Letoria: Blog

I don't know how many readers will access and read this, but I am using it today to pass along an update and a message from my dear friend, mentor, and fellow SOL contributor Invid Fan, who posts here regularly -- certainly with more regularity than me. Any of you who are readers of his efforts may notice he seems to have disappeared.

To be blunt, Invid Fan is ill. He's currently in the hospital undergoing tests and treatments for an uncommon condition. After discharge, he will be in a rehab facility for therapy to help him regain functions the illness stole from him. While in the hospital and rehab facility, he will be unable to access SOL, even if his progress is such that he's physically able to post. He has access to the hospital's WiFi network, but the filters in place prevent him from accessing certain sites, including SOL.

As such, he will be unable to post for an indefinite period of time. He has requested that I use my blog to reach as many of his followers as possible, however small that may be. If anyone who reads this is indeed an IF follower, please try to pass the word to others. I will post updates as regularly as possible. If you have any questions or you wish to pass along get well wishes, please send them to me via the SOL email system, and I will see that he gets them.

As a side note, Invid Fan is the webmaster for my World of Letoria site. If any of you visit there regularly, it's the same thing: it may be a while before anything new gets posted there.

I finally managed to get Chapter 16 finished. It was hard to write -- I changed course at least five times -- and I had a busy daily life demanding I give up writing time.

There was something else, too.

I have to be in a certain frame of mind when I write the erotic parts. Not exactly aroused; I don't want to write when I'm horny. I want to (ahem, pardon me) fuck. No, I guess you'd call it the warm and fuzzies. Naturally, an increased libido is part of the warm and fuzzies, but only a part.

For various reasons, I had a hard time reaching that frame of mind for long stretches, meaning writing the juicy bits was done in fits and starts. Then, about a month ago I started stirring. I managed the sexy parts in three nights.

The wait for Chapter 17 will not be long. It's already written. It was one of those really intense bursts of energy. It was as if the Muse revealed to me with crystal clarity what I needed write, and away I went -- it was done in two days, except for a lot of editing. I'm aiming for a posting around Thanksgiving.

I need to come here and post updates on a more regular basis. I'm not doing anyone, myself included, any favors by neglecting this common courtesy.

I've decided it's time for me to start simulataneously posting the blog entries/progress updates I do for my ASSTR website here. They'll be verbatim copy-and-paste entries, unless I have something SOL site-specific to say.

So, without further adieu, here is the first entry.

Update 3-23-15

I hope spring has sprung wherever you call home. After a brutally cold winter, complete with a two week stretch of epic snowfall, spring, such as it is, has come home for another year. It's been warm enough (40s and 50s) all but one day this week to eat lunch outside wearing a sweater rather than a jacket. My backyard is a shallow pond, just as it is every spring. We're still two months away from being able to plant things, but once the snowpack is gone - likely next week - the tulips and daffodils will wake up. Most of my rose canes are greening up - the deep snow and mulch kept the beds from freezing too deep. I am so itching to get out there and play in the dirt, and see something pretty, rather than bleak, dirty snow on a monochromatic background.

I've made decent progress on Chapter 16. Last night I finished a scene that I discovered was actually very hard to write. For me, dialog is very hard to do well, and I'm never totally sure whether I've done it properly. As difficult as ordinary dialog is, it's harder by an order of magnitude to write dialog between 14 year old girls.
The scene in question involves Laci talking with two of her peers. I'm sorry, but 14 was a lot of years ago, and I'll be damned if I can remember how my friends and I talked to each other. I'm sure our conversations were littered with the standards, "He goes", "she goes", "likes", and "you knows". I remember some of the slang terms we used - this was the early 80s, so I think we sounded a lot like Moon Zappa's "Valley Girl", and we no doubt inflected a lot of what we said as a question. ("I, like, you know, went to Mary's last night? And she goes, 'Wanna get high?' And I, like, go, 'Sure," you know, and she goes, like, 'I got a dime bag from John'?"

That was then, and things have changed in the intervening 30 years. I don't have any contact on a regular basis with teen girls of any age, never mind 13 and 14 - the last one was my daughter-in-law when she and my son were going out together during their high school years, and even that was 10 years ago -- so I really have no idea how girl's Laci's age talk today.

That's a serious handicap when writing the dialog between three girls talking to each other. I have no desire - or intention - to write phonetic dialog a la "Huckleberry Finn", but I'd at least like to get the slang and day-to-day idiom correct. Since it's unlikely I have many teen girls as readers, I suppose I'm less apt to be called out if I'm completely off in the weeds.

Readers who do have frequent opportunities to listen in on "teen girlspeak" might grimace when they "hear" my dialog in their heads, but I can only sigh, do the best I can, and ask for forbearance.

I will say, dialog between Karen and other adults, or even Laci (who consciously - usually -- talks in a more adult way when conversing with Karen) is a lot easier - though "easier" is a relative term. In a future chapter, I had to write dialog between Karen and her grandfather in a flashback scene, and even that was easier than relating teenspeak. I talk to elderly men on a daily basis, so their speech patterns and idioms are familiar to me.

In the end, I can only try my best and hope it doesn't sound too clunky.

I have one other bit of news to report. When I send this update to my web guru for posting, I'm also sending the first installment in the long awaited "Music" page (I still haven't gotten around to figuring out how I want to design the other additions/changes to the website, but one thing at a time). I'm going to start off with a listing of the music I have in the various playlists I've created to listen to as I write. I'll add comments next to songs as appropriate - not all at once, or I'll be here until next week.

I guess that's it for now. As always, I'll keep plugging away and hope I don't have too many distractions.

I've been gone a while. It mostly had to do with real life intruding. Once things calmed down, I was able to slowly, ever so slowly, get back into writing Chapter 15. It didn't help that the path I was supposed to take was hard to find out there in the puckerbrush. I hope it was worth the wait. Now that it's winter and I'll be more or less housebound until April, there shouldn't be such a huge gap between Chapters -- I hope. It's best not to poke at Mr. Murphy's beehive too much.

My wife is definitely a Pink Hatter. I, on the other hand, am a Blue Hatter all the way. It's in my DNA, a gift from my father every bit as much as my brown hair.

Normally, I don't give a Tinker's Cuss about baseball. Hockey is my game, honed by many, many hours spent in cold, nameless rinks at all hours of the day, watching my son try to master the intricacies of skating and moving a slab of rubber on ice at the same time. He got pretty good at it. Figuring I had a choice between learning to enjoy the game or being miserable for months at a time, I chose to learn and love the game.

That said, there's something in my DNA that climbs out of the depths of my being whenever the Boston Red Sox play baseball in October. If you don't hale from New England, it's hard to explain, or even understand. Bruins, Patriots, Celtics -- pretenders one and all. The Red Sox are the glue that binds New England in the sporting arena.

It's in our DNA.

My Dad had it bad. He was 7 in 1946 when Teddy Ballgame and Friends lost to the St Louis Cardinals, the same age I was when the Red Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds in 1975. I can't I remember 1975 very well. I damn sure don't remember the World Series. But I remember as I got older my Dad, night after spring and summer night, faithfully watching the Red Sox engage in agonizing, tantalizing teases, year after year. He watched much pretty every game, lived and breathed Red Sox, taking a break in the winter to suffer with the Bruins.

I think 1986 took 5 years off his life. That one hurt, even me, who really had only a vague, osmotic understanding of what was going on. I was in my first year of nursing school, and I lived at home. The house was crowded the night of Game 6, and my oh my, we were all sure the Curse was about to be broken, sure this was The Year. Then...

No matter how many times I see the replay of that moment, it always ends with Vin Scully crying out, "Behind the bag!" and that stupid ball dribbling down the right field line. From Party to Funeral in one fell swoop. The other shoe dropped. We were punished again for our hubris.

Then came a long spell in Purgatory (Hey, we were good Catholics, it fit). Baseball faded from my consciousness but for a few teases here and there. It never faded from my Dad's consciousness. He kept on hoping, believing, never forsaking what was woven into his New England DNA, watching every night.

Then, at the turn of the new century, it seemed as though things might -- just might -- be changing. Oh, but agonies remained, oh yes indeed, usually at the hands of the vile pin-stripped Yankees, the thieves in the night who stole Babe Ruth from his rightful place in New England. 2003 hurt badly, almost as bad as 1986. My DNA was dragging me back home. I was returning to where I belonged, getting stirred up in October, only to be deflated by November.

Then came 2004. Dad was sick, terminally so. I as a nurse watched helplessly as he wasted away. Still, the Red Sox were on every night. Dad believed. Even in May, there was a sense that... maybe? He struggled, oh how he struggled, to hang on to see his life's dream fulfilled.

Alas, it was not to be. Dad died in June. The Red Sox did not die in June. Or July. Or August. Or September. Or October. They did it, four months after my father, the crotchety old SOB, lost his grip. Four months!

So, on October 28, 2004, I went to the cemetery with a Red Sox cap, sat on his grave, and bawled my eyes out for over an hour. Once I composed myself, I got in my car to go home. I put on a local sports talk radio station so I could live the moment a bit longer. I don't know who's in charge of such things Up There, but for some unearthly reason, the station chose to play Louis Armstrong's "It's a Wonderful World" as a lead in to their next segment.

Needless to say, I had to pull over to the side of the road and spend another half an hour trying to pull myself together.

Yeah, it's in my DNA.

But my wife? She's a Pink Hat. She's from New England, but it isn't in her DNA. I can't remember exactly when it happened, but sometime in the early 2000s, it became trendy for Hollywood types to be Red Sox fans, Bandwagon Jumpers, Faux-Fans. Suddenly, actresses, models, woman in positions of trend-setting authority starting wearing Red Sox caps. PINK Red Sox caps! Women who didn't know a foul ball from a curveball, didn't care either. It was Cool To Be A Red Sox Fan, so out came the Pink Hats.

My wife and I were getting into the We're Serious phase of our relationship, which meant she was being integrated into my family. My father LOVED her, and she returned the favor. Now my wife's idea of playing the bases has nothing to do with baseball. She was true Pink Hatter material. She knew she needed to at least go through the motions of pretending it mattered. So she got herself a Pink Cap, and a Pink Hoodie, and paraded it in front of my Dad to show that, yes, I'm on board.

And he loved it! He just ate it up! Yep, she was the real deal. And so she was... and is.

So when October rolls around, and the Red Sox are still in it, the DNA stretches it's coils and reminds me from whence I came. Then, whatever the outcome, as fall fades into winter, my interest in baseball will fade, replaced by hockey, only to rear up again the next time the stars align. My Pink Hat will sigh, break out her motheaten Pinks, and I... I am entitled to wear my worn and faded Blue Red Sox cap.

Thanks Dad.