See You at the Movies

Tonight, finally, is the Academy Awards. The night when all the speculation ends. We had the elections, the Super Bowl, and now the Academy Awards. What will the so-called television news shows talk about after they’ve rehashed tonight’s red carpet and who’s wearing whom? Oh, yes, there is sequestration.

The Movies. I do enjoy going to the movies. The screen is big enough to completely fill my field of vision. The sounds surround me. The scent of popcorn saturates everything, including my clothes and hair. The lights go down and I am ready to be transported.

Well, after all the trailers and television show adverts, not to mention the local dry cleaners and pharmacies. Then there are the admonitions to silence our cell phones and prohibitions against texting. The requests that we properly dispose of our trash and the entreaties to not talk. But even public television indulges in ads and requests for donations. I guess it’s the sign of the times and a reminder that somebody has to pay for all this. (No, I didn’t forget about the price we just paid for tickets and refreshments. But, never mind, never mind.)

I have seen three of the nine Academy Award nominees: Lincoln, Life of Pi, and Les Miserables. All were done very well. Need I add that the books were better? But then books, by their very nature, have more time to do it better and bigger and in more dimensions than 3.

“But that’s not what I come here to talk about. I come to talk about the draft.” Oh, dear. That’s another song and another time.

What I did come here to talk about is the last time I went to the movies. A couple of weeks ago.

We went to see the re-release of Top Gun in 3D. I love this movie. It’s the nearest I’ll ever come to taking off and landing on an aircraft carrier. Next to lift off from Cape Canaveral, that has got to be the greatest rush possible.

The lights in the theater dimmed and I was ready to be transported along with a small crowd of perfect strangers.

The word perfect  turns out to be an imperfect adjective as applied to that particular audience.

Some man entered with his four-year-old in tow. A vocal, unhappy, four-year-old, easily frightened by 3D special effects. Then a group of noisy 20-somethings, male and female, took seats in the back.

I don’t know which was worse. The frightened child and his insensitive father. Or the young adults who thought they were sitting in their own living room and could spout intellectually limited witticisms during the love scenes.

Someday, when I’m rich and famous, I’ll buy out the theater and invite the public free-of-charge. I will set guards at the entrance to allow only people who are old enough to enjoy the movie—without regard to actual age—to enter.

I’ll have a nice cappuccino and sit in the middle, right up front. And I’ll be transported along with an audience of perfect strangers. 

The Wheel of Time

At last it is done. A Memory of Light is read and the Wheel of Time series is completed. Delayed so long by the time it takes to write and edit and publish books, then the reading interrupted by normal life intrusions, the epic fantasy finally ended for me this morning.

And so it is with A Memory of Light. Physically too large to hold easily and read in bed, this Final Battle sometimes dragged me forward, sometimes hurled me forward, and sometimes beat me down with such sorrow that I didn’t think I could continue. But like the characters Robert Jordan raised and Brandon Sanderson carried on, I had to see it through to the end. Whatever end that might be.

My journey through the Third Age began early in 2008, shortly after the announcement that Brandon Sanderson would finish Robert Jordan’s work. As a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, I had been forever after The Trilogy of the Rings, dissatisfied by fantasy fiction in general. I had never liked series. Most had characters about whom I did not care past the first book. And the stories got watered-down and I, quite frankly, did not care how they ended.

The characters in the Wheel of Time series are so well-wrought that they lived in my imagination parallel to the real people in my real world. I cared what happened to them. I needed as much as wanted to know what happened to them.

And the story. The story is truly epic. Written on this page, the word epic is so small, but it feels too big to be contained by this world. I’m sure the story of my real world, if there might be such a story, is also epic. But it does not present itself to me in a coherent beginning, middle, and end style that I can follow. The characters in my real world are so little known to me, even those closest to me, that I do not get to see more than snapshots and shadows of their thoughts and feelings, their anticipations and experiences. There may be a Pattern to my real life just as there is in the Wheel of Time, but I can’t see it. Here is the advantage of fantasy done well. I can’t see these things in my life but I can in the lives of the characters in these books.

Five years and fourteen books later, The Wheel of Time has turned as it willed and, I am satisfied.

Traditions

Traditions

The radio talk show was focusing on Christmas food traditions. The foods were from around the world, some familiar to me with my Oklahoma background. Some I’ve never heard of before, much less eaten.

The host said his family eats at a Chinese restaurant every Christmas. Visions not of sugar plums, which I have never seen or eaten, but of A Christmas Story and the Bumpus hounds made me smile. Then he said he’s Jewish. Now that’s something to think about.

And I like it.

The idea that Christmas traditions need not be exclusive to Christians is wonderful. In fact, no one need be excluded from having their own Christmas traditions.

We can all appreciate and celebrate peace and good will. We can all enjoy family and fellowship. We can all give and forgive. And none of these concepts require adherence to a particular religion or culture or food preference.

Maybe I should look into holidays that I do not now celebrate. Without a doubt we could all benefit by developing our own Hanukkah traditions or Kwanzaa or Diwali or Eid al-Fitr or Risshun. Or any festival from wherever-in-the-world that celebrates life and hope.

And, perhaps, we would be too busy celebrating to focus on division and despair.

Neil Alden Armstrong

On a grainy black and white television, I watched Neil Alden Armstrong step on the moon July 20, 1969.

People completely disinterested in the event filled the room. Old people whose first trip away from small-town Oklahoma was to go to WWII. And a baby less than two-weeks-old, visiting from its small-town in New Mexico. That baby’s older siblings argued and played with their dog. The baby’s parents, grandparents, and an assortment of other adult relatives chatted and cooed. I felt like I was the only person in the room who cared about the picture on the TV, being received in an American heartland room, live from the moon. And maybe that day, I was. At least in that room.

I knew that with that small step and giant leap we as a species were starting our emigration away from our natal planet.

We all come from a long line of immigrants. My great-grandparents came from the old-country. Someday one of my great-grand-children or great-great-grandchildren will say they came from the old-world. And their new world will truly be a new world, not just a new continent, or a new country, or a new neighborhood.

I do not believe that I will visit a colony on the moon. But I do believe that I will live long enough to see other people do just that. Average people. Not only highly trained, physically fit astronauts hired by and representing this nation or that one. But a geologist from a state university somewhere in this old world, going to do research. A teacher husband joining his doctor wife. He will be one of many to teach the colony’s children. And she will be one of many to provide professional support to the colony’s growing population. A population of miners and mechanics and technicians and restaurateurs and grocers and all the other people who make a community thrive.

That teacher will teach the children about astronauts from the 20^th Century who rode the ships into space. He may not take the time to teach them about the dreamers and the scientists and the regular people just like them who made it possible for humans to out-migrate from Earth. But he will teach them about Neil Alden Armstrong, the first human being to stand on the moon.

January 8, 2013. Make note of that date. The final book in the Wheel of Time series will be available!!!!

I guess this means I will not have to locate Brandon Sanderson and let the air out of his tires after all.

Of any series The Wheel of Time is the best example of the inherent misalignment of readers and writers. We can read faster than they can write…and edit… rewrite… edit… publish…distribute and be discovered by us, the reader.

I have waited so long. But not nearly as long as those of you who started reading WoT when The Eye of the World came out in 1990. You know, twenty-three years for fourteen books, really is not so bad. Especially if you consider that the author died before he could complete what he thought would be the twelfth and final book.

It just feels like forever when you’re caught up in the story and want to know what happens next. Will Voldemort get his in the end?

Excuse me—wrong series. You’d think that Harry Potter would have prepared me for Wheel of Time since I didn’t start reading WoT until after the final Harry Potter came out. Was that 2007, only five years ago? 

Yes, I came to the series only after they announced that Brandon Sanderson would be completing it. Forgive me, those of you out there who have been slogging away at this for long enough to become grandparents. Not to mention losing the author before he finished and not knowing that he had left sufficient instructions for someone else to finish it for you. Then not knowing if the relief author would have the stamina and fortitude to finish it right.

That we still don't know, do we? Check back with me the Ides of January.

Tor has kindly made available  some excerpts for those of us who cannot wait another minute. From the first chapter of A Memory of Light  http://www.tor.com/stories/2012/07/read-an-excerpt-from-chapter-one-of-a-memory-of-light and from the eleventh chapter http://www.tor.com/stories/2012/09/a-memory-of-light-chapter-11-excerpt

And the books are all so long, I almost hated to start each one. But then as I neared the end of Robert Jordan's books and the Sanderson ones were not yet available I slowed my reading to draw it out as long as possible. Repeating with each of the first two Sanderson WoT books. Then I would re-read in preparation for the next one.

Hmmm. If I started tonight, perhaps I could finish re-reading by January 8.

Maybe just the most recent four or five books.

I do have a life to live, laundry to do, a book of my own to finish writing.

“If you don't have time to read,

you don't have the time

(or the tools)

to write.

Simple as that.” 
― Stephen King

What are you reading now? What have you read recently?

Do you get as excited about your favorite author’s new book as you do about a new movie?

When was the last time you shared a book with a friend?

If these questions bring pleasant or passionate thoughts to mind, you may have the tools to write.

We need as many of our fellows’ thoughts and words as we can gather in and reshape into our own stories. King’s plots and Dickens’ characters. Austin’s romance and Asimov’s visions. We need Hawking’s history of the universe and Gould’s history of life.

What am I reading? Last night I finished Philip Margolin’s Gone But Not Forgotten. I’m in the middle of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. And I just got Carl Sagan’s The Demon-haunted World  and Pale Blue Dot. Which to begin first? It’s marvelous to live in the midst of plenty.

Look beside your bed, beside your favorite chair. Check your e-reader. Are you surrounded by humanity’s discoveries and dreams? If not, then you must visit your library, my friend. Or your favorite bookstore. It matters not whether brick and mortar or virtual. Just do it. READ.

Count the Squares

Count the squares

I’ve been thinkin’ again. You don’t know this about me. But I think a lot. Then again, you probably do know this about me, because it’s true of you, too. It’s the human condition—we think a lot. And I’ve been thinkin’ about what it is we think about.

My first inclination is to think that we spend most of our time thinking about problems, but I don’t think that’s true. I think we think mostly about solutions. Even in leisure moments we seek out problems so we can think about solutions. That’s how we read the papers. The front page so we can think about solutions to weighty state and national and world problems. 

But it’s the puzzles that we spend more time actually focusing our thoughts on. And the harder the Sudoku, the better. When we do solve the crossword puzzle, we enjoy our success, but not for long. A solution found sends us looking for another problem to solve.

The better mouse trap is never invented to make money or even to catch a better mouse. It’s the solution to the next problem.