On being productive

     Li Fang (925-996) wrote what was probably the first exhaustive--and I’m sure exhausting--encyclopedia composed of 3,500 volumes he claimed contained all the knowledge in the Song dynasty.  Barbara Cartland (1901-2000) wrote an astonishing 723 romance novels in her lifetime, selling uncounted millions of copies.  John Creasey (1908-1973) wrote 564 novels under 28 pseudonyms.  Robert Shields (1918-2007) wrote a 37.5-million-word diary chronicling every five minutes of his life from 1972 to 1997.  (How he would have loved Facebook and Twitter.)  Bear in mind these folks did all this mostly in longhand or at best with old-fashioned typewriters.

     Stephen King has so far written 54 novels that have sold 250 million copies all over the known universe, along with 200 short stories.  Heather Graham, a lovely and gracious lady I had the pleasure of enjoying breakfast with during a writers’ conference in Florida, has written 150 novels and novellas that have sold 75 million copies in 25 languages.  The James Patterson and Clive Cussler gangs of writers diligently keep the bookstores stocked with a constant supply of new titles.

     So how come I can only manage, on an occasional good day, to compose about 500 words?

     It’s embarrassing.

Phil

p.s. BTW, have you bought your copy of my new novel, DEATHSMAN?  (It’s available quite reasonably in print or e-book from Amazon.)

       Think Great Winter Read by the Fire.

       Think Excellent Christmas Gifts for Family and Friends.

    

Is this sportsmanship?

     During a 200-mile round trip yesterday in eastern North Carolina, Naomi and I saw six dead deer alongside the road.  Presumably six vehicles were damaged.  I hope nobody was injured.

     It’s deer hunting season again, so this is only to be expected.

     North Carolina is one of eleven states (mostly in the Southeast) where “hunting” with packs of deer hounds is still allowed.  It’s an old European tradition probably first practiced in America about 1650, but it’s controversial to say the least because of complaints from land owners, primarily.  By 1920, dog hunting had been banned in all the northeastern states.  Texas even banned it in 1990, and today in those states where it is still allowed the practice is under pressure, with some counties banning it altogether and others imposing restrictions.

     I’m a gun owner, but I strongly disagree with the practice for several reasons:

     First, how sporting is it, really, to station hunters on all four dirt roads bordering a rectangular section of woods (often seated comfortably in upholstered swivel chairs bolted into pickup beds) and then run a dog pack through the woods to flush the deer out into the gun sights?  In my opinion it’s not sporting at all, because the deer have little chance.

     Second, I’ve seen how the deer hounds are often treated throughout the rest of the year, confined to small outdoor dirt-floored pens, simply shot in the woods if they don’t perform well enough, tick-ridden, even abandoned.  They are disposable dogs.

     Third, the dogs frighten the deer so much they will run for miles from their normal habitat, a predictable number of them every year darting across highways where they are struck and killed or maimed by vehicles, which suffer expensive damage—not to mention putting the passengers at risk—which costs us all in higher insurance premiums. 

     In the state of Massachusetts, where I was raised, you may only hunt deer on foot using a relatively short-range shotgun (which is much less dangerous to the citizenry than a long-range high-powered rifle).  And you must employ the learned skills of the true hunter.

Phil

www.philbowie.com

Want to write a novel?

     When I started writing novels, I thought, How hard can it be?  And I proceeded to write two over several months, one about Neuse River pollution by huge corporate hog-raising operations, and another about drug smuggling.  They sit out in my shed today, neither being salable.  (I tell people they’re so bad even the squirrels won’t nest in them.)

     But each of them taught me a lot. 

     Finally, I selected two best-selling novels I liked and took them apart.  That is, I read them again straight through.  Then I read them in detail, taking notes, trying to nail down how many characters and scenes there were, how the story moved, and so on.  I stripped the books down until I could begin to see the bare bones of them.  And that was an excellent exercise because I began to understand how it’s really done.  You don’t ever perceive this by just reading a lot of books, because the authors have skillfully fleshed out the bones and made it look easy, which it most assuredly is not. 

     You may want to try this exercise with a favorite book or two before setting out to write one of your own.

Phil

www.philbowie.com

Team-ups

     Too many years ago, Larry Cotton, then a fellow employee at a large company, and I became friends.  He was a design engineer and I was a draftsman, so we were somewhat like-minded.  We began writing magazine articles together on the side.  For example, one of us spotted a news item that the U.S. Postal Service was considering selling ads on postage stamps, so we made up a series of wacky stamp ads, doing all the artwork ourselves, and sold it to Harper’s  magazine.  We designed and built some kids’ furniture for Popular Science,  employing his children as photo models.

     Our paths diverged when I left the company to start a business.  I continued writing sideline magazine articles on all kinds of subjects from a World Land Speed Record attempt, to sailing on the Great Salt Lake, to environmental issues, to marlin fishing on the Gulf Stream, and he wrote a popular column for an electronics magazine.

     When we both semi-retired a few years back, we got together again and we’ve been co-inventing things primarily for MAKE  magazine since.  Naomi suggested we come up with a scratching post, for example, that would deposit a treat every time a cat uses it, thus training the beast to claw the post rather than its owner’s shins.  Intrigued by laminar flow water, which is turbulence-free and exhibits startling behavior, we drove 600 miles one way to Orlando to see how the Disney wizards had used laminar flow to build a fountain, and then we designed our own.  We’ve invented and built a levitation device for a military sub-contractor, and recently made two complex pendulums for NC State U that will help teach chaos theory to students.

     Because we’re really quite different people, ideologically, politically, and philosophically, we tend to argue a lot as we’re working.

     But precisely because  we’re different, we approach a challenge from different viewpoints, which often results in a compromise that works quite well and that neither one of us would have thought up alone.

     There are examples of successful collaborations throughout business, medicine, law, and the arts.  In music there are Rogers and Hammerstein, Waylon and Jessi, The Beatles.  There are more examples in academia, where many textbooks are written by partners.

     Fiction writers have teamed up to good effect.  The prolific John Sanford, author of the popular Prey  series, has concocted tales with the imaginative help of his good golfing buddy David Cronk.  The even more prolific Stephen King and fellow noir scribe Peter Straub have written some pretty horrific stuff together.

     The fiction author P.J. Parrish is actually Kristy and Kelly, sisters who have won a bucketful of awards and continue to make the NY Times  list consistently.  Asked why they’ve been so successful, their answer was, “. . . the double insight you get into your characters . . . to say nothing of the double dose of energy and imagination . . . we each have special qualities that seem to blend effectively.”

     Just like Sherlock and Watson.  Or Penn and Teller.  Or Wilbur and Orville. 

     Or Larry and Phil.

Phil

www.philbowie.com

How many have to die?

    

     An eighteen-year-old girl in my area was texting a friend while driving.  Whatever that message was, it was expensive.  It cost her everything—all her dreams and plans and ambitions, her friendships, her happiness, her whole bright future—when she ran into the back end of a log truck at lethal velocity.

     The world-wide addiction to cell phones is such that people simply will not stop texting and talking and surfing while simultaneously trying to control a two-ton vehicle at highway speeds.  These people would probably agree that trying to brush your teeth or trim your bangs or apply makeup or watch TV or clip your fingernails while driving would be absurd and suicidal.  Yet they think nothing of risking their own lives and, much worse, the lives of all those around them in order to conduct such conversations as:

     “Hi, where are you?”

     “On the beltway, headed home.  Traffic is an absolute frenzy.”

     “Tell me about it.  Some idiot just cut me off.  I’ll be home in half an hour, though.”

     “Okay.  You want me to stop for milk?”

     “No, I’ll do it.  See you there.  Love you, Snookums.”

     “Back at you, Sweet Cheeks.”

     For such conversations, people are dying gruesome deaths.

     The National Safety Council said 3,328 people died and 421,000 suffered injuries during 2012 alone in crashes related to distraction.  That’s nine deaths and 1,150 injuries per day.  AAA has since upped the current annual death toll to 5,000, or more than 13 daily deaths.  That’s two more deaths per day than the American military suffered on average throughout the entire Vietnam War. 

     Why don’t lawmakers seem at all concerned about these statistics? 

     The evidence is abundant and clear that cell phone use is killing and disabling drivers everywhere.  We don’t need any further studies to know we simply cannot devote sufficient safe attention to driving while engaged in cell phoning.

     The average time to answer a text is five seconds, in which time, at 55 miles per hour, a car travels the length of a football field, ample time and distance for all kinds of bloody mayhem to happen to drivers, passengers, and those around them.

     A number of states have taken timid steps to slow the slaughter. 

     Recently in California, where texting while driving, at least, is illegal, the cops have tried to crack down.  Drivers are often either astonished or angry when pulled over for what they consider to be only normal, innocent behavior.  But at least they’re not yet dead or maimed for life when they accept a ticket.

     When asked, 74 percent of drivers say that all hand-held cell phone use by drivers should be outlawed.

    

     Yet in surveys a majority of drivers admit to using their phones routinely.

     There’s a simple solution.  Cell phones have built-in GPS.  From now on by law they could all be configured from the factory so that when the phone senses any velocity greater than brisk walking speed, it will simply cease to work until velocity is reduced below the limit.  The 911 number would still operate for emergencies.  If you must talk or text, you’d have to pull over to do so—a minor inconvenience when weighed against so many thousands of lives.  Old phones would gradually phase out as they’re retired.

     Ask the parents and friends of the girl who crashed into that log truck if something like this might be a good idea.

Phil

Colorful words

 

     There are, of course, those common primary-color words, the red, green, and blue pixels of our TV screens, for example, which trick our brains into constructing beautiful full-color images.

 

     Then there are those vaguely-familiar, much more sophisticated words that are bandied about, I imagine, in clothing design studios, like taupe, fuchsia, and vermillion.

 

     And then there are some even more obscure color words that hardly anybody knows, such as:

     Smaragdine: emerald-colored

     Filemot: dead leaf-colored

     Porraceous: leek-colored

     Castaneous: chestnut-colored

     Ianthhine: violet

     Lateritious: brick-colored

     Melichrous: honey-colored

     Stramineous: straw-colored

 

     Some color words have evolved beyond their mere pigmentation.  Red, for example was born as the Latin ruber,  which inspired rubra  (red oak), which in turn inspired robor  (strength), leading to robust.  Rubric  was also a close cousin, which described the practice of marking instructions in liturgical texts in red. 

 

     (Incidentally, Colorado in Spanish means, simply, “the color red.”) 

 

     There are the emotional and ideological uses of color words, such as ”seeing red” or, “black-hearted” or “purple prose” or, these days, “going green.”

 

     And there are those of us who, encountering excess frustration or routine bureaucratic idiocy or intransigence, tend to resort to really  colorful language.

 

Phil

(Note: Some of the above facts were gleaned from Mental floss magazine.)

 

 

 

Worn-out words

     Mental floss  magazine recently listed ten ancient words that have gone the way of the unfortunate Dodo:

Jangleress:  female jangler, someone who chatters or tells stories

Bake-meat:  a pie

Corrumpable:  corruptible

Bear:  a pillow

Yolden:  submissive

Bedaff:  to make a fool of

Dulcarnon:  at wit’s end

Fouldre:  a lightning bolt

Englute:  to close with glue

Scorkle:  to scorch

     Which brings to mind a lot of words that were around when I was young but that haven’t survived into this century.  A few:

Ankle-biter:  child (could apply to my cat, Havoc)

Clanked:  rejected (it sounds  like rejected)

Cooties:  imaginary multi-legged infesters

Cranked:  excellent

Deuce:  1932 Ford (a model once often hot-rodded)

Doozy:  something or somebody unique or outstanding

Flat-top:  short square-edged haircut

Flip-top:  convertible

Floozy:  a street walker; a somewhat less-offensive term was floogie

Floy-floy:  a venereal disease, as in a top hit song of the year I was born called “Flat Foot

                   Floogie with the Floy-Floy”

Flim-flam:  a con game (think Congress)

Frail:  broke (think taxpayer)

Gringles:  worries (it sounds  like worries)

New-fangled:  something new but not necessarily good for us (like cell phones)

Raunchy:  gross

Scooch or slodge:  a friend

Slurg:  milkshake

Spaz:  klutz

Tubesteak:  hot dog

Yoot:  kid (clipped youth)

Zorros:  jitters

     What words will they be perplexing lexicographers with a century from now?

Phil