It was there to find evidence of life.

After a dangerous descent through the Martian atmosphere, Phoenix finally came to rest in the Green Valley region of Vastitas Borealis near the Heimdall Crater on May 25th, 2008.

Heimdall, of course, is the Norse God who guards the bridge between Midgard (Earth) and Asgard (the home of the Gods). He will be the one who blows his horn to warn the Gods that Ragnarok has begun and their doom has come.

Heimdall is destined to be the last Aesir standing at the close of the final battle, when he and Loki will slay each other.

On May 31st, 2008, Phoenix reached out and first touched the soil of Mars with its robotic arm. It soon began analyzing samples from the surrounding surface using an ingenious series of on-board ovens and laboratories, sending data back to us here on its work.

It didn’t take long to confirm that, at some point in the past, Mars likely hosted an environment which would support the presence of liquid water. Later in its mission, NASA announced that Phoenix found evidence of perchlorate as well. While these salts are can occur naturally as well as in manufacturing, some believe they could preclude the possibility of life. There is also a chance that the presence of perchlorate is a by-product contamination from the Phoenix’s retro rockets.

Next to the American flag on the outer deck of the lander is a disc made of silica glass specially designed to last for thousands of years. On the disc are messages from Earth — including the works of H.G. Wells and Ray Bradbury as well as messages from Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Sagan.

It is a remarkable achievement, to be sure. But you might well ask, why am I telling you all of this?

While Phoenix was still in transit, NASA began posting updates about the mission on the social networking site Twitter. The first of these appeared on May 7th, 2008: “Less than 20 days till I land on Mars!”

Note the usage of the first person — someone decided to personalize the voice of Phoenix and it was an inspired decision. It didn’t take long for @MarsPhoenix to amassing a following well over thirty-five thousand Twitter users.

I was one of them. I’d been on Twitter for a year or so and one of my friends there posted a message to @MarsPhoenix, which is how I first found out that it was on Twitter.

In the intervening months, I read @MarsPhoenix’s updates with growing enthusiasm and delight. It especially impressed me how it answered questions asked by other users, sharing in the ongoing dialogue and community of Twitter.

As odd as it sounds, it didn’t take long for me — for most of us on Twitter — to view @MarsPhoenix as one of us, just another person out there posting updates about their life. In the common parlance of the community, @MarsPhoenix was one of us. They were a friend.

And we were all shocked a few weeks ago when we got the news: Winter was coming. Without the solar power it needed to keep running, the Phoenix lander was going to shut down.

@MarsPhoenix, our friend, was going to die.

On October 30, 2008, @MarsPhoenix posted a few final words:

“In case we don’t get this chance again, thank you all so much for the questions, comments & good wishes over the mission. It’s been awesome.” [2:56 p.m.]


“Take care of that beautiful blue marble out there in space, our home planet. I’ll be keeping an eye from here. Space exploration FTW!” [3:55 p.m.]

I was at work when these messages came through and I managed not to cry at my desk. Driving home, though, I had to pull over because I just couldn’t see the road for the tears.

Later that night, with my wife holding me, I finally let loose the sadness that had been building inside since that afternoon.

Silly as it might sound, I was in mourning.

I suppose I still am.

But this is what we do, all of us. We live and make connections with each other, we reach out and try to make sense of things. We share who we are and what we have found. And, when winter comes, we grow cold and we fail. And then we die.

And the ones who are left, they mourn.

Apart from a few brief posts over the past few days, the account at @MarsPhoenix has gone silent. There is a slight possibility that NASA may be able to reawaken the lander once winter has passed — a “Lazarus Effect” built into the design — but it is a slim hope at best.

And yet, I’d like to believe that it’s possible — that this is not the end, that this winter will pass… that Demeter will be kind and reach out her warm hand to touch the face of Phoenix and bring it back to life once more.

@MarsPhoenix may be lost to us, but there are others: Cassini is cruising around Saturn and sharing what it sees with all of us. And Phoenix’s siblings, Spirit and Opportunity, are roving the surface of Mars even still.

Because this is what we do, even in mourning, we look to the life that has been left behind and we take hope in the future.

————————-

Addendum — In researching a few things for this post, I ran across an interesting piece of information about Phoenix that I did not know before: After a preliminary planning process, the mission received full approval from NASA to proceed on June 2, 2005.

Which means we share a birthday, my friend and I.

I’ve received a fair amount of mail from listeners over the past few months who, much like Oliver Twist, are politely asking for more. In many cases, they want to stop being listeners and start being readers. Really, as a writer, there’s nothing better to hear.

And I’d love it if I could point you all to Amazon or your local bookstore where copies of Assam & Darjeeling and Matters of Mortology are waiting on the shelves. But there’s a few things that need to happen before that comes to pass. There’s still the matter of needing an agent, for instance. And finding a publisher. Little details like that.

So until that happy day, it occurs to me that I’ve written quite a lot over the years — much of which has never seen the light of day.

And so, leading up to Samhain — which marks the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter, of course — I’m pleased to announce that The Winter Chap is now available for purchase through the print-on-demand service Lulu.com.

It’s a little thing, really, just a chapbook of selected poems and short stories that I’ve written over the years. Most of which haven’t been collected or published anywhere else, except perhaps here on this site.

The Winter Chap is 50 pages worth of stories and poems, including:

• Two Ghosts
• Hooves
• Witch Girl
• The Pink Lady
• The Queen of Middle Night
• Witchglass
• Baba Yaga
• The Whispering Boy

Much of this is new or never before released material, but some of it will be familiar to regular and longtime followers of this blog. And in addition, if you’re kind enough to buy it, you’ll find that it comes with a link to download a free, exclusive audiobook of the text (read by the author, of course).

And, yes, as you may surmise from the title and contents, there will be other Chaps — three more, in fact. One for each of the seasons. Here’s hoping we get Assam & Darjeeling and Matters of Mortology on their way to the bookstore shelves before Winter rolls around again next year.

Click here to order a copy The Winter Chap.

So, I’ve done movies and songs and poems and books and even dreams. But the scariest thing of all..?

This was years ago.

It was summer. My family had gone on an extended trip to visit grandparents on the West Coast and I was alone in the house for six weeks.

I spent most of my time rattling around the house. The cats followed me around, as though they were trying to find where I’d hidden the bodies.

I stayed up too late, reading and writing. I played the radio too loud to fill the silence. Other times, I’d go quiet and not see anyone or say anything for days.

Over time, I found out that I was well suited for it, the solitude. Too much so. I started to avoid going out for any reason. Even getting up for work was difficult. I was spending so much time in my own head that anything which intruded or pulled me out of it became an irritant, something to avoid.

In some ways, it was nice.

Mostly though, it was just sad and lonely.

One night, I had a dream. It was the most complete narrative I think I’ve ever had in a dream, literally telling a story all the way from beginning to end. It was a very personal dream — meaning, I was the main “character” and it all happened from my perspective. But it wasn’t me, I was someone else.

I was a soldier and I was wounded. Afterwards, the whole dream became my short story Summer Salt. If you’ve read the story, you know how it ends. The horror of that last moment jolted me awake.

I lay there in bed, still half-paralyzed by the lingering fear from my dream. I rolled over and reached out, taking my wife’s hand.

“I just had a terrible dream,” I said.

Five, perhaps, ten seconds passed.

She lay there, silently holding my hand.

I could feel her there next to me, awake and strangely watchful like she was holding her breath.

I was not dreaming. I was not asleep, I know. The shock of my dream had driven all sleep from me.

Five seconds, maybe ten before I remembered.

My family was on the other side of the country, I was alone in the house.

But someone was holding my hand.

Then I was up on the other side of the room and the light was on.

I was alone.

I spent the rest of the night on the porch, lost in my thoughts, until the sun finally rose.

As I said, it was a long time ago.

So, let’s talk about dreams. Not to state the obvious, but they’re remarkable constructs, intricate and maddeningly detailed narratives that we manage to generate out of a sleeping mind.

Even more so, nightmares.

Something deep in our minds wants to scare us. But it’s wrong perhaps to ascribe motive or desire. Perhaps it’s better to say that something deep within our mind needs to scare us.

Fear, apparently, has it’s place… even in our dreams.

From an evolutionary perspective, it’s interesting to speculate on whether that capacity represents a vestigial trait that we are on our way to shedding — or is it the first layer of something new in our evolution, a glimpse of something we might one day become?

I’ve been keeping a semi-regular, semi-faithful journal for a number of years now. Apart from my own internal whining, it has served chiefly as a place to write down my dreams — whether they are little, half-remembered shreds or full length narratives. A lot of the time, I cannibalize the creations of my sleeping mind in my writing.

Sometimes it’s just an episode or an image that gets worked into something. Other times, the dream is the spark that sets something alight in my waking mind. Matters of Mortology started as a dream. And my poem “The Queen of Middle Night” (available in this chapbook, shameless plug) is nothing more than a stack of snapshots from my dreams and nightmares.

Like everyone else, my dreams are deeply persona and they run the gamut: I’ve had murder dreams, flying dreams, erotic dreams, apocalyptic dreams, and even prophetic dreams.

(The answer to your next question is “Yes” — but that’s not our topic for today.)

Once, while I was telling a friend about a dream I’d had, he stopped me and said “Your normal everyday dreams are like my worst nightmares.” I took it as a compliment.

But it’s rare for my dreams to scare me — even at their worst, their darkest.

About fifteen years ago, though, I had one of those sit-bolt-upright-in-bed kind of dreams. In it, I encountered one or two of my biggest fears. Yet it wasn’t a scary dream. It was one where you wake up with a gasp, sobbing uncontrollably.

Scariest dream I know of isn’t one of mine. It’s one I heard my father tell my mother, years ago, and it is a very clear memory. We were driving along in the car — that old blue Buick of ours —- and the windows were down. I was in the backseat and I don’t even know if they knew (or cared) that I was listening.

But, as you can tell, it made an impression on me.

The funny thing is, I asked my father about it a few years ago and he doesn’t remember it — neither the dream nor the telling.

Dreams are personal things, so I won’t go into his telling of it here. But I can share a monologue from one of my plays, one in which I shamelessly cannibalize his dream for my own:

I am in the old house, where we lived back before my parents split up. I’m standing in the doorway of the back bedroom, the one where guests would sleep when they came to stay. But no one has come to stay for a long, long time.

The air in the room is warm and musty and thick. Outside, the sun is going down. Tiny particles of dust roam in the shaft of yellow light that spills in through the grimy window.

Against the wall, half-hidden in the shadows, is an old chest of drawers.

The top drawer is open.

A mirror hangs on the wall above it, grimy and filmed with dust. The top drawer is open.

I wipe the dust away from the smooth surface of the mirror. My reflection, my face, hollow and pale, stares back at me.

The top drawer is open.

I look in and there’s, there’s something in there, I don’t know what. Something I shouldn’t have seen. I slam the drawer shut and turn to leave the room, suddenly afraid.

Halfway to the door, the dull sound of wood rasping behind me freezes me in place. I turn around.

The top drawer is open.

I go back and push it closed again.

I step away and, and, the drawer, it . . . it slowly slides out again.

I push it closed, I lean against it, trying to hold it closed. But I can feel something inside pushing back. It’s stronger than I am, my feet are slipping on the floor, I can’t hold it in any longer.

I step back, halfway turn to run and stop when, one by one, all of the drawers slowly slide open.

Like “The Bogeyman” story I mentioned yesterday, my dad’s dream stayed with me for a very long time. In fact, it’s still quite strong in my mind. Any time I pass a drawer that’s not quite closed, I can’t help but push it shut.

And, each time I do, I step back and wait a moment… half expecting something inside will slowly push it open once again.

On this subject, books present a problem. Like movies, there’s lots to choose from — and, frankly, a lot of junk food. I’ve read my fair share of stories that deliver the literary equivalent of “rubber mask” shock without lasting resonance (or, to my sensibilities, quality).

I’ve spent most of my life carrying around books. Like an alcoholic hiding booze around the house, so I am with reading. They’re in my car, virtually every room of the house, at the office, in my briefcase — just within reach if I’ve got a free minute or no one’s looking.

Growing up, books were everywhere. Most of my family were (and still are) big time readers, everyone has something on their nightstand at the very least. Which meant that, as a kid, I had access to a lot of books that were way over my head. One of the best things that ever happened to me was the simple fact that my parents didn’t discourage or prevent me from exploring those things. I can remember them suggesting things, recommending that something might not be interesting or suitable, but I can’t recall a time when anyone ever said “You can’t read that.”

At a certain point, my older brother seemed to have a lot of horror books lying around. Teenagers.

I remember picking up a collection of early Stephen King short stories that I found in his room. I was probably ten or eleven years old. The book scared the crap out of me.

And I couldn’t stop reading it.

One of the stories — “The Bogeyman” — stayed with me for a very long time. There’s no surprise about this. King does an excellent job of capturing that innate fear that small children have of the closet door being open just a tiny bit. Since I was still a little kid, his explanation for why the closet always seemed to be ajar (see the title of the story) rang the hotline of my imagination over and over again. As such, it was years before I finally stopped checking closet doors before I went to bed. Sometimes I still do.

Worst (best?) of all, though is the story that leads off the collection. “Jerusalem’s Lot” owes a great deal to H.P. Lovecraft, something I didn’t realize until much, much later. As stories goes, it follows the classic arc of a man returning to the ancestral homestead only to discover dark secrets and influences lurking in his family’s history. I could write for pages about the varied themes that King (and Lovecraft et al) explore in these kinds of stories, but what I really want to tell you about is a moment near the ending of the story.

The protagonist has ventured into a secret basement/crypt and come face to face with some nasty relatives who still bear the marks of their own self-inflicted deaths. And, of course, they’re still alive. I won’t transcribe it here (it really is worth reading, if that’s your sort of thing) but King’s description of the sheer, evil lunacy in their eyes is excellent. Pure King distilling pure Lovecraft.

They stayed with me, those two. As a child, they were lurking behind every heating register (we didn’t have basements in California). I could feel their eyes on me.

And I can still see them, in my imagination, as vivid as when I first read (and then reread) the story as a child.

Twenty years ago, I spent a few months living alone in a twenty-room mansion in Santa Barbara, California. It was over a hundred years old and I made the mistake of reading Lovecraft for the first time while I was living there. I regret it now that I never really explored the whole of the house, from attic to basement.

But I had no doubt that, had I done so, those two ghouls from King’s story would have been there… waiting.

Edgar Allen Poe notwithstanding, Poetry seems to be one of those things that people don’t typically associate with Horror — either as a genre or as an emotional reaction.

I don’t know that I’m smart enough or qualified enough to really delve into the nature of Poetry and how it works on us as readers — not without seriously embarrassing myself. But at the very least, I would like to share a poem that has stayed with me ever since I first read it, long ago when I was young.

There were a number of books on shelves in our family room — put there, I expect, because of the attractiveness of their binding and the need to fill the shelf with something. There was a multivolume set called “The Yale Library”, as I recall, along with a handful of other books that seemed to serve no other purpose than to be held up by decorative bookends on the mantle.

One of the books was a volume of collected poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay. I think it must have been my father who first pointed me to her poem “Wraith” when I was still in elementary school:

“Thin Rain, whom are you haunting,
That you haunt my door?”
—Surely it is not I she’s wanting;
Someone living here before—
“Nobody’s in the house but me:
You may come in if you like and see.”

Thin as thread, with exquisite fingers,—
Have you seen her, any of you?—
Grey shawl, and leaning on the wind,
And the garden showing through?

Glimmering eyes,—and silent, mostly,
Sort of a whisper, sort of a purr,
Asking something, asking it over,
If you get a sound from her.—

Ever see her, any of you?—
Strangest thing I’ve ever known,—
Every night since I moved in,
And I came to be alone.

“Thin Rain, hush with your knocking!
You may not come in!
This is I that you hear rocking;
Nobody’s with me, nor has been!”

Curious, how she tried the window,—
Odd, the way she tries the door,—
Wonder just what sort of people
Could have had this house before…

It’s a ghost story, obviously. But it doesn’t read to me like a deliberate work of horror, although it’s difficult to know what Millay’s inspiration and intention was. I can remember combing through the rest of the book looking for something else, but (at the time) none of it struck me in the same way.

Because she didn’t write more in this vein, “Wraith” rings true to me, genuine. With apologies for my own speculation, the poem feels like it came directly from experience. Certainly most of the rest of her poetry follows that process, so why wouldn’t this one?

Not only does that make me feel a kinship with Millay but I also see that she felt that same quality, that sadness which seems to lie at the heart of a lot of ghost stories.

And that it is a poem only serves to enhance and expand that feeling of the other, the weird — I mean to say, that late-at-night-no-one-awake-but-me feeling that so often amplifies every sound and strips away the natural, rational skepticism that prevents us from remembering that we live among the dead, one world overlapping the other.

In my case, it doesn’t have to be that late at night, either.

Writing this, I realize for the first time how much this poem parallels my comments from a couple of days ago, the idea of home and comfort and how important those things are to us now and after we’re gone. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why it has stayed with me for so long. When I finally left my parents’ home and went off on my own, Millay’s collection was one of the things that went with me.

I have it still and, still, it haunts me.

There are some kinds of music — particularly the harder, harsher speed metal or even some of the more artsy experimental composers — which set my teeth on edge and kickstart the flight-or-fight impulse in me. But I don’t know that I’d classify that response as fear. The stories about Stravinsky and the premiere of his The Rite of Spring, that’s a pretty incredible tale of the visceral power of music. The best exploration I know of on that subject is this excellent RadioLab episode.

But, from time to time, music has actually frightened me — and not because it was cacophonous or atonal/experimental. There was something genuinely frightening about the circumstances surrounding it and it’s stayed with me ever since. Here’s the top three…

When my brother was in high school, he’d listen to music late at night in his room. He had a battery-powered cassette player and the music would keep pace with the amount of charge left in the batteries. The longer they’d gone, the slower the music would become — producing some genuinely creepy effects. I can remember the batteries going dead one night while he was listening to “Radio Clash” and the music just started grinding down, slower and slower> I was asleep in my room and I could hear, faintly, “Thiis . . . isss . . . the Raaaadiooo . . . Classsshhhh…” drifting across the hallways, just barely audible.

And then he rewound the tape and listened to it again. Joe Strummer’s laugh at the beginning was chilling and I drifted off into half-waking dreams of a demon band, moping their way through the slow-motion tune. Creepy.

And then there was the night, years later, when I was up late writing. I’d recently discovered the music of Glenn Gould and it was just about the only thing I would listen to. As I said, it was late and I was alone in the apartment, working on a particularly difficult segment for a play that I’d been commissioned to write. It was quiet and I had Glenn Gould on, very low and repeating the album over and over again.

A few hours into writing, I realized that I could hear a voice, low and measured, just on the edge of consciousness. I got up and checked around the apartment — nothing. A while later, the voice edged its way back into my consciousness again. Once again, I got up and checked around, looked outside — nothing.

I stood there, listening.

There. The voice rose and fell again, very low.

I switched off the music to hear better. Nothing.

Turning the music back on, the voice began again and I realized that the voice was on the music, on the recording. I did not know it at the time, but Gould had a tendency to sing or hum along with himself as he played. And, because he had passed away years before, I was more or less listening to the voice of a ghost.

But the creepiest music I have ever heard is the times, late at night, when I would be shocked out of a deep sleep by the sound of the cat walking across the open piano. That strange, discordant jumble of notes was so startling, so strange in an otherwise quiet house.

Worst of all was the time when, hearing the piano, I sat up to go down and close the lid on the keys . . . only to find that the cat was sleeping at the foot of the bed. It was a difficult task to work up the nerve to go downstairs anyway and check on the otherwise quiet house. I found nothing, of course — leaving me with no other explanation for what (or who) might have been playing in the night.

I will say, however, that the theme from the Haunted Mansion — aka Grim Grinning Ghosts — is a genuinely spooky little tune. And I love it. But this is coming from a guy who has Tubular Bells as his ringtone. So.

I’m taking another swing this year. For many reasons, Halloween is my favorite holiday and I thought it might be fun to try a “Best Of…” approach this year, enumerating the scariest things I’ve seen, heard, read, and experienced.

Let’s start easy and work our way inward towards the core, where the really scary things are…

A ghost story relies on a recipe, a delicate balance of flavors and textures: Suspense, fear, humor, sympathy, and restraint. That last element is key to a good ghost story, which is why there are so many bad ones.

There are lots of scary movies, chainsaws and rubber mask monsters. Like junk food, they satisfy a craving and can even be enjoyable. But they don’t give you much beyond the momentary pleasure and (perhaps) an unhealthy craving for more. No one fondly remembers that great Big Mac they had back in 1983 — although you might remember your first, in the same way you might remember the first scary movie you saw.

Full disclosure: I don’t like being afraid.

But for many reasons, ghost stories have a fond place in my heart. I don’t particularly care for Horror as a whole. Despite coming of age in the ‘80’s, I never had much interest in the serialized attacks of Freddy, Jason, and Michael Meyers. But I’ve never been overly fond of junk food either. And the current generation of Saws, Hostels, et al interest me not in the slightest. There may be technical skill in their making, they may share many of the ingredients that I appreciate in other recipes, but they are for the most part distasteful to me and I don’t understand their apparent wide appeal. But I feel the same way about KFC’s dinner bowls, so…

(Writing this, I think there’s something to be said for many of the Asian films that have been released in recent years. I’ll take a Ju-on or The Eye over their American counterparts any night of the week. There may be a food equivalent there as well, preferring Chinese take-out to American fast food. But I digress…)

But a ghost story — at least, the ones I think work best — isn’t meant to scare you, not really. Stories, whatever their stripe, are meant to be remembered. A good story, a good ghost story, stays with you. It’s hovering there in the back of your head when you’re driving home, when you’re getting ready for bed. It’s there on the edge of the bed as you’re falling asleep.

A good ghost story, yes, it haunts you.

There’s more to it than that, though. I think that a ghost story works best when, at it’s heart, it isn’t scary but sad. The underlying story of a movie like Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense — which is actually a number of ghost stories artfully stitched together — is founded not on fear but on a genuine, human quality. At it’s core, that sadness sets up a chain reaction with the scary elements, creating a reciprocating, oscillating wave of sorrow and fear which is, ultimately, extremely fulfilling and enjoyable.

But, as great as I think it is, The Sixth Sense isn’t the movie I want to write about today.

It was Halloween, maybe twelve or thirteen years ago. I’d taken my son out trick or treating earlier in the evening, bringing him home against his protests that his bag “wasn’t all the way full yet.” I’d monitored the door with my candy bowl at the ready until the doorbell stopped ringing. I put the boy to bed and shut off the porch light — that universal symbol of Closing Time — and headed downstairs to see what TCM was showing for their Halloween night programming.

By sheer luck, I turned on the television just as the opening moments of Robert Wise’s The Haunting were beginning. I’d heard of the movie and Shirley Jackson’s book, but I’d not been exposed to either one.

Needless to say, I was in for a treat. For two hours I sat transfixed as the story rolled over me like a storm, all stillness and thunder punctuated with bursts of staccato, lightning-fast shock.

Smarter people have written more — and with more insight than I could hope for — about this movie and the masterful emotional and technical achievement it represents.

Suffice it to say that, somehow, Wise puts you in the house. You’re right there, experiencing the story first-hand in a way that few other movies manage to accomplish. Part of the recipe is the restraint Wise shows throughout, of course. Much of it is Nelson Gidding’s script and how he holds back on information, never letting the audience outpace the characters as they move through the story.

One of the best examples of these qualities is how Wise puts you right next to Eleanor and Theodora when that unseen, insistent pounding comes up the hallway towards the door of their room.

This is a movie that typically make’s everyone’s “Best Of…” list. Everything they say about it is true. Not only is it a great scary movie, it’s a great movie. Invariably, most of the credit for this is ascribed to a twist of fate. The legend is that Wise didn’t have a budget for special effects, which makes his unconventional use of sound and camera angles all the more powerful. The unknown, the unseen is far more terrifying that the rubber mask.

But Wise has excellent material to work with nonetheless. The performances are pitch-perfect across the board. The screenwriting accomplishes something uncommon — something that I don’t say lightly — by improving upon the source material. The movie is (with apologies to Ms. Jackson, whose work I love) better than the book.

But yes, the film is somewhat dated and slips into melodrama during a few scenes. But to my eyes, that actually enhances the effect. It’s quaintness, it’s charm sets you at ease — so much so, that you don’t notice that your own growing dread as the story progresses.

And it’s a story that stays with you, it resonates long after the credit roll. And not just as something recalled in the dark, starting at the sounds of an old house settling around you. The genuine, human quality of the story — Eleanor’s yearning for a home, a place of her own — is as haunting and resonant as any tragedy.

It reminds us that ghosts are just like us, they’re human beings with their own stories, trapped in their own sadness.

And, if we’re not careful, we might end up the same way.

Over at Starship Sofa, they’re running Julie Davis’ very kind review of “Assam & Darjeeling” in their latest podcast. She’s expanded her comments a bit further than in her original review, but in case you missed it…

One of the truest pleasures of Assam & Darjeeling is the relationship between the forceful younger sister, Darjeeling, and the thoughtful, sensitive older brother, Assam. The way that they work together to save their mother, yet often clash in the details of how they must proceed is what carries the story and makes us believe in their relationship. It rings true to anyone who has siblings whom they love but who also have the capacity to irritate beyond belief in daily life.

The prolonged squeee sound you hear is, of course, me. I’ll stop eventually.

You can download the full podcast and review here or through iTunes.

The new project — working title: Pantheon — is still coming along slowly, due more to some genuinely frustrating time and schedule constraints than any creative issues. The lack of time to write is becoming an increasing annoyance — and not just for this project. It’s been this way for a long time. I cannot help but feel envious of the writers who manage to make the shift to full-time. One day…

For almost twenty years I’ve tracked my time during the day in fifteen minute increments which standard when you work at any kind of advertising or marketing agency. It’s also an interesting place to keep your head on a regular basis. Once that mindset becomes routine, it’s difficult to turn it off. During the day, that time is time spent (usually) in support of a client. It is productive time and (usually) profitable time. Meaning, we will invoice someone for it. Which is why it is tracked so closely.

Off-hours, however, the mechanism remains the same but I’ve found the mental tracking inverts. Instead of tracking productive time, I unconsciously note unproductive time. Even your normal (e.g. real life) activities are measured in those terms: Making the kids’ lunches, emptying the dishwasher, a phone call from a friend, watching television, writing this blog post . . . those fifteen minutes add up to a lot of time.

Which is rough when you live in a world where time not spent writing is time not writing. It’s lost and whatever might have been written is lost as well.

Early on in DC Comics Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross, we get a glimpse inside the life of The Flash — who has become so fast that he lives between the ticks of the clock. This has, in essence, removed him from reality. When I first read that, I couldn’t help but think “Yeah, I get that…” Or perhaps it’s just the Mercury helmet I relate to.

Possibly I’m just another whiny writer blogging about not having enough time — at least, some of the time.

Speaking of unproductive time, had a very nice weekend. Got a little bit of work done on Pantheon and the new podcast, as well as a considerable amount of noodling on the October Surprise (which has now grown into two separate and rather different surprises, so I’m trying to decide which one I want to do more).

Spent Saturday afternoon wandering through one of an antique mall in one of the dilapidated warehouses near my house. Approximately ninety-eight percent of the merchandise was there during my last visit six months ago, most of it junk. I did spend some time marveling over a remarkably well preserved Steiff Hitler. Toys and dolls of political figures are nothing new, apparently, but it was still odd to think of a child in their crib cuddling with little Adolph.

“There’s a story in that somewhere,” I thought to myself.

“Yes,” I replied. “And Rod Serling wrote it like fifty years ago.”

I did manage to turn up a couple of vintage fountain pens. They sounded like maracas when shaken, a sure sign that the ink and reservoir sacs within had disintegrated. But they were beautiful and quite inexpensive (likely due to their frozen levels and the crumbled mess inside), so I decided it was time I learned how to restore vintage pens.

Back home, Keeley took a nap and I spent a happy hour or so gently disassembling the pens — a Parker and a Welch — and cleaning out the petrified muck from inside the barrels. A few quick searches online, and I had an order in for replacement sacs and some shellac. Updates on my progress to (hopefully) follow soon.


Sunday we spent the afternoon with my wife’s grandparents out at Aurohn Lake — rapidly becoming my favorite place on the planet. Typically, I don’t get nostalgic for places but there’s something very special about this spot. Maybe it’s the determination of the beavers, doggedly blocking the spillway on the dam despite our efforts to keep it clear every few weeks. Keeley did the honors this time around, while I watched and took pictures.

Or maybe it’s the hill, just beyond Six Bar Gate at the edge of the forest. At the summit, there are spots where the waist-high grass has been matted down in gentle depressions by sleeping deer, like snow angels. And to one side there’s a large, wide hole that leads (I’m sure) deep into the hill where a badger in a waistcoat sits by a fire, checking his pocketwatch and ignoring the little showers of soil that fall into his teacup from my pacing overhead.

A card table and a folding chair, a few fresh pens and my notebook . . . sounds like the perfect place to spend an afternoon, writing and looking out at the view.

Then again, it’s probably just the milkweed pods — caught in the midst of their annual, slow motion explosion. We each did our part to ensure that they continue their dominion over the eastern edge of the lake.

Regardless, it’s a wonderful place and it was a good day. I spent much of it talking about writing with Keeley’s grandfather and digging through his old radio scripts from the forties.

Rounding the corner into Halloween, I though it might be appropriate to share this little papercraft Poe. I’m considering the logistics of making hundreds of them and setting up an invasion on the lawn and porch for trick-or-treaters. Perhaps not.

After that, it’ll be time to vote. Here’s my official endorsement.


Winter will be upon us then. Much as I am looking forward to its return, this story has made me very sad. Here’s hoping Phoenix lives up to its name.

Probably have things sorted out by midnight tonight.

Apologies.

[ADDENDUM] Well.. I’m still digging through code. I think I should get things cleaned up by the weekend. Stay tuned and thanks for your patience.