Katherine Briggs, this was one of the early stories I got from the notion of the “fairy funeral.” Of course, that’s not exactly what the story is about–you can work that out for yourself–but I do come up with at least one suitable theory along the way.

 

 

 

As always with these things, “The Beauty of Things Unseen” will remain up until next Wednesday, December 6th. Until then, I hope, enjoy.

Podsnappery

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Podsnappery (n).

Yep. It’s a real word. Not much in vogue these days, but big back in Victorian England and still in the dictionary. Supposedly linked to a character from Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend, a Mr. Podsnap, who lived in a state of blissful denial completely unsullied by unpleasant facts, and thus raised a child who grew up with absolutely no understanding of what the world was really like outside her home, and met it unprepared. I think this word is overdue for renewal, seeing as how so many of my fellow citizens seem to be living under its influence, and nothing else serves so well. “Ignorance” and “denial” come close, but neither does the full job.

English as a language is like that, he said, which should be perfectly obvious to anyone paying attention. We invent new words, borrow new words, and the language evolves. Anyone who doubts that, remember the prologue to the Canterbury Tales? That was proper English, once. Now the average English speaker can still sort out what it means, but only to a certain degree of accuracy. Words drop out of use, or gain new usages over time. “Gay” used to mean one thing, and not very long ago. Now it means something else. People stopped arguing over the difference between “affect” and “effect” and simply borrowed “impact” to mean what they used to mean by “affect.” Can’t say I’m in favor, since “impact” still means “hit” so far as I’m concerned, and being hit does affect you, true, and often effects a change, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. Still, I admit the war is over on that one and I think English lost. Some battles are still being fought, however. For instance, do not attempt to use “irregardless” as a real word around First Reader. She will pin your ears back.

It’s right and proper that new words meet some resistance. They need to be tested and proven before they join the language. Regardless, new words enter usage all the time, sometimes driven by technology (how long before “lol” or “afaik” is accepted spoken usage?), sometimes by necessity, as in “We need a word for that!” whatever that may be. I’m in favor of an import from Japanese, “aware.” No, not “ah-ware” but “ah wa re,” the concept that a transient thing is beautiful, not necessarily because it is pleasing to the eye (though it may be), but also because it is ephemeral and will not last. Like a sunset, or a flower in full bloom, or the turn of a leaf in autumn. Fleeting. I’m not holding my breath or anything, but just putting it out there. It’s a favorite word of mine and I’d love to see it come into English usage, but I know the odds are long.

After all, to think otherwise is to be a tad podsnappy.