Saw an old handgun advertisement on Bill Crider's excellent blog this morning. It started me thinking, as it often does. The reason will become clear in a bit.
The question is, when you're reading an otherwise good novel, hopefully lost in that world, what sort of things can eject you from that fantasy?
For me, it's firearms info. I do have some expertise in that area. I'm not an expert by any means, but I was fairly into guns for awhile in the past. I even spent a few years as a practicing and licensed Gunsmith. Some of the otherwise better authors out there can make the most basic errors concerning firearms. What are some of those?
a. Revolvers don't eject shells, at least not automatically.
b. Revolvers also can't be silenced very effectively.
c. Handguns come in certain calibers, basically the diameter of the bullet. For the most part, those calibers are different from rifle calibers.
d. Both revolvers and automatics are still pistols.
e. Pistols are not rifles, rifles are not shotguns, and vice versa. All are firearms, but they are not interchangeable.
There are a lot more, but you get the idea. The most recent mistake I can think of was referring to an obvious shotgun as a 12 gauge rifle. Believe me, I was ejected from that high speed story forceably. It took a fair while to get back into it. Sometimes, I don't make the effort.
Now, I'm fairly certain that every book has the potential to piss off somebody about something. I guess the key is the readers exposure or expertise.
Are these things needlessly picky? You can decide. My personal feeling is that all books should have a truth, at some level they should educate. Sure, the story may be fiction, but when facts are stated they should indeed be factual. You don't have to be an expert on everything, but if your plot turns on a set of facts, whether it's firearms, bullet trajectory, legalese, military terms, medicine our you name it, you as an author can always have some fact checking done by someone who IS an expert. Cultivate a few of those people, let them have a read of your opus in exchange for some acknowledgement.
The internet is always available for research. Writer's Digest has a wonderful series of books called the "HowDunit Series" each book focused on an aspect like Poisons, or Forensics.
The info is out there, use it!
What yanks your emergency brake?
And, if you want some firearms expertise, I'm available! Cheers!
I'm not talking about those uninformed souls.
When I moved to my grandparent's house at age 4, they had just finished building it. It was a two-story house with living quarters over the gas station at Seward Junction. The stairwell being more or less central in the house created some interesting closet spaces. There was an understair closet on the ground floor that was used for various camping and other equipment storage. There was also a hidden space behind it I didn't find till much later.
It is a bit difficult to explain how it was, but the stair had a landing and switchback to the second floor. A small storage closet was built on the second floor where my grandmother kept the ironing supplies and similar things.
At some point I discovered the best part of that closet. It had bookshelves on both sides! When my father had moved away from his parents years before he had left several of his books behind. There were several mystery novels, a few World War II adventure novels, and a wonderful set of the Book of Knowledge from about 1940. I remember it had the annual update volumes up through the late '40's. There were also other books my grandparents owned, or had been given.
The floor of the closet was about four feet off of the floor. For a very long time it was much too high for me to get into. Not long after I began reading, I discovered the treasure trove of books within and I hounded my grandmother to let me explore them.
I made use of a small step-ladder for several years. I moved things to one side so I could crawl up into the narrow closet, nestle myself between the shelves, and stay for hours. We found a small light made for a sewing machine that I could clamp onto a shelf. I would swing the door somewhat closed, so that it wasn't a hazard to passersby, and hibernate with my books. Not unlike Harry Potter under the stairs, I suppose, although this was my voluntary retreat!
I always loved the smell of old books. I know now that it is the smell of the books decaying and moldering, but to my young nostrils it was fine incense. I would sit there between the shelves for hours on end, flying sorties with Dave Dawson at Guadalcanal and Dunkirk or sailing with Captains Courageous.
I loved browsing through the Book of Knowledge. The layout was wonderful for browsers. It was quite onerous in later years to try and look anything up directly. It was necessary to utilize the index, and generally pull several volumes until you found what you wanted. However, for random browsing it held my interest very well.
It was not unlike the news feed today in Yahoo! or Facebook. You never really knew what you stumble over next, but it was likely to be interesting, and you could take the thread and follow it.
For a few years that closet was my reader's world.
In the mid '50's through the mid '60's the school in Liberty Hill had all twelve grades in one old two story brick building. It was built in 1929, the year my grandfather, W.K. Seward graduated, and torn down in 1969, a year after I graduated. For most of those years the school had no central library. Each class-room had a few bookshelves with whatever books had collected there. Many were no doubt donated by the individual teachers.
I devoured every book possible in all of those classrooms.
Liberty Hill had no public library. I'm not sure I knew what one was until I visited my mother and step-father in Loving, New Mexico in 1957 and she took us to a library there. I thought it was amazing! You could take books home and read them, bring them back and get more. You could browse to your heart's content, and it was free! I spent all of that visit reading those new found books.
It wasn't until the mid '60's that I had that experience again. My father was living in Conroe, Texas, and the library was only a couple of blocks away from his house. I visited in the summer for a couple of weeks and re-discovered libraries.
In my Junior year of High School, the school finally pulled all the books together into one central school library. I finally was able to find a few of those books that I hadn't read before, books that must have been in classrooms I wasn't in.
I was in the school library a lot. I met my first wife in there. It was a small school, of course, everyone knew everyone, but it was in that library that we actually started talking to each other.
Liberty Hill lost its school for a few years after I graduated. I went to college, married, moved away. I actually became a card carrying library member in the Austin Public Library, then the Round Rock Public Library. I was even a library volunteer for many years. I also have to number among my libraries the college library at Central Texas College in Killeen and the complex of libraries at University of Texas and Austin Community College. All wonderful.
Librarians are so cool! I've been in love with one or two!
Finally, another marriage and much mileage later I returned to Liberty Hill. I was lucky enough to become a founding member, and then an elected Trustee of the newly formed Liberty Hill Public Library. Awesomeness! I even got to be evening librarian at LHPL for a time.
I no longer live in Liberty Hill. I use the libraries in Bastrop, Elgin and Giddings.
My own, much trimmed down library of books now has a home in my office trailer. It is my current version of that small book closet from my childhood. I even still have a few of those old books around me. Old wonderful friends.
Old friends are the best friends.
I'm an omnivorous reader. I literally am one of those who would read a cereal box or any other printed matter in front them at meal times. I have loads of books, most in storage currently. I always have whatever novel I'm reading at bedside along with a bag of books next in line, usually from the library. In my study (read "bathroom") I keep one or two non-fiction books usually, along with current and not so current magazines. The latest book there is "Writing Down The Bones" by Natalie Goldberg, and the magazines run to "Mother Earth News", and "The Backwoodsman". (All of which I heartily recommend, by the way.) I also have quite a few books of many kinds loaded onto my laptop ready to look at should I be trapped somewhere in need of reading matter. I feel quite lost if I stop for lunch somewhere and don't have anything to read. I've accumulated books for years. I often know the contents of Half Price Books better than some of those who work there. When I was young and living with my grandparents they had a rather high closet, built over a stair space. The floor of the closet was at least four feet above the room floor. This closet had a couple of shelves on each side full of books that were mostly leftover from my father. I often spent hours in the closet, surrounded by books. I had a small light there and I was quite happy among the 1940 Book of Knowledge and the red set of Miss Minerva and William Green Hill books. And, I still have them. I've added quite a few since. I once donated two library shelf units, three feet wide, six feet tall, I think about five shelves each, and enough theater type books to completely fill them to the community theater I was working with. And, it barely made a dent in my library. (I do miss some of the books now and then.) Much of that was from a purchase I had made some time before at a garage sale of fourteen boxes of theater related books. It completely filled my Chevy Suburban to the roof.
Can you say "bookaholic"?
I'm looking forward to finishing my new office trailer so I can have many of my books around me again. I will, however, still have to weed them out thoroughly in order to fit them in. I do intend to be strict with myself and only keep what will fit. Books in storage are a sad thing. Some of it is a bit silly. I mean, most of my collection is non-fiction reference type stuff. I mean, that's the sort of thing that having the internet makes unnecessary. However, having the printed books does feel good to me.
For many years I had the desire to be a writer. About 1993 I got a chance to write a play in collaboration with a friend, Barbara Stopp Vance. We wrote several plays that did pretty well. A couple of them were produced several times and in four countries. I went on to write other plays including a couple of award winning one-acts that were produced at Sam Bass Theater in Round Rock, Tx.
For several years following I concentrated more on the acting/directing side of theater and less on writing, although I did have several ideas germinating. A short time ago I returned to the writing with ideas for two projects. One is a series of mystery novels, the other is a stand-alone fantasy. I also have several play projects in working. Every single play I worked on previously was developed in different ways. Only one actually began with me knowing the ending, and even that one wound up working out differently than planned. Now I find it easy to come up interesting, if unrelated, scenes, but I often find it difficult to find out what the overall story is, and where it is going. That makes it very difficult. In fact, it's a huge challenge. Sometimes it feels like I'm trying to string together a bunch of improv skits.
Oh, well. If it was easy we'd all be authors.
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.
