My Geneology Homework

My son Pierce was just in the hospital for a week and recovered on pain meds for another week. Now he's catching up on homework. For one assignment, he needed to interview a family member about a great grandparent. Since Pierce interviewed me, I figured I would publish the interview in my blog.

Albert was my great grandfather. He was born in East Hanover Township, 1/11/1902 on his family’s farm in Pennsylvania. His family, descended from a Philadelphia cabinet maker from the Rhine Valley in Germany, still spoke Pennsylvania Dutch. He attended Findlay Divinity College in Ohio on a work-study program and shoveled coal to keep the school heated. He was ordained in the Church of God (before the split over tongues) and found his calling “repairing churches.” Whenever there was a problem, they would call him in. He could talk to anyone and always had a joke about any subject. His family moved a lot.

He was married to a younger Vera Valentine Eshlemann and had six children: Marlin, David, Stan, Eloise, Shirley, and Ken (my grandfather). She was good at baking pies, and after every meal she would hold up her hands and say, “I never owned a dishwasher my whole life, these were my dishwashers.”

By the time my grandfather was born, Albert’s oldest children were in the military. My grandfather joined too, because they were too poor to go to college without the GI Bill. When asked about President Eisenhower, Albert complained, “Ike promised our children would never again fight in foreign wars, and now my boys are in Korea.” He preferred reading the comics in the newspaper. He told his grandchildren jokes like

“Who was the shortest man in the Bible? Nehemiah (pronounced Knee-high-miah) or Bart the shoe-height.”

“Where is baseball mentioned in the Bible? In the big inning.”

“Where are there cars in the Bible? The apostles gathered together and were in one Accord. Before that they only had motorcycles, the Triumph of Gideon was heard throughout the land.”

His last official church was in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, where he married my Great Aunt Shirley and Great Uncle Larry. This is the place he lived the longest. After he retired, he bought a row house there a block from the church, where he could hear the clock bells. He maintained a long, narrow flower garden with snapdragons, Peruvian daffodils, and roses, which he gave clippings of to my grandparents. My grandfather gave children of the same daffodils to my parents. Even retired, Albert drove a 20 year old Dodge Dart to preach at two small local churches. He only stopped after a stroke ruined his night vision because he didn’t want to hurt anyone.

Albert and Vera visited one summer when Grandpa Ken was stationed in Alaska. Ken took him salmon fishing that weekend when he had off work. On Sunday, in the stream, Albert reeled in a prize on steel leader, a salmon so big it took five people to help wrestle into the net. His response was, “This is God’s joke on me. It’s the biggest fish I’ll ever catch in my life, and I can’t tell anyone because I caught it on the Lord’s day.”

When he died in late May 1984, the funeral was huge. The line to view the casket stretched around the block. The oddest person there was a mentally challenged woman in a raccoon-skin coat (in summer). Nobody recognized her. When asked, she said she met him at the bus stop. He was the only one who would talk to her, and he would be missed.

Ten Goals for the New Year

I saw a friend in Facebook with some interesting goals for the New Year, so I thought I might make up a few. One of his was to get one of those Shriner cars with a helicopter blade on top. He can't afford one, so he was planning the theoretical heist. I helped. (Writers can do that without getting arrested.) I pointed out that right in the confusion before or after a parade was the best time. A clown costume could get him in and out without suspicion. Of course, then he had to add "Learn to ride a unicycle" to his goals. Small price to pay for a dream.
Here's what I came up with, in no particular order. I'll consider myself successful if I accomplish half, in addition to what life throws at me every day, but I'll still try for all ten.

1. Write three more books: hopefully a young adult fantasy, the finale of my Jezebel series, and something brand new. The new is always the hardest, more dangerous, and most exciting.
2. Get my son through hip surgery safely and with decent grades and happy, which is why I aimed for only three books not four like normal. He's going to be in a wheelchair for six weeks. We're not sure when it's going to be scheduled yet. I think we've had three rounds of X-rays, a computer gait analysis, and a CT scan so far.
3. Improve my hit ratio with books. Only about half hit the top 100 lists and pay for themselves. About a sixth don't even sell copies every month on Amazon. This means getting feedback from a content editor early so I can change stories if one isn't likely to pan out. It may also mean paying for more marketing.
4. Sign up for new health insurance. My two-year HP retirement benefits run out at the end of August. I can either pay for double coverage starting in March or pay the full amount to continue HP coverage for four months. Obamacare makes it possible for independent writers to see doctors!
5. Read four new authors. This is harder than it sounds. With my glasses problems, I only read about 20 a year and most of those are from old favorites or shared with my family. I want to start with the author of "Fight Club", Chuck Palahniuk. Since my early sci-fi has been compared to the Canadian Cory Doctorow, I thought I should find out why.
6. Create my first audio book (while the kids are at school). It takes about two hours of total silence to generate one hour of story. I even bought the equipment for it already, and Tammy has volunteered to do women's voices. I should do so soon to ride the current wave, but I want to have quality. I also want to make all that time count. Part of me wants to advertise "Foundation for the Lost" to increase its popularity. Another part wants to do Jezebel to boost my biggest money earner and the one most likely to be purchased.
7. Finish importing all my cassette tapes from the 80s into itunes, including converting the .wav files to mp3 for the first ten albums I did. Twice in the last year, I wanted to listen to a given song while writing a particular scene. However, this is tedious. I'll need to download new software and buy a tape player that doesn't hiss. Then I need to spend hours editing the albums into songs with Audacity.
8. Buy albums from four new artists. Again, difficult. I have about 4000 tunes in my collection, 980 in my current writing playlist. However, I don't want to become a barnacle and become stuck in the 90s.
9. Surprise my wife with a romantic gesture once a season. This is difficult because she doesn't like me to kill plants unnecessarily, and we don't have family nearby to watch the kids. She knows me well enough that this is even harder. I also admit to being a complacent. This means I have to make it a point to put forth the effort. She's worth itl.
10. Apply to teach at the local college. After the surgery but before signing up for insurance for next year. Notice this is pretty low on my priorities. As a retiree, any task that takes over 20 minutes of work I don't enjoy goes to the "later" pile. Hmm. That list it pretty long now. I could be an instructor for math or computers, but secretly hope to teach writing. This won't happen, which is another reason it's on the bottom. It's a scientific fact that only three people in any math class actually want to be there.

Family Film Reminders

I recently spent two full days dubbing five years of microcassettes onto DVD for my Dad's Christmas gift. Watching my children again reminded me of many things I had forgotten.

1. Young children are incredibly enthusiastic. When my son opened his third birthday presents, everything was the best, and he was so grateful. That excitement didn't begin to diminish until his first school bus ride at age five.
2. Bath time was play time. They seemed to have more toys in the tub than the rest of the house. I was particularly fond of the rubber ducky cover for the spigot.
3. My daughter loved to dance, even as a baby. She would bop to the rhythm of a basketball or 80s music. Dancing with the Stars awed her.
4. Firsts are fantastic: walking up a staircase, playing in snow, building a block tower taller than yourself, or climbing a ladder to your fort with your loyal puppy.
5. Jumping is fun: leaves, sofas, trampolines, or your new big-boy/girl bed.
6. Newborns have a different cry for each thing they need and train parents to tell them apart. One of them is "I dropped my binkie". We often referred to Mean Mr. Gravity, a young child's nemesis.
7. Spontaneous laughter is contagious. Giggles that well up from a child spread to everyone. Anything can start it, from a feather duster sword fight to a belly zerbert. My daughter had several laughs as well. My favorite was on we called the pirate laugh.
8. Children are kind and believe easily. I played with my kids with a cat puppet and a doctor kit. They talked to the puppet as if it were real, calming its fears and making sure it was healthy. Imagination is contagious as well.
9. School holiday presentation are an hour of sitting for five minutes of your child. Everyone has a moment, but you have to be present to win. Meanwhile, cheer for everyone else's moment. My son was so proud of winning best costume as a penguin that he wore the same outfit for the next five Halloweens. Tammy eventually had to make him a bigger one.
10. My wife, when I managed to catch her on camera, was really cute. I could see her glow whenever the kids ran up to her for a hug or she handed out a Christmas present. I'm really lucky.

Book 4 of Jezebel Released: Approaching Oblivion

I'm really excited by the release of the latest in the Jezebel's Ladder series. Last one, Sanctuary, hit a top hundred Amazon sci-fi list after the first week. Approaching Oblivion hit three lists on day three. Thanks so much to people who continue to read. I tried to pack Oblivion with drama, humor, science, and action. Enjoy.

Book five should be the finale in the series. I'll probably open with a couple childhood scenes on the spaceship. Then the astronauts go back to a strange and potentially hostile Earth. There will be a lot of discussion about companies copyrighting human genetic enhancements. I'll also have fun with media as a tool for social change. I may even have male on the cover for the first time. (Someone wanted me to put Herk in a Hawaiian shirt on this cover)

The main character so far is Stu. He will feel like a demigod in the starship, but be a fish out of water on Earth. After having a long crush on Mira, he's going to fall head over heels for the aura of his primary opponent for control over the incredibly powerful Fortune Enterprises--Mira's biological daughter. She starts out mildly evil, but there will be enough hit squads and double-crosses that she'll figure out old-fashioned Stu is the only one she can trust. I'll have fun with parents being almost the same ages as their children due to space travel.

Right now, two stories are wrestling in my head. While I'm brainstorming Jez 5, I am also writing section 1 of the YA fantasy "Behind the Walls of Sleep"--Winter. It's flowing well, and I've had the idea lodged in my brain for over 30 years. Maybe getting the first 17K words to a content editor in the next week or so will help me decide which novel to focus on for my St. Patrick's Day cover and line edit slots.

New Short Story Collection--Epic Fails

I had a lot of fun writing these between books.


Eight epic fantasy stories that have a common theme—failure. Sometimes dark but often funny, these tales paint other worlds where things didn’t work out the way the main character planned.

• A Lesson in Summoning—an apprentice learns how summon Shrong demons.
• A Boy with No Name on a Horse Called Spot—a young man must earn his adult name.
• Cheating Death—an untrustworthy Greek wizard finds a way to live forever.
• The Loneliness Drug—a new drug hits the market with side effects.
• Of Mycenaean Men: an ancient foible—a Monty Pythonesque spoof of the Odyssey.
• Native Intelligence—a teenaged Indian learns magic from his grandfather.
• Agents of Fortune—an Appalachian witch helps people by listening to the right voice.
• Zaboath Must Die—a post-apocalypse where one person’s heaven is another’s hell.

http://www.amazon.com/Epic-Fails-Scott-Rhine-ebook/dp/B00GW4HV9G

Random Sequencing

I just finished two books and am still in the edit process for one. Now is the time in the cycle to start something new. Have you ever wanted to see inside the head of a writer as he develops a story idea from scratch? It’s a process I refer to a random sequencing. The only comparisons I can use are outlining an invisible person using a ping pong ball in a tornado or panning for gold in a canoe. In days of listening to music and musing, I get maybe one nugget. It takes at least three compatible puzzle pieces to make a novel. Directing the process is worse than herding cats. I want my muse to develop my budding story “Behind the Walls of Sleep.” Before I can write past the fifth chapter, I need to finish building the world. From experience, this can take six to eight weeks, with no guarantee of outcome. The last time I tried to finish this story, the idea for “Jezebel’s Ladder” intruded.

Day 1

I try to develop the mechanics of the dream world. I get two single-spaced pages about rules for goblins. Wizards treat them like trash but they’re really important lesser faerie. To keep them from tunneling into your stronghold, there are four methods: stone slabs, renewing magic wards daily, pockets of nightmare in your basement, or hiring a dim goblin to be your janitor—he’ll keep the others out with goblin hospitality rules.

Day 2

Flesh in the dream world is the same as spirit here. I talk with a zen master character about what the dirt in Astra is made of. He says the same thing as here: crushed mountains, dead things, manure, insects, worms, and microorganisms you can’t see. These all have analogues in the dream world. What’s the bottom layer? Adam or a giant turtle. I Google fairy rings as gates and boundaries. Today is only one page of notes. This is frustrating so I concentrate on the details about the goblins. I decide they could be Japanese bakemono.

Day 3

I look into bakemono and feel a resonance for the part where they are yokai who can transform. In this case, the one in the tavern in town is a giant rat. Oni with an iron club is also an interesting concept I’d like to use--similar to double Varja. I research Shintoism next. The barriers between the mundane and sacred space are the most interesting.

Day 4

I decide that my fantasy stories don’t sell nearly as well as my science fiction. I have NO idea whether I can pull of YA literature and have been advised to stick to my strengths by colleagues. Okay. Let’s try to direct the muse to a well-constructed science fiction world where I can establish a series. My first two ideas only cover half a page and they are superhero driven. Those don’t sell well, and they are more fantasy. The third starts interestingly enough with the recent destructive “asteroid” in Russia being an emissary from another world—one of their royals. Common enough, but in this story, we kill him pretty quickly. Scientists gleefully examining his craft and body for new technology discover a signal being transmitted. A fugitive from the galactic empire on Earth tells us that this is the destruct button. We just declared war on the empire. Our only hope is to send out two missions: one to hide the seeds of our race in the galaxy hub, and the other to a prison world on the edge of the blight. If we can convince the royal imprisoned there to help us before the fleet crosses the blight, we have a slim chance. Either way, it will be a war against species extermination. Only a small minority of humans have the mutation that can survive the imperfect jump drive we cobble together on hollowed asteroids of our own. Some volunteer, but mutations with ANY criminal record are drafted by the UN to fight for us. Lots of exploration and meeting odd aliens. This space opera also verges on comic book. I did similar things for role playing campaigns—not mainstream enough.

Day 5

I run with the genetic idea. I also like the idea of one-word titles to sum up the concept. The core McGuffin in the series will be a technique, available to any billion-dollar mega-corporation or government, to splice specific minor progressive DNA changes onto an embryo. They have very little idea what we’re doing, but it works through trial and error. The company that discovers a key sequence gets to copyright it for 50 years. Monsanto does this with plants now, and there are companies trying to do it with adult DNA of people they’ve tested. There have been a number of stories about trying to make the smartest/strongest person, but this will be about the wild west era before it is mainstream. Think of the race for the gene sequences to make newborns immune to AIDs or cancer. The effects can only be realized in the next generation. Since children have no rights, the parents have to sign the agreements. In exchange, the children are cared for in communal daycares (crèches). The desirable ones are educated for free and given limited use of their own DNA in exchange for corporate loyalty. Think of people like iphones—locked into one carrier, useless for any other vendor or if you fail to make regular payments. Governments like this arrangement because it lowers crime rates and population growth while raising taxes. It will need to be set somewhere with lax human rights and big problems. 3D printers should also feature prominently in this world.

Let’s explore what we can do with this groundwork and one interesting word.

Broken

This story is about a boy who was part of a batch of 100 trying to achieve a specific mix. The indicator of splicing success (glowing skin patch, eye color, etc) didn’t manifest, and he’s literally stamped as a reject. He’s raised in a crèche with 20 other rejects, many of whom don’t live long because the trait they are hunting is on a very narrow isthmus. His own mother refuses to visit him when she finds out he’s a reject. Instead, he bonds to one of the nannies and is the only one of his class to reach eighteen alive. He can solve genius level problems but takes longer than genius time. He’s a further disappointment and washes out of the scholarship program. From there, he signs an extension of his “mineral rights” to the company in exchange for college. At age 30, he still looks 20 and wants to date. To have access to his own reproductive organs, he has to get the device implanted in him “unlocked”. The corporate rights expired but they still refuse to release him. He has to find a lawyer to take his case for free/cheap. A woman with a maternal streak and bio-rights issues of her own takes the case. Perhaps he reminds her of a politician or philosopher long dead. Once she unlocks him, they have a brief affair, and as payment she collects her offspring with desired traits. Back at the corporate labs they discover he not only lived longer than all the rejects, but he lived longer than all the members of the near success group. Since he was never completely sequenced and his samples were discarded with forfeit of rights, the company is now hunting him. In the end, the lawyer claims first rights to his DNA sequence. Consider right of first refusal in contract. 

Senescence

This is a beautiful word referring to the propensity for the next generation cell copy to degrade just a little. It causes aging and eventually mutation and death. This is our built-in self-destruct mechanism as a species. What if someone constructed a DNA sequence that copied true—it would be the next best thing to immortality.

Selfie

The ultimate in self-gratification—a photo of yourself taken by you. Cloning is illegal, but if you find someone close enough, you can print-slice a very close image. This is ideal for organ transplants and more often: young blood. Getting regular infusions of blood and marrow from your younger self can help a person live twenty to forty years longer. Of course, they younger you might have something to say about his process...especially if there are coldblooded as you are.

Chimera

In a rare genetic condition, non-identical twins in the womb fuse into one person—a chimera. These two sets of DNA can compliment each other or fight. The dynamic system is fluid and ever changing.

Automata

Conway’s Game of Life evolves as DNA computers become a reality. Viruses and bacteria join the model in our systems. The human body solves colds and infections every year. Complex problems can be cracked by setting up a person to live the problem to its conclusion. Not all problems are solvable in 70 years and sometimes the experiment is disrupted by external factors. Touching other humans changes the equations and microorganisms are exchanged. What happens when someone “solves” a big problem? We have to bring the answer back to the lab.

Next Step

Ideas won’t stop gushing. Now I need to do the hard work and build this world a layer at a time. Instead, last night, I get a dream about a whole new fantasy magic system where sound is the source of creation. Tuning forks, fairies, and angels feature. One character explains to me that angels were formed when God said “Let there be light”—resonance effects and wave interference patterns, standing waves and superstrings. Wait... change the channel back one!

Cover Reveal: Approaching Oblivion

Whenever Renee sends me a new cover, it's like Christmas. Here is book four in the Jezebel series--Approaching Oblivion. Target release is mid November. With eight chapters to write, I haven't crafted the pitch yet, but here's a teaser:

The aliens who gave Earth so many gifts are termed "the Magi". Approaching Oblivion starts where Sanctuary left off, planning the trip to their final test. Such journeys take months or years, not minutes. Locating and finding how to aid the aborigines will take even longer. Their target is Oblivion B4, the fourth moon of the a gas giant similar to Jupiter. The moon has a maze of cracks on the surface where life flourishes, earning it the name Labyrinth. In addition to the technical preparation required for first contact, we follow Yuki as she replaces an arm, Yvette through a rape court martial, and Mercy through her high-risk pregnancy. Together the women come to the conclusion that the Magi are not as benevolent as they seem. Magi interference seems to repeatedly sabotage their efforts, and more Magi tech must be mastered before they can land. More than one maze needs to be threaded if they're going to succeed in their mission and return to Earth.