Blackmoor Vituperative

I do not remember my biological father. I was two or maybe three when my biological parents split up, and I do not remember anything from when I was that young (my memory from before the age of ten or eleven is actually pretty spotty — I remember snatches of things, but there are large spans of time I do not recall at all).

A while ago, a friend of mine asked if I’d ever tried contacting my biological father. I said “no”. To be frank, it just never occurred to me. Why would I? He said I might regret it if I never tried to contact him. At the time, it just seemed like a senseless thing to do. Why would I bother trying to contact some stranger?

But after thinking about it a while, I decided to go ahead and try. What the heck? It might be interesting. I guess I was just curious. So I asked my mother for my biological father’s complete name and last known address. She had his name, but not his address. She told me the last city she knew of where he’d lived, but that was decades ago. Well, I was a private detective for a brief time, and that was enough. I found him in about ten minutes. Yeah, I’m pretty awesome. 🙂

I called him on the phone, asked if he was the man I was looking for, and told him who I was. He seemed a little taken aback, but welcomed the suggestion that we meet at some neutral place to meet and see what kind of people the other person is.

Well, that’s not going to happen. He called me back the other night, and said that he’d given it a great deal of thought, and he’d decided that 40 years apart is too long a span to get to know someone again. He said he had a wife and a son, and a good life, and that I was a stranger to him and there’d be no point in our meeting. I said I understood completely, and there were no hard feelings. I told him that I didn’t want to disrupt his life, and that I didn’t want anything from him, and that I didn’t blame him at all for not wanting to meet after all this time.

He seemed a little defensive. Maybe he thought I’d take it badly. He also seemed to have some unresolved issues with my mother. He said things like, “I’m sure you’ve been told a lot about me, and I want you to know that a lot of it isn’t true,” and “I don’t know anything about how your mother is doing, and I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know anything about her.”

I told him that other than his name and the fact he was my biological father, I hadn’t been told anything about him, and that I wouldn’t mention my mother at all if he didn’t want me too. Not a problem. I didn’t look him up to discuss her. He seemed to relax a little after that, and said that he’d be willing to answer a couple of questions, “within reason”.

He answered a couple of medical questions for me, and we talked a few more minutes. He said that he had a good life, he’d been married for 37 years and was proud of his (other) son, that he’d never been arrested, and so forth. I said that sounded great, that I’d been married 16 years, and that I also was happy and had a good life, and that I was glad that we had that in common.

At the end of the conversation, he said I could call him again some time if I wanted, and that maybe we could meet some day. I don’t think I’ll bother. I think my curiosity is satisfied, and what I told him was true: I really don’t want anything from him. I am glad I called him, though.

According to the BBC, Richard Gere aroused the ire of Indians when he kissed actor Shilpa Shetty on the cheek at a charity event.

An Indian court has issued an arrest warrant for Hollywood actor Richard Gere after he kissed Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty in public.

Gere, 57, kissed Shetty, 31, several times on the cheek at an Aids awareness event in Delhi earlier this month.

The court in Jaipur in Rajasthan state called it “an obscene act”, after a local lawyer filed a complaint.

It was not immediately clear how the warrant could affect Gere, who is a frequent visitor to India.

Shetty, who found fame outside India as the winner of Celebrity Big Brother in the UK, has also been asked to appear before the court.

Photographs of the clinch were splashed across front pages of newspapers in India.

Public displays of affection are still largely taboo in India, and protestors in Mumbai (Bombay) set fire to effigies of Gere following the incident.

(from BBC News, Gere faces Indian arrest warrant)

I think it’s sad that the culture that gave us the Khajuraho temples, which house some of the most beautiful erotic sculptures on Earth, is so uptight that they issue arrest warrants for public displays of affection.

The USA is pretty messed up, as far as our hypocritical neo-Puritan ways are concerned, but at least we aren’t that messed up.

The name of the protagonist in Spider Season (the novel I am writing) is “Rain”. That’s not her real name, but that’s a long story (the whole first chapter, actually).

I like to picture characters as actors. It helps me visualize. The actor I picture as Rain is Rachel McAdams. She has large eyes, a quick smile, an expressive face, and she seems mischievous.

I also happen to like her as an actor. I really enjoyed Red Eye. I am not sure McAdams will be the Next Big Thing (what’s she done lately?), but I do think she’s a talented actor and she’ll have a successful career.

Here’s some news about her next role:

“Rachel McAdams has signed on to star in “The Return,” a bittersweet drama about three injured soldiers who come home from Iraq and learn that life has moved on without them.

Collee (McAdams), T.K. (Michael Pena) and Cheever (Tim Robbins) end up on an unexpected road trip across the U.S., with Collee on a mission to bring her boyfriend’s guitar back to his family because he saved her life.

T.K., meanwhile, seeks the confidence to face his wife after a shrapnel injury that threatens his sexual function, and middle-aged Cheever plans to hit the casinos in a desperate effort to pay for his son’s college tuition.

Neil Burger (“The Illusionist”) will direct the independently financed project, which Lionsgate will distribute. The budget is less than $20 million.

McAdams, known for her work in “The Notebook” and “Wedding Crashers,” most recently appeared in “The Family Stone.”

Sounds like kind of a chick movie, but I’ll go see it. I hope she’s a brunette in this one. She’s a natural blonde, but I think she looks better with dark hair. Rain has unkempt dark hair.

Rain is a slim, pale human girl with an athletic, almost boyish figure (64" tall, 113 pounds). Her hair is a wild black mane that falls to between her shoulderblades before being gathered into a half-dozen long, slender braids. Her features are angular and mischievous, her large eyes and wide mouth giving her a vaguely elf-like cast.

I wrote that long before I heard of Rachel McAdams, but doesn’t it sound like her?

How times flies. I have written nothing on Spider Season for seven months. However, this weekend was RavenCon, and I attended a couple of writing workshops that I think really helped me with a couple of details that I’d completely overlooked. It also rekindled my interest in finishing Spider Season, at the very least. So to that end, I have downloaded yWrite and am organizing my various scattered notes as we speak.

I am up to about 4,700 words, not including notes. Gee, only around 95,300 to go….

My nephew Kai is a real-life Jack-Jack.

Tonight I used a coupon for a “large 3 topping pan pizza” from Papa John’s Pizza. I paid for a large pizza. What I received was a medium (10 inch) pizza. When I called to complain, I was told that I did receive a large.

Are they crazy? A 10″ pizza is not large!

I was told that if I did not like that, to call the customer service line on the box. I hung up, and looked, and there is no customer service line on the box. I called the store back, and they gave me a number to call, 888-907-0531. I called that number, and it is not in service. I called the store back AGAIN, and this time they said to send email to the email address on the box. I hung up, and looked, and there is no email address on the box. I called them again, and this time they just hung plain up on me.

Papa John’s has the worst customer service I have ever seen. EVER.

I have not been writing as much on Spider Season as I’d hoped. I need to put forth more effort to write more. Zelazny once said in an interiew that he aimed to write something at least four times per day, even if it’s just a couple of sentences. I am going to try and adopt this.

I did manage to get a few lines into the rape scene. That is going to be difficult. I have done a lot of reading in the past week of accounts from rape victims in real life, and frankly it’s pretty horrific stuff. I considered taking that scene out of the book entirely. But it’s her motivation for several short-term goals which are important later, and it also explains her aversion to intimacy. On the other hand, it does seem awfully hackneyed. I am sick to death of having a sexual assault trotted out in every book by every half-assed hack novelist as though it’s a requirement like a copyright notice. (I am looking at you, Piers Anthony). Am I vain to think that I am doing anything better?

I think I am doing something better.

Warning: spoilers follow.

I wrote another 1,000 words on Spider Season over the last few days.

I have several ideas I want to get on paper before I forget them.

Rain goes to a village where a werewolf is chained up and is going to be killed. He says he is innocent of the crime he is accused of, and Rain believes him. She finds out who really did it and saves him. Or maybe he really did it but she finds out that he had good reason. Or maybe he’s an evil bastard and he deserves to die.

The iron ring acts as a barrier to magic. Not sure if it works both ways. Maybe she just can’t affect anyone else with magic while she wears it. That’s what the antagonist sorcerer really wants. Rain thinks he wants the magic book.

When Rain meets Scratch, he asks her to name him. The naming of something has great symbolic significance, he says. Scratch pretends to be her familiar, but really he is the familiar of the antagonist sorcerer the entire time. He’s a spy, or a double agent. At the end of the book he chooses to be Rain’s familiar. The antagonist sorcerer commands Scratch to do something — pick up the magic ring and bring it to him, maybe? — and calls him by the name that sorcerer gave him. Scratch walks over to the ring (or whatever), and says that XXX is not his name anymore. His name is Scratch. And he gives Rain the ring (or whatever).

It is Scratch that suggests that Rain goes to the Ivory Tower and ask for Subreiland’s help. This is a ruse to bring the ring to Subreiland. Does he send her on three pointless quests to prive her sincerity, or does his underling do that? Or maybe she goes through trials on the way there.

I am going back and forth on terminology in Spider Season. On the one hand, I am already using “goblin” and “ogre”, and I will probably use “troll” as well. On the other hand, I am averse to using “elf”. It just seems so hackneyed. I have been reading up on mythical creatures from India, Persia, Scandinavia, and elsewhere: “asura”, “jinn”, “dev”, “huldra”, “kropel”, “haldjas”, and so forth. But some of these terms are popularly associated with images that may or may not have anything to do with their traditional mythical meanings (“jinn”, for example). Also, if I mix and match terms from wildly different cultures (Estonian “haldjas” and Hindu “asura”, for example), I think it’ll just annoy people who actually know something about mythology, and they’ll think I am an ignorant twit who is just using terms he found in a thesaurus without understanding them. Not an unfair accusation, really. So I feel like I have three options: 1) stick to English terms even though it strikes me as hackneyed, 2) stick with the terms from one culture (probably Persian, because I think fewer English-speaking people are familiar with those myths), or make up words from whole cloth. I really don’t want to make people learn a whole batch of vocabulary words just to read a silly fantasy novel. But is making up new words any worse than using existing words that people may not know — deliberately mis-using them, in many cases (much like Tolkien misused “wight”)? I guess I do have a fourth option: use common words and apply them to these creatures: “hidden folk”, “moon people”, “forest folk”, and so on. Bleh. I don’t really like that.

Maybe the simplest method is the best: use English words (“elf”, etc.), and be clear to describe their referents so that people won’t think an “elf” is a little man in a green coat riding an earwig. Sigh. It still strikes me as hackneyed. Maybe my problem is that it really is hackneyed — not just the terminology, but the entire concept of having human beings that aren’t quite human beings. People in latex appliances, to use a Star Trek metaphor. Maybe non-human creatures should be really, really non-human. The only problem with that is that the less human a character is (not just in appearance, but in behavior and speech as well), the harder it is for people to sympathize with it. Can we really empathize with an eyeless, six-armed creature that eats rocks and communicates through rhythmic stomping?

What makes this such a nuisance for me is that I have a character — a minor character — who is for most intents and purposes a conventional elf. He is definitely not human, but for the character to work he has to look almost human. He will probably be the only creature of his kind in the entire book (although there might be another).

When in doubt, go with the simplest answer. Use English.

Or maybe Estonian.

I haven’t done much actual writing on Spider Season over the last few days, but I have been laying a lot of groundwork: figuring out relationships, mocking up scenes in my head, deciding on plot points, and so forth. I have decided not to use units for anything if I can help it. Instead I will refer to a day, half a day, most of the morning; a pace, a day’s travel, a week’s travel; and so on. One unit of measure that I will keep is the “stone”, because that is sufficiently archaic without seeming too tied to our specific world. I could see people in a primitive society measuring things in “stones”.

I think the maguffin is a ring and a book. The book is magic: the ring is anti-magic. This is what protects her against the evil sorcerer that wants the book. But if the ring is anti-magic, how can she learn magic from the book? If she takes the ring off to cast spells, wouldn’t the evil sorcerer strike then? Maybe the evil sorcerer is a ruse to get her to go to the Ivory Tower. She needs to stay focused on her goals, though. She looks at this bit with the sorcerer as a distraction.