Of Tollbooths and Pickles

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Something today made me remember my time at junior high, way back in the last century. One day in class, the teacher gave us a sort of personality test. There was only one question.

Which job would you rather have? a) Tollbooth clerk; b) Construction Flagger, or c) Pickle Taster.

(I have no idea how they came up with this list, by the way. What happened to ‘any child can become President’, which people still believed in those days? Or how about, I don’t know, lawyer? Doctor? Or for that matter, Indian chief?)

Anyway, much to my surprise, the most popular job was tollbooth clerk. I mean, really? Sitting in an office is bad enough, but being cooped up in one of those little booths all day? You would at least get to take people’s money (actual cash, in those days), but it seemed to me like a good way to go nuts slowly.

The next most chosen job was construction flagger. Well, that wouldn’t be as bad–at least you’d get to move around a bit and get some fresh air (though there would be winter work, too, and lots of exhaust fumes).

Only I, and one of the girls in the class, chose pickle taster. This is almost impossible to comprehend. It was the one job that promised scope and variety. One day you could be tossing a bunch of gherkins with a contemptuous review, like Colonel Sanders visiting a troubled Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, the next you might discover a new taste sensation. You could steer the industry toward lacto-fermentation rather than sousing things in vinegar, suggest new recipes–herbs, hot peppers, the possibilities are endless…not to mention that you can pickle almost anything: you wouldn’t even have to nibble on cucumbers all day.

Becoming a pickle whisperer could make a real difference in people’s lives.

Well. Today it occurred to me, having grown more cynical with the years, that maybe this survey was really no different from any other pop quiz you’d get, where how you did would depend on how well you knew the materials covered in class. Given how public school was conceived and run, even back in those days, wouldn’t kids be expected to opt for a safe job working for the government? Along with a few willing to work at the jobs that were left for private industry. The teacher might have reviewed the results of the test and nodded in satisfaction, concluding that the system was working as designed.

In this view, the pickle tasting job would be just be one of those c) d) or e) options on a multiple choice test to entrap the unwary. Statistically insignificant.

Of course, there is another possibility: I, and that girl whose name I unfortunately can’t remember, might just have been genuinely odd people. In support of that interpretation, I did decide to become an author.

Looking Both Ways

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Very pleased with the results of the Based Book Sale just ended! I’m happy that discerning readers can now make their way through the whole of Sean’s Saga without having to spend empty, lonely years wondering what comes next.

This came at a good time for me, as I was considering giving up fantasy writing and switching to some suitably ominous-sounding pen name to concentrate on cozy mysteries…actually, that still doesn’t sound like a bad idea, except for the ‘giving up’ part.

Now, on to the Epic Indie Summer Sale!

Summer Sale

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My Kindle books, including The Well of Time (the latest in Sean’s Saga) are on sale til next week for a buck. I’m doing the Based Book Sale again–looks like a lot of fun books are up this time, I’m seeing pirates, pulp fiction, mysteries…now that the weather’s finally warming up, time to get to the beach (or backyard, as the case may be), sip a refreshing drink, build a sand castle, and most importantly, read!

The Return of Sean

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The time has finally come. Sean is back with the second installment of his saga, The Well of Time.

The tale has grown in the telling, to quote another guy who had an occasional issue with publication delays. The Last Battle, the third and last book of the series, is complete and will be forthcoming this year, along with Kindle editions of both the books.

What if the Wrong Characters Live Forever?

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“Of course it’s very hampering being a detective, when you don’t know anything about detecting, and when nobody knows that you’re doing detection, and you can’t have people up to cross-examine them, and you have neither the energy nor the means to make proper inquiries; and in short, when you’re doing the whole thing in a thoroughly amateur, haphazard way.”

This diffident and witty passage comes from A.A. Milne’s only murder mystery, The Mystery of the Red House (1922). Although not quite up to the standard of Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers, it’s a pleasant and ingenious whodunit with murders both real and darkly imagined, hidden motives, missing bodies, funny dialogue, and the odd secret passage.

But of course nobody has heard Milne’s name because of this book, or his essays in Punch, or his scripts for the early British film industry. Or even his plays, though several of them were hits on the London stage. Once he decided, after a trip to the zoo with his son, to pen a story of the boy’s own adventures with a stuffed bear in a magical wood, nothing else he’d done mattered any more.

Then there’s Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He wanted to be known for his historical novels, and the mega-success of Sherlock Holmes was apparently a bitter pill for him to swallow. He tried to reduce the demand for new Holmes stories by raising his fees, but the dastardly publishers paid up without complaint. (Some people just have rotten luck, I guess.)

Like some Deep State operative at his wits’ end, Conan Doyle then tried simply assassinating his out-of-control hero. The attempt failed. He should have remembered the old admonition about striking at the king. He was more or less forced to bring Holmes back, and write a new series of stories about him, meanwhile continuing to grouse all the way to the bank.

Milne, though also apparently annoyed by Winnie-the-Pooh’s popularity, dealt with his frustration differently. He gave his stories an ending that made Pooh basically immortal, and gifted Christopher Robin with a sort of eternal youth (whether or not his son was happy about that is another matter, but divine gifts often bring troubles in their wake).

Still, on the whole, I like Milne’s way better, and would follow his example if I get a chance. And at this point, I’m formally putting all wish-granting supernatural entities on notice, if any happen to be listening at the moment: any of my characters is allowed to become immortal. Granted, I may be a bit peeved if it were, say, Holly Morrison from Father Winter who achieves a literary version of eternal life, rather than Sean of Sean’s Saga, or my own Robin Hood Wolfshead (arguably unfair anyway, since his parent character is already immortal), or any of the Blackthorn family from my upcoming supernatural-cozy-comedy-cum-epic-fantasy The Blackthorn Chronicles.

But I’d be okay with it. I would try to bear up under the fame and accolades with as much grace as possible. So have at!

The Blackthorn Legacy

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First, I should mention that my books are on sale again for 99 cents on Amazon until next Wednesday, in case any visitor has unaccountably neglected to collect my oeuvre to date.

Next, a little digression about what I’m working on currently. It’s called The Blackthorn Legacy and is the first of four books I’ve planned in the series, which could easily wind up being called The Blackthorn Chronicles. It’s a bit of a departure for me–it presents as, loosely, a supernatural cozy murder mystery, but ultimately identifies as something more and deeper…hopefully. I’ll offer a couple of preliminary excerpts here. It’s very much a work in progress so these may or may not find their way into the finished story in this form or any other.

First, a little background. The Blackthorn family are refugees from the West Coast who wind up in New England when their crazy uncle dies suddenly and they inherit his house and lands. It develops that he has in fact been murdered, while apparently performing some kind of magic ritual. In the first sequence we join Brian and Sylvie Blackthorn, and their children Very and Dylan, attempting to find their way to Uncle Malcolm’s house:

There was still light in the sky, but darkness was welling up from the ground below, and shadows had already claimed the woods on both sides of the road. Brian drove slowly so as not to miss any of the clues that Mr. Blood had laid out for them, like a lawerly trail of very dry little breadcrumbs.

“GPS won’t do you much good out there,” he’d told them, before giving them a series of landmarks to look for. “I haven’t been there myself, you understand. The late Mr. Blackthorn always came to our office for his business. Sally Higgins gave me these directions—you may have noticed her real estate office on the corner. If you decide to sell, you can’t do better than go to her.”

“After a year, you mean,” Brian reminded the lawyer.

“Of course. After a year.”

They jolted over a stray frost heave, and Sylvie’s teeth came together with a snap. “Ow,” she remarked.

“So, what’s next?” Brian asked, slowing down again and peering ahead. Since Sylvie was navigating, she’d taken the notes.

“Let’s see. We passed Johnnycake Lane.”

“That was way back,” Very said.

“And Back Mountain Road, and Gallows Hill Road, and Old New Providence Road.”

“I liked Old New Providence,” Brian said.

“Gallows Hill was my favorite,” Very said. “That must be where they hung the highwaymen. And the witches.”

“And,” Sylvie went on, “we went past the place where the dead tree overhangs the road.”

Dylan remembered that vividly. The tree had seemed still alive, to him. Probably it was just pretending to be dead, for reasons of its own. But it didn’t hide a face in the rough folds of its bark, like many of the other trees they’d passeds. It reached out over the road hungrily, but blindly, and he was glad it didn’t seem to be able to see them.

“Check.” Brian nodded.

“And we haven’t come to…let’s see…’the break in the woods where lightning started that fire last year and burned down a lot of the older trees’. Which is good, because that would have meant we’ve gone too far.”

“Okay…”

“And we also haven’t seen any ‘Class Six Unmaintained Road’ signs, which we would have if we’d missed that place where we needed to bear left, ‘which is easy to do unless you keep a sharp eye, and if you forget and go straight, the road will take you right up the mountain, and you won’t be able to turn around for half a mile or so’,” Sylvie quoted. “Wow, Sally must be a good real estate agent. Very detail oriented.”

“What mountain?”

“The mountain, is all it says here. We’ll have to find out what its name actually is.”

“Okay…so what should we be looking for?”

Sylvie folded up the piece of notepaper. “That’s actually all the landmarks. Now we’re looking for Hill Road, which she just says is ‘a ways further on.’ It will be a right turn.”

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The second sequence is when the family is settling down to sleep on the day they learn that Uncle Malcolm has in fact been murdered:

The silence seemed even deeper tonight, a well of still darkness. Cocooned in his bed, eyes already closed, Dylan imagined himself looking up at the autumn stars. They were cold and bright and far away. The only sounds he heard, now and then, were creaks and faint groans, the house talking softly to itself as it settled into its own time of dreams.

He thought of Charlotte, who had smiled at him a couple of times, and then of Sheriff Greenlaw. He’d liked the sheriff, whose face was friendly after he’d taken off his sunglasses and you could see his windows (of the soul, his father had said that once a long time ago, and anyway windows were eyes too, wind-eyes, that’s what his mom had told him).

Dylan fell asleep still wondering why so many people did that, hiding their eyes, hiding their faces behind masks. Did they get tired of seeing things? Or were they just afraid of being seen? He felt he was getting close to the answer…in two more of his slowing heartbeats, he’d have it…or at most, three…

What Very saw through her closed eyes was the moon—such a moon as she’d never seen rise, huge and orange, even though outside, in the night, it was a new moon and Dylan’s stars held the sky. And she and Charlotte were flying together—not clutching broomsticks, not riding dragons or griffins or flying horses, but just flying. It seemed to Very that she’d always had the knack, but kept forgetting about it until something happened to jog her memory.

She and Charlotte rode the wind, swooping down to touch the trees, then spiralling up toward the moon, which seemed out of reach, but only just. And then with Charlotte flying ahead, looking back over her shoulder to make sure she was following, Very felt the winds fail and the air, suddenly still, caught and held her. She almost opened her eyes with the surprise of it, but instead of falling she began drifting down, like a leaf, rocking gently back and forth.

When the bough breaks, she heard her mother’s voice singing, but she thought sleepily the bough doesn’t break, the leaf just lets go. And she did.

Sylvie had more trouble getting to sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about Uncle Malcolm dying just upstairs. If it had been their bedroom, she would never have agreed to sleep there. But Brian (and it was his uncle, she reminded herself) hadn’t seemed to be bothered by it, and Sylvie didn’t want to make a fuss about mere proximity to death. Every old house has seen people die.

It reminded her of a time she was driving, and when the traffic slowed, found herself stuck behind a truck for a company that made coffins. A bad omen, maybe, if the truck had been following her (there was an old folk belief about that, she remembered), but as it was, just a funny anecdote.

And besides, she thought, that room wasn’t really so close. It was far, far above them…wasn’t it? Yes. The tower, in her mind, had risen into the sky. And something about that high room was drawing her. She opened the door, she walked up the spiraling stairs that seemed endless as the night. But she came at last into the room with its high windows.

She hardly remembered Uncle Malcolm’s death now. It was the stars that mattered, the high, cold stars…she could begin to see patterns in them, they formed a picture, filling the sky with some huge meaning she could just begin, now, to grasp…

Brian fell asleep quickly, but it was the kind of sleep that comes over you like a trance, and feels like being paralyzed. He knew he was asleep, but he felt himself locked in his own body. Within him his spirit stirred, and stretched, and shifted from side to side, testing the limits of this self-prison.

But he didn’t struggle enough, quite, to wake himself up. Still, in a short while, there was a blur of confused images and then he found himself out.

He was standing in front of the door to the tower stairway. There was a faint light from somewhere. It took him a moment to realize it was coming from the crack underneath the door.

Of course, he thought, his uncle must be up there. Working late, as he often did. In fact now Brian could definitely smell the smoke from Uncle Malcolm’s pipe. He remembered now that his uncle was always smoking that pipe, and as a child he’d loved the aromatic scent.

He heard the sound of the knob being turned, and the door began to swing open.

Brian jolted back into his body as if shot out of a cannon. He sat bolt upright in bed, his heart pounding. Sylvie was sleeping deeply next to him. The house was completely still, holding its breath.

But even though he was wide awake with sleep now hours away, he could still smell the scent of his uncle’s tobacco, hanging heavily in the air.

Sean’s Saga: The Last Battle

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Here’s another excerpt, this time from the last book in Sean’s series (barring unexpected things such as the world not ending after all). In this scene, with Fimbulwinter freezing Puget Sound solid, Sean decides to once more consult his occasionally prophetic laptop about what’s in store for him and his friends when Ragnarok comes.

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I hadn’t touched my old laptop in a while, but for some reason tonight I felt like taking a look. I could even have made a case for playing some Twilight of the Gods (TOTG), something like Maybe I missed some random clue Loki embedded in the game, that will make all the difference! But it didn’t matter anyway, since electronic devices don’t work on Runnymede.

Don’t work normally, that is. But my laptop has been known to open a window on the future (or the past, or different places in the present, or maybe alternate timelines. Basically the same standard disclaimer Galadriel pulled out when Frodo took a look in her mirror.)

I know, what did I think I was going to see, with Ragnarok about to hit us like a million tons of jotuns, trolls, and assorted monsters?

Anyway, what I did see was boring, at first. It was just an empty plain, stretching out as far as I could see. It wasn’t day, or really night either—more like one of those twilight places I’d seen way too much of in the last while. I thought for a second it actually might be Hel, but there was no river and no city. Just the empty land.

Then the first jotuns came into view. Mountain giants and frost giants, mostly, but there were puffs of smoke drifting around that made me think fire giants weren’t far behind. It was an army of them, more than I’d ever seen at one time, or actually all the times I’ve seen them put together. They seemed bigger than usual, even for giants, but it was hard to tell with nothing else in sight.

Then some trolls started showing up around the edges, and I could tell just how big they were. They were big. These guys had definitely eaten their meat and potatoes and cleaned their plates, like their giant moms told them to.

They kept on coming in endless waves, passing the point where my magic camera was, I guess, floating in the air. Yup, there were the fire giants, hundreds of them, but who’s counting? I remembered how tough it was dealing with one fire giant in Asgard, and lost track of my stomach for a second.

Other things started to show up after the fire giants had passed by. Dragons, most of them fifty-footers or more, if I was any judge. Hey, where had they found so many? When we wanted a new treasure guardian for Runnymede, we’d had to go on a quest to find one. Maybe there were dragon farms somewhere, run by jotuns in asbestos overalls, with giant kids coming to feed and pet the baby ones.

There were two kinds—green dragons, like the one I’d more or less accidentally slain in the first book, that breathed fire as they slithered along, sometimes incinerating a troll or two (now I really understood what my dad and Fiona were talking about when they mentioned ‘friendly fire’), but also white ones. Those just darted out their tongues once in a while, so I assumed they didn’t breathe flame. No clue what they might do instead, except I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it.

Then I started seeing the draugr. At first I thought those flickers I saw on the screen were caused by, I don’t know, bad prophecy transmission conditions. But then one paused and, as far as I could tell, looked right back out of the screen at me. It looked human, mostly, and wore armor that looked pretty normal, thought maybe a bit rusty. But the face was kind of falling apart, and the eyes were more like black holes.

Once I saw the first one, they were everywhere. Way too many to count, like the trolls and jotuns. (All right, I could probably have counted the dragons, but I didn’t.)

There were other things, too—swords and maces and spears just cruising around like berserk drones, things like animated trees stumping around—literally, they were actual stumps with branchy arms, and you know how when you look at a tree, you can see faces in the bark? You couldn’t not see these. Not to mention the wargs—lots of the trolls were mounted, most using serpent-reins, like the one that had crashed through our picture window what felt like ten years ago.

It seemed like way enough, and I kept expecting the viewpoint to shift and maybe show me something useful. But they just kept on coming. If they didn’t have twenty monsters to every hero I could even imagine getting to the battle, it wasn’t the fault of the hard-working Muspelheim and Niflheim recruiters.

“Where are they coming from?” I wondered aloud.

The laptop seemed to hear that, and finally the scene changed. I had trouble making out exactly what was going on, at first. There was a lot of motion on the screen, but it was like shadows just going around in circles. Then the picture sharpened and I saw two giants—giant women, actually, not that they were any less burly or scary than the guys—who were pushing a huge wooden shaft around, which went through an equally huge, circular stone.

And now I was getting audio, too—a grinding noise that sounded like a waterfall full of swords and armor going off a high cliff, but actually came from the millstone going around and around.

The work wasn’t making the women break too much of a sweat, I guess, because now I heard that they were talking at the same time (in verse, like so many of my least favorite people were lately):

Grind, mill, grind,

Grind out horrors

And the death of heroes!

Grind draugr and dragon,

Warg and woodwose,

Nightmare and maelstrom!

Grind, mill, grind!

They kept repeating that over and over, in singsong voices that I had no trouble hearing over the white noise overload of the grinding. And meanwhile, what looked like shadows, but I was totally willing to believe would become all the evil things they were name-dropping, were streaming out from the mill­stone in all directions.

Thanks to Lore class, I knew what I was looking at, which was a good thing since I didn’t have Parvati around to ask at the moment. The magic millstone was called Grotti, and it could grind out whatever you wanted, as long as the giant sisters could keep it turning. A king whose name I forget had the mill grind out peace and gold for his kingdom, but he wouldn’t give the sisters a break, so they ground out total doom for him.

It looked like they were still at it.

After a while, I felt my head going round and round with the grinding and the chant, like I was tied to the millstone. “That’s enough!” I said.

The laptop screen went dark. I felt a chill at the back of my neck. It had never responded to voice commands before. That, and the audio capability, seemed like somebody had pushed out an upgrade without me knowing it. I didn’t like to think of who it might be, or why.

In fact, I just didn’t want to think any more. Not until the morning, anyway. I knew where and when Fiona was, now. With any luck, by the end of tomorrow I’d actually have a plan.

Resisting the impulse to go out and throw the laptop in the Bay, and hope that the maelstrom the giants were chanting about took it down to the bottom forever, I turned out the lights and got into bed.