Colin Barrett: Blog

I'm afraid this chapter is about as much sex as there is in this story; oh, there's a bit of talk about it later, but even then only a bit. I'm afraid I don't do explicit, detailed sexual descriptions. I don't object to them, mind you, I'm not on some weird moral crusade. It's just that I don't write them very well, and that sort of thing would detract from the story I'm trying to tell here. So I'll stick to my main focus and leave it to other authors, who almost certainly do it better, to take care of the sex stuff.

Well, we're moving on to the point that Minacou is becoming of broader interest among the various people in my story who've been following Maggie's project. Note, by the way, that Maggie's activities with the dolphin haven't exactly been conducted in secrecy. She's working at a busy motel where dolphin performances are an attraction. So why hasn't there been more publicity about a talking dolphin? That's a good question, the answer to which lies in the widespread skepticism that commonly greets anything unusual or extraordinary by normal standards in our human world. If you happened to witness such a remarkable thing, what might be your first reaction? Wouldn't it be mainly to wonder how it was being faked, what trickery was involved? People are doubting Thomases by nature. You know, there's actually a whole movement out there that "knows" men never really landed on the Moon, that the whole thing was a NASA charade, notwithstanding that the Apollo space program had official government backing. Without some official, authoritative imprimatur, how many of us will actually trust the evidence of our senses over "common wisdom" that something can't really be true and therefore must be some sort of fraud? An aspect of the contemporary human condition to think about.

This chapter is for the mathephobes among my readers, the ones who could never understand why their schoolteachers kept besieging them with numbers and forcing them to study such obscurities as multiplication tables and the arcane art of long division. I'm still baffled when I run across shop cashiers who can't make change and the like, but they seem to be legion in today's world.

Not a lot of action in today's chapter. Kind of like the real world in which we all live, and which good fiction is supposed to emulate. One's life usually has occasional peaks and valleys, both sometimes pretty stark, but the much larger areas in between are the plateau of day-to-day living. Just as well, really. If your actual life followed, say, the script of a Shakespearean play, how long could you actually endure the unending drama? How long before you went off the rails into the madness that besets so many of the bard's characters (think of Ophelia, Hamlet himself, Lord and Lady Macbeth, and so forth)?
So today's a little slow. Not so much so as to discourage readers, I hope. But it's a step down in intensity to the two preceding ones.
By the way, the response of local law enforcement authorities to Jason isn't really that surprising. Cops are trained to distrust what people tell them, and to look aggressively for violations. It's the nature of their line of work. You don't have to like it, but I think it's understandable why this is so.

Pretty much every story worth telling has an "aha" moment-a point at which the tale that's being told suddenly comes fully alive.
What I thought while I was writing The Dolphin was how nice it would be if the characters in my story could share that moment with my readers. Well, one character at the start-Maggie. For all that she really believes in what she's doing, I don't think that she had a real expectation that it would actually happen. Thus, when it does, she-like any of us in the same circumstances-is overcome with astonishment. There's neither relief in her immediate reaction nor a sense of personal accomplishment; she's simply overwhelmed. But neither is she paralyzed with a disbelief fostered by years of "received wisdom" that such a thing just cannot happen, to the point of reflexively discrediting the evidence of her senses, as so many might be. Toward the very end of the novel I get into this sort of reaction, which I've personally observed far too often. But enough of that for now. If Maggie didn't trust what she was seeing and hearing, there'd be no story. It's that she does that makes the rest of the tale get to useful places.
Thanks for your votes so far. I wasn't at all sure how this would be received on SOL, notwithstanding that my other writing has done well. I'm very gratified that you seem to like it.