"A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other works of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself."
--Thoreau

I suspect that some might disagree with Thoreau's statement above, but I won't. Steling W. Sill referred in a talk to Nicolas Appert and likened his development of food preservation, or canning, to the written word and books as the method for preserving ideas.

The following shaded text is an excerpt from that talk:

Someone has said that “books are among life’s most precious possessions. They are the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that man builds ever lasts. Monuments fall, civilizations perish, but books continue. The perusal of a great book is, as it were, an interview with the noblest men of past ages who have written it.”

Charles Kingsley said,

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead, from human souls we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away. And yet these [little sheets of paper speak to us,] arouse us, . . . teach us, . . . open their hearts to us as brothers.

Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, philosophy lame.

John Milton said,

Books are not . . . dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy . . . of that living intellect that bred them [Areopagitica]

Speaking of great books, I'm at 27K words on Power to Hurt--that's roughly a third of the way done. I finished the writing of an interesting aerial duel and a crucial attempt at purloining a powerful pebble. There are still problems for a couple characters at sea and Cartier's cache is still the main Macguffin for the rest of the cast--which continues to grow. 

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*

I helped with dinner tonight. Admittedly, "helped" is a subjective term. I didn't go into the kitchen to help; I was merely curious. I had heard a new sound coming from that part of the house. It was the air fryer or air cooker or something like that (why we need to cook or fry air is beyond me) that I've been trying to persuade my wife is the perfect mother's day gift from me--even though I had nothing to do with getting it. The heretofore-unused-machine was making a noise like a blow dryer caught in the garbage disposal. I wanted to see how she worked the new gadget. Before I knew, it she had me putting chicken wings into the thing. The contraption looks like the love child of R2-D2 and Nomad in gray and chrome with a drawer that cooks (or sterilizes). The experience ended like the picture** below.

Everything went well until my wife had me administer a dose of olive oil to the viands. The administering (or is it administration?) went fine; the aftermath went otherwise. While putting away the large (and mostly full) plastic bottle, it wriggled from my fingers. I had already opened the door to the lower cabinet when the bottle made its escape. The bottle fell tilted at an angle as I tried in vain to maintain my grip upon it. It struck the base of the open cabinet at about 60 degrees, taking the impact in the side. The plastic compressed enough to blow the lid from the bottle. Behind the lid came a great splorting warhead of oil which burst at the altitude for best possible dispersal to include me, the cabinet, the cabinet door, the contents of the cabinet, and the floor in its kill-zone. I may not be invited back; so I got that going for me. No, really. It slipped.

The wings were excellent. I approve of the R2-D2/Nomad heated atmospheric food prep apparatus.

*The picture (I think) comes from Lileks.com.

**This picture comes from the bleat comments of Lileks.com by a commentor whose handle is Flangepart.

"I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness."
--Thoreau


I cast a book into the chasm this week. I never heard it hit the bottom. Although that may sound like a reference to the way I publish my own books, it's actually about a book that I was reading which I cast off; I'm not going to finish it. The story ceased to interest me. I didn't like the characters and I discovered that I didn't really care where the story was going. It was a book that I picked up for free and thought it would be a quick read, a break from Brandon Sanderson's Oathbringer.  I saw that I still had 22 hours of Oathbringer left and I needed a break. Even a tasty main dish benefits from an interesting side dish. I chose the free book as the side dish. At about 40% or so through that book, I saw that I still had approximately 11 hours of reading left. I considered the characters--there wasn't one that I liked. The main character, while sympathetic, acted too foolishly to tolerate any longer--I really think his own people would have killed him. He was, I believe, about to go on and become mighty and powerful in a war that seemed too contrived to me and which featured that which has a tendency to push me toward the realm of daydreaming about whether I would rather have a root canal or a kidney stone--demons. It featured demons. So into the chasm it went. Many people have rated it highly and the author has a nice style. It just wasn't for me.

Brandon Mull spoke in one of Sanderson's videos about characters. If I remember correctly, he said something like, "I make up stories about imaginary people doing things that never happened, and I want others to care. How do I get other people to care about what a centaur says to a 13 year-old girl in my story?" (I've put that in quotes but it's not an exact quote). He placed characters at the head of his five point list for writing a great story. The story lives or dies by its the characters. One of my sample readers congratulated me on the excellent character development in the early chapters of Threading The Rude Eye (He said that he liked the battle scenes too, but this bit is about characters). He may not have heard the French girl's accent in his head quite the way I did when I wrote it, or admired her caramel colored eyes, or enjoyed the subtle and not so subtle insults delivered by the former Japanese peasant become-successful-English-businessman, but he did enjoy something about the characters. If he can find some interest and pleasure in learning about the players in my story, my creation has been at least partially successful. I'm confident that he'll like where the characters go and the arcs through which some of them will travel. The action and combat in a story are fun to imagine and to write, but if the characters don't matter, the combat and its results lack importance and impact.

I know what you're thinking:

Speaking of combat (which is my understated way of segueing into a completely different topic) I engaged in an epic battle in the ongoing campaign against the prolific growth of plant based lifeforms surrounding my home. It was the first battle of the season. The enemy had gathered in numberless hosts. The Craftsman warmachine fired to life with the first turn of the key. It did insist on a shot of go-juice, and a morale boosting harangue in the form of compressed air blasted into three of the four tires, but it performed without protest. While I listened to episode 2 of Supernova in the East from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast, the warmachine slaughtered the grassy foe with both blades whirling like twin cyclones that spewed verdant corpses like a grossly efficient abattoir roulant. (It occurs to me that "roulant" is not an English word; it should be--it sounds better than saying a "rolling abattoir"--although, "slaughterhouse on wheels" probably conveys the idea just as well but then I don't get to sound like a pretentious bore who slips in foreign words for artistic effect while attempting to fill that empty void where self-worth is supposed to be located. "Empty void" is redundant but I like it for the three syllable emphasis that using "void" alone would not achieve).

Finally, sometime this week I slipped in (meaning I "found time for," not that I "stepped upon and fell to the ground as a result")a little Charlie Chaplin. I thought this was a scream. My favorite scene was the duel/wrestling match. The title is "A Burlesque On Carmen." Enjoy it if you get time.

And uberfinally, the progress on Power to Hurt continues with the 14K mark having been passed.

"The more thrilling, wonderful, divine objects I behold in a day, the more expanded and immortal I become."
-Thoreau

Speaking of thrilling and wonderful objects, take a look at this:

Which you can get here (hatchet and knife not included). Immortality is looking me in the rude eye and I intend to expand. As far as the expansion goes, I fell short of my goal for the week on the sequel, but I did more than double what I had last week. I'm just over 8,500 words in -- so it's ten percent finished; I'm in chapter three.

As you can see from the picture, my paperback copy came this week, honestly I set the paper size larger than I intended so the book is a little thinner than I had planned. Rather than change it, I'll make each book in the series that size--and I'm looking for reviews. The ebook is only $0.99.

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On another thrilling front, I dismembered three corpses this week.

These three individuals had been hanging around my house for some time now. I was getting a little annoyed with the way they threw shade in my direction. I waited, knowing that I could get the drop on them without too much effort. When I started the chainsaw they quivered but were too scared to move. It was like they was rooted in place, I tell ya. I do got to confess that two of them were already dead and the third was so sick that it couldn't have been saved by even the best soigeon.

The first day, my son Paul Bunyan and I cut off all the limbs from the one what was still breathing. We was going to put the blade to the torso, and we did, a little, but we had inferior cutlery that wasn't suited to cutting through a body of that size. So anyway, my son knew a guy who had what we needed. He came back another day with the improved hardware and we cut down all three like it was the St. Valentine's Day massacre. It got a little messy but we didn't mind too much. My son did most of the cutting.

We piled the smaller body parts where we could put the torch to them when we get ready; the rest we're saving for special occasions to dispose of when we got family over and need something to throw on the fire. We like our celebrations. We'll put the torch to the smaller parts later this month.

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This seems like a good time to give a little review of The Highwaymen.

I saw it via vidangel so that I could filter out the unpalatable parts--which in the case of this movie was mostly language but you might want to filter some of the violence if you want to avoid scenes of bloodshed.

Costner and Harrelson play Frank Hamer and Maney Gault, the Texas Rangers who helped put an end to Bonnie and Clyde. The movie is shown almost entirely from the point of view of these two. If I'm capable of doing basic addition and subtraction (and that is a matter of reasonable dispute), I calculate that Hamer was 50 years old and Gault was age 48 in 1934 when these events took place. Costner and Harrelson play the pair as old men who appear to be in their 60's. It worked for dramatic effect in my opinion.

The film is stunning in a way that doesn't draw attention to that fact. The camera angles, broad shots and narrow shots, are excellent without resorting to peculiar angles or perspectives. The sets/locations are beautiful in a plain and apparently authentic way. I'm no authority on the way things looked in 1934, but the film looked good. The old cars are always beautiful. Notably, there really aren't any good shots of Bonnie and Clyde until they look up into the camera (which is substituting for the eyes of Hamer and Gault) just before their very timely demise. They look like a pair of jr. high school kids skipping class.

The Hamer-Gault relationship is done well but not over done. They share some nice banter. Harrelson is of course the more talkative of the two. His character in speaking with other characters provides background about the pair of rangers. There were a couple quotes that I wanted to remember--but didn't.

I've previously mentioned the 1967 Faye Dunaway, Warren Beatty Bonnie and Clyde movie. This movie is nice contrast to that romanticized version of the criminals. If you're looking to see the seated herky-jerky dance by Bonnie and Clyde to the rapid staccato of several machine-guns, you won't be disappointed--but that scene isn't as memorable for me as it was in the 1967 movie. 

“...Deal mercifully with any whose wounds are too serious to treat. Put tomahawks in their hands before you send them to Valhalla. We’ll escort the wounded to town before we continue the chase. First we’ll construct a pyre.”
--The last words we hear from the Supreme Commander in chapter one of the sequel to Threading The Rude Eye (Tentatively entitled, Power to Hurt)

All of which means that not only is the first book available, the sequel is underway with the first chapter nearly complete--and serious carnage happens. (Serious Carnage -- should be a cartoon character name).

I spent about 5 hours Friday night and Saturday morning working on the paperback version -- I got an email last night or this morning telling me that the paperback is now also live for purchase. I'll order my copy tomorrow and post a picture when I get it. I went to significantly more effort getting this one into paperback than I did with Smoke. It looked fabulous on the screen. I hope the finished product is even better.

I said I was nearly done with the first chapter; that's correct. The new books is at 4K--it would've been double or triple that word count but for the fact that the flu fairy paid me an unsolicited visit and I thought it unwise to allow my fevered brain and trembling limbs to venture into the fictional world of my creation and thereby inflict the characters with tribulations any more severe than I have already planned for them: Things will get bad--very bad--for Alex and the crew. No point in giving them the flu too.

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Finally, two unrelated items. 
First, from H.D. Thoreau:
"We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be."

Second, for no particular reason, a partially painted woodland Indian

Picture taken a week or two ago during actual game play of A Song of Drums and Tomahawks. The woodland warriors were victorious over my frontier fighters.