Things I Learned As a Child

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WRITING 02

 

Looking back at it all now, it occurs to me that the life lessons a child learns while trying to turn into an adult can be downright screwy. Here are a few things I picked up on the journey:

  • Always tell the truth. Except when you shouldn’t. For instance, the answer to the question “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” is never, ever “No, not really.”
  • Be Creative. Except when you shouldn’t. This was when I learned that an improvised flamethrower is not the best method for removing a wasp’s nest. It works, but the collateral damage can be significant.
  • Understand that what seems normal and natural to you likely won’t be to everyone. For instance, when I was a kid, I often wondered what it would be like to be someone else. How was the world I saw and experienced different for them? How was my sisters’, or my uncle’s reality different or the same? Expressing the thought was not a good idea. People worried about me.
  • Repeating a word in mixed company you heard your uncle use? A very not good idea.

 

Things I learned as an adult:

  • I don’t know nearly as much as I thought I did.
  • The grown-ups I knew as a child were, as the movie said, “Making it up as they go, just like I was.” Wish I’d known that at the time.
  • Growing up is highly overrated. I can’t recommend it.

 

I won’t call this something I learned, just a piece of new information (well, it was new to me): I have a Wikipedia page now. I have no idea how it got there. The information is superficial, naturally, but mostly accurate. Read it while you can, because it’s being considered for deletion. And here I thought I’d “arrived.” Richard Parks.

Snowfall

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Snowfall

Snowfall

It has been snowing off and on in central NY for most of the month, but usually just a light dusting or at most 2-3 inches. Which is honestly weird to a guy like me, who lived most of his life in Mississippi. Not that it never snows there, but it’s more of an occasion, and is more likely to happen in March or April than December. And 2-3 inches? That’s a blizzard. That’s an “OMG we’re all gonna DIE!” emergency, and people will hit the stores to clear out everything they might possibly need since they’re clearly going to be snowed in for a month and we had, I think, one snow plow (I saw it, I swear) that was hardly ever used and not much salt, though maybe some grit for the bridges….You get the idea. It was a Big Deal. Here it’s hardly worth mentioning. Now I did live four years in north Alabama not too far from the Tennessee line. It snowed there, at least one good one (4-5 inches) every winter. The first time I put on my brakes and slid right through a stop sign was probably the precise moment I lost my fascination with snow.

Last night we got some real snow. Not a blizzard, but several inches which I will need to attack with the snow shovel later this morning. The irony is that I ordered a snow blower but its arrival might get delayed because of, you guessed it, snow. Still, it is pretty. Even so, after a while with the snow shovel I likely won’t be so enamored. And I did learn one lesson from my time in Alabama.

Studded snow tires. I’m as ready as I can be.

Fairy Gold

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FairyGreenHair

“She pulled a white shirt out of her basket. Or rather, it had once been white, I judged. Now it was covered in blood.

You might be wondering, about now, why I didn’t very quickly slip out of the 4th Street Laundry and call the cops. Seems obvious, right? She’s killed someone, probably a boyfriend or girlfriend, and is cleaning up the evidence. That’s what anyone would think, but then I’m not anyone. She saw me, and very few people can. That proved she wasn’t just anyone, either. The final proof came when she produced gold coins when it came time to feed the machines. Large, antique-looking coins that should never have fit in those dinky quarter slots, and yet somehow became whatever the machine, in its low-level mechanical understanding, expected.

Fairy gold.”

 

I just finished a new story. I would be prouder of this if it hadn’t taken almost three months, which for its length is about two and half months longer than it should have. There are reasons, of course, not even counting the medical incident. There are always reasons to keep you from getting your work done, and few aside from your own will and drive to counter them. So I’m not especially proud of myself. I could have done better sooner. However, at least I did get the story done. In rough, but that’s more than half the battle. Rewriting/editing is merely painful by comparison.

So, what to do with it? Haven’t a clue at the moment. It’s the sort of thing Shawna McCarthy might have bought for ROF (or will be, once I get it cleaned up properly), but that’s in the past, so there’s no point looking there. I’m just not sure where the future is at the moment. I can only hope that there is one. I have to find it, though. It’s the kind of thing we all have to do, at some point. The path that was clear suddenly isn’t. A hope gets dashed, or you simply get turned away from one direction toward another. Life always intervenes and plans gang oft agley. Just ask the mouse. Doesn’t matter. All you can do is keep working.

Regardless, as has been said in many other contexts—you can’t win if you don’t play.

Yamada and Beyond

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Audible Edition

Audible Edition

Surprise package in the mail last week, from my publisher’s agent—physical copies of the The Emperor in Shadow audiobook. Just the thing for those long drives in vehicles that still have those, what were they called? Oh, right. CD players. I’m sure there are a few around…other than mine.

I wonder if I should preface this next section with SPOILER ALERT, or some such, but for those who don’t know, The Emperor in Shadow is the concluding volume in the Yamada Monogatari series. I’m not going to say that I’ll never write another Yamada story, because I don’t know that (he also has another sister we still haven’t met), but the main story arc is completed, since the series always had an endpoint and my only uncertainty was if I’d get it there in a reasonable time frame. The answer turned out to be yes. The publisher plans an omnibus volume which will gather all the Yamada stories, plus three stories not yet collected, plus the three novels. That is likely not to be out until 2018. After that, well I plan to be doing something else. I hope some of you are willing to stick around for that. More details when there are any to share.

 

Review: A Natural History of Hell by Jeffrey Ford

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A Natural History of Hell: Stories by Jeffrey Ford, Small Beer Press, 2016

 

It’s more than a bit awkward at this point, wanting to get on with the review and wondering if I should first introduce the author, Jeffrey Ford, knowing all the while I shouldn’t have to do anything of the sort. Ford is, no exaggeration, one of the finest writers working in the field he’s chosen to be associated with. Or the field that chose him, since in our culture the kind of thing he tends to do has no real framework outside that of the fabulist. If he’d been born in South America he’d probably be considered a magical realist instead. No matter. It’s all pigeonholes and ways of talking about a thing, rather than the thing itself.

Did I just say all that? My apologies. But that’s what Ford’s work tends to do—send the reader off on tangents of thought and realms hitherto unexplored. After the story ends, of course. Until that moment, the story pretty much has you where it wants you.

There are thirteen stories in this collection, and all of recent vintage. Here you will find modern fairy tales, metafictions where a character named Jeff Ford is part of the story, biting commentaries on modern politics and insanity—lately almost one and the same thing–, observations on wealth and class, and none of the above. What you will really find, excusing the short-hand descriptive phrases attempting to categorize them, are stories. That’s what they are, first and foremost. The words attempting to categorize them above are cheerful failures. The stories are not. Nor are they cheerful.

Seriously. With a title like “A Natural History of Hell,” you were expecting sweetness and light? Oh, you’ll get that, too, but sparingly. There’s a dark, unflinching heart at the center of these stories. It looks in humanity’s mirror and describes what it sees, with neither fear nor pity to hinder it. There’s “The Thyme Fiend,” where only a cup of tea brewed from the herb of the title keeps the horrors at bay, until the time comes when they simply must be let in. Or “Blood Drive,” when an insane premise is logically followed to its insane conclusion and the world turns merrily on. One of my personal favorites, “The Angel Seems,” where common sense humanity shows that it has learned the proper way to treat a god.

Quibbles? Okay, fine. One or two of the endings did not quite come together for me. I only mention this at all because those cases were one of the few times I was forced out of the story into a consideration of plot, which normally you don’t even notice in a Ford story, even though it’s always there. Whatever strangeness is going on, you just go with it. If, for an instant, you can’t, it is noticeable. Fortunately, it is also very rare.

As much as I enjoyed this book, I do confess to being slightly put out by one story. We tend to get that way when we read a story someone else has written and sigh, “Damn. Why didn’t I think of that?” This happened in the centerpiece story, “A Terror,” where Emily Dickinson takes that famed carriage ride with Death. That line from HS English –“Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me” is all it takes to set it off. Not that my complaint matters. If I had written a story on this premise, it would not have been like this. Ford did it his own way, which now seems to me the only way, and he owns it.

He owns all of it. Thirteen stories only Jeffrey Ford could have written. Fortunately for us, he was around to do it. May he write many more.