Halfway

When you’re under 20, you think you’d rather commit suicide than get old, partly because you can’t imagine how you’re going to cope with looking wrinkly and grey, and partly because you have no freaking clue how much it actually hurts to croak. Since you also (usually) have no idea what the hell you’re going to do with your life, it’s hard to imagine that you may have another 80 years to do it.


Mercifully, your perspective changes as you get older. Your attention turns outward, you realize you’re part of a bigger picture, and you have friends, family, hobbies, and goals. It’s not the same for everybody, of course. Some people go through a midlife crises that causes them to try, in vain, to recapture their physical youth. Others are fortunate enough to realize that older people actually do have something in common with very young people. Our perspective is changing along with our bodies, very much like theirs is. Call it reverse puberty. Though you’re going out instead of coming in, the feelings you have are actually quite similar, and it seems as if you’re on the verge of an exciting, wide, mysterious world.



For me, those feelings became very apparent when I went on the road trip to Utah I wrote about in the previous two blogs. But it became even more so when I was hiking with my husband Ernie on my 50th birthday. I had forgotten it was my birthday, we were hiking simply because we had the day off. And we were excited about trying a new trail, Peralta Canyon Trail in the Superstition Mountains. It’s a gorgeous trek through a hoodoo-haunted canyon shaped by running water through breccia (volcanic rock consisting of broken rock fragments and volcanic ash) and welded tuff (super-heated ash and debris) from volcanic explosions millions of years ago. Since Arizona was underwater for a few hundred-million years, and featured lakes and rivers afterward, there is also some sedimentary rock to be seen. The water only runs after storms these days. The lower part of the canyon features a variety of lower-desert flora, including saguaros that must be at least 300 years old (it takes them 70 years just to grow arms). Since it was April, those old giants were blooming as we picked our way up the trail.


We were experienced enough by then to know we needed a gallon of water each and some nuts and Fig Newtons. And we took plenty of rests, mostly because I continually stopped to snap pictures. The hike should only take four to five hours if you’re just in it for the exercise – for us it would turn out to take seven. We climbed steadily, toward the upper-desert terrain at the end of the canyon. About halfway there, we stopped and surveyed our destination, then looked back the way we had come. Spectacular views both ways. And then it hit me. "Ernie, today is my birthday!"


The symbolism wasn’t lost on either of us. Halfway through the canyon and halfway through my life, I loved the view. And I was still climbing, still setting goals and trying new things. My mother has always done the same thing, and she’s 88. If anyone could get to 108, she could. This spring, she’s coming with us on another Utah road trip, and she plans to hike with us and see places she has only driven past before.

I’ve got new books to write, new designs to try in my home and my garden, new places to hike and explore, a new subject to study at the college level (geology) and in a new way (probably online courses). The big shake-up in the financial world may shake me loose from my old day job and into a new one (or several new ones). The changes don’t upset me. And now, instead of wondering how I can look younger, I’m wondering how I can stay healthy enough to do all of the things I want and need to do.

Fifty years is a long time. Lots of stuff may happen to change my mind.

But what the hell. I’ve got water and Fig Newtons. Let’s see what’s around the next bend.

Onward and upward.

Ernie's View

Ernie had his own take on the Utah road trip I wrote about in the previous blog entry. He saw things from an artist’s point of view. This posting features a few notes he took, along with some art he scribbled on the way. The hoodoos of Bryce reminded Ernie of tikis, so he invented a new form, the tiki-hoodoo.


Ernie: None of it seemed real until we were up in Northern Arizona, when all the structures along the roadside were trading posts and the mountains took on flowing, shattering shapes. Suddenly Phoenix, Glendale, the job, the routines that controlled our lives were far away. Possibilities were now wide open. Anything could happen.


When we stood on the Route 89 bridge that spanned the Colorado, Nora and I snapped away with our cameras – we were the two obsessed with taking pictures (though I was definitely the most frequent snapper – I think I took over 600 photos). Chris is a rocket scientist, he thought the bridge was pretty cool in and of itself. The river flowed somewhere between 100 and 200 feet below us, it was a little hard to tell the depth. I’m still wondering what caused the spooky bubbles – organic matter decaying?

As we continued into Utah, Ernie kept thinking like a painter.
Ernie: It was like wandering around inside a Max Ernst panting. Ernst painted many landscapes that resembled this geologic wonderland, most of them decades before he finally moved to Sedona.

The Red Rock country of Vortex Land is mild surrealism compared to Vermillion Cliffs on the Navajo Reservation. And this was just a warm-up for crossing into Utah. At first the rocks just talked. Then they sang. Eventually they sent out vibrations that echoed across the universe.

Those may sound like fanciful remarks, but I felt the same way. One of the reasons I took so many pictures was that I was trying to capture the whole experience. Looking at them reminds me what it felt like to be there. But I wish I could have made quality sound recordings of the places themselves – an odd notion, because it was the silence of those places that impressed me. You can’t record that. If you could, those recordings of CANYON SILENCE would sell like hotcakes.


The first Utah city we stayed in was Kanab. Here’s what Ernie had to say about it.
Ernie: We spent a couple of nights in Kanab, with its authentic and Hollywood cowboy memorabilia. From there we checked out Zion (where the bus driver warned us about the Datura AKA the Devil’s Trumpet AKA loco weed that grew all over), and Bryce Canyon, where we found out that the fantastic spires of rock are called hoodoos. A lot of tourists and park workers were speaking French and German, making it like a visit to Europe. At one point I overheard a family speaking French, and they turned out to be Asian.

I loved Kanab so much, I wondered if I might like to move there some day. It’s well-positioned for exploration of the National Parks in the area, from the Grand Canyon and Vermillion Cliffs to Zion and Bryce. I imagined driving to Zion for daily hikes. But when I set my weather function on my Cox home page so I could see how cold it got in the winter, I quickly realized it’s probably too cold for me. It’s perfect in summer, though. So maybe we could rent a place there for a couple of months . . .

We underestimated the time it would take us to travel Scenic Routes 12 and 24 on our way to our next stop, but the roadside scenery was fabulous.
Ernie: Our next stop, through some more fantastic landscapes, was Moab. There we stayed at the Inca Inn, run by a nice German couple. It was next to a Mexican restaurant that offered Mayan fare, and Lin Ottinger’s Moab Rock Shop and Fossils, where geologic treasures are guarded by a dinosaur covered with Christmas lights. Datura grew up through the decorative gardens in front of many of the businesses on main Street.

I think I loved Moab even more than Kanab, and that’s quite a lot. I confess, Lin Ottinger’s rock shop and the great Mexican restaurant next to it may have influenced me.
Ernie: From Moab we went to the Arches and Canyonland National Parks, where hoodoos spoke, and we learned about cryptobiotic soil, a living crust of bacteria and microbes that grow on desert dirt as the first stage to making it viable for plant life.


We were all very careful not to step on the cryptobiotic soil. And in Arches and Canyonlands we saw the two geologic features that I liked the best. In Arches it was Park Avenue (a place I think of as the Hall of Kings because one of the formations to the East looks like a pharaoh wearing the crown of Upper Egypt).


In Canyonlands it was the Sky Island viewpoint of the Colorado River. The scale of both of these views is really hard to portray in a photograph.
Ernie: From there we took more incredible scenic byways, as the signs called them, cross-crossing the Colorado River all the way to the state of Colorado, where we stopped at the Dinosaur Journey Museum and took a break among the mechanical dinosaur and fossil displays before heading through more crumbling mountains that grew higher and greener as we made our way into Denver.


Ernie’s reaction to the World Science Fiction convention was to feel inspired to get working on things again. That alone makes it worthwhile. Here are his conclusions:
Ernie: How could the WorldCon compare to geologic wonderlands? Science Fiction is another world. Another world in crisis. Another world in transformation. The short story still has potential, but New York has turned its back on that. I say it’s time to turn our backs on New York. Anyway, I’m determined to finish my fetal stories and set them loose to show the bastards how it should be done.

Denver is still another world. The 16th Street Mall is a great place for a convention to spill out into. Places to eat, characters walking the streets talking to cell phones or themselves. New and old styles of architecture, buses, and trolley cars create a 21st century urban experience, complete with Nigerian street vendors, homeless beggars, and tattooed youths.

Somehow I managed to find and talk to all the people I wanted to catch up with at the convention. I changed my mind about the short story market, decided to start making a go of it. Also, the editors at ANALOG and ASIMOV’S said that they’d rather have their magazines in the science fiction section than on the magazine rack. I told them that I’d get to work on it.

Em got an idea for a novel, she happily spent most of the con working on it. I looked at ‘Mars-A-Go-Go’ and found that it was not far from being finished. I need to work out an agenda for short fiction. I’ve also been drawing every day this vacation so far. The creative juices are flowing, and this wasn’t yet the end.

Ernie did a bunch of drawings during the trip, and he finished up some stories. He didn’t lose the energy he found on that trip, and I didn’t either. Now we’ve got a scanner, so he can post his art online. Our blogs and our Facebook pages give us new and better ways to connect with an audience. So the story has a happy ending – because it’s just the beginning!

On The Road

You don’t need to read Jack Kerouac to know that road trips can change your life. In August 2008, a road trip changed mine.

But here’s the thing, I’m not sure you can plan a thing like that. You can hope for it, and ever since the movie Easy Rider was released, plenty of people have. But me? I just needed a vacation. It had been years since I had gone out and actually seen a place, other than Disneyland. Not that I don’t love Disneyland, in fact I love that place as much as I did when I was a child, for no rational reason whatsoever. I love visiting Ernie’s family, too; they’re wonderful people, way better than I deserve. It’s just that when I was a kid, I used to visit wild places. And even as a kid, my soul responded to those places, my heart pined for them (even if they didn’t have pines). You know the religious feelings some people get when they’re in church, or looking at sacred art, or listening to the Mormon Tabernacle choir singing Hallelujah? I only get those feelings when I’m looking at a canyon.


When I was a kid my mom took us to Yellowstone, Bryce, Zion, the Grand Canyon, and let’s not forget good old Oak Creek Canyon. But as an adult, I found it a lot harder to travel to those places. Or any places. Or to buy groceries and pay rent, for that matter, because I was a writer. Writers don’t have any money, so I had to get a day job. After that I was too busy working, and the years flew by.

Finally 2008 rolled around, and I noticed that WorldCon was in Denver. "Say," I remarked to Ernie, "wouldn’t it be neat if we drove to WorldCon via Utah and saw some national parks on the way?"

He agreed it would be nifty. And we managed to talk two friends into taking the trip with us, Chris and Nora. They were even willing to share a room when the rates were too expensive. So we picked our dates, and we plotted our course, and Nora called all the hotels to make reservations. Ernie and I began to take morning walks so we would be in shape to explore canyons, and finally the first day of the trip dawned. Chris and Nora drove up in a rented SUV Chris dubbed "The Battlestar Ridiculi," and we all piled in.

I should have had some clue what this was going to mean to me when I was almost too excited to sleep the night before. Jeez, how desperate for a vacation can you get! That morning I was in a daze, so happy I hardly recognized the emotion. And as we drove North on I-17 in the Battlestar, I thought, This is really happening! It wasn’t just something we talked about doing some day. We were On The Road.

As we turned onto Route 89, we began to pass some of the formations of Vermillion Cliffs, and the music from Ralph Vaughan William’s Double Piano Concerto started to play in my head. Yeah, I know, most people think of the Grand Canyon Suite when they see Arizona, and I don’t blame them. But Vaughan Williams wrote music that evokes beautiful desolation, and I think that sums up Arizona and Utah perfectly. We skirted those formations for miles and miles, rank after rank of them, and I didn’t need to read a book, didn’t need to play an album to be entertained.

When we crossed the Colorado River, we stopped at a convenience store to buy sun hats, and then we went onto the bridge to look down at spooky bubbles rising from the depths of the river, which moved very slowly there. The sun was just beginning to drop behind some mountains, and it shone on the Eastern stretch of the river. For me, standing on that bridge was like standing in a temple. I felt awed by the silence of the place, by the sense of incomprehensible age. I was also scared of the height, and fascinated by the massive, concrete bridge with its steel struts.

As we drove toward Kanab, Utah, I watched the light dying in the sky and wished the sun were coming up instead of going down. I haven’t felt that way since I was 10. And frankly, it’s a little nuts, because I really need my sleep these days. But that night, I just savored it. Pure happiness. And – dare I say it? Even better than Disneyland.

From that point forward, I knew my soul had just gotten a gigantic jolt, a charge that will last for the rest of my life. That first day we hiked in Zion, we visited Coral Pink Sand Dunes, we read all the roadside markers at the viewpoints and collected free literature. And I bought geeky t-shirts. The next day we drove to Bryce, possibly my favorite National park in the whole universe, and we hiked in the Queen’s Garden, Hoodoo Heaven. It was just outside Bryce that I was shooting pictures of clouds and captured the Cosmic Question photo I featured in a previous blog.

And even when Routes 12 & 24 ended up taking twice as long as we thought they would, I didn’t care. They took us through the Northern region of the newest national park, The Grand Staircase / Escalante. Once again, I was happy to just look out the window. I wish we could have seen Capitol Reef – we’re planning to go there in May 2010, but that night we hauled ass all the way to Moab, the wonderful town perched between Arches National Park and Canyonlands. What I saw in those wild places made me feel like a pilgrim in Mecca.

So I felt more than a little let down when we finally rolled into Denver for the convention. Though my buddies were so happy, I had to stop moping and enjoy nifty downtown Denver. And for a consolation prize, I got to see the rain going sideways because of a small tornado outside my hotel window. Cool!

By the time we left Zion, I already had the beginnings of a new novel in my head. By the time we left Bryce, I had begun to write a treatment for it. Every night in Denver I added more, and I had 100 pages done by the time we got back to Phoenix. I’m still working on the novel, but I have something important to do before I can feel confident that I can write it as well as it can be written.

I have to become a geologist.

I don’t mean a working geologist, but I have to study geology, both in college and out of it. I want to learn everything I can about the subject, because I love it. And I want to keep going back to those places that inspired me, and see new places, and see old places with new eyes. Ernie and I have started hiking in and around Phoenix now, we’ve hiked the magical Piestewa peak, right in the middle of town, a place where the world seems to go away. We’ve hiked Peralta Canyon Trail and we’ve seen Belly Button Rock (and I fell in some horse poop, but it was totally worth it).

That road trip changed my life. It revived a passion in me that doesn’t war with my other passions, that adds to them instead of distracting me from them. And maybe most importantly, it allowed me to realize my own version of religion. Call it Canyon Religion if you want. Not a woo-woo, New Age kind of Canyon, but something very, very old. Something you feel when you stand on that bridge looking down at the Colorado River, something strong enough to overcome vertigo and fear of spooky bubbles.

Hallelujah!

Sowing Seeds In The Fall

This is for Robert C., whose pal in Mesa, Arizona is getting ready to try fall gardening ventures. I’ve learned a handy trick for sowing seeds into tubs in our desert climate. Cut up the plants that have pooped out for the year (or any plants you don’t want) and spread the bits and pieces over the area where you want to sow the seeds. Let the stuff dry up for about a week, then crumble it further with your hands. You don’t want to pack it too tight, let there be spaces for seeds to fall into. Then sow the seeds and water every two or three days. The mulch will keep the seeds in place so they don’t get washed around by the water, and will retain moisture so the whole mess doesn’t dry out too drastically between waterings. If you don’t have plant stuff to cut up, try straw. Stick a few Grapefruit-sized rocks in there too. You can aim the hose at them to diffuse the water stream.

Here are some photos of the tubs lining my front walk. The ones against the wall will grow sweet peas and zinnias. The ones on the other side will be full of larkspur, stocks, etc. Some of them will bloom from November to June. Others will get in at least three months of blooming . . .

Whoda Thunkit

When the bean counters at the brick & mortar retail giants look at data in order to decide what customer service protocol ought to be, there’s something they always fail to factor in. I’ll call it the Overly Helpful Approach. It’s a side effect of the slavish concept that the customer is always right, an attitude that seems logical on its face until you really examine the consequences of that approach. When you believe the customer is always right, you feel compelled to do everything that customer asks you to do. Once again, this seems logical. But in the field, here are a couple of things that happen.

Thing One: the customer wants everything for free. In the book biz, that means the customer returns everything she buys after she’s read it. Or she complains that she’s been mistreated, and therefore should get an item for free (which she will later return for credit). Or she’ll run your sales staff ragged finding books she wants and then sit down with them and jot notes or read novels all day, then leave them in an untidy pile for them to re-shelve. This is a common thing, and there is an equation to account for the losses caused by this behavior, but those actual losses are hard to track. No one is counting the loss of wages paid helping people who have no intention of buying, or the wear & tear of the particular books used and then ultimately returned as "damaged," or the loss of sales of items that might be purchased by other customers if someone weren’t reading them in a corner.

And now that the economy isn’t doing too well, and more people are pinching pennies than ever, customers are even more likely to commit theft-of-services. Likewise managers are terrified of offending any of them, so the freeloaders are becoming more confident and outrageous than ever.

Thing Two: you have a knowledgeable, well-trained staff, and people use them to research stuff they want to buy and then buy it somewhere else. One good example of this was the Listen-On-Demand service we used to have at the book chain where I work. For years, people could come in and ask us to open CDs so they could hear them. The logic was that once people heard this wonderful music, they would buy it.

Less than 10% of them did so – at least, from us. They demanded to hear albums, sometimes they even pretended they were going to buy them (they’d be returned to me at the end of the day in recovery), but they were actually using us to preview stuff they would then buy from discount retailers. Often they would be looking for obscure songs I would help them track down, or classical music they had no knowledge of, and I would tell them what it was and what albums it was on. I did this because they pretended they were going to buy it from us. Once again, this loss was written into the equation as part of the cost of doing business. But the actual loss was hard to track.

Now that my company no longer carries much music, in stores or on its website, this doesn’t happen too much anymore. But we do plenty of research for people in books they never buy from us. I had one lady walk in recently and say, "I’m looking for books to download to my Kindle. Can you recommend anything?"

I said no. "We aren’t connected with amazon, Ma’am, I can’t advise you what to buy from them."

"Oh," she was quick to assure me, "I’m going to buy some paperbacks too."

But she dumped every paperback I handed her after taking note of the title. Now people who want advice about books they intend to download from amazon are figuring out they shouldn’t tell us so, though they’re perfectly willing to use us for information. After all, it says INFORMATION right over the desk, right? So isn’t it our job to tell them what they want to know?

Meanwhile, we’re fighting to stay afloat, and our managers are scrambling to become MORE helpful. We’re so damned helpful, we’re downright obnoxious. We’ll pounce on you the moment you walk in the door, and when you actually do buy something we’ll brow-beat you into buying an additional item. Because we want you to come back, right?

I’d like to suggest something outrageous. The customer is NOT always right. Sometimes the customer is as wrong as he can be. Even if he’s not a douchebag, a crook, or a scammer, sometimes he doesn’t have a right to get what he’s demanding. He DOES have a right to expect courtesy, patience, and your time and attention. And he deserves to have you err on the side of customer service, to expect the most liberal application of your policies. He deserves the benefit of the doubt, that he should receive the best possible service in the hope that you’ll prove it’s worth it to shop at your joint. But when he proves to you that he has no intention of ever paying you for anything, that in fact he’s going to keep costing you money, his rights run out.

There’s one last cost that’s hard to track. Right now, the bean counters are trying to figure how they can charm, chide and cajole you into buying stuff. And that’s fine, but they also need to figure how to keep you from returning what you’ve bought. And at the same time, they have to figure the cost of bugging you too much, of pouncing on you and refusing to let you go until you’ve listened to sales pitches you didn’t want to hear and had additional items suggested ad nauseam. Those of you out there who actually buy stuff and keep most of what you buy have a right to complain if this bugs you. But please, don’t yell at the sales clerk. Ask to talk to management, or call them, or write to them. Make sure you tell them the sales staff did a good job, you just don’t like the policy. Mention that you like a peaceful, low-key shopping experience, not a song-and-dance routine.

Otherwise folks – if my employer survives the plague of freebee-demanders and the wretched economy, they’re going to decide we survived because we insisted on greeting you the moment you walked in the door, and addressing you by name, and suggesting additional items, and pushing the book du jour on you (without having the slightest clue what you actually like to read), and rattling off a long, baffling speech every time you call, and god knows what else they dream up. You actually do have an effect when you give them feedback about customer service.

Unfortunately, that’s another thing the freebee demanders have figured out. They have no qualms whatsoever about making demands, or about criticizing the staff that just bent over backward to help them find something. Since they’re willing to provide the feedback, they’re the ones who have the most effect on customer service policy.

And they’re not even customers.

Count that, Bean Boys.

Mano Loco

When I was a kid, Phoenix had not expanded to the size it is today; my house was near the edge of town. The fields that stretched to the West and South of us were owned by farmers who grew cotton, and they irrigated their fields the same way the ancient Hohokam Indians did a thousand years ago, with a series of canals. Back then, most kids who lived in my area were Anglo, but some were Mexican American, and the Anglo kids who hung out with Latino kids heard some strange stories about a monster, the ghost of a woman who drowned children in canals. The Anglo kids mangled the Spanish name of this creature, they called her Mano Loco. Later I realized her name was probably La Llorona.

The story I heard was that Mano Loco liked to drown children, she was sort of a female boogeyman. If you wandered near the canals at night, she might come after you. The kids who talked about her did so with such dread, you couldn’t help wondering if it was all true.

And then my brother David saw her.

He was about twelve at the time. This was during the summer, and David declared he couldn’t stand to travel around with us on vacation any longer, he had stuff he wanted to do at home. My mother decided to give him the benefit of the doubt (partly because he was such poor company on those trips), so she asked an adult friend to look in on him regularly and gave him a food allowance. David actually took care of himself just fine, he only had one scare the whole time. This was the night in July when he and his friend Duane were setting off fireworks in the back yard.

These were small fireworks, not the kind that could blow your arm off, and they were both experienced at handling them. It was getting dark when they started, and David actually started to feel a little uneasy as the light died. We had an above-ground swimming pool, and by that time of year we always lost our battle to keep it clean. It had turned into a murky swamp, and David was beginning to wonder if he should just drain it and take it down. That was a lot of work, and he kept putting it off, so now it was horrible and even kind of scary at night. David didn’t want to be outside with that pool when it was dark.

But he wanted to set off a few more fireworks, and the arcadia door was just twenty steps away. Duane said he was ready to go in, and David told him he’d be right there, he just had a couple more he wanted to light. So Duane slid the glass door shut and David lit the last fireworks, thinking I'm outta here, because he was beginning to feel like something was watching him from the pool. In fact, as he turned to go in, he thought he saw a shadow there, like something might be hovering over the water.

David hurried to the arcadia door. Duane stood on the other side, looking at him through the glass, grinning. David tried to open the door, and that’s when he realized Duane had locked it. David wrenched at the door, pounded on it, called to be let in. Duane just laughed. And then he looked over David’s shoulder. All the humor drained out of his face, along with most of the color. David screamed for him to open the door, but Duane turned and ran, leaving David locked outside with something just behind him.

We had a locked gate at the side of the house. David broke the sound barrier getting to it. He doesn’t remember climbing it, he thinks he may have actually jumped over it. It was six feet high. He was moving so fast, he actually bumped into Duane in the driveway, even though Duane had a head start. The two of them ran across the street and crouched under a street light, watching the back gate.

Her head topped the gate, and she stared at them. "Mano Loco," choked Duane. (Yes, he actually choked it, just like in a comic book.) She looked like a dead woman, like someone who spent all her time rotting underwater. She pinned them in her glare for several seconds, and then she sank out of sight again.

They ran all the way to Duane’s house. It was two miles away, and they made it in record time. They spent the rest of the night there, and David stayed at Duane’s for every night afterward, until we came home again. The pool was drained shortly after that, and we never put it up again.

Years passed, and the cotton fields were sold to developers. Phoenix grew far to the West and the South, the canals were filled in. As the Hispanic community has grown here, Anglos have learned to pronounce more Spanish words, including the names of monsters like la Llorona. Some legends say she hangs around under trees, others repeat the legends about canals or other bodies of water. But no matter where she hangs out, she always kills children. That part of the story never changes. We don’t have many canals she can haunt anymore, but our summers get extremely hot, and swimming pools have proliferated here.

My brother and I are too old to see Mano Loco now, but children drown in Phoenix all the time, and many of these drownings seem suspicious to me. Plenty of other cities in the U.S. have just as many, if not more, swimming pools. Why do we have more children drowning than they do?

Maybe it’s bad luck. Maybe it’s inattention.

Maybe it’s an old monster. Maybe the Hohokam had a name for her, too. And if our civilization eventually dies out, maybe she’ll still be here, watching for the next wave of settlers, waiting for their children to wander near the canals.

I wonder what they’ll call her then.

Dreams Are Infectious

I have proof positive that NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC warps young minds, causing kids to grow up to be explorers, adventurers, world travelers, and writers. When Stephen Bodio was a kid back in the fifties he opened a magazine and saw a photograph of a Kazakh nomad and his hunting eagle. It haunted and inspired him for decades until he finally got a chance to go to Mongolia and find those nomads. His adventure is recorded in his book, Eagle Dreams. On the cover is yet another photo of a Kazakh nomad and his hunting eagle, and that photo haunted me until I could track down this book.

Now I hope to do the same thing to you.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hunting enthusiast. I’ve got nothing against people who hunt for food, it’s just that I don’t know a lot about the subject. I’ve got lots of other time-consuming hobbies, like rockhounding, hiking, and recipe-mangling, and there’s only so much time in a given day. Also, I am way too sentimental about animals, and if I had to actually kill the cows I so love to eat, I’d be relying on fish, eggs, and cheese to get my protein fix. It’s my love of birds that drew me to this book, from the tiny hummingbirds with the big attitude to the semi-fabled Harpy Eagles of Africa. Couple that with a picture of a nomad descended from Chingiz (Genghis) Khan with a gigantic Golden Eagle perched on his arm, and you’ve got my attention.

Bodio’s account of his journey is not a long one, though it took him decades to realize his dream. Like many adventurers, his path is oblique, almost accidental, and he ends up in Mongolia mostly because he maintained contacts with editors who could eventually send him there. It’s a story of persistence and resourcefulness – and courage as well, not because the nomads were a danger to him, but because he encounters unknown cultures, labyrinthine bureaucracies, and harsh living conditions. Once he manages to make the trip, he employs natural diplomacy, patience, and intelligence to win the trust of the nomads. He never brags about any of this; Bodio tells his story with self-deprecating humor. Neither does he bog the story down with too much terminology, it’s easy for non-birders (not to mention non-world travelers) to follow.

Bodio’s story packs a lot of good information into 216 pages, but more than anything else, the story inspired me. I’m not as resourceful as Stephen Bodio and probably not as brave, and I doubt I could win the respect and trust of Kazakh nomads who hunt with young eagles – though I might be able to amuse their wives by mangling a recipe or two. But I am a fellow traveler, and his account makes me want to venture out more, even if it’s just into the American Wilderness.

Take a good, hard look at the cover of this book. But be warned, it has unexpected side effects. May cause dreams.

Once More Unto The Breach

This time of year, my garden always turns into a jungle, and it’s my own fault. I know I’m living in the desert, I know 90% of my plants should be low-water use, and yet I keep designing areas that get too much water run-off. Well, no more, my friends! Or mostly no more. Hardly any. I’ve made up my mind, this is the year when the Big Shift begins. I’m keeping a few roses, but the rest are going bye-bye.

Don’t laugh – this is not going to be easy. You know that scene in Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, where Malificent turns into a dragon and almost claws the prince to death? My roses treat me that way when I’m being nice to them, you can imagine what a fight they’re going to put up when I try to prune them out of existence.

A few of them will be given away to unsuspecting acquaintances. And a few of them are doing so badly, they’ll probably give up without drawing more than few pints of blood. I’m pretty sure this process will take three months this fall, and next year I’ll be getting rid of some more. I’d do it all at once if I had a crew of five men and a dump truck, but I’ve got one full-time worker (me) and one part-time (my poor, uncomplaining husband). Together, we’ll cut up rose canes, haul bricks away from raised beds, shovel out the extra soil, and shore up what’s left with stones, decreasing the bed sizes by two-thirds.

And what will go in their places? Rocks! Cacti! Weird desert shrubs! Peculiar garden sculpture! Sound boring? Not at all, I love the Martian weirdness of desert flora. I love how they stand up to the heat and the blazing sun, how some of them will burst into bloom in the worst part of the summer. And I admit, I love how they need so much less water and time (though some of them draw almost as much blood).

I guess every gardener passes through the early phase of trying to turn their garden climate into something it’s not. You can kid yourself into thinking you won’t pay serious consequences for it, until you’ve suffered through a few years of invasive grass and the yellow jackets who love to nest in it – not mention the mosquitos, ticks, fleas, weeds, white flies, and mildew.

Despite all that, my garden has actually been pretty healthy most of the time. If I had several hours a day to devote to it, it would be a more successful micro-climate. But this time of year, I need to take about ten rests a day when I’m out there hacking back the jungle. Those rests take at least fifteen minutes each and include multiple glasses of water and the A.C. turned down to 77 degrees F. Plus I have to use gallons of grass killer to keep the yard police from breathing down my neck, and that stuff is smelly and expensive.

So bye-bye roses (or most of you, anyway). Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still plant my flower seeds this fall. That’s the nifty thing about living in Phoenix; you can still have your cottage garden in the fall, winter, and spring. Veggies too, if you’re feeling intrepid. I won’t even miss those roses.

Assuming they don’t get rid of me before I get rid of them.

So wish me luck. I’m going to need it.

Hummificent The Magnificent

I’m not sure when it happened, I can’t even remember when I bought my first hummingbird feeder, but somehow I became the servant of a tiny, noisy, multicolored creature who loves sugar-water. By the time I moved into my current home (seven years ago), this mutual addiction was firmly established. I have two feeders now, and two Ruby Throats have battled over them for as long as I’ve been here. They may be the same fellows from the beginning, or they may be the offspring of the originals – it’s hard to tell. Hummingbird psychology is simple: battle fiercely for your territory, sip as much sugar-water as you can, and scold the lady who fills the feeders when she’s not moving fast enough.

One spring I was privileged to witness Hummy wars. Two Ruby-Throated males hovered like helicopters, scolded each other loudly, then dive-bombed the yard and swooped to new positions, about fifty feet up. They may have been trying too scare each other off, but it didn’t work. They still perform amazing aerial feats all year ‘round, but I haven’t seen the helicopter stunt in a while.

I like them best when they’re perching outside the living-room window, on an old tomato cage, staring in at me as if I were the entertaining oddity. This is why the sugar-water will always get refilled. This is why I remain the devoted servant of Hummificent The Magnificent.

So, You think YOUR Day Job Is Tough

Before I came to work for my current employer, I worked for the Department of Corrections. I was an officer at a minimum security facility in the middle of town, an odd place that had been converted from an old motel. I think the place appealed to state officials because it didn’t require a lot of renovation in order to make it work as a minimum security facility. The lobby was converted into a control room, the guest rooms were fitted with metal bunks, and the perimeter was secured with a chain-link fence and razor wire.

This may not sound like a lot of security, but I promise you, getting in and out of that joint took effort, even if you weren’t an inmate – although a small percentage of inmates were allowed out on work crews. Since they were minimum security inmates who didn’t want to become maximum security inmates, those who were allowed out for work always came back. So you could say that the security features of the facility were both physical and psychological.

I confess, I spent many days wondering how I would break out if I were an inmate. I did this partly because I was bored out of my skull and partly because I desperately wanted out of that place every minute I was there. I was warned at the academy that inmates do time 24/7, officers do time in 8-hour chunks (16-hour if you do a double shift, but by that time you’re so light-headed you don’t know what time it is anyway). Correctional officers have a very high incident of alcohol and tobacco abuse, and a high rate of divorce.

Don’t get me wrong, my minimum-security women’s facility was no Sing-Sing. The inmates weren’t dangerous, at worst they were annoying. A lot of them were just plain odd. A few could have passed for men (and they spooked me just a tad), but most of them were petty thieves and check-bouncers -- although we did have one gal who tried to kill her husband (twice) and one who set her children on fire.

I think what gets to most correctional officers is 1.) long-term confinement with a large population of maladjusted people combined with 2.) the adversarial (and sometimes downright hostile) treatment of officers by the Department of Corrections. If you want to compare it to retail, you could say that not only are your “customers” from hell, but your boss is old Mr. Scratch, himself.

I liked my fellow officers very much, and as a writer I was fascinated with the inmates. If my current employer, a big-chain bookstore, goes out of business, I might consider working for the D.O.C. again. But I couldn’t do it for more than a couple of years. In order to illustrate why, let me tell you about one of the things that happened at that minimum-security facility. The incident itself will seem like a minor thing until I tell you why it spooked me.

Occasionally, inmates were punished for rule violations by having some of their privileges suspended. We had one gal who racked up a lot of those violations, an 18-year old who had given birth to 3 children by the time she went to prison. Suffice to say she did not have a lot of self-control. At one point she was confined to quarters for a week. This was a big problem for her, partly because she couldn’t socialize with her friends, but mostly because no smoking was permitted inside the rooms, and she dearly loved her cigs.

The no-smoking rule wasn’t just a matter of discipline. Those rooms were old, wood-frame construction, as dry as kindling. If one of them started on fire, there was a good chance the flames would spread rapidly. The rooms were arranged in a giant circle, we’re talking Ring of Fire, folks.

So this gal was confined, and it drove her nuts. She stood in the doorway of her room, hoping her friends would happen by (even though they weren’t supposed to be on that side of the yard) and sneaking cigarettes. I could have forgiven her for that, but when she saw me walking my rounds, she flicked her burning cigarette into the trashcan next to her bunk, which was right up against the wall of the room, next to the door.

First I foolishly tried to explain to her why she shouldn’t do that. But she refused to admit the incident had even happened, so I quickly abandoned that tactic and corralled the Alpha inmate for that room, a Latina who had been trying to recruit other inmates into a gang (without much luck). I told her what I had seen.

“Chances are,” I said, “The butt will go out and nothing will happen. But cigarette butts in ashcans have been known to smolder for hours and then burst into flames in the middle of the night. If that happens, you and your roomies will be trapped in a burning room, and that little fire extinguisher at the end of the row is the only thing they’ll have to fight the fire with.”

She got the idea fast. I told her to tell the other gal to smoke in the bathroom if she was going to sneak cigs and throw the butts in the toilet. She agreed that was a good idea. But afterward, I couldn’t help wondering – even if I had warded off disaster that particular day, could I be sure it wouldn’t happen again? Or even that someone wouldn’t set the joint ablaze on purpose? So I asked the Lieutenant on duty what our fire escape plan was. He told me that in the event of a fire, inmates and officers were all supposed to gather at the center of the facility and wait for the fire department to put the fire out.

Remember, this facility was built in a circle. Also remember, it’s old, and very, very dry.

Have you ever barbecued chicken? Just imagine us in the middle of that gigantic, raging fire. This is assuming we could stop the Human stampede for those razor-wired fences. This is assuming we wouldn’t be leading that Human stampede.

This is why I switched to my current job, ten years ago. Every time I think I’m having a bad day there, I think about what could have happened at that old motel that was turned into a prison. My very worst day at my current job is better than my very best day as a correctional officer.

But yes, if I had to, I could work that job again. I’m a lot tougher than I look. Probably a lot crazier too. If I ever work at a D.O.C. again, one of the first things I’ll do is find out what the fire-escape plan is.

Then I’ll pray like hell I never have to use it.

The Case Of The Sloppy Pincher

Funny how doing things wrong (or in this case, semi-wrong) can lead to a discovery. I bought some tomato plants this year, against my better judgement, and too late in the season. Furthermore, I bought seedlings instead of sowing my own seeds, which is ridiculously expensive. I’ll never get a big enough crop out of my plants to justify their expense, but at least a couple of things went right this year.

First, we had a freakishly cool June in Phoenix. Long-time vegetable gardeners around here will tell you it’s always tricky to get your tomato plants timed right – you don’t want a late frost to fry them, you’ve got to have them blooming when the pollinators are interested in them, and it’s all got to happen before the heat of summer sterilizes the pollen. I deserved to have a big failure in the tomato department this year, since I bought my plants in May (instead of late February). Happily, nature intervened and cut me some slack, extending spring far into summer.

But that’s not the only thing that went right. The other thing has to do with sweet basil. I planted some with my tomatoes in pots, in a spot that gets morning sun and afternoon shade. I figured the basil would shade the wimpy tomato greens and keep them from getting fried. And that’s what they did. But they did something else for the tomatoes as well, and that’s where the partial goof comes in.

I always pinch back blooms on sweet basil, because they spoil the flavor of the leaf. The plant puts so much energy into the bloom, it sucks all the flavor out of the rest of the plant. I also pinch because bees love those basil blooms so much, they’ll ignore other fruiting blossoms in favor of it. If you want your beans to develop, you may be disappointed if the bees are busy with your basil. So I pinch developing basil blossoms almost every day. But here’s the funny thing: I’m a sloppy pincher. So usually a few blossoms develop right at the bottom of the stalk. Because I planted the sweet basil in the same pots as the tomatoes, and because there were a few blossoms to attract the bees to that location, it looks like the tomatoes have benefitted from the close proximity. They came for the basil, and when they ran out of those flowers they moved on to the tomatoes.

I’m thinking I’ll try the trick with other fruiting plants. Mix ‘em up with sweet basil, and plant plenty of tansy too, because I’ve managed to have an entire spring without aphids, thanks to the tansy I planted in several places. I don’t believe in pesticides, I’d rather throw a plant away than squirt it with poison, but I don’t mind doing lots of companion planting. Butterflies and ladybugs love tansy, that’s good enough for me.

So, just to recap – I goofed, but the goof turned out all right. Maybe it steered me in a more productive direction. Next year I’ll mix more basil and tomato plants, maybe throw in some beans for good measure. And I’ll do the same sloppy pinching I always do. We’ll see if my theory is sound.

For the time being, at least, the Great Experiment continues . . .

Tough Noogies

The brick & mortar business where I work has made me sign a document stating that if I talk about them online, I can be fired, so I won’t mention them by name. But I’m not mad at them for making me sign that paper. Because they’re up the creek without a paddle, and I can’t blame them for being freaked out about it. They’ve got a right to look after their reputation. God knows the retail giants aren’t doing anything else very well these days.

Unfortunately, the way most retail chains have reacted to the bad economy is to decide that they’ve got to start harassing the customer from the moment they set foot in the store and not let them go again until they have their name, phone number, e-mail address, and shopping preferences – and woe betide the customer who doesn’t also have a couple dozen frequent shopper cards. Furthermore, at my store I’ve been ordered to address you by name, no matter how much that may offend you. And you need to know my name too. If it’s any consolation, I’ll try to use your last name instead of your first, and I only mispronounce it about 35% of the time. I’ll try to mumble it so you won’t think I’m hitting on you.

But all of that “customer service” will do no good at all in the end, because I work at a book store, and within a few years, most book sales will be done online or with a phone app. Yes – I know everyone is saying that, and I also know there tends to be a gold-rush attitude about new formats and technologies that often turns out to be exaggerated. But in this case friends – it ain’t exaggerated. People are underestimating how big the change is going to be.

Forget all that stuff about how much you like paper books and how you don’t want to change. Because that’s just tough noogies. It’s not about what you want. It’s about what they’re going to give you, what they think they can do to turn a profit. Controlling costs is the only way big biz can squeeze the bottom line right now, and shipping around tons of paper is expensive. Zapping electronic bits in your general direction is way cheaper, and if you put it on a reader you like, you’ll get used to it pretty fast.

Don’t get me wrong, I love printed books. But I have to admit, I’ve been appalled at the waste I see in the book biz. We manufacture astounding amounts of trash every day at our location, just in terms of cardboard boxes and merchandising lists, just so we can build displays of things we want people to buy. But after all that effort, after all that paper and gasoline, most of the books that make it to our shelves get packed right back up eventually and shipped back again. It’s very Sisyphus-ian. Move that pile of sand over here, then move it back over there. On the small scale, no big deal. But we’re talking gigantic, and without easy credit to make it look like actual moolah is being made, the losses are apparent much more quickly than they used to be. So the electronic medium will sweep all that away. And how could that help brick & mortar stores?

Not one bit, actually. So they’re in complete denial about it. That’s why I’m wondering if you’d like a bag for your items, Mr. Smith. What was that phone number again?

The funny thing is, even if the brick & mortar chains crash, I don’t think amazon is going to be the only game in town. Google won’t either, even if they end up selling their own gigantic library of e-books. I think writers are going to control the e-book market, mostly because we’ll be able to set our own prices. We’ll tend to keep them really low, because we don’t have a gigantic overhead to pay for. Of course, we’ll be plagued by pirates and we’ll have to compete with millions of other sites for the attention of shoppers, but that won’t stop us. After all, we’ve been treated like dirt for decades, we’re used to trouble. We’re not easily discouraged, either. In fact, it’s scary how hard it is to get us to give up.


So here’s my advice to shoppers: don’t pay a lot of money for books, or movies, or music. Pay something, give writers and musicians a reason to keep making the stuff that entertains you, but don’t pay a high price for it unless you can’t live without it. If you think someone’s price for an e-book is too high, tell them so. They may lower it. Believe me, if you tell a book store clerk the same thing, they’ll just have to refer you to Customer Care. And there’s just one way a call like that can end.

“Thanks for shopping with us Mr. Smith. Have a nice day.”

My Dad The Time-Traveling War Hero

When I was about 8, I got caught in a really big lie, one so ridiculous there’s no way anyone would possibly have believed it – except me. It was a lie about my dad, and in my own defense, I have to say I told it because of something I honestly did not understand. And I don’t blame my mom for this fact, even though it was partly because she hadn't told me that she and my dad were divorced. My dad was in the Air Force, he was stationed in Viet Nam, so when I asked where he was, she always told me he was away fighting the war. What she didn’t realize was that I was too young to understand that the war was in Viet Nam. The war I saw on TV every day was the one in the movies, WWII. It was WWI, as well, but I figured it was the same difference. I loved those old movies, and I did not completely understand that they were about the past; in my mind, the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s all blended with the present. The past was incomprehensible if it was more than a few years old, so I decided it must all be happening now.

If I had been the kind of kid who watched the news, I might have heard about the war in Viet Nam, but my favorite show was The Time Tunnel. It fed my delusion that the past and present were really the same thing. So one day in school, as we were trooping through a section on WWII in our history books, I pointed to a picture in the book of a fighter plane and informed the class, "My dad flies an airplane just like that! He’s in the war!"

The boys in the class immediately caught my mistake, they pointed out that current fighter pilots flew jets. But to me, a fighter plane was a fighter plane, I didn’t see the point arguing about props versus jet engines. And to make matters worse, I insisted that Dad was still fighting WWII, because that was the only war I knew anything about. So when the boys pointed out that WWII had been over for 20 years, and the gap in my logic became really apparent, I felt the need to fill it with an explanation. "My dad is part of a special force," I said, "they’ve gone back in time to fight the Nazis – because the Nazis figured out how to use the Time Tunnel! They’re using it to steal the plans for the atomic bomb so they won’t lose the war! And my dad is going to stop them!"

Nobody bought that story, and that really ticked me off. Even if it wasn’t true, they could have given me the benefit of the doubt, right? Could they be absolutely positive the Nazis weren’t engaged in time travel experiments? No they could not! And furthermore, attitudes like that just get you eaten when the monster really does come oozing out of the vents at the movie theater. That’s been proven a thousand times over, at least in the movies.

I gave up trying to convince people that my dad was a time-traveling Nazi-thwarter. After a while, I forgot that I had ever told that story – until I read a book by Dean Koontz titled Lightning. I got halfway through that book, realized the good guy was German, then understood exactly what was going on. Okay, maybe he didn’t use the Time Tunnel, but those nefarious time-traveling, bomb-stealing Nazis showed up, just like I said they would!

I’m not saying Koontz used his idea-sucking, thought-theft device on me. He came up with that idea because it was a good idea. Vindication!

When I was about 9, Mom told me she and Dad were divorced. Years later, I was finally able to see far enough past the tip of my own nose to realize there had been a war in Viet Nam, though the truth seemed almost as strange as my lie had been. Maybe we can never make up anything as weird as the truth is.

But we can try, can’t we? Those holes in logic have to be filled somehow. Pardon me while I fetch my shovel . . .

Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho, The Writer's Life For Me

At the risk of incurring the scorn of blogmasters and literary critics, the wrath of REALLY powerful talk-show hosts, the ire of authors of legitimate biographies, and the undivided attention of CNN, I’m going to call some of these blog entries mini-memoirs.

Okay, I suspect none of the personages listed above will actually give a rat’s ass what I call my silly blog entries, or that they’ll even be aware they exist, but in the slim chance any of that happens, I figure I’d better be up front with the fact that I’m a liar. And when I’m not lying, I have a really crummy memory. And when I’m telling the truth, I’ve changed names, dates, facts, and people’s hair color to conceal their identities, not because I’m concerned for their safety or privacy, but because I don’t want to be sued out of all my worldly possessions, which currently consist of a 1050-square-foot duplex and a ten-year-old Ford POS with one broken window.

So why call biographical blog entries mini-memoirs? Why not call them stories if they’re so full of hooey? After all, many writers base stories and novels on their own lives, not to mention the lives of their friends, families, and neighbors. Everything we see and hear, everything that happens to us, is weighed and considered as possible subject matter. But you’d be surprised how much of it changes when we run it through the Fiction Machine. Especially my Fiction Machine, which usually churns out Science Fiction.

On the other hand, I couldn’t call many of my blog entries straight biography either. Because frankly, straight biography would be kind of boring. I’ve never been an international spy, a movie star, or an ex- junkie with a really compelling story of redemption and hope. The only thing that makes me stand out from the e-crowd is that I’ve written and sold several novels. I’m a professional liar. And so is every other writer, even the ones who write non-fiction.

Have you ever noticed that when you share stories at family gatherings, no one can agree about what really happened? As I’m writing this, there are five different books about Abraham Lincoln on the shelf at the book store where I have my day job. Each of them has a different interpretation of Lincoln’s character, his mental health, his relationship with his wife, his style of governing, and even his sexuality. Granted, none of them have engaged in outright lying, as I plan to do, but look at it this way: you’re not going to lose weight using my diet, cure your health problems by referring to my list of natural cures that THEY don’t want you to know about, or become a millionaire by following my investment theories. I’ve got to come up with some way to hold your attention.

But I’m not totally without ethics. I’m not simply going to lie and not admit it. Though I won’t try to point out which parts were deliberately made up, as opposed to the parts that are false just because my memory sucks. If you write a lot of blog entries yourself, you already have some idea why writers lie, not to mention what drives us to write in the first place. This ain’t exactly redemption, but it might be insight.

Recently a new phrase has been coined, truthiness, meaning a lie you tell that you wish to be the truth. But I prefer fibbiness (much easier to say than lie-i-ness). Fibbiness is a lie you tell that you wish were true, but that you don’t expect anyone to believe. Only Mathematicians pursue pure truth. The rest of us tell lies all day long, to ourselves and to everybody else. The lies aren’t just a way to get what we want or to avoid trouble. They’re an attempt to re-shape reality into what we want it to be. Maybe that’s a good definition of a memoir. Or even a mini-memoir. Not to mention a blog entry.

And even if it isn’t – it’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

And While We're On The Subject

Here’s another awkward question people ask me: "Why did you change pen names so often?" And once again, I get a lot of blank stares when I give the honest answer: Because my publisher wanted me to. And not because they were trying to fool readers – at least, not at first.

The first time I changed my pen name, from Emily Devenport to Maggy Thomas, my publisher was trying to fool the book store chains. They had gotten into the habit of only ordering as many copies of a writer’s new title as they recently ordered of the last book. Think about this for a moment – we’re not talking about total sales for the last book. We’re talking about the order information for the last few months. So even if they sold 12 copies of your last title, if they only ordered 1 or 2 copies in the last few months before the new title was released, they would only order a couple of copies of the new one. Not only did that give you no opportunity to grow your audience, it actually caused your sales figures to shrink.

So it was time to become Maggy Thomas and write the book that readers liked the best, the one that got nominated for the Philip K. Dick award, Broken Time. Only my publisher didn’t do anything else to boost that book other than having me change my name. They didn’t make it a lead title or publish it in hardback, it was just another obscure mass-market paperback release for that year. So when it came time to sell the next proposal (for Belarus), my editor had to hustle to keep me on board with the company, and this time her reasoning was simple. She thought I could gain more readers if my name was "gender obscure," meaning that it could be a man’s name or a woman’s. That’s how I became Lee Hogan. So that time around, they were trying to fool the reader.

And that strategy worked fairly well. If the economy hadn’t started to slide the year Enemies was released, I might still be doing Lee Hogan titles. Instead, I and a bunch of other midlist writers got "remaindered" a few months after the 911 tragedy, which means the remaining stock for our titles was sold at a discount, reducing their value and screwing up our sales figures.

It’s not the saddest story out there – I actually managed to get 9 titles published and get my professional credentials, and I worked with great editors. I learned how to write novels, and no one committed suicide. But I have to say, having three pen names has been a pain in the neck. I made fans with all three names, and trying to direct them all to my new stuff could be a real challenge. Just trying to set up Facebook pages for each pen name makes my head spin – as of this writing, I’ve only done it for Emily Hogan and Emily Devenport, because I need a different e-mail for each pen name. I suspect the same is true for MySpace and LinkedIn, and I’m not sure it’s even necessary. I’m hoping I’ll only need two fiction websites, one for my adult fiction and one for my YA, because I’m pretty sure my head is going to explode if I have to remember even one more password.

I’d like to tell you I’d never get another pen name, but if I sell a book to a publisher and they want me to assume yet another pen name, I’ll do it. That’s the biz, folks. Sometimes you end up with Multiple Pen Name Disorder. God help me if I run out of e-mail accounts . . .

Missing Sequels

As a writer, one of the toughest questions I have to answer is, “Why didn’t you write a sequel to . . . ?” It’s not that I don’t have an answer, it’s just that no one believes me – at least, no one who isn’t in the same biz. The short answer is, “I didn’t write that sequel because my publisher made it clear they wouldn’t buy it.” And why wouldn’t they buy it? They say it’s because the previous books didn’t earn enough money. But this is where the answer gets complicated, because usually, what they’re saying isn’t true.

Understand, most of us earn peanuts for our books, anywhere from $4000 to $9000 advance against royalties. Those royalties are usually 8% of gross sales for a mass-market paperback, maybe around $.35 per book. The publisher rarely prints more than 20,000 copies of a book, so you don’t actually have much chance of earning back the advance, and they don’t have much incentive to go back to print. The mid-list books exist to be the french fries of the book industry (you want fries with that?), the product that didn’t cost the publisher very much and the one they actually earn the best margin on. You’d think that would get them to work harder to promote and re-print that product, but that’s where things get psychological. If they start doing that, they don’t have a mid-list book on their hands anymore, they’ve got a potential bestseller. A writer whose book falls into that category can demand better royalties. Get it?

Every mid-list writer is hoping to write the break-out book, the one that will bust them into the bestseller category. But the way the book business is structured, this is almost impossible, and it’s not just the fault of publishers – not by a long shot. Book chains create extremely tough circumstances for publishers, not the least of which is the “strip” system. When they need to generate income to purchase new product, they’ll go through their paperbacks, strip off the covers, and mail them back for credit – regardless of how well those books are selling! The publisher (and especially the writer) just lost that income and that leaves fewer copies available to allow the writer to “earn out.”

Lots of other writers have written extensively about this situation, I suppose I’m not adding anything new to the argument, not even when I say that this old way of doing things is crashing and burning. As my pal, writer Rick Cook says, they’ve been trying to finance an expensive distribution system all these years, and now they can’t do it anymore. The internet and the e-book is going to shatter their business model, especially since they absolutely refuse to do the new thinking that would allow them to flourish. And that’s a great opportunity for writers.


But it’s also a big challenge. One thing publishers have going for them is professional editors. These people help writers polish their work. When we’ve worked on a book for the better part of a year, we lose our objectivity about it. There are problems we can’t see anymore. If professional editors are smart, they’ll start contracting with writers, maybe even lure us into partnerships. An editor who manages a book website and pays good writers 70% of the profit from sales could transform the book biz.

I’ve already got a professional editor I work with: Elinor Mavor, who edited AMAZING STORIES in the early 80s. For the time being, I’m going to manage my own fiction website. I’m so used to not getting rich, all I care about is that it shouldn’t cost me too much money. I’m not afraid to venture into new territory – I do that every time I write a book!

So which books do people ask me about the most? There are three of them. First, a sequel to my Emily Devenport titles, Shade and Larissa. I had both a sequel planned (called Knossos) and a prequel (Stripe).

Second, a sequel to my Maggy Thomas title, Broken Time. This is the title that earned the most critical acclaim, and readers on amazon.com have begged for a sequel. I hadn’t considered the idea until I got so much positive feedback, so I sketched out an idea that I thought I would call The Abyss Looks Back. If I had successfully pitched it to my publisher, they probably would have demanded that I change the title. Now I’ll have to rely on Ellie and my husband Ernie to tell me if my title is dopey.

Last, readers have expressed an interest in a sequel to my Lee Hogan titles, Belarus and Enemies. I could actually envision several books in that series, I’m afraid that universe is too big for just one more book. But the book that’s clearest in my mind is not a sequel, though it’s set in the same universe. It’s set on Tally Korsakova’s engineered world, Canopus, and I wanted to call it Harpy. Of all the possible books I’ve just mentioned, Harpy is closest to my heart. For sure, I’m going to write that one. I hope one day you can read it, too.