Persistence and Progress, Dusty and Etta

The new year arrived and still my manuscript isn’t a book. A moment of despair (OK more than a moment) when I realized this is exactly the same situation I was in last new year.

Wishin' and Hopin'

There was a brief mid-year frenzy of activity when I finally made contact with a respected literary editor who did not want to represent me but instead gave me many good ideas on how to pursue publication on my own, followed by my respectable burst of query letters, writing samples, bios, and keeping a careful log of whom I contacted and when.

The rest of the year spent like Dusty Springfield; meanwhile, one by one, drawing big black lines through each name when the rejection impersonal note/email arrived.

By December, only one was left, the nice folks at Atticus, for whom I still hold out hope, but they’re taking for-f——–ever to give me an answer.

And another, McSweeney’s, who had not replied except to say they’d received my manuscript – back in August. I’d tried sending follow-up emails, but they all bounced back. Their web site said they’d changed their submission process, but if you’d already submitted using the now-defunct process, your work would still be read. (These are the folks who say on their web site that the time it takes them to respond is “forever.”) Just be patient, they said. Wearing thin.

At Last

I heard from another writer that their editorship had changed and tried to find out name of the new editor, tried to get this writer I’d met to help me (since he claimed to know them), but he never answered my emails).

So in desperation I sent a message to their generic, customer service email, and the next day got a reply from a real, not rumored, associate editor. Just as I’d feared, my submission had been lost amid all the changes there (which were true). Send it directly to me, she said, and I will put it in the front of our reading queue.

Does this constitute progress? I’m saying yes, and if I’m right, my tune may change from “Wishin’ and Hopin’” to that passionately voiced song from the great talent we lost just yesterday: “At Last.”

Ephemereality is Almost a Word

Totality is Worth Waiting For!

I’ve morphed this blog into many contortions this past year, but lately it’s been about the uncertain route a book must travel toward publication, its eventual culmination a rare and ephemeral event whose essence I pondered while lying in bed last week watching the Earth’s shadow creep across the full moon just prior to sunrise – a total lunar eclipse so convenient I didn’t even have to get up for it.

Seeing something nearly 240,000 miles away, but unfolding right outside my bedroom window is a lot like the yearning to be published. The object of desire looks so close but is actually so very far away, and so many things have to fall into place for this experience to occur successfully: our location in the universe, in the solar system, on Earth. The timing of the full moon at night, and whether it’s happening at a time I actually want to be awake. The weather and visibility so easily compromised by clouds, wind, or the inherent activity of any atmosphere (in foggy San Francisco most astronomincal events are over before they even begin).

And yet it happened; the sky was clear, the timing was perfect and the eclipsed moon itself, glowing a soft red during totality, was surprisingly spectacular (I’ve been disappointed by many past lunar eclipses, but perhaps my expectations are too high).

Life rarely works out this well.

My manuscript is currently with Atticus Press, the nicest folks who’ve ever not given me an answer, and whether it’s an eventual yes or no, I want to give them a major shout-out for the modest amount of respect and attention they’ve been able to send my way. The fact that they asked to read my manuscript after I sent them a sample, the fact that they always reply to my emails, even if it’s just to say: not yet, please be patient.

There are so many good writers out there, so few books that actaully get published, so little money to be made in a diminished market that’s evolving in convoluted ways we can’t even fathom,  must less see clearly.

For the writer, it’s the prolonged torture of waiting. Even giving it the best spin possible, waiting for publication is an experience that remains ever-elusive. The strain of trying to see that far, that well, across such a well-trod yet perilous expanse is almost painful, but looking away is out of the question. Because I might lose my footing and destroy all the progress I’ve made up to this point. Because what’s happening out there is rare and ephemeral and must be experienced. Because any moment the sky may clear and I can reach out and grab the moon, pull it in through my bedroom window and hold it in my hands. Because I’ve chosen to experience the entirety of the event and it’s not over yet.

Nothing can take the place of an actual visual experience like the lunar eclipse I saw last week.

I will feel that way again when I see my book, when I can hold it in my hands, leaf through the pages or swipe through the e-version, and think  finally at last, the ephemeral has become real.

GREETINGS FROM INTERSTELLAR SPACE

Wolf Howling - No Moon Needed!

This artificial wolf, sculpted in mid-howl, sits right outside the entry to the Goldstone Deep Space Network in the Mojave Desert, where giant radio telescopes monitor distant signals from space.

Wolves don’t actually howl at the moon. They howl to communicate with other wolves, and the higher they hold their heads when they emit the sound, the stronger the signal and the more distance it will travel.

“It’s all about acoustics, since projecting their calls upward allows the sound to carry farther,” says Cristin Conger on the Animal Planet web site.

While researching my novel, I visited Goldstone. I saw the huge radio telescope dishes towering over the desert floor and observed the hushed activity in the darkened control rooms where deep-space signals are displayed on arrays of computer monitors surrounded by DSN employees hunkered down in front of them.

It was one of the revelations of my Goldstone visit that Voyager 1, launched way back in 1977, is still out there, phoning home.

When I read this week that Voyager 1 is about to leave the Solar System – a truly momentous occasion – I thought about how long it’s been out there (nearly 35 years), how incredibly far its signals actually travel (11 billion-with-a-b miles back to Earth), and how long it takes to make any measurable progress, even in what is considered our own cosmic neighborhood.

Voyager 1 passed Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980, completing its planned mission to fly by the gas giants and send data back to Earth. Since then it’s been headed toward interstellar space, and soon will send us radio-signal postcards telling us what it’s like in a place no Earth object has ever visited.

Deep Space Monitors

The folks at Goldstone will be first to receive these messages, their sensitive receivers and  powerful antennae tuned to capture Voyager’s radio transmissions, growing weaker with each passing moment – here’s real-time odometer for those who want specifics.

No one knows what interstellar space is like, a place so unknown we won’t even know when we get there because there’s no distinct boundary.

The first indication we have arrived will be confusion, according to Chief scientist Ed Stone of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Already the signals from the solar system are fading and the high-energy signals from interstellar space are increasing. Some call this a cosmic purgatory or a stagnation zone, but these labels seems limiting and sad. I think we are in a transitional area, a preparatory period for what lies ahead.

I think signals from interstellar space will be more like a cosmic wolf howl.

“It’s no surprise that we are captivated by the sound of a howl,” writes Lisa Matthews on the “Wolf Song of Alaska” web site,“ for as the mysterious song fills the vast expanses we are somehow reminded of, and are reconnected to, the wondrous aspects of nature that we may have forgotten about.”

Surely after the confusion is bound to come wonder, awe, and some new amount of understanding.

Browsing Inside the Book

This is a grid!

Back before e-books, I used to go to my neighborhood branch of the public library to browse. Mostly I’d look through the “new releases.” I enjoyed the physical act of pulling a volume from its shelved position for whatever reason (I recognized the author, liked the subject, thought the cover had an ultra-cool design), flipping through pages, checking out the table of contents and reading the very first oh-so-important sentence, imagining the treasures within.

But there was also the equally viable choice of rejecting that book and choosing another, and another, and another, until one seemed to offer more potential pleasure than the others. Once a book was chosen, however, the browsing was over because, as we all know, reading is a linear event.

Bookshelves are grids while the books populating them have narrative timelines inside. The first chapter leads to the second, page one hundred follows page ninety-nine. The content of the story itself depends on narrative progression. Actions lead to reactions, causes lead to effects, problems beg for solutions, dilemmas demand the resourcefulness needed to overcome them. One thing has to happen before another one will make sense.

While timelines move straight ahead, grids offer multiple choices, many directions. Grid browsing connects unlike subjects. I can be in the science section, step to one side and I’m in art, turn around and suddenly I’m in the biographies. Grids offer access to all possible stories versus access to one story, one storyline at a time. There is a distinct pleasure in prolonging the browsing process, sampling all possible stories before settling for only one.

The internet is a giant version of the library grid, all books on all topics browse-able by topic, title, author’s name, keywords. Amazon’s “look-inside” feature provides the virtual version of browsing physical books on shelves. But the same thing happens once a book is chosen and added to my cart. Ebook or hard copy, I’ve just purchased a linear experience.

What if browsing could continue inside the book? And how would this work?

Experiments in interactive fiction have mostly fallen flat because the narrative arc (think of a gently curved timeline) is what holds the whole thing together. Disturb the arc and the story is ruined, and nothing disturbs the arc like interactivity. Deconstructing a story leaves it in pieces, and the reader may not have the same skill as the author for assembling the pieces into a satisfactory whole.

But what if additional, browse-able elements did not interfere with the story, but instead augmented its effects?  What if adding something grid-like to a timeline enabled the story to continue its forward momentum while at the same time allowing the reader to choose from among possible narrative associatons?

The grid has to exist alongside the timeline, not separate from it.

It’s reading text augmented with visuals, sounds, additional texts that never take you away from where you are, because like the characters and events in the story, the elements exist inside the timeline. These augmentations are more than illustrations; they are stand-alone mini-concepts related in some way to the primary text. But because they are also gridlike, they can be accessed apart from the linear text, perhaps as varying grids – a character grid, a locations grid, a themes grid, an events grid – each offering a different version of the story, not tied specifically to its characters and events, but related. Another way to construct the story, its themes, its elements.

Here’s an example I’ve created for Venus on Mars. In the linear text, my character Letha has this experience just as she dies:

The smell came first, something rotting.  The window light flickered and then dimmer; hidden in the encroaching shadows of her sitting room, Letha was able to make out a narrow chancel filled with water rushing away from her toward a sparkling oasis she’d known was there her entire life, but had never been able to locate – as if the paint-by-number landscape in the poorly realized painting hanging on the opposite wall had become a garish portal to her after life, and the turquoise river depicted in it the route she’d take to get there. 

And there’s the painting on the wall, right alongside the text.  Choose the painting and it comes to life, a series of coffins floating gently on the water. Meanwhile the story continues:

 She traveled supine along the surface of the water, soft on her body as the satin lining her casket, now a sturdy boat ferrying her to her next destination.  She turned her head to see a network of similar containers in the distance; each must be carrying its own passenger.

Just below the painting there’s more text, a brief meditation on the idea of death as a journey, citing Emily Dickinson and Albert Einstein (art and science side by side!).  You’re still in the story, but you’ve just experienced an augmented moment within it.  And that augmented moment is made up of wildly disparate elements.

Bookshelf browsing is a near-lost art. I want to resuscitate it and relocate it inside the story, where it just may belong.

I Want to Go to There!

Eye on the Prize!

While wandering lost in the desert, my character Venus repeatedly fantasizes her eventual rescue as a way to keep herself alive. The centerpiece of her self-sustaining vision is an ice-cold coconut piña colada she’ll enjoy in the shade of a Martian oasis:

I’m not there yet; I’m still stranded in this God-forsaken place, but the oasis is here, too, because I can see it right in front of me. It’s like they’re two different pages in a picture book I’m mentally composing, and I can flip back and forth between them in my mind.  

At that time (1971) we still didn’t know whether Martian oases existed or not, although we’d begun to have some serious doubts.

The Lesson-to-Self here is that it doesn’t matter whether your goal is real or not, as long as you keep pursuing it – because that’s the only way you’ll find out. It’s like the impossibility of time travel – your goal exists in the future so there’s no way to know whether it’s real without actually going there – and you can’t do that, just yet.

There was a mind-bending episode of “The New Twilight Zone” in which space-time got out of sync and the characters found themselves wandering through a construction zone – it was their own future being built. None of it was finished yet, but presumably it would be by the time they were supposed to get there.

I want to go to there, as Liz Lemon would say. I want to go to some point in the future and see what’s being built for me, even if it’s still a work-in-progress. I want to see the framework in place, if not the finishing touches – because that would be proof enough that the future I’m envisioning is real – or will be.

Odd, I think, that the “Twilight Zone” couple didn’t grab a hammer or drill and get to work building their future just the way they wanted it to be. No, instead they fretted about how to find their way back to normality. The present, not the future, was their goal!

Two potential publishers who have expressed interest are now reading the manuscript. They are my dual Schroedinger’s Cats, the quantum agents of my unknown and unknowable future. If I could peek forward, I’d see the outcome, or at least a suggestion of it. I’d see Frances or Anita (not their real names) reading with interest, or else I’d see the manuscript abandoned on a desk or desktop (one was submitted electronically, the other as hard copy). Until I hear from one of them, both outcomes co-exist.

And that chilled piña colada will have to wait.

 

Explorer to Expert – a Good Move?

She's so hot she emits sun flares!

In Jeff Herman‘s oft-touted and comprehensive guidebook for writers, he laments, ”I transitioned from being an explorer into being an expert.”

Yes, I said he laments. You might think being an expert in one’s field is the end-all, be-all, have-it-all situation. You’re arrived, people admire your accomplishments, you get invited to speak or consult and you might even make money doing all this. Meanwhile your resume expands to outlandish proportions.

Being an expert is a fairly modern phenomenon. Past civilizations lived more generic lives out of necessity, growing their food, educating their children, building, maintaining and defending their homes. Now we shop for heirloom tomatoes, send our kids off to preschool, call a plumber when the faucet leaks, speed-dial 911 when danger arises. If there weren’t experts, we couldn’t do any of this.

We are encouraged from an early age to specialize, the first step on our way to becoming experts – we  join the math club, take tap-dancing lessons, go out for a sports team, declare a major, pursue a profession.

I didn’t do any of those things – in college, my major chose me, and my professional goals seemed indistinct and forever pliable. I explored the arts; mostly cool things seemed to happen to me and I rarely questioned my good fortune. A teaching job, for me? A grant, how nice! An award, a sabbatical – why, thank you! Before I knew it I’d become an expert – a professor of cinema with a Ph.D. and a load of accomplishments.

I’m thinking about all this after completing my new web site, which collects, organizes, maybe even boasts about what all I’ve done, and adds a few new bells and whistles to boot. At the conclusion of this arduous task I was so pleased with myself that I almost glowed like the old-fashioned bathing beauty on my home page, the one I scanned from a vintage postcard, the one whose head emits sun flares I created with Photoshop – expertly, I might add. Even if I never accomplish another thing, I thought smugly to myself, I’ve already done so much, and have done it all so well.

This is where the lamenting part comes in. Why lament over one’s laudable successes? Let’s ask Jeff Herman.

“Experts stand still and cultivate their crops,” Herman writes. “Explorers keep moving, looking, touching, consuming and discovering.”

An expert’s professional life, Herman explains, generates a momentum that has a way of self-perpetuating itself – doing one’s job, perhaps with mounting responsibilities, making decisions, meeting deadlines, responding to professional requests, and yes, polishing one’s image, perhaps with a fancy new web site.

Explorers’ lives are messier. Without a plan, without sometimes even a clue, they are able to navigate beyond the day-to-day obligations most of us take for granted. Perhaps, as non-experts, less is expected of them, providing them with more flex-time to decide what to do next, or to accept the bounty of whatever opportunity presents itself. (I’m not talking hippie-fied free-spirit here, but more a balanced approach in which one keeps the explorer self forever alert and responsive.)

My characters Lulu and Dr. P illustrate the difference between expert and explorer. He’s an astronomer committed to his work, first documenting those canals on Mars, later in life conducting the elusive search for “Planet X,” while she, the non-expert, pursues her ideas in a decidedly unconventional way:

“I begin each morning without a coherent theory, but always with a vague and fragmented idea that seems to have crept into my head as I’ve slept. By the end of the day, I try to either coalesce my notion, or else dismiss it and wait for another to announce itself. I realize, of course, this is not scientific protocol, but I am a secretary, not a scientist, and it is the method that works best for me.”

If I have taught myself anything while writing this novel and the previous one, it is the need to free myself up enough to explore, along with my characters, whatever lies ahead. Laika the space dog does this literally, going where no dog or human has gone before, while Lulu achieves some sort of cosmic self-awareness that seems to serve her well:

“As I lift my skirt and step cautiously across the rock-strewn desert, I am inventing my future: views never seen in a territory not yet charted, an ever-expanding route through a complex universe that future beings will calculate all the way to infinity.”

In his transition from explorer to expert, Jeff Herman says, “the more visceral messages from my heart and gut lost their traditional primacy in the constitution of my life.” His conclusion that our society needs both does not diminish the need for individuals to think carefully – and often – about which defines best their life and work, and if something seems out of whack, to keep in mind that transitions can come at any time.

I may have become an expert, but now, thankfully, I find myself transitioning from expert back to explorer.

New Writer’s Site, New Hope?

New Publishing Tool!

I just joined Inkubate – actually you have to be invited to join but this just involves asking for an invitation and they replied to me within a minute, which means they’re either very efficient or they’re just getting started and are hungry for fodder. Either way it works for me.

I read about Inkubate on the HuffPo and it sounds legit. Authors post tiny excerpts from their work (really tiny – 2000 characters or less and spaces count), plus an even tinier pitch (200 characters). That was the hardest part – I pulled sample after sample from my manuscript and they were all too long. And I’d already written what I thought were short blurbs, but they were all more than 200 characters. It took me last night and this morning to come to terms with their severe restrictions and post something that seems well-written, representative of my work and “stand-alone” (i.e.not needing any explanation).

Publishers and agents sign up to look at these (otherwise they’re privacy protected) and if they like what they see, they can bid to represent the author. If my wildest fantasy comes true and more than publisher or agent one gets interested, a bidding war commences – woohoo! Plus the writer gets paid by Inkubate each time his/her materials are read.

It’s a new model attempting to pre-empt and streamline the nearly unworkable method of submitting materials individually to agents and publishers then waiting, waiting while they sit in a “slush pile” – exactly what I’ve been doing (I’m feeling very slushy these days).

You go, Inkubate!

The Stratification of Me

My layers exposed

I’m sorry this blog has gone dark over the past few weeks – so much to do, so little to say about it.

My work is out there, is more out there every day, and as a result, I find myself in a massive holding pattern. Most places I’ve sent queries, manuscripts, synopses and CVs, are small, independent presses with miniscule staffs, and it takes forever (one literally says “forever” on their web site) for them to respond. You have to play by their rules and obey their etiquette because otherwise they’re liable to toss your work right into their virtual or actual trashcan.

So to amuse myself in the interim, I’ve been working on my stratification. I learned about this from real businesspeople so it must be of some value. I’ve identified three levels so far – the base level made up of my individual projects (each book I’m writing, each movie I’m editing, each class I’m teaching or preparing to teach). There are specific tasks to do within each project (write, design, edit, organize, publicize).

The next level up collects all the individual projects into larger categories of professional interest and activity like “web cinema,” “fiction writing,” “interactivity,” “cosmology,” “water fitness,” “music” (those are some of my categories). I haven’t yet figured out what to do on this level, but it’s nice to go there and think about how some areas may be connected (like creating a web site or video trailer for a book I’m writing, or building a working model for the interactive novel I’m envisioning).

The top level, where I seem to be spending most of my time these days, is Jan Millsapps – who I am, what I do, how I “brand” myself or how I explain myself to the world. I’m nearly done designing and building a new top-level web site, since the one I’ve used for the past ten or so years (“futurecine.com”) doesn’t really describe all I do any more. I registered “janillsapps.com” and will have the new site up and running within a few days (you can go there now if you want to preview, but all the links aren’t working yet). I’m also in the process of being “wikipedia-ed” and will have my own listing online soon. Yes, I’ll let you know.

The idea of stratification is that there’s always something to work on – when my novel is stalled out, there’s more fiction or nonfiction to write, more queries to send out, writing a new entry for this blog, updating my Flickr photos, designing the “interactive cinema” class I’ll soon be teaching, or creating a new playlist and some new moves for my water aerobics class.

And it’s all valid activity, because everything I accomplish on one strata benefits something that lives on another one.

“Who is Jan Millsapps” informs “what is interactive cinema” informs coming to terms with a new kind of participatory fiction in which readers engage more directly with the material, using a variety of media and said model of interactive narrative. Or my nifty new home page with updated bio will be an easy link I can text or email to potentials agents and publishers.

I’ve spent days working on my new home page (top strata) that has involved my Photoshopping and animating a visual representing myself (bottom strata) and then using Dreamweaver to put the whole thing together, links and all (middle strata), in preparation for launching my new site, my new virtual persona, my online presence (top level, with drum roll, please).

Will this help me write good novels, or even more, help get them published?

It certainly can’t hurt.

Roving Mars, Without a Business Plan

Rover route on Mars

Without realizing it, I’ve joined those plucky rovers transversing the surface of the Mars, Spirit and Opportunity, explorers with no goal other than to keep going. Landing on the red planet early in 2004, each rover bounced a few times, took a deep breath as it spread its solar wings to collect power, rolled forward and never looked back.

Seven and a half years is a long, long time for space hardware to survive in hostile conditions. Spirit is still there but unresponsive for more than a year and the folks at JPL have pretty much given up on it, but Opportunity continues its quest, its progress minimal (it traveled three feet on Sept. 8, for instance) but constant. It’s being driven in reverse now because that’s the only way to keep it moving forward (there’s some sort of lesson there), toward…whatever it comes upon around the next boulder.

Here is what makes me a rover. I’ve been on Mars, more or less (if not boots on the red ground, then at least mentally) since I began my Venus on Mars project a few years back. I can describe the terrain I’ve covered: the dry stream beds, towering volcanoes and breathtakingly deep craters. I’ve choked on the unagreeable atmosphere, been swept up in intermittent dust devils, shivered in the chilling temperatures, and admired the odd salmon-colored sky dotted with two irregularly shaped moons. I’m nearly worn out but still moving forward, mostly by sheer persistence and determination, toward…hmmm.

What is is you want to accomplish, my friend Jim Mahoney asked me recently when we met for lunch and I talked about my Venus on Mars project – what it was, what I wanted it to be. A few weeks later, I’m still struggling to answer that question.

Mostly I talked about what Venus on Mars wasn’t. It wasn’t yet the new form of narrative with augmented moments I keep thinking about because I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. Moreover, the application I need to do what I want to do doesn’t exist, as far as I can tell, which just makes me frustrated and way too whiney.

Do you want to create a new application, he asked me. No, most definitely not. Jim is an experienced Silicon Valley coder – he creates applications and web pages from scratch – but now after completing his MFA in cinema he’s looking, as I am, at new media forms. Lately he’s been developing online interactivity for music and movies.

Jim tells me he has something I’ve never even considered: a business plan. These VC types he’s been meeting with have convineced him this is the next logical and absoutely necessary step in his own pursuit of success. He’s abandoned Strip-Press, a project I thought was really cool, because he realized it would not be as profitable as the one he’s working on now. He calls it Exploded Views – equally cool, but more promising profit-wise.

I’ve never tried to make money on what I do, a double-edged sword. I’ve always had teaching for income, my creative work for funsies. Now I’m thinking maybe this good fortune, salary-wise, has actually kept me from being more serious about it the work I’m doing, creative-wise.

Do you want to sell lots of copies of your book, Jim asked. Sure, but I never envision it becoming a best-seller. It’s not that type of book, I’ve been told. Emphatically. Respectable sales figures are the most I can hope for. So, no, that’s not what’s driving my rover.

There’s a “transmedia” conference planned for October in San Francisco, all about new narrative/media forms. I’d like to participate, to share my ideas with the public at large. I’d like to be one of the people known for creating something new from the old. I’d like to be among the avant-garde, the innovators, the go-to experts when questions arise about how to create media-enhanced narratives without losing the literary essence we associate with reading books. But I didn’t get invited. When I looked at the list of presenters, I realized the thing they all had in common was the very thing I lacked – a way to parlay my thoughts, dreams and occasional products into profit. They’re all into making media-money and I’m not.

Click to see my Mars rover!

Because I never have taken myself and my creations seriously enough to think of a business plan.

I’m thinking about those Mars rovers – and the far-away scientists who drive them. They must take themselves very seriously; otherwise they’d never survive.

Meanwhile I’m chugging along mindlessly, joy-riding, perhaps, when I should be forging ahead more seriously.

Where’s my spreadsheet?

Perfect, Again and Again and Again and Again

Eye of the Storm

Done with the Venus on Mars rewrite. Happy, happy, happy with the results (although I was happy enough with earlier versions). I’ve put it down to rest, now watching Hurricane Irene coverage on cable news while waiting, waiting, waiting for the publisher who’s reading it right now (I am hopefully assuming) to respond. Waiting to hear back from all the other queries I’ve sent out, waiting for someone somewhere to offer some acknowledgement that my book is finished, again. That whatever sound and fury it contains may soon be unleashed on the world.

This anticipatory state of  non-activity is a lot like waiting for a hurricane to arrive: you’ve done everything you can to prepare, you know it’s out there churning – and you know that once it commences, there’ll be so much going on. But for now all you can do is sit and fidget. Nothing else is needed from you except patience.

While waiting, I opened up the manuscript of my very first and still very unpublished novel, Born Again and Again and Again and Again, which begins with two dramatic  events – the birth of my main character just as Hurricane Hazel hits the Carolina coast:

October 15, 1954: 

Hurricane Hazel was furious. The worst storm in decades slammed into the Carolina coast with winds of 150 miles per hour and an 18-foot storm surge unfortunately timed with the full moon’s high tide and with Marie’s due date. Now maybe her folks would stop asking her to name the father of her baby, Marie thought, welcoming the storm as the perfect diversion. Her dad was busy boarding up the windows of their motel and her mom was packing for all of them to flee the storm, but Marie had no intention of going anywhere. She was wet down there and her labor pains had started. She hitched up her skirt, rubbed her tremendous belly and prepared to give birth.

“Brothers and sisters, may we accept the good Lord’s wisdom, which we know is far greater than our own. May the Lord comfort us as we grieve for these fine people, Charles and Frances, and may we appreciate their dedication and their ultimate sacrifice as they stayed through the deadly storm to care for their daughter Marie and to bring their precious grandchild into this world.”

Charles and Frances, the grandparents I never knew, had both perished when a big slab of concrete blew right through the living room window and crushed them as they sat in their matching green recliner chairs to rest after helping Marie deliver her baby. They had endured eleven hours of Marie’s high-pitched screams. Sometimes I wonder if the concrete slab had seemed like a relief in comparison.

And this one seems perfect to me, still. Time to dust off the doc file, get this one out there as well. This particular hurricane, and the imagined frenzy it will create, is way overdue.