Susan Fadellin's Blog

I read something both interesting and unsettling today:

There are, no doubt, lessons here for the contemporary reader. The changing character of the native population, brought about through unremarked pressures on porous borders; the creation of an increasingly unwieldy and rigid bureaucracy, whose own survival becomes its overriding goal; the despising of the military and the avoidance of its service by established families, while its offices present unprecedented opportunity for marginal men to whom its ranks had once been closed; the lip service paid to values long dead; the pretense that we still are what we once were; the increasing concentrations of the populace into richer and poorer by a corrupt tax system, and the desperation that inevitably follows; the aggrandizement of executive power at the expense of the legislature; ineffectual legislation promulgated with great show; the moral vocation of the man at the top to maintain order at all costs, while growing blind to the cruel dilemmas of ordinary life – these are all themes with which our world is familiar, nor are they the God-given property of any party or political point of view, even though we often act as if they were.

You might wonder which recent news analysis or editorial opinion I pulled this from. In fact, it was written in 1995 by Thomas Cahill, describing the fall of the Roman Empire in How the Irish Saved Civilization. He goes on to observe:

“Though it is easy for us to perceive the wild instability of the Roman Imperium in its final days, it was not easy for the Romans.”

For some crazy reason, the phrase “doomed to repeat…” keeps running through my head.

A cliche, to be sure. But oh, so true!

I added The Heart of What Was Lost by Tad Williams to my wish list today, thanks to one of Amazon’s never ending helpful suggestions about what I might like to read. I remember being caught up in the original trilogy, although I’m not sure that I ever made it through To Green Angel Tower. Ineluki is the character name that has stuck in my memory. He influenced my own character, Isar. I liked the Finnish (or what I once presumed to be Finnish – the wiki suggests I’m wrong) borrowings. I wonder how many of the mythological underpinnings I would recognize all these years later. And how can you go wrong with swords named Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn? Interesting to see that testimonials from both G. R. R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss credit Williams as inspiration. Now I’m itching to pull The Dragonbone Chair off of my shelf – when I already have four books in progress. This is often why I don’t finish a book or a series: I get distracted by something new. Or something old that is new again – in the middle of  re-reading David Brin’s Startide Rising for my library book club, I’m tempted to go back and read the rest of that entire series too. I will never get through all the books I want to read and re-read!

For the past three days the house has vibrated with the sound of helicopters passing overhead, bearing their burdens of water-filled bladders to the Burro Fire on the far side of the Catalina Mountains. Early in the day clouds form, as volumes of water rise into the dry air, but by the evening only a smudge of smoke lingers in the sun-baked air. Traffic lights went out on Oracle as I drove down the highway to get cat food, and then the power went off and on twice more while I waited in line in the store. They wrote down the SKUs of the items in our carts, then walked back to the shelves to get prices, before using a battery-powered calculator to tally the total, and running a manual credit card swipe. The manager had to teach the clerk how to work the manual slide machine on the spot. “It’s the heat,” they explained apologetically, “and the high demand for power.”  Many people left the store empty-handed, unwilling to wait when technology failed, confident of its return … and theirs. How quickly we forget the slower pace of even thirty years ago, or a past when we understood there were limits beyond which this lifestyle is unsustainable.

I live in a community in the Sonoran Desert. It’s a place where “lawn” is defined by the shade of stone that covers your yard: Desert Gold, Apache Rose, Santa Fe Brown. Rain is seasonal and precious. And after the rains, an amazing thing happens … the desert turns green. Not in a lush temperate forest sort of way, but in a hushed and quiet sort of way. At first it’s barely noticeable. And then on a fine, warm day in early spring the green breaks out everywhere, pushing through stone, digging into the hard-packed sand.

But do we reverence this seasonal blossoming of life? No. On a fine, warm day in early spring I am outside ripping up all evidence of this annual miracle. Only a short list of approved specimens, mostly cactus, are allowed here. A delicate wash of less pretentious green joyfully announcing Spring is considered rude. It brings down property values. And therefore, community opinion condemns and fines those who are not diligent in eradicating the threat. Most of my neighbors can be seen out with their gallon jugs of herbicide, waging war on the enemy.

Am I the only one appalled by this? I bend and kneel and pull by hand, silently asking forgiveness, wondering at the insanity of civilization and the price we pay to be part of it.

Re-reading John Crowley’s novel Aegypt, now published on Kindle under the author’s original title, The Solitudes, some 30 years later has been a revelatory experience – not only for its insight into the foibles and follies, the naive earnestness and yearning of a generation, but also for the wealth of vocabulary and the sheer profusion of references I failed to notice or understand the first time. Today a shard of a sentence – “… back to the door into dream they issued from, the Gate of Horn” – sent me first to my own bookcase to stare in wonder at a used paperback I’d picked up but hadn’t read yet, another novel in Robert Holdstock’s Mythago series, Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn, and then to Wikipedia. And there I learned of the origins of the gates of horn and ivory, a play on words in Greek, a literary image to distinguish true dreams from false. The image first appeared in the Odyssey, according to Wikipedia, but it has surfaced in literature over and over again.

The list of English references includes the likes of Edmund Spenser and Alexander Pope and T.S. Eliot, E.R. Eddison and H.P. Lovecraft, the Holdstock book on my shelf but also books by Neil Gaiman (well, of course) and Ursula LeGuin (I shouldn’t be surprised) that I own. The effect of reading the article was like a series of tumblers clicking into place and opening dozens of doors with just one half turn of a key.

I am both awed and humbled. Humbled because I realize that the more I read (and re-read), the less I know. If I lived another 30 years I don’t know that my mind could hold all those references and make those connections. And awed because within the span of my life, computers help make connections that once would have taken a researcher weeks, months, years to assemble, as easy as typing a phrase into Google search.

My grandmother used to shoo away blue jays from her bird feeder, declaring them to be bullies. And I’ll agree that blue jays can be noisy, aggressive birds. But they don’t hold a candle to the quiet menace of the mourning doves who inhabit the Sonoran Desert.

I was sitting at my desk this morning, sipping coffee, intent on my computer screen, and looked up to see four mourning doves sitting on the back wall directly outside my window. Not in front of the empty bird feeders that are another 20 feet further down the wall, but in front of the window where I sat at my desk. I made a mental note to fill the feeders with the last of the bird seed I had in the house a little later, and returned my attention to the screen.

When I looked up again ten minutes later, there were six. Not standing sidewise as they generally do when they are walking along the top of the cinder block wall, but hunkered down and looking directly in my window. Weird, I thought, before I looked back at my screen.

Five minutes later there were eight, and now I am seriously creeped out. “Um,” I said to the dog, “maybe I’ll just fill that feeder now.”

One of the interesting things about moving has been acquiring a “new” home phone number only to discover its previous owner haunting the line. The first day my new phone number went live, I received calls from two different collection agencies. No, I assured them, that number was activated for me and no such person by the name you are looking for lives here. Then I was awoken one evening later in the week by an unidentified female leaving a message in sultry Spanish on my anonymous answering machine. Last night the caller ID identified a couple of incoming calls from someone with the unfortunate name of Ron Roach. This morning he decided to leave a message with the mechanical voice that answers my phone. “Dude! You finally get your phone turned back on and then you don’t answer it? Call me back as soon as you get this!”

Mysterious-er and mysterious-er. These random voices start to conjure dark stories. I should probably hasten to send them on their ways as quickly as the collectors, but misguided curiosity has me listening vicariously, like someone in a B horror movie opening the basement door against all common sense and better judgment, looking for the ghost in the wires….

Once upon a time in an RV rolling westward on I-20 there lived a hobbit. Not a brand, spanky new fully caparisoned RV, but an arthritic, incontinent old warhorse who had seen one too many campaigns. Our super special “Rolling into Arizona” rental deal was billed as returning the beast to its home pastures for “refurbishing”. But although the engine still beat strong and true, no amount of refurbishing is likely to restore the myriad of cracks, dings, stress fractures and unidentifiable stains covering its aging, abused body.

I knew this was going be an interesting adventure when we got to the RV rental location in Charlotte, NC to find it was a dingy auto repair shop circa 1950 complete with an overweight, grizzled proprietor with a Carolina accent so thick you could spread it across a dozen corn muffins, and his young, overworked and underpaid world-weary lackey. We were late because of torrential rain on Saturday, and the lackey gave us an overview of the beast that we were going to trek across country in that was cursory at best. Among other things, he assured us there was no need for concern that the LP gas detector was hanging off the wall and inoperative, because “they put something in propane to make it smell and you’ll know if there’s a problem”.

By the time I had driven the beast home from Charlotte, I wanted to paint “Serenity” on the side (I’m switching metaphoric movie genres here, so keep up). The thing flung every interior piece not recently bolted down hither and yon with every turbulent patch of acne pockmarked road I hit. The thermostat cover popped off, the circuit breaker cover flopped open onto the floor, the shower door slid open, the bathroom door slammed open and shut repeatedly, and the window screens, bent by some previous frustrated and furious renter, rattled incessantly. I will say that it wasn’t quite so noisy when laden down with my precious possessions, but we still needed to set the music volume at max to hear anything above the noise of the cabin.

We left Atlanta about 2pm on Monday, after I watched the car carrier guy (my name is STEVE, he told me in heavily Russian-accented English) light up a cigar as he drove off with my Mustang as the first car on his rig. Goodbye, I waved wistfully, wondering if I would ever see it again. What with the dog shaking and the cats yowling and rush hour in Birmingham, we rolled into our planned first stop in a small RV park outside Meridian MS about 8:30pm. We managed to get the electric line plugged in, but then after opening every compartment I could open (we were given 3 keys for the rig, and a few locks resisted all of them) and making unwilling friends with a local wolf spider, I abandoned all hope that we had a water hose for the “city” water hook-up as illustrated in the cheerful 30 minute online orientation video we had watched before setting out. Fortunately, we had packed lots of bottled water, since we were explicitly warned in advance not to drink or use the “fresh water tank” for cooking purposes. The toilet was slightly roomier than an airline counterpart, and marginally cleaner than a concert port-a-potty, but gave off the queasy sensation of both, so with one emergency exception, we diligently used rest area and campground bathrooms throughout the trip.

We used the propane cooktop to heat water for breakfast Tuesday morning, and were pleasantly surprised to find that at least one burner worked. We made soup for lunch at a rest area across the Louisiana state line, and I was beginning to feel like an actual RV camper. We got to a very nice RV campground in Canton TX before dark on Wednesday, where I was able to buy a water hose in the campground store, and we congratulated ourselves on getting electric, water, and sewer lines hooked up like the pros we thought we were becoming. I took the dog for a walk around “Walden Pond” while Vanessa made a phone call… and I returned to find her waving her arms frantically and pointing at the small lake of water pooling beneath the RV. She had the foresight to shut off the city water but the undercarriage of the old girl still seemed to be dripping steadily. Checking further, we found that the toilet had overflowed (fortunately, since we had been so fastidious, with fresh water). We got that under control with turning off the “city” water, and promptly called the 24/7 customer service hotline. We were told by the very pleasant after-hours customer service rep (who only takes notes until other people can arrange for repairs in the morning) that it was just a “weak” valve and not to use the city water hook-up any more. Poor old girl. After 140,000 miles she should have been on hormone therapy. I guess the lackey “forgot” to include the water hose for a reason. Sneaky.

At that point, I looked at the document I had signed upon registering at the campground office that declared we had chosen to stop in a dry Texas county where open alcoholic beverages were not allowed, and just shook my head. I guess I picked the wrong week to stop drinking.

I was sure of it when we awoke Wednesday morning to find the refrigerator had passed away quietly during the night. We called the 24/7 customer service hotline again, and were told that we would get a call back after they had located a repair shop along our planned route, and that our expenses for ice and a cooler chest would be reimbursed at journey’s end. With that, we set off across the endless state of Texas.

The RV rental company called us back a little before noon to tell us what we were discovering for ourselves, namely that there is NOTHING between Dallas and Van Horn but sand, scrub, mindlessly churning oil rigs, abandoned mobile homes, and the eerily rusted frames of missing signs rocking above dry and deserted gas stations. Not even zombies want to live in west Texas. We fought a head wind from hell all the way across the Lone Star state, and the “10 mile to the gallon” prophesied to us by the old geezer in NC became 10 gallons to the mile. We damn near ran out of gas. But 5 miles east of Van Horn, visible for a good ten miles across the black Texas night, a sign blinking D I E S E L in 20 foot high red neon letters lured us in like a moth to a flame.

“Honey, are you sure it will take all that?” I was asked when I requested $75 of gas from pump 1. “And then some,” I replied. One thing we had learned by this point was that most gas stations cut you off after pumping $75 worth of gas, and send you packing to another establishment like some hopeless drunk. Even Love’s truck stops max out at $125. The only gas station willing to let the old warhorse drink her fill was the one in NC where we began our journey. There, the lackey pumped $149 worth of unleaded into the beast, only to be asked by the proprietor, “Ya mean ya couldn’t ‘ve squeezed one more dolla’ into it?”

Weary and relieved, we rolled quietly into a KOA outside Van Horn, following 3 jack rabbits in the headlights who appeared to want to show us to our pull-through. We awoke Thursday morning to the sight of the Guadalupe mountains in the distance, registered with the nicest couple of campground proprietors you could want to meet, and had a breakfast of eggs, sausage and biscuits in the campground coffee shop that tasted like pure heaven. That breakfast fueled us (if not the warhorse) past the crazy construction in El Paso and across the vast open spaces of New Mexico, all the way home to Tucson.

The last leg of the journey was returning the warhorse to Mesa. My second day in the desert, and it rained. When we finally pulled into the rental parking lot, next to a fleet of younger models outside the bright, clean and modern RV showroom, I had the feeling our beast might be headed for the glue factory. And after the rental agent went out to look her over I was sure of it. The agent came back with a look on her face that said: “You came in that thing? You’re braver than I thought.”

In making a final (one fervently hopes) revision pass through my second novel, I came upon a word that had been flagged by both my exacting editor and my document program: waybread.

First, I looked it up on Merriam-Webster, and found this:

way·bread

noun \ˈwāˌbred\

Definition of WAYBREAD

Brit

: broad-leaved plantain 1


Origin of WAYBREAD
ME weybrede, fr. OE wegbrǣde; akin to MD wegebrede broad-leaved plantain, OHG wegabreita; all fr. a prehistoric WGmc compound whose first constitutent is represented by OE weg way and whose second constituent is akin to OE brād broad; fr. its broad leaves and the fact that it frequently grows by the wayside — more at way, broad

A plantain? Really? That was a surprise. The roots of the word are somewhat what I had in mind when I used it, but I wasn’t thinking of a plantain, for certain, which means I misused this oh-so-intriguing word. But where did I get it from then? What dark corner of my convoluted brain offered that word up at that moment in my writing?

Probably some game term, I mutter at myself reproachfully as I Google it. And Wikipedia helpfully informs me:

Waybread may refer to:

Lembas , a special food made by the Elves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books
Plantago major , a plant


Ah, Tolkien. An unconscious borrowing, then. A pity. I shall have to replace it with some mundane word of lesser lineage.

But I’m grateful for the journey it took me on, and I have a new “true” word that will sit on a sunny shelf in my brain for awhile, instead of lurking in a recess, undefined and misunderstood.

I once attended a writing workshop where the moderator told us to describe our work – a novel or short story – in a single sentence. When it came to my turn, I started … stuttered … stopped. And then muttered, “I don’t think I can describe it one sentence.” To which he smugly replied: “Then you don’t know what you’re writing about.”

I’m pretty sure I do know what I’m writing about, but that comment has rattled around in my brain for years, making grinding and clanging noises like a stack of pots falling over in a cupboard. I write novels, my internal monologue protests, not short stories. I confess I have no talent for the sharp focus and succinct closure of a short story. I build worlds, and the characters who live and breathe in them cannot be summed up in a few adjectives any more than I can be, or you can be.

But when it came time for writing a description for my first novel, I gritted my teeth and came up with a single sentence:

On a world once dominated by giants and ageless sorcerers, two men seek to unravel the secrets of a centuries old enchantment with the help of the woman unwittingly summoned to aid them.

One hundred thirty-nine thousand, two hundred and thirty-three words summed up in thirty-three. I think I did it out of spite, to put that self-righteous dismissal behind me. But now I’m thinking about the pitch for my second novel, and looking back on the first, and thinking it deserves more.

On a world once dominated by giants and ageless sorcerers, three men seek to unravel the secrets of a centuries old enchantment with the help of the woman unwittingly summoned to aid them. A dispossessed prince, a man with no memory of his origins, and a Huntmaster, more at ease with the eagle and wolf he is bonded to than with people, must overcome their doubts and differences to deal with this unexpected stranger, who is as surprised and dismayed as they are to discover she has inherited an artifact that is the stuff of legends – a staff named Bifrost, a bridge to other worlds and ancient powers.

Is it a better pitch? I don’t know. I think it was easier to write the 139,233 words of their story…