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It’s hot out there

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There it is again. You could make an argument that it sounds about like any other prop-driven aircraft, excepting the DC-6 has a low throbbing growl, perhaps owing to the weight 3,000 gallons of fire retardant it’s hauling. In some respects that sound should be reassuring. It means that someone is looking out for us, yet it’s thoroughly disturbing, because you only hear them when there’s a fire nearby.

Fire season comes every summer. Around here the worst of it usually seems to be in the springtime when folks are trying to clear away brush and the tinder-dry trees have yet to get a few good rain-showers. Further north, it tends to be worse later, in large part, because of increased lightening activity and much hotter, drier conditions.

As I listen to the fading hum of the aircraft engines, I start to wonder. Is this the year? I mean, it could be. Everything is green and we’re hardly in to May. In spite of repeteted threats, the daily appearance of ominous looking clouds have failed to do more than spit a few drops of rain for the last several months. Is this the year of the fire?

I’ve lived in Alaska for over 35 years, and I can’t recall ever having had spring this early. As a child I can remember hunting easter eggs in calf-deep snow. I may have been short and it was the granular dessicated snow of late winter that has a way of working it’s way into the top of your shoe and causing ankle freeze, but it was still snow. This year, my kids didn’t have an Easter egg hunt, but if they had, it would have been in above-freezing weather without snow under the swelling buds of the birches.

For years we’ve been hearing the phrase ‘early fire-season’. It’s been said routinely enough now I reckon it’s safe to just call it normal. Every one of those years I’ve heard it, I’ve wondered if wild fire will devastate the Anchorage hillside, reaching even into mid-town, displacing tens of thousands of residents. Perhaps, it will be Wasilla instead, burning through the sprawling suburban neighborhoods and even across Lake Lucille where flaming ash could alight on Sarah Palin’s house, causing even her to eat her words on climate change.

I don’t know, but what I do know is that every year, the feeling of danger is lurking just at the edge of my conscience. Sometimes it’s just general discomfort. This year, it’s a little worse. As I drove home listening to a report of the evacuation of Fort McMurray, Alberta, a northern city with a population of 80,000, I saw a jaw-clenching sight from the highway. A column of smoke, much too close to home, rising from the patch of land between the Knik arm and the Talkeetna mountians. It was not the smoke of a controlled burn. It was a wide band heralding the arrival of a potentially dangerous wild-fire.

As I thought of those people in Canada, with so little time to gather their most precious belongings and head for safe ground, I wonder, is this going to be my lot this year too? What will we do with the animals? If I have only 45 minutes to evacuate what to I take? Where will I go? How will many thousands of people evacuate on only three routes, two of which are only two-lane highways.

It also begs the question, how the hell did we get here? March used to be a bitterly cold bitch of a month. The past few years have been pretty damn mild, really. I understand that it’s an El Nino year, a year where warm ocean currents poke much further north than usual, but I’ve been through those before. They’ve been nothing like this. Is this what we can expect from climate change? Is this the shape of things to come? Will the fires continue to close in our our Alaskan urban centers until disaster? I expect the answer is yes. In spite of all caution and tireless heroics of our wildland fire crews, we could very well find ourselves watching as any one of the most populated areas of our state burns.

I know, perhaps this is all a doomsday scenario, after all the story is hardly a 3rd line note in the local news outlets, failing even to beat out an electronic-device sniffing dog, but as I sit and watch the thermometer outside my window with disbelief, listen to yet another DC-6 rumble overhead, and wait for the golden sky to turn hues of pink and orange, I wonder just how unrealistic it is. After-all, green trees before the end of April? Who ever heard of such a thing?

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Review – Book 2 of Embracing Entropy

You know what I never do? Review a book. Mostly, it’s because I generally suck at it. I want to say things like: Read it, you’ll like it. That’s not a review. I’m also one of those jerks that usually gives books I like 4-stars, with a few exceptions. I mean, like, Harry Potter, yeah, 5 stars, but most everything else I like – 4 stars. It’s just how I think. As a writer, I know nobody wants to see that, they want to see 5 stars. With that in mind, I read a book over the weekend that I want to talk about. Yes, I gave it 4 stars, and I like it and think you should read it. The book I want to talk about is a novella, Wish for survival, by Jessica Marie Baumgartner. It’s really the middle part of a trilogy of novellas that have been turned into a book Embracing Entropy which was released today (03/15/2016). I haven’t finished the 3rd book, yet.

I did a couple of brief reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, about the book itself, to be honest, these reviews are only a little bit more informative than: read it, you’ll like it. I’m not going to directly re-hash those because this blog is supposed to be about writing, and one really interesting thing about this book is the writing itself. Don’t get me wrong, the story is good too, and if you want to read it for just the joy of reading a good book, do that.

First off, it’s in first person present tense. If I were forced at gunpoint, or knife point, or just asked politely to choose a single piece of writing advice to dole out it would probably be: “Don’t ever, ever, ever write a book in first person present tense”. However, and this is truly interesting, Jessica M. Baumgartner pulls it off. It works. Why does it work? I don’t know for 100% sure, but I’ve got an opinion, but first another observation. The book isn’t just a series of events that builds to a climax where, against all odds, the hero pulls off a win. I mean, it is that, that’s what books do, but what I’m trying to say is that it’s from a completely different angle. It’s for this reason, I think, that it works. So what is the angle?

As a reader, you experience events through the ‘right now’ emotion of it more than a description of events that have already occurred. Thinking about first-person past tense, I’d argue that the focus on emotion wouldn’t be nearly so complete and might even be a little distracting. This style gives the flow a slightly clipped, raw feel, where the reader is bouncing through the emotions of the main character, it’s a bit like each event being a slightly larger wave crashing into the reader.

In spite of the unusual approach, the story is engaging and doesn’t prove a difficult read, it reads quite as well as anything else. As with so many cleverly constructed books, I did find myself stopping to ask: “What about…?” This happened to me when I read the Martian. For the first pat of the book, I found myself being not super impressed, until I realized that the writer was being intentional and, in fact, it was all very well done.

For most of us (writers), having a reader stop to ask a question is a bad sign. You don’t want that. In this case, I think that’s the point, perhaps not intentionally, I don’t know, but the reader isn’t meant to know the answers to a lot of questions. The main character doesn’t know the answers to the questions we’re asking, she’s asking the same questions, or would be if there weren’t more important things to think about. We’re supposed to be experiencing her part of the story through her feelings and the narrow band of what she can see. By the end of the book, I reached the point where I realize that the questions I was asking myself: Why are the bad guys attacking? What do they look like? What sorts of weapons are they using? didn’t matter. What really mattered was what the main character was feeling, the immediate need to resolve the right now concerns. Who cares about the motivations of the bad guys when a close friend might be dead? Does it matter what they look like if there’s no future for the children? That’s what is important in the moment, not motivations or the mechanics of the enemy weaponry.

See that? It’s the right now that’s important, and that’s why this story could pull off the first-person present tense, and actually, in order to have the same impact and feel, it almost has to be written from this perspective. We as readers are meant to be standing in the moment where we’re blind to so many of the events going on outside the direct sight of the main character.

So, from that perspective, I’d recommend reading this one. Not just because the story is solid, but because the execution of the story is unique and compelling.

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We’re too young for this nonsense.

Before I start here, I just want to say that this is not a writing blog post. It’s a little more personal than that, but it’s an interesting story and not the sort of story you can make up, so I’m going to toss it out there.

Yesterday, while I was at work, I learned that an old friend from college had passed away suddenly in her sleep. I’m 37 and she was 36. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen to people of our age, does it? I mean, when I’m in my 80s, well yeah, that shit is going to happen. It does when you get old. It still sucks, but it’s also a part of life, it’s just not something you expect when you’re in your mid 30s. My friends are still having kids for crying out loud.

When I first read the texts I thought it was maybe another famous person. It didn’t register that it should be the person that I had known by that name. Nope. It was one in the same. Now, I wasn’t close friends with her, and neither was my wife. We hung out, had coffee and chatted – the usual stuff you do in college. My wife’s history with her went back further into high school. Now, none of this alone is so poignant or significant. After all, we live in a sparsely populated state. The saying runs something like: If you don’t know someone, you know someone that does. To wit, I once visited former Governor Bill Scheffield’s house to help him with a computer problem, and attended a funeral with former governor Tony Knowles, I even once attended a 4th of July parade where I was obligated to shake Sarah Palin’s hand, and had her dad as a substitute teacher more than once. So, to know someone who has passed away is not, in and of itself, an unusual thing here. What makes this so absolutely disturbing is the following story:

Before my wife and I started dating, at the age of 19, she was trying to get my attention. She stalked me, invited me up to her room to check out her Christmas lights, and asked a friend and I to join her for dinner. I’m an idiot, and so none of this really struck me as interested. What finally did it was the Symphony. I was at dinner with the young woman that would some-day be my wife and her friend. They were chatting comfortably and I was in a stupor of exhaustion due to some very intense and competitive nights stealing wooden pallets from teams in other dormitories for our annual bonfire party (we won that year BTW). Anyhow, my someday wife’s friend turned to her and said, I can’t make it to the symphony this weekend, sorry. My someday wife turned to me without missing a beat and asked ‘I have an extra ticket, do you want to go?’ Naturally, I assumed that I was only being asked in order to use up a spare ticket. When my someday-wife arrived to pick me up, she was wearing a dress. In retrospect, this was not a shot across the bow, but a full broad-side. I only know this because getting my wife into a dress these days requires an assurance of a $300 romantic night on the town. Even then, it’s a debate. In any case, the symphony date was the first of many and here we are nearly 20 years later. That, however, is not the point of the story. What is the point of the story is that the woman who died in her sleep yesterday was the very same who had given up her ticket in what I was, and still am, sure was one of the best wing-woman plays of all time.

How is it that the young-woman who helped get my wife and I together could end up dead in her sleep? I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense, and I know that’s life, it’s full of those sorts of things. I still don’t have to like it though do I? Anyhow, I know you’re not around to hear it anymore, but thanks Katie, you bailed on your friend at precisely the right moment in our lives once, I just wish I’d thought to say so sooner.