Into the Breach

I’ve been a bad journal-keeper lately. I’m trying to finish the manuscript for the sequel to The Glass Maker’s Daughter, which currently is titled The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. The book’s reached that point where everything is avalanching into completion. But yesterday a curious thing happened.

The Glass Maker’s Daughter takes place entirely within an imaginary city very much like pseudo-Renaissance Venice. Its main character is part of that culture’s aristocracy; the story takes place very much the city’s largest estates and in its palace. Then there are a few detours to a couple of seedy spots, giving the heroine an awareness for the first time that there are indeed a number of indigents within her city’s walls who are as vital to its future as she. The Buccaneer’s Apprentice focuses on those people. Its protagonist is a poor kid who, thanks to Cassaforte’s draconian system of work-debt, has spent all his life as an indentured servant of one sort or another. He’s only just managed to escape the worst of them and to obtain a spot as servant to a really poor (in every sense of the word) troupe of traveling actors, when the ship on which they’re sailing is attacked by pirates—who are part of a political intrigue that threatens Cassaforte itself. By the end of chapter two, the actors are taken for slaves, the ship is sunk, and poor Nic is left to fend for himself on a deserted island.

The book’s story is how, after so many years of being owned and directed, Nic manages to come into his own independence. It’s about how he manages to bluff and scrape his way home, collecting allies as he does, and how he defends a country that admittedly hasn’t given him any of the advantages boasted by the heroine of The Glass Maker’s Daughter. It’s also about how living on society’s margins have given him an insight and flexibility that the more aristocratic classes might not have.

Anyway. Yesterday I had a fairly straight-forward scene to finish in which Nic and his allies, having made their way to a seedy shipping port before sailing for Cassaforte, had to find a used-boat salesman. They’d been given the address of a tavern where the guy was hanging out, and they’d made their way through the city’s dirty streets while avoiding drunkards, beggars, and buckets of muck being slopped from upper story windows, when suddenly they all balked, en masse. “He’s not in there,” they told me, nodding at the tavern I’d picked out for the scene. It was a nice, smelly tavern, too. “He’s in that place.” They pointed to the doorway across the street.

“But that’s a whorehouse,” I told them. “See? I just wrote a little sentence about the buxom woman sticking her head out of the window and flirting with them. Did you see how she jiggled her breasts? That's because she’s kind of a hooker.”

“He’s in there,” said Nic and company. They crossed their arms.

“You heard me say it’s a whorehouse, didn’t you?” They all nodded at my question. “Are you sure? Tavern? Drinks? I could put in a bawdy tavern wench.”

“You already had a tavern scene,” Nic said. “Chapter four. Remember? When I get traded in a card game? Do you really want to repeat yourself?”

“Yeah,” said the blue-face pirate who had accompanied him throughout most of the book. “I’d like the whorehouse, too. I'm adult. It's been a while.”

“Is a whorehouse even appropriate for a young adult book?” I asked.

They were already stomping ahead of me. “Your editor will love it,” they called back.

So before I really knew what was happening, my characters barged through the whorehouse, looking around with wide-eyed wonderment, giving each other advice on how to behave (and not to kiss the women with sores on their lips), sniffing with disapproval, and generally having the time of their lives as they hunted down the used-boat salesman for ten pages.

They do that sometimes, one’s characters. Sometimes their rationales for running amok aren’t very well justified. At other times, though, they have the right instincts. I think they did, here. Any town can have a seedy tavern. In a port town catering to adventurers and freebooters, however, a nice, grimy whorehouse really can set the mood, plus it gives one’s cast a chance to sound off and show themselves for what they really are—prudes, libertines, or something in between.

The Show that I No Longer Understand

Whenever I watch Lost these days, the experience is a little something like this:

KATE: They can’t take my son!
HUGO: Where are the Fritos, dude?
BEN: We have to go back to the island.
CHARLOTTE: I have a headache.
DANIEL: How is your headache?
CHARLOTTE: I still have a headache. Why are you looking at me like that? Do you know what’s happening to me?
DANIEL: Yes. I mean, nuh-uh.
SAWYER: Watch out for the flaming arrows!

Then, as it cuts to a commercial, I’ll sigh and say, “I don’t understand this show.”

“Me neither,” the Mont will reply. Then we’re into the plot again.

BEN: We have to go back to the island.
RANDOM WOMAN FROM TWO SEASONS AGO: They have to go back to the island.
LOCKE: They have to come back to the island.
DESMOND: This has something to do with the island.
SOME CHICK ON A BOAT: I don’t want you to go back to the island.
HUGO: Dude, where are the Hot Pockets?
DANIEL: How is your headache?
CHARLOTTE: Wow, my head hurts. Why . . . why are you looking at me like that? Do you know something?
DANIEL: I am doing my best to convince you that the nosebleed you get every time the island transports itself through time and space has absolutely nothing to do with anything and is probably just a case of the sniffles, while I wrinkle my eyebrows in obvious worry, and this is how you repay me? With questions, woman?
CHARLOTTE: I can see in your eyes you know something.
DANIEL: Oh, that. It’s probably just a sty.
SAWYER: Duck! It’s a nuclear bomb!

Another commercial. “I don’t understand this show,” I’ll murmur.

And I really haven’t understood Lost at all for the last three seasons. Week after week I watch it, through shocking revelation after shocking revelation, and though I have a vague grasp of the plot—I think it has something to do with them needing to go back to the island—I honestly couldn’t summarize in a succinct way where the show has been or where it might be going.

There are frustrations. I get a little bit baffled at how characters who weren’t introduced until last season are allowed to carry so much of the story now, while good characters like Juliet get to tromp around in the background with an air of “What the hell. I don’t know what’s going on, either.” A lot of the show’s mythology has gotten so complicated that it takes a flow chart or a real Lost-o-phile to get any of the nuances. Flaming arrows, nuclear weapons, time travel, hidden relationships, mysterious figures . . . Lost is so chock-a-block with them that I feel a little bit desensitized when the Next Really Important Thing happens. Explosions? Groovy, but I’ve seen them before. Strangers with guns? Oh, that’s so Season Two. Secret Dharma Initiative installations? Well duh!

I no longer understand the show. But I let it all wash over me and don’t worry about making sense of it all. It’s an enjoyable enough ride, so long as I don’t examine too closely what makes it go.

The Maps of Cassaforte

Back in November, I had to spend a couple of painful days coming up with a map of the invented city that is the setting of my April book, The Glass Maker's Daughter. It was painful because although I knew in my head the basic shape of the city, and how it was supposed to look, the process of having to draw it out, with proportions and distances, just sounded like torture.

I also had an editor whose sharp eyes could spot every inconsistency possible. There's a gondola chase late in the book, for example, that had our heroes paddling to freedom in directions that were inconsistent with the preliminary map I'd drawn, so the text had to be fixed. And then there was some weirdness about bridges and their directions that had to be adjusted. A scene early in the book that had taken place on a side street, suddenly got moved to a main thoroughfare. Eventually, however, my abysmal-looking map and the book were in sync, and I pitied whatever artist had been handed the job of trying to translate my utter lack of artistic ability into something decent looking.

Here's my terrible attempt.

And here's the artist's final, glorious rendering.

I actually got teary when I saw it. It's so beautiful. Look at my little flags for the seven cazas of Cassaforte, all with their little logos, just like I'd suggested! Look at the river gates, done so well! It's just so perfect. I want to live there. Plus I want to take the artist out for dinner.

And no, Cassaforte doesn't have a giant white gulf running down its middle. The map is split so it can fit on two pages.

Fred: Then and Now

A year ago, when she was all of three pounds, it was kind of cute.



Now that she's twelve pounds, and we thought she'd be calmer and we could put ornaments on the tree without worry? Not so much.

The Glass Maker's Daughter

I finally saw the back cover copy for The Glass Maker’s Daughter yesterday for the first time.

From enchanted champagne flutes to rituals that hold the city together, magic lies at heart of Cassaforte. Bearing a striking resemblance to Venice, this medieval city of canals is the home of Risa Divetri, whose future is about to be decided.

Risa has led the sheltered life of a nobleman's daughter, but now she's on the brink of adulthood. Soon she will leave home to study the family craft—creating and enchanting glass objects. The gods will choose which school is best for her. But then the impossible happens: Risa remains unchosen. The gods don't need her? The rejection sends Risa into a spiral of shame, anger, and confusion. If she's not meant to be a glass maker, what will she do?

An answer is found when Cassaforte's age-old magic begins to unravel and corruption threatens their kingdom. As she battles against dark forces, Risa's fiery spirit and untapped powers rise to the surface—leading her toward her true fate.

I would totally buy this book!

S.O.S.

Back in the dark days of the late nineteen-seventies, when I was in middle and early high school, my church had something called Youth Club. Youth Club existed before most of us in Richmond had cable television or video games or computers, and we youth had little to do save wander aimlessly about, sad and listless and unaware that we were among the last, lost generations of teens who could never post drunken photos of ourselves to our MySpace pages.

Well, thank goodness for the church and its highly-structured Wednesday evenings, or else we never would have had anything to do. Youth Club started after school let out, and consisted of choir rehearsal, then a worship service that well-meaning adults tried to make relevant to us kids by filling it with strummed acoustic guitars and songs from Godspell, all sung in a style so earnest and sunny that it has induced in me a permanent antipathy for any religious service involving folk guitar and the songs of Stephen Schwartz. Afterwards we had dinner, which usually consisted of boiled hot dogs and one of those glorious Southern church casseroles that are constructed from such unlikely bed mates as asparagus, a can of Campbell’s soup, and crushed potato chips. And then, after a cross-grade recreational period, we older kids would head off to our crafts sessions.

Ah, the crafts sessions. How I hated them. By the time it rolled around, I’d been at the church for over four hours and was ready to go home. I also disliked that the two available craft classes tended to divide up by gender; one would be a traditional, ‘girly’ craft like decoupage, where the girls would cut pictures from magazines and shellac them onto flower pots. Another semester, the ‘girly’ craft might be the construction of endless amounts of god’s eyes, using popsicle sticks and brightly-colored yarn. The boys, on the other hand, tended to gravitate toward the manlier choice. One year it was woodworking, where I managed to produce a handsome and only slightly lopsided birdhouse, and a chess board that was absolutely sunning so long as you regarded it from four feet away, squinting all the while, and ignoring the globs of wood filler and glue that I’d required to fill in the major gaps between the inlaid squares.

Another semester the boys opted for car repair. I went right along, afraid that giving in to my utter lack of interest in the combustion engine and a vague preference to be sitting with the girls making pot holders from stretchy loops might brand me as a sissy. So I suffered for three long months as the group’s leader, a deadly-dull adult church member, would point to the scale model of a car engine, remove a part, hold it up before the six of us assembled in a semi-circle, and intone, “This is a carburetor. A carburetor injects fuel with air. Air passes through the barrel of the carburetor, thusly. Gasoline meets the air stream through a small hole in the shaft of the carburetor.” For twenty minutes he’d drone on about the carburetor. Once he was certain we should have absorbed that information, he would set the plastic part on the table and move on to the next. I think the goal was that by the end of the semester, when he had gone through a theory of every part of the engine, we would be able to put it back together with a confidence born of twenty hours of his lectures, but I don’t think he actually ever got us down to the very inside of his sorry little plastic model.

Of all the crafts classes I disliked—and I disliked them all—the one that caused the most suffering was on learning Morse code. Now, I’m not even sure how Morse code qualifies as a craft; it certainly doesn’t produce anything that one’s parents can display on their mantels or refrigerators for a week before quietly losing them into the trash can where they belong. It’s not soothing or restful. But the church had someone—Mr. Dunwoody, an elderly gentleman in his late sixties or early seventies who deserved better than a half dozen boys sitting sullenly in an airless upstairs Sunday School room, staring at him with resentment because we were all too proud to admit we’d rather be with the chattering girls snipping pictures from old copies of Good Housekeeping—who was willing to teach Morse code, so Morse code it was.

Every Morse code class began the same way. “This,” Mr. Dunwoody would say, pressing the little buzzer that served as his teaching tool, “Is A.” He would let off a short beep followed immediately by a longer one. “And this,” he would add, impressed with himself, “Is B.” He’d tap out a dash followed by three dots. On he’d work through the alphabet until we’d reviewed all the letters. “Did we memorize all that?” he’d ask. We boys would look at each other, arms crossed, not saying anything. “Good. Now let’s try a simple message.” Tap, tappety-tap, tappety-tap-tap-tap, he’d pulse out at a medium speed for what seemed like hours. “Did we get that? Anyone?” Our faces would remain unmoving as he looked around the room. “Why, it was a popular Bible verse that any of you young men should know. Anyone?” Eventually he would grow frustrated with our stony faces and simply tell us what the verse had been, and then, unfazed, would tappety-tap out another.

What Mr. Dunwoody didn’t really understand is that Morse code had absolutely no relevance to any of us whatsoever. I don’t think there was a single one of us who had ever seen an actual telegram. None of us had parents old enough to remember the wars where Morse code might have played an important role. Even at that age, a young person has a good sense of when he’s being taught something that he will never, ever be asked again in his entire life to call upon, and knows that even the learning of it won’t be a good exercise. The notion that we should actually invest time in memorizing the Morse code with its seemingly random assignment of dots and dashes to individual letters, when we knew that come spring we’d never be seeing Mr. Dunwoody and his mechanical buzzer again, was absolutely ludicrous.

Then Mr. Dunwoody made the fatal mistake of bringing in buzzers for everyone.

He paired us off and sat us across the table, our little charts of code and a pad of paper at our sides. “Try some short phrases,” he suggested. My partner and I glared at each other. “Something that you can pick up easily.” I consulted my chart. Slowly and laboriously, sweat almost dripping from my juvenile brow, I managed to tap out, over the course of five minutes and with a lot of pauses, K-I-S-S-M-Y-A-S-S.

My partner sneered at me and tapped back, over as equally long a time period, B-I-T-E-M-I. Either I made a transcription error, or else his finger got a little twitchy toward the end, there. “Are we having fun?” asked Mr. Dunwoody.

“Yes,” we agreed without any sincerity whatsoever.

The next week, the buzzers were back again. I wanted to gouge my eyes out. Anything, anything would be better than having to sit there tapping out little messages of disdain to each other. Even homework. “Let’s try to up the speed a little this week,” Mr. Dunwoody suggested. “You should have that code good and memorized by now!”

Fine. He wanted the speed increased? I’d increase the speed. “Ready?” I asked my partner. He shrugged. My finger paused over the buzzer button, then began to tap out dots and dashes in rapid succession, outpacing even Mr. Dunwoody at his plodding best. Tappety-tap-bada-ba-bappedy-beep-beeepety-beepety-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP! It was all nonsense, of course, but my staccato pulses sounded more urgent than anything the Titanic sent out on the last night of its voyage. For a second my partner looked suspicious. Then he drew his mouth into an expression of outright scorn, ready to denounce me.

“Well, what are we doing here?” Mr. Dunwoody looked decidedly unimpressed as he walked over to our portion of the table.

“But Mr. Dunwoody,” I said, trying to seem innocent. “It was a popular Bible verse that everyone should recognize.”

“Yeah,” said my partner unexpectedly, swallowing the insult he’d been ready to hurl. “I got everything he tapped. Didn’t you, Mr. Dunwoody?”

Mr. Dunwoody looked startled. “Why—no. I didn’t.”

“Let me try it this time!” My partner sat up, excited for the first time since class had started the month before. His finger rapped at the buzzer excitedly, producing spurts of sound that exceeded mine in speed. The index finger of his free hand glided over the Morse code chart, as if he were idly looking up the odd letter here and there. After the better portion of a minute, he finally stopped. “Did you get it?”

By this time, other kids in the class had stopped their glum stabs at their buzzers and were watching, highly entertained. “I got it,” one of them said from the far end of the table, followed rapidly by assents from the others. “That was easy!” said one young wag.

“But I didn’t. . . .” Poor Mr. Dunwoody shook his head, looking from face to face as he tried to confirm his worst fear, that we’d outstripped him without warning. “That was too fast. I didn’t. . . .”

It was too late by then, of course. The genie had been released from the bottle. Everyone around the table began punching their buttons with random dots and dashes, all at so high a speed that it was a marvel we didn’t sound like one annoying, high-pitched buzz. Mr. Dunwoody’s head snapped from side to side, trying to take it all in. His mouth twitched in a way that Edvard Munch’s model must have, trying to get into character before posing for The Scream.

“Gee, Mr. Dunwoody,” said another of the kids in his Beaver Cleaver voice. “This is fun!”

Mr. Dunwoody took one stricken look at us, gulped, and fled the room.

My parents always said that the decoupaged flowerpots I brought home the rest of that semester were some of the ugliest things they’d ever seen.

The Lifeguard

It's been too long since we had a dose of Fred:



Ever since the first week we adopted her, Fred’s appointed herself my guardian in the upstairs bathroom. None of the other cats were doing it, she seemed to notice, and since I obviously couldn’t be trusted to myself in that room of death and torture, she’s made sure to keep a cautious eye out.

She’s particularly concerned whenever I take a shower. I’ll twist the appropriate knobs to start the water running, and she’ll extend her neck and take on a certain expression of worry once she sees the shower head start to spray. Sometimes she’ll run to the edge of the tub to make sure for me there’s nothing lurking inside. Like a shark, perhaps, or a less solicitous, alien feline from another household ready to claw my naive and unsuspecting shins.

Once I’m in the shower and the sliding door’s shut behind me, she’ll sit on the sink and fret. If I peek above the enclosure, she’ll range her head up and meow at me in her high-pitched voice, cross-eyed and agitated. The longer I stay—god forbid I should condition my hair—the more shrill she’ll get, until finally she’s calling out to me repeatedly over the water, insisting I get out.

When I do, she complains, loudly wondering over and over again why I’d subject myself to the nasty water. Usually she howls so loudly and with such distress that the Mont can hear it on the floor below. When I’m done, she’ll immediately run over to the tub again, braving the soap-scented wisps of steam billowing out so she can give the shower another once-over. Once her duty’s taken care of, she’ll cast me sympathetic glances while I towel off, then move on to other timely matters. Like monitoring the squirrel population on the back deck.

Now, Fred never, ever repeats this behavior when the Mont showers. I think she recognizes his competence; there’s apparently no question that he can withstand a good dunking. It’s only me that she frets over. Obviously it’s because she feels I’m too feeble and dim-witted to cope with threats to life and limb like water, and shampoo.