“In a democracy, we get the government we deserve.” Something to keep in mind.

Way back, shortly after Senator McCain won the Republican primary, I remarked to my son that at least (at last!) we would have two decent candidates running for the office of president. I was so very, very wrong.

Update:
From Andrew Sullivan

“We cannot control these despicable liars in the McCain campaign. We can only tell the truth as fearlessly and as relentlessly and as continuously as we can until November 4. We must do our duty. And if the American people want to re-elect the machine that has helped destroy this country’s national security, global reputation and economic health, then that is their choice. But I am not so depressed to think that they will.

We must give them the truth. And that will feel like hell. And we must tell it like Truman told it: cheerfully, passionately and relentlessly.”

Now and then my husband and I actually escape from the mundane weekend world of yard work and the occasional movie and do something interesting. At the end of June we went on a hike on the dry and austere south side of Haleakala. Starting from Piilani Highway, we hiked down a jeep road to the coast, and then for some miles through the lava fields along the “King’s Trail” to La Perouse Bay (Keoneoio). The King’s Trail is an amazing story in itself, built 150 years ago over extremely rough a’a lava flows — but this blog entry is about the groves of wiliwili trees we passed on the way downhill.

This area was once dryland forest, now long gone, with only some remnant native trees left. It’s still amazingly beautiful, but sad as well. Presumably when it was forested the rainfall was higher — studies have shown that forests on high elevation island slopes do seem to affect the net rainfall. At any rate, our hike was at the end of June, in very dry conditions.

Wiliwili trees (Erythrina sandwicensis) are probably the most common of the surviving native species. In dry areas they will spend much of the year in a leafless condition, producing leaves and beautiful flowers only when there has been a good deal of rain.

On this hike, I was very keen to see how the wiliwili trees were holding up. A couple of years ago the islands were invaded by a tiny gall wasp, which rapidly destroyed almost all non-native wiliwili trees that are commonly used for landscaping. The native trees are also attacked, but I’m happy to report that the trees in the area of our hike are still holding on. Their remote location may offer them an advantage, as well as their habit of dropping all their leaves.

Wiliwilis are legumes, and their seed is a good-sized orange bean. I picked up a few from the ground under a tree that clearly served to shade cattle on a hot day — so there was no hope they would have sprouted in their native habitat. One of them sprouted right away, another a couple of weeks later, and the rest have recently taken off after I cracked their seed coats. Here is a picture of the first to grow:

The seedling reminds me a lot of the sprout in the movie Wall-E. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who walked out of the theater after that movie feeling rather depressed. Yes, the movie was cute, sweet, and entertaining, but the Earth does not recover from ecological damage like that, at least on a time scale that matters to the human species.

At any rate, I hope the gall wasps don’t figure out that I’m harboring a wiliwili nursery in upper Kula, and I hope that whitish spot on the leaf of the seedling is not the first sign of something bad.

Here are a few photos from the hike:

A grove of wiliwili trees, leafless under dry conditions

That’s me, hiding from excess sunlight, as always.

It’s an austere landscape.

A panoramic of the south slope. The lone green tree is a native, Reynoldsia, I believe. The brown leafless trees in the distance are wiliwili, though they’re hard to see at this image resolution. That’s the island of Kahoolawe in the background.

I finished a written interview last week with Denis Labbe, a writer for the website lefantastique.net and the magazine Galaxies. He informs me the French translation of Limit of Vision came out in March of this year. I still haven’t seen a copy, but hopefully one will wend its way to me eventually. Denis was kind enough to send the cover image. It’s that same cover again — sigh — but I do like the addition of the gray, graffiti-esque mark up.

I confess an addiction to reading news stories online. I spend far too much time every day browsing the New York Times, the Honolulu Advertiser, Newsweek, Time, and a few other websites… time that could be spent a little more productively, no doubt.

What I really can’t figure out is why I still glance at the comments that often accompany articles. The NY Times is the exception. They must edit the comments they get, because most of them seem reasonably intelligent. Newsweek, Time, and the Honolulu Advertiser though… ick. Glancing at their comments generally feels like tip-toeing through sewer water. Ninety-percent of it seems composed of insults and assorted name-calling, unreasoned hostility, baseless gossip, or diatribes that don’t address in any way the subject of the article (if we can assume some intentionality, I have to suppose these last are aimed at an earlier commentator, though I don’t wade that far in).

And yet I look! I guess I’m always hoping to see that things have improved, but that never happens.

I have some scenarios in my head about the people posting. At the Advertiser I think of those two old guys from the muppets, who sit in the theater audience lobbing insults at everything that happens on the stage – (some of you might be old enough to remember the muppets…) – only at the Advertiser the hecklers are a lot nastier. They come across as people who just don’t have lives, pitching shots because they don’t have anything else to do.

At the big magazines it feels like a different crowd. Here there just has to be a huge population of political hacks whose job it is (paid no doubt) to slime and smear.

Web 2.0 may still be a big deal, but for me it serves as a great demonstration of the value of a good editor.

Of course none of this is intended to discourage people from commenting here… after all, I get to approve all comments before they appear!

Update: same subject, much more funny writing:
“Local Idiot To Post Comment On Internet”

Like most people, I put off upgrading WordPress until forced to — usually by a hacking exploit which is what happened this time. I cleaned out the database and everything looks okay, but in this world you never know. It could happen again in the next few minutes.

That’s an hour and a half that could have been devoted to writing, gone.

Sigh.

Thanks to Khaled for the nudge. In a recent comment to my last post — made almost a year ago — he asks if I am still writing. Fair question and well-timed. I have not done nearly as much as I would like over the past year — some story development for a potential docu-drama and more work on my fantasy novel “The Wild.” Frankly, I find it hard to work at a computer all day, and then come home and … work at a computer — while being creative at the same time.

But just in the past few days, all this has changed. The situation at work is such that I have finally been able to go part-time again — and that makes me so much more productive as a writer. Currently I’m working to finish a couple of long-delayed projects, before starting development work on a new novel. There may also be some contract work in the pipeline — the docu-drama project seems poised to move on to phase 2.

So that’s where things stand now. Once again, I will endeavor to keep up with this blog — (more time now! more things to say!) — but if I fall behind, feel free to give me a nudge.

Thanks Khaled!

Thanks again for all the input on what to do with my young-adult novel Skye Object 3270a. After considerable thought, and looking at the rather long timeline for revising The Wild and getting it into print, I’ve decided to go back to my initial plan of charging a small amount for this e-book edition of Skye Object 3270a.

So I am happy to announce that Skye Object 3270a is now available at my publishing website MythicIsland.com, priced at $5 for the PDF file.

So what’s it about? It’s a young-adult novel, aimed at an advanced middle school audience. Those of you familiar with my work will recognize the setting from the Deception Well story world, but Skye Object 3270a is otherwise independent of that book and its characters. It’s high action science fiction designed to be fun, exciting, and maybe a little scary. If you are fortunate enough to know avid young readers, why not buy them a copy?

Preview the first chapter here.

Click here to purchase the download.

In 1998 I wrote a young-adult novel entitled Skye Object 3270a. It was set in the Deception Well story world, but was otherwise independent of that book and its characters. The novel didn’t find a publisher – no one knew quite what to make of it, I suspect – and it has been sitting ever since, until this spring when I decided I would offer it as an e-book. My first plan was to charge a nominal $5 for the PDF, and I already wrote most of the script to automatically email a copy when a purchase is made… but now I am reconsidering. Is it better to follow instead the model of most open source software, and make the novel available for anonymous download? Certainly it should get much higher circulation that way, and then those who enjoy it can make a small payment if they wish, or return to the website to purchase other books.

So what is the best business model? To make a few dollars upfront? Or to try to get my name out to a wider audience? At the moment, I am definitely leaning toward Plan B. If anyone has thoughts on this, I’d be interested to hear them.

Thanks!

I sat next to a bodhisattva today, on a twenty minute inter-island flight. I had an aisle seat, she was sitting beside me, and her companion had the window. It was impossible not to eavesdrop on an energetic and animated conversation that began with a deep examination of their personal emotional needs, their experience with channeling, insight on her past lives, their struggles to find the perfect romantic partner, and other subjects that discretion suggests I not repeat here.

Then, perhaps halfway through the flight, he leans toward her and asks her to accept what he is about to say with an open mind. “I truly believe you are a bodhisattva.” She laughs pleasantly and agrees. The talk moves on.

Far be it from me to claim expertise on any religion, but I do happen to know that a bodhisattva is a Buddhist figure, commonly conceived as one who is on the way to becoming a Buddha, but “delays his own final and complete enlightenment in order to save all sentient beings out of his enormous compassion.” (dictionary.com) So a bodhisattva is a very powerful spiritual being. As an example, the Dalai Lama is considered by many to have this status.

I admit I tried to sense a spiritual aura… just in case. Perhaps I am just deaf to such things. Still, I imagine spirituality as something conveyed more in emotion than in words. The talk-talk-talk of the bodhisattva and her companion was quite incredible to me — both for its simple abundance, but also that such confessions and discussions should be made in a public place.

Perhaps in their enthusiasm, they simply forgot I was sitting beside them. But even enlightened beings might do well to remember the value of a little discretion.

The name of this website comes from a place name in the fantasy novel that I finished last fall, and which went to market in January. Long after I had started writing this novel, but long before it was done, my agent called to say he was concerned – the market for heroic fantasy had collapsed, and almost nothing was selling anymore. I wasn’t too bothered. This was typical of my career – the collapse of science fiction arguably began around the time I started breaking into the market – and anyway, I was writing the book I wanted to write. I hoped to have it published – I thought it would be published – but if not, at least I would have written it.

So I kept at it, through some very stressful years.

When my agent read it last fall, he was… shall we say ‘concerned’ again? ‘Finely crafted, but doesn’t draw the reader in until well-along in the story.’ I was surprised, and none too pleased, but after some discussion it went off to market anyway. His premonitions proved accurate, for the novel did not find a home among the last of the major fantasy publishers. The general reaction was very similar to my agent’s, “Doesn’t grab me enough; Doesn’t draw me in.” Well, okay.

Strangely enough, I am not depressed. I still think there is a market for this book, but now I will have to find it without the involvement of New York publishers. This is not a horrible fate. Truthfully, I have had such awful experiences with the publication of the last two books that it’s not hard to look at this positively.

So unless I am struck by a bolt of good sense and persuaded otherwise, it’s my plan to self-publish the novel. Not as it is, of course. The book did not garner the reaction I expected, and I want to try to understand why, and re-write it, if I can see a better way to do things. So now the book – and all the risk of publishing it – belongs to me alone, which is frightening and pleasant all at once. Since no one else can tell me what to title it, or what cover image to use, I would like to finally introduce it to you, at least by name. It’s called The Wild. I look forward to working on it again, and I will do my best to make it a better book by the time it sees print.