Why Write This Story?

Of all the potential story ideas we cracked out of coconuts in yesterday's post, the one that got under my skin was Joe-Bob VanDermeer's situation (he's got a last name now, that's how you know it's getting serious).

We've discussed how a science fiction writer can get ideas. Now, how does the writer choose which idea becomes a story?

The answer is as diverse as the writer. No doubt an action-adventure oriented sf writer (think Michael Crichton) would have gone for bioweapon smuggling in coconut shells. Other writers may have been attracted to the idea of crime rings selling illicit tubs of petroleum based Tide on the black market. Some would have gone for a futuristic Great Gatsby in which rich women trapped in their personal corporate hells let loose at wild parties where they dance wearing nothing but coconut shells. After a brainstorming session, one of the resulting ideas keeps popping up in the writer's head- in the shower, commuting to work, peeling potatoes- a certain situation will worm its way into the brain and get lodged there. The only way to get it back out is to write it. Joe-Bob got stuck in my head, and he'll be the subject of my next story.

Can a writer know that a story will be a best-seller (or a seller, at all) before writing it? Not unless it's possible to ride on the confidence of name recognition and previous success. But, wait a minute, doesn't the writer want some kind of guarantee all the work of writing the story will be worthwhile? Yes, of course! I'll explain how you find the guarantee in a minute.

Over the last twenty-four hours Joe-Bob VanDermeer has been simmering in my brain. Here's what I know about him:

1. He hates coconut-based biodiesel with a passion and refuses to buy a vehicle that runs on it because he and his father were counting on ethanol (corn-based fuel) making them enough money to keep the family farm. The U.S. has turned its back on the small, independent American farmer by approving vehicles that run on Copranol instead of Ethanol- allowing poor nations overseas to get "rich" while Joe-Bob struggles to hold the family's land. To make matters worse for Joe-Bob, vehicles that don't run on Copranol are no longer made- and neither is Copranol-free diesel.
   
2. He's a die-hard Lutheran. He believes the conception of his son is a miracle. He identifies with Abraham as a hero figure, but is not so crazy as to think he is Abraham and his child is Isaac.
3. He wants the child to be a boy so much, that he refuses to believe he's going to have a daughter even after Peggy's sonogram. Though this appears sheerly sexist, we will learn that Joe-Bob's family life is extremely female-dominated. He's craving male companionship and misses the father-son relationship he had with his (dead) dad.
   
4. He loves his family with all his heart.

Joe-Bob is precisely the kind of person I wouldn't be friends with- provincial, hyper-religious, suspicious and jealous of foreign people and ideas, sexist. But he's only got one job in the female-dominated process of bringing his "miracle" child into the world- to get Peggy to the hospital for the delivery. He's determined to bring his son into the world his own way- to drive Peggy to the hospital on coconut-free diesel. Trouble is, regular diesel doesn't exist, anymore. I know Joe-Bob is going to go on a search to find it, I know Peggy's going into labor early- forcing his hand. I know at the last minute Joe-Bob's going to remember his father's old tractor, and that the couple will be tooling down the highway in an antique John Deere, stopping up traffic from Boonsville to Urbandale. The image of Joe-Bob and his pregnant wife put-putting to the emergency room in a tractor makes me love him, and makes me intrigued to learn more about the woman sitting beside him, knee jammed against the tiller.

The ideas that came together to form the scenes above came from researching solutions to our current environmental problems. Then like tinder they were sparked by images from my childhood in Iowa: eating dust on stretches of highway while creeping behind tractors who shouldn't have been on the road, my grandfather's farm, government cars with corn ears painted on the doors (Ethanol advertisements), and by stories from my husband's grandmother about the birth of her children, stories of friends who have had sonograms. The only person who could possibly write Joe-Bob Vandermeer's story is me. That's what I'm selling, that's what I'm offering to my readers- a story that only I can write. That's how I know its worth creating, and worth sharing with the world.

Coconut Bras and Drug Smuggling- Where Science Fiction Ideas Come From

How do science fiction writers get their ideas? It's a question every writer who does a book signing, interview, or question-answer inevitably hears. Today we'll go step by step through the process.

Over the last few posts, I've gone into a lot of detail about environmental responsibility and green cleaning. We've talked global warming, we've talked trash, we've talked about environmental problems now and in the future, and looked at possible solutions.

The science fiction writer researches a topic and gathers as many of these possible solutions around her as possible. Then she examines them, one by one, and tries to think of all the new problems that could come out of those solutions. See, a story isn't a story unless there's a problem.

Let's get more concrete here and talk about coconuts. Yesterday in the segment on green cleaning I mentioned that today's environmentally friendly vegetable based soaps are made out of Copra (oil from the pressed seeds of coconuts). Sounds like a great idea, right? Coconuts are a renewable resource, and the use of soap in place of detergent cuts down on the use of the non-renewable resource, petroleum. An International Herald Tribune article even claims that the oil used to manufacture soaps is also being successfully tested in Samoa as an alternative fuel source for cars and power plants! Hooray for coconuts, they'll save the planet. They grow on trees, for gosh sake. What could possibly go wrong?

Evil giggle of the science fiction writer.

We already know biodiesel fuels have drawbacks. That solvent property that makes coconut oil into great dirt-dissolving soap, actually loosens engine debris which jams filters. Biodiesel breaks down rubber engine components and compromises seals and pumps in automobiles. Lower fuel efficiency, high cost, and sparse availability are also problems. (HowStuffWorks.com ) Can these problems be overcome? Sure. Car manufacturers can design new cars to run on these solvent, lower efficiency fuels. But what about Joe-Bob from Booneville, IA? He's still driving his 1990 Chevy Silverado. The old Silverado's still got life in her, but since everybody in the surrounding cities have switched to new-fangled coconut diesel, Joe-Bob can't find any old-fashioned fuel for his pick-up (biodiesel stalls the Silverado and stops her up good). Joe-Bob's wife is expecting their first son (Joe-Bob knows it's a boy no matter what that crank doctor says in Urbandale). The baby is practically a miracle, since Joe-Bob and his wife have been trying to conceive all seven years of their marriage. Joe-Bob needs the Silverado filled with old-fashioned diesel so he can get Peggy to Urbandale for the delivery without breakdowns. He's going to have to trek all over Dallas County to find the coconut-free diesel he needs- and the fact that his Silverado is out of fuel isn't going to make his journey any easier.

Enough Joe-Bob. Let's go city-chic.

New York goes green. Public transportation runs on coconuts. A heavy tax on petroleum based consumer products makes it cheaper for New Yorkers to buy environmentally responsible cleaning products. It's going to take a lotta coconuts to fuel, bathe, and scrub the city (or the nation!!). So what happens to all the coconut shells? It's not a long-term problem, since the shells will eventually biodegrade. But what if coconut shells became all the environmentally-conscious fashion rage? According to Wikipedia, coconut shells can be used to make buttons, musical instruments, and, my personal favorite, can be used to "theatrical effect" by making an "improvised coconut bra". Can you see it now? Lingerie shops across Manhattan, the dummies in the store front windows are dressed in hula skirts and coconut bras. All the best parties are filled with women who have rigged coconut shells to make a sexy, environmentally-conscious fashion statement. I can hear the jokes about shell size now.

On to more story-centric musing. Wikipedia suggests coconut shells can house small animals or make nifty guitar-esque Asian instruments and drums. The thing that strikes me about the coconut shell is that they can be hollowed. The coconut shell could be made into the perfect drug smuggling scheme. In my future vision, coconut shells, whole or hollowed, are going to be moving across borders for processing and waste disposal. Anything from cocaine to a bio-engineered germ that would kill millions of people (or maybe just wipe out all the cash crop coconut trees) could be smuggled inside a coconut.

My fingers are itching with three or four other more potential problems. Yikes! There's number five. This is how science fiction writers get their ideas. Not all of them make it to the story development phase, but science fiction stories are born as ideas, and this is (more or less) where they come from.

Green Cleaning (Part 4- Looking back to see a better future)

"Organic chemicals are widely used as ingredients in household products. Paints, varnishes, and wax all contain organic solvents, as do many cleaning, disinfecting, cosmetic, degreasing, and hobby products. Fuels are made up of organic chemicals. All of these products can release organic compounds while you are using them, and, to some degree,when they are stored."

-from the EPA.

Many Americans are poisoning themselves with the products they use to clean their homes- and this information isn't just coming from nontoxic cleaner manufacturers like Seventh Generation- it's coming from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Last November I made the switch to green cleaning. I'd like to say it was a gesture of my deep commitment to protecting the environment for future generations, but the truth is, I made the switch to improve the health of myself and my husband today.

Here's some more cheery news from the EPA:

"Research shows that some VOCs can cause chronic and acute health effects at high concentrations, and some are known carcinogens. Low to moderate levels of multiple VOCs may also produce acute reactions."

What household cleaning products produce these damaging VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds)? The answer lies under the bathroom sink, in the linen closet, wherever you keep your cleaners. Products such as chlorine bleach, ammonia, oven cleaner, and toilet cleaner produce damaging VOCs both when you're using them, and when they're sitting seemingly harmlessly beneath the bathroom sink.

I have none of these products left in my home. So how do I clean? By traveling back in time and looking at what people used to clean their homes before these harsh chemicals were on the market. There is nothing in my home that can't be cleaned with vinegar, baking soda, and vegetable soap.

Vinegar can be used in place of chlorine bleach to remove stains. Half a cup left to sit in the toilet gets the bowl sparkling clean. A solution of vinegar and water cleans glass, shower doors, the refrigerator. Vinegar's acidic properties dissolve mineral build-up, and give it disinfecting properties. If your child broke into the cleaning cabinet and drank the bottle of vinegar, he might get sick to his stomach, but if he drank the same amount of chlorine bleach or toilet cleaner he would die if you didn't make it to the hospital in time. Even if he doesn't get into the cleaners, the EPA says it's possible their presence in the cabinet may cause him to develop cancer when he gets older. What do you want in your house- vinegar or toilet cleaner? Most people don't have to care about saving the whales to answer this question.

Baking soda is my abrasive cleaner of choice. It scrubs pots and pans, stove tops, scours bathroom tile, and eliminates grease and grime wherever I find it. It gets rid of odors in the refrigerator and on carpet and upholstery. (Bon Ami is a household-friendly and environmentally-friendly step up from baking soda for tough scouring jobs).

For everything that can't be cleaned with vinegar or baking soda, there's soap. But before we go any farther, let's talk about exactly what soap is.

As I learned in the fourth grade, soap is a surfactant, a substance that keeps water from beading up so the water comes closer in contact with dirty surfaces. The closer the water gets to the dirty surface, the easier those surfaces are to clean. Until World War I, all surfactants were soaps, and they were made from fatty oils derived from animal or vegetable sources. Wartime shortages of vegetable and animal fats during WW led to the development of synthetic surfactants in Germany. These surfactants used petroleum as the "fatty" oil source. These "artificial soaps" were called detergents, and became "widely available in the United States in the 1940's...today, detergents have all but replaced soap-based laundry products." (Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook)

Petroleum-based products haven't stopped their domination in the laundry room. Our dish soap, bath soap, all-purpose cleaners and countless household and health and beauty products are made from petroleum. Using a bottle of dish soap causes many of the same environmental problems as filling your car with oil, such as depletion of natural resources, and pollution and contamination from drilling. What's more, use of these products (especially in higher than intended concentration) pollutes your home! Detergents are less severely damaging to your health than the other cleaning agents we've talked about today, so I'll leave you with this thought: which would you rather wash your baby's bottle with- detergent made from petroleum, or soap made from vegetable oil?

Most vegetable based soaps on the market today are made from coconut oil- this goes for laundry soap or shampoo. Brands like Seventh Generation and Mrs.Meyers manufacture coconut-derived soaps. You'll also find dozens of health and beauty brands whose products are derived from coconuts instead of petroleum. Soaps are gentler on your skin, your clothes, your house, your health. And they're a heck of a lot gentler on the environment. To promote its products, Seventh Generation claims that if every U.S. household replaced their purchase of dish washing detergent with dish washing soap, the savings in petroleum could heat and cool 4,800 American homes for an entire year.

That's a lot of oil.

I think a lot of people feel that being environmentally responsible will lower their standard of living. This simply isn't true. In many cases, what's kinder to our outside homes is kinder to our inside homes and our personal well-being. Being environmentally responsible means being aware of the products you buy, and knowing your options. You don't have to buy petroleum based products and top-loading washing machines- there are alternatives. And green cleaning doesn't mean going back to the stone ages. Did you know a dishwasher run at full capacity uses about half the energy of washing dishes by hand? (Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook).

Every person, every town, city, province, nation has a unique set of physical and cultural needs. In order to make the Earth a good place to live, an effort needs to be made by government, industry, and individuals to establish guidelines, innovate solutions, and make choices that find a balance between our needs today and our needs tomorrow. Last night I heard Vice President Gore speak at the Oscars about environmental concerns as a "moral issue" as opposed to a political issue. I'd say it's an issue of survival.

This concludes the practical portion of my Green Cleaning series. Tomorrow, we'll take a look at coconut fuel and other nutty solutions to pollution problems. I don't know how many of them will be viable in the future, but it's a lot of fun to see what people come up with, and imagine some of my own.

Green Cleaning- Part 3 (Drippy Drying Racks in Brooklyn)

I was kindly invited to spend a week in an Italian country home. The scene was a small town in Northern Italy. My guestroom window opened onto the family vegetable garden, and beyond I could see people bicycling down dirt roads past vineyards. But to get a complete picture of an Italian village or city, you can't forget the laundry.

It's hanging everywhere: on collapsible drying racks in the front yard, on balconies. In the city flapping sheets are protected from pigeon poop or mop water from upstairs by yellow and green plastic sheets (in Turin I learned the hard way how important these plastic sheets can be). The visitor's first impression chugging into the train station of a city of 2,000 or 2,000,000 are the apartment buildings that face the tracks, all fluttering with laundry.

The point here is that Italian homes never have dryers, and that they do an extraordinary amount of laundry per capita.

I had many long discussions in Italy trying to explain why on earth Americans buy dryers. I heard all the arguments against them: they take up space, they consume costly energy (and put an unnecessary strain on the environment), they shorten the life of expensive clothing and family linens. In fact, when I lived in Italy, I was more than happy to sun myself on the balcony and hang the laundry out to dry. It was a pleasant task, and not so much more work than monitoring the dryer. And, sure enough, clothes never shrank, and they lasted so much longer.

About a week after living in Brooklyn, I was back to the dryer. Why?

Hanging the clothes out to dry is a great idea if you've got a big back yard or if you live in a place where every apartment, no matter how small, comes equipped with a balcony. Here I have no balcony, and certainly no big back yard. So I set up my drying rack in the bedroom to dry my husband's thick, cotton socks. The next morning they were still dripping wet.

See, Italy has a very dry climate. Here I'm in an oceanic, at times swampy climate. Humidity is my biggest household problem. The thick terry cloth towel that dried in 2-3 hours in Italy takes 2-3 days to dry in Brooklyn, and the moisture it adds to the already damp bedroom causes mold. This environmentally-friendly laundry solution is possible in Italy, but impossible in humid climates.

Back to my sojourn with Italian friends. Our hostess was allergic to my cats, so they were camped out in the spacious guest bathroom/laundry room. Every time my hostess needed to go in to do laundry, I had to stick the kitties into their carriers for her.

The cats went into the carrier for laundry three to five times a day. No kidding. This is for a household of two adults (and two guests, who only used the washer twice that week). So, what's up with that? Unlike my American friends, the Italians I knew would often wear the same outfit several days in a row, only changing their underthings. Without a doubt Americans wash their clothes more frequently. So where does all this laundry come from?

It comes from the fact that Italians rarely use disposable paper products. The fabric of Italian lives is literally fabric. A cotton or linen tablecloth is on the table at every single meal. Napkins are always made of fabric, never paper. Handkerchiefs are used instead of Kleenex. Paper towels, or carta da cucina, are only used for drying delicate washed herbs or draining fat from cooked meat, so all household cleaning is done with rags. Almost every act of cooking and cleaning involves linens, and they must be kept clean.

While transitioning between two apartments, I went a few months doing all the laundry by hand. Knuckles red, arms aching, I would scrub tablecloths, bedsheets, blue jeans, and bath towels in the sink. Rinsing them was the worst part, and you really haven't lived until you've tried to squeeze a pair of blue jeans dry. Last month while watching the film 3-Iron, I noticed that the typical Korean homes depicted in the film didn't have laundry machines. The protagonist of the film made a point of doing the laundry for his "hosts," which was accomplished by scrubbing clothes with bar soap on a textured rubber mat in the shower. I wish I'd learned this technique before those months of dunking clothes in the sink.

On the happy day I got my first Italian washing machine, I was overjoyed. I put the first load in and turned on the machine. The cycle lasted an hour and a half (opposed to the typical 20 minute cycle of an American washer). Why? Because if you're going to scrub your toilet with a rag and then reuse it, you want that puppy clean. I quickly learned the Italian way of life was a lot kinder on the rain forest, and created less garbage for those landfills I talked about on Friday. But I questioned the environmental friendliness of using gallons of potable water and gallons of petroleum-based laundry detergents, bleach, powdered disinfectant, and fabric softener.

Fortunately, environmentally-friendly laundry products are on the market in the U.S. and in Europe (see Green Cleaning- Part 4).

As for water waste, European front-loading washers use a third to half the water of a typical American top-loading model. Front-loading machines consume 68% less energy than top-loaders, and get clothes dryer on the spin cycle, reducing dryer time. They use significantly less soap, and are able to wash clothes at high enough temperatures to disinfect, eliminating the need for environmentally toxic bleach. Their drum washing system has been proven to significantly increase the life of clothes (statistics mentioned above are from Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook).

Front-loading washers are available in the U.S.- but they have only a sliver of the market share. Why? Easy answer: front-loading washing machines cost more at the store. Top-loaders are comparatively cheap. Despite the fact that water, soap, and especially energy costs would save a family money in the long run, the fast, cheap solution is the one that sells. So, is everyone in Europe rich? Why are they dishing out money on expensive front-loaders? Another easy answer: they are the only type you can buy when you go to the store. Less environmentally friendly models simply aren't available to the consumer.

We've already seen legislation passed to curtail emissions by restricting the kinds of cars and trucks automobile manufacturers can sell in America. Why not do the same thing with a washer?

Nifty textured mat or no, it is hard to envision a future world where Americans do their laundry by hand. But generations of Europeans (and likely other cultures, as well) have been using environmentally-friendly laundry techniques, and the appliances and detergents they use are keeping up with the times. The U.S. definitely has something to learn about laundry from folks across the Atlantic.

We haven't washed our hands of laundry yet. In tomorrow's installment of green cleaning, we are going to discuss detergents and cleaners of all kinds, and how the cleaning agent you choose can make a significant difference not only for the environment, but for the health of your family, today.

Green Cleaning- Part 2 (Signing Your Garbage)

Whether you're living wild off the land in the Australian outback or kicking up your heels in Manhattan, everybody, I mean everybody, makes trash. Trash could be as simple as fruit rinds, animal bones, and human waste buried in the ground, or as complex as an old refrigerator that has to be disposed of carefully, draining the poisonous Freon and removing the doors so children can't lock themselves inside and suffocate.

So, with trash the big question is, how do we get rid of it?

When I moved to Italy, I couldn't take all my stuff with me- I had a lot to unload. We gave appliances to family and called the Volunteers of America to take furniture, exercise equipment, kitchen things. The rest of our unwanted belongings filled up the industrial-sized dumpster outside our house- four weeks in a row.

Trash takes up space.

When we moved into our first Italian apartment, understanding the garbage bureaucracy was quite a challenge. There were black bags for regular garbage, yellow bags for plastic bottles, I think blue was for paper and cardboard, pink for cans and bottles, and green was the color for biological garbage (known affectionately by the locals as bio, known in our house as the "stinky trash"). You've got it, the Italians recycled food. The bio garbage went to some communal compost heap in the country. Egg shells, coffee grinds, leftover pasta, cheese rinds, cat food covered in sock lint- anything that could biodegrade went in there. Separating all those categories was fairly space consuming in my tiny kitchen, as I needed bins to keep everything separate. I also had to keep track of alternating collection days. Later in Turin, the process was simplified by marked dumpsters practically outside my front door. No more color-coded bags of garbage piled in my kitchen. On my return to the states it took me about a month to stop reflexively pausing every time I dumped carrot and potato peels in with the regular trash.

While visiting my father-in-law I was introduced to a whole new way of thinking about garbage- by the pound. He opted not to pay for garbage collection, but instead to load all his trash into the back of his car and drive it to the dump. There he was presented with a game card. He drove from station to station, and workers weighed his trash and his various forms of recycling. The game card tallied the weight of the recycled material against the weight of the garbage, and he paid the difference by the pound as he left.

Trash has weight, ergo mass.

Here in Brooklyn I needed to get rid of a large appliance still in working order. I called the Salvation Army, and after nearly an hour of run-around was told they wouldn't come take it. When I told my neighbor this story, he laughed, and helped me carry the appliance to the curb. He'd had a similar experience with the Salvation Army, and told me around here all I needed to do was leave my item on the curb a few days before collection. He'd gotten rid of a working refrigerator and broken water heater that way. Someone would pick it up, he told me- and, sure enough, my item disappeared. Yesterday on the way to buy bread I almost tripped on a toaster oven- a sticky note on the side read, "still works."

Growing up in Iowa garage sale Saturdays were thrilling family treasure hunts.

In Turin used wardrobe bins were all over the neighborhood. Homeless people broke into them overnight, and in the morning immigrant women and children picked through the used shirts, trousers, and shoes.

Trash can be reused.

My grocery service delivers all my produce and deli items with stickers that bear my name and address. Someday when future generations are mining a landfill they're going to come across my name. "Heather Pagano of XYZ St., Brooklyn dumped her Styrofoam banana padding here." I know the service is just trying to keep my bananas from arriving smashed, but my name is on that stuff! People are going to know I'm responsible. I actually stopped buying certain items because of the packaging. Ecologically unsound packaging costs my grocery service at least $7.50 a week Could ecological packaging ever become a selling point? Only if consumers are signing their names to their garbage- literally or figuratively.

We're responsible for the things we don't want anymore.

And what about a world where the cost of garbage disposal is super high? This is already true in places like Japan, where the disposal of furniture or appliances requires the Japanese to go to city hall, fill out a form, and purchase a costly seal they attach to the used item so collectors know the pick-up has been paid for. What if trash collection became too expensive for families to afford? Imagine people just chucking their trash outside- what a mess! The freelancer junk market would boom as it collected, refurbished, and resold used goods. Services like eBay would be flooded with remade junk. How would the economy continue to flow if purchasing items became a liability?

The fewer places there are to go with the garbage, the more costly its removal.

In a sense, modern man isn't that different in his trash technology than the first caveman who buried the remains of his meal. We can't do much more than dig a hole and bury stuff underground. We've learned a lot about previous generations by examining the stuff they buried, or that got buried by earthquake, flood, volcanic eruption, time. We are putting the signature of our civilization into landfills. Someone is going to be digging through it someday, looking for non-renewable resources we thoughtlessly threw away. I wonder what they'll think of us?

Green Cleaning- Part I (Our Inside and Outside Homes)

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced its Fourth Assessment Report on February 2nd, global warming finally made significant headlines in the American press. Global warming was considered a fact of life six years ago when I moved to Italy. I was in Turin for the 2003 European heat wave, one of many climactic crises brought on by global warming. I spent the agonizingly hot days, like many Europeans, with no air conditioning. I lay on the sofa in a half-conscious daze, occasionally remembering to eat gelato. 20,000 Italians who weren't as young and strong as I was died.

The next summer, still in Turin, my husband and I bought an air conditioner. The torture of the past summer overrode knowledge that air conditioning units would only make the heat problems worse in the future.

And isn't that where we all are, those of us with the means to choose whether or not to buy the new A/C, the new car, the next can of furniture polish? See, human beings are wired to survive the day- which is why I bought that A/C, and human beings are also wired to care for themselves and their loved ones. Parents change diapers, people clean their toilets, wash their windows, use wads of paper towels when the cat spits up a hairball. So we're faced with a situation where the products we use to make our inside homes inhabitable are making our outside home uninhabitable. What can we do? More importantly, what will we do?

I think this is a fantastic discussion for people who are writing about the future. Not only will global warming change the fabric of our future world, but the things we do to try to prevent drastic environmental consequences (whether they work, or not) will color our everyday lives. Having lived overseas, I've seen that local climate and culture play a huge role in the way people keep house. I'm talking things that sound insignificant: how people do the laundry, how people clean the bathroom, how people take out trash. We're learning that all these "insignificant" daily acts have a huge impact on the environment.

So this week I'm going to share some of my experiences of the seemingly small differences in how Italians go about their daily lives, and do a little research to learn how things are done in a variety of places. I'll examine why some of these foreign practices are only suited to certain climates and cultures, and discuss the possible impacts of what might happen if selected local practices were implemented on a global basis. How might the typical American house be changed? And to conclude the series, I'll discuss what I learned about green cleaning when I went cold turkey last November, and how green cleaning (which comes from a previous generation, not a foreign culture) could change the touch, the taste, the smell, the experience of living in future homes.

The Garden of Eden

I have a new post up on the Friggin' Write blog. I discuss The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway. The Garden of Eden is interesting not only because it was published after the author's suicide, but because the main character is heavily based on Hemingway, himself.

One Rat Short

Writer/director Alex Weil had ten minutes and eighteen seconds to make me cry over two rats and an empty cheese curl bag, and he did it.

I was drawn to this film by the thirty second teaser on iTunes. Thirty seconds was just enough to get an idea of the animation style, and to draw me into a world I know all too well, the NYC subway. One Rat Short was a candidate at this year's Sundance Film Festival. (One Rat Short and all the other Sundance shorts are available for download on iTunes).

It's hard to say too much about ten minutes and eighteen seconds of film without giving everything away. Let me point out a few reasons why the film is cool.

1. Setting. This film was animated by a someone who, like me, has logged hours staring down at subway tracks waiting for a train. The contrast between the grimy subway opening of the film and the pristine white of the new world into which our protagonist falls is striking.

2. Characters. There are four characters in this film. The protagonist is a big, grey, hairy rat (don't worry, he looks cute, not disgusting). Just as the settings contrast with grimy and pristine, the two main characters contrast- one grey and dirty, the other sleek, white, and clean. Other characters include a troublesome cheese curl bag (the animation on the bag is so lovely it is called a "ballet" on IMDb), and a robot whose gears don't all line up, if you know what I mean.

3. No words. Not a single syllable is uttered during the course of this short. I'm finding that more and more of my favorite films, such as Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring and 3-Iron by Ki-Duk Kim have very few words, or none at all. An amazing piece of cinema really doesn't need them.

An Interview with Lindsay Noseworth

Today we are joined by Lindsay Noseworth, whose rôles include Master in Arms of the Inconvenience, and the not unburdensome responsibility of being second-in-command of said airship. Mr. Noseworth has stepped up to the plate, as it were- although playing baseball is difficult, if not impossible aboard an airship- to be the role model and all-around conscience of the crew of the Inconvenience, also known as the Chums of Chance. Mr. Noseworth has agreed to discuss events which unfold during "Light Over the Ranges," this being the first of five books contained by the larger, door-stopping tome, Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon.

Heather: Mr. Noseworth, could you tell us a little something about the Chums of Chance?

L.N.: Well, certainly I could, seeing as I, myself, am one of their number. The Chums of Chance is an organization that turns boys into men, and teaches them to fly- that is, to fly on an airship and go on all sorts of adventures some of which, perhaps, you've already read.

Heather: Can you give us some examples?

L.N: Goodness gracious, where to start. There was there was our top-secret assignment in Washington*, during which, by the way, we came across Pugnax.
(*see, The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit)

Heather: And who is Pugnax?

L.N.: Oh, he's just a dog with an annoying habit of lallygagging on deck reading books, and generally getting underfoot and being a nuisance.

Heather: Excuse me, did you say the dog reads?

L.N.: Incessantly. Well, there was the time we went to Mexico**, and the whole mess we had to straighten out in Hawaii***, which happens to be where Miles learned to play the ukelele.
(** see The Chums of Chance in Old Mexico; *** see The Chums of Chance and the Curse of the Great Kahuna)

Heather: Miles Blundell, that would be, correct?

L.N.: Exactly. Fine enough fellow, as they go, but he nearly precipitates disaster upon the Inconvenience, endangering not only the crew but everyone underneath the airship before we've gotten more than a dozen pages into Pynchon's chronicle of our adventures.

Heather: That brings us to an interesting question. Your branch of the Chums of Chance organization has received rather more press, shall we say, than other crews of hardy fellows trying to keep their noses clean as they keep the peace. Would you comment on how Mr. Pynchon's rendering of the tale in question compares to the vast literary output other authors have produced in your honor?

L.N. To be honest, ma'am, I've seen better work than Against the Day. For starters, he left Chums of Chance right out of the title of the book. Going to make it hard to sell, that's for sure. Our young readers won't know the book's about us, and unless they're smarter than me, they won't know what the title means, at all.

Heather: A point well taken. Beyond the title do you have any other complaints?

L.N.: Well, don't get me wrong, Mr. Pynchon has clearly done his best, and put in untold hours scratching his pen. But he could have saved himself a whole lot of work if he'd kept the story more to the Chums of Chance. See, every few chapters, he'll pick some fellow who shares a meal, a song, an afternoon's work with us, and just goes running off from the Inconvenience chasing after this fellow. Not only that, we stop the whole story to go back and learn the details of their lives, and sometimes the details of their parents' lives or their children's lives. And I hate to say it, but not all these characters are folks you'd invite to Sunday dinner, if you know what I mean. Some of them are fools, no better or worse than the rest of us, but some of them are unemployed, have wives who run off with magicians, some are dynamiters, some are murderers-- some are even communists. And I just don't think that's the sort of thing our young readers should have their impressionable young minds exposed to.

Heather: Thanks for shedding light on the novel today, Mr. Noseworth. I trust your crew is, by now, missing your inspiring presence. I leave you to your duties.

Stranger Than Fiction

The very first time I picked up a book by my favorite science fiction author, Robert Heinlein, I didn't like it. The book was Number of the Beast. It had been recommended by a friend, but I just didn't' see where Heinlein was going with all the drivel about who was in charge of what on the Gay Deceiver. There were only four people, for crying out loud. Zebadiah, Deety and her Dad, and Hilda were running for their lives, and all they could talk about was marriage and rank. Come on. Four people. Get in the Gay Deceiver and get away from the black hats, or the lot of you deserve to be blown to smithereens!

Eventually I slogged through the pecking order chapters and began an adventure that changed the way I think about fiction. The more I read in the genre, the more I saw this theme of selecting the appropriate crew for the mission into the unknown. See, when a small group of people is suddenly isolated from their family, friends, boss- in short, from the entire cultural fabric of civilization- that tiny group becomes civilization unto itself. They have to provide all needs for each other, professional and psychological, and do so very far away from home. There's a lot of discussion about who should be chosen based on skill set and social lubrication. Do we send all men? All women? Couples in even number? Married or unmarried?

In 2005 Technovelgy.com addressed this issue and quoted from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land to illustrate the similarities between problems faced by Heinlein's fictional mission to Mars and the actual mission to Mars being proposed in 2005.

So when I read about Astronaut Lisa Nowak in the news, it brings to mind questions that science fiction writers have been asking for a long time: what's the best way to avoid conflict in social systems when a small group of people loses contact with our established social supports? The buzz about a mission to Mars in 2005 produced several articles on the challenge of keeping a group of people far from home for a proposed three years. Jay C. Buckley cited psychological adaptation first in his list of biomedical dangers to the crew. You got it, psychological concerns came before bone and muscle mass loss and cellular damage from radiation. Buckley believed the psychological challenge could be overcome through the use of training and a careful selection process. The reason you'll find Nowak in the "science and space" column of USA Today instead of on the crime blotter, is because she looks like an example of bad selection process. NASA mentions this problem in the article I cited above, saying

NASA spokesman Doug...Peterson said it's also too early to know whether NASA's process for choosing astronauts would be affected by Nowak's situation....Astronaut selection is highly rigorous.

Yet NASA flight surgeon, Johnathan Clarke, says
the agency has turned a blind eye to both astronauts' mental troubles and their extramarital affairs


So as little as I enjoy the details of the psychological breakdown of a woman and the resulting assault, it's clear that this news story will be in the minds of those who select the pioneers of the future, and those who are writing about them.

Leitmotif and Lightsabers

Pop your favorite movie into the DVD player, turn off the lights, and turn off the sound. What's the first thing you notice? You can't hear the actors talking, right? Come on, by now you've got all Han Solo's lines memorized (you could also turn on the subtitles). Dialog is no longer a problem, so what's your next insight? The neighbor's dog is barking, the ice maker in the refrigerator makes a lot of noise. Ok, you've had your moment of zen, now back to the movie. Depending on the film and your personality, you've noticed that your movie experience is missing the cool lightsaber sound effects and- wait for it- the soundtrack.

A good soundtrack can tell the story almost without the dialog, sound effects, (and dare we say without the video?). Depending on the successful realization of the director's vision, the soundtrack can take on a variety of roles during the course of a movie. It can tell the story, or it can act as a foil to what is happening on screen. Today I'm going to talk about what happens when the soundtrack tells the story. It accomplishes this by describing a character, a setting (place), or an event.

Let's take John Williams' Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope as an example. Who can forget the endearing "Princess Leia's Theme?" Think Princess Leia, you see the two buns on the sides of her head, maybe get a flash of her bending toward R2-D2 to send her call for help to Ben Kenobi, and you hear the lilting flute melody that is associated with Leia throughout Episodes IV, V, and VI. Other tracks on the Episode IV soundtrack paint pictures of places (the quirky "Moisture Farm" theme or the gorgeous French horn solo, "Binary Sunset"). Some melodies depict events (like "The Battle of Yavin.")

Associating a particular musical theme with a character, place, or event is called leitmotif.

Leitmotif was loved by opera composers, and it is still a mainstay of our dramatic soundtrack composers, today. Most of my favorite soundtracks use leitmotif, and you can learn a lot about what's important to the theme of the film by examining the leitmotifs or, to sound less like my music history prof, by examining the track names on the CD. A look at the Star Wars soundtracks shows that events make up a lot of the themes, but characters and places are also very important. Another of my favorites, Howard Shore's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, has a lot to do with places: "The Bridge Of Khazad Dum," "Lothlorien," "The Great River," as well as titles from events in the film. What a great way for the the filmmakers to translate Tolkein's love of names of places into leitmotifs that use music to paint a picture of the landscape.

Ok, now you can turn the sound back on your DVD. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the music.

Free Stuff- How to Find Your True Name pdf

I've added a new section to my website where you can download free stories to read, enjoy, and send to your friends. Check out the new page or download the first pdf of the series right from my blog.

"How to Find Your True Name"
by Heather Pagano

A light-hearted short fantasy about the nature of Truth, Beauty, Unsecured Debt, Public Toilets, and Love.



HowToFindYourTrueName.pdf

Apologies to Columbus, Ohio

The best one-liner I've read in quite some time comes from Thomas Pynchon's latest release, Against the Day. Now, I've never been to Columbus, Ohio, but trust me, character Merle Rideout has good reason for being fed up with Pynchon's fictional Columbus.

Here's the quote:

"If the U.S. was a person," he [Merle] later became fond of saying, "and it sat down, Columbus Ohio would instantly be plunged into darkness." -Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

Hilarious. What makes it so funny?

1. The line draws a funny connect the dot picture, leaving the reader to connect the last dot. The fact that we complete the joke ourselves makes it really hit home.
2. The line is not only in character (it's hard to see that out of context) but it develops the character. Merle didn't just come out and say butt, keister, heiny, or ass. He found a roundabout way of making his crude observation without using impolite words. Interesting.

This one-liner has been tickling my brain since Thursday. Maybe now that I've written it down and figured out why it got stuck there, I can finally get it out of my head.

Intelligence Loves Company

"I, Rowboat" by Cory Doctorow from his short story collection, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present.

This story is chock full of cool ideas. The title, for starters, is super. Robbie the rowboat is one of the last of the AIs on earth who hasn't committed suicide. Why are all the AIs voluntarily shutting down their consciousnesses? The answer is that there are no humans left on earth to play with, anymore. Humans have all abandoned their meat puppet shells (Doctorow's terms) and uploaded their consciousnesses to the noosphere.

Robbie the rowboat keeps on chugging because he's a convert to Asimovism (an AI religion based on Asimov's three laws of robotics) and because he gets to interact with sort-of human beings from time to time. See, Robbie's in the tourism industry. He oversees two non-conscious meat puppets who rent their bodies to humans in the noosphere so they can have a vacation in physical form. The vacationers spend their time scuba diving near Osprey reef (the reef becomes a major character in the story).

Doctorow tackles some pretty big issues, like what is consciousness, what is intelligence, what is humanity. Ideas as lofty as this are expressed in the narrative:

“The reason for intelligence is intelligence...Intelligence wants to exist, to spread itself, to compute itself. You already know this, or you wouldn’t have chosen to stay aware...Why did humans create intelligent machines? Because intelligence loves company.”

The ideas in the story are embodied through the adventures of the sweet, self-effacing Robbie. His adventures live in a world that grows more complex and engaging in proportion with the excitement of the story, which is what makes for fun reading. Here's my favorite line from the story, near the climax of the tale:

"Robbie...was panicking, something he hadn’t known he could do as an AI, but there it was. It was like having a bunch of sub-system collisions, program after program reaching its halting state."

The only problem with the story was the denouement. In my opinion, it would be much improved by ending with the words: "Sorry, I just don’t see the difference anymore" (the transformation of character is so great, that the reader loses connection with Robbie after this point). But this small issue hardly keeps "I, Rowboat" from being one of my favorites in the collection, so far.

Pluralism and the Language of the Future

Lots of science fiction writers weave future language into the fabric of their created universe. Orwell's 1984 had Newspeak. Joss Whedon's Firefly posits the dual spread of English and Chinese through the colonized universe. The real-life constructed language, Esperanto, is such a mainstay of visions of the future, that its use is parodied in the sf Britcom, Red Dwarf.

Why so much fuss about language? For one thing, writers know our everyday experiences and cultural identity are colored by the languages we speak. It's also an attempt to avoid unthinking ethnocentrism. Given the prominent place English holds in the international community today, it's especially tempting for sf writers to assume a future society where everyone speaks English.

So my interest was really piqued by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow's discussion of the place of non-English languages in the future. Their book, The Story of French, may have started with the history of the language, but it brought readers up to date with statistics and events from 2006, and predicted language trends of the future.

Nadeau and Barlow explained that, while French was once the default international language for diplomacy, business, and education, English took over that role in the 20th Century. The aftermath of African colonization, French-speaking Canadians, and the spread of goodwill French-teaching organizations across the globe, have kept French on IV, but it was being wiped out on the international affairs stage (did you know the official language of the European Union is English?). An organization was created to promote the use of French on the international scene, but Nadeau and Barlow claim the Francophonie was only so much hot air until they hit upon a key idea: language pluralism.

France was once (and still is) the figurehead for democracy. Now the French language is becoming the figurehead of language pluralism- that is, of using more than one language. The trend in international bodies such as the UN, is to move toward a single official language (English) for efficiency. This leaves those who aren't native speakers at a disadvantage, and contributes to what Nadeau and Barlow call "mental colonization."

Waving the banner for more than one language in international diplomacy and cooperation, French speakers have captured the attention of other nations who don't want to see their languages disappear. That hot air Francophonie organization for promoting French is being joined by nations who don't even have large French-speaking populations (though they must prove strong French linguistic and cultural presence in their national identity to join- check out all 55 member flags). Momentum is slowly gaining for the idea that French is "the other language." Speaking French gives non-native English speakers an alternative to speaking English, and gives them hope that their language, too, might survive.

Just to be clear- I love English. I even spent several years teaching English to non-native speakers who wanted to learn for both practical reasons and because they just liked the language! But I'd hate to envision a future where there were no new French books for the September rentrée, where there were no new languages for me to study. Language is intertwined with culture, and learning a foreign language gives us a window to that culture. Efforts of the French-speaking community to promote linguistic and cultural pluralism may change the color of life in the space colonies of our future, and in the space colonies of our dreams.

Guest Authoring General Fiction Posts

I've been invited to participate as a guest author at the Friggin' Write Blog. I submit posts on all things literary every other Wednesday. Today's post is all about The Body Artist by Don DeLillo.

My first post answered the question What is Literature? My definition eschews attempts to classify literature as stuff that's not spec fiction, and goes deeper to explore the relationship between literature and the use of language.

Doctorow's "I, Robot"

The fourth story in Cory Doctorow's new science fiction anthology, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, really gets the attitude Asimov's human detective, Elijah Baley, has toward his robotic colleague. Doctorow puts an interesting twist on robopsychologist, Susan Calvin, by making her the disreputable wife of the protagonist detective. References to Asimov's I, Robot series are sprinkled throughout the story, including naming one of the "Calvin" character's robots Lenny.

Of course Doctorow puts his own spin on the scenario, posing questions about who owns the rights to what, and why the answer to that question is so important to society. He again shows an uncanny knowledge of twelve-year-old girls, though in this story we get to know Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg through her father's eyes. Single Dad Arturo is struggling with the aftermath of his wife's flight to Eurasia to build illicit robotech. She's left him to keep his chin up for Social Harmony approval so he can keep his job, and struggling to get Ada Trouble out of bed, in school, and still win her love.

A fun, detailed world awaits the reader in the beginning of the story, though as the overly-long tale drags on, the concreteness of the world drops away. Large portions of the action take place in a generic mall that, as I had no details about it, read like a typical, present-day American mall. Aside from setting issues, the father-daughter relationship so well set up in the opening lines of the story loses power when, in a moment of action-adventure, Doctorow pauses to remind us how important Ada Trouble is to her dad. We already knew that, and the reader can see the strings as Doctorow tries to tug our hearts.

But don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun reading this story. It's jam packed with cool ideas and futuristic car chases. The references to the I, Robot world will tickle any Asimov fan. And, by the way, if you haven't read the originals, check out the core stories of I, Robot and my favorite novel in the I, Robot universe featuring Elijah Baley, Caves of Steel.

Peter Jackson's King Kong and My Popcorn Recipe

Saturday was movie night at our house. We turned off the lights and got ready to enjoy Peter Jackson's 187-minute-long remake of King Kong. When the movie was in theaters, we stayed home and watched the original, which we had never seen. We were probably the only couple to go out and by the soundtrack to the 2005 remake, and not the DVD. But, as fans of the original movie and fans of what Jackson & Co. did with the Lord of the Rings, we were pretty pumped to see the movie.

The first hour of the movie impressed us a lot. The second hour I spent chatting with my mother-in-law and making popcorn (the conversation and snack were a heck of a lot better than the movie). The third hour redeemed itself with a satisfying and engaging ending.

Here are some things Jackson & Co. did right in the opening:
1. Ann Darow's character, transforming her from a starving young woman (original) to a starving young artist (2005 version) whose passion for theater makes her love story with writer Jack Driscoll plausible and sweet.
2. Buildup to Skull Island maintained tension through the first third of the movie. Our arrival there was not disappointing- it lived up to all the spooky hype. Kudos to Jackson for set building, casting and directing the Skull Island natives, and film techniques used to make arrival on Skull Island genuinely scary.

Following this are some truly lovely shots that establish the fantastical, prehistoric island where everything, from the insects to the T-Rex, are super sized and super beautiful. But within five minutes...

Heather's Popcorn Recipe
1/4 C organic popcorn kernels
3 T extra virgin olive oil
1 t fine sea salt

Directions: Air pop the corn, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and toss well. Serves two bored viewers.

So what went wrong? I'm hardly the first to notice that the drawn out creature feature battles dilute the tension of the story. At this point Jackson & Co. has made the viewer really care about Ann Darow. We want to know her fate! But we have to wade through way too many brontosaurus stampedes to get a glimpse at what's going on with her and Kong. Not only that, the creature battles are not well done. Cheesy battles that don't take simple physics into account may work in short clips, but not for the length of time we're exposed to them in the 2005 remake. Up until the moment we see the first dinosaur, the actions of the heroes are gripping, because they're battling and barely surviving, using their knowledge and skills to the best of their abilities in the face of tremendous threats. This truly scary feeling drops away in the middle of the movie, and we are left with continuous near-deaths that should have been real deaths. Coincidence and highly implausible escapes (that at my kindest evaluation were lucky, and at times were ridiculous) water down the element of danger and look just plain goofy.

Jackson's portrayal of the relationship between Ann and Kong saves the movie, so by the time I got to the end, I really did care what happened to Kong, and felt that he had made a connection with Ann. I think that was the heart of the original move, and despite a lot of vine-swinging T-Rexes, Jackson managed to deliver that heart in his remake.

3-Iron and the Nature of Reality

In a previous post I discussed how much I enjoyed the 2003 Korean film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring directed by Ki-duk Kim. It struck me so much, I had to try another. 3-Iron (Bin-jip) was no disappointment.

The beginning of this film is anything but fantastical. A young man rides from house to house on his motorbike, sticking advertisements for a restaurant to residents' doors. We quickly learn that Tae-Suk isn't working for a restaurant, but using these flyers as a way to tell whether or not people are home, or away on vacation. When he finds one of his flyers left on the front door for several days, he knows it's safe to pick the lock, and let himself inside. As far as Tae-Suk is concerned, he's not doing anything wrong. He's homeless, and all he wants is a bath, a meal, and a place to spend the night. He makes a point of doing something nice for the people while he's using their pad- watering the plants, doing the laundry, fixing a broken clock. Those who return usually don't even notice he was there, and he he never steals more than some leftovers from the fridge.

Tae-Suk's seemingly harmless existence incurs its first genuine act of crime when he discovers something extraordinarily valuable left abandoned in a wealthy man's home- the man's wife. There is no question this young wife has been badly abused by her husband. She's covered in bruises and blood, and when her husband telephones she screams. When Tae-Suk is surprised by the arrival of the abused woman's husband, he exacts revenge on the husband, beating him by driving golf balls into his gut until he crumples. Tae-Suk flees the house, taking the young wife with him. The young woman is initiated to Tae-Suk's way of life, but the karmic consequences of what Tae-Suk has done to her husband haunt their shyly blossoming love.

As these consequences grow darker, Tae-Suk learns the cost of his way of life and his love for the young woman. He combats his problems in a unique way that brings us into the realm of the speculative. An event quite near the end of the film could have two possible consequences. Not only does the denouement allow room for both of these outcomes to have occurred, it calls into question the reality of all the events that happened previously.

I loved this film. The details of each home or apartment Tae-Suk enters opens into the private world of fully-developed characters. The detail and touchable, almost smellable reality experienced by the viewer make the ambiguity of the ending hit home, causing a lurch as we question what is real, and what is not.

Harry Potter 7 to be Released on July 21st!

I was still bleary-eyed this morning when I was inundated by announcements about the seventh of seven books in the Harry Potter series. The final book's title had been released over the holidays in a puzzle on J.K. Rowling's website, leaving fans eager to know when they could get their hands on it. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is already available for pre-order on amazon.com. If you're anywhere near as excited as I am to get your hands on this book, pre-order and avoid long lines and sell-outs in June!

There will be lots of speculation today about how Rowling will end the series, but I hate spoilers. I'm all for the buzz, but I really don't want to know what happens until I get to the last page. I feel so strongly about this, that my husband lost his voice reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in an attempt to finish before we accidentally heard anything about the ending on the news.

What I'd like to talk about is how the Harry Potter series fits into spec fiction. Harry Potter is fantasy, one of the three major genres of SF. Rowling used some pretty conventional fantasy staples- fantastical creatures from Anglo-Saxon lore, magical spells in Latin, the idea of witches and wizards- and made something magical of them. She isn't the most original or inventive writer out there, her prose style isn't head and shoulders above the rest- but she sure does understand story. Rowling brought fun and adventure back to the mainstream perception of reading a book. That isn't the only key to her success. Her world building skill is absolutely head and shoulders above the rest. Think about it, wouldn't you love to take your next vacation at Hogwarts? The Harry Potter world is real to anyone who has read even one book in the series.

So, not only has Rowling captured a huge audience and been translated into at least 47 languages (I've even seen a copy in Latin), but she revived the spirit of storytelling. I have fond memories of sitting in rapt attention with my equally enthralled sister-in-law and mother-in-law while my husband read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6) aloud. The Harry Potter books speak to the spirit of wonder in all of us, regardless of where or when we were born, or whether or not we're diehard SF fans. I think that's quite an accomplishment, and I can't wait for July 21st, so I can hear the rest of the story