David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Spent most of yesterday afternoon going through my writing papers with the person who comes in on an irregular basis to help us organize things. (Actually, a different person from the same company… the woman we’ve been working with fell and cracked her neck. She’s currently in rehab and expects to be walking again within a year. Our thoughts are with her.)

I have a file drawer with folders for each story, and a second file drawer for novels. I also had a stack of papers that needed to be filed. Well, actually, several stacks. It’s only recently that I realized that those stacks added up to about two feet of papers going back to 2006. Oog. Hence the organizer.

It was very, very helpful to have a second pair of eyes and hands. All I had to do was look at a page and tell her which story it was associated with, and she filed it away in the appropriate folder while I was looking at the next page. She also helped me by forcing a decision about “file first, then sort chronologically” or vice versa or both at once, which seems a stupid thing to get hung up on but had been stalling me on this project for literally years. She was also very cruel to me and forced me to keep sorting long after I would have given up if it were just me, or just me and Kate. All of which is what we pay her for.

In three hours we powered through the two feet of papers and got everything sorted into folders. The bad news is that the file drawer filled up and half the folders are now in hanging-file boxes on the floor. At least the big tottering piles of unsorted papers have been vanquished.

Next step is to go through each folder, sort it chronologically, and pull out (or copy) papers to be sent to the NIU archives. I have an appointment with the organizer to do that in July, but I think it may take more than one session. I hope that once that’s done the remaining papers will fit into one file drawer.

Going through my old papers was actually a heartening experience. Yes, there were a lot of rejection letters (the pile goes back far enough that I was getting most of my rejections on paper, which isn’t true any more), but there were also a lot of contracts, a lot of positive reviews, and many reminders of other successes, like the program from the 2006 Hugo Awards ceremony. So, although that was a lot of work and I didn’t do any actual writing yesterday, I feel really good about the whole thing.

We’re just back from a week in Eastern Oregon. This is a trip that Kate’s been wanting to take for years, and I must confess that I was unenthusiastic about the idea until my trip to “Mars” showed me how beautiful the desert can be.

Sun 6/12: Portland-Kennewick

We started off with two days at the home of Kate’s parents in Kennewick, Washingon. On the way we stopped to eat our sandwiches at the Portland Women’s Forum State Scenic Viewpoint (AKA Chanticleer Point) and to admire the scenery from the historic Crown Point lookout. As we drove we passed quickly from the wet green side of the mountains to the dry brown side.

We crossed the Columbia for a stop at the Maryhill Museum, which was built as the home of Quaker enterpreneur Sam Hill (yes, he’s the origin of the phrase “What the Sam Hill?”). When the utopian farming community he’d planned failed to materialize, he repurposed the building as an art museum. It contains a fine collection of chess sets, a bunch of Rodin sculptures, many artifacts of Hill’s friend Queen Marie of Roumania (yes, she of the “glorious cycle of song”), and the 27″ fashion dolls the French fashion industry created to show off their creative powers immediately after World War II, when there weren’t enough resources for a full fashion show. These dolls were thought by the French to have been destroyed, but they’ve been at Maryhill ever since. Recently they were rediscovered by the French and were spruced up and taken on tour, along with new replicas of the sets on which they were originally displayed… including a bizarre one by director Pierre Cocteau. As we usually wind up doing, we went through all the exhibits backwards (it’s not on purpose, I swear) so we saw the weird one first.

Mon 6/13: Kennewick

A pleasant day of thrift-storing and suchlike with Kate’s parents.

Tue 6/14: Kennewick-Pendleton

On the way out of town we made a slight detour to buy tortillas at a tortilleria in Pasco. We had some difficulty finding it, but it was worth it — we wound up with a backstage tour and a package of chapatis. It’s weird to realize that the Columbia doubles back and flows West-to-East here, so to get from Oregon to Pasco we had to cross the Columbia twice. Then we managed to enter Oregon from Pasco without crossing the river again. Never drove around a river before…

After driving through pretty rolling hills and lots of wheat (?) fields, we reached Pendleton (“Where the Sidewalk Ends and the Real West Begins!”) and had dinner at Hamley’s (a Pendleton tradition since 1863). We split a steak that was one of the better ones I’ve ever had.

Wed 6/15: Pendleton

After a lovely B&B breakfast we visited the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute, an excellent museum of Native American culture and history, though the story it told is kind of depressing.

In the afternoon we took the Pendleton Underground Tour. This tour is less sensational and overblown than the Seattle equivalent, more matter-of-fact, and felt more like true history (much of the story you’ll hear on the Seattle tour is pure hogwash). The tunnels themselves were built by the city as a “backstage” delivery route, kind of like Disney World, more prosaic than Seattle’s. Many of the underground rooms we visited were decorated as shops, using artifacts found in the tunnels, though the rooms themselves were used at the time as storerooms and workrooms for the shops above. Other rooms were shown in the same state they were used in, such as the living quarters for Chinese laborers (below). We also visited an above-ground former brothel, shut down in 1953 and apparently left exactly as it was, untouched, for decades.

After the tour we visited the Round-Up and Happy Canyon Hall of Fame, where the famous bronco War Paint now bucks forever. Pendleton is best known for the annual Round-Up, a major rodeo and civic festival. It sounds like a lot of fun, but because of the expense and crowds we will probably never visit Pendleton during the Round-Up. Happy Canyon is the Native American side of the Round-Up, a cheesy melodrama that’s been presented in exactly the same way every year since 1916 (kind of a Western version of Oberammergau’s passion play).

Thu 6/16: Pendleton-John Day-Dayville

After another fine breakfast, we packed up, checked out, and hit the famous Pendleton Woolen Mill for a tour of the mill and a turn through the factory store. I never did get an answer to my question about the blue label on all Pendleton products that says “Warranted to be a Pendleton” — if you believe the product is not actually a Pendleton, where do you take it for your warranty claim? If you bring it here, they’ll either say “no, you’re wrong, it’s one of ours” in which case there’s nothing for them to do, or “yep, you’re right, it’s not one of ours” in which case they have no responsibility for it. Either way you’re stuck with it. This is, I suppose, a purely philosophical question as I got nothing but strange looks from every Pendleton employee I asked.

From there we drove through the Umatilla and Malheur National Forests — beautiful country, green and mountainous and covered with trees, which then changed to rolling hills and scrub — to the Kam Wah Chung Co. in the town of John Day, a unique bit of Chinese-in-America history. This building is the only surviving remnant of John Day’s Chinatown, claimed to have been the 3rd-largest Chinatown on the West Coast during the 1861 gold rush. Two Chinese men lived here and ran a number of prosperous businesses for both Chinese and Western customers (grocery, apothecary, Chinese traditional medicine, hotel, translation service, even an Oldsmobile dealership) up until the 1970s, when the building was abandoned and locked up after their deaths. It stood pretty much untouched for decades and is now displayed with all its original artifacts.

From there we drove to Dayville (“Our Fossils are Friendly!”). I’d thought Pendleton was small, but downtown Dayville consists of a tiny one-room city hall, a post office, a park, a mini-mart, a mercantile store of the “if you can’t find it here, you can probably get along without it” variety, and a cafe (which wasn’t open). A nanny goat followed us all the way back to the hotel, until Zander the owner’s golden retriever chased it bounding away.

Fri 6/17: Dayville

Fortunately we’d been forewarned about the lack of restaurants, so we’d filled our cooler in Pendleton. After a breakfast in our room of yogurt, banana, and cold canned coffee, we drove through very pretty Picture Gorge to the Sheep Rock unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. This national monument consists of three widely-separated units. The first thing we hit was the visitor center and fossil museum, opened 2004, which was packed with interesting fossils (all mammals and plants, these formations postdate the dinosaurs), very well labeled and laid out, with good use of color coding and a lot of information about climate change to emphasize its relevance to today’s world.

From there we drove a short way to the Blue Basin trailhead for a guided trail walk with chatty, earnest Ranger Danny. There we saw beautiful, strikingly blue-green mineral formations and got an interesting talk about how this area has changed in the past 33 million years or so and how many different disciplines come together to understand the fossils that have been found here. The broad fossil leaves with “drip tips” characteristic of very wet climates contrast sharply with the tiny, water-conserving leaves of the plants found in the basin today.

Next we drove to the Cant Ranch, across from the fossil museum (it WAS the fossil museum until 2004) for some more recent history, an interesting contrast (e.g. Q: “How do we know when this happened?” A: “We asked Mrs. Cant last week, she’s 98”, vs. “radiocarbon dating and guesswork”). It’s still a working ranch, we saw cattle being loaded onto trucks. Ranger Danny was our tour guide again; fortunately, we liked him. We talked with him about sheep shearing in Oregon vs. Australia, and found a pair of unlucky rabbit’s feet still attached to the gnawed leg bones (Seanan, we thought of you).

Sat 6/18: Dayville-Mitchell-Fossil

Awoke to gray and drizzle, alas. After another breakfast of yogurt etc. in our room, we packed up, checked out, and drove through the tiny town of Mitchell (“More espresso stands per capita than Seattle!”) to the Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. We walked a couple of the trails, which were very colorful and pretty in a different way from anything else we’ve seen, some of it reminiscent of the “Mars” base in Utah.

Then we drove back to Mitchell for lunch and explored Mitchell’s main street. We bought a few things, but despite the many characteristic old buildings it’s kind of a depressing, broken-down little town.

Next we drove through a variety of terrain, almost a recap of all the geology we’ve learned about this week, on some very pretty but kind of scary twisty mountain roads, until we arrived in the town of Fossil, where we walked right into our B&B room (no host at the moment and no locks at all). After a nap we walked around the town, which is bigger than Dayville but still pretty damn small. I kept thinking about Cicely, Alaska (the town in Northern Exposure).

Fossil’s main attraction is a hill behind the high school where you can dig your own fossils ($5 per person, please don’t mess up the site or take too much and please put the tools back). We fossicked for a little less than an hour and I found some recognizable leaf fossils, so I’m happy.

Sun 6/19: Fossil-Clarno-Antelope-Shaniko-Maupin-Portland

Breakfast at our B&B was family-style, the food merely okay but there was plenty of it. We packed up, checked out, and tried to get gas, but the one gas station in town was not yet open for the day. Then we drove to the Clarno Unit of the John Day National Monument. We’d considered passing this unit by, but the first two units had been so different from each other that I wanted to see what the Clarno unit offered. I’m glad we did. The main attraction here was a huge spectacular mineral formation called the Palisades, a petrified 44-million-year-old “lahar” (mudflow), the most amazing landform of the whole trip. We walked three short trails, including one 150 feet up to the base of the formation (didn’t quite make it all the way up that one).

We’d planned to drive home via Condon and I-84, but our host at the B&B had recommended the route via Antelope as being more scenic, and as the weather wasn’t bad we decided to go that way. The town of Clarno was so small it didn’t even get a speed-limit sign. We hit Antelope (former Rajneeshpuram) at 11:30, it had a cafe, it was open, so we stopped for lunch. The cafe had a gas pump but no gas. I was starting to get a little worried about running out of gas in the middle of nowhere.

Next stop, Shaniko. We’d thought Shaniko was a ghost town, but when we got there we found a hip happenin’ place… turns out it was Pioneer Days, with food, a blacksmith demo, free wagon rides, and other activities. Too bad we didn’t know about this in advance. We thought we’d pass on the wagon ride, but the guy from the Oregon State Wagon Train was very persuasive, he even bought us a couple of sarsaparillas to get us on board. It was all pretty cool, but though Shaniko had two gas stations neither one had any gas.

The next town, Maupin, was a fairly large town by our revised standards. It seems to run almost entirely on river rafting, and — hallelujah — featured an open gas station. We were followed into the station by a convoy of four VW vans we’d seen in Shaniko. From there it was a straight shot across dry flat desert scrub with Mt. Hood, Mt. Jefferson(?), and the Three Sisters(?) visible ahead, a picture-postcard Eastern Oregon view.

I blinked and suddenly we were surrounded by steep hills densely carpeted with huge trees, more green than we’d seen in a week. We made a rest stop in Government Camp, where we found chill air, and even a heap of black not-yet-melted snow at the end of the parking lot. The Portland-area small town of Sandy seemed so cosmopolitan by comparison with the last few days. Finally, we arrived at home — damp, cool, noisy Portland, hurray. And what’s this in the mail? Oh boy, a jury summons.

Ah, civilization.

Though it was all very pretty, I’m happy to be back on the soggy, populous west side of the Cascades. But it’s cool to hear the names of these places on the radio news and know a bit about what they’re really like.

The month of May has been busy so far and promises to get even more so, with things getting even more interesting in June.

Briefly:

• There’s an interview with me in the May issue of Locus, with a full-page photo, and my picture on the cover even! (Though it’s just one of the postage-stamp-sized insets on the right-hand side.) You can read some excerpts from the interview online.
• The Breaking Waves charity anthology is still going strong, with all proceeds going to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund of the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
• I have my Wiscon program schedule and it is awesome:
  • Friday morning: Writers’ Workshop (closed).
  • Saturday 4:00 pm, Michelangelos: Space Fairies from Beyond. A reading by Seanan McGuire, Sarah Monette, Catherynne M. Valente, Pamela Dean, and me. Did I say awesome already?
  • Sunday 10:00 am, Assembly: About the “Writing the Other” Workshops. I’ll be moderating, with fellow panelists Ada Milenkovic Brown, Nisi Shawl, and Cynthia Ward talking about the book and workshops.
  • Sunday 1:00 pm, Room 629: World-Building as a Spectator Sport. Amy Thomson, Deirdre M. Murphy, Paul Rehac, Benjamin Rosenbaum and I improvise an alien world using suggestions from the audience. This was a real hoot last year.
  • Sunday 4:00 pm, Senate A: I’d Object, If I Weren’t Invisible. I’ll be moderating again, and discussing bisexuality with fellow participants Betsy Lundsten, Jennifer M. Nissen, Julia Rios, and Alberto Y%26aacute%3B%26ntilde%3Bez.
• In Locus Online, Lois Tilton reviews the June Analog, including my story “Citizen-Astronaut,” and calls it “pretty good stuff.”
• I presented a half-hour talk before Hand2Mouth Theatre’s production Uncanny Valley. I blathered for half an hour, without hesitation, deviation, or repetition, on the subject of science fiction for a fairly large and polite audience. Got a few questions, and a couple of people came up to me with compliments after the show. It was fun! The show itself was… well, not a “play,” per se, more of a performance piece with music, movement, and words on the topic of memory. But if you kind of squinted you could see that in the world of the piece there was a technology of some sort that used motion, music, and objects to evoke lost memories. I talked with the director afterwards and discovered that in earlier versions of the piece (it’s constantly under development) the science fiction aspects of the show were much more overt. But audience members got angry when they broke the rules they’d established, so rather than becoming more consistent they made it vaguer. Oh, well. Would have liked to have seen the earlier version.
• Just for a lark, I signed up with a casting service in hopes of getting cast as an extra on Leverage. Wish me luck! I’ve already gotten one call (not for Leverage) but I was not available when they needed me.
• I had two stories due (one final, the other a draft) on May 15. I got both of them done in time, and I’m pretty happy with the way they both came out. Now we wait.
• I had a colonoscopy. (Happy 50th birthday.) The preparation was no fun at all, but the procedure itself was a complete non-event. By which I mean that, although I was apparently rather chatty while under sedation, I have no memory of it whatsoever. My memories go straight from the doctor starting the IV to talking with Kate (plainly in the middle of a conversation) in the recovery room, with no sense of lost time in between. Weird. They found and removed a couple of small polyps, which were non-cancerous, and I don’t have to do that again for five years.

I am now at the airport awaiting my flight to Albuquerque for the Rio Hondo writing workshop. From there I’ll proceed to Milwaukee (rendezvousing with Kate at Phoenix) where we’ll spend a few days with my dad before heading to Wiscon. Basically, I won’t be home until June.

I’ve also received a couple of very good writing opportunities in the last couple of days, which I will have to work fast, hard, and smart to properly exploit. It’s all good stuff but a lot of it requires work and a lot of it I can’t talk about yet.

Boarding soon. Whee!

I have been asked to present an informal “pop talk” half an hour before the May 14 performance of Hand2Mouth Theatre‘s Uncanny Valley, described as a “sci-fi adventure into psychic space.” I haven’t seen the show yet myself, but here’s a little bit of information about it:

We have used a number of SF inspirations and sources throughout the 1.5 year creation process (books, stories, films, etc.) We have been particularly interested in the “what if” suppositions in SF as well as perspectives on the “other”, “doubling”, and the “uncanny”. One of the underlying questions of the show is “What if the theatre were a literal memory machine that allowed actual past events to be re-experienced, experienced by others, possibly even manipulated and altered?” In earlier phases of the show, SF was a strong stylistic force (space suits, mind reading machines, alien doubles, time travel, etc.). In this final phase of the show, these elements are de-emphasized and treated more subtly. What remains is a thrilling and uncanny meditation on the nature of memory, consciousness, reality, and time. In the course of the show, by seeing skewed unfamiliar alternate versions of ourselves through the looking glass of the memory machine, we can somehow view our past and present with greater clarity (much in the same way that SF can reveal hidden truths about the real by exploring the unreal).

You can watch the intriguing video trailer for the play, and read more on the company’s blog.

My talk will be informal, conversational, and interactive. I’m planning to mention Philip K. Dick, of course. Are there any other SF themes, authors, or notable works I should be sure to bring up?

If you’re in the Portland area this Saturday, I hope you’ll come to the show!

The Lady Washington and Hawaiian Chieftain are a pair of replica 18th-century merchant sailing vessels. The Lady Washington portrayed the HMS Interceptor in the film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and also appeared in Star Trek Generations. Their home port is in Aberdeen, Washington, but this weekend they were visiting Rainier, Oregon. As it happens, I’m considering setting my next novel aboard an 18th-century sailing vessel, so for research purposes Kate and I drove up to Rainier to experience one of their “Battle Sails,” in which the two ships shoot at each other with real black powder. It was a great day for a sea battle, with temperatures in the fifties, lightly overcast, and just enough wind for sailing.

There were about 40 of us passengers all told, about 10 of them small children who had come to sail on the “pirate ship.” As it happens, the Chieftain was unable to carry passengers at this time due to generator issues (though she was still able to sail and fight) so we all piled onto the Lady Washington. It was a little crowded but not unreasonably so.

The crew numbered 11: the captain decided where the ship should go, manned the tiller, and gave high-level instructions to the first mate; the first mate turned those instructions into detailed commands for the hands who actually set the sails; the engineer was in charge of the diesel engine (which we used only when docking; in the 18th century a ship like this would almost always have anchored offshore) and when under sail was the most experienced hand; the steward was in charge of herding the passengers and also acted as gunner; and seven hands clambered about and hauled on ropes as directed. This complement is fairly similar to the size of crew the ship would have had when hauling cargo in the 18th century.

I noted that there were neither NO STEP signs nor friction strips anywhere on the vessel; any approximately horizontal surface was fair game for being clambered upon.

All of the crew were dressed in a rough approximation of period costume, accessorized with safety harnesses and other modern practicalities. Several of the hands wore Vibram shoes with individual toes, which seemed a reasonable accomodation to soft modern feet. The captain and engineer were in their thirties, I’d say; all of the rest were college-age and I believe all of the hands were volunteers who were paying for the privilege of working and learning aboard. The youngest and least experienced hand had been on board for three days. Three of the hands were women, as was the first mate (who was addressed by the captain as “madam mate”) and short Mohawks were popular with both sexes.

The ship herself was also a compromise, being equipped with a diesel engine, radar, life jackets, and other modern features, as well as bunks with a lot more than eighteen inches per crew member. I’m glad we were on the Lady Washington rather than the Hawaiian Chieftain, as the latter vessel is both based on a more recent original and is less authentic in many of her appointments.

The captain, a skinny somber fellow who advised a small child to get away from the tiller because “there’s two hundred tons of ship pushing that rudder around, and I’ve seen men’s femurs get snapped right in half” and remarked “madam mate, see to it that doesn’t happen again,” was an interesting contrast to the first mate, all grin and aviator sunglasses, who said things like “awesome!” and “set the jib, question mark?”

I wish we’d been given a little more information than the basic safety drill (how to put on the life jackets and when to put your fingers in your ears). I did pick up a few words of sailor-ese, but I never got a very good understanding of how the mate’s shouted commands translated into the motions of the sails, never mind how those motions translated to the ship’s heading and velocity. The crew climbed up into the rigging to unfurl and furl the sails at the beginning and end of the voyage; the rest of the time, all but one of them spent their time running back and forth between four stations on the deck, hauling on ropes to turn the sails around the axes of the two masts. The one remaining hand was entirely responsible for all of the sails at the front of the ship, which kept her very busy; apparently this was a rite of passage. Those motions of the sails, plus the tiller, were sufficient to direct the ship into a favorable position to fire on the other ship while avoiding being fired upon. Even though the wind was quite light, only about 8 MPH, when the sails were turned to catch it, the ship gave a very perceptible lean and surge — a thrilling moment.

Combat for this type of small merchant ship does not resemble the massed broadsides you’ve seen in the movies. She was equipped with two deck guns, each about two and a half feet long and firing a three-pound ball, plus two small swivel guns at the back. Our single gunner, carrying a satchel of black power and a slow match, ran to whichever gun was closest to the enemy, loaded it, and fired at the captain’s command (which was generally “as they bear”). These little three-pounder guns (by comparison, the guns in Master and Commander were eighteen-pounders) were enough to make a noise and do a little damage — hopefully enough to scare off any seagoing predators. Our main battle tactic was to try to get directly ahead of the other ship, where she had no guns, while attempting to get into a position where we could fire a “raking” shot down the length of the other ship. It was also useful to get upwind of the other ship, stealing the wind she needed to maneuver. Between the maneuvering and the time for the gunner to prepare the guns, each ship got off a shot every five to fifteen minutes; it was a duel, not a slugfest.

The two ships were firing blanks — just black powder, no cannonballs — at each other. We were instructed to plug our ears for the shot (and it was damn loud; I can’t imagine the noise of a broadside of eighteen-pounders) and then listen for the echo. A quick echo back from the other ship was counted as a hit; a delayed echo from the far shore was a miss. There was definitely a difference in the sound between the two. When the other ship shot at us, meanwhile, we could tell when the shot was about to come because we could see and hear them preparing it. Apart from all the yelling and gunfire, sailing ships are quite quiet.

The 18th-century sailing vessel was the most complicated machine of its day. There were hundreds of different ropes, every one of them had a specific purpose, and the crew had to know the vocabulary, leap into action, and execute the commands with precision and alacrity, or else lines would foul, sails would collide, and the ship would lose way — a sitation difficult to recover from. In other words, it was a lot like square dancing.

Unlike square dancing, however, the crew was expected to repeat back every command even as they began to execute it, and also to announce changes in status such as opening hatches and returning to deck after going aloft (e.g. “back on deck, three in the fore” meaning that there were three hands still aloft on the foremast). These formalities were strictly observed even though it didn’t seem that anyone was listening. At one point, when a hand landed on the deck, he looked up and announced “back on deck… can’t tell.” I don’t think anyone other than Kate and I laughed.

Lady Washington was handicapped with several inexperienced hands, in addition to the passengers getting in the way, and when we returned to port the captain announced that “if we all had fun, then everybody won” — in other words, we lost the battle badly, and if this had been an actual emergency we would have been disabled, boarded, and taken prisoner. (The goal was never to sink the enemy ship — whether pirate or navy, there was always more money to be made by capturing it in usable condition.)

Now I have a real understanding of why the officers always stand on the elevated quarterdeck at the back of the ship. Because of its position and elevation, it has the best view of what’s going on both onboard and out on the sea. From there you can see if lines or sails are fouled, if hands are in the wrong place, and where the other ship is. The crew, on the other hand, doesn’t need this information and in fact may be better off without it. At one point, during a brief lull in the action, the engineer paused in coiling ropes and idly wondered aloud where the other ship was. I said to him “you don’t really have to know, do you?” He grinned and said “Naw, all I have to do is pull on whatever rope the guy in the funny hat tells me to.”

This little trip was nothing more than a taste of an approximation of an 18th-century sea battle, but we had fun and I got some sensory details that I can probably use in my writing. If nothing else, it provides a solid real-world structure on which we can hang the imagery when we read the Aubrey/Maturin novels.

Last night I presented the annual Stolee Lecture to an audience of about 60 BVU students, faculty, and staff. When I saw the beautiful video projection set-up they had, I asked the audience if they’d rather see slides of my trip to Mars, or hear me read a story as originally scheduled. They voted overwhelmingly for the Mars talk, so Mars it was.

Iowa people are quiet, polite people. They didn’t react a lot, or ask a lot of questions, but I’m told the talk was well received.

After the talk I wrote 1630 more words on the steampunkish story. It now stands at 7003 words and still isn’t quite done, which is unfortunate as I was asked for 3000-5000 words. Once it’s finished I will see how much I can cut, and then I will probably have to beg the editor’s forgiveness for going over. We will see.

Woke up this morning to snow. Two or three inches of wet, slushy stuff, still coming down, and a hard cold wind. I am assured this will not affect my ability to get to the airport. I really hope it doesn’t cause any problems, because I’m tired and I’m lonely and I want to go home and see my sweetie.

I sat in on one of Inez’s creative writing classes this afternoon. The class began with a ten-minute free-writing exercise, and Inez gave everyone in the class except me the choice of two writing prompts based on story titles of mine (“Moonlight on the Carpet” and “Teaching the Pig to Sing”). Most of the students chose “Moonlight on the Carpet” and most of those who chose to read them out loud produced creepy stories very much like my own of that title. Most of those who chose “Teaching the Pig to Sing” had a story that involved a literal pig, unlike my own.

I also participated, but rather than give me my own titles Inez gave me a choice of two of hers: “Easy A” or “Hecate on Toast.” Here’s what I wrote:

Hecate on Toast

Hecate was on my toast again.

“Why does a Greek god keep appearing on my toast?” I asked her.

The face imprinted on the bread turned to me, dark and light swirls moving impossibly across the warm and crumbly surface. “It is a message from the Fates,” she said. Her voice was warm and buttery, as you’d expect.

“Yes, but what message?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged, one perfectly-turned shoulder coming briefly into view above the lower crust. “I’m just the messenger. You know how the Fates are.”

“Sadly, yes.” I looked out over the quad, at the smoking hole from last week’s dragon strike. The Fates had decreed that one too, and the administration was still trying to get bids on the repairs. “I wish they’d be a little less capricious, is all I’m saying.”

“It’s in their nature.”

“Yeah, like the scorpion who stung the frog while crossing the river. But the scorpion died! Sometimes obeying your nature is not the best thing to do.”

“He could have waited until he got to the other shore before stinging the frog. Then he would have obeyed his nature and still gotten across the river alive.”

Was this snarky comment a message from the Fates as well? Could it apply to my life in some way? I popped open the calendar on my phone and checked the coming week. I had two exorcisms to perform, a protective spell to cast, and I’d booked out all of Wednesday to freshen up the wards on the girls’ dorm. None of these seemed amenable to obeying, or not obeying, my nature.

Just then a whang echoed across the room. Startled, I looked up to see an albatross — a mighty seabird bigger than a turkey with a ten-foot wingspan, staggering on the windowsill and shaking its beaky head in stunned confusion. “Who put that there?” it said.

A talking albatross was surely another sign from the Fates. I opened the window and let the stunned albatross flop onto the carpet below. “The window? It’s been there for years. Surely there’s some reason — some deep, significant reason closely connected to your ineffable, most secret nature — that you happened to run into it just now?”

“Well… it could have something to do with the fact that I’m an ensorceled sailor.”

I stared, as stunned as any window-smacked albatross. “Leon?”

The albatross stared back. “Oswald?”

“What are the odds!” I cried, and embraced my long-lost brother. His feathers were greasy and he smelled of fish. “Where have you been these past seven years?”

“Oh, you know… hanging out on the waves, snatching fish, ogling the lady albatrosses… the usual. You?”

“I’m in maintenance now.” I gestured out the window. “Every spell on this campus needs constant upkeep, and I’m the guy.”

“Shouldn’t there be a spell to keep low-flying birds from smacking into your classroom windows?”

“Yeah,” said Hecate from the toast. Her voice, still buttery, had gone cold. “Shouldn’t there be?”

Suddenly I realized what had been nagging me for weeks — ever since Hecate had appeared on my toast for the first time. I’d neglected an entire class of protective spell. It was, perhaps, in my nature to do so. What else might be happening because of that?

Just then the skies split open and one of the Fates descended into the quad, its four pairs of wings raising a tremendous wind. “Package for Oswald,” it said, and handed me a lightning-girt parcel.

This wasn’t going to be good.

So here I am at Buena Vista University (which, by the way, they pronounce “byoona” rather than “bwayna”… apparently this has something to do with the Spanish-American War) in Storm Lake, Iowa. BVU is small and in the middle of nowhere but very well endowed; the campus is saturated with wifi and every student gets a laptop and, this year, an iPad as well. Walking past students’ screens at breakfast, I see: Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Microsoft Word, Facebook. The school also makes up for its location with an extensive travel program. Most students travel somewhere like New York each year, and my host Inez is going to Korea. And, of course, they paid to bring me out here to speak.

Nonetheless, it is the middle of Iowa. The coffee I got this morning was so pale and weak I literally thought I’d gotten tea by accident. I mean, if there were text on the bottom of the cup you would have had no difficulty reading it. Inez took me out for Mexican last night; it was actually quite good, but as we were preparing to leave the gal at the next table asked me what I’d had. “Arroz con pollo,” I said. She blinked and asked me what that was in English.

The school mascot is the beaver, which apparently most of the visiting lecturers find hilarious. As I’m from Oregon, the Beaver State, it’s not funny but it is a bit distracting.

I got a lot of writing done on the plane yesterday: 1684 words for the day, total of 5363. Just the siege and aftermath to go. Unfortunately, the editor asked for 3000-5000 words, so once I’m done I’ll have some cutting to do. More writing this morning, as I don’t have any obligations today until lunchtime.

And that’s the news from Storm Lake, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the students are jesus christ, was I ever that young?

At the airport oh-God-early for a flight to Omaha via Denver, followed by a two-hour drive to exciting Storm Lake, Iowa, home of Buena Vista University. My Clarion West classmate Inez Schaechterle is a professor in the English department there, and she’s invited me to come out for a few days to deliver the annual Stolee Lecture (I’ll be reading my story “The Tale of the Golden Eagle”) and speak to several English classes. All expenses paid, and an honorarium besides, so yay.

I’ve been working on a short story which is something in the steampunk direction. I expect to finish it before I return home, possibly even today.

Otherwise there’s not really much to report. Kate and I have been hither-and-yonning a lot, and yesterday was the first day in two weeks we were in the same place at the same time. Now I’m off again, but I’ll be back on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday it’s a 24-hour fast and other fun stuff in preparation for a colonoscopy Thursday. No worries, it’s just a standard screening, but it’s a royal pain; what with the prep and the sedation it affects most of a week. Feh.

Stick around, the fun never stops around here.