melissa embry's blog

Adventure classics -- The mysterious Miss Alcott

2012-03-09T08:29:00.000-06:00

Behind a Mask, or A Woman’s Power

by Louisa May Alcott, writing as A.M. Barnard

What nineteenth century reader of paperbound dime novels would have suspected the purported author of today’s Adventure classic, worldly A.M Barnard, as a writer of moral children’s fiction? None, Louisa May Alcott hoped.

Alcott became famous under her own name for that model of family values, Little Women. But before the tale of the four March sisters, she supported her family -- including her high-minded Transcendentalist father, Bronson Alcott -- with tales of the type she termed “blood and thunder.”

There are hints about these in Little Women -- references to writerly protagonist Jo March’s forays into newspaper serials, to family theatricals, and stories such as the “Phantom Hand” which paid for a new carpet for the poverty-stricken March family.

But the sensational stories existed only a scholarly conjecture until antiquarian book dealers Madeleine Sterne and Leona Rostenberg located correspondence from a publisher listing Alcott’s pseudonyms.

Although they announced their find in an issue of the Bibliographical Society of America in 1943, it took the feminist renaissance of the 1970’s to prompt reissuance of the stories themselves.

Alcott’s novella, Behind a Mask, opens with the arrival of Jean Muir, a new governess wispy enough to make Jane Eyre seem overfed. She feigns a sympathy-inducing faint in
the first chapter. But when the most astute of her observers murmurs, “scene first, very well done,” the demur Miss Muir lets her mask slip a moment to remark, “The last scene shall be still better.”

And it is -- but I won’t give away the rapidly twisting plot that will have readers rooting for the governess despite her shifty ways. The story, and others by or about Alcott are widely available now, occupying dozens of pages on
www.amazon.com/. (I got tired of clicking “next” after page twenty-five.)

Modern readers may find the biggest mystery in Alcott’s apparent repudiation of her suspense stories. They’re surprisingly good. (And actually make easier reading in the twenty-first century than the works of Alcott’s near-contemporary, H. Rider Haggard, discussed last Friday.)

As Ms. Sterne writes in her preface to Behind A Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott, “Her characterizations were natural and subtle and her gallery of femmes fatales forms a suite of flesh-and-blood portraits. Her own anger at an unjust world she transformed into the anger of her heroines, who made of it a powerful weapon with which to challenge fate.”

For more about Alcott -- and Ms. Sterne -- see Alcott’s official website,
www.louisamayalcott.org/.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics takes a break from the nineteenth century for Michael Crichton’s 1960’s medical thriller, The Andromeda Strain.)

Wordcraft -- Tough times, tough secrets

2012-03-07T08:29:00.001-06:00

I’m a Detective!

Elizabeth Marie Hutchinson -- When I Dream

by Regina Stone Matthews

It’s in the news all too often -- families next door or down the block outwardly living normal lives while inwardly torn apart by addictions, tough economic times, even violence. They’re part of our communities -- except they aren’t.

That’s why the latest book in Dallas area writer Regina Matthews’ middle grade series, I’m a Detective: Elizabeth Marie Hutchinson -- When I Dream, is about the “importance of communities.”

Previous books dealt with Elizabeth Marie’s discovery of the nature of friendship and the problems of bullying. But the older Elizabeth Marie gets, the bigger the problems she encounters. And, “now there’s middle school to deal with,” Ms. Matthews told an audience recently at the Woman’s Center in Richardson, Texas.

Or, as Elizabeth Marie says, “Middle school was weird enough, but not as weird as the house across the street. . . . the Hendrix family had lived in that house for as long as I could remember. And in all that time I had never been inside their house.”

Elizabeth Marie enlists her friends (including former bully Margaret Callahan) to solve the lunchroom thefts plaguing Wilson Middle School. But as the thefts escalate, she learns that to catch the thief, she’ll have to enter the house of the reclusive Hendrixes and uncover secrets it will take a whole neighborhood to solve.

The dilemma of the Hendrixes, Ms. Matthews said, is based on a family she babysat for when she was a teenager. And similar problems have only increased as neighbors become more isolated from each other, as children become more invested in protecting the family’s secrets against the adolescent push toward conformity and in the face of potential bullying.

“If one kid gets that,” Ms. Matthews said, “I will consider myself a successful writer.”

The Hendrixes aren’t the only characters based on real life, she told her audience. The original Elizabeth Marie characters were based on her own daughters, and first story in the series, Elizabeth Marie Hutchinson -- When I Dream, had its origins in tales she told them as children. Thinking “this would be something I could read to them and that they could read to themselves,” she wrote her first manuscript, put it in a filing cabinet, and lost track of it for years.

After uncovering it following her family’s move to Dallas, she researched self-publishing avenues but found the costs of the do-it-yourself method beyond her means. In 2008, she found her present publisher, print-on-demand PublishAmerica, which accepted her unsolicited manuscript, “and I was hooked,” she said.

She is currently at work on an adult book of memoir and essays, Anyone Seen My Rose-Colored Glasses.

But will there be more Elizabeth Marie books? Maybe, she admitted. After all, her middle school heroine is almost old enough to be interested in boys. . . .

(Print and Kindle versions of all the Elizabeth Marie Hutchinson books are available through www.amazon.com/.)

Totally Texas -- Spring break destination: Dallas

2012-03-05T08:57:00.001-06:00

To prepare you for spring break -- March 12-16 for many North Texas school districts -- I’ve gathered get away suggestions easy on family budgets, but that won’t leave children at loss when asked how they spent their break.

I’ve planned these around the Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s routes for maximum penny-pinching. The few incidents of violence on DART may have made you wary of bringing your children on board, although I personally have ridden DART trains and buses for more than a quarter-century without seeing a single violent episode.

But if you want to drive, especially if pressed for time, there’s parking at or adjacent to the Dallas Museum of Art, the Crow Collection of Asian Art, and the Nasher Sculpture Center. Lots are also adjacent to the Dallas World Aquarium and the Sixth Floor Museum. The museum and aquarium parking lots take either cash or credit/debit cards. I haven’t parked at the Sixth Floor, but it’s only a few blocks from the aquarium, if you want to see both on one parking fee.

All DART train lines feed into downtown Dallas. (See www.DART.org for routes, schedules and ticket prices.) I’ll start from the east end of downtown and list attractions along the tracks.

First stop downtown is the Plaza of the Americas, at the Pearl Street DART station. Chill at the indoor ice skating rink, or just watch the skaters. As in the rest of downtown Dallas, there are plenty of fast, reasonably-priced restaurants open weekdays, catering to office workers.

Walk a few blocks north from either the Pearl Street station or the next stop on the route, St. Paul Street station, to reach the Crow Museum of Asian Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Dallas Museum of Art. See their sites, www.crowcollection.org/, www.nashersculpturecenter.org/, and www.dallasmuseumofart.org/ for exhibits and family-friendly events.

Back on the DART track west through downtown, you’ll find Thanks-giving Square about a block from the Akard Street station. Eating places abound in nearby office buildings, or bring a picnic lunch and enjoy the tranquility of the enclosed square and its spiral tower.

The next stop after Akard Street finds you in the West End. (Yes, parents, there are public restrooms in the nearby West End Transit Center.) Dallas’s West End is home to both the Dallas World Aquarium at 1501 N. Griffin Street (about a block from the train stop), and the Sixth Floor Museum, 411 Elm Street, in the former Texas School Book Depository (about four blocks from the West End station).

The aquarium will probably be your most expensive stop, but it’s a place to spend a day. There are restaurants and a snack bar, or eat at nearby sandwich shops to keep costs down. See www.dwazoo.com for the aquarium, and www.jfk.org for Sixth Floor Museum. (Please note that some Sixth Floor Exhibits may be emotionally demanding for young children.)

Outside the Sixth Floor Museum is Dealey Plaza. Walk a couple of blocks to “Old Red,” the nineteenth-century county courthouse turned museum, and east to the John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza with its “open tomb” designed by architect Philip Johnson.
Continue on DART to transfer to the Trinity Railroad Express (TRE) to Fort Worth (more about that next week) or stay on red line trains to the Dallas Zoo, 650 R.L. Thornton Expressway. For zoo information, including registration for spring break camps, see www.dallaszoo.com/. The sight of lions lounging outside the floor to ceiling restaurant windows in the zoo’s Giants of the Savannah exhibit is awe inspiring. My grandsons love the bug house and the playground at the Lacerte Family Children’s Zoo near the entrance, although I doubt the water feature will be open this early.

There’s more than I can list in a single post. For additional information, revisit posts for August 15, 2011, (Dallas World Aquarium); November 14, 2011, (Sixth Floor Museum); November 21, 2011, (Thanks-giving Square); and January 2, 2012, (Nasher Sculpture Center and Dallas Museum of Art).

(Next Monday -- Totally Texas visits Fort Worth for more spring break adventures.)

Adventure classics -- She: love, grief and power

2012-03-02T09:02:00.002-06:00

She

by H. Rider Haggard

This March, Adventure classics enters the dangerous territory of the suspense, or thriller, novel. Whether these works include elements of mystery, romance, or science fiction, their defining characteristic is sheer edge-of-the seat storytelling. And H. Rider Haggard’s breakout novel She grandmothered many such tales.

The story appeared as a serial in The Graphic magazine in 1886-1887. (The publisher expected to illustrate the story, “although possibly the lack of costume may prevent it,” according to a letter quoted in D.S. Higgins’s biography, Rider Haggard.)

It was a best-seller upon release and has never been out of print since. Taking into account its numerous movie adaptations, spin-offs and parodies, it’s one of the most-referenced literary works in the English language.

(American actress Betty Blythe, whose picture illustrates this post, starred in the last of at least six silent movie versions in 1925. Blythe’s film was shot in mid-winter in an unheated Zeppelin shed near Berlin and Higgins notes the lightly-clad heroine suffered a great deal from the cold.)

To summarize the story, She recounts the adventures of reclusive English scholar Horace Holly and his ward, Leo Vincey. Following the directions in an old manuscript, Holly and Vincey discover a lost kingdom in East Africa ruled by a strange and beautiful queen known by her followers only as She-who-must-be-obeyed. Or, briefly, She, who’s languished in mourning for more than two thousand years awaiting the reincarnation of her dead lover. A lover who, not so coincidentally, is Vincey’s many times great-grandfather.

A never entirely explained process has not only kept She alive for millennia, but made her irresistibly beautiful, as both Holly and Vincey learn, to their grief.

Meanwhile, back in nineteenth century England, Queen Victoria had been in virtual seclusion for more than twenty years following the death of her beloved husband, Albert. Victoria, of course, was not nearly as old or beautiful as Haggard’s heroine. Still, it’s hard to imagine the story of a reclusive, aged, grieving queen being written in any other era than Victorian England.

And despite the eponymous “Victorian” attitudes of rigid sexual morality and limitations on women’s rights, it was impossible not to notice that the greatest empire in the world was headed by a woman. Whether propelled by Victoria or She, before the end of Haggard’s century, powerful women had become a topic hot enough to keep readers and psychoanalysts busy for years to come.

(In case anybody missed the connection to Victoria, Holly reports that while She recounted the story of her sorrowful love to him, “she gave a little sob, and I saw that after all she was only a woman, although she might be a very old one.”)

Victoria’s grief could not bring back Prince Albert. Neither could She’s long vigil assure her happiness with Vincey. In the end, natural processes reasserted themselves and She suffered a terrible end. And the men who loved her marked forever.

Do I even need to say She, in both novel and movie versions, is widely available at www.amazon.com/?

(Next Friday: Even spinsterish Louisa May Alcott could pen fire-breathing heroines, at least under cover of a pseudonym, as Adventure classics demonstrates with a look at her novella of romance, treachery and suspense, Behind a Mask.)

Wordcraft -- Reading groups for writers

2012-02-29T08:49:00.001-06:00

About a year after seeking the support of writing groups, I realized I needed reading group support as well. I started the search at the bookstore in my neighborhood, and after a few blank looks and perusal of fliers posted in obscure locations, found the Foreign Authors Bookgroup. It’s changed locations at least three times since, as bookstores closed or decided they didn’t have space for us, but I keep going.

The core group has remained surprisingly stable, led, at least since my entry in late 2006, by Julia Carpenter. (See her blog, The Diligent Dilettante, http://the-diligent-dilettante.blogspot.com/, for examples of her many talents.) For the last several months, we’ve met at a restaurant, La Madeleine at 3906 Lemmon Avenue in Dallas’s Oak Lawn neighborhood.

Because several of us eat supper there, the restaurant is willing to let the group use a private room from 6:30 to 8 the first Tuesday of each month. However, you don’t have to eat there to join the book group. You only have to love reading and talking about reading.

The group reads eleven books annually. (The September meeting is a “nomination night” to present candidates for the next year’s reading.)

As the name suggests, the group reads books -- usually but not exclusively fiction -- by non-U.S. authors, or at least about non-U.S. cultures. This gives us latitude to consider works as varied as Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s The Voice of Hope, about Burma’s struggle for democracy; and Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol’s classic, Dead Souls.

We like variety, of cultures and genres, so not all the reading is heavy. February’s selection was Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, about the trials of working for Henry VIII during the Boleyn days. And our summer reading will include The Keeper of Lost Causes by best-selling Danish thriller author Jussi Alder-Olsen.For more information, please contact us at foreignauthorsbookgroup@gmail.com/

(Not sure foreign authors are your cup of chai? I found a wide array of book clubs at www.meetup.com/. Add your city and search words “book clubs” or “reading groups” to find one right for you.)

Although the book is not particularly oriented toward writers, Julia shared a new venue for writers -- The Dallas Writers Journal, www.dallaswritersjournal.com/.

Also -- Goldminds Press is seeking western, historical fiction, military fiction and memoirs. Its editor, Steven Anderson Law will speak at the Houston Writers Guild conference April 13-14. See his site, www.stevenlaw.com or www.houstonwritersguild.org for information. I mentioned Goldminds previously in this blog’s July 27, 2011, post, “Texas Tales at A Real Bookstore.”

Still in western mode, another small publisher, Moonlight Mesa Associates, opens its 2012 short story contest March 1. See www.moonlightmesaassociates.com/ for details. This year’s special requirement -- an Arizona setting.

Totally Texas -- A weekend of dueling powwows

2012-02-27T08:52:00.001-06:00

I’m listening to Beyond Bows and Arrows on the radio (KNON 89.3 FM, 6-8 p.m. Sunday) while writing, and the drums renew my strength after a day of dealing with the aftermath of computer hackers. I expected to write only about the Morning Star Parents benefit powwow at Gainesville High School this Saturday, March 3. But the BB&A deejays announced “dueling powwows” for the weekend at Gainesville and the University of Texas at Arlington campus.

First the Gainesville powwow, since that’s where the Dallas Indian United Methodist Church will work the concession stand.

Hey, I’m not just pushing Gainesville because I’m a Methodist. It’s also where the Pahcheka Comanche family makes the fry bread. (See the May 11, 2011 blog, “Quanah Parker’s descendent drops in.” ) Don’t let them hear you compare fry bread to sopapillas, although they serve honey with this stick-to-your-ribs specialty for kids and those with a sweet tooth. Indian tacos and other snacks as well. And say hello to Sandra Blackbear Ramirez, who’ll probably be at the cash register, from the Comanche’s “sister tribe,” the Kiowas.

Besides, Gainesville is conveniently on the way to the Choctaw Casino in Durant, Oklahoma, so you can stop by on your way to the casino or back. See Google or other mapping software for directions to the high school at 2201 S. I-35. The crew at BB&A discussed the difficulties of getting to the high school north on I-35 from Dallas while I wrote. Don’t lose heart at the U-turn and long drive on the frontage road. The last time I was there, I wasn’t the only one who thought we were driving halfway back to Dallas before finding the high school.

Parking and admission to the dancing are free, but bring money for food, crafts, and jewelry. The Gainesville contest powwow benefits scholarships for Native American students. Gourd dancing opens at noon with gourd dancing, with the grand entry at 2
p.m. Dancing continues until the 10 p.m. announcement of winners. The drum group is from Texas’ only reservation tribe, the Alabama Coshattas in Livingston. See www.gainesvilleregister.com for more detailed schedule and list of staff members.

“Like” the Dallas Indian United Methodist Church’s Facebook page, as well, to stay current on local Native American cultural activities.

Also on Saturday, the Native American Student Association at UTA holds its 17^th annual benefit powwow from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. in the Bluebonnet Ballroom of the University Center, 300 W. First Street, Arlington. This powwow also benefits Native American scholarships.

Gourd dancing is from 10 a.m. - noon, “just for fun” dancing from 1 -5 p.m., with grand entry and contest dances at 6 p.m. Albert Old Crow, from Beyond Bows and Arrows, emcees. See “utanativeamericanstudents” on Facebook, and http://www.uta.edu/studentorgs/nasa_aises/ for details.

(The last time I was at the Gainesville powwow, I was too busy working the concession stand to take pictures, so this post’s photo is from last fall’s Traders Village powwow in Grand Prairie.)

Adventure classics -- Rule of the lame tiger

2012-02-24T08:47:00.000-06:00

The Jungle Book

by Rudyard Kipling

Who wouldn’t have qualms about including a work by that apostle of imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, in a collection of classic adventure stories? Even admirers have been embarrassed by Kipling’s beliefs, as David Gilmour describes in his biography, The Long Recessional.

But when writing about books that have stood the test of time, I couldn’t ignore The Jungle Book. It’s a cultural staple and, among Americans at least, greatly loved in its Disney animated movie incarnation.

(Although I suspect Kipling would have hated the Disney version, whose jazz sequences are my favorite parts. He was no fan of things American in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- his difficult marriage to American Caroline Balestier.)

I was surprised, as often on a re-reading, to find the Mowgli stories comprised less than half of the first Jungle Book. The remainder is filled with unrelated stories, including one bizarre insertion about Arctic seals, and with the exception of “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” all deservedly forgotten now. (Not that writing lesser stories is a reflection on Kipling’s ability. Any writer so prolific is entitled to off days.)

However, upon considering the allegories Kipling deliberately inserted, I was still more surprised by the implications of his insistence on the heroism of the wolves as “free people” and the role of the lame but villainous tiger, Shere Khan.

“Free people” in India, a country then ruled by a foreign power? Smaller animals threatened by a huge single one? Could Kipling have channeled the wolves as
representatives of Indians and Shere Khan as the British Empire?

No doubt he’d have denied it. But the decade of the 1890’s that gave birth to the Jungle Books also saw the publication of his most famous poem, “Recessional.” The title is at first sight an odd one for a celebration of Queen Victoria’s reign. But it makes sense, in the words of biographer Gilmour, from a writer whose life encompassed the decline, nearly to its end, of the British Empire.

It seems unlikely Kipling could fail to recognize Britain’s fatal flaw, at least from the standpoint of imperial domination. A country propounding rule by representatives chosen by the ruled -- what colonial people could fail to see the conflict between the Empire’s talk and its walk? No wonder the tiger was lame from birth.

(The Jungle Book is in the public domain, which allows me to adapt an illustration from an early edition for this blog. The books and movie discussed here, including Gilmour’s biography, is available at www.amazon.com/.)

(Next Friday Adventure classics starts a new month of classic thrillers with another look at aspects of the British Empire, H. Rider Haggard’s “imperial” -- his adjective, not mine -- She.)

Wordcraft -- Carrying the torch for space opera

2012-02-22T08:29:00.001-06:00

I confess -- I’m an opera fan. Sure, the music is to die for, but there’s all the other stuff to love -- romance and riches, a sword fight or three, murder and revenge. And wonderful as opera’s drama is on Planet Earth, it’s even better in outer space!

So on a rainy day during the ConDFW convention last weekend, I drew sustenance from the panel discussion “Soaring Ships and Swashbuckling Sentients: Trends in Space Opera.”

The questions moderator William Ledbetter posed to panelists Ethan Nahte, Mark Finn and Lee Martindale were, did space opera disappear in the last few years? And can it make a comeback? The answer to the last, it seemed, is that space opera is poised for a comeback with the release of next month’s movie about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ interplanetary hero, John Carter of Mars.

But to say the swashbuckling-in-space genre has disappeared is an overstatement. “For the last fifteen or twenty years,” Finn said, “(space opera) hid in other genres. I think there’s a lot of space opera in steampunk. . .and in military science fiction.”

But exactly what is space opera, an audience member asked. Isn’t all action-oriented science fiction space opera? Does it always require swords?

According to Martindale, “if you don’t use nine hundred pages explaining it, it’s space opera. If you’re more interested in story and plot than science, it’s space opera.”

A helping of romance -- in the original sense of the term -- is also essential, Finn insisted. “There should be an emotional throughline in the story.” A throughline he hopes will hold good in the upcoming John Carter movie.

“It can’t be worse than Traci Lords’ version,” Nahte said, referring to the 2009 direct to video film featuring the former porn star as Carter’s Martian love interest.

Finn admitted bad movies have hurt the genre’s credibility. Last year’s Conan movie, for instance, “took a piece of my soul.. . .That said, I’m looking forward to the new movie. (It) had me at the thirty-five foot jump” in the trailers.

(Burroughs’ story called for Carter to retain the muscles strengthened by Earth’s higher gravitation. And no, the original book in the Carter series, A Princess of Mars, didn’t spend a single page explaining how to transport a nineteenth century Civil War hero to another planet.)

But even if the new movie doesn’t live up to his expectations, Finn raised a rallying cry for what he termed the growing power of secret (and not so secret) space opera fans.

“We don’t have to watch anything substandard and bad. It’s okay, if a bad science fiction movie comes out, to say, it’s bad and I won’t support it. . . There’s still a lot of good novels that haven’t been made into movies yet. We have to support the good stuff.”

(For more about the panelists, see http://marktheageinghipster.blogspot.com/, for Mark Finn; www.williamledbetter.com/; and www.HarpHaven.net/ , for Lee Martindale. Ethan Nahte’s latest story, “Ripping Jack,” appears in Pulp! Winter/Spring 2012, available at http://www.amazon.com/.)

And for more on the subject of Mars, see National Space Society of North Texas’ poetry contest about Mars, The Next Frontier: Exploration and Settlement of Space. Complete information is at www.nssofnt.org/activities/poetry-contest-2/poetry-contest-2012/. Entries must be received by July 31. The society will announce winners at September’s FenCon convention in Dallas.

FenCon also sponsors its own short story contest and is accepting members for its annual writing workshop. See www.fencon.org/ for details.

Totally Texas -- Rains bring spring flowers

2012-02-20T08:42:00.002-06:00

I write this on a day of continuous rain, trying to cheer myself with the reminder: in Texas, winter rains bring spring flowers. Substantial rain combined with this season’s mild weather could bring us a bumper crop of spring blooms and wildflowers. To help you with spring chores and show you where to enjoy the beauty of flowers like the cherry blossoms now gracing the Dallas Arboretum, today’s blog is dedicated to spring flowers in North Texas.

(Remember, flowers don’t always bloom on schedule. For events involving outdoor flowers, contact the websites to verify best bloom times.)

On-going -- Texas Discovery Gardens releases newly emerged butterflies daily at noon (because flowers need butterflies)! Entry to butterfly house included in admission, $8 for adults, $4 for children 3-11. At Fair Park, 3601 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Dallas, 75201. See www.TexasDiscoveryGardens.org/

Mid-February - March --Mrs. Lee’s Daffodil Garden in East Texas, Highway 271 North, south of Gladewater. Open 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. daily, weather permitting. Free. For bloom times and road conditions, see www.daffodilgarden.com

February 25 -- Calloway’s Nurseries’ Gardenfest program of speakers and workshops, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. at its Arlington South, Flower Mound, Hurst and North Plano stores. Topics include bulbs, roses, color in the garden and more. Free. See www.calloways.com/gardenfest-calloways for complete schedule.

February 25 -- North Haven Gardens, 7700 Northaven Road in Dallas holds classes on winter-planted vegetables, drought-hardy gardening and roses as edible herbs. Free. See http://nhg.com/Events.htm for details.

February 25 -- Texas Discovery Gardens offers a new class on butterfly biology, 10 a.m. - noon. Cost: $15; $10 for TDG members. Register at www.TexasDiscoveryGardens.org/

March 3 -- Texas Discovery Gardens’ tour of butterfly house (repeats on first Saturdays); 11 a.m. through 5 p.m. (last ticket sold at 4:45 p.m.). Included with admission price. See www.TexasDiscoveryGardens.org/

March 3-April 8 -- Fort Worth Botanic Garden, 3200 Botanic Garden Blvd., joins the butterfly fun with Butterflies in the Garden in its Conservatory, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. Tickets $10 for ages 13 and over, $6 for children. See http://fwbg.org/ for details and discounts.

March 3-April 8 -- Dallas Blooms, at Dallas Arboretum, 8617 Garland Road, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. daily. See www.dallasarboretum.org for pricing and special events during the festival MSN called one of the top places in the world to see spring flowers.

March 11 -- Japanese cherry-blossom viewing (hanami) -- Dallas Arboretum, including music and family activities. (Although the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens does not have a festival coinciding with cherry-blossoming, it updates bloom times on its Facebook page. See link at http://fwbg.org/)

March 23-25, March 30-31 & April 1 & 6-8 -- Palestine Dogwood Trails Celebration. Festival in downtown Palestine March 24, 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. Complete calendar available at www.palestinechamber.org/

March 23-April 8 -- Tyler Azalea and Spring Flower Trail. Azalea Trails Arts & Crafts Fair March 24-25; Saturday (24^th) 9 a.m. -6 p.m.; Sunday (25^th) 11 a.m. - 5 p.m. For complete calendar of events, see www.tylerazaleatrail.com/

April 1-30 -- Ennis Bluebonnet Trails. Bluebonnet Trails Festival April 21-22, 9 a.m. -5 p.m. See www.visitennis.org/

Adventure classics -- A little horse to love

2012-02-17T08:51:00.002-06:00

My Friend Flicka

By Mary O’Hara

I knew Mary O’Hara (born Mary O’Hara Alsop) worked for the movies. But on re-reading her classic story about a boy and his horse, My Friend Flicka, the cinematic quality still amazed me. It opens, “High up on the long hill they called the Saddle Back, behind the ranch and the county road, the boy sat his horse, facing east, his eyes dazzled by the rising sun.”

What I hadn’t known until researching this blog was that the novel’s setting was the real Remount Ranch near Laramie, Wyoming, where O’Hara and her second husband, Swedish horseman Helge Sture-Vasa, ran a sheep ranch and other businesses during the 1920’s and ’30’s. I’d marveled at her detailed descriptions of the ranch’s topography -- now I know where they came from. If I ever get back to Wyoming, I’ve got to see it. The 3,800-acre ranch is privately-owned, but listed as a national landmark, according to www.remountranch.com/history.html/.

Although the site states the ranch’s name came from its use as a source of horses for the U.S. Cavalry during the 1930’s, O’Hara wrote in her autobiography, Flicka’s Friend, that Sture-Vasa named it because of his work for cavalry remounts during World War I.

(The U.S. military used cavalry into the Second World War. Even pictures of the infantry division in which my father served in the 1930’s show mounted officers and mule-drawn artillery and supply wagons.)

The hardships O’Hara and her husband faced as sheep and horse ranchers mirror those depicted in My Friend Flicka. She and Sture-Vasa met in Hollywood, where she had
made a career as a continuity writer following the failure of her first marriage, to distant cousin Kent Parrot.

Wyoming seemed like an escape from the unreality of the motion picture business. But it took her Hollywood training to dig Remount Ranch out of the economic quagmire of the Great Depression.

First published in a short story version, “My Friend Flicka” grew into a novel at the urging of Bertram Lippincott of the Lippincott publishing firm. “I liked your little story,” O’Hara relates Lippincott saying, “because it’s s-s-so sentimental.”

It was, but a country longing for something to feel good about as the Great Depression slipped into world war turned it into a bestseller. A movie followed, starring the young British actor Roddy McDowall as Ken McLaughlin, and shot in the Technicolor O’Hara’s lush descriptions demanded. The horse-opera hungry decade of the 1950’s even spawned a TV series, which provided the picture for this post.

O’Hara wrote two sequels -- Thunderhead and Green Grass of Wyoming, also successful. But there was no happy ending for her. After a quarter century of marriage, she divorced Sture-Vasa, at least in part because of his admitted infidelities. He remarried; O’Hara did not. After his death, a friend sent her his obituary. It mentioned him as a famous horseman.

(O’Hara’s books, including her autobiography, are available at www.amazon.com/

(Note to readers looking for a source of ribbon cane syrup in Dallas -- I don't know of a source, but one of the local farmers' markets may have it.)

Wordcraft -- Writer's Garret: readings & a new home

2012-02-15T08:34:00.001-06:00

Is it possible to find “evidences of grace in a mental hospital ward?” Dallas writer Tom McClellan asked the crowd last weekend at the Writer’s Garret.

His own answer was yes, in abundance. The Garret paired readings from his published essays with a sweet and saucy side of memoir from UNT professor Bonnie Friedman for the first public reading at its new home in the Lucky Dog (formerly Paperbacks Plus) bookstore at 10809 Garland Road in Dallas.

McClellan, a Dallas teacher and writer, chose two essays from his book, Reflections from Mirror City. His writings, described as “Thomas Merton interpreted by Hunter S. Thompson,” by Washington Spectator editor Lou Debose, have appeared in publications as diverse as D Magazine, The Texas Observer, and Christian Century.

After a friendly tussle with Friedman over who would read first, McClellan allowed his wife Carolyn to read for him because of his emphysema. His selections dealt with the ironies of finding grace in the midst of illness, death, and disaster; McClellan spoke with both frankness and humor about his personal struggles against mental illness.

At the end, he took the lectern for the final words himself, concluding an essay on the death of a friend met in a psychiatric ward: “Say these things so your hope will grow, your charity increase.” (For more about McClellan and his writing, see http://reflectionsfrommirrorcity.wordpress.com/.)

The second writer, Bonnie Friedman, comes to Texas by way of the Bronx. Her first book, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life, was a Village Voice bestseller. Now an assistant professor in the University of North Texas’ creative writing program, she chose excerpts from a work in progress for the audience.

Despite the differences in background between Friedman and McClellan, their writings harmonized on the theme of grace: hers included a minutely-observed description of her elderly mother, in her words, -- a “sheitel jew” with the mien of a Russian aristocrat. (And enough chutzpah to outface a revolution.)

“At the age of eighty-five,” Friedman began her reading, “my mother lost her job and started running.”

Not running away from anything, of course. Instead, running “for her health” -- a regimen of pre-dawn shuffling up and down the halls of her apartment house that first entangled her and her elderly husband in a lawsuit and ended by charming her persecutor.

A listener, laughingly aghast at Friedman’s vivid descriptions, asked what her mother thought about being the subject of her writing.

Her mother, she assured the audience, has given her permission to write anything she pleases (although without reading the words herself). “I hope she would like it,”
Friedman said. She travels back to New York frequently to keep in touch with her parents (and perhaps to gather more material). For more about Friedman’s works, see
http://www.bonniefriedman.com/.

The Garret will sponsor its next public readings in April. For information about the Garret and its programs, see www.writersgarret.org/. Some online information still references a previous address, but please note the current address is 10809 Garland Road, in Dallas.

Totally Texas -- Sci fi, oh my, at ConDFW XI

2012-02-13T06:16:00.003-06:00

ConDFW XI

Crowne Plaza Suites, Dallas-Park Central

7800 Alpha Road

So you exercised your will power (see "Perserverance, iron will & Wodehouse," January 11) and cleaned out your bookshelves. And now books are stacked knee-deep all over your living room, but you’re looking at the vacant shelves and thinking -- I need more books!

If you’re also a science fiction fan, get to the book swap at this weekend’s ConDFW. Swap or buy -- proceeds benefit the charities DonorsChoose (www.DonorsChoose.org/) and Half Price Books: Half Pint Library.

The con’s at the Crowne Plaza Suits on Alpha Road in Dallas this Friday through Sunday, February 17-19. In honor of the glitch in the Mayan calendar some believe predicts the end of the world in 2012, there will be parties! See www.condfw.org/ for details.

While waiting for the apocalypse, you can meet writing guest of honor Cherie Priest, whose steampunk novel Boneshaker won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel; artist guest of honor William Stout, whose work inspired Jurassic Park; and several Texas authors including A. Lee Martinez, who clowned for the picture with this post at a previous convention. (Martinez’s books include horror, science fiction and fantasy with an underlying theme of humor.)

It’s a literary con, so there will also be readings, panel discussions and workshops on a variety of subjects (making leather masks, anyone?), gaming, and book and art sales. Stay late Saturday night for the costume parade. The first time I went to the Con, the costume highlight was the belly-dancing Redheads of the Apocalypse. The last time I saw the Redheads, they had turned from dancing to writing, but I still expect this year’s parade may move this family-friendly event into the PG-13 category.

Walk-in memberships for walk-ins are available at the door, single day or all three, adults and children. If you’re an adult student, bring your ID or a copy for a discount.

Abandoned Towers promised to run my story “The Gates of Shaizar” -- one of these days. In the meantime, the print/online magazine is offering a writing contest to celebrate its relaunch. The concept of “abandoned towers” must appear in the short story, poem or flash fiction writers submit. See http://abandonedtowers.com/.

Adventure classics -- Spinning fool's gold into fame

2012-02-10T08:50:00.000-06:00

The Call of the Wild

by Jack London

In November 1902, 26-year-old Jack London returned to the United States from England with the manuscript of his first book in his pocket, and not much else. He was glad to accept his publisher’s advance for his next several books -- as long, he said, as he wasn’t expected to write about Alaska. He’d had enough of the far north during the gold rush of the late 1890’s. All he managed to find was a load of iron pyrites, glittering rocks better know as fool’s gold.

“I want to get away from the Klondike,” London wrote, indicating he wanted “to attempt a larger and more generally interesting field.”

Within a month, however, he was writing a story whose protagonist, a dog named Buck, reverts from a paragon of civility to primitive denizen of the wild. The story would become his famous book, The Call of the Wild. And as millions of readers know, it was set in Alaska.

“For three weeks,” biographer Alex Kershaw reports in Jack London: A Life, “(he) did nothing but follow Buck through the white silence, scratching out word after word in thick pencil. . . For once he had not paused to lecture his readers. . .but had concentrated instead on telling a story.”

In it, the half-St. Bernard Buck, who “had lived the life of a sated aristocrat” in his home in California, is stolen and sold for $300 as a sled dog during the gold rush. (The inflation calculator at http://www.westegg.com/ estimates Buck’s price was the equivalent of more than $7,000 currently.)

But high value doesn’t insure good treatment, and Buck soon finds himself in a struggle for survival.

George Platt Brett, Sr., head of McMillan Publishing, asked London to remove some
profanity, anticipating a school-age audience. And although assuring London of his liking for the story, he feared “it is too true to nature and too good work to be really popular with the sentimentalist public.”

He could not have been more wrong. Instantly hailed as a classic, the novella has since sold millions of copies and inspired numerous filmed versions. The picture illustrating this post comes from the earliest Call of the Wild movie in 1935. It starred Clark Gable and Loretta Young, whose on-screen love affair overshadows the dog’s story. (And stimulated the economy of the Pacific Northwest where it was filmed, according to
http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/ )

Years after publication of The Call of the Wild, London, in debt as usual, would return to the theme of Buck’s transformation but in reverse, to write a companion book, White Fang. London himself, after all, had returned from Alaska to his home state of “sun-kissed” California, to fame, fortune and civilization.

(Next Friday -- in a February of animal adventures, Adventure classics looks at Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka.)

Wordcraft -- Reading and the art of memory

2012-02-08T08:55:00.001-06:00

When I started hanging around with writers, they asked, what are you reading? It’s a truism of writers that they can’t write without having read. But the question tongue-tied me. I read, but what had I read?

At the FenCon workshop in Dallas last fall, Pyr editor Lou Anders insisted that members read widely in their genre. And at Austin’s ArmadilloCon a couple of years earlier, guest writer Scott Lynch attributed the “overnight success” of his fantasy The Lies of Locke Lamora, to an intense program of study he undertook through reading in his genre.

When I began writing the “Adventure classics” posts that appear on Fridays in this blog, I expected to get by with books I’d already read. It proved impossible to write intelligently about a book read years, even decades earlier, so I re-read. And found, to my surprise, that the books often differed markedly from my remembrance of them.

Lynch of Locke Lamora fame claimed to have increased his reading from about thirty books a year to more than a hundred. But if my faulty memory is any indication, how can more reading help? Won’t we just forget even more?

In his Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, journalist Joshua Foer quotes sixteenth century essayist Michel de Montaigne on the problem of reading and retention.

“I leaf through books, I do not study them,” Montaigne wrote. “What I retain of them is . . . only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued. . . .”

Montaigne tried to remedy his memory dilemma by writing summaries in the back of his books.

I wrote lists. But since reading Foer’s book, I’m thinking of building a memory palace instead. It’s an idea also touched on in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, her Man Booker Prize-winning novel about Henry VIII’s adviser, the uber-organized Thomas Cromwell. (Although in the end Cromwell misplaced his head.)

Based on a first-century Latin textbook entitled Rhetorica ad Herennium, a memory palace is simply a visualized space to place memories in. Or rather, to place images -- the more bizarre the better -- that call to mind what a person actually wants to remember.

To show you how it’s done, Foer records the imagery he used to memorize a card sequence at a U.S. Memory competition. “Dom DeLuise, celebrity fat man (and five of clubs), has been implicated in the following unseemly acts in my mind’s eye: He has hocked a fat globule of spittle (nine of clubs) on Albert Einstein’s thick white mane (three of diamonds) and delivered a devastating karate kick (five of spades) to the groin of Pope Benedict XVI (six of diamonds.)”

Foer got a U.S. Memory Championship and a book out of his techniques. I’m already having fun. Maybe I can throw away my list of books. Or maybe not.

(For more about Joshua Foer and Moonwalking with Einstein, see http://joshuafoer.com/. Or if you want to test your memory against the champions, see www.worldmemorychampionship.com/.)

Totally Texas -- Art Jam on FM 279

2012-02-06T08:43:00.000-06:00

FM 279

Ben Wheeler to Edom

What will your sweetheart say if you give her a deadly weapon for Valentine’s Day? “Thanks” -- if it’s a handmade blade from Harrison & Son Knifesmith. Just one of nearly a dozen shops open for the Second Saturday Art Jam running from Ben Wheeler to Edom this Saturday, February 11.

Shops are open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the small towns only a few miles apart on FM 279 in East Texas. From Dallas or further west, you can reach FM 279 by taking I-20 east and exiting at either Highway 64 or Highway 19 through Canton. (Highway 19 intersects 64.) A few miles’ drive east on Highway 64 takes you to the fork toward FM 279.

As mentioned in last Monday’s post, you’re nearly there when you see the billboard for Edom’s Blueberry Hill Farms -- but that’s a stop for the summer.

If you’re looking for a more conventional gift than a knife for your valentine or yourself, you can choose from the likes of handmade chocolates from Blue Moon Gardens (a few miles east of Edom), jewelry from Zeke & Marty’s, Studio Metal Jewelry or Ken Carpenter Jewelry. Or a boutique item from WhimZee for her, Edom Ranch Art for him. (Or vice versa.)

Too many choices? Ponder them over pie from Edom Bakery & Grill or The Shed Café, a burger at Moore’s Store in Edom, or panini and a glass of wine at The Forge in Ben Wheeler. Or treat everyone to Blue Bell ice cream cones while drooling over (but not on, please) the vintage racing motorcycles at Scoot’s ’n Scoops in Ben Wheeler.

Special events for Saturday include music by Loretta Callens and the Edom All Star Band on the Edom Jam Stage during the day, and more live music at The Forge and Moore’s Store in the evening. Some shops and art galleries feature demonstrations during the day, including weaving, copper smithing, and raku pottery. Parking and admission are free. No matter which side of the road you park on, FM 279 is easy to cross.

And there’s more, lots more. For a complete list of events and times, see http://279artisanstrail.com/.

Although Saturday is the official event date, most shops and galleries are open this time of year Thursday through Sunday. Check individual listings at the 279 Artisans Trail site for specifics, special hours, or to make appointments.

Adventure classics -- Parlez-vous lonesome cowboy?

2012-02-03T08:49:00.000-06:00

Smoky the Cowhorse

by Will James

The best Will James story may be the one he never wrote -- the true story of how a French-speaking Canadian teenager became the author of a classic of the American West -- Smoky the Cowhorse.

I hoped to use some of his charming drawings to illustrate this post. But while checking the copyright dates for Smoky as well as James’s purported autobiography, Lone Cowboy, I had a bittersweet moment of the kind he might have used in his books, if he’d dared. The rights were renewed by his brother, Auguste Dufault -- member of the Canadian family James refused to acknowledge during his lifetime.

(William Gardner Bell, author of Will James: The Life and Works of a Lone Cowboy, discusses the copyright issue in detail in an article in Corral Dust magazine, Vol. XV, available at www.potomac-coral.org/.)

On its face, James’s life is classic Americana -- a boy named Ernest Dufault runs away from home and builds a new life for himself, including a renaming and a new language. After a prison term for the quintessentially Old West crime of cattle rustling, he reinvents himself again, becoming an award-winning author. (Smoky received the Newbery Medal for children’s literature in 1927).

James might have declared himself even after publication of the book, a Black Beauty-like, or War Horse-like, saga of a horse’s life turned upside down by human interference and greed. (Although even there, he had started to build his own trap with the preface comment, “My life, from the time I first squinted at daylight has been with horses.”)

But by the time of Lone Cowboy in 1930, he had dug himself too deeply into his persona to find an honorable way out. Lone Cowboy became a bestselling Book-of-the-Month Club selection, but not even his wife Alice knew the truth of his origins.

Until his father’s death in 1926, he still wrote to his Canadian family in French, notes Anthony Amaral in the biography, Will James, The Last Cowboy Legend. Afterward, he wrote only to his brother Auguste, and only in English, which his widowed mother could not read.

And in spite of being at the peak of his career following Lone Cowboy, “inside he was drowning in dread of being ‘found out,’” Amaral writes. “Alcohol became his anesthetic. . . And every time he drew a sober breath, the misery returned and drove him back to the bottle.”

At last, estranged from his wife and family, his writing deteriorating, he died September 3, 1942, at the age of fifty from complications of alcoholism. Alice heard the news of his death from a radio announcement. Later that month, while his horses grazed, his ashes were scattered in the countryside he loved near Billings, Montana.

(All books mentioned in this post, including James’s, are available at
www.amazon.com/. For additional information, see also the Will James Society at www.willjames.org/. )

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a month of animal adventures with Jack London’s The Call of the Wild.)

Wordcraft -- A thousand stops around the world

2012-02-01T07:43:00.001-06:00

How can you describe a thousand wonderful places in an hour? If you’re Patricia Schultz, author of the newly-revised, 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, you don’t even try.

Instead, she treated the luncheon audience at Highland Park United Methodist Church Tuesday to what she called “thirty favorite places” from the newly-revised second edition of her bestseller. But what’s her most favorite place? Whichever one she’s visited most recently, she said. For her, that’s the Hebrides Islands of Scotland. “I can still smell the heather and feel the mist on my face -- because it’s always raining in Scotland.”

A rainy vacation may not be everybody’s tea and scone, but for Schultz, it’s not just the places, “it’s the people you remember.” Especially, but not only, when they’re people she met over the whiskey bar -- fifty varieties of single malt scotch -- on the ferry to the Hebrides.

Even while showing slides of postcard-perfect views, she emphasized the people she met along the way. From the children who surrounded her broken-down van on the way to the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia, asking to hear about Beyonce. (“I read People,” Schultz told us, “so I was up to date.”) To “Edith from Machu Picchu,” a ninety-year-old native of New Jersey she met in a hotel in Peru, who recommended Schultz’s own book to her as a guide.

Schultz said if she hadn’t already chosen a proverb recommended by a Mongolian friend to open the second edition of her book (“better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times”) she’d have used Edith’s mantra -- “get the hardest trips done first, because your knees have expirations dates.”

(Edith was on her second set of knees -- titanium -- for help in getting around the ancient Incan capital, she informed Schultz.)

Other favorite places ran the gamut from an elephant-back safari in Okavango Delta of Botswana, to towns in the Palestinian Authority running side by side with Israel, to newly tourist-friendly countries in the former Yugoslavia. (She recommends staying in Tito’s old palace.)

And of course, there’s Italy. With an Italian mother and years of residence there, Schultz has such a warm spot for that country, she’s written a 2012 calendar just about Italy.

Schultz, however, spoke warmly about any travel opportunity. Although amazed that only thirty percent of Americans have a passport, she didn’t believe that we need to see other countries first to experience the benefits of travel. In fact, she’s also written a Thousand Places guide to the U.S. and Canada.

“There’s no education in the world like you experience when you leave your home, when you get out of your comfort zone,” Schultz said. “You see things differently. . .and you appreciate what you have when you return.”

(Schultz’s books are widely available in bookstores -- she also spoke at the Lincoln Park Barnes and Noble Tuesday -- and online. For a complete list of her works, see www.workman.com/authors/patricia_schultz/. For information about Highland Park’s sponsorship of authors, see www.hpumc.org/authorslive/.)

Totally Texas -- Expedition to East Texas

2012-01-30T08:49:00.001-06:00

Even if it’s not First Monday Trades Days, my family stops at the Dairy Palace in Canton on every expedition to East Texas. Located at the junction of I-20 and Highway 19, the Dairy Palace is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It offers more than hamburgers and serves shakes and cones made with a multiplicity of Blue Bell ice cream flavors. Take quarters so the kids can play video games while they wait (but not long) for their orders to get cooked. For a complete menu, see www.dairypalace.com/.

This coming weekend, though, is the First Monday flea market in Canton. A quick review for anybody not from around here -- despite the name, the market runs Thursday through Sunday BEFORE the first Monday of each month. This month, that’s February 2-5. Crowds are lightest on Thursdays, with about seventy percent of vendors already in town by then, according to at least one site, www.cantontradedays.com/.

Canton is just off I-20, about an hour’s drive east from Dallas. You can reach it from exits off I-20 to Highway 64 or Highway 19, which is the main drag past the market. Vendors in most of the covered buildings take credit or debit cards, but bring cash for parking (most convenient sites start at $5) and for vendors in the open areas. I go with goals in mind, but keep my mind open for wonderful surprises.

For more information about Canton’s First Monday Trades Days, see my post of June 27, 2011. Fortunately, the discussion of dehydration is less likely to apply at this time of year.

Trades Days, however, are not all the near end of East Texas has to offer. I’ll blog more next week about the Second Saturday Art Trail in Ben Wheeler and Edom. But shops are open in both towns Thursday through Sunday, year round. (Usually 9-5, but hours can vary.) Take Highway 64 east from Canton to FM 279. (You’re nearly there when you see the billboard for Edom blueberries -- not ripe at this season, alas.)

In Ben Wheeler recently, the whimsical art at the Blue Moose and Flying Fish galleries, among others, caught my eye. In nearby Edom, make time between shopping for art and
antiques to pick up a pie from the Edom Bakery & Grill. The restaurant made County Line magazine’s Upper East Side of Texas Hall of Fame for its pies in an array of flavors. See
www.edombakery.com/

Gardeners will want to travel still further east on FM 279 to Blue Moon Gardens,
www.bluemoongardens.com/ or to FM 279’s eastern junction, rejoining Highway 64, all the way to Tyler. The grounds of Tyler’s Municipal Rose Garden, 420 Rose Park Drive, are open year round, from dawn to dusk. In winter, check out its camellia garden. The weather channel predicts possible showers in Tyler Friday and Saturday. But if the weather is fair, bring a picnic -- maybe a pie. See www.texasrosefestival.com/

Adventure classics -- Predators in a shared landscape

2012-01-27T08:36:00.001-06:00

Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

When I first read Barry Lopez’s 1978 study, Of Wolves and Men, I expected to learn something about wolves. And I did. But as the title implies, Lopez is as interested in the intertwined history of our two species and human beings’ understanding of the predators who have haunted our imagination since prehistory.

The first of four divisions in his book deals with wolf behavior and biology, which Lopez does in beguiling detail. But how much do we really know? He gives a wry estimation in the book‘s introduction that the amount of observed behavior of wolves in the wild amounts to only a fraction of their actual life. How much, he wonders -- and we wonder with him -- takes place beyond these bounds?

The remaining portions of the book deal in more detail with how human beings have perceived wolves. (Perhaps Lopez believed he was better able to interpret his own species from having a specimen -- himself -- under constant observation.)

“The wish, of course, is to uncover some underlying theme that synthesizes all perceptions of the wolf, all allusions to him, in one grand animal. . . But I am not hopeful that a feeling of integration will be forthcoming. And even if it is, I don’t think it should be trusted.”

Lopez’s accomplishment lies in raising difficult questions rather than supplying easy answers. Even while admiring wolves, he cautions us not to place blame too easily on those who have demonized the wolf.

“The wolf. . .continues to generate more adamant positions and to trigger more powerful
emotions than any other large predator in the northern hemisphere, especially if the question is about where wolves might fit in a landscape shared closely with humans,” he writes in an afterword to the book’s 2004 edition.

But it’s not a question only applicable to wolves.

What should my daughter and I do when we and her young children see coyotes running during daylight hours in a suburban Texas park where small children play?

Or how should society deal with an orca who kills a human being in an amusement park? With owners of private zoos, such as the man who opens the doors of cages full of predators in rural Ohio? Or with the law enforcement officials who believe they have no recourse except to shoot the animals on sight? With any of the creatures whose lives human beings continually encroach on?

At least, Lopez concludes, let us “thank this enduring creature, Canis lupus, for standing by while we continue to pursue . . .the implementation of a universal justice that would include all we see living around us.”

Note: As I prepare to post this, it looks like a bad day for wolves. Their protected status as an endangered species expires in the U.S.’s Western Great Lakes region. And today’s Dallas Morning News featured a review of the movie, “The Grey,” a fictional account of wolf attacks in Alaska. No doubt wolves will survive, as they have since Paleolithic humans first threw spears at them.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins a month of fictional animal adventures with Smoky, the Cowhorse, by French-Canadian cowboy/author/artist Joseph-Ernest Dufault. The man better known by his pseudonym, Will James.)

Wordcraft -- New and classy writing classes

2012-01-25T08:47:00.001-06:00

It’s been a month since Christmas and maybe you, like me, sometimes think, especially here in the northern hemisphere in the dead of winter -- we need a little Christmas right now! Consider giving the gift of a writing class to yourself.

In Dallas, I’m dreaming of a new class from the continuing education program at Southern Methodist University (SMU). A class for people who’ve completed a novel, even if one they’re still trying to peddle. It’s called Novel 2.0.

SMU’s Continuing and Professional Education (CAPE) creative writing program filled a need for me and others, who didn’t want another degree. We just wanted writing instruction, with a goal. The program took me to seminars in New York with editors and agents. But it was aimed at first-time novelists, not continuing writers.

“(And) as time went on, we began to realize that writing your first book and writing your second are different things,” CAPE director Suzanne Frank told the audience last weekend at Dallas’s Times Ten Cellars.

Enter Novel 2.0. The numbering system may confuse those who went through the SMU program a couple of years or more ago. It is not the novel track whose multiple classes could lead to a writer to New York.

The new eight-week class for writers with at least one completed novel will be taught by Ms. Frank, writer of several mystery and science fiction novels, and Daniel J. Hale, an Agatha Award-winning mystery novelist.

It will include, among other segments, one on what Ms. Frank called “prewriting -- all the stuff you ever do before you sit down and put anything on the page; an investment in your thinking.”

Followed by actual construction of the story. “But we’re going to do it backwards,” she said. “We’re going to start with the end and with the agent of antagonism.”

One of the earlier goals of the previous SMU program included writing the climatic scene. That done, however, most students in the classes I attended got stuck like old 33 rpm records at the beginning, endlessly rewriting the opening.

(Okay, some members of my current workshop will want to kill me for saying that.)

I’ll caution would-be students -- SMU courses are not the least expensive in town. If you’ve never taken a writing class or two before, you may want to start with some from schools in the Dallas County Community College District. A continuing education class
from DCCCD’s Richland College originally sparked my interest in writing fiction. Brookhaven College offers an even larger selection, both classroom and online. See www.smu.edu/education/creativewriting/ for SMU’s programs, www.brookhavencollege.edu/ for Brookhaven, or www.rlc7.dccd.edu/ for Richland.

Duotrope’s Digest added contests to its listings, reversing its longtime policy against fee-based markets. Not all contests are equal, but how better to compare them than through Duotrope? See www.duotrope.com/, and consider subscribing to get latest updates delivered to your inbox.

I’m disappointed the Western short story contest run by Moonlight Mesa Associates isn’t on the list, but see www.moonlightmesaassociates.com for details. This year the Arizona publisher has added the requirement that stories must be set in Arizona.

Totally Texas -- Dragons & other monsters

2012-01-23T08:18:00.002-06:00

For those of you, like me, who were surprised to find the Chinese New Year coming so early, here’s the rule for this combination of lunar and solar calendars. Oversimplifying a bit, the Chinese New Year falls on the second new moon following the winter solstice. This enables me to tell my daughter, born on January 19, that she is under the sign of what appears to be the previous year, not the Western calendar year of her birth.

This year, that beginning date is today, January 23. Happy New Year!

This year is under the sign of the dragon (one of the twelve animals of Chinese astrology). My twin grandsons (year of the dog) don’t care how it’s determined. They just think dragons are cool!

(And for something really cool, see the water dragon image writer/artist Heidi Berthiaume created for the year 2012 at the bottom of this page. Since I was born in a water dragon year, I told her I had to have it, and she graciously consented.)

If you didn’t get enough festivities this past weekend for the beginning of the dragon year, the Trammel and Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art offers a reprise the first Saturday in February, February 4, during its AdventureAsia: Family Days at the Crow programs. Free events run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 2010 Flora St., Dallas, 75210-2335.

The Crow Collection’s ongoing exhibits are always free. The museum is closed Mondays but open Tuesdays through Sundays from 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., and from 10 a.m. - 9 p.m. Thursdays. For a complete list of exhibits and activities, see www.crowcollection.org/

Can’t wait another day for big scary monsters? Try Planet Shark: Predator or Prey? at the Museum of Nature and Science, 1318 South Second Avenue, in Dallas’s Fair Park. The exhibit, running through September 16, is open Mondays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. Several galleries include exhibits of shark evolution and biology, including fossil jaws and teeth like those in the picture accompanying this post.

One gallery (situated to the side) includes news footage of shark attacks and their aftermath, including exhibits related to the blockbuster movie Jaws. A sign warns it may
be too graphic for young children. I found the information fascinating, but it’s not stuff I’d take my not quite six-year-old grandsons through.

In conjunction with the exhibit, the museum’s IMAX theater currently shows the movie Sharks, with marine biologist Jean-Michel Cousteau, and Sea Rex: Journey to a Prehistoric World. Both movies run through May 25.

I was relieved to learn that, due to the length of the movies, the museum is not showing the TI signature film featuring time lapse photography of the Dallas skyline with them. Some may grieve, but time lapse and heights give me vertigo. Visit
www.natureandscience.org/ for ticket prices, show times, and other museum events.

For my final monster suggestion, the Heard Natural Science Museum in McKinney continues its Dinosaurs Live! outdoor exhibit of life-size, animatronic dinosaurs through Sunday, January 29. The robotic dinosaurs move, roar, and in one case, spit water on unwary bystanders. My grandsons, not quite six, have seen and loved the exhibit in past years, but still find the roaring T. rex intimidating. See www.heardmuseum.org/ for times and ticket prices.

Adventure classics -- She loved, she flew, she wrote

2012-01-20T08:28:00.000-06:00

West with the Night

by Beryl Markham

“There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa -- and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime,” Beryl Markham wrote in the opening chapter of her 1942 memoir, West with the Night. Take it as a warning that the only book by the British-born Kenyan aviator will not dwell on the aspects of her life we’d expect from a celebrity who was also a beautiful woman.

Not a word about her multiple marriages or multiple affairs with famous men. Even the reason for her initial celebrity -- the first woman to fly solo east to west across the Atlantic -- occupies only one not very lengthy chapter. (Flying against the prevailing winds makes a westbound flight more difficult than an eastbound one.)

The bulk of her book is about Africa, especially the East Africa where she lived from early childhood. Despite the immense social and political changes Kenya underwent during the time she knew it, her Africa was a frontier land of outback farms, Masai villages, hunting safaris and provincial racetracks.

“I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there a year,” she wrote.

She began flying at the inspiration of pilot-mentor Tom Black (and possibly by a downturn in her first career as a race horse trainer). She received her pilot’s license, the first issued in the colony to a woman, in September 1933.

But as the world spiraled toward total war in 1936, she found herself once more longing for change. She described her decision to fly from East Africa to England as if it was a weekend outing. And once in England, remembering a man “who had lived in Zanzibar, leaning across the table and saying, ‘J.C., why don’t you finance Beryl for a record flight?’”

J.C. was John Carberry, an Irish peer and African settler. He financed and Markham
flew, finally making a crash landing in a swamp in Nova Scotia after a flight of twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes.

She lived to write her book, but at least one biographer disputes her writing. Errol Trzebinski’s 1993 The Lives of Beryl Markham claims the real author of West with the Night was Markham’s third husband, journalist Raoul Schumacher. (Although Trzebinski had earlier stated in a PBS documentary that only a woman could have written the memoir.)

Maybe the real reason there was only one book is the one Markham hints at while describing the writing of a letter: “Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it. I sit in a labyrinth of solitude jabbing at its bulwarks with the point of a pen. . . .”

Even for someone attuned to solitude, there comes a surfeit.

(Next Friday’s Adventure classic turns from modern machines to ancient adversaries in Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men.)

Wordcraft -- The importance of being employed

2012-01-18T08:27:00.002-06:00

It’s a fact of writing life that most writers cannot support themselves solely through their writing. Sound bad? It’s actually great!

Because jobs don’t just pay the rent, they give us something to write about. The presence of raw material for characters, plots and setting is so essential that even if we don’t need a paycheck, we should consider getting a job. Even a nonpaying one.

Consider Dallas-area writer Susannah Charleson. She’s worked actual paying “day jobs” -- college professor, flight instructor, radio and TV broadcaster. But the material in her 2010 nonfiction bestseller, Scent of the Missing: Love & Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog, comes from her volunteer work as a canine search-and-rescue team member.

Ms. Charleson recently worked with the actors and crew of the TV version of Scent of the Missing, in which she’ll have an Alfred Hitchcock-type cameo with Ponchatoula German Shepherd Smokey, shown in the accompanying photo by Smokey’s trainer Ed Sanders. Her next book, The Possibility Dogs, is due out in 2013.

What’s her insight on the symbiosis between writers and real-life experience?

“Writers have the opportunity to observe and interpret second-hand,” she said, “as well as a chance to get out in the world and do a thing and translate those experiences directly. Both are valuable, but often, I find, it’s the voice of genuine, first-hand experience that makes your work unique. There are a thousand bystanders for every person stepping up. Getting in there and living an engaged life makes the writing richer.”

Scent of the Missing follows her transition from searching crime scenes from the air (an extension of her work as a flight instructor) to the not as glamorous as it sounds work of ground and water searches with dogs.

“Three to seven training hours a week,” she wrote, listing the requirements for search-and-rescue (SAR) work. “Plus expected home study, plus emergency calls. . . One friend asked, ‘Does it pay well?’”

(The answer was, not at all, in dollars.)

Like a thread through her story runs the story of the dogs, especially the golden retriever, Puzzle, she trained in rescue work, and whose picture adorns the book’s cover. For more about Ms. Charleson and her dogs, see
http://susannahcharleson.com/ or her Facebook page. She and Puzzle tweet jointly as PuzzleCharleson.

(Next Wednesday -- Members of Southern Methodist University’s Creative Writing Program talk about life after seminars with New York agents and editors.)

Totally Texas -- Keeping the cow in Cowtown

2012-01-16T08:50:00.001-06:00

Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo

Will Rogers Memorial Center

3401 West Lancaster Avenue

Leave it to Fort Worth to make rodeo a cultural event -- right up there with its great art museums. Of course, this isn’t just any rodeo. During the stock show that began this weekend and runs through February 4, visitors can attend the Cowboys of Color Rodeo, a “Best of the West” Ranch Rodeo, a fiesta-themed “Best of Mexico Celebracion,” PRCA professional rodeo, and “Bulls’ Night Out.” And those aren’t mechanical bulls.

And where there are cattle, there must be horses as well. If you like your horses on the wild side, try Mustang Magic, this Thursday through Saturday (January 19-21). The event sponsored by the Mustang Heritage Foundation features mustang mares who were running wild only months ago. Take a look at the contestants at http://www.extrememustangmakeover.com/themustangmagic.php/-- they’ll be available for adoption Saturday night.

The trail drive era that earned Fort Worth the nickname “Cowtown” only lasted from 1866 until the late nineteenth century before passing into legend. But no place gives the legend as much boost as Fort Worth, whose old stockyards earned a listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.

The Fort Worth stock show began in 1896 when a show (actually the second one of that year) was held to coincide with a meeting of the National Livestock Exchange. From that beginning, things only got bigger.

In 1904, the great African-American cowboy, Texas-born Bill Pickett, gave an early demonstration of bulldogging -- the sport he invented. The following year, the first rodeo -- a demonstration billed as a “Wild West Performance” -- took place at the stock show. Unfortunately for Pickett, bulldogging didn’t join the official list of rodeo events until 1938, years after his death.

This year, any visitors who want more than rodeo can see a jaw-dropping array of livestock judging (llama performance classes, anyone?); hear story-telling by the Texas Cowboy Poets Association; and watch a mounted shooting competition.

They can listen to music, eat, shop (and not just for cows), and attend Cowboy Church on Sundays. Anybody not sure what to do first can check out
www.fwssr.com/ or the stock show’s Facebook page. And of course, it has its own app. Like Fort Worth, the stock show is legendary -- with a modern twist.

Also this week -- for those who like their horses of the iron variety, the North Texas Council of Railroad Clubs holds its 27^th annual model train show in Plano Centre, 2000 E. Spring Creek Parkway, Saturday and Sunday (January 21-22). Admission is $8, free for children age 12 and under with a paid adult admission. See
http://www.dfwtrainshows.com/ for details.

Adventure classics -- Little Prince, lost and found

2012-01-13T08:26:00.000-06:00

Wind, Sand and Stars

by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The late Curtis Cate, in his biography of French aviator-author Antoine de Saint-Exupery, remarks that virtue “is almost invariably less glamorous than vice. The warning was there, but Saint-Exupery characteristically refused to heed it. . . (devoting) all his written work to a questioning study of such basic human virtues as courage, determination, perseverance, responsibility, generosity, self-sacrifice, loyalty, and love.”

Not to mention that he wrote prose like a poet and lived and died like a hero. Even Saint-Exupery’s famous attraction to women, famously returned, enhanced rather than dimmed his luster.

A college roommate introduced me to Saint-Ex’s most famous work, the fable of The Little Prince. I admit finding it a bit saccharine, preferring the memoir of his days as a civilian aviator, Wind, Sand and Stars.

One of the many ironies of his life was, after serving years at a post in North Africa without mishap, to crash in the Sahara while on a flight to Saigon in 1935. He and his mechanic-navigator, Andre Prevot, survived both the crash and several days of near-death and hallucinations from thirst before being discovered and rescued by a passing Bedouin.

The experience was the basis for a prominent episode in Wind, Sand and Stars as well as The Little Prince (whose marooned aviator converses with the small visitor from a neighboring asteroid).

Some of the telegrams with the message “So terribly happy!“ Saint-Exupery mentioned receiving as he recovered from his experience must surely have come from his wife. For
in 1931, he took one of the bravest (perhaps most foolhardy) actions of his action-filled life -- marriage to a young Salvadoran-born widow, Consuelo Suncin.

The twice-widowed Consuelo, as flamboyant as Saint-Exupery, wore black to their wedding. Both of her previous husband had died within a year of their marriages to her. Saint-Exupery would survive thirteen years of their tempestuous, frequently unfaithful union. After his death in a still-mysterious air crash over the Mediterranean in 1944, Consuelo never remarried.

In 1945, she wrote a lengthy private account of their love affair. Then she packed it away in a trunk, where it would not be discovered until two decades after her death in 1979. When first published as The Tale of the Rose in France in 2000, the centennial of Saint-Exupery’s birth, it caused a sensation.

And The Little Prince claimed its place, not as a children’s story, but the story of the love against all odds of Saint-Exupery and Consuelo.

All books mentioned, including Consuelo’s, are readily available at
www.amazon.com/, www.alibris.com/ and other sources.

(Next Friday in Adventure classics’ true stories: He flew, but she came back -- Beryl Markham’s West with the Night.)

Wordcraft -- Perseverance, iron will & Wodehouse

2012-01-11T08:54:00.001-06:00

The cynical will call it coincidence. I call it a message from the Muses when articles in unrelated magazines -- Writer’s Digest and Smithsonian -- simultaneously address the power of willpower.

(Remember last month’s post about subscribing to, and reading, magazines? We have to read to write.)

Okay, the Writer’s Digest version, in its February 2012 issue, was about submitting short stories. But the point of the article was that the author, Jacob M. Appel, won a writing contest with a story that had been rejected seventy-five times. Including a previous rejection from the magazine sponsoring the contest he won. Seventy-five rejections. I find three or four discouraging. And the thought occurred -- what willpower Mr. Appel has.

The Smithsonian article, from December 2011 was a review of the book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength . It analyzed the components of nineteenth century explorer Henry Morton Stanley’s legendary determination.

The last story I read about willpower was by inimitable comic writer P.G. Wodehouse. After the equivalent of getting the sand kicked in his face, Wodehouse’s character sends for a book on developing iron will. It includes the usual terrible things like getting out of bed early and taking cold showers, followed by hilarious results.

Stanley didn’t bother with cold showers. In his explorations, he was probably lucky to get enough water to shave with. Which he did every morning, even while companions dropped dead of starvation around him. (Although the artist’s version of his meeting with missionary Dr. Livingstone accompanying this post depicts him with a beard.)

British biographer Tim Jeal, in his analysis of Stanley in Smithsonian, concluded that the explorer’s habitual neatness and order created “an antidote to the destructive capacities of nature all around him.” Mental tricks such as neatness may have helped form Stanley’s formidable willpower.

And that and other tricks are ones even sedentary writers can employ.

Focusing on a goal other than our own glorification: Even if the goal is only to entertain, distracting our fellow beings from their cares is not a light calling.

Keeping things neat: Besides improving my willpower, I found half a dozen things I’d considered hopelessly lost while cleaning out a bookshelf!

Distracting ourselves from the immediate pain of our problems: Rejection hurts? Write something else. Or send the story to another journal. Or even get a blog post or an article credit out of our rejections. (For further discussion of Stanley’s habits and why they helped, see www.smithsonian.com/)

And that guy from Writer’s Digest with his seventy-five rejections? Apparently Mr. Appel -- rather, Dr. Appel -- distracted himself by earning degrees in law and medicine. Again, a cynic would wonder what he wants to do when he grows up. But writers rejoice in knowing he’ll never run out of things to write about. Which is the topic for next Wednesday -- the value of nonwriting jobs for writers.

Totally Texas -- Blue yonder and beyond

2012-01-09T08:51:00.000-06:00

Frontiers of Flight Museum

6911 Lemmon Avenue, Dallas

Our quest on a day too cold for outdoor activities was a place with room for kids to play that also appealed to adults. We found it at the Frontiers of Flight museum near Dallas’s Love Field airport. Actually, we’d been to the Smithsonian affiliate before, on a summer day when it was too hot for outdoors. But this museum has plenty to keep bodies and minds engaged even when temperatures in Texas are just right.

The museum, open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, occupies a 100,000-square foot building at the southeast corner of Love Field. Be prepared to exit off Lemmon Avenue as soon as you see the museum entrance sign, even though the building itself still seems a long way off.

As we parked, my daughter’s five-year-old twin sons were awe-struck at being able to walk beneath the wings of a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 protruding from the museum wall. The plane’s position wasn’t due to pilot error. Its front end stands inside, where the plane serves as a mini-museum of information about Love Field’s iconic airline, alongside other Southwest historical exhibits.

As we entered the museum, the glass-walled model room caught our eyes. The museum augments its exhibits of full-sized planes and other craft, including the Apollo 7 command module, with scale models. And the model room is where lucky volunteers design and build these.

The boy’s favorite exhibits included the moon landing exhibit and the playground, with its airplane scaled to fit child pilots and a climbable indoor control tower. My daughter found the exhibits of flight attendants’ uniforms from the 1970s and 1980s hilarious but thought-provoking.

I was most interested in a newly-restored Curtiss JN-4D “Jenny” biplane from World War I and the exhibition of posters of famous cockpits currently on loan from the Smithsonian Institution. The “At the Controls” exhibit gives visitors a pilot’s-eye view of a century of changes in flight technology. From the controls of the Wright Brothers’ original Flyer, to a space shuttle. From a World War I SPAD XIII with bullet holes to the atomic bomb carrying Enola Gay.

Museum admission is $8 for adults, $5 for ages 3-17, free for children under age 3. For more information about the museum and its educational programs, see http://flightmuseum.com/

Can’t get enough airplanes? See also the Cavanaugh Flight Museum near Addison Airport, 4572 Claire Chennault, Addison, Texas. With indoor and outdoor facilities, it boasts more full-size planes, especially military aircraft. The boys’ took their Navy vet grandfather from Florida there especially to see the Navy planes. See www.cavanaughflightmuseum.com for hours and admission prices.

(For what it felt like to fly the old planes, see this coming Friday’s post on Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Stars.)

Adventure classics -- A pilgrimage to save his life

2012-01-06T08:58:00.000-06:00

The Travels of Ibn Jubayr

by Abu al-Husayn Muhammad ibn Amad ibn Jubayr

translated by Roland (R.J.C.) Broadhurst

“One day in the year A.D. 1182,” relates translator Roland Broadhurst in his introduction to the journal of ibn Jubayr, “the Moorish Governor of Granada, then the wealthiest and most splendid city of Spain, summoned his secretary to discharge some business.”

The governor was a prince of the Almohad dynasty whose current ruler was Yusuf I. And but for a fit of pique at his secretary, ibn Jubayr, the governor’s life on this earth would be as little remembered as Yusuf’s dynasty, which the Reconquista would sweep from power within the next few decades.

As the story goes, when ibn Jubayr entered his employer’s presence on that day, probably in the Muslim year 578, the Muslim governor, fallen far from the puritanical principles of the earlier Almohads, offered him a cup of wine. Ibn Jubayr refused. The governor flew into a rage. After forcing ibn Jubayr to consume seven cups in punishment for the refusal, the governor in remorse lavished him with a cup of gold for every cup of wine.

And to atone for his involuntary sin, ibn Jubayr set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca. It was, of course, his religious duty to make the pilgrimage. And his capricious employer’s generosity gave him the means (as well, presumably as a suitable leave of absence).

But there have been reasonable-sounding speculations that ibn Jubayr was anxious as well to remove himself from an unpleasant and possibly dangerous situation. An employer, after all, who tries alcohol poisoning on his secretary makes the boss at The Office TV show sound stable.

At any rate, ibn Jubayr left Granada on February 3, 1183 (by the Muslim calendar, the 30^th day of the month of Shawwal, A.H. 578) and didn’t return until the spring of 1185, after the death of Yusuf I, the overlord of Granada’s governor.

During his two years away from Spain, ibn Jubayr kept an almost daily record of his travels across half the known world. He managed to see every sight along the way -- from the pyramids of Egypt to the grand mosque of Mecca to a volcanic eruption in Sicily -- and talked to or expressed opinions about most of the important people of his day, from Sultan Saladin to the secluded Abbasid caliph in Bagdad to the Norman King William of Sicily. His book brought him an immense literary reputation.

Did ibn Jubayr develop a yearning for travel from his experiences? Or did he find absence from Spain a refuge from the increasing political problems at home? He made two more trips eastward, without leaving any further account, and died in Egypt on his final journey in 1217, as the Almohad dynasty crumbled behind him. His book lives on, readily available at
www.amazon.com .

(For the next two Fridays, Adventure classics features back to back true life adventures from pioneering literary aviators Antoine de Saint-Exupery and Beryl Markham. First up -- Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Stars.)

Wordcraft -- Writing conferences in heart of Texas

2012-01-04T08:56:00.000-06:00

Don’t we sometimes get tired of having our friends and family inch away when our contribution to the latest movie discussion includes terms such as “thematic midpoint ”? Or when we mention the interesting POV (point of view) in a popular novel? And wouldn’t we like to know, you know, how writers we see published actually get that way? That’s what writing conferences are for -- chances to hang out with other writers, even published ones, sometimes hobnob with agents, editors and, (gasp!) publishers.

There are a number of sources for conferences and other writerly events, such as Poets & Writers magazine, www.pw.org/: Writer’s Digest magazine, including the blog FeedBlitz, available through www.WritersDigest.com/: and the online New Pages, www.NewPages.com/. So in this post I’ll only mention conferences I have attended fairly recently, or those attended by people I know.

This list, in chronological order for 2012, is for Texas conferences.

February 17-19. ConDFW XI, Dallas. A literary science fiction/fantasy convention featuring writing and publishing-oriented programming. This year it also has a short story contest. At $35 for a three-day membership ($40 at the door), it’s an inexpensive way to dip your toes in the convention world. See www.condfw.org/ for information. Story contest closes January 22.

May 19-20. DFW Writers Conference, Hurst. Here’s where you’ll start to see agents and editors in attendance. Admission through March 19 -- $295, which includes parking, meals and an agent appointment. See www.dfwwritersconference.org/ for details.

June 22-24. The Writers’ League of Texas 2012 Agents Conference, Austin. Lots of agents and editors. Cost -- $399, or $299 for the new YA A to Z ticket, with additional charges for private consultations with agents and editors. See www.writersleague.org/

July 20-22. The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. Details TBA, but affiliated with the Mayborn School of Journalism at University of North Texas in Denton. Nonfiction only, but lots of agents, publishers and cash awards. Check http://journalism.unt.edu/maybornconference/ for updates.

July 27-29. ArmadilloCon34, Austin. A science fiction/fantasy convention with a writing workshop. I last attended in 2009 and found that the small-group critiques helped me make my first story sell. Details TBA. Best source of information I’ve found so far is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArmadilloCon/

September 21-23. FenCon IX, Addison. Science fiction/fantasy convention with writing workshop and short story contest. Although not yet stated on the site,
www.fencon.org/, an email from the workshop director indicates Canadian sci-fi writer (and Hugo award nominee) Karl Schroeder will be the writing instructor. Cost for convention -- $25 plus additional charge for workshop and/or contest entry fee.

That’s it for now, but I’ll post more state and local conference information as it becomes available. And I appreciate any information you can share.

Totally Texas -- Art and walking on grass

2012-01-02T08:23:00.000-06:00

Nasher Sculpture Center

2001 Flora St., Dallas

My daughter practically grew up at NorthPark Center, as enthralled by its museum-worthy modern art collection as by the shopping. So I didn’t have to apply much persuasion to get her to visit a whole garden’s worth of outdoor sculpture from the collection of the family that developed NorthPark.

Her twin sons were out of their kindergarten classes for winter holidays, so any outing had to be friendly to exuberant little boys. The Nasher is. There’s an indoor portion of the museum, where the boys appreciated the sculptural quality of even the drinking fountains. But the high point was the outdoor display -- approximately thirty pieces in a garden setting of nearly two and a half acres where walking on the grass is positively required.

The art, drawn from the collection of the late Raymond and Patsy Nasher, changes periodically. On this visit, the boys’ favorite was Richard Serra’s curving double wall of Cor-ten steel entitled, “My Curves are not Mad.”

Walking between the forty-four foot long weathered walls of Serra’s work is like traveling through a cave with a view of the sky. The boys didn’t have to touch the walls to appreciate the experience of enclosure and discovery.

Although admission is always free for children age twelve and younger, the Nasher offers free admission to all January 7, as on the first Saturday of each month. The “Target First Saturdays” programs include children’s art activities, family tours, story time with the Dallas Public Library, and more. See http://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/Events-Calendar/ for details.

The Nasher opens at 10 a.m. for First Saturdays. Otherwise, its hours are Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. - 5 p.m. Its site near Woodall Rogers Freeway and North Pearl Street in downtown Dallas is adjacent to both the Dallas Museum of Art and the Crow Collection of Asian Art.

Can’t wait until Saturday for your art fix? The Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 North Harwood, offers free admission tomorrow, January 3, and the first Tuesday of every month. See
www.dallasmuseumofart.org/ for regular admission and hours, as well as discounts on combined tickets for the DMA and the Nasher.

Thanks to readers from nearly two dozen countries who viewed my blog 2,230 times in 2011!

Here’s a guide to what you’ll see in the coming year: Mondays are about family-friendly places and events, concentrating on my area of North Central Texas. My lively grandsons are my guide to what kids like, and their tastes run to the outdoors and out-sized (as in this post about the Nasher Center). Wednesdays are about the art and craft of writing, with plenty of practical advice, such as this week’s post about writing conferences. Fridays are a tour through classic adventure literature of all genres. January’s selections focus on nonfiction adventures, and themes vary each month.

Each post is small enough to read on a coffee break but large enough to challenge your
imagination. Have a great year!

Adventure classics -- Lost in space, naked

2011-12-30T06:00:00.000-06:00

Perelandra

by C. S. Lewis

I’m a C.S. Lewis fan, and there’s lots I love about his science fiction trilogy, the source of this week’s Adventure classic, Perelandra. But even I have to admit, as science fiction, it’s got to be one of the oddest ever written.

For anyone who thinks Lewis begins and ends with the Narnia books, here’s a brief synopsis. Mild-mannered English professor Elwin Ransom is kidnapped by fellow professor Weston and taken to Mars in the first of the series, Out of the Silent Planet. The inhabitants of Mars are nothing like either Weston or Ransom (not to mention readers) expected. Not just that the Martians aren’t human, but that they exist in a sinless state, never having experienced the kind of fall from grace that occurred when Earth’s Adam and Even succumbed to temptation.

In the second book of the series, Perelandra (later published with the more descriptive title, Voyage to Venus), Ransom takes flight to the second planet of our solar system. This time he travels with the aid of angelic spirits, with a mission to save Venus’s inhabitants from sinning as well.

Problems? Partly because Perelandrians don’t know sin (and partly because their planet is pleasantly warm), they don’t wear clothes. So neither can Ransom, their “first contact” with humans. Nothing wrong with that, except making it hard to find an illustration that doesn’t trigger Blogger’s adult content alert. And, not exactly a spoiler alert -- the book takes way too long to wrap up after the climax.

Despite Lewis’s long list of nonfiction writings, he was still young in the craft of writing fiction. But he learned fast.

In Perelandra, he foreshadowed the relationships between human beings and animals that would become the great charm of the Narnia stories. He demonstrated his talent for what science fiction writers call “world building” -- the ability to construct a fully-rounded fictional world -- and the descriptive powers he would lavish on Narnia as well.

Perhaps most important for a writer, he made his first attempt at developing a strong female character in Tinidril, the Venusian Eve. He would use that ability again and again, creating characters such as Lucy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the sister of Psyche in his last novel (and my favorite) -- Till We Have Faces.

For more about C.S. Lewis and his writings, see Adventure classics post of September 9, 2011, “A faun in a snowy wood. . . .”

(Next Friday -- Adventure classics begins a month of true-life adventures with record of a medieval Spaniard whose pilgrimage to Mecca may have saved his life -- The Travels of Ibn Jubayr.)

Wordcraft -- Resolution 4: Pay it forward

2011-12-28T08:46:00.000-06:00

’Tis the season for giving -- and, maybe, tax deductions. And, like making resolutions, giving doesn’t have to be painful. Some of my favorite sites are asking for funds now, and when many join together, a little can become a lot.

Duotrope’s Digest, http://www.duotrope.com/, states that if each of its current users and subscribers contributed $6.01 for the year, it would meet its goal to keep the site free.

Duotrope is my go-to place to find publishers for my fiction. It’s a favorite of many other writers as well. Even the occasional cranky ones who gripe about the overabundance of statistics. Or the fallibility of self-reported statistics. But I can live with the knowledge that five writers got acceptances to a collection I’m aiming for without reporting their information to Duotrope. It may sound like I work for Duotrope, but I don’t. I only subscribe and use.

A few years ago I would have been embarrassed to admit to another of my now-favorite sites -- Wikipedia. Now, like the print encyclopedias I used to buy, it’s a first stop for research. Often pedestrian and seldom the last stop, but always useful. And it’s looking for funding, too.

You’ve probably seen the appeals from article writers and even Ward Cunningham, who invented the wiki as a website whose users can easily modify it. I clicked on one of the links and used my PayPal account to make a donation. (Other forms of payment are accepted.)

Another of my favorite sites is Wikimedia, http://commons.wikimedia.org/ , filled with non-copyrighted “clip art” to use when I don’t have a photograph of my own for a blog
post. Wikimedia shelters under the same umbrella as Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation. This is a nonprofit organization whose donations may be deductible as charitable contributions in the United States.

(Duotrope is not established as a nonprofit and contributions to it are only deductible as possible business expenses. But in either case, contact your tax adviser or the U.S. Internal Revenue Service,
http://www.irs.gov/.)

Finally, in keeping with my favorite price for anything -- free -- there are ways to give back to our writing community that only cost a few minutes of time. One suggestion from a former mentor, Susannah Charleson (author of the book on search and rescue dogs, Scent of the Missing), is to write a review on Amazon, http://www.amazon.com/, for writers who have inspired us. Or if you belong to a professional site such as LinkedIn, offer to write a recommendation for someone -- writer, teacher, editor -- whose work you admire. And show up for free readings and discussions in your community.

Happy New Year and keep writing!

(Next Wednesday -- Writing conferences in 2012)

Totally Texas -- Can you hear the train coming?

2011-12-26T08:44:00.000-06:00

Joel’s Christmas Train

156 Hidden Circle

Richardson

Plenty of yards in Richardson’s Duck Creek neighborhood boast eye-popping displays of holiday lights. But I don’t think anybody’s feelings will be hurt if I say none of them come close to the show in Joel Occhiuzzo’s back yard. Because no one else has his very own train!

When I visited Mr. Occhiuzzo’s holiday train recently I remarked that the show seemed even more impressive than last year’s.

“Ten thousand more lights,” he said, as thrilled as a kid. “And the train is new!”

The electric train that circles his yard from 6 to 10 p.m. nightly (weather permitting) from Thanksgiving through the evening of New Year’s Day is a grownup little boy’s dream. Small enough to fit in a suburban back yard but big enough to ride in, Joel’s Christmas Train is now in its eleventh year of delighting neighborhood children.

Mr. Occhiuzzo himself is the engineer, circling a miniature theme park of cartoon character figures and lights. Lots and lots of lights. The show faces the creek and the glow of lights across the water is charming enough to set Ebenezer Scrooge’s heart beating faster.

Train rides are free, but with an anticipated 600-800 passengers a night this year, Mr. Occhiuzzo welcomes (nondeductible) donations. And he depends on the help of a crew of dedicated volunteers who start setting up the train and its tracks soon after Labor Day for the annual Thanksgiving night opening run.

As the retired Mr. Occhiuzzo explains on his blog, http://holidayexpressridingtrain.wordpress.com/, “The idea of having a train came in a dream. I thought I could build one easily, I soon found out it wasn’t going to be easy!. . .
(Eventually) I rented a 16-foot truck and loaded 130 feet of tracks, 44 foot of train batteries and drove 1,250 miles to get my current system.”

My daughter in Richardson first alerted me to the train. With two little boys who were crazy about trains, she was eager to locate Mr. Occhiuzzo’s. This year, her husband scheduled his vacation for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. And I won’t say it was just to take advantage of the holiday train, but that’s definitely on their to-do list.

Also for kids, or kids at heart -- Trains at NorthPark, the entrancing toy-sized trains crossing a diorama of the United States, continue their run through January 1. They are located this year near Barney’s New York on the second level of NorthPark Center, Northwest Highway and Central Expressway in Dallas. Tickets are $3 for children and seniors, $6 for adults, with discount tickets available at Tom Thumb stores. See
http://www.northparkcenter.com for times, including special hours for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

Adventure classics -- A wolf in the Magic Theater

2011-12-23T08:54:00.000-06:00

Steppenwolf

by Hermann Hesse

In his 1961 author’s note to perhaps the strangest of his stories, Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse writes, “. . .it seems to me that of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other, and frequently it is actually the affirmative and enthusiastic readers, rather than those who rejected the book, who have reacted to it oddly.”

No kidding, Herr Hesse -- everybody wants to skip from protagonist Harry Haller’s late-life crisis to the giddiness of the underground Magic Theater.

But if we reach that destination without paying proper attention to the landmarks along the way, we may not be able to find our way out again. We may even mistake the theater’s violent plays for reality. Or vice versa.

Which is just as well, since Haller’s adventures, not so coincidentally begun when he was the same age as Hesse, might otherwise be merely commentary on the state of Hesse’s psyche during the 1920s. Or (and also) on the state of his native Germany when even an intellectual like the old friend Haller encounters “sees nothing of the preparations for the next war that are going on all round him.”

I first read Steppenwolf at the end of the heady 1960’s, whose cults of music, sex and drugs Hesse seemed to have foreseen decades earlier. When I reread it, I was closer to Haller’s age and understood why the death of his alter ego, the beautiful young woman Hermine, was neither a suicide nor a murder.

And why his punishment for the crime -- both terrifying and healing -- was to be laughed at.

Hesse volunteered for service in Germany’s Imperial Army during the First World War, but by the end of the war’s first year, he appealed to intellectuals not to be seduced by the
propaganda of patriotism. You don’t even have to be told that his works were eventually banned by the Nazis, do you?

But I’ll leave everyone to find her own way to the Magic Theater and back. As Hesse also notes, “Poetic writing can be understood and misunderstood in many ways. . . Many an author has found readers to whom his work seemed more lucid than it was to himself.”

(Next Friday: As the New Year approaches, we zoom through space in C.S. Lewis’s science fiction novel, Perelandra.)

Wordcraft -- Resolution 3: Get out there!

2011-12-21T09:03:00.000-06:00

Okay, you’ve written a story. Maybe several stories. And you think you’re ready to publish. Well, here’s my experience. I tried writing a novel (actually, a few novels), sent them to agents and got -- nothing. In those pre-online days, it seemed as if literary agents could have made a living from re-selling the stamps off my SASE’s.

So when a friend from a university novel writing course confessed she’s writing short stories now and asked whether I’d heard of Glimmer Train, I told her what I’m telling you. I have heard of the big contests; I’ve entered them; and I’m not trying to discourage anyone from going out for them.

But big publications and big contests receive many more stories than they can handle. Most entries get a form rejection at best or nothing at. In the meantime, smaller publications, less prestigious sites, and sites that don’t pay as much may be eager for your stories, or at least willing to provide valuable feedback.

Finding them isn’t as hard as you may think. By following resolution #1, you know what kinds of stories you write, that is, what genres you do best. Your writing group from resolution #2 has helped you work through a lot of basic craft issues. But ultimately, the only person who can tell whether your stories are publishable is a publisher.

A lot of you link to Duotrope’s Digest. Good for you. Duotrope can also search for the most accessible sites in given genres. I ran such a search, then researched the results again, looking for sites with credibility, the ones I’d be proud to have my work seen at.

I found The Lorelei Signal. It looked good. It showcased stories I respected. And its guiding light, Carol Hightshoe, published my first story, “Gift Cards of an Ex-Goddess.” It’s still one of my favorite publications. The next reading period begins January 15, at http://www.loreleisignal.com/

Other small publishers have printed my stories, or even when they haven’t, they’ve made comments that enabled me to sell stories elsewhere. Stories such as “Shaman,” (rejected by Heroic Fantasy Quarterly but published by Short-story.me) ; or “The Gates of Shaizar,” (rejected for a Ricasso Press anthology but since accepted by both Pulp Empire and Abandoned Towers).

Just don’t aim too low. Sites that will accept everything don’t give you credibility. And sites you’re embarrassed to be seen at -- not worth it.

(Next Wednesday -- Resolution number 4: pay back by paying forward.)

Totally Texas -- Santa says: Listen to your heart

2011-12-19T08:32:00.001-06:00

My daughter confided recently that children in her five-year-old sons’ kindergarten classes are already attempting to undermine other kids’ beliefs in Santa Claus. An attempt that seems, somehow, childish.

The boys know there’s more than one kind of reality. They more or less politely derided my pretense that a small plush moose toy named Miles was “real” in the sense of belonging to a species of gigantic quadrupeds whose antlers would get stuck trying to fit through the door of their suburban home. But the boys assured me that Miles, when tucked into a child’s bed, really does keep dreams from turning into nightmares.

That’s the kind of reality Santa Claus has. Just ask his alter ego, psychology professor Carl Anderson, who’s been the face and voice of Santa for more than twenty years at Dallas’s NorthPark Center.

Beginning the day after Thanksgiving, Santa, aka Dr. Anderson, entertains crowds of children and parents daily from his small house on Level One near Macy’s.

When I heard him last week, the crowd of children began chanting “Santa, Santa,” even before he entered the house, and some adults joined the refrain as well during Anderson’s signature story about Trouble the Christmas elf. The storytelling continues at 10:30 a.m. daily (Sundays at noon) through December 23.

Pictures with Santa are free if taken by family members, but there’s such a line, you have to assure your place with a numbered ticket. Ticketing starts at 9 a.m. Monday through Saturday and 10 a.m. Sunday. (Children may also have their pictures taken by a professional photographer.) See www.northparkcenter.com/holiday/ for complete listings of picture times and other events.

Santa also invites listeners to read his family-friendly blog, http://santasays.org/ In answer to the often-asked question “Are you the real Santa?” he writes, “I let them know that whether I am or not I represent their being cared about and a wish that they be happy. A young boy asked (recently) ‘How do I know if you are the real Santa?’ I tapped his chest and said, ‘Listen to your heart’. That’s where our ‘truths’ lie.”

Adventure classics -- The man who almost wasn't

2011-12-16T07:33:00.001-06:00

“The Queer Feet”

by G.K. Chesterton

So entrenched is G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown canon that I was puzzled when I realized during a recent re-reading that the little priest with a face “as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling” wasn’t the original leading character. Instead, the much more elegant and more obviously sophisticated French police investigator Valentin played that role.

In fact, the first Father Brown story was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post edition of July 23, 1910, under the title, “Valentin Follows a Curious Trail.”

But by the second story, Chesterton had become so fond of the priest that he killed Valentin (by suicide), leaving Father Brown to reign supreme. And the other character as firmly associated with Father Brown as Dr. Watson is with Sherlock Holmes, the sympathetic master criminal Flambeau, disappeared from sight until the series’ third story, “The Queer Feet,” published in November 1910.

Aside from its now cringe-worthy title, “The Queer Feet” is my favorite of the entire canon (at least until I reread them all again). It showcases Father Brown’s combination of rationality and spiritual allegiance against the background of a plutocratic club whose membership today’s one percent would envy.

I won’t do a spoiler for those who haven’t read it, but the actual method Father Brown uses to condemn a crime and rebuke the wealthy is only one of the story’s delights.

Dudley Barker mentions early in his volume, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, that Chesterton’s favorite childhood memories were of his father’s toy theater. And despite his failure as a playwright, Chesterton’s life and writings displayed a deep sense of the theatrical -- a sense shared by other members of his family. Barker records that G.K.’s brother Cecil once considered abducting him to France, hoping to persuade him to leave his wife. (G.K. was devoted to her; his family couldn’t stand her.)

One aspect of “The Queer Feet” baffled me, I admit. Why didn’t anyone in the hotel hear the noise when, as Chesterton writes, “the window of the room behind (the priest) was burst, as if someone had passed violently through.”

The answer, biographer Barker would probably say, is as simple as Father Brown’s explanation of the crime (and accounts for a number of other oddities in Chesterton’s stories). He always wrote in a hurry. “Once he had dictated,” Barker writes, “he rarely made any corrections. . . the secretary had to get swiftly on to her bicycle and ferry the copy to the railway station.”

Intrigued by Chesterton and Father Brown? The American Chesterton Society’s website, www.chesterton.org/ hosts a Chesterton 101 series of lectures and sponsors chapters in several states, including Texas. For information about the Dallas-Fort Worth Chesterton Society, contact Tom Ridenour at wthomasridenour@sbcglobal.net/

(Next Friday: Wear a flower in your hair when we look at Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse’s 1927 gem that became a 1960’s psychedelic favorite.)

Wordcraft -- Resolution number 2: Join other writers

2011-12-14T08:44:00.004-06:00

It’s still December and you’re already making your second writing resolution for 2012. Feel proud of yourself as you join a writers’ workshop. And then faint from terror.

I’ve been a fairly regular member of a workshop, at the Dallas Writer’s Garret, since 2007 and can honestly say that by the last couple of meetings I’ve been able to resist the urge to lock myself in the restroom before my turn came to read. Because putting your work out there is scary. It’s amazing that we writers hope for publication, when our work may be seen by thousands of people, but fear putting it before a dozen.

But those dozen, of course, are the ones you see face to face. The ones who say things about your writing that ring in your ears. That’s the terrifying part, but it’s also the helpful part. I’ve heard unpublished writing at conventions, and the stories from writers who attended writers’ groups were better than those who hadn’t. It’s hard to be objective about our own work. We need to enlist the eyes and ears of others as well.

(There are online groups as well, but nothing quite beats the physical presence of other group members.)

After I had tried writing fiction for about a year and family members started to avoid me for fear I’d ask them to read my stuff, I realized I needed to find other writers. But how? An internet search turned up some possibilities, but for those of you in North Texas, I’ll list some I can vouch for from personal experience.

-- The Dallas Writer’s Garret. Moving from its current East Dallas location in January, but check www.writersgarret.org/ for the new place and times.
The late Texas Poet Laureate Jack Myers and his wife Thea Temple founded the Garret, which has its own education program as well as sponsoring writing workshops. Attendance at the workshops (called Stone Soups) is free for first-timers, $3 thereafter. Garret members also enjoy unlimited free attendance.

-- DFW Writers’ Workshop. Meets every Wednesday evening at 508 Simmons Street in Euless, Texas. Non-members may visit twice a year to observe but reading and critiquing is limited to members. Dues are $100 annually, prorated quarterly. DFWWW also sponsors a convention I’ll say more about in a later post. See www.dfwwritersworksho.org/ or call 817-714-6573.

-- North Texas Speculative Fiction Workshop. Meets the second Saturday of each month except December at the Hurst Barnes & Noble Bookstore, 861 NE Mall Blvd., in Hurst, Texas. DFWWW member Pat Hauldren (Alley) is the founder and moderator. It was free when I attended a few years ago and I that’s still the case. See www.ntsfw.com/ This group (and several others) are also on
www.meetup.com/

Contest deadlines -- December 15 (tomorrow!) is the deadline for the first short story competition from Short-Story.me. Contest fee is $5. See the site, www.short-story.me/ for details. (And check out my fantasy story “Shaman” from 2010 while you’re there.)

Also due December 15 -- Entries for SheWrites Young Adult Novel contest, whose proceeds benefit Girls Write Now. See www.shewrites.com/ for details (even if you’re a guy).

(Next Wednesday: Resolution number 3 -- find homes for your stories.)

Totally Texas -- Santa arrives on a fire engine

2011-12-12T08:43:00.000-06:00

Richardson’s Santa’s Village

Richardson City Hall

411 W. Arapaho

I hope this season’s final installment of Richardson’s Santa’s Village has weather as pretty as the past weekend’s. The child-sized village of more than a dozen brightly-colored buildings hosts Santa and his helpers again this Thursday through Sunday, December 15-18, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Santa arrives in holiday style on a big red fire engine promptly at 6, to the sound of sirens, and the line for photos with him quickly stretches around the tiny house with its white picket fence. Signs caution that Santa must leave by 9 p.m. for a reindeer feeding, but there’s plenty to do between his arrival and departure.

My daughter and son-in-law brought their twin boys, who particularly liked Santa’s Pet Shop, with puppies available for adoption from the Richardson Animal Shelter; and the Beary Good Hospital, where they got weighed and measured (and received small toy bags as well). And then there was the K-ELF TV station, the reindeer shed, the ornament factory, and more.

Volunteers dressed as cartoon figures and toys stroll the grounds for more chat with kids and photo ops for their parents. Although the village is only staffed three weekends during December, it is lighted nightly and also open to the public for strolling and photographs during the day.

I got to the village between Richardson’s city hall and library only a few minutes past six, to find the parking lots already nearly full. Adjacent bank and post office lots also fill quickly, so either come early or wear comfortable shoes and be prepared to walk a few blocks from business parking. (It’s wise as well as polite to ask first.)

Admission to the village is free. If the weather is threatening, check for possible closings at www.cor.net/SantasHomepage.aspx?id=4124 or call the recorded message line at 972-744-4300 after 5 p.m.

Also in Richardson: Joel’s Christmas Train -- an electric train large enough to ride on runs through Joel Occhiuzzo’s backyard at 156 Hidden Circle from 6 - 10 p.m. nightly through New Year’s, weather permitting. The train runs around a lighted, theme-park style center. There are no tickets to buy, but with an estimated 600-800 passengers nightly, Mr. Occhiuzzo appreciates (nondeductible) donations. For more information, see www.holidayexpressridingtrain.wordpress.com/

Adventure classics -- Love and a broken bridge

2011-12-09T08:08:00.000-06:00

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

by Thornton Wilder

In the conclusion of Thornton Wilder’s novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a character mediates on the meaning uniting the five victims of an apparently meaningless accident and finds it to be love.

“. . . There is a land of the living and a land of the dead (she thought) and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

It was the kind of message that won thirty-one-year-old Wilder his first of three Pulitzer Prizes and catapulted him to popular success in 1928 (not always a given for modern Pulitzer winners).

Wilder movingly celebrates the love of siblings, of friends, of parents and children (whether biological or not). Could I possibly have been as old as high school age when I read the book without wondering why, of all the kinds of love that united the disparate victim’s of that mythical bridge’s fall, Thornton Wilder didn’t include sexual love?

Not until I reread it recently did the omission startle me. Perhaps the slight to physical love occurred because Wilder’s own experience, in the shadowy erotic world he inhabited, was too like that of another character, the Svengali-like Uncle Pio whose love for his protégé Camila can never be realized.

“(Uncle Pio) regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.”

Would The Bridge of San Luis Rey have been the same, I wonder, if Wilder had written it after he met Samuel Steward, aka Phil Sparrow and Phil Andros, through their mutual friend Gertrude Stein? (For more about Steward’s career as a writer, tattoo artist and
“sexual outlaw,” see, among other sites,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/books/26secret.html/) Steward died in 1993 at age 84 after outliving, among other lovers, Rock Hudson, Rudolph Valentino and Wilder.

Wilder’s older brother, divinity professor Amos Niven Wilder, wrote a brief (but almost impenetrable) memoir titled Thornton Wilder and his Public, which, tellingly, avoids any mention of his private life.

Its most poignant section includes a quotation from the most famously gay of foundational American writers, Walt Whitman. “Of the great poems received from abroad and from the ages. . . Is there one whose underlying basis is not a denial and insult to democracy?”

And Thornton Wilder concludes, “Democracy is not only an effort to establish a social equality among men; it is an effort to assure them that they are (neither) subjects nor low -- that they should be equal in God’s grace.”

Even, he dared not yet add, if they are gay.

(Next Friday -- G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown comments on society and spirituality in a story whose title makes modern readers do a double take, “The Queer Feet.”)

Wordcraft -- Resolution number 1: subscribe

2011-12-07T08:42:00.002-06:00

Here I ’m writing about resolutions for the coming year and it’s not even Hanukkah yet. What a grinch! But seriously, it’s waiting until New Year’s Day, when some of us are sleep-deprived, possibly even hung-over, that gives New Year’s resolutions a bad name.

So we wait until the last minute, jotting down vague pledges to lose weight, be kinder, get a new relationship -- maybe a new bank. Or find a job. Any job. Or promises to do stuff we know we’d never do. Because it hurts or it’s too hard (losing weight, etc.).

I found out longer ago than some of you have been alive that resolutions can be fun and easy and still be good for you.

Here’s a suggestion for resolution number 1: subscribe to a journal. Subscribe to a magazine to hone your writing craft or because it contains the kind of stories you enjoy and would like to write. These may not be the kinds of magazines you think are good for you. They’re the ones whose presence in your mailbox or inbox makes you read them cover to cover before you even look at the bills.

(I tell my mail carrier she doesn’t have to deliver the bills, but she says something about it being her job.)

Even if the magazine you subscribe to is a “just stories” one, it will help you improve your craft as you begin to notice how the writers you love to read do their job.

Publishers make all kinds of offers this time of year to get your subscription. Go to a newsstand, shake a few magazines, and see what offers fall out. Or tell those people who otherwise will buy you another pair of socks or, goddess forbid, a fruitcake, what
magazines you’d like to see in your mailbox over the coming year.

If you’re not sure what you like, look at the picture accompanying this post for ideas. (Just not at poor old Realms of Fantasy. I got an email while preparing to write this saying that they’ve gone down for the third, probably last time.) Online resources such as www.duotrope.com/ (or see link at the end of this blog) list sources of fiction and poetry, of whatever type suits your fancy. And you can often link to the magazine’s website to give it a free peek.

Online ’zines are even easier to subscribe to than print ones, and usually free. Subscribing to these is so fun, easy and cheap you may end up with way too many. Don’t let that stop you. Too much of a good thing can be even better.

(Next Wednesday: Resolution number 2 -- find a writing group. Writing doesn’t have to be lonely.)

Deadline for SheWrites’ first-ever Young Adult Novel Contest is December 15. Top five winners get advice on their book from agents. All proceeds benefit Girls Write Now, mentoring the next generation of women writers. For info, see http://www.shewrites.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network/ And yes, you can join SheWrites even if you’re a man!

Totally Texas -- Dreaming of fairy tales

2011-12-05T08:50:00.002-06:00

Holiday at the Arboretum

Dallas Arboretum

8525 Garland Road

I welcomed the warmth of blazing fireplaces when I toured the historic DeGolyer House at the Dallas Arboretum this weekend. Outside, the temperatures dropped and rain spattered. Inside, a childlike dream of decorations, along with greenery and masses of red and variegated poinsettias kept everything cozy.

Each year, the Spanish Colonial Revival-style house built by geophysicist Everette L. DeGolyer and his wife Nell Goodrich DeGolyer houses memorable holiday-related collections. In keeping with the Arboretum’s “Fairy Tale World” theme, this year’s display is entitled “It’s A Fairy Tale Holiday.”

Arboretum board members John and Kim Semyan loaned their collection of vignettes based on fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters, as well as seasonal displays such as “The Night Before Christmas” and “Jack Frost.”

A display of “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,” among others, adds whimsy to the living room’s Renaissance furniture and art. Successive displays continue through each room of the house.

My preference, admittedly, is for the DeGolyer House’s more intimate rooms. The proportions of the small sitting room near the master bedroom, with its white and pale blue walls, seem particularly suited to the delicate fairy tale figures. And the stained glass windows of the dark-paneled family breakfast room shimmer even in through the rain on boy puppet Pinocchio.

The house is open for tours 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily through December 31.

Photography is no longer permitted in the DeGolyer House, so I’m offering with this blog a nostalgic picture from a previous year.

Playhouses based on fairy tales will also remain throughout the Arboretum through the end of the year and a replica of Cinderella’s coach drawn by topiary horses stands outside the DeGolyer House, ready for photographing fairy princesses, and fairy tale-costumed characters wander the grounds daily from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The Arboretum is open daily (except Christmas Day) through December 31, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. For additional information and special holiday activities, see
www.dallasarboretum.org/
###

Also this week: Richardson’s Santa’s Village continues Thursday through Sunday, December 8-11, and December 15-18, from 6 - 9 p.m. The colorful village is located in front of the Richardson City Hall, 411 W. Arapaho. Free. Although the village experienced some rain-related closures this past weekend, the Weather Channel forecasts cold but clear weather for the coming weekend. See www.cor.net/SantasHomepage.aspx?id=4124/ for details, including any closings.

Adventure classics -- Light in every way

2011-12-02T08:33:00.002-06:00

The Light Princess

by George MacDonald

I’ll admit not catching most of George MacDonald’s sly satirical touches when I first read his mid-nineteenth century fairy tale, “The Light Princess,” in my family’s 1956 edition of The Junior Classics. But I knew that this story about a princess with a mind of her own -- light as it was -- was like nothing else I’d ever seen.

This wasn’t a princess who stayed obediently cloistered in a tower. Or whose idea of a rowdy night out was going to sleep for a hundred years. Not on your life. This was a princess who, when confined to her room, climbed out for a midnight swim.

And if a handsome prince happened to come along -- she wasn’t about to put herself out looking for one -- she didn’t worry about whether their friendship conformed to conventional Victorian standards of deportment. As long, of course, as he was a good swimmer. Swimming was her passion and water, indeed, was the only medium in which she could enjoy the freedom of not floating off into the atmosphere.

Because much as some of us may wish to register more lightly on our scales, this princess really was light -- a defect wished on her by a spiteful aunt, whose witchcraft had deprived the princess of her gravity in both the scientific and psychological senses.

Of course, she was able to regain her gravity by falling (one of MacDonald’s many puns -- and they are hilarious, not horrible) in love. And when her boyfriend the prince (he’s the obedient one in the story) offered to die by drowning to save her life, threatened by the actions of the same wicked aunt, the princess saved his life instead.

Given that the story is from the hand of the Scottish preacher turned professor turned author who C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien acknowledged as an influence, both the
obedient and disobedient have their proper place in the scheme of things.

Lewis Carroll, who would complete Alice in Wonderland with MacDonald’s encouragement, wrote in his diary in July 1862 about a walk with MacDonald. They took MacDonald’s publisher the manuscript of “The Light Princess,” which included, in Carroll’s words, “some exquisite drawings by Hughes.”

I was unable to find any of the drawings by Pre-Raphaelite painter and illustrator Arthur Hughes, but I’ve snitched one of his more famous paintings, “Ophelia,” to go with this post. If that sounds too serious, consider the description of the fairy tale’s light-minded princess: “. . .she would laugh like the very spirit of fun; only in her laugh there was something missing. . .I think it was a certain tone, depending upon the possibility of sorrow -- morbidezza, perhaps.”

“The Light Princess” is included in numerous other editions of MacDonald’s works, with illustrations by artists as famous as Maurice Sendak and actor Humphrey Bogart’s mother Maude Humphrey. But it’s also available online at
http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/George_MacDonald/The_Light_Princess/

Want to know more about George MacDonald? See
http://www.george-macdonald.com/

(Next Friday, a December of spirited adventures continues with Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Bridge of San Luis Rey.)

Wordcraft -- Being there, déjà vu

2011-11-30T08:49:00.000-06:00

During his recent appearance in Dallas, Stephen King bemoaned the fine points of a setting you can’t know until you live in a place. He visited Dallas during the course of extensive research for his book about President Kennedy’s assassination, “11/22/63.” And still there were a couple of items, both minor, that he said had gotten by him.

One was the local pronunciation of Oak Cliff radio station KLIF. Another was the spelling of the town of Killeen. Two l’s, not one as in King’s book, although he said not even his fact-checker caught the tiny omission.

His visit reminded me, on this last day of 2011’s NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month), of the importance to your novel’s setting of your presence in that setting.

I love researching in libraries, online or off. But writing stories and this blog has prompted me to go places I wouldn’t have gone to otherwise. And the experience of being there gives me a feel for the subject I can’t get otherwise.

How would I have known how King responded to Dallas journalist Lee Cullum’s quip about his greatest fear if I hadn’t been in the audience? How would I know how blue the lights are at a strip club if I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes? Or how dragonflies hover over the rain pools of a paupers’ cemetery?

Those of us who write fiction are, by definition, professional liars. But we have to tell really good lies. Lies that can stand up to the utmost grilling our readers can give us.

Journalist Bill Marvel wrote this month in the Dallas Morning News about the perils of photography in public places. I complimented him, confessing that I carry my camera everywhere, photographing such unlikely spots as Dallas Rapid Transit stations and the surroundings of the county hospital without incident. (FYI -- a portable toilet at one station looks like a great spot for my antagonist to dump a body.)

Marvel told me a lot of writers use their cameras this way. But be careful of the old pump house at White Rock Lake (a former city water source), he said. One of his readers was hassled by police for photographing it. Makes me want to go there!

In these last few hours of NaNoWriMo, consider stretching your word count by incorporating a description of your favorite site. Port-a-potties and all.

　

(For Stephen King’s answer to Lee Cullum, see my post for November 16, “Stephen King on changing history.” For Bill Marvel’s article, see http://www.dallasnews.com and search “opinion, Sunday Commentary.” The article title is “The illegal assault on photographers.” For my previous post on settings, see November 10, 2010, “Nothing beats being there.”)

Market update: Julia Carpenter, the go-to person for a book reading group I attend, found a new outlet for fiction and nonfiction at www.dallaswritersjournal.com/ A paying market for a wide range of material. Thanks Julia!

Totally Texas -- The weather inside's delightful

2011-11-28T08:33:00.001-06:00

The trees are starting to change color and you know what that means in Texas -- Christmas is coming! Of course, when we say “changing color” we don’t mean the leisurely way Mother Nature does it. We mean green to red in in two seconds or less. As in the Illumination Celebrations at the Galleria, 13357 Dallas Parkway.

Okay, usually I’m all “get outside, you don’t get any vitamin D sitting indoors,” but this weekend’s weather reminded me that sometimes the great outdoors isn’t all that great. That’s when we thank God and mass marketing for places with indoor entertainment. Preferably free. Throw in some low-cost exercise and all you need is chocolate to make it perfect. Preferably chocolate served hot after a rigorous ice skating session.

After watching the skaters (hey -- I couldn’t skate and shoot pictures, too) I wondered whether the calories burned in a skating session would cancel out the chocolate. Calorie counting site www.ehow.com says one hour of ice skating burns the same number of calories as jogging with lower impact (not counting falls). For a one hundred-twenty pound woman, that’s 381 calories an hour.

Up the intensity and you up the calories. The way national skating champions Ashley Cain, Josh Reagan and Amanda Dobbs will during their exhibitions at the Galleria this Saturday, December 3, at 5 p.m. Additional performances and skaters perform the following two Saturdays, all free.

Cain and Reagan are the 2011 U.S. National Junior Pair Champions. Dobbs is a U.S. medalist and international competitor. U.S. Junior National Champion Jonathan Cassar joins Dobbs for the December 17 performance.

Between skating exhibitions, you can watch the huge mid-rink Christmas tree do its multiple choreographed color changes daily at noon, 2, 4, 6 and 8 p.m. through December 24. (No 8 p.m. show on Sundays.)

Or take to the ice yourself. See www.galleriaiceskatingcenter.com for times and rates.

And of course, restaurants line encircle the rink, in case you succumb to the temptation to sip or nibble.

When it comes to ice skating in Dallas, the Galleria isn’t the only game in town. Downtown in the Plaza of the Americas, America’s Ice Garden is open daily, offering freestyle sessions and classes. See www.americaicegarden.com for details.

Plaza of the Americas, 700 North Pearl Street, is immediately adjacent to the Pearl Street DART train station and bustles during the week. However, be warned that during the weekend, virtually all of the Plaza’s restaurants close. You can brown bag for weekend skating sessions. Or you can stroll a few blocks to the downtown Neiman Marcus, 1618 Main Street.

This year’s holiday windows at Neiman’s include a maze of climbing tubes for kids. Free, this Thursday through Sunday (December 1-4), from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. The event repeats later during the month.
Neiman’s Zodiac Room restaurant is open daily except Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Neiman’s website is www.neimanmarcus.com/. However, I had trouble finding information about the window display there, and instead happened on a bevy of excited kids during a recent outing downtown.

Adventure classics -- Tessering with strangers

2011-11-25T08:28:00.002-06:00

A Wrinkle in Time

by Madeleine L’Engle

It’s not true that all books with the strength to become classics faced rejection. It just seems that way. Still, learning that more than two dozen publishers rejected A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 blend of science fiction and fantasy, amazed me. Still more amazing -- some Christian schools also banned Wrinkle and other books by the overtly Christian L’Engle from their classrooms.

Why? Some of her obituaries (and the popular culture site Hollywood Jesus -- www.live.hollywoodjesus.com/ ) blame her advocacy of universal salvation, the belief, as she wrote, that “all will be redeemed in God’s fullness of time.”

I think the more likely reason for the book’s initial rejections was that publishers in the early 1960’s just found it baffling. What begins as an apparently realistic novel for children -- what publishers would characterize today as young adult -- changes shape into an exploration of time and space through the semi-scientific concept of a “tesseract” -- explained in the book as a wrinkle in the time-space continuum.

And the guides through this wrinkling are a trio of old women who look like the popular conception of witches. And then, of course, there was a psychic known as the Happy Medium who reads the future -- kind of -- with her crystal ball.

So is Wrinkle science fiction or fantasy or Satanism? In a world now aware that Harry Potter is less about wizardry than the struggle between good and evil and that even Gandalf was an angel in disguise, it’s hard to imagine anyone mistaking Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which -- the beings who guide heroine Meg Murry and her fellow time/space travelers -- for minions of evil.

But publishers, parents and schools in 1962 may well have wondered how American kids in a country still reeling from McCarthyism and the sting of losing round one of the race for space to the Soviet Union were supposed to know the difference. Even the review from Horn Book, one of the most prestigious guide’s to children’s literature, noted that the rewards offered by A Wrinkle in Time were the result of its “unusual demands on the imagination.”

Somehow, L’Engle’s readers managed to sort things out. Wrinkle won a Newbery award (given by a division of the American Library Association) the year after its publication. And L’Engle went on to write a multi-part series about the family of its heroine Meg and her future husband, Calvin O’Keefe. And kids (as well as the cast of the TV series Lost) kept reading.

(Next Friday, a December of spirited adventure opens with “The Light Princess,” a tale of a heroine who lost one of womanhood’s least appreciated assets -- gravity. By L’Engle’s influence and fellow universalist, George MacDonald.)

Wordcraft -- Bones of a novel, part III

2011-11-23T08:31:00.002-06:00

With one week left in this November’s NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month), I’m hearing cries of anguish as even writers who have kept pace with goal of writing fifty thousand words in thirty days feel the strain. The main reason, I think, is starting the race without a map.

Okay, I’m crazy about structure. But I got crazy by learning the hard way how tough it is run a race without knowing where the track is. A reminder came earlier this fall at Pyr editor Lou Anders’ writing workshop.

I’m writing a contemporary novel, but, desperate to enter the science fiction/fantasy workshop, I pulled out the first chapter of a nearly decade old fantasy novel to enter. Despite some qualms, Anders liked the premise and characters, but when he asked for a pitch-length synopsis, I was stuck. The remainder of the novel sprawled too hopelessly even to summarize.

It’s coming together now, thanks to help from Anders’ one-day novel writing workshop.

I posted about the three-act format of screenwriter Dan Decker (author of Anatomy of a Screenplay) last month. But with only a week of NaNoWriMo to go, how about fantasy author Michael Moorcock’s suggestions for writing a novel in three days? Yes, THREE DAYS!

First step -- have a lot of people after the same thing. And make it something concrete. (Sorry, world peace isn’t achieved in three days.)

At first glance, this sounds like every fantasy quest plot. But the more I thought, the more it seemed to apply to a multitude of genres -- a search for a ring of power or a wedding ring. For Princess Leia or Rapunzel. For the evidence to convict a suspect or to clear a family’s honor.

Second step -- have a protagonist ready to walk out on the whole thing when something else comes along. Notice, you don’t need to open with the heroine’s birth. Just her moment of decision, her fateful choice, her call to adventure -- whatever term appeals to you. He gets an offer he can’t refuse. The doorbell rings and an old love appears. (Just don’t make it the alarm clock sounding. It’s been done too often. Trust me.)

Third step -- the end. (Wiping the sweat from your brow!) But don’t ignore the end. According to Anders, for the ending, Moorcock suggests looking back to the beginning and picking a character from the past.

I love having the end mirror the beginning. I’ve heard suggestions elsewhere to have the final scene echo the opening one, but with a difference. Bilbo returns to his hobbit hole, only to find all his possessions being sold at auction. Or, to look forward to Friday’s adventure classic, A Wrinkle in Time, the opening sentence, “It was a dark and stormy wind,” is permuted into the final one, “But they never learned what it was that Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind and they were gone.”

I’ll write more later about structure, and suggest you take a look at what author and former editor Kristen Lamb has to say at www.warriorwriters.wordpress.com/ But for now, watch out for the bones, and a happy ending to all!

Totally Texas -- Tower of Thanks-Giving

2011-11-21T08:18:00.002-06:00

Thanks-Giving Square

1627 Pacific Street, Dallas

In the days when I worked in downtown Dallas, the DART train I rode chugged every day past a mysteriously-walled park. A white spiral tower rose at one corner, a trio of bells at another. I finally became curious enough to walk over there. It was Thanks-Giving Square, one of the curious little oases of the heart of the city. One of the things Dallas actually does right.

Philip Johnson (also the architect of the Dallas memorial for President Kennedy), designed the park’s pathways to slope below ground level, concealing it from the sight of surface traffic. Its buildings are understated. Its waterfalls mask traffic sounds. When I walked in, Dallas felt a million miles away.

There’s a sheet of water, some understated buildings, trees and grass. From the park level, that’s it. It’s easy to underestimate the importance of water and shade and quiet. Unless you live or work in the heart of the ninth largest city in the United States, one which prides itself more often on bigness than humanness.

The park’s main entrance features a trio of bells, a multi-racial mosaic expressing the scripture, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and a gold-leafed ring large enough to step through with ease. At the other end of the park, the Thanks-Giving Tower rises in a spiral of white marble aggregate smaller than, but not dwarfed by, the surrounding city skyscrapers. It houses the a small, multi-faith chapel and the stained-glass Glory Window.

The window is the culmination of sixty-seven panels designed by Gabriel Loire of Chartes, France. The abstract designs of the windows spiral around the tower, their colors becoming brighter until they reach the apex. A booklet from the park invites viewers to lie on the floor for an unforgettable view of the design. (There are also chairs from which those less nimble may view the windows.)

In the center of the chapel, below the window, is a seven-ton marble altar supporting a glass bowl where visitors may place expressions of thanksgiving.

Although it is not longer possible to ascend the spiral, the abstract nature of the designs makes it accessible to those of any -- or no -- religious persuasion. Christian and Muslim worship services are scheduled regularly.

The park is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily, according to its website, www.thanksgiving.org/ , and easily reached from the St. Paul or Akard DART stations. An exhibition of the works of the Thanksgiving Expressions winners is on display through January 2, 2012.

Also this week: Trains at NorthPark, through January 1, on level two near Barney’s New York. Tickets $6 for adults, $3 for children and seniors, free for age two and under. Proceeds benefit Ronald McDonald’s House. See YouTube for video highlights from last year, www.rmhdallas.org for hours and details.

Tuesday, November 22, is dollar day at the Dallas Zoo. All admissions are $1 (regularly $12 for adults, $9 for kids and seniors), free for children age two and younger. Open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; $7 parking fee, or take DART for a $4 day pass. See www.dallaaszoo.com for information.

　

Adventure classics -- A book, a beauty and the devil

2011-11-18T06:48:00.000-06:00

The Club Dumas

by Arturo Perez-Reverte

A mysterious death leaves a beautiful widow. A wealthy businessman seeks arcane help to increase his power. And a shady hunter of lost books finds himself in league with, well, maybe the devil.

Not since Raymond Chandler has a detective story been as darkly intellectual as Spanish journalist Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas. And before Dan Brown, Perez-Reverte was hatching plots about secret societies and the awakening of supernatural forces that led me to slot this into “fantasy month” on this blog.

I’ve broken my own rule in dubbing a book less than twenty years old an adventure classic. (The Club Dumas was published in 1993, and translated into English in 1996.) But I’m tired of hearing people ask, “who’s that?” when I name Perez-Reverte as my favorite writer. Actually, I sometimes find this a convenient way to cut off people who ask me what kind of audience I’m aiming for with my own yet-to-be published adventure novel.

But ignorance of this Spanish writer among English speakers must surely lessen since the translations not only of his modern-day thrillers but of the historical adventures of his seventeenth-century hero, Captain Alatriste, played by Viggo Mortensen in the award-winning Spanish movie released in 2006.

Spanish speakers have already made the TV version of another of Perez-Reverte’s books, The Queen of the South, the most-watched novela premiere in Telemundo’s history.

The screen, unfortunately, was less kind to the film version of The Club Dumas. Released in 1999, Roman Polanski’s version was titled The Ninth Gate. Not even Johnny Depp as the lead could save it.

Enjoy the book, instead. The language is as lush as Chandler at his best -- “She was the type of woman who takes an age to light a cigarette and looks straight into a man’s eyes as she does so” -- is Perez-Reverte’s partial description of an easily consolable widow. And the literary quotations make an entertaining treasure hunt on their own as characters discuss Dumas, Conan Doyle, and Sabatini with equal flare.

Too bad Polanski’s film cut not only the subplot about the search for a missing Dumas manuscript but the literary references. Maybe the devil made him do it.

Want to know more about Perez-Reverte? See www.perez-reverte.com/ or exercise your Spanish at the sister site, www.perezreverte.com/

(Next Friday -- Adventure classics finishes a November of fantasy with Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. You’ll never read “It was a dark and stormy night” the same way again.)

Wordcraft -- Stephen King on changing history

2011-11-16T08:31:00.000-06:00

Stephen King couldn’t have appeared more casual as he strolled onto the stage of the Majestic Theatre in downtown Dallas last week to discuss his new book, “11/22/63,” about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on that date. Smiling and applauding crowds packed the auditorium, but I wondered whether he recalled the smiling crowds that had surrounded the soon to be murdered president.

Perhaps Dallas Morning News journalist Lee Cullum had the same thought. But to her question about what most terrifies the master of horror, he replied, with a deadpan expression, that the true horror was what might lurk in the back seats of all the cars people forgot to lock on their way to see him.

King’s newest book, however, isn’t about his signature horror genre but about the struggle of a man, Jake Epping, who finds a time tunnel -- a “rabbit-hole,” in King’s words, to the past, in the back of a trailer in a tiny town in Maine. A rabbit-hole he will go down in an attempt to prevent Kennedy’s assassination.

Prevention, of course, means knowing whether Lee Harvey Oswald, the man arrested but never tried for Kennedy’s murder, was the real assassin.

“From the book,” Cullum said to King, “it appears you are almost certain (Lee Harvey) Oswald acted alone. Why?”

“I’m afraid the conspiracy people will jump up and say ‘you lie,’” King admitted. “But I’m ninety-eight percent sure it was Oswald acting alone.”

The reason, he said, is the gun. “Follow the gun. It was Oswald who ordered the gun. He picked the gun up at the post office. His wife photographed him with the gun. It was only his gun.”

Still, King leaves room for speculation. If Oswald’s original intent was to assassinate Kennedy, why did he get a job at the Texas School Book Depository where the fatal shots were fired before Kennedy announced plans to visit Dallas, King wondered. What difference might it have made, if Oswald’s estranged wife had been willing to reconcile with him?

“There are forces that decide ninety-five to ninety-eight percent of our lives. The rest of it is wild.”

And why another book about the Kennedy assassination now?

At least partly, King said, because of his belief that history repeats itself -- and not just for his time traveling hero, Jake Epping.

King first tried to write a book about the assassination in the 1970’s, he said, but the experience was still too raw. The urge resurfaced after the election of Barack Obama, who King saw as paralleling Kennedy in many ways, including “the hate that surrounds him,” and with the rise of the tea party movement he equates with the political extremism of Dallas in the 1960’s.

But even for time traveling Jake Epping, the past proves hard to change. As Epping learns, “the past is obdurate. It doesn’t want to change.”

“I think (opponents) sensed in Kennedy the possibility of a real change in society and that scared them,” King said. And then he noted that despite the hatred, people cheered the president along the motorcade route. “The political atmosphere was very dark, but really, there was only one Oswald. But all it takes is one.”

Totally Texas -- Shots still echoing

2011-11-14T08:34:00.001-06:00

The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

411 Elm Street, Dallas

It was a journalist’s nightmare in the pre-mobile era of 1963 -- an incredible, unexpected story and no way to call it in. Pierce Allman and his co-worker Terrance Ford from local TV station WFAA were among those gathered in downtown Dallas to watch the car carrying President John F. Kennedy, then-Texas governor John Connally, and their wives when shots rang out.

Although they were only two blocks from WFAA (Channel 8), Allman remembered running into the adjacent Texas School Book Depository in search of a phone to call the station. He passed a nondescript-looking young man coming out of the building and apparently thought little of the chance encounter at the time. The young man was later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald, generally believed to be the assassin of President Kennedy.

And the unprepossessing, early twentieth-century brick warehouse where Oswald worked found a place in history when the rifle identified as the one that killed the president was found near a window on its sixth floor.

Almost unbelievably, the building continued to operate as a warehouse for school textbooks until 1970. The Sixth Floor Museum housing exhibits related to the Kennedy assassination opened in 1989 in space leased from the building’s current owner, Dallas County.

The museum is immediately adjacent to Dealey Plaza, the most visited landmark in Dallas. From the plaza, visitors can see the “grassy knoll,” believed by some to be the hiding place for a second gunman in the assassination and later covered with flowers by thousands mourning the president’s death.

The museum’s exhibits include an audio tour narrated by Pierce Allman, who recounts his brush with Oswald, and guides visitors through a vast collection of artifacts detailing the history of Kennedy’s brief presidency, his assassination and its aftermath.

The assassination is one of the events that those who of us alive at the time mark our lives by. I was a sixth grade student in a small town one hundred fifty miles away when a school administrator walked into the classroom full of us eleven and twelve-year-olds to tell us what had happened. We didn’t know how to react. As I sat recently through one of the museum’s short films about the assassination, I wept.

The museum open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas. Hours are 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday and noon until 6 p.m. on Monday. Admission is $13.50 for adults, which includes the audio tour. There is a parking lot adjacent to the building, or do what I did -- get off at the Dallas Rapid Transit (DART) West End station and walk about four blocks west. See www.jfk.org or call 214-747-6660 for additional information.

Adventure classics -- Questing for unicorns

2011-11-11T08:29:00.000-06:00

The Last Unicorn

by Peter S. Beagle

How should I read Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn? The dreamlike imagery of the book’s language almost begs to be read while under the influence of something. But the 1960’s era quest of the last unicorn on Earth to find the surviving members of her race resonates with echoes both of the Cold War and ecological disaster.

In case that sounds too somber, Beagle lightens the mix with comic skits that might have come from the likes of Monty Python. And although he states the idea for Unicorn came during an artistic retreat in 1962, when only in his early 20’s, the finished book resonates with a lifetime’s love for fantasy.

As the book says when bumbling magician Schemdrick outwits an equally bumbling outlaw, “. . . he had a good grounding in Anglo-Saxon folklore and knew the type.”

The same thing, apparently, could be said for Beagle. The book’s stream of references to mythology keep like-minded readers laughing. Or weeping, as in the scenes of the pathetic zoo of fantastic creatures in which the witch Mommy Fortuna imprisons the unicorn.

When my daughter was a child, we watched the 1982 movie of The Last Unicorn. I’m still moved by Mia Farrow’s voicing of the doomed love story of the unicorn, transformed by Schemdrick into a woman, with the son of her enemy.

Beagle, who also wrote the screenplay, has been in a long dispute with the company controlling the film. Fortunately for fans, at the New York Comic Con last month, he announced an agreement that will include a renovation of the film in time for its 30^th anniversary. Lest we forget, see the opening at YouTube The Last Unicorn, or through the link on Beagle’s Facebook page.

Also last month, at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, Beagle received a lifetime achievement award. And in Texas, fans this weekend (November 12-13) can meet him at Wizard World in the Austin Convention Center. Beagle says on his Facebook page that he’ll be at table 2505 in Artists Alley. For additional information, see www.wizardworldcomiccon.com/

(Next Friday -- Spanish ex-war correspondent Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas gets my vote for the newest adventure classic on this blog.)

　

Wordcraft -- Get your NaNoWriMo on

2011-11-09T08:44:00.001-06:00

I was chatting with a fellow Dallas Writers Garret member during the intermission in last week’s Orchestra of New Spain concert when the subject of NaNoWriMo came up. That’s pronounced “nan-oh-rye-mo”, short for National Novel Writing Month, although it’s now gone international. It’s an organized effort to get people to commit to writing 50,000 words of their novels during the month of November.

Mandy looked sympathetic when I confessed I hadn’t even signed up at NaNoWriMo’s official website . “You’re only four days late,” she said.

As I write this, I’m getting even later.

(Mandy will also blog about NaNoWriMo on November 10, at http://ordinaryaddictions.wordpress.com/)

Gimmicky though it sounds, NaNoWriMo gives a lot of us the incentive to get busy with that book we’ve always meant to write. Or the next one, or the one after the next one. Whining all the way about other commitments (I was cleaning out an old family house for sale), even I managed to add more than 10,000 words on my novel in progress last year.

The official website is www.nanowrimo.org/ ,where the highly competitive can also log in their daily word counts.

The whole point of NaNoWriMo is to turn off your inner editor -- the voice saying you must correct all the misspellings, the lapses in logic, the bad grammar and punctuation -- before you can move forward. The NaNoWriMo attitude is, just let go and write. Editing’s what the other eleven months of the year are for.

But if you need help getting started, check out www.io9.com/581467/the-7-types-of-short-story-openings/. The site titles these as openings for short fiction, but there’s no reason you can’t use them to start a longer piece as well.

I’m always skeptical of writers who claim not to have any plan for their books. My own experience from previously writing apparently without plan is that I at least knew who my characters were and had some idea of what would happen in the story’s course. (I always look for places and ways to blow things up.) But once past the basic idea of your novel, if you need help with structure, consider Kristen Lamb’s blog,
www.warriorwriter.wordpress/. Of course, I’ve blogged about structure, scene, and characters, but Kristen’s put it all in a connected series. Tell her I sent you!

(Next Wednesday -- Hear what Stephen King has to say about his newest book, “11/22/63,” hailed by Dallas Morning News writer Joy Tipping as “Stephen King’s Great American Novel”. At this writing, some tickets were still available for King’s appearance Thursday, November 10, at www.showclix.com/)

Totally Texas -- Henderson: syrup, hijinks & barbecue

2011-11-07T08:07:00.003-06:00

Heritage Syrup Festival

Depot Museum

514 N. High St., Henderson

Once upon a time parents didn’t worry about their children ingesting high fructose corn syrup -- it didn’t exist. Once upon a time children knew the thrill of gnawing lengths of cane, peel and all, on the way to school, covering the school bus with sweet juice. It was a simpler, if stickier time, and it’s back again at Henderson’s annual Heritage Syrup Festival this Saturday, November 12.

The cane in question was ribbon cane, a subtropical version of sugar cane that used to be widely grown in the South. The juice was extracted, within my experience, by mule-powered mills and a team at Henderson’s Depot Museum will demonstrate syrup making this way from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday.

But syrup making is only an excuse for the entire town to hold an all-day and late into the night festival. The focal point is the Depot Museum at 514 N. High St. The museum complex’s four-acre sight near downtown includes a 1901 Missouri-Pacific railway depot, caboose, and 1841 log cabin, among other historical buildings.

This year’s activities include storytelling, arts and crafts, and children’s activities, and conclude with a 5 p.m. until midnight street dance in Heritage Square downtown.

The syrup festival is held every second Saturday in November, but the Depot Museum is open year-round except on state holidays. Its mission is preserving the heritage of surrounding Rusk County, with emphasis on folk arts. The museum opened in 1979 with the depot itself and has since expanded to include the Republic of Texas-era Walling Cabin and numerous other exhibits. The museum also sponsors a Folk Art Day each May.

For additional information and a complete schedule of the Syrup Festival activities, see www.depotmuseum.com/

The Syrup Festival is one great reason to visit Henderson, which happens to be my home town. Another reason is Bob’s Bar-B-Que, 1205 Pope St., on the east side of U.S. 259. Robert Allen, whose picture accompanies this post, has owned and run it for more than thirty years, and it’s where my daughter and I eat when we visit Henderson. Some web reviews say it’s take-out only, but Bob’s actually added a sit-down eating room a few years ago. And when I was there in October, it also sold ribbon cane syrup.

Bob’s can be a little hard to find. If you miss it, call 903-657-8301 for directions.

(Note to readers looking for a source of ribbon cane syrup in Dallas -- I don't know of one, but local farmers' markets may have it.)

Adventure classics -- Return to Middle Earth

2011-11-04T08:45:00.000-05:00

The Hobbit

by J.R.R. Tolkien

Never underestimate the importance of bedtime stories. Fantasy writer Rick Riordan said he started his bestselling “Lost Hero” series because his son demanded more stories. Even more famously, an obscure professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University scribbled a line on the blank page of an examination paper he was grading. The line, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” grew into a tale he told his children.

And after the head of a publishing firm got a positive report on the completed story from his own ten-year-old son, Rayner Unwin, the tale became The Hobbit, published in 1937. The professor, of course, was J.R.R. Tolkien.

Although in Tolkien’s remembrance, that first sentence of The Hobbit seemed random, it drew on a fascination with languages dating back to his own childhood and on a personal mythology he had begun to write as an escape from the horror of service during the First World War and recurrences of the dreaded trench fever that flourished in the unsanitary conditions.

As he recalled in a letter, he was already writing the stories that would be the basis of the underlying history of Middle Earth “. . .in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.”

They did not, however, include any beings remotely like hobbits. And when Tolkien offered his publisher the stories that would form the Silmarillion, the verdict came back, “not commercially publishable.”

The work that would seal Tolkien’s fame, The Lord of the Rings, did include plenty of hobbits. The by-then adult Rayner Unwin guided it through its later stages despite the reluctance of his father’s firm to incur an expected loss on its publication.

As the Tolkien Society’s website, www.tolkiensociety.org/, reports in its understated way, “It soon became apparent that both author and publishers had greatly underestimated the work’s public appeal.”

A reminder of that continuing appeal came recently from British blogger Mark Lord (www.marklord.info/) spreading news of a new Hobbit movie directed by Peter Jackson. I also found a regular chronology of the film’s making by tracking the dates of www.youtube.com/ uploads (just search “hobbit film”).

Peter Jackson, also known as the man who brought the complete Lord of the Rings to the screen, will release the first of the two-part production December 14 in his hometown of Wellington, New Zealand. Hope it’s in my town by Christmas!

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a November of fantasy with Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Bonus for Texas readers -- Beagle will be at the Texas Renaissance Festival near Plantersville this coming weekend, November 5-6, and at Wizard World in the Austin Convention Center November 12-13. He’s also very accessible on Facebook.)

Wordcraft -- Kent stays true to historical fiction

2011-11-02T08:40:00.001-05:00

It’s always a pleasure to listen to Kathleen Kent, author of The Traitor’s Wife, the prequel to her bestselling novel The Heretic’s Daughter. She stopped by a Real Bookstore in Fairview last week to discuss her latest book -- and what she’s working on next.

I first heard her speak at the Dallas Writers Garret in early 2009, soon after the release of The Heretic’s Daughter. The hardback first edition with her autograph must have been printed before the novel hit the New York Times bestseller list, because there’s no cover blurb announcing its status.

Although The Traitor’s Wife was Ms. Kent’s first choice of a title for the prequel, it was initially published last fall as The Wolves of Andover. The title change occurred, she told her audience, because the publisher believed there were too many books already out with the word “wife” in their titles. The United Kingdom edition, however, retained the original title and its sales encouraged a recent trade paperback version in the U.S. with the restored title.

The Heretic’s Daughter tells the story of Martha Carrier, one of nineteen women and men hanged during the seventeenth century witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. The tale of the hysteria that swept the colony had been told several times, but never from the standpoint of a family member of the accused, until Ms. Kent wrote her historical fiction based on reminiscences of her mother’s family -- a descendant of Martha Carrier.

If Martha’s story sounds stranger than fiction, that of her husband, Thomas Carrier, told in The Traitor’s Wife, is even more fantastic. Family tradition insists that he was one of the executioners of Charles I who escaped from the Tower of London to the American colonies to elude assassins sent by the dead king’s son, Charles II and marry Martha Allen, later to be accused of witchcraft.

Although Ms. Kent at first believed her family’s stories about Thomas Carrier -- that besides being a regicide, he was seven feet tall and lived to be 109 -- were exaggerated, research turned up justification for the claims. The story in The Traitor’s Wife, she said laughingly, “is based on fact and the rest is the product of my fevered imagination.”

She was amazed to find at a reunion of the Carrier family after publication of The Heretic’s Daughter, that “so many of them had heard the same stories about Thomas.”

The man also known as Thomas Morgan the Welshman entered the new world “with two known regicides -- two of the judges of Charles I. He was gossiped about. There were rumors that followed him all over New England.” Carrier’s height was also attested to by contemporary news accounts of his death that stated two coffins had to be fitted together to contain his body.

Are there more books about the Carrier family in the offing? Maybe, Ms. Kent said. Although she is currently writing a book dealing with the post-Civil War Reconstruction era in Texas, she is interested in the story of one of Martha Carrier’s nieces who was kidnapped by Indians during the colonial period. For more about Ms. Kent and her books, see www.kathleenkent.com/

If you want to recite your own family’s stories with the art they deserve, check out the Youth Storytelling Festival this Saturday, November 5. Members of the Dallas Storytellers Guild last weekend assured the audience that the festival, with workshops and performances, isn’t just for kids. Registration starts at 9:30 a.m. at the Zula B. Wylie Public Library, 225 Cedar St., Cedar Hill, Texas. See
www.cedarhilllibrary.org or call 972-291-7323 ext. 1312.

More interested in writing than speaking? Writer’s Digest editor Chuck Sambuchino teaches a one-day writing seminar, also November 5, at the Trinity Writers’ Workshop in Hurst, Texas. See www.trinitywritersworkshop.com for details.

　

Totally Texas -- Pumpkin time at the Arboretum

2011-10-31T08:47:00.000-05:00

Autumn at the Arboretum

Dallas Arboretum, 8525 Garland Road

October at the Dallas Arboretum means pumpkins. More than 50,000 weird and wonderful pumpkins, fall squash and gourds decorate the gardens. This year there are also gardens made of pumpkin mosaics (Southern Living magazine’s October issue featured them). But hold onto your trick or treat bag -- there are whole fairy tale houses built of pumpkins.

The Pecan Grove showcases all of these photo ops. And since the Arboretum asks people to come in costume for their pictures, the grove and walking trails recently have been crowded with children dressed as fairy tale characters.

Halloween on Monday this year also coincides with the Mommy & Me Mondays events of the autumn festival. For children under 5, that means a petting zoo, arts and crafts activities and face painting from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and more.

Need any more excuses to snap those pictures? Take a photo of your children, or your favorite fairy prince and princess, in a life-size replica of Cinderella’s coach “pulled” by topiary horses.

The Arboretum warns that, because of the activities, Monday is its busiest weekday. But most of the crowd leaves for naptime by 2 p.m., leaving the gardens to older visitors until its 5 p.m. closing.

In spite of the pumpkins, my vote for the star of this fall’s festival goes to the Nancy Rutchik Red Maple Rill, opened this month. More than 200 Japanese maples line the banks of the rill’s cascading creek and its walkways. As always, there’s plenty of room for children to move around.

Autumn at the Arboretum continues through November 23 but the gardens stay open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except for Thanksgiving Day and Christmas. See www.dallasarboretum.org/ for additional information, including tickets and parking.

Also this week: Admission to the Dallas Museum of Art’s First Tuesday program is free November 1. Activities from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. are designed for children five and under, but all ages are welcome. See www.dallasmuseumofart.org for details.

Can’t stand to wait another year for the next Halloween? Stretch the fun with the Dia de los Muertos art exhibit at the Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E. Lawther Dr. in Dallas. The free exhibit runs through November 12 during regular Bath House hours, Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 6 p.m. See www.bathhousecultural.com/ for information.

Adventure classics -- Was Dracula Irish?

2011-10-28T08:46:00.001-05:00

Dracula

by Bram Stoker

With apologies to Vlad the Impaler, there’s a good chance Irish author Bram Stoker’s Dracula was, in fact, an Irishman. Before Romanian readers grab their wooden stakes, let me say I was at first skeptical. In his introduction to the classic novel, scholar Joseph Valente pushes past the story’s horror and now-obvious sexual implications to argue for a reading of anti-colonialism. In particular, a reading heavily critical of the treatment of the Irish by the British Empire.

I know -- Irish partisans credit their country with so many things, you’d think they’d not only kissed the Blarney Stone but had heavy make-out sessions with it. Irish-American historian Thomas Cahill even wrote a book titled, How the Irish Saved Civilization.

But Valente goes beyond suggesting that “Dracula” is a pun on the Gaelic phrase droch fhola (pronounced “drok-ola,” according to Bandubh Books blog, http://drochshuil.com), meaning “bad blood.”

“Although Dracula hails from Transylvania,” writes Valente, a professor of English at Illinois University, “(the) description of the landscape, the people, and the history all echo either facts or legends about Irish life. . . ”

There’s more, of course. Valente also wrote an entire book, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood, to argue his point.

I’d also add a consideration from the standpoint of a writer. It’s sometimes safer to make political criticism from a distance, as another Irish writer, Jonathan Swift, did in his criticisms of the fictional kingdoms of Lilliput and Brobdingnag. And Stoker had a lot to lose by criticizing the British Empire in the late nineteenth century in which he wrote Dracula. Although a believer in home rule for Ireland, for much of Stoker’s career he lived in London, working for actor Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre. Through his association with Irving, he mingled with London’s high society, who might have attended his theater less if they thought he considered them, well, blood-suckers.

It’s also possible that Stoker simply sympathized with two small countries on the western and eastern extremities of Europe whose struggles for freedom had gone unrealized for so many centuries.

Want to learn more about the Irishness of Dracula? See Valente’s book or Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne’s The Undead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula, both available at www.amazon.com/ As far as I know, Cahill’s book did not credit (or discredit) the Irish with inventing vampirism.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins a month-long look at fantasy, starting with J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and a preview of Peter Jackson’s movie version about the little people.)

More tales of horror: Dallas Storytelling Guild spins ghost stories at the White Rock Lake Bath House, 521 E. Lawther Dr., Friday and Saturday, October 28-29, from 7 to 9 p.m. Not for the faint of heart or pre-teens. Admission is $5 at the door. See www.dallasstorytelling.org/ for more details.

Wordcraft -- Reflections of young writers

2011-10-26T08:24:00.002-05:00

Six of us, volunteers from the Dallas Writers Garret, gathered Tuesday for the first round judging in a national program for young writers. For more than forty years, the National PTA’s Reflections program has encouraged American students, from preschool through high school, to explore their artistic talents.

It was my second year to be serving as a judge for the literary portion of Lake Highlands High School’s entries in the program. I have to admit to feeling a little nervous. Was I judging too harshly? Too leniently? Each of the thirty-three entries -- essays, short stories or poem -- received readings by three judges acting independently.

When we discussed our choices afterward, I was relieved to find we had a consensus on most of the higher-ranked entries. Now it was up to someone else to tally the scores and decide which entries advance to judging at the district, and, ultimately, national levels.

All entries were judged on their interpretation of the theme -- “Diversity means,” for 2011-2012; creativity; artistic merit; and mastery of medium. Our group found that originality -- the “creativity” area -- was where the higher-ranked entries broke out of the pack.

Although we looked at literary compositions, Reflections also accepts entries in the areas of dance choreography, film production, musical composition, photography, and visual arts. All entries must be inspired by the current year’s theme.

The National PTA gives up to five Awards of Merit and three Awards of Excellence in each grade division, for each arts area. The PTA also holds a competition to determine future themes. In Texas, the winning student receives $100 and has his or her theme presented at the 2012 National PTA Convention. But hurry -- the state deadline for theme submissions is November 5. For details on the theme contest, see www.txpta.org/

Interested in having your school, or your child’s school, participate for the upcoming 2012-2013 year? See www.ptareflections.org for guidelines. The 2012-2013 theme will be “The magic of a moment. . . ” I can hardly wait to see what it inspires.

This Saturday, October 29, herbalist Thea Summer Deer discusses her book, Wisdom of the Plant Divas, at http://debutauthors.wordpress.com On the site now -- her gypsy cold remedy, just in time for sniffle season.

Also this Saturday, the Dallas Public Library hosts its 6^th International Book Fair from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library. The Central location is at 1515 Young Street, at the corner of Young and Ervay across from Dallas City Hall. For a schedule of events, see http://dallasinternationalbookfair.com/

　

　

Totally Texas -- Robot dinosaurs invade McKinney

2011-10-24T08:56:00.000-05:00

Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary

1 Nature Place, McKinney

If I asked my daughter’s five-year-old twin boys to list their favorite dinosaur, it would probably be Tyrannosaurus rex. Still, when I wanted a picture of somebody shaking the paw of the animatronic T. rex at the Heard Natural Science Museum in McKinney, nobody volunteered. Except my daughter, of course. (She avowed a love of strange creatures from a young age.)

That said, the boys insisted that Mom follow the map from the visitors’ center to be sure they hadn’t missed any of the robot dinosaurs. The 46-foot T. rex joins several new life-size animatronic prehistoric creatures in the sixth annual Dinosaurs Live! Life-size Animatronic Dinosaurs exhibit that runs through January 29, 2012. The dinos move and roar (or otherwise vocalize) along the outdoor trails that also introduce kids and adults to the native flora of North Central Texas.

On our visit last week, the boys found some of the indoor exhibits closed for remodeling. But besides the dinosaurs, there are still exhibits of wild animals the Heard is rehabilitating and a butterfly garden of native plants whose colorful exhibits demonstrate to both gardeners and lepidopterists what can be done to create wildlife-friendly habitats.

In addition, the Heard has six and a half miles of hiking trails that wind through several habitats of the 289-acre wildlife sanctuary.

This Saturday, October 29, the Heard also hosts outdoor concerts featuring local artists from the Collin County Songwriters Association from 1-4 p.m. Admission to the concerts is included in the regular admission price. See www.heardmuseum.org/ for prices and schedule.

The Heard is open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. (Doors close at 4 p.m. to ensure everyone gets a chance to tour the exhibits.)

Also this week:

Friday, October 28, through Saturday, October 29 -- Palestine’s Fall Fest includes Texas State Railroad “Peanuts” ride with Snoopy and other events. See http://www.palestinechamber.org for details.

Friday, October 28, through Saturday, October 29, the Paris (Texas, that is) Antique Fair at Red River Valley Fairgrounds. See http://www.paristexasantinquefair.com

Saturday, October 29, through Monday, October 31, Half-Price Books’ 5803 E. Northwest Highway location in Dallas holds a haunted house from Saturday, October 29, through Monday, October 31, all day in the community room. There’s also a trick or treat scavenger hunt October 31 from 6:30 p.m. through 9 p.m. (while supplies last). See
http://www.hpb.com

　

Adventure classics -- Mother to Frankenstein monster

2011-10-21T08:51:00.000-05:00

Frankenstein

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Writing a novel is tough enough; tougher still when the writer is a teenager. But a first novel written by an unmarried teenage mother living with a struggling poet isn’t likely to be listed on any conventional pathway to greatness. Luckily, no one told that to nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who became Mary Shelley after the suicide of Percy Shelley’s first wife.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley probably wouldn’t have recognized a conventional pathway if she’d set foot on one. She was the daughter of eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and political philosopher William Godwin. Although the elder Mary died when her daughter was eleven days old, the memoir Godwin wrote detailing his wife’s unorthodox life -- she had another daughter by a lover prior to her marriage -- effectively overshadowed the reputation of her writing for more than a century. Considering that the younger Mary was increasingly estranged from her father and stepmother, few in the family could have been astonished when she eloped to Switzerland with the already-married Shelley at age sixteen. The young couple invited Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, along for company.

By the summer of 1816, Mary and Shelley (whose first wife would die that December) were again living in Switzerland. Their household included both their then-surviving child, William, and Claire, pregnant by Shelley’s friend Lord Byron. The Shelley ménage, Byron, and Bryon’s personal physician, John Polidori, spent the unseasonably rainy summer telling -- and daring each other to write -- ghost stories.

I can’t find any record that Claire accepted the challenge. Shelley and Byron wrote soon-abandoned fragments. Only Mary and Polidori finished their tales. Polidori’s story, “The Vampyre,” is credited with being the first vampire story published in English. Mary, of course, ended by writing a short novel originally titled, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Within a decade, all the participants except Mary and Claire who had shivered with delightful terror in the rainy summer of 1816 were dead.

Frankenstein was first published anonymously in 1818, with a preface purported to be by the author but actually written, as Mary commented later, entirely by Shelley. By the time she wrote her own introduction for the 1831 edition, she was struggling to make a living for herself and Shelley’s only surviving child. She had suffered through the deaths of three other children and her husband, and had barely survived a miscarriage.

These sufferings lend poignancy to the words of her introduction: “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone: and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more.”

(Not until the last decade of Mary Shelley’s century would any horror novel rival the reputation of hers -- Bram Stoker’s Dracula, coming next Friday in Adventure classics.)
　

Wordcraft -- The bones of a novel, part II

2011-10-19T08:23:00.000-05:00

Editorial director of the science fiction/fantasy imprint Pry, Lou Anders, promised the members of his recent writing workshop at FenCon a discussion of the three-act method for structuring their novels. Then he spent the first half of his discussion, based on Dan Decker’s Anatomy of a Screenplay book and classes, instructing us about characters. Did he misspeak?

He insisted he had not -- that the characters must come first in writing a story. “Page counts, events at act breaks, ups and downs are all by-products of proper Character Structure,” Decker wrote. “Putting the by-products first is writing backwards.”

Accordingly, in defining the functions of Act I (read: approximately first quarter of a novel), Anders listed the introduction of the main character, the villain (opponent or antagonist) and relationship character. In a screenplay for a two-hour movie, these occupy the first thirty pages. Within the first eleven to thirteen pages of the screenplay, the main character must make a fateful decision -- a yes or no answer to a choice that determines whether there will be a movie (or novel) or whether we’ll quit and go home.

Although the page numbers are for 120-page screenplays, I’ve noticed that even in 300-400 page novels the main character’s decision arrives almost as quickly as in a screenplay. It was a lesson all the workshop’s participants seemed to have absorbed. With rare exceptions, their protagonists made the fateful choice at least by the end of the first chapter.

The first half of Act II -- up to the story midpoint, whether for screenplay or novel -- consists, Anders said of “asking questions.” The act’s second half begins to answer those questions and ends with the low point that finds the protagonist as far as possible from the goal. The purpose of Act III is for the protagonist to fight from hopelessness to win the goal. The last act’s tension, Anders said, “is not for ‘will she win?’ but for what she goes through to achieve it.”

He reminded us that achieving a goal doesn’t mean the ending is always the happiest one. Using the movie Casablanca as an example, the main character, Rick, doesn’t walk off the screen with his lover Ilsa. He doesn’t get what he wanted. He gets what he needed -- redemption and purpose.

Writing partner Robin Yaklin (see her blog at http://debutauthors.wordpress.com/) and I are on a novel structure jag that includes Randy Ingermanson’s “fractal” approach. There’s so much more that after a break next Wednesday for another topic, I’ll be back with more ways to structure a novel, including additional suggestions from Anders.

(By the way, Anatomy of a Screenplay is temporarily out of stock at http://www.amazon.com but available at another online book source, http://www.alibris.com/ And if you read this before Friday, you’ll get to see a new Halloween skeleton illustration from another one of my favorite sites, http://commons.wikimedia.org/ Or see its link at the bottom of this page for wonderful copyright-free images.)

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Correction to Monday’s blog -- The Heard Museum’s Halloween event is this Saturday, October 22, instead of October 29, as originally reported. Tickets are available online for Halloween at the Heard, http://www.heardmuseum.org

　

　

Totally Texas -- Fall into beauty at Japanese Garden

2011-10-17T09:02:00.001-05:00

Fall Festival in the Japanese Garden

Fort Worth Botanical Garden

3220 Botanic Garden Boulevard, Fort Worth

It’s all too easy for me, living in East Dallas, to make quick trips to the Dallas Arboretum and overlook the metroplex’s other great public garden to the west -- the Fort Worth Botanical Garden. This is almost a sin anytime, but especially during the fall festival in the Japanese Garden at the Fort Worth location.

Descending the pathways into a world of lush plantings, with pavilions overlooking waterfalls and koi-filled ponds makes me forget I’m in Texas -- in the best possible way. The annual festival this coming Saturday through Sunday, October 22-23, adds events that make the setting come to life like a scene out of traditional Japan.

Amid displays of flowering chrysanthemums, visitors can see sakura dancers moving to traditional music; watch martial arts demonstrations; and attend a tea ceremony. Children’s activities include calligraphy, origami, face painting and paper making.

The festival runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, October 22, and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, October 23. Admission is $3 for those age 13 and older and $1 for children ages 4-12. Admission is free for children under four. Remember also to bring plenty of quarters for the fish food dispensers located strategically near the garden’s ponds. The huge, colorful and sociable resident koi are so used to being fed they head straight toward shore when they see visitors.

Free parking for this year’s festival parking is in the Linden Avenue lot off the Montgomery Street entrance closest to the Japanese Garden. See http://fwgarden.com or call 817-871-7677 for additional information.

The remaining outdoor portions of the Fort Worth Botanic Garden are open from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. during daylight savings time, so visitors may extend their stay to enjoy the other garden attractions.

Also this week -- October’s Free Third Thursday at the Trinity River Audubon Center, October 21, has an Owl-O-Ween theme. The day’s 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. all-owl activities include close-ups of live native owls and more, at 6500 Great Trinity Forest Way (formerly South Loop 12), Dallas. See www.trinityriveraudobon.org/

Also free on Thursdays this month, the Dallas Angelika Film Center at 5321 E. Mockingbird Lane (in Mockingbird Station), screens classic Hitchcock films 8 p.m. in the outdoor atrium. See http://www.angelikafilmcenter.com

Upcoming -- Halloween at the Heard Museum in McKinney. It’s this Saturday, October 22. Tickets available online at www.heardmuseum.org

Adventure classics -- A hanging and an old gringo

2011-10-14T08:31:00.001-05:00

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

by Ambrose Bierce

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Bierce is more famous for his often-filmed Civil War story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” or for his mysterious disappearance during Mexico’s revolution.

In a number of ways, Bierce’s life parallels Edgar Allan Poe's, including service in the army, a series of jobs with periodicals, and reputations for bitter literary criticism. But it was his writings about paranormal events that ultimately earned him comparison with Poe, a comparison Bierce detested.

Like Poe, he wrote horror because people bought it, but the two writers’ styles could hardly have been more different. As Carey McWilliams notes one of the earliest works about Bierce’s life, Ambrose Bierce: A Biography, “The method, in so far as it attempted to produce a ‘dominant impression,’ might be the same (as Poe’s), but the styles were of two worlds. Bierce’s style has nothing of the sonorous, rhythmic sweep of Poe’s best prose. On the contrary, Bierce aimed at clarity, precision, and simplicity.”

But precision and simplicity can be deceiving, as Bierce’s best-known story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” demonstrates.

It relates the story of Southern plantation owner Peyton Farquhar, condemned to be hanged near the end of the Civil War for sabotage. But was Farquhar entrapped by a spy, or merely warned of the consequences? As the scholars who edited The Short Fiction of Ambrose Bierce caution, “Readers -- in effect, all of us -- who initially misread Farquhar as the hero of the story put their feet on a path that leads to the shocking conclusion. . . .”

The atmosphere of journalistic realism was enhanced by Bierce’s personal knowledge of the setting, where he served as a Union Army officer in the Civil War. (Poe’s similarly-detailed knowledge of the setting for “The Gold-Bug,” discussed last Friday, stems from his own service on Sullivan Island in South Carolina during his army enlistment as a young man.)

The combination of realism and the ending’s psychological twist won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Awards for the 1962 French film based on “Owl Creek” and later shown on television as an episode of Twilight Zone.

It’s been reprised in a variety of settings, from a 1929 silent film to a 2006 DVD version, and seems as destined for immortality as the mystery of Bierce’s own death.

In 1913, at age 71, Bierce traveled to Mexico. He corresponded with his secretary, Carrie Christiansen, who later destroyed his letters after making notes of a few excerpts, as well as dates and postmarks. The last letter was mailed from Juarez, Mexico, in December 1913. Bierce was never heard from again.

Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes’s novel The Old Gringo (Gringo Viejo) fictionalizes Bierce’s disappearance and was adapted into a 1989 film. And Bierce lives on in additional films and stories, sometimes combined with elements from “Owl Creek.”

For additional interesting speculation, with photos, about Bierce’s fate and final resting place, see The Ambrose Bierce Site, http://donswaim.com/bierce-lienert.html/

(Next Friday -- Adventure classics revisits the progenitor of all horror stories, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.)

Wordcraft -- Bones of a novel, part I

2011-10-12T08:53:00.002-05:00

On the last day of the recent FenCon writing workshop, workshop leader Lou Anders wanted to teach us to write screenplays. Why, some participants must have wondered, would Anders, editor for a press that publishes novels, want to discuss screenplays in a nonscreenwriting workshop?

Because when he taught it to other novelists, he said, their beta readers went from merely sighing to weeping aloud at the climax of their books after putting the principles of Dan Decker’s Anatomy of a Screenplay into practice. And maybe because Anders, who has taken Decker’s classes, is a former screenwriter himself. And he’s the guy you’ve got to please if you want to get published at the Pyr imprint where he’s the editorial director.

Having struggled with the structure -- rather, nonstructure -- of the fantasy novel I pulled out of my files for the workshop, I was willing to learn more. I’d read enough books on screenwriting to be a fan of adapting the three-act structure of screenplays to the longer format of a novel. But I’d struggled not only with the structure but also with character relationships.

Protagonist I could pretty well get, although it helped to hear Anders point out that the protagonist’s desire -- the overriding reason for the story -- must be concrete. “It can’t be ‘happiness,’” Anders said.

Okay, but why, when I picked out a bad guy, didn’t he (or she) always work the way an antagonist is supposed to?

Surprise, Anders said, clicking through the stills from classic films that illustrated his talk. The antagonist is out to prevent the protagonist from achieving his desire, but he’s not necessarily a bad guy. So in the movie Casablanca, the antagonist isn’t the Nazi. He’s “good guy” Victor Laszlo -- because Laszlo and protagonist Rick want the same thing -- Laszlo’s wife, Ilsa.

And when Anders mentioned a third party, the “relationship character,” most of us looked knowing until he told us, this person isn’t necessarily the romantic interest. Instead, the relationship character is the one who accompanies the protagonist on his journey, has often “been there” before, and is the person to whom the protagonist expresses the theme of the story. Or who may express it himself. So in Casablanca, the relationship character isn’t Ilsa. It’s Claude Rains’ Captain Renault, who insists that Rick is a sentimentalist at heart, and who stays with him to the end, even when Ilsa leaves.

Those less steeped in older classics might find Anders’ analysis of the Batman movies more helpful. The relationship character is the Joker -- he’s always there.

Now we had a triangle of character relationships -- protagonist, antagonist and relationship (also known as dynamic) character. Need to expand the list of characters to fill the needs of a novel-length work? Give each member of the trio her own corresponding triangle, remembering that every antagonist and relationship character is the protagonist of her own story, every protagonist is somebody else’s antagonist or relationship character. Happy writing!

(But wait, is that it? Where are the three acts? Coming up next Wednesday, in bones of a novel, part II.)

　

Totally Texas -- Coming up roses in Tyler

2011-10-10T08:39:00.001-05:00

Texas Rose Festival

Tyler Rose Garden, 1900 W. Front St., Tyler

The waitress in Tyler asked if I was wearing rose perfume. I explained it was the effect of walking through the Rose Garden Center and, of course, the gardens themselves. The roses on my visit this weekend were recovering marvelously from record heat and drought. They were filled with enough blooms to scent the air and bursting with buds ready to open in time for the annual Texas Rose Festival this Thursday through Sunday, October 13-16.

The 10 a.m. ribbon-cutting Thursday at the Rose Garden Center, 420 Rose Park Dr. (adjacent to the garden), opens the festival. But the Rose Show, displaying more than 14,000 roses, will already occupy the garden center beginning at 9 a.m.. The show continues from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, and from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. Sunday. The rose show, as well as the gardens, are free.

Pageantry and glitz are as much as part of the festival as the commercially-grown roses that have filled fields around Tyler since the 1930’s. Although the coronation of this year’s festival queen, Morgan Elizabeth Rippy, is by ticket only, everyone may see her and her court Saturday at the morning parade and afternoon Queen’s Tea.

The parade begins at 9 a.m. at Glenwood Boulevard and Front Street. Curbside viewing is, as always, free, but there is a $3 admission fee for the parade’s end at Trinity Mother Frances Stadium (formerly Rose Stadium), 700 Fair Park Dr. The Queen’s Tea, as my waitress particularly wanted to know, is 1-3 p.m. at the Rose Garden, and is also free.

Numerous other events around Tyler are timed to coincide with the Rose Festival. For more information, visit www.TexasRoseFestival.com or call 903-597-3130.

Fall is a great season for roses in Texas, where all but a few varieties rebloom once temperatures drop below torrid levels. Also showcasing the queen of flowers this weekend in North Texas is RoseDango. It features The Rose Gardens of Farmers Branch, 2610 Valley View Lane in Farmers Branch, Saturday, October 15, and Chambersville Heritage Rose Garden at 7032 County Road 971 in McKinney, Saturday through Sunday, October 15-16. Admission is free. See www.rosedango.com for information and events.

In more of a roses, schomoses mood? Try the Edom Festival of the Arts, Saturday, October 15, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. To get to Edom from Dallas, take I-20 east past Canton to the Van/Edom exit (Exit 540). Turn right on FM 314. For more information and directions, see www.edomfestivalofthearts.com/

Ongoing -- State Fair of Texas continues through October 23www.bigtex.com/). Autumn at the Arboretum continues at the Dallas Arboretum through November 23 (www.dallasarboretum.org/).

Adventure classics -- Poe's cypher challenge

2011-10-07T07:46:00.002-05:00

“The Gold Bug”

by Edgar Allan Poe

Which is the scariest thing about Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story, “The Gold-Bug?” Dropping a large beetle through a skeletal eye socket or his maddening use of dialect?

The nineteenth century was the high tide of phonetic writing in fiction. Not since Samuel Johnson standardized the spelling of the English language were there so many spelling variations writers hoped would approximate their fictional characters’ actual pronunciation.

The practice forced readers to sound individual letters aloud for clues to their meaning. Nicholas Carr, the subject of my August 10 post, might have said it threatened to return the art of reading to a medieval level.

The practice of writing nonstandard English for speakers of lower social classes, with the snobbery and racism that implied, further diminished the practice’s standing. Nowadays, writers from those despised races and social classes are moving to reclaim their versions of English, but in more imaginative ways than phonetic dialect.

But as I write about my twenty-first century prejudices, I can imagine Poe sneering, so I’ll move to what won “The Gold-Bug” the hundred dollar prize offered by the Dollar Newspaper in 1843 -- the cryptogram whose solution was a map to pirate treasure.

Poe prided himself on his ability to solve coded messages. During his editorship of Graham’s Magazine, he wrote an article, “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” offering a free subscription to anyone who sent him a code he couldn’t decipher. He ended the contest, saying he had solved all the legitimate ciphers he received. Poe published two, purportedly by a Mr. W.B. Tyler, challenging readers to solve them.

But although Poe claimed to have found their solutions, nobody else did -- for the next century and a half. In 1992, the first of Poe’s published cryptograms was solved. In an attempt to solve the second, as well as determine the originator -- strongly suspected to be Poe himself -- a college professor decided to seek help in a manner typical of Poe. He held a contest.

Israeli-Canadian software engineer Gil Broza won the contest in 2000. The solution, needless to say, was more difficult than the one Poe wrote about in “The Gold-Bug.”

Scary cryptograms are great. But it wasn’t those that made me afraid to go sleep after reading Poe’s story as a child. That was done by the answer protagonist William Legrand gave to the question of the story’s unnamed narrator:

“Now there is only one point which puzzles me. What are we to make of the skeletons found in the hole?”

Legrand answered: “. . .it is clear that (Captain Kidd) must have had some assistance in the labor. But this labor concluded, he may have thought it expedient to remove all participants in his secret. Perhaps a couple of blows with a mattock were sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the pit; perhaps it required a dozen -- who shall tell?”

No visible gore, but how would you top that ending?

If you’d like to learn more about the solving of the Poe cryptogram, see http://bokler.com/eapoe.html

(Next Friday’s classic horror -- Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.)

　

Wordcraft -- What an editor wants to read

2011-10-05T08:50:00.006-05:00

Recently, Lou Anders conducted what he says on his blog was his first ever writing workshop at FenCon VIII in Addison, Texas. Few workshop leaders would be better equipped to tell us what an editor wants to see in the first pages of a novel. He’s this year’s winner of the Hugo Award for editing, long form, and the editorial director for Pyr books. He hears twelve to fifteen pitches for books daily, and he and his assistant at Pyr look at, by his calculation, a thousand manuscripts annually. Of those, Pyr publishes thirty.

After talking through a few of the nineteen workshop submissions, he tactfully formulated “the no prologue, no multiple POV (point of view), no unlikable protagonists rule” of things that turn off readers within the first few pages. Our starting goal as writers is to “give people as few reasons as possible to drop out” of reading a story.

What else turns him off? Perhaps surprisingly for a hard-boiled looking guy -- profanity. “I like to save profanity for the moments that count,” he said.

That’s partly because, he said, for all the emphasis on action in science fiction and fantasy, women and girls constitute the overwhelming majority of readers -- 75 to 90 percent. For YA (young adult), the reader demographic is even stricter -- teen girls and their mothers. Writers must master the art of “getting it past the mothers -- and getting the mothers to read it.”

So what does Lou Anders like? Contemporary sounding language, for one thing. Telling details, for another. He commended a writer for a passage in which a character flipped her long hair from under the handle of her bag, although admitting he might forget to add something like that because “I don’t have hair. . . (but) little tiny details that are realistic prepare people for the nonsense to follow.”

He also likes humor. “Find a way to be upbeat even when you’re downbeat. . .Even dark books have moments of humor, and the darker they are, the more humorous.”

And how to get those sympathetic protagonists? Not by making them pathetic or overwhelmed. But for a struggling character, “If we see what she’s given up and what she’s juggling, we’ll sympathize with her.”

Want more of Lou’s writing advice? See his blog, “bowing to the future,”
http://louanders.blogspot.com And check back here next Wednesday for his discussion of novel structure from a former screenwriter’s point of view and ways to break into writing.

Looking for markets? Don’t get tricked into forgetting these small publishers’ deadlines timed to coincide with Halloween:

CLIFFHANGER BOOKS -- Submissions window for its second anthology of Paramourtal romances closes October 31. See www.cliffhangerbooks.com
DARK TALES OF LOST CIVILIZATIONS -- Also closing October 31. See
http://ericjguignard.blogspot.com

NAKED READER PRESS -- Quarterly open reading period ends October 31. See www.nakedreader.com

Other deadlines at www.duotrope.com/ although Naked Reader wasn’t there when I last checked.

Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators, North Central/Northeast Texas, holds its annual conference this Friday and Saturday, October 7-8, at Fielder Road Baptist Church, 2011 S. Fielder Road, in Arlington. Authors, editors and agents will be there. See
www.scbwi.org for registration and details.

　

Totally Texas -- State forecast: Sunny and Fair

2011-10-03T08:46:00.001-05:00

State Fair of Texas

Fair Park, 1121 First Avenue, Dallas

It was the opening weekend of the 2011 State Fair of Texas, and the question at the forefront of all inquiring minds was: what, in the name of sanity, is fried bubblegum?

Okay, maybe it was the question at the forefront of my mind. And despite a momentary flinching, I persevered to find an answer. Of all the concession booths in all the fairs in Texas, I had to walk into the only one that offers it. Actually, I had to consult page 12 of the free guide book available at information booths in the fair to locate it. It was site number four on the Big Tex Choice Awards Finalists’ map, near Gateway Plaza. I was headed for Gateway Plaza anyway, to see Cirque Shanghai, whose Chinese acrobats, from the looks of them, seldom consume fried foods. Much less fried bubblegum.

It didn’t look the way I thought it would. Fair foods seldom do. Okay, they’re often encased in fried dough. But it seemed so innocent and cookie-like, I forgot all the advice I ever heard about not swallowing your gum. Beneath the sopapilla-like dough was a center of pink goo that smelled and tasted like the Double-Bubble of my childhood. And then, quicker than a pig race, it slid down my throat and was gone.

It might be fair to say it was more fun to eat than yummy. And at nine coupons ($4.50 in real money), a little pricey. But that buys you three gobs. Share with friends.

One other epiphany: it’s been a few years since I went to the Fair, before DART’s Greenline trains stopped at the front gate. For somebody brought up on a culture of parking in people’s front yards or walking what seemed like miles to get from public parking to the fair, this was a revelation. Despite previous problems with the relatively new Fair Park Station, this year’s transportation was a dream.

A few words of warning. If you buy the Fair entry/DART combo at Kroger’s, you may have to prompt the clerk to give you the $17 package (which would otherwise be $16 for a Fair ticket and $4 for a DART day pass). And if you change trains downtown, as I did, you need to look for those labeled “Greenline, Buckner Station” to get to the fair. Some trains are labelled “Fair”. Some aren’t. Ignore anything labelled “Special.” When you leave the fairgrounds, look for “N. Carrolton” trains to get back to downtown. And follow the advice of DART employees to move to the front of the stop. Front of the train cars were virtually empty, while those close to the gates were packed.

After several hours of pounding the fairgrounds, there was one other attraction I had to sample -- a foot massage chair. It was only a quarter (half a coupon in Fair money), but I’d give it a thumbs down. Maybe that should be a toes down. Save your money for the fried bubblegum.

The State Fair continues through October 23. Check http://www.bigtex.com/ for daily information.

Other ongoing attractions in North Texas:

-- Autumn at the Arboretum, Dallas Arboretum, 8617 Garland Rd., Dallas. Through November 29. See www.dallasarboretum.org/

-- Animatronic dinosaurs at the Heard Natural Science Museum, 1 Nature Place, McKinney. Through January 29, 2012. See www.heardmuseum.org/

Adventure classics: First rule -- don't get run over

2011-09-30T08:28:00.001-05:00

The Saturdays

by Elizabeth Enright

Missing parents are staples of storytelling for children since, apparently, people began telling stories. To a great extent, this reflected reality. An article in the August 2011 issue of Scientific American, for instance, estimates that for most of human prehistory, few of us lived past the age of thirty. But honestly, I didn’t realize at first that all the young people in this month’s Adventure classics blogs were missing at least one parent.

Today’s is no exception. The mother of the four Melendy children in author-illustrator Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays, died at the birth of the youngest child. The children’s father is often away lecturing. And despite having a live-in housekeeper, the Melendys live through most of the book without adult supervision.

Not that they spend any time worrying about that. Most of the book follows their adventures after they pool their allowances to let each Melendy have a solo Saturday outing. And what outings they were -- to art galleries and operas (brother Rush is fascinated by the mechanical dragon Fafner at the Metropolitan Opera),beauty salons and circuses.

Although Mr. Melendy cautions his children that “the first and most important rule” is “don’t get run over," the children are otherwise on their own in 1940’s era New York until the youngest, six-year-old Oliver takes an unauthorized trip to the circus that gets him brought home by a mounted police officer.

In last Friday’s post, I commented on possible links between the orphaned status of the hero and the family problems of author Robert Louis Stevenson. This week, I have to wonder whether author Enright’s experiences influenced the Melendys’ situation. Enright’s parents divorced while she was a young child. Her mother Maginel Wright Enright, sister of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, remarried, but her second husband died while Elizabeth was in her teens. Maginel was an accomplished illustrator of children’s books (a career her daughter initially followed). But Elizabeth noted in a magazine article watching her mother “through to glass doors of the little room she used as a studio, my nose snubbed resentfully against the pane, for I was forbidden to enter while she was at work.”

Perhaps her way of making peace with the abandonment she felt as a child was to displace it onto Miranda (Randy) Melendy, the chief and best-loved character of The Saturdays, with the dark, curly hair of Maginel, and the same propensity for art and creative untidiness. A girl like her mother, only present with her.

(Next Friday -- Adventure classics starts a month of Halloween horror with Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Gold Bug.)

Wordcraft -- Small press roundup

2011-09-28T08:34:00.000-05:00

So you don’t have an agent. Or she hasn’t been able to sell your stuff to a publisher. And you’ve thought about self-publishing but know it’s still frowned on in many circles. Is there any respectable way to get your long-form fiction or story collection published? Maybe even get money from it?

Small presses that don’t charge you to publish your book are out there. And I’m back from last week’s science-fiction/fantasy convention FenCon in the Dallas area with news of how to find them.

These aren’t vanity presses. You must offer what they want when they want it, follow their guidelines, and still write wonderful stories. The good side of this is, anyone who sees your story in print (or as an e-book) will know the publishers only accepted it because they expected it to make a profit. And they were willing to expend their own time and money on professional editing and distribution.

And they don’t charge you anything. The bad side of that is, they also don’t pay advances, only royalties. But if your book is as good as you think it is, it’ll end up paying you.

From the small press panel I heard at Fencon, I’m only listing those currently accepting submissions. But hurry -- the window of opportunity can be narrow.

CLIFFHANGER BOOKS -- Senior project director Kevin Hosey is accepting submissions for the second book in Cliffhanger’s Paramourtal series of paranormal romances. The submissions window closes October 31, 2011. See www.cliffhangerbooks.com for details. The imprint also has a series of original superheroes, currently closed to submissions. If you’re more interested in superheroes than romance, contact cliffwriter@cliffhangerbooks.com for future submission requests.

NAKED READER PRESS -- Senior executive editor Amanda S. Green insisted that the name only refers to the company’s motto of letting nothing get between readers and the story. It actually doesn’t publish erotica. But almost everything else is accepted for e-book distribution only, with more specifics at http://nakedreader.com/ Its next reading period is October. One month only. If your book isn’t ready by the end of next month, catch them the next time around in January.

ZUMAYA PUBLICATIONS LLC -- Editor Elizabeth Burton was at a science-fiction/fantasy convention, so she had to warn us that Zumaya’s list for these genres is filled through 2012. But if you write in other genres, see www.zumayapublications.com/

A personal note -- my rodeo story “Eight Seconds” is being reprinted in Alec Cizak’s Pulp Modern. The volume, including crime, fantasy, and Westerns, is available at www.createspace.com/3683805 with a very hubba-hubba cover illustration. Available on Amazon in about a week. If you just like Westerns, the story is also on Amazon in its original publication, Moonlight Mesa’s Award-Winning Tales.

On a less pulpy note -- my friend Robin Yaklin’s blog,
http://debutauthors.wordpress.com features live discussion with Ann Hite, author of Ghost on Black Mountain, this coming weekend.

Totally Texas -- Richardson rocks to Cottonwood art

2011-09-26T08:36:00.000-05:00

Cottonwood Art Festival

Cottonwood Park, 1321 Beltline Road, Richardson

It’s fall and temperatures are safely below the one hundred degree mark. That means it’s festival season in Texas. Richardson’s semi-annual Cottonwood Art Festival runs this weekend, October 1-2, at Cottonwood Park, located on 1321 W. Beltline Road, between Coit and Waterview.

A tent city transform the park twice a year as the festival selects more than 240 artists each spring and fall to exhibit -- and sell -- museum-quality work.

Although my grandsons loved last spring’s big metal animals and kinetic sculptures (that means, they move), for children, there’s also ArtStop. It’s an interactive children’s area where kids can paint a mural monstrous both in size and subject matter, throw clay on potters’ wheels, paint on tiles or draw on chalkboard easels, and lots more.

And Cottonwood is not just about art. Local bands performing rock, country, jazz, blues, swing and folk music will play from morning until 6 p.m. both days on the stage in the courtyard area near the park’s lake. Food and spirits are available in the courtyard. Outside, there’s always plenty of basic fair food and soft drinks.

The festival runs from 9 a.m. - 6 p.m. each day. It’s my favorite price -- free. Parking is also free, but mostly find your own along adjacent streets and shopping center lots. Bring comfortable shoes. And a well-behaved dog, if you have one. It’s a great time of year to walk around outdoors. For additional information and maps, see www.cottonwoodartfestival.com/

Also in Richardson this Tuesday, September 27, author Jamie Ford discusses his bestselling novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. Ford will speak in the Richardson Reads One Book event in Richardson High School Auditorium, 1250 W. Beltline Rd., at 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 6:45 p.m. Complimentary tickets are available at the Richardson Public Library, 900 Civic Dr. For information, call 972-744-4350.

Oh, and that other little event called the State Fair of Texas also opens this week. The gates of Fair Park open at 10 a.m. Friday, September 30, followed by a noon parade through downtown Dallas. The State Fair runs through October 23. See www.bigtex.com for details.

　

　

　

　

Adventure classics -- A flight through the heather

2011-09-23T08:00:00.003-05:00

Kidnapped

by Robert Louis Stevenson

I can’t help wondering whether prescience, coincidence, or simply wishful thinking led Robert Louis Stevenson to open his 1886 novel Kidnapped by having young David Balfour say, “I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning. . . when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house. The sun began to shine. . . .”

Seventeen-year-old David seems curiously happy for a young man whose parents were lately dead. Stevenson himself was only a few years older when he incurred his family’s displeasure for the formation of a club whose constitution began with the words, “Disregard everything our parents have taught us.”

Stevenson’s parents were not pleased. Stevenson’s biographer, J.C. Furnas, quoted his father as saying “You have rendered my whole life a failure.” Stevenson’s marriage in 1880 to an American divorcee ten years his senior didn’t improve his family’s opinion.

His wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, would soon charm the parents as she had Robert. And the subsequent publication of his son’s best known works also may have softened the elder Stevenson’s opinion. But not until his father’s death in 1887 did Robert feel free to seek a complete change of climate to deal with his ill health.

Kidnapped itself, written while Stevenson searched vainly for a more congenial climate, testifies to an affection for his Scottish homeland that endured despite its adverse effect on the lung diseases that had plagued him since childhood. Except for the beginning and ending, the novel’s plot consists mainly of describing David Balfour’s wanderings through the Scottish Highlands. But it’s not a description that would appear in any tourist’s brochure. Stevenson knew better than to sugarcoat the rigors of climate and terrain in the land he loved.

Stevenson added a final shock to his family’s sensibilities in his choice of a companion for David Balfour’s wanderings. After leaving his father’s house, David showed up at the estate of his miserly uncle Ebenezer Balfour, not realizing that he, not Ebenezer, was the rightful heir. Although a shipwreck finally thwarted Ebenezer’s attempts to get rid of David, the young man soon found himself a suspect in a murder and forced to flee in the company of historical figure Alan Breck Stewart.

And who was Alan Breck Stewart? An adherent of Bonnie Prince Charlie, failed pretender to the British throne, whose family, as Catholics, were anathema to the Presbyterianism of Stevenson’s family. Ironically, although Alan Breck failed to put Prince Charlie on a throne, David Balfour would never have survived to gain his own rightful place without the aid of Alan’s fictional alter ego.

(Next Friday -- I’m beginning to worry about the “orphan” theme emerging from this month’s adventure classics with young protagonists. At least the Melendy children still have one parent left, but that doesn’t keep them from setting the house on fire and other disasters in Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays.)

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Note to readers -- I have removed a comment linking to a website I have not had a chance to verify. Let me know if you have had any problems associated with links on this blog. -- Melissa

　

Wordcraft -- A magazine to balance your life

2011-09-21T08:34:00.001-05:00

It might seem that a South African immigrant who ends up in Grapevine, Texas, with a degree in computer science; starts her own magazine because she wants to interact more with people; and hires her first writers from craigslist would have no problem believing that strange things can happen. But when Lumbie Mlambo got a call from somebody claiming AT&T wanted to buy ads in her fledging publication Equanimity, she hung up. It couldn’t be real, she thought.

“And then I called back,” she said at last night’s Literary Mingle meeting, “because I wanted to see if that number was really for AT&T.”

It was, and the people at the other end wanted to buy full-page ads after seeing the first edition of the magazine at a Women’s Expo in Dallas. The magazine’s first print run was 20,000 and was labeled “special edition” because Ms. Mlambo wasn’t sure there would be another. After the AT&T call, she knew there would be. And another, and another. Get the idea?

Originally without a model, cover girl-ready Ms. Mlambo put herself on the first edition with the help of local photographer David Goff. Now, she said, people call her to ask to be featured. Suze Orman is expected to grace the cover of a Financial Edition in the future. The magazine has been available at Barnes & Noble bookstores, but Ms. Mlambo, its chief editor, wants to move into wider venues. Expect to see it in supermarkets soon. But if you can’t wait to find it near the checkout counter, you’re welcome to subscribe at www.equanimitymag.com/

The magazine’s website statement markets it for both men and women. Some covers of the glossy quarterly, subtitled “balance your life,” have the look of an up-scale women’s magazine. Others look like a cross between Forbes and GQ, as when “Top 40 under 40” entrepreneur Jordan Wirsz and gentlemanly etiquette author Enitan Bereola shared the cover spot.

Both men epitomize Ms. Mlamblo’s motto of “discipline.” It’s the trait that moved her father, who wasn’t able to finish school, to work longer hours to be sure his children could learn. She wanted to start a magazine that people could learn from, she said. And it includes departments on topics such as fashion, self expression, and giving for a cause.

Even though I’m a frequent scanner of magazine racks, I might not have learned about Equanimity without the help of Kat Smith, whose Preface Entertainment sponsors The Muse Literary Mingle’s monthly get-togethers for people in the Dallas-Fort Worth literary community. For more information on Literary Mingle’s monthly programs, see www.preface-ent.com/

　

Totally Texas -- Science fiction for the people

2011-09-19T08:24:00.000-05:00

FenCon VIII/DeepSouthCon 49

Crowne Plaza North Dallas,

14315 Midway Road, Addison

The fan-run literary sci-fi and fantasy convention known as FenCon returns to North Texas this coming weekend, September 23-25. It’s not just about wild costumes, although there are always plenty of those at the Con, now in its eighth year. Many fans, like the young man in the illustration for this post, design and make -- in some cases, build -- their own wearing apparel. And FenCon has workshops to help you get them right, concentrating this year on steampunkish Victoriana.

Not sure what steampunk is? You’ll know once you’ve seen the “Hustle in Your Bustle” demonstration on Friday’s program schedule. But even if you’re not into bustles, literally or otherwise, the convention offers readings and book signings by local and nationally-known authors, editors and artists.

Or fans can visit discussions on everything from choosing e-readers to the evolution of women in comics. From a discussion of cartoon characters Phineas and Ferb to a workshop on the making of professional-looking wings. Programming for children and young adults runs all three days as well and ranges from serious NASA science to arts and crafts projects on Harry Potter wands and the construction of dragons from chenille pipe cleaners.

The breadth and variety of programming prompted local CBS station KVTV to list FenCon VIII as one of the best literary events this fall in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Memberships for the entire event or one-day will be available when registration begins at the Crowne Plaza hotel at 9 a.m. Friday. See www.fencon.org/ for information on events and membership prices.

I’ll be there, participating in a writers’ workshop led by Hugo award-winning editor Lou Anders. Sorry, that workshop is sold out. But maybe I’ll see you in the panels or at a party or Saturday night’s costume parade. I’ll be the one dressed as a writer and you’ll be the one -- well, I can’t wait to see your bustle!

Other good stuff this week -- some of it free:

Rosalyn Story returns to Dallas Tuesday, September 20, to read and sign her newest novel, Wading Home. Ms. Story is a violinist with the Fort Worth Symphony and was one of the featured writers at SMU’s literary festival earlier this year. At Skillman Southwestern Library, 5707 Skillman Street in Dallas. Refreshments at 6 p.m., with reading at 6:45. Free.

Shakespeare Dallas is back at the Samuell-Grand Amphitheatre, 6200 E. Grand Blvd., Dallas, starting Wednesday, September 21. Enjoy Hamlet outdoors in the cooler fall temperatures. Times and ticket prices at
www.shakespearedallas.org/

Autumn at the Arboretum currently boasts nearly 50,000 pumpkins imaginatively displayed. You’re bound to find plenty of photo opportunities if only you can get the kids to stay still long enough. At 8525 Garland Road, Dallas. See www.dallasarboretum.org/ for details.

Adventure classics -- Last woman left standing

2011-09-16T08:19:00.000-05:00

Island of the Blue Dolphins

by Scott O’Dell

The protagonist of Island of the Blue Dolphins opens the book with a remembrance of the day sea otter hunters landed on her tiny island home. It was a day that would mark the beginning of the end for her entire people.

Scott O’Dell’s novel attempts to give a name and memory to the girl who would become known to history as the Lost Woman of San Nicolas. By 1835, conflict with the otter hunters had nearly wiped out the Native American tribe living on one of the Channel Islands off the coast of California. When news of the catastrophe reached the mainland, the Santa Barbara Mission sponsored a ship to resettle the surviving people of the island the Spaniards had called San Nicolas.

But when the ship left the island, the woman later baptized as Juana Maria (given the name Karana by O’Dell) wasn’t on it. The explanation for this oversight died with her, but the novel follows a story narrated decades later, in which she jumped overboard as the ship left and swam back to the island. O’Dell explains her action as an attempt to rescue her younger brother.

She soon found herself alone on the island, her brother killed by wild dogs and the mission lacking enough ships for a second rescue attempt. The brother’s existence and death were among the few facts that could be gleaned when another ship finally found her eighteen years later.

Island of the Blue Dolphins ends with the rescued Karana hoping to reunite at last with her family. But her real story was to end tragically. Isolated for centuries, possibly millennia, on their island, the remaining members of her tribe soon succumbed to diseases for which they had no immunity. And attempts to locate anyone who could speak her language, even among other Channel Island natives, proved futile.

Juana Maria, her true name unknown, became fatally ill only seven weeks after arriving on the California mainland.

Island of the Blue Dolphins, a Newbery Award winner in 1961, is the best known of Scott O’Dell’s many novels for children and teens. Its simple language and muted emotional tone make bearable the otherwise horrific plight of the abandoned young girl.

Only I wondered, rereading it recently for the first time in decades, whether the tone might also have been O’Dell’s attempt to write something the culture of the time considered an “Indian” voice.

But that was the beginning of the tumultuous 1960’s. By the end of the decade, Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize and the gates were opening to a renaissance of literature about Native Americans written by Native authors.

(Next Friday -- Young David Balfour searches for his sole living relative, only to find a miserly uncle who doesn’t mind selling him into indentured servitude in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped.)

　