Chapter Six is up at Geek Eccentric today. This chapter takes us into Doug’s head and into Steve Asten’s lair.
It’s aliiiiive. Or rather, it’s liiiive.
Chapter 4 of DinoLand is posted at Geek Eccentric as of half an hour ago.
In this month’s installment, the zoology team attempts to help a sick brachiosaurus. How do you do that? With armored vehicles, a team of acrobats and tranquilizers fired from a cannon. While praying. With a few ambulances on standby.
How does it go? That would be a spoiler. Click over to Geek Eccentric and check it out.
Just a quick post to let you all know that Chapter 3 of DinoLand is live today at Geek Eccentric. Head on over and check it out because the plot is thickening and it is getting real.
As an aside, I’ve been meaning to write more than these monthly posts about things that are getting published. I actually have several posts started, but the first month of our son’s life has gotten between me and this blog. That said, I’m hoping to post more in the next few weeks; I have some projects I’m working on now that the school year is winding down and I’ve also just wanted to blog more.
It’s the first Sunday of April and that means that DinoLand’s second chapter is online today at Geek Eccentric.
This month’s chapter features a new point of view character, a brachiosaurus with a problem and a possible business deal that could cause even more problems for the people at the park who love the dinosaurs. Oh, and a child disappears.
Head on over and check it out, sci-fi and dinosaur lovers.
Dim the lights, add a few red Solo cups full of Milwaukee’s Best and this is just like a college dance.
A long, long time ago, I stole my mom’s VHS tapes of PBS’s Pride & Prejudice miniseries and took them to college with me. My friends and I spent two nights watching it in the common room of our freshman dorm. I don’t think we got through all six hours, but we got far enough through it for a lot of deep sighs and a couple of “Tell her/him how you feel, you fool”s. I’d already watched it with my mother and spent a lot of time watching, (and rewatching,) the scene in which Elizabeth tells off a hot and bothered Mr. Darcy, but I never read the novel.
After reading pages and pages of praise for Austen in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own last month I couldn’t help myself; I downloaded it.
I finished Pride & Prejudice last night, and I get it! I understand Bridget Jones and the cult of Austen. I have seen the light!
It makes so much sense; Elizabeth Bennet is a relatable character. She and her sisters are still at large in the world. They have more freedom, but they’re still around, and they do pretty much the same things they’ve always done; they sit around their rooms and overanalyze their boyfriends, they visit relatives and they go to dances. (One of my friends pointed this out too; in a lot of ways, being at a college dance is like being at a ball. The same dynamic is still there, just with louder music and a lot of cheap beer and dancing that would shock every Bennet sister but Lydia.)
Mostly though, it was refreshing to read an old book and hear a voice that sounded like mine. I’ll bet that’s what the Austen cult is really all about. We don’t get a lot of points of view in period fiction like the viewpoint of Elizabeth Bennet. In contemporary fiction, like Dumas’s The Count of Montecristo, women are used as prizes or props or played for laughs. A woman’s quest for a husband is treated as comic relief. A woman’s quest for anything else is criminal.The words that Dumas puts into their mouths don’t sound like anything I’ve ever said or heard my friends say.
No wonder women have been drawn to Austen’s novel since she published it in 1813. In Pride & Prejudice, she treats the quest for a husband with dignity (and proves to the readers that grand dramas can happen in sitting rooms and ballrooms and on walks as well as on the high seas or the catacombs of Rome.) It’s a relief to catch female voices from the past that don’t sound strained or fake. Even the most unlikable women are three-dimensional and relatable. I can think of at least two Mrs. Bennets that I know in real life, a host of Lydias and a few Marys. I might even know a Lady Catherine.
I really wish I’d read the book when I was in college, but the cult of Austen put me off.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I did try, once, to read it. I was in the fifth grade and full of myself, because I was reading Jules Verne instead of Sweet Valley High, and I thought I was special because my religion teacher had complimented me when he saw Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea on the corner of my desk. After I finished that, I was hungry for more praise, so I pulled Pride and Prejudice out of the school library and took it home to show my mom, who knew what I was doing. She tried to explain to me that even though I was an above average reader and might be able to understand the vocabulary, I probably wouldn’t understand the nuances of the story. And she was right. The famous first sentence – It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife – was completely lost on a 10-year-old. After a day of trying to understand the Bennets and the Bingleys and why one rich old-timey English family would feel discriminated against by another old-timey rich English family, I gave up and quietly returned the book to the library.)
I wish I’d read it after my friends and I watched the miniseries in our dorm lounge. I doubt it would have made me more of an Elizabeth and less of a Lydia. It probably would have given me false hope, and I probably would have spent hours combing over my college campus for a Mr. Darcy who wasn’t there, but it might have made me an English major, and even if didn’t, I would have gained a new favorite book.
We were going to stay. We might have been fine if we stayed.
But when the City of Bridgeport ordered a mandatory evacuation on Saturday afternoon to people in my neighborhood ahead of what was, at that point, Hurricane Irene, I decided that we weren’t going to take our chances with the storm. We packed our bags and headed to my family’s place.
We were back in less than 24 hours. The storm seemed like it had been over-hyped. We didn’t see any downed trees or accidents on the highways. Everything was great. Then we turned onto our street. The Long Island Sound, which normally keeps to itself, had come inland, about half a mile.
Usually, when you stand in this spot, you're looking down at the Long Island Sound, not wading in it.
Our whole neighborhood was under water. We parked the car several blocks away and started wading. I had visions of our living room furniture floating, or worse, of our house tilting in the saturated soil, and falling over, like so many trees shown on the news. But when we stepped out of the water and onto the porch, we realized those fears were unfounded.
We shone our flashlights into the basement. It was flooded almost to the top. Paint cans and other debris floated by. We couldn’t see it, but our washer and dryer and the big chest freezer had floated up and tipped over. It all seemed like a little too much right then. I’m not sure what pushed me over the edge. Maybe it was all that water, reflecting the light from my flashlight back up at me. Maybe it was watching a pitcher I’d used for drinking water floating by in the filth, but that’s when I began to panic.
And I realized something. Some people should not have a phone when they’re drunk. Some people should not have a phone when they’re hormonal. I should not have a phone when I’m panicking. Fueled by a rush of fight-or-flight adrenaline, I promptly called my mother and reported to Facebook that the house was under water. Sorry, Facebook friends. Things were not nearly as bad as I felt they were at the moment. You all did not need to read my fear-fueled updates.
Things didn’t end up being so horrendous. Two of our closest friends, whose own power was out, had us over, grilled us some hot dogs, and came back to our house with their pumps and a case of drinking water. Our neighbor let us use her electricity. I hope that someday we can be as much of a help to them as they were to us.
This is what it looked like before the drains were cleared.
This is the best part – it was our neighbors and friends who cleared our street of water. The gentleman who lives across the street from us waded out with a broom and began pushing away the debris on the closest storm drain and then clearing leaves, fallen branches and garbage from the drain with his hands. We heard bubbling from the center of the street. Several of us rushed out with rakes and sticks and poles and our hands and spent the next hour pulling leaves out of drains. You’d clear one and there’d be a sudden strong pull on your hand as the water began to fall from the street into the sewer below. And then, if you’d cleared the drain enough, a small whirlpool would appear. People came along and took cell phone videos of us, standing up to our thighs in floodwater, clearing drains. I’m sure we’re on YouTube somewhere. Within a few hours the street had drained completely. We would still have standing water if it weren’t for our neighbor’s idea.
This morning, I took a walk down to the small, usually nasty beach at the end of our street. I had to walk through some weird Lovecraftian muck to get there, but when I did, I was surprised. The beach was higher than usual. There was about a foot of new, clean sand. The water was still and shining and the sun was out. A beautiful beach after an awful storm is so cliché; the writer in me was sickened. But the Bridgeport resident who’s had enough of clouds and brackish water was happy to see it.
I once read an article which said that people don’t like to read positive, inspirational blog posts. Well tough noogies. Here are some lessons I learned yesterday:
– There are no winners in an argument about whether or not you should evacuate your home.
– If you can pack for a mandatory evacuation, you can pack for anything.
– Mandatory evacuations are not actually mandatory.
– We are a nation of idiots with cameras in our cell phones.
– Good friends are the best resource ever.
– Knowing and being willing to help your neighbors is the smartest thing anyone can do.
– Teamwork can clear a flooded street a lot faster than Public Works can.
The shovel has returned.
I woke up with a plan this morning: Coffee, shoveling, novel, in that order.
My plans to shovel were thwarted the instant I got out the door. I loaned the snow shovel to one of the neighbors, who is from a warmer clime and who looked like he needed to dig out his car in order to go to work. He accepted the shovel and took off down the street with it. That was an hour or so ago. Possibly he’s digging out a friend. Maybe he’s just running around, yelling “Whee, I stole a shovel.” Whatever he’s doing with the shovel, I haven’t seen him in a while.
I’m a little irked about this, because I enjoy shoveling. There are a lot of reasons to like it: It’s cheap exercise, I get to interact with the neighbors, I get to be outside and there’s the instant gratification of physical labor.
But those aren’t the reasons I like shoveling.
I like shoveling because I can shovel any way I want to. I can shovel in a diagonal line. I can shovel in a circle. I can shovel half the steps and then decide to stop and go inside. I can shovel my name into the snow in front of our house.
I never do any of those things, but I can.
Why? Because of my childhood, of course. Read more