Spoink!

I’ve been gardening in Phoenix for about 10 years now, and I’ve learned that if I want the seeds I sow to sprout, I have to use the blitz approach. If I want 3 or 4 sweet pea vines to sprout, I have to sow 10 to 15 seeds. If I want a tub full of zinnias, I need to sow 50 zinnia seeds. If I want larkspur to tower above the scene, I need to take the dried-up old stalks in June and shake them over the area where I want them to grow the following year, a hundred little seeds or so.

After that, I need to shred old, dead matter from expired plants and gently sift it over the spot where I sowed the seeds. I need to water that area 2 to 3 times a week. Over the next several weeks, sprouts will appear. I call them spoinkers. This is because I imagine spoink! is the sound the sprouts make when their leaves pop out of the seed casing. All over the garden, it’s spoink! Spoink! Spoink! And those casings go flying.

I’ve tried a lot of flower varieties for my Phoenix garden, and I’ve settled on a few stellar performers. Sweet peas, zinnias, stocks, larkspur, celosia, snapdragons, and nasturtiums. If I’m lucky, one or two of the dozens of sunflower seeds I sowed will grow big enough to open a giant head.

But Nature is way better at sowing seeds than I am. Every year, several of the flowers that grow in my garden were sown by wind, and rain, and pooping birds. They don’t need to scatter shredded mulch over the seeds, they don’t need to fuss over them at all. Wild sunflowers bloom in several places, and I try to leave 1 or 2 of them where they are, because the birds and bees love them so much. I figure I owe them at least that much. Because no one has perfected the blitz approach half as well as Nature.

And thank goodness for that!

Ragnarok And Striped Socks

I don’t believe in the End of the World. Call it Ragnarok, The Apocalypse, Armageddon, The Rapture, 2012, whatever. It’s not going to happen.

Though admittedly, sometimes it almost happens. The climate changes, a comet slams into us, ice ages and volcanoes occur. There’s even evidence that the sun may have partially fried us with a really massive solar flare a few-hundred million years ago. Yet life persisted and flourished.

I don’t even believe in World War III. The damned thing would just be too expensive. Any super-virus would burn itself out before it could pass itself on, any toxic agent would not spread far, any bomb would do limited damage. Our current world-wide depression is little more than an annoyance for most people, even as it provokes wide-reaching changes.

Losing a loved one can seem like the end of the world. Or losing your home. Lots of people experience figurative ends-of-the world. But even when we die, it’s not over. We’ve had an effect, we dented the universe with our own, particular gravity well, and even if no one remembered us, we still existed – nothing can change that. Time and space wove together to create our existence, and even as the arrow of time moves past our lives, the cosmic garment it knitted is still there. I like to picture it as a colossal sock. Maybe with stripes. Or polka dots.

Nope, there’s no end of the world. Though some day, maybe 4 or 5 billion years from now, the sun will lose its current balance of hydrogen-into-helium and it will expand to swallow the inner planets. But I wonder if the shock wave of its expansion might nudge us farther out, rather than swallowing us. Not that we would be in good shape, even if it did. Anyway, at that point we’ll have a different solar system. Some surviving planets might even evolve a hospitable habitat. After all, didn’t Superman come from a planet that had a red sun?

Okay, I’m reaching with that one, but in 4 or 5 billion years, if we still exist, we’ll probably be smarter and have better gizmos. We’ll have colonized space. We could actually outlive our world, though no species from Earth has managed to do that so far. I’m just saying it’s possible. In fact, what seems kind of impossible is the fact that we exist in the first place.

Think about it: we had to have just the right kind of sun: not too big, not too small, not too heavy, not too gas giant-y. Our solar system had to have enough of the right elements present when the planets coalesced to make minerals and amino-acids and all that good stuff. And collisions had to take place; several planetoids collided to form the earth, and one of those collisions had to produce our moon. Enough nickel-iron had to be present by then to form that nice, spinning, electromagnetic-field-producing core that keeps radiation from frying us, but that field also needs to let enough radiation in to allow for mutation. Our moon has to be large enough and orbiting at the right distance to stabilize our axis of rotation and provoke regular tides.

During an early period of heavy bombardment, comets crashed into us and brought water. Little comets still do. We have currents in our mantle that move the continental and oceanic crust around, volcanoes blow up or ooze various types of lava so we can have minerals beneficial to crop-bearing soils. We have the right ratio of land to water to generate storms that drop rain.

Hooray for volcanoes! Hooray for weather! Hooray for cake! We’re here, and that’s amazing. We can wonder how it all came to be. We can dream about what’s possible in the future.

But the end of the world? Not gonna happen. Not as long as we keep thinking and dreaming and planning. That’s what we evolved to do. Somewhere between all those bombardments, volcanic explosions, ice ages, and hurricanes, we got up on our feet and peeked over the next hill to see what might be there. We survived the Almost End Of The World. We could do it again.

So stick around. You won’t witness the End Of The World, but who knows what other strange stuff might happen? After all, that’s what makes life worthwhile in the first place. That and striped socks.

Or maybe polka dots. Whatever.

She Sells Seashells (On Her Website, Wholesale)

Recently I’ve been kvetching a lot about the book biz, specifically about working for one of the big brick & mortar chains. And I’ve had good reason to grouse, though it’s also true that there are many day jobs that suck way worse than mine. This is still the best job I’ve ever had in terms of work environment. I like my co-workers very much, my G.M. has bent over backward many times to give me the schedule and vacation days I want, and this is nothing to sneeze at. Even with all of its flaws, I would keep this job for 10 more years if I could. And because of this, I do everything they ask me to do, including offering extra items to people at the cash register and addressing them by name. Who knows, maybe it will work.

But I’m not just a sales clerk, I’m also a shopper. So when I wonder what’s going to happen to big-chain brick & mortar retail businesses, I think about what I prefer in my own shopping experience. And most of the time, what I prefer to do is go online. Here are the reasons.

When I first started shopping online, it was because I couldn’t find something I wanted locally: seashells. Yes my friends, I found a website where she sells seashells. (In case you’re interested, it was Sanibel Industries, but there are many others.) After that point, I no longer thought about shopping in stores if I could get something online, and this included clothing, rugs, baking supplies, garden supplies, and books & music.

So selection was the first reason, but it wasn’t alone. Price and convenience were also factors. There I sat, in my jammies, sipping coffee and listening to the birdies sing outside, and I could use my search engine to find the best whatsis for the most reasonable price. You have to be cautious about where you’re willing to enter your credit card number, but I’ve had that problem in brick & mortar places too. Credit card companies are much more alert to fraud attacks than they used to be, and I always review my statements.

So the possibility of fraud doesn’t scare me away from the internet. It’s a great source of information too, and I’ll probably be enrolling in some online college courses this year, so I wonder how necessary it’s going to be in the future to set foot on a campus. I can get news online from a variety of sources, no more newspaper is necessary. I can research hikes I want to take, places I want to visit, movies I’m thinking of seeing. I can find the classical music that brick & mortar stores haven’t been willing to stock for years. I can find out-of-print books and DVDs. So I have to ask myself, if I didn’t work for this big book chain, would I even set foot in any of its stores?

And the answer is no.

The thing is, there are still stores I’m willing to visit in person. Like the grocery store. And it’s nice to eat out from time to time. I love antique malls too. I like Costco and Target, though I don’t visit either of them as much as they would probably like me to. I go to Home Depot and Lowe’s, though my favorite places to go for gardening supplies are family-owned nurseries. I can buy shoes online, but my husband has weird-sized feet and needs to try shoes on. An experienced clerk can really make a difference in those situations.

Which brings up a key concept – the small business with a devoted clientele. Some of these do very well, despite a bad economy. They tend to be small restaurants, bakeries, plant nurseries, antique shops, curiosity shops, etc. I still like to visit those. Most small book stores only do well if they are hybrids that combine books with other products and services, in a fashion that doesn’t enable too many freebee readers and shoplifters.

But they don’t make huge amounts of money. And they don’t spend huge amounts either. Old fashioned business principles tend to apply to these stores much more than they do to big chains, who mask a lack of profitability with easy credit and who waste money so shamefully, it’s a wonder they don’t fail a lot faster than they usually do.

I don’t know that Big Business will ever be totally finished. But the next ten years or so may be the era of Medium Business, brick & mortar stores that are big enough to obtain the loans and credit they need and the name recognition that will attract the customers, but small enough to avoid the waste and the overpaid executives whose sole purpose in life is to think up Kafka-esque bullshit.

But what will happen online is hard to say. Hundreds of millions of people (me among them) will be offering things for sale and even things for free online. As people become more computer- and web-savvy, they’ll have more options, as both buyers and sellers. Not to mention entertainment consumers. Not to mention entertainment producers! We’ll see more change in the next ten years than we saw in the previous ten, and that’s a heck of a lot of change.

Will book stores still be around? That depends on whether one or both of the two biggies fail. I’m expecting to see a transition period, but I’m not sure how long it will last and whether or not there will be a huge glut of remaindered hard-copy books for sale. Or whether people will embrace the different e-readers so thoroughly, a lot of books will get pulped or buried in landfills.

Even libraries may convert to electronic systems, though how much remains to be seen. Librarians would use their time assisting research rather than shelving and alphabetizing.

What would happen to book store clerks, then? We may end up doing the same thing as the librarians, but with a different pay system. I wouldn’t mind that one bit. I’m good at research, and it would be a great way to develop a friendly customer service environment. You wouldn’t even have to do it at a bookstore, you could work with a headset, a telephone, and a computer at home.

Oops. We’re doomed!

The Autobiography of an Idea

Previously I blogged about ideas, specifically where writers get them. I mentioned that writers don’t have a problem thinking up stories, we’ve got the opposite problem. We’ve got too many damned ideas, so many that we can feel overwhelmed by them. But that doesn’t really answer the basic question readers are asking when they wonder where those ideas come from, so I thought I’d take another stab at it. Let me tell you where I got the idea for my Lee Hogan novel, Belarus.

Belarus was not actually the novel I intended to write. The novel I dreamed up was titled Shrouded Woman, the book that eventually was published as Enemies. One night Ernie and I went to visit Borders. Back in those days, Borders was a novelty, a gigantic book store where you could actually hang out. I was looking at the new books on the big tables at the front of the store, and one of them captured my attention. It was titled The Autobiography of a Face. The cover featured a close shot of a woman whose face was partially obscured by a veil. But even with all that fabric in the way, you could see her jaw was disfigured.

That author wrote about how cancer had changed her face and her life. Her image on the cover haunted me, I kept coming back to that book and looking at it. I didn’t buy the book, and I never read it either, mostly because the image on the cover had moved into my head and stared evolving into a character. I had no room in there for reality, fantasy had taken over the machinery.

When we got home, we discovered that a bunch of movies had arrived in the mail – we’d had the bad judgement to join one of those mail-order movie clubs, and our freebee-enticement selections picked that fatal moment to show up. We decided to watch Anastacia, starring Yul Brynner and Ingrid Bergman. For those of you who’ve never seen it, the movie is about a woman who may be the last survivor of the Russian royal family, an artifact of a lost world.

I went to bed that night and dreamed. In my dream, the lady with the veiled, disfigured face and the story of Anastacia had merged. By the time I woke up, I knew it was a story I had to write. I sat down at the computer and started to sketch out the basics. I asked myself why the lady at the center of the story was disfigured. Then I puzzled over why the society she lived in would insist she hide her condition behind a veil, and why that society should resemble imperial Russia, especially since it had been transplanted to another world. Why should anyone do that? What did they find when they got to that world? I already knew an alien race lived there – who were they? Why were they there?

I kept asking myself the questions whose answers would explain the lady. That’s how I pieced together her back-story. But I felt I had to explain that back-story to my editor at ROC when I pitched the book (otherwise she might not understand why the shrouded lady should exist), so I wrote a 35-page treatment instead of the usual proposal. I had already written 7 other books for ROC, and the last one, Broken Time, had been nominated for the Philip K. Dick award. I thought I could get away with it. And I was right — sort of. My editor loved the back-story. So she wanted me to write 2 novels instead of 1, and the first would be about Andrei Mironenko, a sketchy-yet-important character, the guy who had founded the planet Belarus.

"Sure!" I said confidently.

Belarus turned out to be the hardest book I’ve ever written. It was a multi-viewpoint, third person narrative full of brilliant, complex characters. I made the mistake (thinking I’d never have to actually write the scenes) of promising 2 wars in the story. And I knew almost nothing about imperial Russia. I hadn’t a dime to hire a researcher and I was holding down 2 jobs at the time. I ended up making a few historical boo-boos that were pounced upon by a couple of reviewers on amazon (I’ll be fixing them in the upcoming electronic edition), but that wasn’t even my major concern at that point. I was busy dreaming up a world.

So remember, we started with a picture of a lady on the cover of a book and a half-digested movie, glommed together. They ended up in the Cuisinart of my dreams, and I asked myself a bunch of questions to explain a few things. Then BOOM, a contract. The fun part was behind me, the pick-and-shovel work took over my life. Time to mail an SASE to that Idea Company and buy some help. Only there IS no Idea Company, there’s just my feverish imagination. And the amazing part? That’s enough.

I started with a sketchy idea. As I wrote each section, characters just showed up. I didn’t plan them, I rarely thought about them. They walked into the room and tapped me on the shoulder. They knew what they were going to do and why. Most of them were a complete surprise to me, and that includes my favorite character from both books: Baba Yaga. She was the easiest one to write, she was the magic that made the whole shebang come together.

But don’t get me wrong, I didn’t sit down every day and channel all these folks. Some of them took a lot longer to arrive than others. I often sat down feeling baffled, and I often got up the same way. Some sessions I only managed a paragraph or two. I had to finally set myself a quota of ½ page per day, because I didn’t think I could accomplish a whole page. Having set myself the challenge of figuring out how a space war might be fought, I had to conclude it was a ridiculous notion. I conferred constantly about the technologies that might be involved with my super-smart husband, Ernie. The whole mess creeped along, one shambling step at a time.

But eventually, the machinery I was constructing began to run on its own, and Belarus took on momentum. Once that happened, I was able to write several pages a day, on one memorable occasion turning out 25 pages in just a few hours.

Ideas come from the subconscious. When you train yourself to retrieve and shape those ideas, they take on a life of their own. It’s sort of like having your own Central Casting, a mob of method actors who are convinced there’s no business like show business. Sometimes they’re brilliant, sometimes they’re corny, but they’re always THERE. You’re stuck with them. They’re stuck with you. Once you’ve written about them, they’ll move into other people’s heads, even if those people don’t remember where they got them.

Ideas think themselves up.

I hope that answers the question. Even if you didn’t ask.

Ideas And Baseball Bats

There are many perfectly innocent questions that readers ask writers, but the one that’s most likely to make some writers go ballistic is Where do you get your ideas?

Not all writers go ballistic, we know these folks are actually asking, how we get our ideas, not where (as in some town that ships out ideas in little boxes). People who don’t make up stories wonder how it’s done, what’s the magical process, what arcane lore do writers possess that allows us to invent entire worlds, fill them with people, then (coherently) chronicle their adventures? These same folks might be a little freaked out if they found out that writers get their ideas from the same places lunatics get their obsessions, delusions, and hallucinations, and that the mental condition that causes some people to compulsively check the stove 25 times in a row to make sure it’s really off also prods us into writing about stuff that never happened to people who don’t exist.

The truth is not very romantic, I’m afraid. And furthermore, writers aren’t either. You’ll find the same spectrum of personality among writers as you would find among teachers, lawyers, construction workers, sales clerks, and everybody else. Some writers are open-minded, good-humored, and nice to puppy dogs, others are nasty rotten twits. Most of us are somewhere in between.

Yet despite our real-life limitations, it’s possible for us to write about anything, from anyone’s point of view. Our characters may be saints, serial-killers, soldiers, kings, beggars, dogs, aliens, even talking coffee pots. We write from these points of view with varying degrees of success, but the point is, we can at least imagine the universe from their perspective. I think that’s one of the traits all writers share.

But to be a successful writer, you need two extra things: drive and the ability to learn. Drive is going to keep pushing you through unknown territory as you wrangle your story from its beginning to its end. And you will learn how to do it as you go, not just that first time but every single time you sit down to write. Once you’ve done it enough times, coming up with ideas won’t be a problem. In fact, you’ll have to beat ideas off with a baseball bat.

And that’s actually another problem. You end up with too many ideas. You’ll often feel compelled to scribble notes for them, do rough outlines if the idea is a good one, and you end up with twenty or thirty novels-in-progress at any given point in time. Even if you don’t have a day job (and most of us do) you couldn’t possibly write all of these novels, not if you want to do a good job of it. And that can paralyze you, much in the same way a sink full of dishes makes you want to avoid doing the dishes at all costs.

So how do you get past that? You pick a spot and start. Sometimes you have a false start, so you pick another and try again. You commit to a particular story and you finish it, come Hell or high water. That’s where drive comes in. If you try to rely on inspiration, you’ll start writing a hundred books and drop every one of them when the work gets too hard.

I’ve written fourteen books in about twenty years. That’s not counting another twenty that are about half finished and yet another twenty that are just in the form of rough notes. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to keep writing books as long as I want to, until I croak in front of my computer (or whatever gizmo takes its place). Getting enough ideas probably won’t be a problem, even if I get over the need to write and develop some other all-consuming pastime. No, I suspect my problem will always be too many ideas (and too many dishes, for that matter).

So pardon me while I pick a spot and get started. And pass the dishwashing liquid.

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.