Approaching Dawn

Admittedly, quarantine has not brought any real great changes to my life. I now attend church in my living room Sundays, watching the service streaming over the television on YouTube, and I no longer have to make excuses to keep from going out...having to wear one of those blasted masks is reason enough to stay home. And since we stream instead of using cable or satellite, we miss most of the insipid and virtuous/inspirational commercials. Still, though I can tune out the messages and images (the lonely piano, the solitary car, the idiotic idea that a mask is not a mask), I can't ignore the fact that most of us are on lockdown.

I read recently that many people have discovered the joys of not having to rush about madly, the things that can be accomplished by not going out, a clean garage, for example. Employers/employees have found advantages in working from home. Some have even stated that when all this ends (i.e., when politicians have wrung the last bit of power from the crisis) they might be interested in continuing to work from home. Wanting to stay home to work is but a small step from avoiding people as a matter of principal, a mindset I have had for years. Because of my aversion toward socializing, some have termed me "xenophobic,' which is a fear of strangers (a tribal virtue, not a vice), but I think it might be more "anthrophobic," because it's just people in general, a bit stronger than the common social awkwardness most people seem to have to some degree.

I wonder if this enforced isolation might eventually morph into an actual aversion, which brings us to Dawn, a planet in Isaac Asimov's novel The Robots of Dawn, third in his Robot Series, which began with the SF Mystery The Caves of Steel. Again, Earth-based detective Elijah Bailey is called to investigate a crime involving Spacers (those who left Earth centuries before during a period of expansionism), but this time it involves him leaving Earth and its "caves of steel" (vast underground cities) and traveling to Dawn. The problem is that, like all Earthers, Detective Bailey suffers from agoraphobia (a fear of open places), a phobia so strong it nearly cripples him; it stems from the people of Earth spending their entire lives living in the teeming subterranean cities under conditions that others would see as claustrophobic.

The book is wonderfully written and plotted (what novel by Asimov wouldn't be?), though maybe not as well done as the first two books (the aforementioned Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun), but I really don't want to delve into the plot. If you have not read it, I strongly recommend all three.

What made me think of The Robots of Dawn is what Elijah Bailey discovers when he finally reaches Dawn. He has to deal with the wide-open spaces, the spacious houses and the spaces between people, but he discovers the human inhabitants of Dawn have their own bugaboo phobia. Asimov does not call it anthrophobia, but it is. The isolated houses of the Spacer colonists are self-sufficient, they have robots to run their errands and do their bidding, and if they want to visit anyone they can do so by projecting a holographic image. Over time, the inhabitants of Dawn have developed an intense aversion to actual physical presences, a hindrance to the detective's investigation since he is used to living cheek to jowl with his fellow humans and feels restricted in trying to "read" a hologram.

So, are we heading toward being like Dawn's inhabitants? We're getting used to not being around people, and while Zoom is nothing like a hologram, it's a step in that direction. We may not have robots to do our fetching and carrying, but we can get anything we need delivered...yeah, that Prime membership is really paying off. Our houses may not be isolated, but it's easy to shut out the world, even with the front door open. 

What would make a conversion from gregariousness to isolationism relatively easy, is that every person really is an island...sorry, John Donne. Despite an incessant bombardment by clueless companies and an increasingly irrelevant government, many people are discoving the truth of the new now: we are all in this...separately, not together. Day by day, we learn we don't need others, we don't need to go out, and if we do need to interact with others, there is Zoom...safe, undemanding, alone and coming with an OFF switch. 

Writing in the "Age of Plague"

When Daniel Defoe published his novel A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722, people did not think it was a novel at all, but an actual account of events in the year 1665. If anything, they considered Defoe (who would have been five at the time) as the editor, and that his editorial contributions were minimal. The book was even more detailed than the celebrated diaries of Samuel Pepys who actually wrote during the Great Plague (1665-1666). In the work, Defoe mentioned real neighborhoods, real people and even wrote about individual houses.

The book was well received when published and was still well regarded in 1780, but by then it was considered a realistic novel. This is a tribute to Defoe's research skills, for he read hundreds of original documents and interviewed oldsters who had lived through the calamity that struck London, adding to it his own childhood memories. Of course, not every literary scholar and historian considers the case closed on whether or not it's a novel. It lacks the structure of a novel, reads like a memoir and carries a gravitas greater than many historical accounts of the period. The question will probably never be settled.

It's been 298 years since the publishing of the book, 355 years since the setting of the novel, and modern readers probably don't know that Defoe wrote anything other than Robinson Crusoe (another book taken initially as real history), and even fewer remember their history lessons about the Great Plague. Of course, that may change a bit now that we find ourselves beset by the pestilence out of China, which now goes by the name of COVID19 (it's a trendy thing, giving everything an easy-to-recall acronym or portmanteau designation). Being stuck inside for a few weeks, some people might actually pick up that history book they kept from high school, for some reason.

A few years ago, I had a series of dreams that I converted into plots for novels. Pulling a novel out of a dream is nothing new for me, but this was unusual in that it happened over a two-month period and resulted in about forty different plots. The genres were varied, from science fiction to crime to fantasy to western. When I have more ideas than I can immediately do anything with, I usually jot down the idea, include some mnemonics (to jog my memory later) and sketch a few rough ideas as to characters and setting. This time, however, I gave the stories titles, wrote detailed plots and extensive characterizations, and developed cover ideas using GIMP and Canva. I also typed out the first several pages of the story so I could hit the ground running if/when I came back to it.

After finishing the fifth DCI Ravyn novel, Murder Amongst the Rushes, I thought it was time to take a brief vacation from dark and legend-haunted Hammershire County and pursue a few other projects. I looked in my files and saw that Behind Thick Walls, an amalgamation of the Crime and Post-Apocalyptic genres was the most developed of the stories. It seemed to me that with a working cover, a complete list of characters with full biographies and about a dozen pages of the novel written, it would be a fairly easy matter to dive into the project and get going. And so, in early November 2019, I started work on the novel and wrote in the beginning blurb...

"...but there was nothing natural about the plague that swept the world, seemingly in the twinkling of an eye. Earth’s peoples went to sleep in a time beset by wars and rumors of war, secure in their empires of technology and commerce, and awoke to an Age of Plague."

And then, as I worked off and on on it (personal and family situations prevented a concentrated and sustained effort), I found events in the real world warping to mimic the fictional situation. Oh, there were differences, of course. The story is set in Mexico and COVID19 is nowhere near as terrible as the plague in the story, at least not yet. And, while it seems we need only wait out COVID19 (as we did Spanish Flu, Asian Flu and SARS), the plague of the book ("Rot") seems to be the gift that keeps giving.

When I first started, I drew a measure of inspiration from Defoe's book, Pepys' diaries, and the crime novels of Elmore Leonard. As the year turned, and we entered January and February, I discovered my fictional inspiration pushed aside by the news of the day. And now, with California on lock-down for the foreseeable future, I find myself writing about a society beset by plague while living in a society beset by plague. Am I (are we all) trapped in a meta-novel? If so, I hope the cosmic writer is not as cavalier with characters, as I often am.

Hopefully, we won't hear the sound of a Typewriter in the Sky...

More than a Thousand Words

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen told us late in the 19th Century, "A thousand words does not leave the same deep impression as one good deed." Today, thanks to the San Antonio Light hawking its pictorial coverage of the Great War in 1918, we have the phrase as "a picture is worth a thousand words." Fiction magazines used to illustrate stories with drawings, paintings and even lithographs, but these days, with fiction magazines all but gone, the relationship between story and art is mostly limited to the book cover, which may or may not actually illustrate some aspect of the story. Usually, it's more along the lines of "inspired by" or "suggested by" rather than actually illustrating; in the case of the great Richard Powers, it was more "I captured the spirit of the book" or "The book is really weird and so is my painting."

We usually think of the story creating the art, but it can also flow the other way, the art inspiring the words. This is what happened when Edwin Markham saw French artist Jean-François Millet's painting L'homme à la houe and wrote the powerful poem "The Man with the Hoe." When I took a creative writing class at Castle Park High School (it was the first of its kind in the district, strictly experimental) we used a book called Pictures for Writing. This approach was particularly helpful for class members who could write well, but had problems finding inspiration. There were a few other books in the series. The problem that some had with the technique, however, was that they could not get beyond whatever they saw in the picture. Others did quite well transferring the old journalist's mantra of "5W's & an H" (Who, What, Where, When, Why & How) to discover the hidden story. My only problem was that every picture inspired me to write a science fiction or fantasy story; these days, however, it would have been a mystery/suspense story. There were times when I almost felt sorry for Mr Ligon (our teacher) when he read my story, looked at the assigned photo and shook his head in dismay and confusion. 

Back in the 80's and 90's, I was very active in the small press movement, a kind of counter-traditional publishing that evolved in the later part of the 19th Century. It often took the form of publishing one's own work, but small or "craft" presses also came into being. Until the 60's, when specialized paperbacks took over from the pulps and traditional publishers discovered a new market, science fiction and fantasy novels were published by the likes of Shasta Press and Gnome Books, after first being serialized in genre magazines. Alas, the small press is no more, for which I blame the Internet and Amazon, my usual Black Hats for things that cannot be blamed on the Usual Suspects...fans of The Lone Gunmen will understand. Most of that involvement on my part was as author and publisher, but I also sometimes snuck in as an artist.

However, I never tried to pass myself off as an "artist;" I usually told myself I was just an illustrator, an interpreter of someone else's talent. I read the stories and tried to give the author's words life, choosing just that particular moment that would emphasize the action or distill the essence of the story into vivid graphics. It was just a hobby and I was flattered that people asked me to help them out with their projects. I hope I succeeded more often that I failed. Here are a few of my efforts from published stories:

A Plant-man from a re-issue
 of one of ERB's Barsoom stories.

A sorcerer brings doom upon a city

Pirates attack in this space opera.

A strange cloaked figure wanders through a Celtic land.

Sometimes, I drew illustrations that I would use as a basis for a story, or sometimes I gave them to friends who mined them for stories and poems. However, most of those drawings and paintings I no longer have. This was back in the day before computers and scanners were part of my life. I sent out originals of the works, which were gifts to friends (other small press writers and publishers), whether of not they used them. I do still have a few, though:

For one reason or another, some of them dealing with trauma, others with the more mundane issues of life and and time and events beyond control (and not a little ennui, admittedly), I put away the pens and pencils and papers for a long time. I suppose if there is one thing that can be said with absolute certainty, it's that nothing remains the same, that everything changes. Everything that goes away comes around again, which is why I try to never throw anything away. So, in 2020, I got the drawing bug again. The difference is that, with the demise of the small press, there went my social life. With just a couple of exceptions, everyone I knew from my small press decades have either moved on to other endeavors or passed away. So, now, if the new drawings are to inspire new stories, it will all be up to me...unless others volunteer. 

She haunts the bayou, lingering in the moist darkness
as she watches isolated points of light, the tiny lanterns
of those whose shacks are far from civilization.
And she waits...

The Canvyrn leads an unhappy life, enslaved and
mistreated by its arrogant and foppish rider;
one day there will surely be a reckoning...

The Davyn and its rider lead caravans across the shifting sands
of the Great Sand Sea. Though the Davyn has a 360 range of
view and wears goggles to keep his vision clear, the desert is
a dangerous place, full of perils, from savage marauders
to ancient evils...

Transformations, Faded Hopes and the Trauma of Change

Buy in the US or UK

With Murder Amidst the Rushes, DCI Arthur Ravyn and DS Leo Stark begin their fifth adventure in the legend-haunted English County of Hammershire, and it starts with two men leaving the Mad Badger pub, walking onto the old brick bridge crossing the River Dresal, and only one returning to the pub's car park.

Arthur Ravyn has finally recovered from injuries received during the course of events related in Murderer in Shadow. And, finally, Sgt and Mrs Stark have been blessed with their long-anticipated baby, whom they have named Catherine. For once, Ravyn and Stark begin a case without the shadow of Superintendent Heln looming over them; the little fellow has been sent to Paris to attend a crime prevention conference...ah, we can only pity the French.

Each of the previous books in the series had a specific theme, and this book's is Transformations. We all look for ways to change our lives, but change is never as easy as it should be. All too often, any change we might effect has results neither intended nor anticipated. All of us has been so wracked by changes over the years, either through our own efforts or by the actions of others, that it's hard not to hold the belief that, "All change is bad." And it gets worse as we go along. What might have seemed adventurous in our salad years now seems traumatic. I have to admit, however, I am the wrong person to judge the necessity of change...these days, even moving a chair from one side of a room to another is enough to send me into a glassy-eyed stupor. Yeah, change is never good.

But, as the characters in Murder Amidst the Rushes find out, there is no escaping the whims of a cruel and often capricious universe. Some hope for relief from a wretched home life, yet have no idea how to escape. Others try to hold on to what they have, yet events beyond understanding or control take away the dreams and aspirations they had achieved. Then there are those who know what they want, think they know how to achieve those goals, and will not let anything, or anyone, get in their way. When greed and ruthless pursuit become the paramount drivers of a man's life, can murder be far behind? As Stark comes to realize, "Gold makes monsters of all men."

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The book is available in both digital and print editions on Amazon. If you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription ($9.99/month and well worth it, according to the Wife), you can download it to your e-reader and read it at no extra cost...considering you're paying a subscription fee, I don't use the term "free" as others, including Amazon, do. If you have Prime, but not Kindle Unlimited, I think you can still borrow the book as part of the one book a month you're allowed.

Murder Amidst the Rushes has been out for about a month now. The response to it has been very encouraging, and it seems to have sparked renewed interest in the entire Ravyn series by those encountering it for the first time.

For those who have contacted me over the past year with comments and questions, I apologize for the delay in bringing the book into print. It has been a very difficult couple of years, marked by death, illness, surgeries and traumatic events of all sorts. Some I have handled better than others, but each new situation played its part in overcoming my best intentions. Thanks for your patience and encouragement. I truly appreciate your support.

Click HERE to purchase the entire series