An Exchange of Words: David B. Coe’s Weblog

This week’s BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award is a bit different from recent ones, in that we’ll be focusing in depth on a single issue question.  

I’ll begin by stating the obvious:  There was plenty of buffoonery this week — the staffers with Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign who refused to let two Muslim women sit behind the candidate during a campaign appearance because they were wearing hijabs (traditional head scarves) come to mind, as do the Republican operatives who have been pounding away at Michelle Obama for a remark she explained months ago.  And then there was Rep. Steven King (Wingnut from Iowa) who won the first or second BOW Award I gave out with his offensive comments about Obama.  This week, in questioning Scott McClellan, he asked, “Couldn’t you have taken this to the grave with you and done this country a favor?”  Apparently Rep. King doesn’t understand that while McClellan’s book might not have done any favors to the GOP or the Bush Administration, it has done a great service to our country.  But the man’s an idiot, so it’s not surprising that he doesn’t get this.

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We’re quickly getting into summer mode here in our household. The university had its graduation nearly two weeks ago, so Nancy is already into her summer research program. My older daughter (the newly minted teenager) is now done with her school and is officially an eighth grader (Yikes!), and my younger daughter finishes up next week.

All this means, of course, that the kids are going to be around more, which tends to make writing that much more difficult. I’ve finished the copy edits on THE HORSEMEN’S GAMBIT and am now back at work on the STILL untitled third book of Blood of the Southlands. I might need to have a web contest: “Name the third volume!” The winner gets his or her idea splashed across the jacket of my new book…. The first book was THE SORCERERS’ PLAGUE, then THE HORSEMEN’S GAMBIT. Right now I’m leaning toward THE AUTHOR’S NEMESIS, but I’m not sure my editor will go for that….

I’ve made good progress over the last few weeks, so I thought I’d post my second progress bar. Last time I was at 14% — 19,700 words or so. That was April 22, exactly a month ago.

I’ve made pretty good progress since then, especially if you consider that I’ve also had to travel to a con, copyedit a manuscript, and take down a photo exhibit. If I can continue to average 26,000 words a month, I’ll be done by the end of September. I can live with that; the book’s due November 1.

As of today, I am officially the parent of a teenager.  A girl teenager.  A very pretty girl teenager.  I need a gun….

I am entering a phase of life during which I will become utterly clueless in the eyes of a child who once revered me.  I will be hopelessly unhip.  In fact, I already must be, since I can’t imagine that the word “unhip” has been in vogue since the release of “Hotel California.”  Oh, and my musical taste now sucks.  Once upon a time she thought it was cool to listen to not only the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Little Feat, but also James Taylor and Bonnie Raitt and Sting.  Now, if the musician’s name is more than one word long, and if it doesn’t begin with a lower case letter and include a number and six consonants, it’s not worth listening to.

For the next several years, my very existence will be a source of shame and mortification for her.  I will be able to make her cringe simply by opening my mouth or saying hello to one of her friends; I will be able to embarrass her any time I want. (Okay, so maybe there’s an upside to this….)

The phone will no longer be ours.  Oh, Nancy and I will still pay the bills.  But none of the calls will be for us.  My daughter will point out that this is the perfect reason to buy her a cell phone, but I’m not sure we want to go there either.  She also wants a facebook page.  And one (or more) of those online IM accounts.  She’s already emailing her friends all the time.  She makes me swear that I won’t read her messages, but even if I did want to read them, I wouldn’t be able to make sense of what she and her friends write.  We are all destined to live in a world without punctuation, capitalization, or traditional spelling, a world in which phrases become an indecipherable series of obscure acronyms:  nvm, omg, idk, l8r, g2g. 

SMN (Shoot Me Now…)

And boys.  Good God, there are going to be boys.  Lots of them.  (Of course she had to get her mother’s looks — it would have been too much to ask that she be short and funny-looking and bearded like her Dad….)  Hence the gun.  It’ll have to be a shotgun.  Something I can be cleaning on the front porch as they roll up to the house for that first date.  I should probably get a hound, too.   And a rocking chair.  They all go together:  hounds, rocking chairs, shotguns.  Then again, I’m not at all sure that as a Jewish liberal New Yorker with an earring I’ll be able to pull off the “Dad with the Shotgun” thing.  I wonder what it costs to put landmines in the front yard and driveway.

At least the second one isn’t a teenager yet.  Then again, she’s 9 already.  And very precocious.  

God help me….

So I got another 1,500 words today and I’m ready to begin charting my progess on this book (the third and final volume in my Blood of the Southlands trilogy) for all to see. My thanks to Karen Miller for the link that made possible what is for me a huge technological leap (how pathetic, I know).

Hey wow!!! It worked!

All right, 14% is not all that impressive. But I started just under three weeks ago, so I’m pleased.

My email server is down and I’m shocked and dismayed to find myself totally debilitated by this.  I feel as though I’ve been cut off from the world, though of course I haven’t.  My phone works.  The internet connection works.  I assume that my mailman will stop by later.  But I keep on having to resist the urge to try the server again, to see if they’ve managed to fix the problem in the last seven minutes.  Pathetic.

Update on my daughter:  She’s still coughing and still carrying a low-grade fever.  It’s hard to say if the antibiotics have had any effect yet.  She certainly doesn’t seem to be getting worse, but as of yet, I see no evidence that she’s getting better.

Patience has never been one of my virtues, and today it seems I’m being tested on several fronts.

My friend Faith Hunter (http://faithhunter.livejournal.com) posted today on the talismans (Talismen?) she places on her computer to keep the techno-gremlins at bay.  It got me thinking about the charms I have on my computer.  There are two in particular that I look at every day.  Neither has anything to do with the workings of my computer (though, now that I say that, I think I should find something, as an offering to keep the computer gods happy).  Rather, they remind me of the earliest days of my career, when I wondered if I’d ever really make it as a writer.

I’m a refugee from academia and I actually gave up an academic job to pursue what was, at the time, just the chance of a promise of a possible book contract from Tor.  Not much to go on.  I had a conversation with my Mom in the midst of making this decision.  She thought I was making a terrible mistake, throwing away six years of graduate school and a great job for something she saw as dubious at best.  The conversation quickly degenerated into a fight.  The next morning, I happened to glance at my horoscope in the local paper.  I’m not a big one for reading horoscopes, but this one caught my eye.  Here’s what it said:  “What began as mere fantasy undergoes metamorphosis, becomes real.  Hunch pays off, you win by adopting unorthodox procedures.  Those who say it can’t be done will be startled by results.  Aquarian involved.”  

Oh, yeah:  forgot to mention that my Mom was an Aquarius.

That horoscope, yellowed now, despite the fact that it’s completely sealed in plastic, is taped to the base of my monitor.

That same summer, not long after I signed my first contract with Tor, Nancy and I went to New Mexico for a week.  We visited the Acoma pueblo and while we were there I found a tiny little sculpture of The Storyteller, the mythic figure of the pueblo culture who passed on stories to children, keeping alive the oral history traditions of the Native American peoples.  The Storyteller is usually depicted as a large woman surrounded by small children, who perch on her knees, on her lap, on her shoulders.  This particular sculpture had been done by a little girl — her mother sold pottery and she wanted to sell something, too.  At the time I was still wrestling with the decision I’d made, still wondering if I had made a mistake in giving up my academic future to pursue something so uncertain.  I saw this little sculpture and knew immediately that I wanted to have it on my desk, that it would be a symbol of sorts for what I’d decided to do with my life.  It’s a simple piece, made out of clay of course.  I’ve dropped it or knocked it over a hundred times and it’s still in one piece.  Symbolic indeed.

Anyway, those are the talismans I have on my desk.

Today’s music:  Nickel Creek (Nickel Creek)

It doesn’t take a lot of snow to convince the local powers-that-be to cancel school.  We barely got more than a dusting last night, mixed with a bit of sleet and freezing rain.  But that was enough.  Nancy and I had assumed that it would be — we’ve lived here a long time and have gotten pretty good at predicting what the county board of ed will do.  But when we went to confirm it this morning we found that our satellite TV wasn’t working.  We tried the internet, but that’s also satellite (we live out in the sticks) and it didn’t work either.  Ice on the dishes.  So much for modern technology.  We finally had to call the police.  No school for my third grader; late start at the middle school.

I hate to be one of those parents who complains about how easy kids these days have it — you know, “When I was your age we walked seven miles to school, barefoot, in the snow, uphill both ways.  And we liked it, dagnabit!”  But the fact is, when I was kid, it took at least — at least — six inches of snow to get us a snow day.  True, I lived up north in NY, where we were used to snow and towns actually had snow removal equipment.  But still, this is ridiculous.  My kid’s happy to have the day off, but there is no reason they had to cancel school today.  — Sigh — My tax dollars at work…

Happy Birthday to rebel country rocker Steve Earle who is something north of 50 today.  I met him several years ago when he was living in Sewanee.  Nice guy. 

Today’s music:  Steve Earle (Guitar Town)

My desktop is starting to quit on me.  It’ll be a slow decline, I think, and so I have time to consider what to get as a replacement, but I want input from you all.  My current desktop is a Dell Dimension 4300 that I bought in December 2001.  I also own a Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop that’s only a couple of years old.  But I like working at a desktop for most of my writing.  I’m considering switching to an I-Mac.  Why?  Well, my wife is a dedicated Apple person and loves her computer.  Also, I have no desire to get anywhere near Vista.

I have several applications that are Windows specific, but I can run them on the laptop. (One of these is the foodlink software I use for our local food buying coop.  I’m the coop coordinator — I run the whole thing, so I absolutely have to be able to run that software on SOMETHING or the coop will die, and I don’t want that.)  Other applications are not tied to Windows, including ms word, which would allow me to use both a Windows machine and a mac for writing.

So my question, to those of you who have switched from Windows to Mac:  Any regrets?  Any problems you’ve encountered, or has it all been cyber-bliss?  

Today’s music:  Fiona Burnett (Counterpoint)

Today’s my Dad’s birthday.  He would have been 88.  It’s been eleven years since we lost him and I still think about him every day.  And each time I do, the memory of him brings a smile to my face.

He was an easy man to love — great sense of humor, terrific smile, infectious laugh.  He became friends with pretty much everyone he met.  He only got to know my older daughter briefly before he died; he never met the younger one.  He would have adored them both, though, and they would have been crazy about him.  He also never got to see any of my books in print, and I think he found it a bit strange that I wanted to spend my life writing what he thought of as fairy tales.  But he would have gotten a kick out of seeing my career progress.  I can see him shaking his head and saying, “They actually pay you to do this?”

He would have been fascinated by cell phones and mp3 players — he loved gadgets.  On the other hand, my siblings and I tried for years to get him to buy a computer and he always refused.  “When would I ever use it?” he’d ask.  To which we’d say, “All the time!”  But we never convinced him.  He would have been disappointed by the baseball steroid scandal.  He would have gotten a kick out of watching Tiger Woods play golf.  And he would have despised this President and his immoral, illegal war.

He worshipped my mother and spent the last few years of his life helping her cope with the illness that eventually claimed her life.  He stuck around for a while after she died, but his heart wasn’t in it.  His father lived to 103 — outlived him, actually.  His mother died at the age of 91.  But without my Mom, Dad barely made it to 77.  Love is a powerful force, and so is grief.

This post isn’t intended to elicit sympathy.  Far from it.  I miss my Dad a lot, but it’s been years since we lost him, and at this point my memories of him are joyous and fun.  Think of this more as a birthday card, and a way for me to tell you a bit about my father.

Happy Birthday, Pop.  I love you.

Kudos to newly elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who yesterday followed through on one of his main campaign promises.  Rudd, the leader of Australia’s Labour Party, which swept to power in November’s national elections, ousting the utterly misnamed “Liberal Party” and its leader, John Howard, vowed throughout the campaign to add Australia to the list of signatories of the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming.  Yesterday in Bali, at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, only a week after he took office, Rudd delivered the ratification papers.

In many ways, it was a symbolic act, since Australia was already basically in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol’s carbon emissions targets.  But it was a powerful statement nevertheless; an acknowledgment that the previous government had been wrong to keep Australia out of the agreement, and a none-too-subtle reproof of the Bush Administration’s continued refusal to sign on to Kyoto or to pledge support for the treaty that will eventually emerge from the current meetings.

Look, before my friends to the right jump all over me, let me say that Kyoto was not a perfect document.  Not by a long shot.  And we can only hope for the sake of the entire planet that whatever agreement comes out of Bali will recognize that China and India can no longer be considered “emerging nations” when it comes to manufacturing or carbon emissions caps.  But the failure of the current U.S. Administration to take the lead on global climate change should be an embarrassment to every American.  We are sacrificing the future of our children and grandchildren, and risking the survival of the entire planet, all out of concern for corporate profits and the preservation of un unsustainable way of life.  News flash:  if we continue to lay waste to the planet, corporate earnings and the price of the newest Hummer model will be the least of our concerns.

Today’s music:  Michael Hedges (Breakfast in the Field)