Confessions of an iPad User

Dear people of the internet, particularly those who feel to hijack the comments sections of every tech web page with your anti-iPad screeds,

I own an iPad. I admit that I didn’t intend to buy one originally. I wasn’t a scoffer—I’d simply hoped to wait for the second generation. But then I played with them in the stores, and more particularly, got to sit down with one that a friend had bought, and I was hooked. I could easily see how I could fit one into my everyday life and work style.

So yes, I made a reservation and picked up an iPad a week and a half later. And here’s the thing: I really like my iPad. One of the first things I did was to put two-hundred and thirty-six of my favorite books on it, so that I could use it as a reading device. (And I haven’t even begun to score my classic favorites from Project Gutenberg, yet.) Yes, I could read books on my computer. I don’t like doing it though, any more than I enjoy watching movies or television programs on my computer when I could do it on my, you know. Television. Why do I like reading on my iPad so much? Because I can take it to bed. I can turn it sideways and read lying down. It weighs practically nothing. The screen is big. I can adjust the brightness and the typeface and the type size to suit my whims. I can hold it with one hand while I do my business on the john.

I use the iPad as my portable music library. The ForScore app allows me to organize PDF files of piano sheet music and have them all in one lightweight and easily transportable device. One that’s backlit, thank you very much. When I tap the glass, the page flips, and stays flipped. I can annotate and highlight sections. The app came with 1300 pages of sample piano music already installed. My repertoire consists of classical pieces in the public domain, so I’ve easily doubled that just by looking on public score repositories for stuff I already knew.

I’ve got access to all the internet services on my iPad that I really need. And I like the device because it’s slim and portable. I can stick it into its carrying case and take it out on the town without feeling compelled to drag along accessories and power cords and all the little things that my everyday computer would require. The battery lasts me a good dozen hours. I can use it at a table, or sitting in a comfy chair, or while I’m flat on my back. It carries a decent chunk of my music library. I have a word processor on it, so I can carry around copies of my latest manuscripts and work on new ones. It’s easy to type on. Easier still if I flip on my tiny bluetooth keyboard. It’s silent, cool, and suits me perfectly. And I suspect the thing hasn’t even come into its real heyday yet.

So this is what I don’t get, trolls of the internet. If I like a device, and if I find a lot of utility for it, why do you care if I bought it or not? I didn’t, as far as I’m aware, use your money for the purchase. That came out of my own bank account.

You can lecture me all you want about the alternatives. I can’t see myself propping a netbook up on a piano rack to play, much less annotating my score and flipping pages easily. I’m not going to take one into bed to read, either. I’m happy with what I have. Why do you care so much?

It seems to me that though they purport to be higher-minded and smarter than Apple fanboys, the Apple haters are an even more obnoxious breed. They hijack any internet forum they can to disparage Apple products, malign Apple users, and say anything they can to make themselves feel better about their own purchasing choices. Yet their pretense of despising anything ‘trendy’ is trendiness itself; jumping on a brand and its users on the internet isn’t a way of expressing your superior individuality. It’s just anonymous dog-piling, and takes no more thought than farting.

Dudes. Buy what you want. If it’s a Droid or a Windows product, it makes no never-mind to me. I don’t think any the less of you. Say what you want about me, but I honestly don’t believe that one’s computing purchases define me as an individual, any more than I believe wearing a shirt with an Abercrombie and Fitch logo will turn me into a sun-tanned catalog model, or slapping on American Apparel will turn me into an urban hipster. Bashing people for sport doesn’t make you a superior person. I buy what I like, if I like, and I let other people do the same.

Why don’t you?

Just a Friendly Little Cat

Chloe the Ragdoll cat was supposed to be non-clumping. That's how the breeder sold her as, anyway.

Of course, the breeder also said that Ragdolls were friendly and sweet and cuddly lap cats who loved to be with their owners, and in the fourteen years we've had Chloe, she's been crabby and neurotic and would never deign to do anything so lowly as to sit in anyone's lap. She does love to be with her owners, but it's only so she can point out in a whiny voice exactly how they are neglecting and mistreating her.

Perhaps a kitty Freud could cope with the neurosis. The only thing I can tackle is the clumping fur, and that's by giving her a bath regularly.

Which she hates.

Fred watched the whole proceedings with horror, then cringed away, and said, "Dude, WTF?"

To which Chloe glared.



Fred: "Seriously, WTF?!"



Beauty has its costs, though. Chloe's been swanning around the house ever since she dried off, looking glamorous and knowing it.

The Little Stranger

One of my all-time favorite books is Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a pair of twin tales about the intertwined lives of a Victorian guttersnipe and a privileged, sheltered young lady. I’d already loved Waters for Tipping the Velvet, a literary box of bon-bons with a bold lesbian narrator whose picaresque journey through Victorian London’s music halls, back alleys, bedrooms, lands her in the arms of the organized labor movement. I’d loved the creepy, seductive Affinity, with its world of mediums and apparitions.

But Fingersmith manage to push every pleasure button in my system. Not only was it a ripping good read, but its intricate narrative structure provided twists and turns and double-crosses that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Charles Dickens would’ve been proud. Appalled, and proud.

When I recently finally got my hands on Waters’ latest novel, The Little Stranger, I was a little apprehensive, however. Waters’ post-Fingersmith effort, The Night Watch, was set during and after World War II London, and though it was beautifully-written, it wasn’t exactly exciting. When I saw that The Little Stranger was also set after the war, I was slightly apprehensive. I needn’t have been.

Like The Turn of the Screw, The Little Stranger is a ghost story. Narrated in memoir style, the book is the tale of a physician of limited stature and means who becomes increasingly involved in the madness of a once-proud family of a country squire. Both the family and their rambling estate —which is the kind of architecture to which Mrs. Danvers might have been found, skulking about and mumbling about her precious Rebecca—are falling apart at the seams as the ghost of a lost child toys with its occupants, one by one.

The chills of The Little Stranger are subtle. The ghost manifests itself through the slightest of sounds and shadows, with only the smallest of traces left behind. As the doctor narrator struggles with his own skepticism and the dogma of modern-day science, the ghost eats away at the house’s inhabitants from within, leaving them empty and hollow at the core before doing away with them entirely. It’s a tale of subtle chills and goosebumps, rather than morbid images and shrieks.

In fact, the novel is so subtle that it wasn’t until I was three-quarters of the way through that I wondered to myself where it was going. From a literary standpoint it’s a great homage to Du Maurier, Henry James, Le Fanu, and most especially the very early Agatha Christie, but in reading, it seems very little more than a well-told fireside ghost tale. It wasn’t until I recalled the twisty, devious Waters of Fingersmith and Affliction that I realized exactly what was happening but was left unsaid in her story, and I plowed through the book’s last quarter, eager to see it resolved.

And it wasn’t. The book came to a suitable conclusion, but it was so ambiguous that it left the impression of something being omitted. It was like watching The Sixth Sense without that grand reveal at the end that snaps everything into perspective. There’s no peek behind the magician’s cabinet, to see how it all was done.

Only, of course, the reveal is there all along, for those who are sharp-eyed enough to find it. It’s in the novel’s lush first pages; it’s laid at its barest in its very last sentence. Understanding what’s really afoot in the novel requires reading it fairly closely, though. Judging the reviews from ordinary readers that I browsed through on the Amazon web site, most of which had kind of a um, what was the big deal? kind reaction, that might be a lost art.

For anyone who enjoys the milieu or a well-told tale, however, The Little Stranger is full of shivery, dreadful pleasures.

Scaredy-Cat

Our youngest pet, Fred, is a most satisfactory cat. She’s got spunk. She has a wicked sense of humor—or at least she does things that make me laugh, like settling next to one of the other cats while they’re napping, waiting until they’ve been lulled into a false sense of security, and then hauling off and clocking them. She’s sweet and purry at night, and a lap cat during the winter. She’s a chatterbox who’ll carry on entire conversations at the drop of the hat. She’s photogenic. She is a top-notch squirrel monitor at the back windows. And best of all, she always seems grateful to be living here.

As I said, most satisfactory.

However, she’s the archetypal scaredy-cat. The slightest disturbance and she’s off like a shot to hide somewhere. If she can’t hide beneath the den sofa, she’ll cower beneath the bed upstairs, or huddle beneath the staircase in the basement, shivering, until I go down there to find her. I’ll point a flashlight in her direction and see two tiny, frightened headlights for eyes shining back at me.

Fred is frightened of the following:

- Thunderstorms. The slightest bass roll in the distance will have her scurrying for the safety of a dark enclosure, from which she won’t emerge until two or three hours after the storm has passed.

- Rain. Because it accompanies thunderstorms, I imagine.

- Trucks. Because they sound like thunder.

- Construction. When our neighbor had a new driveway poured, poor Fred spent the entire day in the basement.

- The vacuum.

- The sound of the door opening to the closet where we store the vacuum.

- The doorbell. I don’t really know what the doorbell has ever done to her, but apparently they have a dicey relationship.

- People who enter the house after they ring the doorbell. If we have a party, Fred will stay upstairs all evening with big, alarmed eyes. Then halfway through the party she’ll decide to venture down, see what’s happening, and will discover that everyone pays her so much attention that she sticks around and looks adorable so people will fawn over her. Then we have to repeat the entire process for the next party.

- Branches falling from the trees.

- Raccoons.

- The sound of the smoke detector going off.

- When I turn on the vent fan over the stove. Because usually it’s a hasty precursor to the smoke detector going off.

- The sound of people crunching through leaves on the deck.

In some ways, Fred’s little phobia make it easier to deal with her. She’s the only cat I will take outdoors, accompanied, because I know that if she gets out of hand, all I have to do is stomp on the deck a few times or brandish a broom and there she is, scurrying back to the back door and cowering to be let in. In others, it’s a little bothersome. Finding her after a scare can be a pain, since she has a tendency to find the most out-of-the-way places in the house. We’ve taken to trying to anticipate the frightening moments and to put her beneath the blankets on our bed, where she feels safe, stays warm, and where we can find her easily.

I keep hoping she’ll outgrow some of her fears. So far, though, we’ve just become accustomed to the sight of a brown and black fuzzy streak zooming by.

Conversations with My Father: Fancy Food Edition

THE SCENE: An uncrowded Denny’s on Broad Street.

ME: I haven’t been to a Denny’s in forever.
MY FATHER: This will be a treat for you, then!
ME: Mmm. Denny’s. That’s a real treat, all right.
MY FATHER: Now. Let me explain the menu to you. I like the Build Your Own Grand Slam breakfast. It’s only $4.99. You get to choose four out of the ten items. I choose eggs, pancakes, hash browns, and sausage. You could choose eggs, pancakes, biscuits, and bacon. Or you could choose pancakes, bacon, sausage, and grits. Or you could pick an English muffin, eggs, ham, and. . . .
ME (my voice raised): I get it! Thank you!
MY FATHER: Are you always this grumpy in the mornings?
ME: So basically, when I’m in town, my role is to escort you to crappy chain restaurants?
MY FATHER (offended): Denny’s is not a crappy chain restaurant!
ME: Let me rephrase. My role is to escort you to every restaurant in town that has photos in the menus? We’ve been to IHOP, and Outback Steakhouse, and Golden Corral, and you were threatening the Olive Garden again.
MY FATHER: Well, when the Barramundis and I go out to dinner, they refuse to go to chain restaurants. They think it’s ‘important’ to support ‘local’ restaurants.
ME: I can’t say I disagree with them.
MY FATHER: They make me go to fancy breakfast places where I will get two eggs and a slice of toast for eight dollars. Eight dollars. At Denny’s, you can get a Build Your Own Grand Slam for $4.99, and you can get eggs, pancakes, hash browns, and sausage. Or eggs, wheat pancakes, ham. . . .
ME: I think we've covered this territory, thanks.
MY FATHER: Even at a fancy place like Appleby’s, you can get a better value for your money.
ME: To you, there’s basically Denny’s and Golden Corral, and then everything else is just fancy, isn’t there?
MY FATHER: What do you mean?
ME: Fancy or unfancy: Appleby’s.
MY FATHER: Fancy.
ME: Fancy or unfancy: Chili’s.
MY FATHER: Fancy!
ME: Bennigan’s?
MY FATHER: Oh gawrsh, Fancy.
ME: Ruth Chris Steak House?
MY FATHER: So fancy.
ME: So to you, a Ruth Chris Steak House is on the same level of fanciness as an Appleby’s?
MY FATHER: Listen. Jon Stewart. You know Jon Stewart. You went to school with him.
ME: Yes, and he slept next to me in sweatpants for two semesters of abnormal psychology.
MY FATHER: Well Jon Stewart has a British sidekick and Jon Stewart was joking with him about how once his sidekick came to America and ate at Denny’s, the sidekick never wanted to go back.
ME: You don’t think Stewart was being ironic?
MY FATHER: No.
ME: Did I ever tell you about Cafe Muse back home? No? It’s one of those breakfast and lunch-only places. It was featured on Oprah because they have some kind of amazing grilled cheese sandwich and it gave Oprah’s girlfriend Gayle an orgasm.
MY FATHER: You’ve eaten there? Is it fancy?
ME: Oh, it’s very fancy. They have French toast there that’s slices of chocolate bred stuffed with vanilla-and-liqueur-laced cream cheese, then drizzled with chocolate sauce. I always get these amazing whole wheat pancakes with berries and homemade granola.
MY FATHER (with suspicion): How much?
ME: Twelve dollars.
MY FATHER: Oh gawrsh. Twelve dollars.
ME: And if you want bacon, it’s three dollars extra.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. Gawrsh!
ME: It’s fancy and delicious.
MY FATHER: Well what’s good enough for Jon Stewart is good enough for me and that includes Denny’s.
ME: Next time you come visit we’ll go to Cafe Muse.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. You are trying to kill me.

The Epigraphs of Cassaforte

During the editorial process of The Glass Maker’s Daughter, my original editor at Flux had a vision of prefixing the chapters with little quotations from fictional sources. The epigraphs could illuminate the chapter at hand, he said, or simply give color to the world I’d created.

Although for two or three minutes my reaction was grumpy (more work?! Dangit!), I threw myself into the project with enthusiasm. I’m the child of two historians. I know my source materials. So it was easy and fun for me to make up all manner of pretend source materials with a renaissance flavor—travelogues, letters, secret documents, journals, guide books. When I carried on the tradition with the two sequels, I wove in all manner of other types of imaginary source materials. Nursery rhymes. Broadsides. Popular sayings. With the chapter quotations in The Buccaneer’s Apprentice I was able to explain Cassaforte’s unique theatrical traditions without interrupting the flow of the narrative, for example.

Theatre is important in the novel, because it’s Nick’s experience with Armand Arturo’s Theatre of Marvels that gives him the acting chops necessary to masquerade as a dread privateer. Staged performances in Cassaforte are similar to commedia dell’arte, but who wants to interrupt the nonstop action gripping pirate tale to explain what commedia dell’arte might be? Not I. A few brushstrokes at the beginning of a chapter, however, from a fully-imaginary expert, and there it is.

What I don’t think most people realize when they read the chapter epigraphs is that they really tell a story unto themselves. I didn’t make up trivial facts, or irrelevant material. The epigraphs of The Glass Maker’s Daughter introduce characters and countries that appear in The Buccaneer’s Apprentice and set up an arc of action that carries on into The Nascenza Conspiracy. There are letters from a spy known as Gustophe Werner, for example, who doesn’t feature in the first book of the series, but is quite prominent by the third; it’s a long-range form of foreshadowing. I intended to clue in the reader that Cassaforte is not merely a country unto itself, but part of a vast world. And it’s a world that might not be completely enamored with the Cassaforteans and their magical blessings.

The epigraphs of The Buccaneer’s Apprentice are similarly forward-looking, but not quite as much so. They’re a little more self-contained, and if one reads between the sea shanties, the theatrical reviews, and the travelogues, they provide a lot of information that might otherwise go unnoticed. There are hints at relationships between the characters—where they’ve been and where they might be going in the future. Sometimes the epigraphs are wry commentary on the action that follows, or has immediately preceded.

Every quotation is there for a reason, though. They shouldn’t be overlooked.

In the department of cool things, I received a mockup for the cover of The Nascenza Conspiracy this week.



It’s a nifty concept, and I like the fact that it’ll have both protagonists, Petro Divetri and Emilia Fossi, on the cover. I did ask that in the final realization, which like the first two covers will be done by the totally awesome Blake Morrow, that Emilia be given an outfit that was a little more military-like, given that she’s supposed to be a palace guard in the book. “She’s looking a little bit like she’s on the way to a Young Republicans meeting,” I told my editor.

He wrote back, puzzled. “Does that mean she’s not a Young Republican?”

The Buccaneer's Apprentice

I'm happy to announce that The Buccaneer's Apprentice, the second novel of the Cassaforte Chronicles, is available for your reading pleasure.

It's a tale of nautical intrigue. It's a story about crooked card games. And it's a novel about an acting company so bad that it can only get engagements in foreign countries that haven't heard how terrible they are.

But mostly it's the story of a cursed seventeen-year-old who bluffs his way from lowly apprentice to the pirate master of the Azure Sea, in the days when an enemy armada is sailing for the shores of Cassaforte with deadly intent.

Here are a couple of places to purchase the book online:

The Buccaneer's Apprentice at Amazon

The Buccaneer's Apprentice at Barnes & Noble

As always, I appreciate it when those of you who've read and enjoyed my books review them on Amazon or other sites.

One special note: I know some of you like to run down to your local bookstore, look for my novels, and then inform me that the bookstore doesn't have any copies left on their shelves. I'd like to gently remind my readers that I don't have control over the distribution of my novels. If your favorite bookstore doesn't have it in stock, ask them to restock and to order a copy for you from their warehouse. They'll be happy to help you, I'll be happy you bought a copy, and it'll arrive in a mere couple of days. Also, if your budget is low, don't be shy about asking your local public library to get a copy!