Please Help Find Nichole

Reblogged from M.S. Fowle:

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I've never said this to any of you, but PLEASE REBLOG THIS! We need as many people as possible to see it, even if you live overseas - PLEASE REBLOG or REPOST!

This past Sunday night, a local teenage girl went missing and no one has seen or heard from her since.

15-year-old Nichole Kristine Cable of Glenburn, Maine was last heard from Sunday night at around 9:20pm.

Read more… 527 more words

Will be praying that she is found safe and alive.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz

Up late last night so needed a little more shut eye before work. New installment of “Denied the Stars” tomorrow. Happy Monday!

Denied the Stars (Part 2)

The color must have drained from my face, because seconds later the man was clapping me on the shoulder.

“Relax, my young friend. I’m not gonna bite. Look … see.”

The man used his left index finger to lift his thick mustache and upper lip to reveal a normal set of teeth, though in considerably better shape than a man of nearly eighty had any right to.

“See. Nothing pointy or sharp. You’ll find no animals in the village with two little teeth marks either.”

I somehow mustered the strength to speak, “Then how do you…”

The man thumbed in the direction of the bar maid, “She gets it for me, from the butcher I think, though it’s not exactly a secret in town either. The coffee shop down the street’ll serve me if I’m in a bind, but I can only get in there in the winter, and only if I don’t linger. But Anna has never left me high and dry. She wants me to make her one, when she gets older, but I’m hoping she’ll change her mind.”

I felt like someone was putting me on. The blood had to be cornstarch or something else. Some local trick to get the best of the locals. But if the man was playing a game he wasn’t playing a very good one. Even an amateur would’ve sprung for the teeth.

“So … if you don’t bite anyone, how did you…?”

The man knocked back the rest of his drink and nodded to the bar maid to get him another, “Not all at once. You have to indulge an old man his ways, especially when he buys you a drink.”

The woman walked over and set down two glasses, his opaque, mine frosted. Even though the glass was clear I was hesitant to take a sip, not quite sure of the contents. As it turns out the quality of the beer had significantly improved. Evidently the bar maid didn’t give out the best stuff to just anyone.

“Thanks.”

“Anything for a fellow cosmonaut. As I said, I was like you as a child, dreaming of one day not just going to the stars but living there. You Americans may have landed on the moon first, but we were the first to make space our home. Our greatest hero dies in a plane crash, we keep going. Our first space station crew asphyxiates on reentry, we send up another. There was a spirit in those days, something I think your country forgot, of space being the next frontier.”

“And so I wanted to be a part of it. Most cosmonauts started as pilots, so I joined our air force at 14 by lying about my age. I was an experienced flier by 19 and a candidate for the Soviet Space Program by 22. We’d been launching space stations since the 70s and the last of the Salyut line, Salyut 7 was launched just a few years before I joined the program.”

“I trained harder than men twice my size. I wanted to get to the head of the line as soon as possible. But my body began refusing to cooperate.”

“What happened?” I asked.

The man gave me a wry smile, “I’m anemic, or was anyway, which as ironies go is a pretty good one. I’d been able to stave off problems before with regular transfusions, but the training program was straining my body beyond its limit. Somehow I was able to keep myself upright through sheer force of will during the day, but at night I would collapse into my bunk, not sleeping, but simply unable to command my body. My internal organs were deprived of oxygen, and if that goes on for long enough your body begins to shut down.”

“How did you hide what was happening to you?”

“Early on in the program I made the acquaintance of one of the program’s doctors, Andrei, who helped me get my transfusions without the rest of the team knowing. Sometimes he would stop by my bunk at night to give me something to help me sleep and restore me to some kind of working order. I think we both knew that actually flying a capsule might kill me, but he wanted to help me try.”

“One night I collapsed in the hallway on the way back to my room, gashing my head on a crate as I went down. Still have the scar.”

He parted his hair back his forehead and a thin white line extended for nearly three inches, starting from his temple.

“How did you survive?”

“I didn’t. I don’t know how much blood I had lost when Andrei found me. I was shifting in and out of consciousness and could only sense a vague form lifting me up, then putting me down on a table. I don’t know if he tried to ask me, asked me if I wanted to become like him, but the question had been answered a dozen times as I kept trying to force this shell to get me into space.”

“The transition is painless. at least it was for me. The body does not strain, the mind does not trash. There is only a sense of warmth slowly ebbing away. At the time I had thought I was only dying. But then I suddenly awoke, and Andrei was looking at me with sad dark eyes.”

To be continued…

Denied the Stars (Part 1)

The bar was no more promising than the rest of the town, but I didn’t feel like sitting in my hotel room staring at four walls before the launch. Taking a trip to space, even as tourist, seemed to be something that should have more of a sendoff, some acknowledgement that this time was in fact special.

Probably if I’d taken the Virgin Galactic route there would have been a party, but something about going up into space with the people who did it first made more sense to me. That and it was 50,000 dollars cheaper. Still, a gruff trainer signing off that I had completed my three days of athletic preparation did not quite feel like all the pomp the occasion was due.

Walking through the door of the bar was like walking back in time, not just a few decades, but centuries into the past. Most were dressed as you would expect them to be in some old soviet movie, ratty gray coats, with wool hats and long gray beards. The only woman in the room was the bartender, and it was unlikely anyone had made a pass at her in 15 years, or dared try.

The room was packed with the only available seats at one of the many tables around the edge of the room, each with at least one occupant. Parties are usually better when more than one person is involved, but I didn’t particularly relish ambling my way up to a stranger, especially strangers who looked like this.

I grabbed my beer which was chilled in a long cold glass and started an aimless walk toward somewhere to land. Everyone seemed to ignore me, everyone except for a man with a dark beard and darker eyes in the far corner. It was not a warm look per-say  but it did seem to be the best invitation I was going to get, and he did not raise any objections when I sat down across from him. He even had the decency to say the first words.

“You’re going up tomorrow?”

“Yes,” I replied a little startled, “how did you know?”

“No one visits this place except to go up into space. And you look tired, but not like the rest of us. We have been tired all of our lives, but for you it has only been the last few days.”

I took a nervous sip of my beer, “Yeah, they’ve been working us pretty hard. Seems like a lot of effort just to sit in a chair, be weightless for twenty minutes, and then come back down.”

“Then why do it?”

“Well, because, I d’know. It’s space. It’s the kind of thing you dream about when you’re a kid. And I know it’s not like the men who went to the moon or anything, but it’s the biggest taste of it I’m likely to get.”

Unexpectedly the man laughed, “That is a good reason. Men much younger than you forget what it is like to be a child. I saw Gagarin fly when I was eight and I’ve never forgotten it.”

“Gagarin?”

Yuri Gagarin was practically the reason I was here, that and the money. We may have landed on the moon first, but Gagarin beat us to the heavens. He returned there about eight years later, only that time dead. Not many in the year 2030 remembered him with quite the same reverence, but as I’d said, space was my dream since I was a child.

“But that was seventy years ago! Pardon my asking but what do they put in the water around here?”

“It’s not the water,” the man said as he took a sip of his own drink. He then pulled a shot glass from deep in the folds of his coat and poured out a little of his mug. The substance was thick and viscous, a dark crimson that swayed back and forth in the glass as he poured. Leaving half the shot glass empty he pulled out a flask and filled it to the top with something brown.

“Nothing like a jack and blood, eh my young friend? And you thought all we Russians drank was vodka!”

To be continued…

Writing For No One

Writing is something I do in private, but everything I write is public, or at least destined to be.

I’ve never been much of a diary keeper, even though I love to buy journals and notebooks. A personal chronicle of the day-to-day events of my life would be pretty boring, even to me. There have been some periods in my life where I journalled every day but even these are largely story ideas, or adolescent obsessions I’d just as soon forget.

If I was going to write a diary, it would probably something like this blog, a chronicle of what I was thinking about at a particular time. The entries are certainly of a time, some tied specifically to current events, others just to my own thoughts. But more often than not I’m trying to write these posts for an audience, to share my reflections, or to spark some conversation. There’s nothing particularly private about this sort of writing, even if it can occasionally feel intimate.

Some authors have letters that are only released after they die, but I am definitely a product of my generation when it comes to long form communication. “The Letters of Ben Trube” would be a pretty thin volume, and would probably need a lot of pictures to reach a publishable length. I haven’t written an honest to God letter in years, and most e-mail I write is for work, or quick blurbs to nail down the evening’s details with “The Little Red Haired Girl.”

Fundamentally it comes down to this:

I don’t write something if I don’t intend for someone to read it.

I’m not sure if I need writing that is just for myself, but it is something I wonder about. So much of our lives these days are lived publicly. There are definitely parts of my life that are private, but the only way they’ll stay that way is if they stay in my head.

My Dad does Bible study every morning, and he writes in a notebook his thoughts on the passage, often following questions from a particular Bible study or his own thoughts and prayers of the moment. I have never read these journals, and I’m not even sure if Dad goes back to them after he’s written them, but this is a form of writing that is certainly private. I’ve tried similar practices myself but I tend to stop quickly as they seem like too much work to try to fit into my already busy life. I don’t mind talking about scripture but somehow writing about it in the morning is too much work, even though writing is something that flows more naturally.

I don’t know if it’s that I’m engaging different parts of my brain, or just taking more time to stop and think, but writing is more natural to me than talking. I seem like a rational and reasonable human being on the page, even if I can be quite irascible in real life. A Bible study would seem like the perfect sort of writing to do in private, but even there I know I would have the temptation to share my thoughts of a particular morning with all of you, and pretty soon it would be just another source of fuel for the blog.

As you may have guessed I don’t have an answer right now, as seems to be the case with a lot of these sorts of reflective posts. About the only thing I can commit to is the desire to try new patterns, new routines and types of writing. I don’t feel like I’m missing something by not having private writing, but at the same time I wonder about it.

What do you guys think? Do you keep journals, writing only for yourself?

Find The Thing You Love Most, Then Give It About 10%

Last week I came across an interesting piece in The Onion. The title is pretty self-explanatory: Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life.

When I posted this on my Facebook wall, the little red-haired girl thought it was a little depressing, and asked me if I really feel that way about writing. Truthfully…no…most of the time.

I generally think that at least for the moment having a “day job” is good for me in that it encourages a disciplined life, and does provide that steady income that seems to keep houses running. I also generally think that when given unstructured time, I am not at my peak performance.

But when I was up visiting Brian last weekend, the Lady Buckley raised an interesting point: weekends are not the best time to judge how we use unstructured time. I admit that I base a lot of my assumption that I am more productive in my writing with a job on one summer in college where I had no job, and did no writing. And the weekends are not the same as the rest of the week. They are often when the big household tasks need to be accomplished, and they are also the period of recovery from the work of the week.

Early in the fractal book’s drafting, I took some of my excess vacation as writing days. Those days were among the most productive I’ve had as a writer, even though I probably only worked four hours at a stretch. I think the “I’m more productive when I have a job” is a lie I’m telling myself to make me feel better about the fact that I still need the job. It probably used to be true, but working a job for five years or more starts to put you in the disciplined mindset by default.

I’ve tried to compensate by giving my “first fruits” to my writing, but much like real fruit there’s a point when it’s ripe and when it’s raw. I can’t say that I am giving my “first fruits” to my writing if it involves waking up at 4:30am in the morning. That is not me at my best. I am typically at my best between 8am and 12pm, my mind is awake, my body is fed, and my creative energy for better or worse is going into my day job.

I’ve also tried to compensate by writing everywhere. For a while it was notebooks with me at all times, now it’s tablets. Every device I own is optimized for me to work either on the blog or my many works in progress, and keeping them up to date is a task in itself. If I’ve got a stretch of 30 minutes or more of down time, I’m filling it with something. I’ve long ago given up the “sacred writing space” and write  now like I’m a bum rambling to myself on the street.

I think all of us who write, and have to also work have this debate with ourselves from time to time. I don’t meet many writers (except for hobbyists) who really want to be splitting their time the way they are. I don’t have the set answer to this dilemma, other than write when you can, wherever you can. Find a day job that has a quantifiable (and preferably static) impact on your life, and one that keeps your mind engaged enough for you to switch gears to other creative work when you get the chance. And recognize that if working a job is something you’re going to have to do for a while, then it’s important for you to not hate what you do. Negative thoughts and exhaustion carry over into other areas of your life, and may slow down your ultimate dream goal.

But most of all, relish the writing when you can, and give it 100% of that 10%.

Trying Old Things

I just started watching Community, via Netflix one disc a week.

I like jumping into established series a few years in, make sure they’ll be something that’s worth the time. I got burned last year by Up All Night. Solid first season, followed by massive reformat and now limbo before it officially dies. Sure it was nice to spend some time with that show last year, but now it feels like a wasted investment.

I like trying new things. I’m a little too susceptible to the latest food item or gadget. But for whatever reason TV is different, and books and blogs too. I don’t read that many blogs regularly, but those I do I read like I am waiting for my next fix. I actually get a little annoyed if a blogger I like stops blogging, even though I myself take time off to empty my bucket, or sleep.

As new writers we need people to take chances on us even if it doesn’t look like we’ll deliver. But it may also be that certain people won’t take that chance until we show them a body of work. It is difficult to judge if we have been a success, or when success will come. In the meantime we have to write like we are a success, but with a consistency that shows we know the work we need to put in.