National Grilled Cheese Day (Now with Giant Robots!)

My novel is coming out on Tuesday, there are a thousand words of a new novel sitting on my laptop waiting for me to get back to them, and the science fiction world is embroiled in a kerfuffle about the Hugo award. The impending debut of Howard Carter fills me with a certain gut level of anxiety that I've never encountered before, my work in progress is a bit 'in the weeds' at the moment, and the Hugo imbroglio just saddens me.

It's also National Grilled Cheese Day, so let's talk about that instead.

Grilled cheese sandwiches weren't a Thing in our house growing up, so I don't have nostalgic warm fuzzies attached to the idea of the thing. I'm not sure why, but mom just didn't feed us cheese sandwiches for some reason. But I have a deep and abiding, possibly genetic, yen for things involving cheese, so it was the first thing I ever learned to make on my own without help.

Two slices of wheat bread, margarine, and pre-wrapped sandwich slices of American cheese*. Heat control when cooking is learned behavior and I burned the crap out of the first three or four that I made without ever getting the filling to melt. I ate them anyway because we didn't waste food in my family.

By the fifth sandwich, I'd sussed out that "Back end of a Mercury Rocket" was not the correct setting for the stove if I wanted something edible to come out of the skillet and I was off and running on my first culinary adventure. Eventually I also worked out how to handle a sandwich that's been buttered on the outside pre-cooking.

I've since learned a thing or two about what does and does not count as 'cheese' and tested my wits against various cooking implements that were intended to deliver prime sandwiching to the huddled masses yearning to eat cheese. My favorite is the panini press, but I don't have room for one on the counter in our small kitchen, so I stick with the cast iron skillet by preference.

The best grilled cheese sandwich I've ever had was at Beecher's Cheese in Seattle, which is where that photo above was taken. That is the moment of bliss, caught with the lens of my wife's smartphone. Their mac & cheese is God's gift to humanity, by the way, but National Mac & Cheese Day isn't until July** so that's another post.

Though maybe we should contemplate how many National ________ Day's one country really needs to have.  I don't know who comes up with this stuff, but if it gives me a ceremonial excuse to eat cheese, I'm down with it.

Oh, and Howard Carter Saves the World is coming out on Tuesday, so I declare April 14th to be National Giant Robots Day! Don't miss out on the giant robot event of the year. If you have a Kindle (or the free Kindle app) you can pre-order from Amazon now: http://tinyurl.com/HowardCarterSavesWorld or it will be available on Nook, Kobo, and other formats soon. (Amazon just makes it so easy to upload and do presales on eBooks.)

Now if you'll excuse me, there's a block of Beecher's cheese and a loaf of bread in the kitchen with my name on it.

* Which may or may not have actually contained any measurable amounts of actual cheese.
** Yes, really, July 14th apparently.

Running on borrowed nostalgia...

This is about cars. I am not a car guy per se, though I do enjoy an episode of Top Gear now and then.

My dad was a car guy. Sorry, I should say my dad was a Car Guy. He collected books on the history of cars, he collected model cars, he took pictures of every interesting car he ever saw (often from multiple angles) and kept binders of these photos to refer back to. He could rattle off specs and production dates and designers and engine sizes like other kids' dads could rattle off baseball statistics. He could tell model years apart by the shape of their taillights and tell you what someone got wrong on a restoration. He wasn't a gearhead, mind you, he couldn't repair one if his life depended on it, but my God, did he love the automobile. For him it was about aesthetics and culture, a trip through an art museum held less for him than a walk through a car show. And oh my, did he take me to car shows.

Not just old cars either, dad loved cars, period. Every year when the new models came out, he would send me into the showrooms of the local dealerships while he waited out in the car to collect the new pamphlets for the coming models of Ford, Dodge, and Chevy and Toyota and whatever else came through town. More than that, I sat beside him more than once while he dickered with car salesmen just for the fun of it over some car he had no intention of buying.

My dad's Karmann Ghia looked exactly like this one, except

it was brown. Even I can see what he saw in it, I think...
Source: Wikimedia Commons

 Personally, I'd rather have a voluntary root canal than go through the process of picking out and purchasing a car.  It would be cheaper for one thing...

In case you ever wondered why I don't write much about the cars my characters drive, this would be it.

Amusingly (to me at least) it wasn't me, but my sister who finally caught the car bug from dad.  But I'll get back to her in a minute, because how she caught the bug is important to this story.

My first car was a 1985 Nissan 4x4 pickup. I was 16. It was chocolate brown with a gold-fleck in the paint and a roll bar bolted in the back. It was awesome. I was proud of it as any 16 year old would be. And I crashed it in the middle of a Valentines Day ice storm a week after we bought it and dad was livid, as you might imagine, but we got it fixed and back on the road and I drove it all through high school.  Most of the vehicles I've owned since have been small pickups by Nissan or Toyota, but never was quite as much fun or saw quite as much mud and gravel roads as that one. Partly because I moved to a series of decent-sized cities, and partly because I got it out of my system early.

That truck was fun, but it wasn't ethereal. Even when I was jouncing down a rutted path or bogging through a muddy field or driving a freshly-waxed and vacuumed version of that same pickup with a pretty girl in the passenger seat on a date... even in those moments, I never had that "It doesn't get better than this, I AM IN LOVE WITH THIS CAR" moment.

My sister's Mini looked not very much like this one, but 

isn't it cool?  She probably felt like she was pulling the
Italian Job every day on the way to work...
Source: Wikimedia Commons

My dad would speak wistfully of his favorite car, the one in which he fell in love with the automobile. He had a scrapbook's worth of pictures of it, naturally: It was a brown convertible Karmann Ghia that his dad bought for him at an auction. Karmann Ghia, I was informed, was an Italian-designed sports car maker, who basically built a roadster on a Volkswagen Beetle chassis. It was oddly beautiful, with rounded fenders and swooping lines of the sort you just don't see anymore. It was just the thing for bombing down the winding back roads of rural Missouri.

Then, as the story goes, he woke up one morning and his dad had traded it for a tractor (I told you we were from rural Missouri). Dream over. Move along. Nothing to see. Chores to do. Carry on. But his feelings about that car were so strong that I still feel a whiff of borrowed nostalgia every time I see one.

But I've never felt that. Not firsthand. Not ever. Today, I was talking about cars with my sister because our old Nissan is about to give up the ghost and we need something more fuel efficient and earth friendly, when she told me she'd felt it when she got in her 2004 Mini Cooper for the first time. Which gives me hope that some day, a car might be something other than a means of conveyance from point A to point B.

But I won't hold my breath.

In the mean time, I have a root canal to schedule... er... I mean I need to find a car that won't fall apart half way to work in the morning.

This is the definition of "First World Problems", I guess.  Ah well, maybe I'll spot an old Karmann Ghia at the back of the car lot and get a whiff of my old man's nostalgia once again. Might tide me over through the interminable cultural dance that is car purchasing in America...

Nerd World Order: We Won... Now What?

I don't know if I will post this, but I had to write it for the same reason that I write anything: because things build up in my head and I can't do anything else until I've let them out. It's how I cope with a world that often befuddles me.

Close your eyes and picture a nerd in your head. Seriously. Close your eyes and think about "Nerds" for a minute.  Summon a mental image that embodies the essence of Nerd Kind.

Got it?

What was your mental image?  Did you picture Bill Gates? The guys from Big Bang Theory? Or maybe Anthony Daniels from Revenge of the Nerds? Awkward, brainy-but-socially-stunted men with questionable hygiene and tape on his glasses suffering under the knuckles of the school jocks...

Me, basically?

Congratulations if you imagined Felicia Day. You are ahead of the curve if you did. When I was a kid, nerds and geeks were synonymous, and they did not as a general rule look like Felicia Day (at least none of the ones I knew did) but we'll get back to Ms. Day in a minute.

When I close my eyes and picture a nerd, I picture myself.  At around the age of 12 or 13, usually, but any age will do. Bespectacled, awkward, desperate to fit in. Talking to my peers with the ineptitude of a foreigner speaking a language with which he is only passingly familiar, always a page behind in the guidebook and wearing the local garb like it's a Halloween costume.

This is going to sound dark, and it was. And it might not jive with the stories I usually tell of a childhood out of an Archie comic if it had been ghostwritten by Ray Bradbury. Those stories are true and so is this: No true story is entirely light or entirely dark. It's mostly a matter of what bits you choose to leave out.  Humor, as is often the case, has been a defense mechanism of mine for as long as I can remember.

I was a nerd before anyone thought it was okay. I was tormented and sometimes quite literally tortured by bullies under the uncaring gaze of teachers -- mostly gym teachers. Once, after I had been bodily picked up and slammed down on a larger boy's knee as one might when trying to break a stick, cracking two of my ribs, the gym teacher who had watched it happen ordered me to get up out of the dirt and run laps for the sin of being an asthmatic wimp who would rather read a book than toss a football. I managed a quarter of a mile out of shear fear of punishment before saying "screw this" and stumbling off to the nurse's office without permission.

What I remember most is that I got in trouble and he did not.

That sort of thing happened over and over again. From the relatively innocent glasses getting stolen and thrown in a toilet to my head getting stomped or my testicles randomly punched. From early on, classmates singled me out as someone they could make cry if they were heartless enough. These memories are rife with adults standing by, ignoring what was happening, apparently under the impression that getting my ass kicked on a regular basis would build character.

I don't know if it built character. It might have made me stubborn or I might've been born that way. I do know that it built, deep in my heart of hearts, a deeply-embedded suspicion of authority. So congratulations for that.

I was told that if I just wouldn't cry, they would leave me alone. That turned out not to be true. I was told again and again to ignore them and they would stop. That wasn't true either. I ignored them so well that I developed the ability to become vacant -- to retreat so far inside myself that it was as if my body was a costume and I was simply pretending to be Scott. Which is a handy thing when the other kids view kicking you in the crotch as a hobby.

Being smart or talented didn't seem to matter once you walked out of the classroom and into the halls or onto the gym floor where might made right.

I was uncoordinated and I was (and remain) almost painfully thin. If I sit still for too long, the pressure on unprotected arteries will put my extremities to sleep. I have historically had very little meat on my bones or the ability to acquire it, much to the frustration of the same gym teachers that thought what I really needed was more laps, more weight lifting, more basketballs to the face.  More time to suck it up, wipe the blood off my face and get back to moving a ball from one end of a pointless expanse of grass to the other end of the same pointless expanse of grass.

If a foreign government did half of the things that happened to me to an American soldier, the United States would bomb them back to the stone age on principle.

My parents helped as much as they could. God bless them, they tried and I wasn't an easy child at the best of times. They were as understanding as two adults can be who have no idea what I was going through because I wouldn't tell them most of it. It wasn't fair to them, but I was a kid, what did I know of fair? Very little of my experience of life outside of the house was about what was fair.

Talking was too painful anyway. Far easier to escape to my room and bury myself in books -- escape into fantasy.

I spent nights and weekends in basements with like-minded friends, rolling dice and sending characters with more impressive attributes than my own down dark dungeon hallways.  I gravitated toward bards because what I really dreamt of wasn't strength, but charisma. I yearned not to punish the monsters that tormented me day in and day out, but to communicate with them. To somehow get across to them that I was human too.

Because I don't think most of them believed that I was.

What does this painful reminiscence have to do with anything?

It's to underline the fact that when I tell you I, by God, earned my nerd glasses and if anyone has the right to be a got-here-first, these-damn-kids-have-it-too-easy, nerdmudgeon, it's me.

But I can't.

I didn't endure all that only to force those who came after me to go through it too. That's insane.

While I was in the trenches, up to my ears in a fight against an enemy that had no idea they were losing, somewhere, out beyond the schoolyard, the heroes of nerd kind were inventing the personal computer, creating video games, piecing together the internet, and conquering the world on my behalf.

If it was a war, then we won.  Comics, computers, games, books... The things that got me beat up are the things that now define our culture. Our President is a nerd. There's a picture of him posing in the Oval Office with Nichelle Nichols, the lady that played Uhura in the original Star Trek. He's throwing the Vulcan salute which is the closest thing nerds have to a gang sign.

Nerds rule.

Literally.

Which brings us full circle. Now that we have the upper hand, will the Nerd World Order rule benevolently? Or is it time for us, in turn, to give as good as we got?  Are we to now become the closed clique against which the outsiders run headlong in hope of belonging?

Recently there was this piece at CNN.com by one Jon Peacock titled "Booth Babes Need Not Apply", which implies that we should go exactly that route. Peacock was apparently set off by the influx of girls pretending to be nerds so they can dress up and go to Comicon. You see, being a nerd is cool now so everyone wants a piece of the action. Pretty girls that were never seen in those dank basements are popping up at Comicon and other conventions dressed like Lara Croft and Catwoman and Princess Leia and "sexy insert noun here". Peacock implies that these pretenders can be discerned from the "real" nerd girls by dint of being too sexy. By making him feel uncomfortable and drawing attention away from the nerdiness of the event with their feminine wiles.

Peacock's rant struck me and many others as inherently sexist. It also resonated deeply with some part of me that I am ashamed to admit exists. The part of me that was snubbed by the pretty girls that saw me as sub-human.

They're too pretty to be real nerds. They never suffered like I did, how could they?

Even I found myself thinking that and I damn well know better.

My wife is, hands-down, one of the smartest people I've ever met and a mechanical engineer to boot. Told from an early age that she would never be good at math because she was a girl. She is also the prettiest girl I've ever met and a nerd at the same time. She hid her grades from her classmates so they wouldn't know she was the one who blew the curve in physics class and was told by fellow engineering students and professors alike that she didn't belong in engineering because of her looks and gender.

Those men who said those things were wrong; no one had more business being there than she did. Who were they to tell a brilliant, articulate woman what she could or could not accomplish because of her gender?

And who are we to do the same to any woman in any other sphere?

Did we all really suffer through the travails of growing up nerdy just to perpetuate that horror on the next generation? Are we truly going to demand that others endure that hellish existence before we let them play our particular reindeer games?

Or did we claw our way to the top of the societal heap so that no one else ever had to go through that again?   To win the right for everyone to pursue their interests and enthusiasms as suits their whims?

The truth is, we've created a world where everyone is a nerd, or can be if they put their minds to it. Felicia Day is a mogul of internet video, in the vangard of the new entertainment, built on the uber-nerdy and self-referential gamer comedy "The Guild".  Steampunk has rewritten fashion and film. The Maker movement is generating real inventions and real revenue for the creators.  Comic books are the film industry right now.

The 21st century is shaping up to be a time when formerly nerdy/geeky enthusiasms are pursued with furious abandon.  And while it's no utopia, it's a world where - as predicted by Herbert Gerjouy predicted  - the illiterate is not the one who cannot read, but the one who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

And if it's really a nerd world, then that makes all of us nerds. No glasses or pocket protector, or background as a bullied minority required.  We went through it so you wouldn't have to.

Sure, we're "the ones who are cool" but that means we get to define what that means this time. Playing 'we got here first and you're too late to play this game' is nothing but rank hipsterism.



Postscript: Peacock's rant launched a thousand blog posts in response, but the one that most resonates with me is this one by John Scalzi, once and future king of the nerds, who dismantles not only Peacock's standing as someone who can decide who has nerd cred or doesn't, but everyone else's.

It's Story Time In America: Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss

There were two people outside of my family that inspired me to become a writer: Jim Henson and Dr Seuss. But that dream would have been meaningless if there had not been two people inside my family who told me it was okay if I wanted to write a novel, as long as I got my homework done first.

The children of readers become readers; a lucky few get to be writers.

Today is Dr Suess's birthday, which coincides with the National Education Association's "Read Across America" celebration. It's an entire day about childhood literacy.

I have come to understand that I was a lucky child; growing up it was a rare day indeed that wasn't about childhood literacy. From my earliest memories there was a shelf of books in my room. There was an orange shelf in our room stuffed with Golden Books, picture books, and Storybooks telling tales from Disney and the Bible... I romped with the Pokey Little Puppy, and sailed to a far off land where the Wild Things roamed. I helped The Little Engine up the big hill and helped Grover avoid the Monster at the End of his book. 

Why my dad painted that shelf bright orange, I will never know. Maybe my memory is faulty and it was really turquoise, but whatever the color, it was where we found our books. It was at my elbow when I sat by my sister, wandering the desert with the Israelites and I enduring the Long Cold Winter with Laura Engels Wilder.  

That shelf of a peculiar color seemed so large at one point and then suddenly it wasn't big enough to hold our library. My sister and I branched out on our own, leaving behind story time for the adventures of Nancy Drew and the Brothers Hardy. More and larger shelves replaced it, a library that grew at the same rate we did.

Today is a day that celebrates childhood literacy. Today is a day when I encourage everyone to sit down with a child and read if they can and donate to an organization that does if they cannot. But it takes more than that to make a reader: You have to read too.

Most people think of the image in the photo above when they think about encouraging children to read, sitting with a kid on your lap, doing all the voices as Grover tries to keep you from turning the pages. But that's not how my parents turned me into a reader. 

If they ever did that, I don't remember it.  

Of course they read to me, but the way they turned me into a reader was by being readers themselves. They made time in their day to turn off the television and open a book. They did it consistently across the entire course of my life. And for all my rebellions -- and they were many -- that was the image of adulthood that I carried with me.

So celebrate childhood literacy today. Read to a kid. Donate to the cause. Buy books for your local libraries and schools. But understand that childhood literacy isn't a holiday. It's not something we do once a year like Thanksgiving or Halloween.

If you make one day about literacy and you have made a start.  Make every day about literacy and you've made a reader.  

Visit the NEA Foundation's website at readacrossamerica.org to learn more about how you can help improve childhood literacy in your area.

Being Green :: The Jim Henson Generation

Of course, I haven't seen the new Muppet movie yet. But I come from that generation sometimes referred to alternatively as "The MTV Generation" or "Generation X" and a few other less salubrious titles. But really, we're the Jim Henson Generation.

And don't you ever forget it.

My generation was the first that never knew a time when it wasn't perfectly acceptable for a bunch of monsters to teach your kids how to share and get along with people who don't look just like them. I learned my numbers and letters from my sister, but she was backstopped by Kermit the Frog and company.

She didn't have to teach me it was okay to be green. Jim took care of that one.

Since Sesame Street first aired in 1969, by the time I was old enough to sing the song, it was already a cultural institution. I remember when no one believed Big Bird had a woolly mammoth buddy named Mr. Snuffleupagus. I remember when Grover was the monster at the end of the book and Elmo was just another red monster in the chorus of many. Ernie was my favorite, followed close by Grover and Oscar the Grouch.

Alas that mom refused to buy me a trash can to hang out in.

But it wasn't Sesame Street that makes me think of myself as living in a world that Jim Henson created. It was the Muppet Show, which ran from 1975-1981 and then lived on in reruns through most of my life.

As much as anything else, picking apart that show taught me how to write comedy.

‎"One thing that happens with comedy writers is that they are all really good at coming up with beginnings... really good set ups, but they can't figure out how to pay them off. What my father figured out was, if you can't get out, you just either blow something up, or eat something, or just throw penguins in the air."                                                                                               - Brian Henson

And the writing on the Muppet Show was nothing short of brilliant. At times, it was entry-level Monty Python and at the same time hearkened back to the vaudeville impresarios of yesteryear. They channeled Groucho Marx and Jack Benny and Bob Hope without pausing to see if you got the last joke before moving on to the next. Sometimes there wasn't a joke, just an absurd situation devolving into chaos.

On some level, we knew that the show was trying to appeal to our parents. Going back and watching the shows now as an adult, I find new appreciation for just how much Jim was pitching over our heads to hit the adults on the sofa behind us.

The Muppets introduced me to Peter Ustinov and Zero Mostel, as well as the madcap brilliance of Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. Henson and his writers delighted in wordplay and snappy patter. It's quite possible that they're responsible for my fondness for puns, but don't hold that against them. The Muppet Show was the first time I saw John Cleese. They also taught me a new way to think about comedy and led me, by way of Spike Milligan to the Goon Show and on to Monty Python and the rest is history.

A couple of weeks ago, I got the chance to watch the Muppet Movie again on the big screen. The Seattle International Film Festival has been having an entire month of Muppet-related shows and events.

Sitting in the darkness of the SIFF cinema, surrounded by children and their parents, I was astounded by how well it held up. Leaving aside the six year old behind me who whispered to his mom "Why are people laughing at the waiter? He hasn't said anything yet!"

How do you explain Steve Martin to a six year old?

Wherever I went, I was always the "different" kid. The outsider, and not in a cool way. But it didn't matter because I lived in a world where it's getting easier to be green.  And we have Jim to thank for that. When I grew up, I wanted to be Jim Henson.  I still do.  In the meantime, I'm having fun being someone that he inspired.
---

UPDATE!

SIFF's celebration of Jim Henson "Muppets, Music, and Magic: Jim Henson's Legacy" continues through the end of November! Click here for show times and ticket information. http://www.siff.net/cinema/seriesDetail.aspx?FID=253

(Note: I am unaffiliated with the Seattle International Film Festival, et al. This is genuine enthusiasm, not a bizarre scheme to boost ticket sales.)

Sir Kenneth Robinsion on paying off the creativity deficit...

On Monday, I talked about the diminishing creativity of the American child and a local effort to do something about that.  Or at least a part of it. 

This video was recommended to me at a meeting on Monday where we were discussing what it would mean to create a community writing center on the east side of Tacoma. An under-served, under-resourced community if ever there was one.


At risk of this becoming the "TED is Cool" blog, I'm going to post two more TED videos, making it three in one week.  I trust you will bear with me.


In a 2006 TED Talk, Sir Kenneth Robinson talked about the death of creativity and the under-appreciation of the arts in a global culture that puts a higher value on skills and talents that are of use to industry whilst stripping away the parts of the child that society values less... 




This past year, Sir Kenneth returned to TED to finish his speech (as he puts it) positing a new model for learning.  Replacing a fast food model of education with an agricultural model to grow creative young minds.  He makes some fascinating points, some of them perhaps a trifle utopian.  I would certainly love to see a community that could carry this off...  

The History of English (or: Those Irritating Americans Are At It Again)

I was amused to check my news feed yesterday to find the headline "Why do some Americanisms irritate people?"  A click of the mouse took me to the BBC and a short (and rather gentler than expected) history of just how annoying we Americans are with our knack for creating slang so pervasive that there was just no stomping it out.

It goes both ways, my friends. And not just the Beatles and the Rolling Stones either. The British sensibility, especially in terms of comedy, is so deeply intrenched in American society these days that most of us don't even realize it. Beyond American Idol and Big Brother, both of them imported across the pond, there are very few modern sitcoms that do not owe a greater debt to Basil Fawlty than they do to Lucy Ricardo.

It goes both ways and in currents so deep that many of us don't realize they're there until we dig around a bit.

Toymaker

The creative impulse takes many forms and often comes from a place of frustration with what's out there not living up to the potential you can see.

When I was a kid, I made quite a few of my own toys.  All of my favorite toy guns came from the crates of miscellaneous junk beneath my grandfather's work bench, not Toys-R-Us.  Not because we were poor, but because I thought the toys I envisioned in my head were just that much cooler than the ones you could buy at the toy store.  The 1970's and 80's were woefully short of space helmets and other spaceman spiffery because it was all Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars in the toy stores.  I loved my Star Wars figures as much as the next kid, but I really wanted Buck Rogers and for that I had to make my own  I think I was born twenty years too late for the real golden age of space toys and all the very cool robots and ray guns that accompanied the space race.

Thankfully, my parents and grandparents encouraged this sort of thing.  At least until I went as far as getting into pounding heated nails into tiny swords for my GI Joes.

Dad drew the line at me becoming an eight-year-old blacksmith.

I harkened to the nameless students slaving away on Star Wars miniatures who eventually became the nucleus for Industrial Light & Magic and yearned to work alongside the master of creating wonder from foam and felt, the late great Jim Henson.  And early on, I had a particular affection for Santa's elfin helpers as well.

Even those toys I did buy (or was given as gifts) eventually found their way under the tools.  All of my favorite GI Joe and Star Wars characters and vehicles were custom paint jobs and crazy amalgamations made to suit my own fancy, characters in my own extended storylines.

This was a childhood custom-built for a future artist and author, I suppose.

As an adult, I transferred this into sculpture and artwork, but I always go back to the toys.  I troll the junk drawer and the woodshop and the aisles of misfit toys that stock the shelves of thrift stores, looking for something neat, something overlooked, something broken.  Sometimes I repair the toys on the spot and put them back on the shelf, sometimes I take them home and toss them in a box to be later turned into something entirely other.

Really these impulses are all extensions of the same brain frequency, the translation of a mental picture into a three-dimensional object.  A sculpture is the same as a toy is the same as a table is the same as a novel.  I've made props for renaissance faires and small theatrical productions, I've created elaborate costumes for science fiction conventions (especially Steampunk, naturally) and even had a blog for awhile on creating period costumes for men. 

These things are my toys, as carefully crafted as any story I've ever written. Whether it's a story or a toy or a reproduction of a 15th century wheelbarrow, in the end what this is really about is making neat stuff.

And I like being the guy that makes neat stuff.

I'm With the Banned

I grew up reading Maurice Sendak and Judy Blume, Doctor Seuss and Robert Louis Stevenson.  I read Mark Twain and John  Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway.  I read Vonnegut and Bradbury and Steven King. 

And all along the way, my path was peppered with people telling me to stop, that those books were a danger; they would be a corrupting influence on my growing mind.  If the books didn't do it, then Dungeons & Dragons was sure to have me dressed up in a black cloak and lighting candles around a pentagram in no time and if that didn't do me in, the rock bands were all trying to get me to commit suicide anyway.

It's a wonder any of us survived, really.

Nonetheless, I drank deeply at the font of knowledge, thought for myself, and often found things that changed my mind about one topic or another.  Judy Blume showed me an unblinking look at the world through a girl's eyes.  Vonnegut changed my mind about the glorification of war.  Anne Frank taught me the horrors amongst hope that even Vonnegut couldn't bear to relate.  Twain convinced me that my racist peers were idiots.  Hemingway was a fine role model for how not to relate to the opposite sex... the list is endless.

I grew up on Sesame Street and managed to maintain an attention span sufficient to read (and write) long-form fiction.  I pulled imaginary capers with The Mad Scientist Club without becoming a brainy hooligan and followed Harriet the Spy through the secret lives of her friends without becoming a snoop.  (Though I did major in journalism, so there might be something there...)  I read the Brothers Grimm without once encountering a witch trying to entice me into her oven and the poems of Shel Silverstien without becoming... well, whatever it was that the people who wanted to ban it were afraid I would become.  I honestly can't be bothered to care what they thought would happen.

And the dictionaries!  Oh my, the dictionaries!  Yes, Virginia, the dictionary is an insidious thing, full of pulchritude and words that will "infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war."  I picked up many a dictionary containing all of Carlin's Seven Dirty Words and all I got for my trouble was a first-class vocabulary.

Too often I find myself faced with someone whose world is a frightening place, a Place That Is Out To Get You.  And apparently it was a world without personal responsibility, a world where we were hapless victims floating along, performing horrors at the whims of Muppets, dungeon masters, guitarists, and authors.

At times, it seems like my entire childhood was spent traipsing across a landscape of the banned and the forbidden. Jim Henson was destroying our attention span so that MTV could turn us into zombies or sex maniacs.  (Or worse yet, zombie sex maniacs!) 

Come to think of it, with all the "evil" I was exposed to, it's a wonder I didn't become a super villain.  I guess all those Marvel comics I read and bad 50's B movies I watched really didn't do me a lick of good. [edit: All I got out of it was a book deal].

Somehow my generation survived our exposure to the blandishments of the fiendish cathode ray tube, as well as Judy Blume, Shel Silverstein, Jim Henson, and Talking Heads.  Just as my parent's generation survived JD Salinger and To Kill a Mockingbird, Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles.  And just as each generation has persevered in spite of (or because of) those cultural influences their elders and betters were certain would destroy them all the way back into the dawn of time.

And I think that's what the book banner is afraid of most. Not that we'll be destroyed or seduced by what we read, but that we won't. That the fear lives only in their heads. That we'll read this Awful Thing That Should Not Be Tolerated and go on to live perfectly normal lives. We might discover that the bad guys don't always get their poetic comeuppance. And worst of all, we might discover that the ideas that they find foreign and threatening aren't that frightening after all.

- Scott

A Story Short

For the past week and heading into the next month or so, my updates have not been and will continue not to be as regular as you've come to expect.  There are several illnesses in my family and something's got to give.  But as often happens amid turmoil, creativity has burbled to the surface as I take refuge in my typewriter.

I believe that I've mentioned before how my dad loved Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories and how he wanted me to love them too.  But I just couldn’t. There was too much of a gap there, too far of a leap required of a kid born in the 70's.  A kid who had already sold his allegiance to the Ray Bradbury and Tolkien crowd.  I was conquering Martian frontiers with John Carter and exploring Middle Earth with Frodo.  I didn't have time for stories set in rural Michigan circa 1910, I was living in THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!

Though in fairness, dad gave me my first battered copy of John Carter of Mars and it was at his behest that I

spent some time exploring Victorian Africa with Allan Quartermaine.

I often wondered what it would have been like if I had liked Nick Adams and what it would have taken to make that happen for a kid of the Star Wars era.  What if those stories had been written by someone who spoke in a voice I recognized, a voice less burdened by Hemingway’s affection for the primal male rituals and closer to the swords and sorcery of Tolkien or the jetpacks and laser guns more familiar in my late twentieth century childhood?

Short stories are not my usual forte.  I tend to take large bites of the stories I concoct and I want a large canvas to make them as detailed and beautiful as their architecture can bear without the constraints of the short story getting in my way.  I love short stories, but I don't write them very often.

But the coming-of-age in the space age idea kept prodding and poking me.  Mine was a childhood spent wondering why the promised WORLD OF TOMORROW kept being put off until tomorrow and then the next day and the next.  And a character began to coelesce.

The other day I sat down at the computer and was surprised to find a story of a young man of my generation looking for the future he had been promised by those same Science Fiction visionaries and moth-eaten books from the 1950's and 60's that haunted the basement of the local library.  A kid who thrilled to the same ideas as I had and wanted to know what happened to that jetpack he was supposed to get when the world's odometer clicked over to the year 2000.  A kid who was far more clever and self confident than I insomuch as he was willing and able to do something about it.

It never ceases to surprise me when I find stories hiding in my head that aren't 100,000 words long.  And the self-discovery that like Hemingway I could tell fantastically exagerrated tales spun from my own childhood imaginings.  No more or less surprised than I was to find those half-imagined adventures were still lurking in there, buried under the more literate and adult adventures that overlay them.

What I ended up with was not even close to an attempt to rewrite the Nick Adams stories, far from it. For one thing, I'm definitely not Earnest Hemingway and have no desire to be.  Nonetheless, the stories I've been telling myself for the past couple of weeks are informed by Nick Adams even if it was just that I was reacting against that archetype.  Nick was in the back of my mind as I filtered my thirty year old self back into the ten year old body of a boy that was (in the words of Douglas Adams) similar to but not entirely unlike me.   Certainly I made him smarter, more self-assured and at once more naive than I have ever been.  Because in the end, even if a character contains a sizeable portion of Scott, it's never Scott.  His sister is never my sister and his parents never my parents, though in this case I would say his soul is my soul.

These new stories owe as full a debt to the things I was reading the summer of my tenth year on the planet.  John Carter of Mars, The Mad Scientist’s Club, The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown and God knows the pages of those musty picture books from the 1950’s that teased and tempted my young mind with the impossible future of gleaming domed cities, jetpacks and monorails.

Eventually, of course, that ten-year-old became a thirty-year-old and we made the leap together and I treasure those stories less for what they are than for what they meant to him.  But before the end, my dislike of Hemingway became a bonding thing for us. Which is why I return to it time and again.

Regardless of Hemingway’s influence on these stories, his influence on my dad meant that Dad and I talked about books from the very beginning and the Nick Adams stories in particular. I learned to love them because he did, just as I learned to love books because he made it look like the right way to live.

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John  Carter cover public domain - care of Wikimedia Commons

Children's Book Week & My Next Project

This story is both about and not at all about Children's Book Week.  It is simply the happiest of coincidences that this week and CBW happen at the same time.  Sometimes if you shake the puzzle box juuuuust right, the pieces fall together on their own.

Last week I began a new project and acquired a new co-author.  I will be writing a midgrade/young adult novel with the able assistance of my 12 year-old nephew Jared.

Yes.  You read that right.

We talked a bit and I ran an idea by him that he likes and we have a bit of a rough idea what we're doing and how we're going to do it.  It will be a contemporary fantasy with young protagonists, written to - at least in part - bridge the chasm of our respective generations but also the expanse of United States that lies between us.

I'm not sure how I'm going to approach blogging about this.  I love the genre and feel in many ways that the most exciting things currently happening in literature are happening in the areas marketed to these younger age groups.  And the constraints of the intended audience are that much greater and yet also that much less at the same time.

I love the idea we came up with, the first go at characters we're going to use to tell our tale and the fact that it gives us something to talk about when we don't see one another for such great lengths of time.  Jared is such an avid reader and really seems to love writing.  And I was about his age when I first got the bug myself so... family tradition?


This is going to be wonderful fun.


Anyway, happy Children's Book Week, everyone!  I was going to jokingly lament that Hallmark doesn't make a card for this, but it occurs to me that there are cards for this holiday.  They generally have more than two pages and they stock them in the kid's section of your friendly neighborhood bookseller.

Cheers!

Sunday storytime with Werner Herzog

Did you enjoy Prides & Prejudice & Zombies?  Then you'll love Curious George and the Existentialists.  Ok, it's not really Werner Herzog, but it is a brilliant deconstructionist take on a classic children's book.  I love this for its quirky sensibility... 

A boy pretending to be a wolf pretending to be a king

I loved Where the Wild Things Are. It was my favorite book as a child. Sendak, along with HA Rey, Richard Scarry and a little-known fellow named Charles Schultz were my earliest artistic muses. I spent hours and hours copying their works, trying to unlock their styles and create my own curious monkey, Busy Busy World, Wild Things island, and Peanuts Gang.

I've written extensively about how I feel about movie adaptations of beloved books. And though I approach any movie adaptation of a beloved book with trepidation, I stand by what I said back in July: "No matter how far afield a two hour Where the Wild Things Are movie takes a 48-page children's book, the impact that this seminal book had on my life won't be undone."

But this is Where the Wild Things Are.

A couple of years ago, I heard a great interview with Maurice Sendak. He mentioned all the attempts to get this book onto the screen that ultimately failed. Even John Lassiter of Pixar fame did a test version for Disney and they couldn't make it work. At forty-eight pages, but only nine sentences, Sendak left a lot of silence for us to interpret the book for ourselves. And the interpretations have been diverse.

There have been many who thought it inappropriate for children, that it somehow condoned acting-up and being a wild thing. Sendak was amused by this interpretation. Most people don't get that the story this book tells - mostly in pantomime - is that even after this kid has been a little monster throughout the entire book, his mom brought him dinner anyway. Even though moms yell and send them to their room and might even get mad and punish, etcetera. Sendak thought it was an important lesson for children that yes they need to behave, but even when they're at their worst, their moms still love them. At the end they're still a family.

The movie is made by a man who "got it" and written by someone else who "got it", the incomparable Dave Eggars. It holds tightly to Sendak's themes. It doesn't change Max. It doesn't change the Wild Things. It doesn't water down the raw intensity of what it is to be a boy at a certain time in life.  It fleshes out Sendak's pantomime. It keeps the dangerous edge that the book had, this little boy pretending to be a wolf, pretending to be a king.

If you've read the book I feel that I cannot really spoil this movie for you. But SPOILER ALERT nonetheless because there are details below.

Spike Jonez gave the movie a modernist, hyper-real look that's hard to describe. There's a documentary air about it, with lot of handheld-cameras. The lighting is realistic, not glossy. Natural lighting without the Hollywood gloss. Jim Henson's creature workshop built the Wild Things, so they're on set and the boy is obviously interacting with physical specimens. The CG special effects are constrained to the faces and some of the super-human jumps and the like. They remain supportive of the story rather than overpowering them.

Max is a little monster, but he's really just a little boy looking for control over something. Anything.

His sojourn among the Wild Things has a vision quest feel to it. He's journeying inward and there is danger there, his hold on them as their king is tenuous at all times and you feel it. Every scene reflects his inner chaos and his relations with his family. Each Wild Thing is a facet of the boy's personality with the most dangerous and mercurial of the lot, Carol, masterfully brought to life by the actor in the suit (as are all the monsters) and the voice of James Gandolfini. Underlining the metaphor is that Max holds sway over the wild things by his fingernails. He can guide them, he can cajol them, he can sometimes get therm to expend their efforts in creative and wonderful ways, but he ultimately only controls them by the barest margin. At all times there's the threat that he'll lose control and they'll consume him.

Jonez brings the sense and sensibilities of a real kid. Throughout the movie you can feel Sendak moving behind the scenes. This movie is the book and it's not. It's everything the book was, plus. It's ultimately a tale of a kid who lives mostly inside his head, with few friends and an older sister who is taking the first steps into adulthood, down a path that young Max isn't ready to follow. She is leaving behind a younger brother who is feeling the sundering of what you get the impression was a close relationship at some point, lost playmates spinning apart in a family that's spinning apart in the wake of the loss of his father.

But Jonez lets you infer a lot from very little and I found it very artfully done. The parts of the movie that take place outside Max's external world are few and just enough to let you see the glory and tragedy of being a little boy. Max Record, the boy who plays Max is fantastic. He carries off the role of a boy who simultaneously hates what's happening to him and around him and hates his lack of control over himself and the events that shape him. His beleaguered mother is brought to life in few short scenes and artfully so. A woman trying to raise two kids, hold down a job and find a life and happiness for herself.

In the contractual terms of any vision quest, there is self-awareness dawning slowly throughout the movie. Max grows up a little, realizes the tightrope he walks, but not all things can be resolved. Not every side of him will suffer the bit and bridle. And Max attains some understanding of himself, of his family, of his creativity, of his ability or lack thereof to contain and control his monsters. And in the end he has to get in his little boat and come back. Mom gives him a hot meal and they are a family, Wild Things and all.

Is this a kid's movie or a movie about a kid? I don't know. I don't have a kid. The child Scottie would love this movie, though. He wouldn't catch all the undercurrents or the metaphors, but it's the right kind of scary and the good kind of dark to trip the same triggers that Labyrinth found when I was my nephews' age. Kids movies don't have to be happy. The best among them have multiple threads that give the kids something and their parents something and then the kids something to come back to and find when they see them again with their kids. I think Where the Wild Things Are aspires to the latter realm. And it's not for me to say whether or not it attains it. But as a boy who has been a wolf, a king and a wild thing, I loved it for it similarities to the book as well as its differences.

It takes an imaginary village. . .

Most children have imaginary playmates. I would be intrigued to find that some researchers have interviewed writers and non-writers to chart the incidence of imaginary friends as it correlates to storytelling in later life.

For my part, I had an entire village, called "Westmoore". It was woven of snippets of Sherlock Holmes and Wordsworth's moor wandering, and not a little of Tolkien's bucolic Britain. Like one of those mythical islands sitting on the back of a giant sea turtle, Westmoore wandered from fantasy locations to real ones as suited my playtime needs. It was a secret base for GI Joe, a setting-off point for Hobbits and elves, and a waystation for all manner of imagined heroes and villains.

Cobbled lanes pass underfoot as the wanderer enters the village. A lumbering haycart trundles past, the mists wrapping tendrils through the spokes as the farmer gives you a tip of his cap and an appraising look on his way by. Lights filter through the soot-stained glass of the Cat & Fiddle where the echoes of frivolity keep back the gathering night. Half-timbered houses wander away into the gloom and up on the hill overlooking the town, the ruined castle (there has to be a castle) watches over the bucolic scene.

By the end of my childhood, Westmoore had become anchored in an imaginary corner of the Lake Country of northern England. The Hobbits and elves had wandered off to points unknown and more modern adventures were taking place in the mists of Westmoore. My first full-length novel took place almost entirely in Westmoore and amid the rooms and secret passages of that castle. It's a book that may never see print because books by lads of fifteen so rarely do (with good reason) but it did serve to finally cement the place in the modern era.

In the book I'm currently trying to sell, Westmoore makes a cameo appearance. A teensy tiny bit of the action takes place under the skeptical eye of the matron of the Cat & Fiddle. It gave me a bit of a thrill to take my readers to a place I loved so much as a child, to allow part of my mysteries to unfold among the misty byways where I wandered as a child.

Future editors may excise it as unnecessary, or object to a journey through a very real swath of England that ends in an imaginary village. But for the moment, it lives and breathes once more -- an imaginary village where Wordsworth walked arm-in-arm with Tolkien for a little while in the mind of an asthmatic kid crafting adventures in his head.

Welcome to Westmoore.

Writing Life, Part Two: A Literate Lineage

In an email last year, my mother intimated to me that she didn't feel that they had contributed significantly to my writing skills. (Such as they are.) I wish to say here and now, in front of God and these witnesses... Au contraire!  

I'm still trying to decide if she meant she didn't want credit for all this... (it's a bit late for that, don't you think?)  

We'll set aside the fact that dad accidentally taught me to type partly because he didn't like my messy handwriting and simply point out that my upbringing (as previously noted) was quite literary. 

Both of my parents tattooed the love of reading into my psyche. Mrs Robinson and the English teachers that preceded her may have taught me to care about the difference between "it's" and "its", but that doesn't get mom and dad off the hook.  

My friends will tell you that I talk about my parents a lot and with good reason. They brought to me the worlds of Dr. Seuss, Richard Scarry, The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, H. Rider Haggard, and the rest. I came to be aware of a wider world than that of our small town in Missouri. Mark Twain alone (who was also coincidentally from a small town in Missouri) made me believe that this was something I could do too. We went to libraries instead of sitting at home watching TV. 

I wanted to be well read because it looked like A Good Thing To Be. In our house, it was the only way to be.  

Mom & dad also taught me funny. But that's more than how to tell a joke. I was introduced not only to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, but to Red Skelton and Jack Benny. I learned that being funny didn't require a four-letter vocabulary and that clever was better than brassy (the most important lesson any writer can learn in my opinion) and not to bite off a subject I can't chew. 

It's appropriate that my first published short story was a humorous lark about daylight savings time being used to avert Armageddon. 

I also learned that "neatness counts" and if I can't write it neatly, then type it. I got all that somewhere, and I don't really think I got it at school. I couldn't have because honestly, I wasn't really paying that much attention in class. (ahem)  When my fourth grade teacher challenged my authorship of a paper, dad went to bat for me. "Yes, a fourth grader really can write like that..." Incidentally, I began my first novel that year. (I recall it later caused trouble with the administration because it was an action-adventure kids-are-smarter-than-adults kind of novel and they didn't approve of such notions.)  

Most writers I know are readers who read something somewhere along the way and say "Psht! I could do better than that!" This is generally followed by someone who says, "Really? Then maybe you should." For me, it was my parents, who told me it was ok to be a writer as long as I got my homework done first. (Not that I ever did...) 

Parents who make it a Good Thing to be well-read, literate, and well-spoken are forming adults who hold the same values even if we don't seem to be getting it at the time. I'm not sure my parents appreciate how rare they were when compared to the parents of my friends in highschool and college. No matter how you cut it, parenting as much as anything made me a writer. 

Sorry, mom. You're just going to have to accept your share of the blame... er... credit.

-Scott 

Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing...

Note: Any rumors you might have heard as to the existence of "Free Kittens" are to be regarded with suspicion. "Free Kitten" is an oxymoron. When I spend my time in veterinary waiting rooms, you get reminiscences of novels past.

You have been warned. (The cats are doing just fine, btw... the little pickpockets) ~ Scott

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I began writing my first novel in the fourth grade. Every writer says that, I suppose, but it's worth dwelling on these things on rainy days. Where was I? Oh! Right... The Fourth Grade. 

I can’t say for certain that it was the cause of me taking up the pen at this time, but it happened to be the point when dad began handing me Things To Read. Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain… dad's desert island list of great authors and titles. I didn’t like White Fang but I loved Treasure Island. I just couldn’t get into Dracula or Frankenstein, and didn’t much like Ivanhoe.

I had opinions and wasn’t afraid to express them (except for White Fang which I pretended to like because for some reason it seemed like I should) and dad guided me in the directions my tastes seemed to be leading. I can’t say this injection of classics to the juvenile paper I was shifting was the tipping point toward being a writer. I can say with 100% certainty that it’s the reason my boyhood reminiscences are often woven of wildly divergent and overlapping themes and reading levels. To this day, I never disdain to read a book that was "beneath" me and never feared to assay a book that was allegedly above me. Don't worry; if I don't know something, I'll raise my hand. That's what parents, encyclopedias and dictionaries are for, after all.

If I enjoy it, or think I might enjoy it, I read it. I don’t much care in what section of the bookstore or library it is shelved. Jack P. McGurk, Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown, Henry Mulligan & Homer Snodgrass stood alongside Tom, Huck, Holmes & Watson in the misty byways of my imagination. These guys joined Allan Quartermaine & Henry Curtis, David Balfour & Jim Hawkins in a sort of prototype for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (I’m sorry to say Mina Harker wasn’t there, but I don’t really like Epistolary fiction). This reading list – you might note – was very very Boy’s Life. It's only to be expected. Anne of Avonlea doesn't hold a lot of interest for a fourth grade boy (at least it didn't for me).

The television programs I watched and the movies I enjoyed were of the same stripe. I don’t personally believe that this is the Bad Thing that some make it out to be – I turned out just fine, after all with a fully-developed sense of myself in relation to the other gender. I’m personally convinced that one’s attitudes are only formed by one’s fictional choices when there are no countervailing parental attitudes to balance them out. But what do I know?

All of this is a long way around to telling you that I first put pencil to loose-leaf page at the point in my life when active imagination and play is still encouraged yet the real world has become real. As real as the world has ever been for me, anyway. A binder or notebook of clean paper is very much the same as a blank sketchbook to me: Meant To Be Filled. What are you waiting for, kid? Grab a #2 pencil and get crackin’!

The adolescent novel is a direct reflection of all the things you’ve read or seen on the screen up to that point. Everything that you’ve enjoyed and absorbed gets melded and regurgitated in some manner. The verbal equivalent of a Rorschach Inkblot. My literary alter-ego was named “Indiana Perkins” and all the rest of the characters were my schoolmates, focused through the lens of some pop-culture phenomenon ranging from The A Team to Goonies (heavy on the Goonies).

If I was in fourth grade now, I imagine it would be heavy on the Harry Potter. Thus is life.

Lest I take all the credit for this, it's time to confess that I had a co-author. A schoolmate signed on to co-write this piece. Gannon was more popular than I, and being a kid who was painfully shy, insular, unathletic and never “popular” in any real sense of the term. I was the kid that spent his life pretending to be someone else somewhere else -- not because where I was or what I was doing was bad but because it provided a buffer between me and a world that gave me panic attacks. Anyway, Gannon’s name on the cover page made what I/we were doing almost cool, or at least acceptable to the other kids. At the very least, it became a bit less weird. I was only too honored to share the byline (and frequently the blame).

The premise was that of a school trip to another city gone awry, hijacked midflight by terrorists who took our class hostage (Pan Am Flight 73 had a huge impact on us). In the ensuing story, the kids banded together (led by my character and my buddies) in a MacGuyver/A Team sequence of events which were spiced with a healthy dose of Mad Scientist Club for spice. I would credit Toy Soldiers, but it came long after this, no doubt germanated in the fertile imagination of some other kid.

It was fun. It got taken away at various times by various teachers (I never lost a comic book to a teacher, they took away my novel) and it didn't get finished until grade five, but I had a blast writing it. It also taught me more than any writing teacher before or since. I discovered authorial voice and writing my own novel taught me to really LOOK at the things I was reading and watching on TV and I began to understand how to structure a story and how to write dialogue.

My playtime shifted accordingly. My GI Joe men stopped being GI Joes and began taking on personas of my own creation, each with a back-story I created independent of what Hasbro might have put on the back of the box. They worked through full story arcs with complex twist endings and the tale frequently ended badly. They waged personal conflicts, sought revenge for past slights, investigated mysteries, got involved in Flemingesque dramas… and when I discovered Tolkien and Fritz Leiber, I even created medievalish costumes for them out of craft felt and pounded nails flat to make swords and daggers. Shakespearean tragedies and even a strange version of The Ring Cycle were acted out on the conrete floor of my parents' basement.

What that first novel did not teach me was how to collaborate. It should have, but it didn’t. I would like to tell you that ultimately I was far more into it than my coauthor and believed far more strongly that it was worthwhile. Both of those things are/were true but really it’s because I wanted to make things so complex that for other people it began to look like work rather than play.

Or so I guess, I don’t really know because I wasn’t yet self-aware enough to make enquiries.

My penchant for ignoring what was so obvious and prepackaged didn’t enamor me of the other children in any case. In my life I rarely had more than one friend at a time. Honestly this was owing about half to the tendency to live inside my own head to the exclusion of all else, and the rest was because I rarely got through half the explanation of what I was doing or wanted to do before the other kids lost interest.

I would give almost anything to have a copy of that novel. Alas that it has fallen into the dust of history, remembered only by me (and maybe Gannon) as yet another book that only I remember with characters and an author that only I know are missing from the pages of Books In Print.

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Photo by Me ... from my collection of antique children's books