StanleyWheeler

 

It wasn't 1814, but I took a little trip along with my wife down the mighty freeway.

We didn't take bacon and we didn't take beans, and we caught our daughter in a town that wasn't New Orleans.

We had a delightful time with the daughter as she made an important life-step with the assistance of some awesome folks. On the way home, we almost witnessed a freeway crash. A short distance ahead of our car was a big white truck--like a furniture truck. We were slowly gaining on the truck. A lone male driving an older white car came roaring up on our tail and passed us. Our car was a few seconds away from the point when I would move over to start my own maneuver. 

The old white car, instead of continuing on to pass the truck, jerked back toward the right lane. With two wheels, and half the car over the dotted line, and the odometer on his life expectancy rapidly clicking toward termination, the driver must have looked up or otherwise realized that he was about to adopt the rear end of the truck as his headstone. He swerved back to the left, hit the brakes, and dropped in behind the truck.

I passed both vehicles. The old car took the next exit. I suspect the driver had some clean up to take care of.

Of course we had more nice experiences--like planting peppers and tomatoes with the mighty fisherman of a previous epic entry, moving "organ toppers" with fisherman's spawn, hiking among the red rock, and eating at a variety of places with daughter--but I don't have the inclination to tell about that. So here's a picture of some ornamentation from a park.

On the writing front: I'm still looking for recruits for my Skirmishers. Sign-up by clicking on the Newsletter tab at the top of the page and responding to the call in my newsletter. In Death Bedrenched is about to go out to the Skirmishers, my advance readers, so don't delay. 

I''m pleased to have a couple more book ideas on which I'm anxious to start. One, will be a weekly project about a warrior-king. The other involves the moon, and will have to wait until book 5 in the Tomahawks and Dragon Fire series is finished later this year. The moon idea will continue to incubate until then--or I'll forget about it. The idea came to me while reading this:

As for the book itself, I think it's standard Heinlein. The heroes are competent (or trying to become so), driven men who will not be dissuaded from their goal. They overcome long odds and the voices of dissent. I was struck by the lack of descriptive detail in both tales. I try to run my descriptions on the lean side so that the movie in the reader's head can color the unimportant and supporting details according to their whim, but in these novels description was almost non-existent. Powerful story-telling eschews descriptions of every blade of grass, every cloud, every dish on the table, every speck on the wall, and, most importantly, every thread of women's clothing. Although I might have preferred more description in these tales, I would rather a piece of fiction suffer from too little rather than too much description. I feel the same way about commas--unless, I've, chosen, to make, a foray, into Shatner land.

Lastly, I've completed my vidangel watch of Outer Range. I started with high hopes. By the end, I was pretty "meh." The main problem with the show is that everyone is insane. There are no normal people in this show. Everyone makes stupid decisions, and compounds the problems with more stupid decisions and rash actions. I don't know if I'll even care by the time another season comes out, if it ever does.