They’re Building A Bomb

I’ve read a lot about the Manhattan Project, Soviet spying during the era, and on Allied successes and failures in derailing Germany’s atomic bomb project.

But I have yet to read a book like Steven Sheinkin’s “Bomb: The Race to Build – and Steal – the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon.”

In this compact book, Sheinkin pulls a lot of stuff together, including some things I had not been aware of, and tells a tale worthy of the best spy novels. For anyone looking for an introductory book to the battle for the bomb, look no further.

Yes, Sheinkin’s book lacks a lot of the technical aspects of most of the other books written on the subject, but that’s beside the point – his audience is clearly different, his aims more focused on telling a complex tale as succinctly as possible. It’s a fantastic book to hand any curious individual of any age wanting to get a taste for Manhattan Project literature.

He shows considerable skill in focusing in on the critical events, knowing how to provide just enough knowledge to keep the story going without bogging it down in technicalities, nor leaving any of the principal events out. Such concise packaging is enviable, especially in the era where it’s felt leaving anything out is a sin.

And his writing style portrays the same tension filmmakers have used on the same subject:



Any student of the Manhattan project ought to have this book on the shelf, if only to help someone else pique an interest in the topic.

Do I Love Learning? Me?!

It’s that tine again in my English classes where they read an article about the love of learning. Which means, of course, it’s time for my navel-gazing at the questions: Do I love learning and what am I learning now?

Well, you have to answer yes to the first.

Then when all you can think to say is uuuuuuuuhhhhhh about the second, you think maybe revisiting your answer to the first question is in order.

Michelle and I had this conversation last night. A companion to the discussion is our son’s struggles with college calculus and physics (classes I would not take in a billyun years because MATH). She thought that if she really loved learning, maybe she should take some math classes to help her learn the stuff she hadn’t liked much in high school.

“You’re going to take a calculus class?” I asked.

“Nooo no no. I’d have to start smaller. Way smaller.”

So what should I be willing to learn?

Well, writing a book is something I need to learn how to do. Or edit a book. Or create a coherent story. Or something. Which tells me I should probably be going to writers’ conferences, as learning collaboratively is where most of the learning occurs. I don’t know what I don’t know about editing, see, so my struggles to get Doleful Creatures to completion are likely going to continue to be struggles until I change my approach.

But the big conference close by, in Salt Lake City, is coming fast and all the spots are filled. Maybe I need to make that a goal next year. But we all know how well I do with goals.

Maybe a writing conference would help. Though the social aspect of them frightens me. A collaborative learning environment might be just the thing. Or not. Maybe.

Hear Me Phineas Worrell!

I’ll admit, the first time I watched the story of Lloyd Worrell, I was put off.

Scared, more like it. Who was this guy who kicked dogs, pretended to eat invisible steak, and loved to watch his equally creepy boy smash up his cinder block toys?

And that house – junky, cold by appearances, open and empty.

Yet.

Underneath, it’s Ernest. Ernest P. Worrell.

I don’t remember the first time I met Ernest P. Worrell. Probably through one of his commercials, though I don’t remember a product. Maybe a bit about him on TV featuring a commercial – I grew up in Idaho and I believe we had one local dairy then – actor Jim Varney did his Ernest character for a lot of dairies – but not much else.

But I watched the Ernest movies. Oh, did I watch them. I’ve got the books. I was a member of the Ernest P. Worrell fan club to the end, when the club folded and they sent me a free bumper sticker as a thank you.

I sold the car the sticker was on. Probably the most valuable thing on that car was the sticker.

I’m reading now Justin Lloyd’s biography of Varney and loving every minute of it.

Almost every minute. The writing is a little rough around the edges. But that’s okay. It suits Ernest – and Uncle Lloyd – just fine.

I never knew, for example, that “Never Get Poop on Your Shoes,” was the alternate, “English” title to the film “Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam.” Which I love. Nor did I suspect Monty Python was an inspiration for Dr. Otto’s writers, though I can see that a bit now in retrospect. I’m learning a lot about Varney and the character of Ernest.

Part of me wonders if there wasn’t a bias against Varney in Los Angeles and in New York that kept him from meatier roles. Yes, he was typecast as Ernest, but clearly had a range that could have made him a much more prominent character actor than he ever was. But as Varney was from the South and played to Southern stereotypes, the elites may have just let him fly under the radar (though Disney certainly saw the potential when Ernest got more cheers at the Indianapolis 500 than did their own Mickey Mouse).



I’m gratified he did win a Daytime Emmy in 1989 for his TV show, which I loved as well.

Lloyd’s book feels pretty comprehensive. And I also have to wonder – who else but a relative would write this book (see coastal elitism as a reason why nobody else would).

There’s one thing I feel lacking – photos. There are a few, but I kept hoping for a lot more.

Pratchett's "Pyramids." Almost Passable

I am at heart a big Terry Pratchett fan. But as with any author, there’s going to be work of varying quality. Pyramids is probably the least entertaining Discworld book I’ve read. And I’ve read a lot.

The book brings the funny, but in random, discrete packets. It’s a “chuckle occasionally” novel, where Pratchett was clearly still trying to find his feet as a satirist. Or something.

Because though this is the 9th Discworld novel, I still get the feeling Pratchett is trying to be a “serious” fantasy novelist, attacking the Big Questions (in this case, the folly of religious faith). But he’d also been noted as a guy who could occasionally get a laugh out of the reader, so there’s that element sneaking in too.

With the funny trying to compete with the serious this early in his career, neither come out well.
The concept of camels being good at the higher maths, funny. Sorta. And the mocking of the Greek philosophers felt good. But every time Pratchett shows religion as a creaky thing worthy of replacing in favor of – I’m not quite sure – all I see are the tired old saws from every man-about-town who’s got a religious bone to pick.

Maybe because I belong to a faith that isn’t as staid or, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because I’m a person of faith. Are there things wrong with religion and with those who adhere to them? Yes. Just as there are things wrong with scientists and those who adhere to science. Zealots of whatever strip tend to take things too far.

On that end, Pratchett really doesn’t say anything new. He gets better at it as his career progresses (although it’s amusing to see him take humanist stances that mirror my own religious beliefs; that would probably irritate him to no end.

Anyway. I’m pleased to have read some earlier Pratchett, if only to help me appreciate the latter Pratchett all the more.

Beware the Cognitive Surplus

The more weird things happen on the Internet, the more it comes down to the Shirky Principle.

More specifically, it comes down to the cognitive surplus described by New York University writer in residence Clay Shirky, in his book “Here Comes Everybody,” but outlined even more clearly in his TED talk “How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World.”



Shirky’s basic premise is that the Internet affords the “ability of the world’s population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global projects.”

Now, that’s the big view.

On a smaller scale, cognitive surplus is:

1. The world’s free time and talents
2. Our ability to produce, rather than merely consume, content.

“The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” as Shirky says. For the purpose of his TED talk, he identifies LOLcats as the stupidest possible creative act. It takes little effort. It generally has a wide audience. And it’s everywhere.

We could be using our cognitive surplus and the freedom afforded by the Internet as an outlet for our content by, say, producing quality content. I’m working on fantasy novels. But they’re hard. In the meantime, I blog and share funny and stupid stuff on social media with friends who also generally favor funny and stupid stuff.

But just as the harmless stuff we do – quoting MASH episodes, amusing each other with obscure references from Bloom County and other aspects of shared culture – is easy, so is the less-than-nice stuff that goes on online.

Thus the weird and stupid crapola we now see on the Internet.

Conor Friedersdorf, writing at The Atlantic, is in a way asking us to consider our use of cognitive surplus as we interact with a great sink of cognitive surplus: Online shaming. He writes:

I’m sitting in a coffee shop as I write this. Imagine that a man sitting at a nearby table spilled his coffee, got a phone call just afterward, and simply left, so that staff had to clean up his mess, a scene that culminated in a haggard-looking barista drooping her shoulders in frustration. Was the call a true emergency? We don’t know. But if not, almost everyone would agree that the man behaved badly.

Yet almost all of you would react with discomfort or opprobrium if I followed the man back to his office, learned his name, spent a half hour waiting to see his boss, adopted an outraged tone, explained his transgression, felt righteous, then commenced a week-long mission to alert his extended network of friends, family, and professional contacts to his behavior, all the while telling masses of strangers about it, too.

On the other hand, if that man spilled his coffee, leaving that same haggard barista to clean it up, and if I captured the whole thing on my phone camera and posted it to Twitter with a snarky comment about the need to better respect service workers, some nontrivial percentage of the public would help make the clip go viral, join in the shaming, and expend effort to “snitch-tag” various people in the man’s personal life. Some would quietly raise an eyebrow at my role in that public shaming, but I mostly wouldn’t be treated as a transgressor.

One cannot help but wonder whether there are better norms. The internet isn’t restoring what was lost when we left the village, but today’s version is eroding the compensating benefit of getting to live fluidly across domains, in part because digital norms seem uninterested in protecting it.

Snark and shame are mediocre commodities, easily created and easily shared online. And snark and shame can come from the simplest thing: Our outrage that someone else on the internet doesn’t think like we do.*

But we’re seeing more and more proof that this kind of sink for our cognitive surplus is generally unhelpful, and often incomplete and frequently deceptive.

We score snark points. Yay for us!

But as Friedersdorf laments, we lose a lot in the execution, because our ability to compartmentalize (and here I’ll quibble and say we should not have norms that deviate so much from one compartment to the next that a breach in containment will result in irreparable damage) our lives is eroding. Make one slip-up that doesn’t fit with the prevailing digital norms, and you’re dead meat.

“Each day on Twitter one person is the star,” wrote a wise person, probably on Twitter. “The goal each day is to not be it.”

A parallel axiom, also likely from Twitter: “The internet can give you your fifteen minutes of fame, even if you don’t want it.”

So good luck with that. There’s a lot of cognitive surplus out there waiting to make you an unwitting star.

It would be good for us to remember what Edward R. Murrow said about Senator Joseph McCarthy:



“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. Good night, and good luck.”

*Even the use of this comic has the chance of spurring outrage in some of the more brittle communities. The same artists write and draw the BC comic strip, once written and drawn by Johnny Hart, who let his Christianity bleed from the church domain into the comic strip domain a bit too often to keep the peace.

Goop

Remember, China was the first nation to send seeds that sprouted and grew on the face of another world.

Remember, because in images that’ll likely be in textbooks in a hundred years as space-farmers read holographic magazines and sip holographic coffee at the Moon-Cafes where they go once their duties of tending their moon-crops are done for the morning are going to feature something quite heavily:
Caulk.

Not the verdant green of the first cotton plants to sprout on the moon.

But caulk.

Behold:

Remember when this experiment, described here, was set up on Earth, they knew they were going to have a camera facing the soil in which they’d planted the first Moon-Seeds. They knew they wanted to record what was going on with the seeds and share those photos with the world as a FIRST!!!1!11!

So of course there’s tons of goop.

And what appears to be a cascade of glue as well. And a plastic lattice.

They’re telling me there’s a cotton plant in here somewhere. Other pictures show a much better sprouting. See?

But mostly I’m seeing caulk. And other assorted goop.

I still think it’s neat they grew plants on the Moon. Albeit briefly.

There’s such a thing, however, as presentation, folks. Presentation. Maybe the lattice is important. As is the goop, probably.

But this thing couldn’t have been designed to be less goop-dependent? Or, if the goop was unavoidable, perhaps it could have been made, you know, a lot less goopy? Was this thing built with off-the-shelf components in a nation that’s become a manufacturing powerhouse? Nobody looked at this and thought, “You know, we really should spend that extra $100 on a custom lattice that fits the space. Maybe we could take some money out of the goop budget.”

Maybe the goop is some futuristic, nutrient-rich Moon Goop?

Only the farmers sitting in the Moon-Cafes know for sure.

3,333rd Post

Because we're a species that loves celebrating meaningless milestones, here's one for you.

And because I've kinda got a Dutch stubborn contrarian in me, it's one that really doesn't make sense. What you are reading now is this blog's 3,333rd post. Ten Wonderful Years, by the end of this year. So maybe I'll save that post until the end of 2020. . .

Maybe *I'm* The Bad Tourist?

We all have our stories of the Tourist from Hell.

Tourists regularly boggle the mind, for instance, at Yellowstone National Park, 2 ½ hours north of where I live. If they’re not taking a whizz into Old Faithful or packing away baby bison in their vehicles because they looked cold, they’re marching around on delicate thermal features or sitting at the Old Faithful Visitor’s Center grumbling about the high price of ice cream and how much more they enjoyed themselves at Yosemite.

But then there are the natives.

Oh, the natives . . .

I had the audacity once to set my car alarm – a half-second honk – while visiting the Coquille River Lighthouse near Bandon, Oregon. Now I suppose I have no proof it was a native, but someone certainly left a pre-printed note on the dashboard just in a fit about the half-second “fart” my cart made when I set the alarm because I was causing noise pollution. Never mind that the foghorn from the lighthouse was louder. Never mind that the waves hitting the beach and the seagulls overhead were louder. MY CAR FARTED and I was being called out. Anonymously.

So whatever.

So when I read about the horrors New Zealand is allegedly suffering at the hands of a marauding pack of possibly English tourists, I had to wonder: Are they as bad as they were made out to be, or are we seeing a combination of Bad Tourist meeting with Bad Native?

I’m tempted to say the latter.

Not because the tourists haven’t behaved badly. But it seems to me the folks in New Zealand have jumped on the “These People are Terrible” bandwagon to the point that it almost feels like harassment. Read this story and tell me you’d like to be treated this way.

No new bad behavior to report. Except on the part of natives reporting on this family’s every move and warning business owners that the trash is in the house.

Ah, you say. They were on good behavior because they’d been spotted out! I’m watching you, Wazowski, always watching!

Balderdash.

They got caught doing nothing terrible in particular, and the people of New Zealand felt a little disappointed. Because these people should be Bad Tourists every step of the way and provide more tongue-clucking entertainment for the locals.

About 90 percent of the time, folks, when I encounter a Bad Tourist at Yellowstone National Park, a big part of the problem . . . is me. I see one or two instances of “bad” behavior and then, as trip dynamics go, I tend to see the same folks at different places all day long. And the next day. And the next day. So I become quickly attuned to watching for additional bad behavior, and sometimes I’m rewarded and MMMMMMM look they’re being Bad Tourists again! Yummy!

And sometimes it’s my attitude that causes me to look past their ordinary behavior. Or inflate some minor slight into Bad Tourist things.

So I’m part of the problem.

Yes, my car did fart.

So the rest of that trip, I did not cause my car to fart. If that’s all it takes to keep the peace, it’s a small price to pay, right?

Once Again, You’re Not Helping

t is, of course, The Thing. Art as protest. Protest as art. An indelible attack on the wossname of power and prestige and probably penises, for all I know.

But in the end:

Printing a fake copy of The Washington Post, complete with a website rabbiting the same stories in the name of protest, makes the job of the real Washington Post and the real news media that much harder in the era of Fake News.

First and foremost, I have to say this: I’m no supporter of President Trump.

But this is straying into “cutting off a man’s legs and stealing his drawers” territory.

Yes it’s cute and all to make this kind of protest.

But to the rabid Trump fan, you’re playing into their hands. Proof – no matter you know it’s fake – that the media is out to get The Donald.

But it’s fake, you say.

Doesn’t matter. It’s proof.

Fake proof, you say.

Doesn’t matter.

It’s proof.

But –

It’s proof.

Because, as George Orwell says in “Animal Farm”:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

That’s all we’re running on now. Images, Appearances. And the little stunt provides images aplenty. Doesn’t matter it was meant as a protest. Or even a joke. Or that The Washington Post had nothing to do with the Fake Washington Post.

What matters is the appearance of Fake News.

And you provided that.

Slippery Soap, Meet Slippery Slope

Two things to consider:

1. Saying your fundamental argument is right when you’ve totally mangled the facts you used to reach the conclusion of that argument is, at the base, wrong.

2. Dismissing a series of falsehoods on which an individual built a career as a no-nevermind because that person could have, with only little effort, clearly documented his fiction as reality is, at the base, wrong.

And one more:

3. That we have people looking at these two things and saying “You know what? Getting the facts wrong and telling lies about true things is okay, because the end justifies the means” is, at the base, incredibly wrong.

What’s happened in the Trump Era is that one party’s president disregards the truth as irrelevant to reality.

What’s also happened is that hyperpartisans for both American parties have revealed that’s been their thinking all along.

Both the Republican and the Democrat parties have proved to me, in the last few years, that both are bankrupt. The first has revealed it no longer cares about morality. The second has proved that the motto “When they go low, we go high,” is only a collection of words surrounded by quotation marks.
Off to better things, says I.

I don't disagree with what's being said in the articles, by the way. But the comments. They're absolutely toxic for anyone who expects a certain party to be upholders of truth and morality at the moment we have an Oompa Loompa in the White House.

Men at Arms -- A Protean Watch Novel

As I wrote earlier, one of the many reasons to enjoy reading Terry Pratchett’s books is because Pratchett is a writer’s writer. When he’s not dismantling writerly tropes, he’s experimenting with different lenses through which to tell his stories.

“Men at Arms” is probably the most ur-writer book of Pratchett’s that I’ve read.

It is – depending on which source you consult – the second or third “Night Watch” story, which evolved into Sam Vimes novels.

While it’s interesting to see Pratchett play with the idea of Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson as the Watch’s main character, with the putative Sir Samuel Vimes as more of a sidebar character.

We see other characters, such as Angua von Uberwald, Gaspode the Wonder Dog, Fred Colon, and Nobby Nobbs emerge fully-formed, taking on the roles they’ll have (with the exception of Gaspode) through the Night Watch series: Angua as the not-so-closeted werewolf always fighting the Human/Dog dichotomy within (which, ironically, Gaspode is the one to point out); and Fred and Nobby, the Watch’s Laurel and Hardy constants. We get to see Pratchett used these various characters to various ends in the books, but we see them fully formed.

Then there’s Sir Samuel, who evolves from that sidebar character to become the Conscience of the World. Or Vetinar’s Terrier, whichever you wish to think of him. Though he is oft an object that is acted upon – as Vetinari does, and as does the Summoning Dark in Thud!, Vimes shows us he is also Someone Who Acts, often despite of those who wish to use him as a tool to their own ends. And let’s not forget the little bugger inside Vimes whom is the Watchman who Watches the Watchmen.

Vimes is, to my mind, Pratchett’s most fully-formed character, though you wouldn’t suspect that of him as you read the first few Night Watch novels.

I could wonder what made Vimes suddenly leap to the fore in the Night Watch novels, but I suspect it’s this: Vimes was more fun to write. Captain Carrot is a great character, but he’s designed to be a great simple character. Vimes could feign simplicity, but underneath he was mightily complex and conflicted. Probably that conflict is what makes Vimes fun to write.

Maybe this is a blinding flash of the obvious. But it’s a good thing for a putative writer to see.

Playing with those Metaphors

Presented here, with as little comment as possible, a lesson on using metaphors in writing, by Terry Pratchett; from pages 188-89, “Men at Arms.”

“[G]ive me some more coffee. Black as midnight on a moonless night.”

Harga looked surprised. That wasn’t like Vimes.

“How black’s that, then?”

“Oh, pretty damn black, I should think.”

“Not necessarily.”

“What?”

“You get more stars on a moonless night. Stands to reason. They show up more. It can be quite bright on a moonless night.”

Vimes sighed.

“An overcast moonless night?” he said.

Harga looked carefully at his coffee pot.

“Cumulus or cirro-nimbus?”

“I’m sorry? What did you say?”

“You gets city lights reflected off cumulus, because it’s low lying, see. Mind you, you can get high-altitude scatter off the ice crystals in – “

“A moonless night,” said Vimes, in a hollow voice, “that is as black as that coffee.”

“Right!”

“And a doughnut.” Vimes grabbed Harga’s stained vest and pulled him until they were nose to nose. “A doughnut as doughnutty as a doughnut made of flour, water, one large egg, sugar, a pinch of yeast, cinnamon to taste and a jam, jelly, or rat filling depending on national or species preference, OK? Not as doughnutty as something in any way metaphorical. Just a doughnut. One doughnut.”

“A doughnut.”

“Yes.”

“You only had to say.”

Harga brushed off his vest, gave Vimes a hurt look, and went back into the kitchen.

Pratchett is at heart a writer’s writer, who often explores odd little tropes of writing with enough exaggeration to point out how most of the rest of us are mucking things up.

I know I do it, and when I see something like this in my own writing I want to kill myself.*

And I see it a lot in others. Last year, I read a professionally-edited and nationally-published book wherein all of the characters blushed to show embarrassment. All of them. Even the dark-skinned characters. Which led me to wonder – when dark-skinned people blush, is it noticeable? If you can’t answer that as a writer, you probably shouldn’t use blushes as your go-to for your characters to express embarrassment.

And maybe it is noticeable. Maybe I’m the moron here. My own writing shows me clearly I can and often am wrong.**

*See? I’m doing it RIGHT NOW!

**AND AGAIN!

Buck Rogers is Boring to Me

Came to a somewhat shocking realization this morning as I was reading more news about the New Horizon spacecraft’s remarkable visit with Ultima Thule on New Year’s Day:

The current state of manned space exploration is really boring.

And maybe that’s a crap attitude, similar to the “milk run,” or “making landing on the moon about as exciting as flying to Pittsburg” attitude the Apollo astronauts and associated hangers-on had to deal with in the early 1970s.

But it’s my attitude.

And I’m sure whomever is currently in orbit around the Earth right now – I assume there are people in orbit; it’s become de rigeur to have someone in orbit these days – are doing interesting things. Highly valuable things that will someday contribute to the great whatever.

Or maybe not.

I have little interest in finding out.

Clearly, there are others who are interested. There’s even a website and app – of course there’s an app – that’ll tell you, to the man or woman, how many people there are currently in space.

It’s three. As of 0731 today.

What are they doing in space?

This particular site doesn’t seem to care either. Maybe the app is different. But right now, it’ll tell you the number of people in space, their names, countries of origin, and just how long, to the day, they’ve been in space. Click on a name and you’ll get sent to that astronaut’s Wikipedia page.

Which don’t seem to care what, exactly, these people are doing in space either.

But I have read article after article about New Horizons and Ultima Thule. I’ve pored over what few photos have been released of this primitive little planetismal and can’t wait to see more. (Although the New Year’s Eve party they had at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory? Looked pretty boring to me. Of course, there were people involved. Boo.)

But Ultima Thule. Forget the dumb Nazi connection to the name. What would it be like to stand at the junction of those two lobes? Would each tower above you as if you were at the bottom of a narrow canyon? Or are they large enough the view would appear as if you were merely at the bottom of a wide valley? As I’ve never stood on a small object like either Ultima or Thule, I have no frame of reference, aside from the canyon/valley idea. But I would love to stand there. That’s when manned space exploration gets exciting to me – much more than merely orbiting weightless. Even if they’re doing really neato science as they bob about.

I should fix my attitude. Because they probably are doing interesting things at the International Space Station. Besides, continued public support for manned space exploration just might get us out of orbit and onto something much more interesting than a tin can floating above the earth.

But when it’s the probes and rovers that get to go to the interesting places like Ultima Thule, the far side of the Moon, and Mars, that’s where my main interest will remain.

2019 Goals, or HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

So I just came off a 12-day break at the beginning of which I promised myself I was going to go to work on Doleful Creatures and finally finish making a silk purse out of that particular sow’s ear.

Given the alternative title to this post, you probably know how that went.

Words added: None. Which is probably a good thing.

Words read and edited: None. A terrible, no-good, very bad thing.

I kinda spent the entire break like Ole from those old Fibber McGee and Molly* episodes:

Fibber McGee: How are you going to spend the summer, Ole?
Ole: Well, in my backyard there is a hammock.
Fibber McGee: Yeah?
Ole: In the hammock, there is a newspaper. You lift up the newspaper, underneath is Ole. Flat on my back all summer joost donatin’ my time.
Fibber McGee: Well, it sounds like Ole’s gonna loaf all summer. Figures. He loafs all winter.

And yet I still need some 2019 writing goals.

So, I offer a few:

1) Ponder whether I get my version of Alphonse Daudet’s “Le Chevre de M. Seguin” into a fairy tales retold anthology. I should know something by the deadline of January 5. Or is it the 8th? Or should I anticipate waiting a month or more to hear back that I’m not going to be included?
2) Work more on Doleful Creatures. I’d like to make this a concrete goal. Probably something along the lines of organization and pruning. There’s a story there I really like, but there’s a lot of mess in the way as well.

That’s probably already more than I can manage. I admire those who make and meet goals on a consistent basis. I’ve been nursing Doleful Creatures along for years, with over the past two years little enough to show for it. But part of me wants to say at least I’m realistic about it. When I’m not crafting Newberry Award speeches, that is.

*If Matthew Brock will allow use of his copyrighted material, that is.