ThomStratton.com

I’ve noticed my interest in my current novel has flagged of late. It’s just hard to write for some reason. I think it has to do with knowing that, even if I do manage to sell a novel some day, there’s just not that big an audience for Sci-fi/fantasy compared to other genres. Advances on fantasy novels, for example, maybe run around $5000, whereas a children’s book can pull in $100,000. It’s not fair, necessarily, but it’s the reality. I may as well embrace it. Writing what you love is all fine and good, but if you don’t make much money at it, what’s the point?

So, I’ve decided it’s time to change my focus. I’m dropping my current project and starting something new and more marketable. It’ll be about a teenage girl whose parents buy this old manor house out on the edge of the woods, not realizing the place is haunted by the family who lived (and died) there over a hundred years ago. The ghost family, of course, want the new occupants to leave–all except their teenage son, who takes a liking to the girl. The two of them decide to work together to try and reconcile the two families, and over time they form a bond that transcends time and physicality. It’ll be the ultimate forbidden romance–they can never truly be together, and not just because their families want to keep them apart.

Yeah, enough of this fantasy nonsense. I’m going where the money is. I’m going to write teen paranormal romance from now on. Starting tomorrow. It’s bad luck to start a novel on the first day of April. Tradition holds that nothing you write will ever be believable.

I do believe that love is the best answer, in spite of my posts to the contrary. I just suspect that for far too many people, they’re living in a Foreigner song: “I wanna know what love is… I want you to show me!”

The problem with that is two-fold. First of all, love means that you must do something. Far too often people seem to think that love means, “get the government to pass a law to make them do something, or make them stop.” That’s not love. That’s coersion, which these same people are generally against when it’s a weapon pointed at them. Passing a law far too often means you’re giving up–you can’t seem to convince people to do what you want, so you’ll leave them no option. That’s not love, that’s revenge.

The other half of that is, as I’ve said before, when people invoke love as an answer it’s most often when they want someone else to show the love, to them. It’s the domineering partner approach: “If you really loved me, you’d do this.”

Do people truly understand how difficult it is to love a person into a different path? From what I can tell from most of the people prescribing this, they lack the patience for it. If loving someone into thinking differently were quick and simple I know many people who would not be agonizing over their kids’ rebellion.

Besides, love isn’t really love if it’s only offered in exchange for certain behavior. Remember Shakespeare? “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken;”. Or, to quote a favorite Dale Carnegie quote of a friend of mine, “A man convinced against his will Is of the same opinion still.”

Love can change hearts, and even do so quickly. But in many cases it’s more like erosion. It takes time, and you may not even notice the change. And I will admit that sometimes one simply does not have that kind of time. That’s why, unfortunately, there are times when violence and even war are the answer if the question is, for example, “how do I protect myself or my family against this person/group who is trying to do us physical harm?” Love can even work in those cases, but too often there simply isn’t time.

I’ll be among the first to admit that love is not easy. I know I’m not very good at it yet. But I’m pretty sure I’ll have an easier time convincing my neighbor to keep his dog from leaving deposits on my lawn if we’re on good terms because I’ve been taking the time to say hello, see how he’s doing, find out some things about him, and so on. I’ll have an easier time gaining his cooperation if I speak to him kindly and calmly, not screaming and yelling, demanding immediate action NOW!

I’ll have more influence over people I disagree with if I make sure the meme pics I post actually grant the other side some respect and a measure of credit (though granted, such pics may be hard to find…). Better yet, I could eschew the memes altogether and actually say what I think in a clear, concise, non-attacking manner. People tend to accept what we have to say when they know where we’re coming from and why we might think that way. It may not change their mind, but it may broaden it, even encourage them to consider your point of view in their calculations next time.

Love is not a zero-sum game, yet far too many people view life that way. So if love is truly the answer, we need to be looking for ways we can all win. While this can be accomplished with changes to law, it requires a great deal more effort than usually goes into laws these days. It requires moderation, a light hand and, yes, the preservation of areas of gray. If the devil is in the details, then love is in the gray area. Not always, of course, but love likely exists best in the gray areas, where it comes down to people to decide what is best between themselves rather than have the law decide for them with no acknowledgement of circumstance. Love is when someone says, “Well sure, it’s legal, but because I know it would bother or harm you/society, I’ll not do that. I’m willing to sacrifice some of what I think would make me happy to preserve/improve the common good.”

And sometimes it even means, “I don’t get my way on this at all. It’s not fair, but I still love the people I am around, and I’ll just accept this for now, keep loving them, and hopefully someday they’ll come to see things differently. They’ll at least be more open to change if they see that I do really care about them and am not doing this to harm them. Who knows? They may never change, but to perserve society we all have to give somewhere.”

I think that comes closer to the answer than most everything I see out there these days. Love is the answer? Okay, then let’s live it.

Our neighborhood is waking up from winter. The trees are in flower (unfortunately, this also means a lot of the ornamental pear trees, which frankly stink), the early spring bulbs are coming up and blooming. The birds are moving into the birdhouses we put out. We’ve taken the cover off the patio swing. The early-bloomer neighbors are turning on their sprinklers.

It’s time for yard projects.

We’ve got an area behind our house that, once our maple trees leaf out, spends most of the year in shadow. Grass doesn’t grow particularly well there, and as often as not it’s a mud bog after the sprinklers come on. We’ve been wanting to do something about it for some time. The plan is to put in a patio next to the shed, put in a path along the rest of it, fill in with some new dirt, and put in a shade garden on either side. This is the year.

Our neighbors have been wanting to put in a trampoline since they moved in, and want to set it in the ground. This is their year, too. They’ve arranged for a power digger (of some kind) to come and do the excavation. The only problem, they explained to my wife the other night, is knowing what to do with the dirt. Since we’re looking at shelling out for a lot of dirt (and in spite of the cliche, dirt is not cheap), we had a few suggestions. We’ll be getting some dirt, literally dirt cheap. We just have to supply the labor to move it from their yard to ours.

Of course things notice when you have a little bit of money. I noticed the fence between us and those same neighbors is threatening to fall down. I almost wish it would, actually. That’s right next to where they want to put in their trampoline. They could just dump it across the property line onto our side, saving me about 300 steps x 10 cubic yards of wheelbarrow trips.  But I’m not ready to build another fence yet. The last one I built needs to be stained.

That’s the fun thing about having a yard. No matter how much work you do, there’s always more work to do.  So I try to put a brave face on it by quoting Carroll O’Conner’s character from “Return to Me”: I’m blessed with work. The kids like it. On extra, non-repetitive yard projects we pay them some money to help out. And I’m starting to consider paying for some of the repetitive ones, too, like mowing the lawn.

Yards aren’t all toil, though. This year spring coincides with a sudden resurgence of interest in Nerf guns from my boys. They’ve been able to coax me outside several times for some semi-painless warfare. I do enjoy occasionally running around in the yard like a kid, sprayin’-and-prayin’ under heavy fire. And occasionally my wife and I get to actually sit on our patio swing and enjoy the spring air, watching the birds visit the feeders. I find that warm, earthy spring days bring out my hidden optimist. Yard projects always seem so much easier, and more fun, in the early spring.

As I write this it’s raining. I’m happy to see it. I know I’ll have to turn on my sprinklers eventually, but I put it off as long as I can. I live in a desert, so we have to use force to get most things to grow, but for a little while in early spring it’s fun to pretend that everything would grow of its own accord. Spring rains help prolong the illusion just a little longer.

It’s spring, and the world is coming alive. It’s contagious. It’s good to get outside again and try to catch it.

I’ve been feeling somewhat down, a bit anxious, a little restless lately. Part of that is due to pushing forward into unfamiliar territory at work, which has had me uneasy for weeks now, but there’s something more going on. I just can’t put my finger on it.

But it doesn’t matter. I got to wondering if I happened to feel like this around this time last year, and so I went back through the archives and found that…well, no. I didn’t. I was getting bummed out over the negativity in the news and on social media at the time, but it doesn’t sound like the same thing.

But what I did find was a post where I took myself to task for not looking at the good things in my life. I suspect that’s applicable to this particular feeling, too. Life is, after all, quite good. Let me count the ways:

• I have friends and family who, upon seeing this post’s title, would happily step forward to spare me the effort. Oh wait, is that looking on the positive side?
• My kids are doing well in school and in their various other hobbies/activities
• Our fruit trees appear to have survived the strange spring weather and are flowering
• My dog is still happy to see me when I come home
• I don’t live in Europe during Napoleon’s time
• I turn on the faucet and water comes out–I don’t have to take big water barrels to the river several times a week
• I don’t have to get out of my car to open the garage door–and I have room to park in my garage!
• I’m not too old to have fun running around outside with my kids

Yeah, life is good. And from what I’ve heard, it beats the alternative.

I ran across this video the other day… (though you may want to read on before you invest time in it)

This video is just a little embarrassing, frankly. I consider myself a geek, but these people are a little over the top to the point I can’t decide if this is really made by nerds for nerds or if it’s actually making fun of nerds. In any case, the premise of this video drifts all over the place. (Didn’t any of these people have basic English composition? State your thesis and stick with it as you defend it! This can’t even agree what it’s thesis is!) Of course the premise that any geeky controversy could ever be adequately resolved to everyone’s satisfaction is ludicrous, so this shouldn’t be taken too seriously anyway.

For the record, Will Riker was both awesome and overrated. The writers couldn’t make up their mind, and it showed. When he was given good material he rocked it. But if anything he was the victim of reality. The creators of TNG tried to emulate a more true-to-form military structure, in which the XO is a critical position. But for story-telling purposes the role tends to be a little redundant. And the writers either didn’t understand what an XO does or they didn’t really try to establish it, and so we often have Will Riker looking like a guy with nothing to do.

I think he also suffered a bit from the “We need a Kirk clone in this” syndrome. In many ways he was Kirk light; chasing skirts, swaggering a bit, cracking jokes, etc. His character did grow in time, and there are some really good episodes that allowed him to really shine.

Now as to the offered-and-retracted-and-ignored charge that Riker was the most awesome character on ST:TNG, that’s just plain silly. TNG was an ensemble cast in ways that even TOS didn’t pull off. Every character had its strengths and weaknesses, their good moments and bad. I liked them all–even Troi became easier to like as time went on. There was a rapport among them that I enjoyed. It’s no wonder, really, why DS9 was such a shock to the system after that. And I have to admit that “First Contact” is one of my most favorite of all Trek movies, right up there behind Wrath of Khan, and Voyage Home.

Anyway, I suppose the video accomplished part of its mission. It’s got me thinking about TNG again. It’s been a long time. I ought to watch it again and see if it’s still holding up.

We hear a lot about the bad apples out there–or at least the supposed bad apples, since more than a few cases have been purposely miscast for political gain these days. The only way to combat that is to highlight all the good men and women in law enforcement and the good things they do. Case in point:

While officers are trained to look for suspicious signs wherever they go, this time Crook’s eye could only see a need.

“She is a single mom and she has the two kids, and she is taking care of the kids, and we noticed she is doing a good job with that, but she just didn’t have some of the things she needed for basic needs,” Crook said.

He could see she was using the bathtub to do laundry and didn’t have a bed to sleep on. So he went to work. He spread the word about the need and within a few days his fellow officers, a local business, residents and Habitat for Humanity helped provide a brand new washer and dryer, and more importantly, for Ashley Simmons, a bed.

…

“People don’t understand. They don’t get that the little things really do help and get you a long way,” she said. “To be able to lay in a bed and go to sleep tonight is going to be like heaven pretty much.”

In addition to the feel-good story of people helping people, that last paragraph really sticks out. Much of the “national argument” looks pretty silly in the face of things like this. Who cares what this politician called that one? This woman needed a bed. Do we really want to help the poor? May I suggest that one more post on Facebook criticizing this group or that for not doing more isn’t the answer? And next time you feel inclined to criticize the police, first stop and consider if you’ve done as much to help as they have.

My daughter recently had a performance at a nearby mall, and so my older son and I took her there. She had to be there half an hour before the performance was to start, so we found ourselves with some time to kill. But we were in the mall, so that should be easy, right? El wrongo mucho!  I don’t know if this typical of all malls, or just ours, but with the exception of a few sports paraphenalia stores, cellphone stores, and a toy store, there was nothing there to interest the male half of the species. It was, by and large, wall-to-wall clothing, make-up, accessory, salons, and spas.

Even the bookstore that once was there is no more!

We combed every square inch of that toy store. It was small, and half an hour was more than adequate to the task. We wandered around the rest of the mall for a while, trying to find something to interest us, but since we weren’t there to eat, we were out of options. We went back to where the performance was to take place and we waited.

Once the show started I did find one more option that might have kept us entertained a while longer: Yankee Candle. I do enjoy smelling candles, although the atmosphere within a Yankee Candle store is at least 20% parafin and 60% scent, and I can’t stay there long without getting woozy. But seriously, other than that the most exciting thing to look at was the cookware in JCPenney…!

With the death of record and video stores is there anything to attract boys to malls, except for food courts and girls? Is this typical these days, or is my mall just seriously lame?

What do you get when you combine steam punk, Japanese mechs, and Eastern Europe of the 1920’s?

This:

If I were those peasants, I don’t think I’d be still trying to work through all of this.

This is all evidently part of a board game the artist is planning to release. I must admit I’ll be looking for it. And in the mean time, the artwork on his website is imagination fodder extraordinaire. I swear I’ve had dreams like this.

His art has an impressionistic feel to it, and a roughness I find appealing. He seamlessly juxtaposes natural settings with unnatural items and creatures, while conveying a sense of story. Needless to say I like his work, or I wouldn’t be posting it here. I’m especially fond of “Wojtek”, who appears in a lot of his works.

Go check out his site.

Evidently during World War II at least some german prisoners of war were held in a camp here in Utah. After Germany’s surrender a US soldier at the camp went on a shooting spree, killing nine prisoners and wounding twenty others in what was called the worst massacre at a POW camp in US history.

Many of the soldiers were assigned to help the local farmers with their crops and were described as friendly and cooperative.

But Private Clarence V. Bertucci, guard a the camp, was harboring a deep hatred of Germans and decided one night to open fire on the Germans’ tents with a machine gun mounted in a tower. He got off 250 rounds before he was stopped by an officer on duty. Bertucci was court-martialed, declared insane, and sent to a mental hospital. The German dead were buried in the Fort Douglas Cemetery, and the wounded were returned to Germany as soon as they were able. Today there is a German War Memorial at Fort Douglas in remembrance of the incident.

Read more here.