Recent Reads and Synchronicity

Within the last couple of days I finished reading 3 books I had started at various times recently. I'm not sure how it happens, I often have several books in progress. Usually it's a book I'm reading that someone gave me, or I've had kicking around for awhile, then I get one from the library that of course I need to read and take back soon, or it's one I just got from one of my favorite series or author's I'm more interested in, so I jump into that one and then later go back and finish the previous one. I also often have one book in progress by my bed for night reading, and another in the bathroom for, well, you know. The bathroom is my branch library, what can I say?
It's usually non-fiction writing-related books in the bathroom, or magazines. (The two magazines I read regularly are "The Mother Earth News", and "The Backwoodsman".)
Regardless, the three fictions I just finished are, in no order, "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell", "The Jamais Vu Papers" and "Slave of my Thirst".
A bit of an eclectic mix, I admit. I did enjoy all three. "Jamais Vu" was a pretty wild ride, but oddly, it fit in interestingly with the Avatar Master's course I just finished. I always find it fascinating how something like that takes on a whole new meaning after you have a viewpoint shift like that.
There was one of those odd synchronous moments also, when I realized, even though "Slave" and "Jamais Vu" were vastly different subject matters, the author Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) made a cameo appearance in both.
I run into that now and then. It's always an interesting "whoa!" moment when two very different genre books I just happen to read in sequence just happen to mention the same idea. Sometimes it's an obscure quote, sometimes it's a fictional character or real person. But it happens too often to be random chance.
Just a couple of weeks ago I read two books, one a fantasy by Lionel Fenn (Blood River Down), another a mystery by Bill Crider (Booked For a Hanging). The two were written in different decades, different authors and different genres. I picked both at random to read, one from the library, one I had bought. Yet, both mentioned the fact that the same quote from Shakespeare, "Lead on MacDuff", was actually a misquote, the original being "Lay on, MacDuff."


Okay, it's a trivial thing, perhaps, but the part that got me was the synchronicity of the same thing appearing in two very different novels I read at random.
Synchronicity is a great subject all its own. Nowhere does it crop up more often than in the study of genealogy.
Guess it all just illustrates the principle that "there are no accidents."
As to the books. I enjoyed all five.
"Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" took a little getting used to. For me, it was one of those books that start a little slow, but I think it was necessary to truly set up the premise involved. It was well worth reading. The size is daunting to some, no doubt, but for those of us who Stephen King and Stephen R. Donaldson, that's not such an issue.
"Slave of My Thirst" was an interesting take on vampires, and worked in a lot of plausible fictional background on Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and other true and fictional issues of the late 1800's. Again, an interesting read.
I already mentioned "Jamais Vu" and how it meshed with my Avatar experience. The book came out in 1989. It reminds me somewhat of "Godel, Escher, Bach." (Another book on my "to finish" list, as soon as I find my copy again.) . "Jamais Vu" covers a lot of territory, and I don't know exactly how to describe it. I suppose most of all it touches on the relationship of "reality" and mythical universes. A lot falls within the realm of the movie "What the (bleep) do we know?" If you missed THAT, it concerned ramifications of quantum physics and mysticism. Not as dry a subject as it may sound.
I may as well talk about the other two books I mentioned above.
I find Lionel Fenn (Charles L. Grant) to be a truly funny fantasy writer, somewhat in the vein of Piers Anthony's Xanth series.
I stumbled across a few of Fenn's books by accident some time back at Half Price Books. I think my favorites are "Once Upon a Time in the East", and "The Mark of the Moderately Vicious Vampire", although every one I've read has been just as much fun. I recently got copies of "Blood River Down" and "Seven Spears of the W'Dch'Ck". Both are earlier works, I believe, but still very funny. All of Fenn's works are well worth finding and reading.
As far as "Booked for a Hanging" is concerned. My esteem for the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series of mysteries by Bill Crider is also very high. I don't know if "small town colloquial/folksy" is an actual genre of mystery, but this would be a prime example of it. Maybe a cross between "Murder She Wrote" and "Andy of Mayberry". Whatever it is, I love it! Growing up in small town Texas myself, every corner Sheriff Rhodes turns awakens a new "Oh yeah, I remember that!" from myself. I think I've already said I'm a bit envious. I hope my own planned series set in Central Texas is as good.

Rainy Day Writing

Stormy last night. Slept pretty good. Pretty involved dreams all night. I didn’t remember any worth writing down this time. Well, okay, there was one. I was going along as an observer on a balloon flight. Huge balloon, made up of light clear plastic, like dry cleaner bags joined somehow. Wasn’t hot air or gas, we were riding inside the bubble somehow. Anyway, I didn’t really get inside. A couple of women I’ve known were going up and inviting me along. There was a rope ladder through a hatch in their ceiling that led into the balloon, but the opening in the trap door was too small for me to get through. there was a larger opening nearby, but that led to a different balloon they had. Somehow one of them switched things so I could climb on up through the large opening and still get there. Not sure I want to cogitate too much on the connotations. That’s about all I remember of that dream, anyway. It ended about the time I crawled into the balloon. It was a large open space with a lot of braces.
I mostly intend to do some work today on my Deputy Constable Penn Sadler story. It takes place in a precinct of mostly small towns in central Texas. A fictional county and so forth that bears a great resemblance to where I grew up, and where I live now. I’m planning a series of novels for the same area. I was a bit taken aback by Bill Crider’s “Sheriff Dan Rhodes” series. He has very much tapped the same vein. I love the books, though. Encouraging to see that it can indeed be done and well.
My main character, whom I’ve named Penn Sadler, is a native of the area, which I’ve called Shin Oak. He had been a county Deputy Sheriff, spent a little time as Acting Sheriff when the previous one left office under a scandal. Penn was defeated in his run for the office by some political chicanery and left the department, which pleased both him and his new boss. Penn is a good officer, so he got a job as Deputy Constable with an old friend, Constable Sam Hart, under his local Justice of the Peace, Sara Beth Adams.
Penn keeps up with matters in the Sheriff’s Department through his old friends there, as well as friends in other state departments. Contacts he cultivated through his previous career and a few high profile cases he had helped with. These contacts serve to draw him into many of the sorts of cases a Deputy Constable wouldn’t normally handle.
I've also been consciously using my tarot system for plotting/outline both the book and the series. It will be interesting to see how it all turns out, huh? As the man said, I can hardly wait to see what I write next!

Research

I've had several other things going on lately, so a lot of my writing has taken back burner. I have, however, been spending some time in Giddings, Tx, lately and taking advantage of faster internet capability to do more research for my proposed "Small Town Texas" mystery novel series. I'll reserve the name for now. I've been able to download pix of small-towns in the area, to add to my own collection.


I do have to admit that reading the "Sheriff Dan Rhodes" series of mystery novels by Bill Crider is also a huge inspiration. I really like his use of description in the novels to really put you in the scene, and having grown up in a similar setting, I can't help reading with a continual sense of "oh, wow, I remember that!" I hope I can come somewhere close to the same result with my own book(s). I have been working on just one novel about it, but in the process it has been interesting to build a fictional town and populate it with businesses and characters drawn from my own experiences in several locations in Texas. The area of my novels will be an amalgam of my own hometown mixed with many other towns around the state. I have developed such an extensive amount of detail for my "town" and countryside that it almost has to be utilized for more than one story. There are times that it is a pastime of its own to research it.


O well, it will pay off!