Where Do I Go From Here?

    I'm an omnivorous reader. I literally am one of those who would read a cereal box or any other printed matter in front them at meal times. I have loads of books, most in storage currently. I always have whatever novel I'm reading at bedside along with a bag of books next in line, usually from the library. In my study (read "bathroom") I keep one or two non-fiction books usually, along with current and not so current magazines. The latest book there is "Writing Down The Bones" by Natalie Goldberg, and the magazines run to "Mother Earth News", and "The Backwoodsman". (All of which I heartily recommend, by the way.) I also have quite a few books of many kinds loaded onto my laptop ready to look at should I be trapped somewhere in need of reading matter. I feel quite lost if I stop for lunch somewhere and don't have anything to read.
    
    I've accumulated books for years. I often know the contents of Half Price Books better than some of those who work there. When I was young and living with my grandparents they had a rather high closet, built over a stair space. The floor of the closet was at least four feet above the room floor. This closet had a couple of shelves on each side full of books that were mostly leftover from my father. I often spent hours in the closet, surrounded by books. I had a small light there and I was quite happy among the 1940 Book of Knowledge and the red set of Miss Minerva and William Green Hill books. And, I still have them. I've added quite a few since.
     
    I once donated two library shelf units, three feet wide, six feet tall, I think about five shelves each, and enough theater type books to completely fill them to the community theater I was working with. And, it barely made a dent in my library. (I do miss some of the books now and then.) Much of that was from a purchase I had made some time before at a garage sale of fourteen boxes of theater related books. It completely filled my Chevy Suburban to the roof. 


Can you say "bookaholic"? 


    I'm looking forward to finishing my new office trailer so I can have many of my books around me again. I will, however, still have to weed them out thoroughly in order to fit them in. I do intend to be strict with myself and only keep what will fit. Books in storage are a sad thing. Some of it is a bit silly. I mean, most of my collection is non-fiction reference type stuff. I mean, that's the sort of thing that having the internet makes unnecessary. However, having the printed books does feel good to me.


    For many years I  had the desire to be a writer. About 1993 I got a chance to write a play in collaboration with a friend, Barbara Stopp Vance. We wrote several plays that did pretty well. A couple of them were produced several times and in four countries. I went on to write other plays including a couple of award winning one-acts that were produced at Sam Bass Theater in Round Rock, Tx. 


    For several years following I concentrated more on the acting/directing side of theater and less on writing, although I did have several ideas germinating. A short time ago I returned to the writing with ideas for two projects. One is a series of mystery novels, the other is a stand-alone fantasy. I also have several play projects in working.

    Every single play I worked on previously was developed in different ways. Only one actually began with me knowing the ending, and even that one wound up working out differently than planned. Now I find it easy to come up interesting, if unrelated, scenes, but I often find it difficult to find out what the overall story is, and where it is going. That makes it very difficult. In fact, it's a huge challenge. Sometimes it feels like I'm trying to string together a bunch of improv skits. 


    Oh, well. If it was easy we'd all be authors.

 

Book Review

Silent Night, Deadly Night by Lisa Lach

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


This book is a confusing read. It is apparently self-published and shows it. It would have seriously benefited from being edited. The book badly needs better organization and an index. I am very fond of local historical accounts. I am a past member of the Williamson County Historical Commission, Williamson Co. Genealogical Society, Round Rock and Liberty Hill libraries, and an author. The quoted sources were informative, but the connecting narrative was very hard to follow and suffers from grammar and typo/spelling challenges. I would only suggest reading this book if you want to see the source material, which is plentiful. Don't read it to find a coherent story.
We also are not told anything of the author's background or her purpose for writing the book.
I will finish the book, I will learn from it, but it is not a "Good Read".




View all my reviews

The above is my review of a book I am nearly done reading. The book purports to tell the true story of the lynching and Christmas Day shootout in McDade, Texas in 1883. Guess I should have been clued in by the toy cap pistol on the cover! I'm a writer, I support self-publishing. However, books like this illustrate the drawbacks.

Recent Reads and Synchronicity

Within the last couple of days I finished reading 3 books I had started at various times recently. I'm not sure how it happens, I often have several books in progress. Usually it's a book I'm reading that someone gave me, or I've had kicking around for awhile, then I get one from the library that of course I need to read and take back soon, or it's one I just got from one of my favorite series or author's I'm more interested in, so I jump into that one and then later go back and finish the previous one. I also often have one book in progress by my bed for night reading, and another in the bathroom for, well, you know. The bathroom is my branch library, what can I say?
It's usually non-fiction writing-related books in the bathroom, or magazines. (The two magazines I read regularly are "The Mother Earth News", and "The Backwoodsman".)
Regardless, the three fictions I just finished are, in no order, "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell", "The Jamais Vu Papers" and "Slave of my Thirst".
A bit of an eclectic mix, I admit. I did enjoy all three. "Jamais Vu" was a pretty wild ride, but oddly, it fit in interestingly with the Avatar Master's course I just finished. I always find it fascinating how something like that takes on a whole new meaning after you have a viewpoint shift like that.
There was one of those odd synchronous moments also, when I realized, even though "Slave" and "Jamais Vu" were vastly different subject matters, the author Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) made a cameo appearance in both.
I run into that now and then. It's always an interesting "whoa!" moment when two very different genre books I just happen to read in sequence just happen to mention the same idea. Sometimes it's an obscure quote, sometimes it's a fictional character or real person. But it happens too often to be random chance.
Just a couple of weeks ago I read two books, one a fantasy by Lionel Fenn (Blood River Down), another a mystery by Bill Crider (Booked For a Hanging). The two were written in different decades, different authors and different genres. I picked both at random to read, one from the library, one I had bought. Yet, both mentioned the fact that the same quote from Shakespeare, "Lead on MacDuff", was actually a misquote, the original being "Lay on, MacDuff."


Okay, it's a trivial thing, perhaps, but the part that got me was the synchronicity of the same thing appearing in two very different novels I read at random.
Synchronicity is a great subject all its own. Nowhere does it crop up more often than in the study of genealogy.
Guess it all just illustrates the principle that "there are no accidents."
As to the books. I enjoyed all five.
"Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" took a little getting used to. For me, it was one of those books that start a little slow, but I think it was necessary to truly set up the premise involved. It was well worth reading. The size is daunting to some, no doubt, but for those of us who Stephen King and Stephen R. Donaldson, that's not such an issue.
"Slave of My Thirst" was an interesting take on vampires, and worked in a lot of plausible fictional background on Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and other true and fictional issues of the late 1800's. Again, an interesting read.
I already mentioned "Jamais Vu" and how it meshed with my Avatar experience. The book came out in 1989. It reminds me somewhat of "Godel, Escher, Bach." (Another book on my "to finish" list, as soon as I find my copy again.) . "Jamais Vu" covers a lot of territory, and I don't know exactly how to describe it. I suppose most of all it touches on the relationship of "reality" and mythical universes. A lot falls within the realm of the movie "What the (bleep) do we know?" If you missed THAT, it concerned ramifications of quantum physics and mysticism. Not as dry a subject as it may sound.
I may as well talk about the other two books I mentioned above.
I find Lionel Fenn (Charles L. Grant) to be a truly funny fantasy writer, somewhat in the vein of Piers Anthony's Xanth series.
I stumbled across a few of Fenn's books by accident some time back at Half Price Books. I think my favorites are "Once Upon a Time in the East", and "The Mark of the Moderately Vicious Vampire", although every one I've read has been just as much fun. I recently got copies of "Blood River Down" and "Seven Spears of the W'Dch'Ck". Both are earlier works, I believe, but still very funny. All of Fenn's works are well worth finding and reading.
As far as "Booked for a Hanging" is concerned. My esteem for the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series of mysteries by Bill Crider is also very high. I don't know if "small town colloquial/folksy" is an actual genre of mystery, but this would be a prime example of it. Maybe a cross between "Murder She Wrote" and "Andy of Mayberry". Whatever it is, I love it! Growing up in small town Texas myself, every corner Sheriff Rhodes turns awakens a new "Oh yeah, I remember that!" from myself. I think I've already said I'm a bit envious. I hope my own planned series set in Central Texas is as good.

Rainy Day Writing

Stormy last night. Slept pretty good. Pretty involved dreams all night. I didn’t remember any worth writing down this time. Well, okay, there was one. I was going along as an observer on a balloon flight. Huge balloon, made up of light clear plastic, like dry cleaner bags joined somehow. Wasn’t hot air or gas, we were riding inside the bubble somehow. Anyway, I didn’t really get inside. A couple of women I’ve known were going up and inviting me along. There was a rope ladder through a hatch in their ceiling that led into the balloon, but the opening in the trap door was too small for me to get through. there was a larger opening nearby, but that led to a different balloon they had. Somehow one of them switched things so I could climb on up through the large opening and still get there. Not sure I want to cogitate too much on the connotations. That’s about all I remember of that dream, anyway. It ended about the time I crawled into the balloon. It was a large open space with a lot of braces.
I mostly intend to do some work today on my Deputy Constable Penn Sadler story. It takes place in a precinct of mostly small towns in central Texas. A fictional county and so forth that bears a great resemblance to where I grew up, and where I live now. I’m planning a series of novels for the same area. I was a bit taken aback by Bill Crider’s “Sheriff Dan Rhodes” series. He has very much tapped the same vein. I love the books, though. Encouraging to see that it can indeed be done and well.
My main character, whom I’ve named Penn Sadler, is a native of the area, which I’ve called Shin Oak. He had been a county Deputy Sheriff, spent a little time as Acting Sheriff when the previous one left office under a scandal. Penn was defeated in his run for the office by some political chicanery and left the department, which pleased both him and his new boss. Penn is a good officer, so he got a job as Deputy Constable with an old friend, Constable Sam Hart, under his local Justice of the Peace, Sara Beth Adams.
Penn keeps up with matters in the Sheriff’s Department through his old friends there, as well as friends in other state departments. Contacts he cultivated through his previous career and a few high profile cases he had helped with. These contacts serve to draw him into many of the sorts of cases a Deputy Constable wouldn’t normally handle.
I've also been consciously using my tarot system for plotting/outline both the book and the series. It will be interesting to see how it all turns out, huh? As the man said, I can hardly wait to see what I write next!

Just Who IS this RainCrow?

Somewhere in here I feel the need to introduce myself so anyone who feels the need can find out a bit about me, or not, as you wish.
I've always loved the opening lines of Steve Martin's "The Jerk", but I won't use it here. I grew up outside a very small town in central Texas, raised by my grandparents. We lived over a gas station/garage and I was pumping gas, doing mechanic and general fix-it work, and entertaining myself from an early age. I read a LOT! We also had some livestock, made and sold handcrafts in the store, and gardened. Hunting and fishing was something I enjoyed often. I graduated from Liberty Hill High School after going through eleven of the twelve grades in the same building.
Electronics was my major when I went to Central Texas College in Killeen, but I changed over to Drafting and Design. For forty years I've been a steel detailer for most of the steel fabricators in central Texas. Along the way I've managed to marry, raise three great kids of my own, and three more who became mine. I have also followed my interests into many areas. In no particular order:
For many years I shot muzzle-loading rifles and pistols competitively. I won a few ribbons, nothing major. I hunted with them as well. I no longer hunt, but I still have the guns. I was a licensed gunsmith for a few years as well.
For 22 or so years I played a Texas Ranger in the annual Sam Bass Shootout in Round Rock, Texas. That got me into:
Theater. Starting in 1981 along with the shootouts, I became involved with Sam Bass Theater in Round Rock. I became an actor with that group, as well as playwright and director. After I moved from Round Rock in the mid-90's, I worked with other local groups including San Gabriel Productions in Georgetown, Way Off Broadway in Leander, and founded Liberty Hill Community Theater in Liberty Hill, where I was playwright in residence.
Writing. I have several successful plays to my credit, most co-written with Barbara Stopp Vance. Several others I did on my own. All are published online on www.scribd.com. I have other plays and two novels in the works currently. (And this blog, of course.) After moving back to Liberty Hill in the mid '90s, I became one of the founders, and eventually one of the first elected trustees of the Liberty Hill Public Library.
Five years ago I began making and playing Native American style flutes. I enjoy playing them and I sell one occasionally. I also got into African and Middle Eastern hand drumming. I've always loved musical instruments, and collect them. I never learned to read or took music lessons, but I enjoy fooling around with them. My most recent acquisition was a set of bagpipes I picked up on Ebay for a very good price. They were damaged, the damage has already been repaired, I can't wait to start practicing with them! (Thank goodness we live in the country!)
Last year I took a Permaculture Design Course in Austin. For much of my life I have been into organic gardening, a long time reader of Mother Earth News, and very much in favor of a do-it-yourself lifestyle. The PDC course went a long way toward putting all those pieces together. I am now a Permaculture Designer. I'll say more about that in another post.
Three years or so ago, I found my partner, Cat Dancing, and moved near McDade, Texas. We are soul mates. She is an artist in Intarsia, a type of wood mosaic art, as well as stained glass, jewelry, and other things. (Another eclectic soul.) We put together our own workshop this year. We share many of the same tools, as well as woods. I with my flutes and other projects, and Cat with hers.
Along with my interest in the Native American flutes, and this RainCrow name I have chosen for myself, I am asked often if I am Native American. I do have some Choctaw blood (I believe). Another of my interests has been genealogy. I was a long time member of the Williamson County Genealogical Society as well as the County Historical Commission. My grandmother's grandmother was Native American and Choctaw seems the most likely tribe. We haven't been able to trace that any further. At any rate, I am proud of the connection, but it certainly isn't enough to legally claim!
The Native American and shamanistic view of the universe has always been a part of my life. I was raised in one of the more fundamental Christian sects. I was very active in that church until I was in my 40's, but at heart many of the subsidiary teachings never really sat well with me. There always seemed to be a lot that just didn't add up. Inside myself I had my own views. I always did read a lot, I learned early on that my views were pagan. For the past several years I have been connected with Tejas Web in Austin. It is a very loosely knit group of eclectic pagans of many varieties who do public rituals and classes together. I rank many of these members among my closest friends and even chosen family now. Along with this has come a renewed interest in the Tarot. Cat Dancing, my partner, is a very accomplished Tarot reader and teacher locally, and my studies with her are ongoing.
I have found many good applications of the Tarot to writing, which I am exploring currently.
We just finished a very good season with the new Sherwood Forest Faire near here in Paige, Texas. This was the first year of a brand new renaissance festival here. Cat and I took the plunge and began building our permanent booth there. It was a very successful opening. Next year look us up. Booth 309, Cat Dancing Creations!
That's my tip of the iceberg for this round. All of it will re-appear no doubt in future posts, as well as the million and one things I didn't mention. I plan to share a lot of what I have learned about most of these subjects and whatever else interests me at the time. Stay tuned!