Available on Amazon Kindle

Season of Marvels: Viking Tales joins my novel, Of All the Western Stars, and science fiction story collection, Stars That Sing the Requiem, on Amazon Kindle, all published by Variations on a Theme publishing.

Season of Marvels: Viking Tales is a collection of stories featuring Norse and Icelandic Vikings in fantasy and science fiction stories covering a span of time from 800A.D. to the present day, to the far distant future.

Stories include: “Viking-Trojan War,” in which 9th century Vikings and their zombie warriors encounter the University of Southern California Trojans, with a movie deal sure to follow; “The Last Ship,” in which the fate of the Greenland Vikings in the Little Ice Age may have had extraterrestrial cause; “Season of Marvels,” a fantasy story in the style of the Norse sagas, because there’s always a slavering demon in the codfish bin; “Borealis,” a science fiction novella set far in the future in which a young man and his cat attempt to manipulate a Viking-type culture, originally published in Writers of the Future, vol. IX.

The cover image is a photo I took of abandoned houses in the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland. The Orkneys were settled by Vikings and retain much of their influence.

Read more about the stories in Season of Marvels: Viking Tales, with excerpts.

Likewise on the streets of Hollywood. I’m using “Hollywood” generically to mean the greater Los Angeles area as studios and television networks are spread about and few are actually in the city of Hollywood.

On the streets, if you’re generally touristing the area, it’s rare to come across a film  production taking place. And if you do, as I did a couple times on Hollywood Boulevard (I think that film was Jimmy Hollywood, with Christian Slater – I was in the area for a writers conference), there’s no opportunity to interact or talk to the folks, as they’re busy working and are trying not to be a tourist attraction. In fact, they quite emphatically do not wish to be a tourist attraction and have hired assistants and guards to keep the tourists at bay.

So, given all that, I actually became the tourist attraction one day. It was in film school. We were doing a remote shoot on some random street somewhere. There were mannequins in a store-front window we wanted to get in the background of a scene. When you picture our film equipment and crew, take what you see of a professional crew and just downsize it a touch. We shot 16mm film versus a movie production shooting 35mm. A documentary film crew would have been shooting with exactly our equipment, however, as it was all professional film gear, just not “major motion picture” format. And in crew numbers, we had somewhat fewer; three or four of us, plus our actor.

There we are, setting up our shot, when some tourists from somewhere in the Midwest came upon us. They were quite excited to see a real movie production and wanted to take photos of us, of them, and of them with our cameras and equipment.

We weren’t annoyed at all, more amused, really. They were delightful, friendly people. We explained we were a student film crew, not a real movie studio crew. They didn’t care about that, they said, it was exciting to see any film production in action.

Photos were taken. We posed. They posed. They posed with our cameras and lighting equipment and we took photos of them on their camera. And they happily went on their way.

The end of the tale is this. Somewhere, in someone’s photo album, are photos of me on a film shoot labeled as someone’s encounter with Hollywood.

This PBS station is the subject of many of the tales in my “upcoming” list of stories to tell. But this first story isn’t really a story at all, but a story that didn’t happen. Maybe some would view it as a missed opportunity, but for me it’s just a little novelty item that was brought to mind a short while ago when a friend posted a video on Facebook.

The PBS station, which happened to have the largest studio, or sound stage, in northern California, was sometimes hired out for productions. Sometimes it would be a commercial shoot. Sometimes a little drama production. It varied.

One day, a lady at the station came up to me in the tape room and very excitedly told me that the next day Britney Spears would be at the station using the studio to shoot a video and I could come in on my day off and see it and be involved!!!

“Who?” I asked.

“Britney Spears!!!” Her answer probably really dropped to two exclamation points by this moment.

“Really,” I said, “I don’t know who that is.”

No kidding. I had never heard of her at this point. It was years later, in fact, when the scandal entertainment shows latched on to her that I found out who she was, remembered that day and said, “Oh! That Britney Spears.” Needless to say, I did not go in on my day off to watch the shoot. So, here’s the video that was supposedly shot that day, though I can’t personally attest to it:

At most television stations the transmitter building and tower are not close to the tv station itself. When at the tv station your connection to, and awareness of, the transmitter is mostly by readouts and displays, and, of course, in seeing that you’re actually broadcasting on the air by looking at a television showing your interestingly arrayed patterns of electrons showing up as the pretty moving pictures we all enjoy. If that picture looks like a fuzzy, gray blizzard and your transmitter power readings are zero, you can confidently conclude you’re off the air.

Inevitably, when off the air, someone will rush in and ask, “Can’t you put a slide up?”, with said slide being the Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By graphic everyone at every tv station wishes to never see on the air. Then, hopefully, the miscreant realizes the impossibility of what he just said and blushes. Hopefully. That story is so common in television everywhere it hardly bears mention. But in Bill’s story the dolt in question failed to the greatest extreme I’ve ever heard in a basic understanding of how of television is broadcast.

You see, their transmitter tower fell down.

While this is rare, it’s certainly not unheard of. I know of a few times a tower collapse has happened. In this case I’m not sure which station it was or where; somewhere in the Midwest. They went off the air very abruptly. They checked and tweaked and pushed transmitter power controls. Then they received the report that their transmitter tower had actually fallen down. They quit trying to get the transmitter back on at this point. They quit trying everything, really, and just sat back and contemplated the magnitude of what had just taken place. They were going to be off the air for a very long time. A transmitter tower collapse is not something fixed or repaired in a day or, most likely, even a month.

As I recall it being told to me by Bill, it was a salesman who rushed in once it was determined what had happened. He was confronted by the sight of the entire technical and engineering crew sitting around doing nothing while the station was off the air. To clarify, they were doing nothing at all while his commercials were not being broadcast, hence money was not being made.

Once they broke into his rant and explained about the tower and the probable length of time it was going to take for them to get back up and broadcasting again, he calmed down a touch but still managed to fail most profoundly to understand what he’d just been told. “Yes, well, if you can’t run the programs or commercials, can’t you at least put a slide up?!”

The other dandy Bill told me involved a fellow who was looking for ways for the television station to save money. He suggested they shut off office lights when not in use — that sort of thing. Then he found a place they could really save money. There was a small building, not even at the tv station, that drew a huge amount of electricity and cost the station a horrible amount of money. Worst of all, no one was even at this building. Obviously, this was the best place to save money by shutting off power when no one was there. Yup… that was the transmitter building.

Bill Daily passed away in 2004 at the age of 50.
He is still remembered fondly, and is sorely missed.

This little tale didn’t occur during my watch but was told to me. It seems this little tv station would record a minute long “news update” to air in the afternoons and early evenings, about the times the network tv stations were doing their local newscasts. The news story usually was ‘written’ by the receptionist; cribbed, in reality, from the newspaper. Whoever really wanted to be on television became the news anchor (also usually the receptionist). In this case, however, it was a young man who came to do these news updates on a regular basis.

Being a major news anchor apparently was not in his list of career aspirations as he did not devote himself to producing high-quality resume-tape material in these news updates. The story told to me was one day he was reading his story on camera and his nose started to run. He didn’t stop reading. This wasn’t live. It was being taped so a take 2 was entirely doable. His nose continued to run as he doggedly read on. A giant gob of snot suspended itself from his nose until it leisurely dropped down onto his chest as he continued to read the news.

“You’ll want to do that over, right?” the director suggested when the update was completed.

“No, it’s fine,” came the reply.

Yes, indeed, that’s what they aired.

I encountered one of these folks early on. It was a small market in an even smaller tv station but with a client whose ego filled the studio and beyond.

The ad was for a car dealership. Local car ads now have nearly vanished. The corporations send slick national ads with room for a local tag. Back a while, though, local car ads were the place to look for comic creativity. If you ever lived in southern California you probably remember Cal Worthington and His Dog Spot. Those cheap, corny ads helped build a car dealership empire.

I suspect our client that day had the same sort of delusions aspirations in mind for his ads. He was doing an Easter sale ad, and naturally you have to have a bunny.

The bunny was an attractive young lady dressed up in a rabbit costume. The costume wasn’t some tarty, Playboy-inspired outfit, though the young lady was clearly cast with that vision in mind. No, her costume was a baggy, fake fur bunny suit complete with bunny-eared hood. All that showed was her face. I recall our producer, in a low, snide aside, suggesting she was the girlfriend of the (much older) car dealership owner. If that was the case, the relationship probably ended that day.

Lighting was set. Bunny-girl was miked and audio was checked. Aim. Focus. Roll tape.

Bunny-girl bounced enthusiastically and delivered her lines. It wasn’t high art, but it was kind of cute. If the audio was good and the video stuck to the tape we were done, right?

“No! Cut!” screamed the client. It was all wrong. He rushed up to the bunny-girl, talking intently to her about her motivation and delivery. Our producer and director leaned in and strained themselves trying to look concerned, professional, and affirming.

Take 2… Bunny-girl bounced and delivered her lines.

“No! Cut!”

Take number… I’m sure you get it. Twenty-one takes of the bunny-girl car ad were recorded. The simple, easy session stretched late into the night. The screaming got louder at the end of each take. The client’s face turned red and he looked like he was going to have a stroke. Happy, bouncy bunny-girl was red-eyed and fighting tears. She was failing to deliver the artistic nuances the car dealership client demanded of her performance. Our producer and director, usually consummate jerks themselves around any attractive, young female, were even struggling to try to get the client to stop being mean to the bunny-girl, while battling with the overriding desire not to annoy the guy paying the money.

Take 21… They finally called it off for the night. A sobbing bunny-girl was probably not going to sell cars. The next day, when everyone was more calm, they could come back and continue shooting the ad.

The punchline to this tale? You probably already guessed it. Yes, they used Cut 1.

I decided it’s time for that embargo to come to an end. I have over thirty years worth of stories of this often bizarre business. Correct that to Business, with a capitol B.

So what is it I’ve done in these past 30+ years? In the final analysis, I’ve arranged electrons into interesting patterns, flung them into the ether, and seen them vanish.

Wow. There’s a lifetime accomplishment to boast about! Every bit of work in over thirty years time has vanished into electrons. But the stories, and the fun I had gathering them, remain, so I’ll put them online where they’ll be… well, um… arranged into interesting patterns of electrons.

Tales of Television: How It Began

As with many things in life, plans change and evolve. In junior high school I wanted to be a computer programmer. By my senior year of high school I was intending to go into aerospace engineering with a glimmer of hope I might get into the NASA space program. That was 1976-77, however, and there wasn’t much of a space program. I talked, somewhat half-heartedly, to the Air Force. They were far less than half-hearted. Not only were they not interested in adding women to their ranks – this was the point where they might tolerate but certainly not encourage women – they certainly weren’t interested in a female with bad eyesight.

The Air Force only had been a thought, not a serious plan. My high school, a small town school in northeast Minnesota, had nothing in the way of guidance programs and there was no Internet to search for “how to get a career in NASA,” so Plan B, or really Plan C, took over when I graduated. Aerospace engineering was a dead career path at that point in time, so I went into electrical engineering instead. Mostly this was because my older brother was an electrical engineer, and my mother pushed me that way. The community college which had the engineering courses leading to the University of Minnesota was nearby, only sixty miles away, so I could live at home, continue to take care of the farm and the farm work, and still go to college.

For two years I was the only female in all my math and physics classes.

None of the men in my classes even really talked to me. That was a little crushing, but I learned later on that was because they were afraid to talk to me! I was that elusive, frightening creature called a ‘female’ and they were unable to work up the gumption to talk to me, much less ask me out on a date. The nature of the intelligent male geek is more widely known now, but then, as an eighteen-year-old girl from a farm, it was a mystery to me.

My breaking point with electrical engineering came during a class on physics dynamics. It was a struggle for me, in large part because I had missed the prerequisite class so I was jumping into the middle of a very complex area. I recall very clearly, however, correcting the teacher on one point in which we were calculating the frame rate of a film camera shooting a man in slow motion on the moon. I may have had trouble with the coefficient of gravity portion of the equation, but I certainly knew the frame rate of a film camera and how to make it do a slo-mo! Then came the day when the teacher asked one of these twenty men in the class, all of whom wore pocket calculators strapped to their belts every day, the name of the fellow sitting next to him. That fellow was absent that day and this other one, who had sat next to him in every class for two straight years, did not know his name. I quit engineering the next day. I needed a bigger, brighter, more dynamic world for myself.

In the middle of all this, on a trip to Los Angeles, I registered my first television script with the Writers Guild. It was a spec script for Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and – dang – it was a good script. The show was cancelled the very next season after a huge revision that did-in my story line. It was a tip-off, however, of where my real interests resided.

From there, I toyed with going into computer special effects for movies. One key problem with that was the field had not yet been invented. Maybe I could have been a pioneer in it, but there was always the problem of making a living to deal with. I then went into a television program at a Minnesota university for a year, and from there on into the Cinema-Television Production program at the University of Southern California (now called the School of Cinematic Arts). That’s right, the George Lucas/Star Wars film school. Never aim small. USC isn’t in Beverly Hills, though my apartment did have a ce-ment pond, and I drove a Firebird, not a truck. Still, the farm girl headed for Hollywood.

Day One, Class One, the teacher drew a dollar sign on the board and said, “That’s it. That’s the whole lesson.” It was a very pragmatic school who turned out people who really work in the Business. Artsy was fine, if it was marketable. It fit my Heinlein-based sensibilities quite well.

I got my first paid gig in television only a few months after starting at USC. It was videotaping a computer conference. I was, again, the only female in a room with nearly two hundred geek men. This bunch, however, had several “high-functioning geeks” (that’s what my husband, a computer guy, calls himself) and at every break I was surrounded by men fascinated by me and the television equipment. Funny thing was, I had studied so much higher math and computer science, I could pretty well follow what they were talking about in the conference. Still, once I had television truly in hand, that was that. Whatever form it took – writing, producing, directing, or anything else – I was in.

More Tales of Television…

Four of the six stories in Stars That Sing the Requiem are previously published, with two making their first published appearances.

StarsThat Sing the Requiem, available from Amazon Kindle

The stories are:

Stars That Sing the Requiem – This is a very personal, though not truly autobiographical, story of the yearning for space and the future for those of us who had been pushed away from it. Stars That Sing the Requiem actually began in 1982 as a concept for a screenplay, a college film school project that had to percolate a few more years before it came together into this short story. This is more of a tale of feelings than events, and has always struck a stronger chord with female editors and readers than male–it’s October Sky for those of us who had for most of our lives been pushed away from the quest for space yet yearned for it as strongly as any of the men. Stars That Sing the Requiem was first published in Galactic Citizen, accepted as a reprint to regrettably defunct Keen SF (and spoken of highly by the editor in an interview), published in Millennium, both the webzine and a later ‘best of’ print issue. The editors of Millennium nominated it for a ‘Best of the Web’ anthology, to which it was also accepted.

Flower on the Moon – This is a hard science fiction story is a soft sf setting. Flowers on the Moon is about a terraforming project of a type we seldom hear about–terraforming our own moon. I worked quite a bit on the idea, and the science, that the moon could be made to hold a thin atmosphere if an artificial cap could be put on it–part of Heinlein’s ongoing idea that wherever there is mass and energy people can create a livable environment. The true theme of the story, however, is that the efforts and sacrifices of individuals can summon and change the future. Originally published in Private Galaxy Magazine.

Silver Lady – This is a short-short, or prose poem, about Earth’s moon. It’s a delicate little piece about our yearning for Luna and her yearning for us. Originally published in Wellspring literary magazine, reprinted in Jackhammer.

Silence At the Fall of Night - This is the most truly personal story of the collection. Silence At the Fall of Night is science fiction romance written at the time when my then future-husband and I were romancing on the Internet sight-unseen to each other from 2000 miles apart. This was the era on the Internet before there even was a World Wide Web. There were no profile pictures. There were no chat rooms. There were no personal websites and no photographs posted online. There were only people as silent “voices” speaking through plain text. One came to know the pure essence of a person without any of the usual external information. This was how my husband and I came to know each other. During our online romance we exchanged the equivalent of approximately 6000 printed pages of pure text; I have the printouts, Geo saved the text files. Silence At the Fall of Night is this pure relationship, a romance with no sight, no voice, no touching, just pure human contact coming out of the darkness.

Terra Formation - This is a science fiction story that is one of those stories based on an interesting notion that occurred to me–what if you needed to terraform a planet fast, in a catastrophic way, much as Earth was changed in the past at the time of major extinctions, but by intent.

Those We Left Behind – This story is a prequel to a series of other stories and novels (some complete, some not) based in my “Scouter ‘verse.” The story is science fiction and looks at the choices that must be made if we turn our backs on this planet to reach out to others. Originally published in Millennium Science Fiction and Fantasy, reprinted in The Best of Millennium Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine, Vol. 1 Issue 3, republished in Private Galaxy.

The movie of The Hunger Games is opening soon and apparently it’s a big, Harry Potterish thing with the preteens. I had never heard of the books until I saw a trailer for the movie recently, even though they’re been on best seller lists for nearly two years.

The Hunger Games, available at Amazon.com, on Kindle and in print

I got the first book in The Hunger Games series when I got my shiny new Kindle for Christmas and the book was a free Amazon Prime borrow. I found the first book compelling, even though there’s nothing the least original in it (but the same could be said, in truth, of Harry Potter). Originality of concept often isn’t as important as the freshness and the vitality of the approach. As the Harry Potter series breathed a vibrant new life into some very old fantasy concepts, The Hunger Games gives a hint of that vitality to the post-apocalyptic survival scenario, at least in the first book.

The main character, Katniss, a teenaged girl, was interesting. She had the whole ‘girl power’ thing going on, but had a decently set-up background that made her feats possible, and enough flaws built in that she wasn’t over-the-top on invincibility. But her very necessary flaws and self-doubts did sometimes read as an author purposely acknowledging that her character, who otherwise would be a “Mary Sue” needed these characteristics.These elements sometimes felt strained in the narrative.

The world scenario had numerous logic problems that kept jumping out at me. The world-building is certainly not comparable to the absolute believability of the Heinlein juveniles, but on the whole, I enjoyed the first book of The Hunger Games series and wanted to read the sequels.

Book 2, whose title didn’t last for me even a minute, had the unfortunate “middle book” syndrome. It had no particular beginning and no particular ending. Worse, the author felt compelled to redo the entire scenario from book one using a rather weak, gimmicky excuse for it. This scenario, which was the point of the first book, had to be repeated but bigger and badder. It was movie sequel syndrome all over again. Special effects and extremes took over in place of plot and character development.

Nothing particular was resolved and there was little forward motion. As it got further into the book more and more of the active portions of the plot were taken out of the main character’s hands and control; she became a character who was acted upon rather than taking action.

Book 3 went completely flat for me. It also totally wraps up the character and scenario so that further sequels are improbable. The main character in this book seemed to spend most of the book unconscious, injured, or otherwise so immobilized she was pretty much not a part of the story. This is quite a feat of unfortunate writing when we’re trapped in first person narrative writing and the interesting story is all taking place out of the main character’s sight!

So Katniss trudges sullenly through the third novel being acted upon, rather than taking action, and sulking rather than taking part in the greater story. Then, in what felt like an editing revision in response to some wise reader/editor’s feedback, Katniss jumped up and took charge of the story and action for a few chapters that read like a video game (a gross, violent, gory video game), only to have this fizzle away into helpless nothingness. Her one big moment of taking control of the story and plot was telegraphed so poorly it came as more a relief after a long wait than as a dynamic surprise. Then, again, after this huge moment of stepping forward and seizing control of the plot and scenario, Katniss again took to her bed, sulking and not following up on her huge moment. The ending was a massive letdown to the entire series.

I might reread book one at some point as it had some very good flavor and characters, but can’t see rereading the entire series. For the movie, I’ll wait for free cable.

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