Category: The Ramble (page 24 of 461)

This is a guest post by author Keith Rosson about his new novel, Fever House, out today. If I may offer a brief editorial, here: this book arrived for me to blurb once upon a time and I failed to read it in time to do so, but having since read it, I will say this will almost assuredly be one of my favorite novels of the year. It is electric and mad. It defies genre. It is a horror novel, but it is also not only a horror novel — it is part rock-and-roll bio, part spy thriller, part crime noir nightmare, and it’s written in a way with sharp, incisive, thoughtful prose that, somehow, mysteriously, kicks you in the teeth but also makes you feel good while it’s happening. I fucking loved it and I think you will too.

Buy links at the bottom of the post. — c.

***

My author’s copies of my new novel, Fever House, arrived today. Three big-ass boxes from UPS, my oldest kid, the seven-year-old, struggling to help me carry them in.

We put them on the coffee table and then I went through that moment where I was almost afraid to open them up. That last stretch of time before the book became a tangible, real thing – be it beautiful or be it be-warted, you know?

But then I cracked open a box and marveled at the thing. I felt such gratitude – realizing how lucky I was to have an entire team of people whose jobs are to make my book the best it can be. Lucky, man. 

 Cracking open that box also reminded me that every single book I write is a highwire act and a sleight-of-hand trick and a mystery all smooshed together. Because there’s always that nattering question buried beneath the wonder of holding your book in your hands for the first time. Always the same thing: How the hell did I do this? And will I ever manage to do it again?

Early drafts of Fever House were written in my kid’s bedroom while she was in kindergarten. We live in a small house where space is at a premium, and during the day – this was that first tumultuous year when the schools reopened – was unoccupied. The irony is not lost on me, that I penned this wildly violent, propulsive horror novel in which the severed body parts of a possibly slain devil are a not inconsequential plot-point, and I did all of it while sitting at a desk under my kid’s finger paintings of Pikachu and unicorns and rainbows and stuff. Let it be a testament, I guess – if you really want to write, you’ll find a way.

It was a tremendous release valve, this book. During those early drafts, my partner and I had just become foster parents of two little girls, aged two and three at the time, and I found myself, with zero experience as a parent, suddenly flung into the exacting demands of fatherhood. The sudden caregiver for these two young kids who had been run through the trauma of the foster care system; it was very much, for all of us, a trial by fire.

And then – ta-da! – about a month after we got them, COVID ripped its way across the country and our state was placed in lockdown.

So I was new father to challenging, wounded, terribly frightened children. And all of the sudden we’re in the midst of a pandemic and none of us can leave the house.

I was the stay-at-home parent that first year. So many times I felt like I was failing – failing everyone, constantly – and there was this profound sense of encapsulation. Claustrophobia. I think we all experienced it, or something like it. A period there in those first months where only essential workers went outside, ostensibly kept the world running; we hardly went anywhere. Our local playground had yellow caution tape around it. Had signs warning everyone away. We lived inside.

Fever House kickstarts with a pair of legbreakers who discover a severed hand in a freezer while collecting debts for their boss; proximity to the hand induces a near-uncontrollable desire for violence to those in its proximity. There is a sense of steeped paranoia all throughout the book – its dark-funded black ops agencies, its twisting, ricocheting narrative through multiple POVs, it’s veering, historied world-building. In retrospect, I can see where it all came from, tapping away in my kid’s room under those rainbows and Pokemon drawings; it was me trying to quell the fear that the world was dying, to counterbalance that feeling that I was profoundly fucking up and was ill-equipped to be a parent of any lasting decency or accord, you know?

All of that personal stuff – the COVID-bubble, the panic around my new responsibilities – butted up against the political, too. Portland – where the novel takes place – became an absolute hellhouse of egregious law enforcement overstep and violence in the weeks following the murder of George Floyd. While it sparked the mass-mobilization of some of the largest protests in history, Portland uniquely stepped it up and kept street-bound protests going for over 100 days straight, every single night. Often multiple that ranged in the thousands to, sometimes, a hundred or so black bloc folks. Chad Wolf – acting-head of Homeland Security at the time, at the behest of President Trump, decided to send in a mish-mash of officers from a number of federal law enforcement agencies, agencies which were allowed to remove insignia and badge numbers. It was madness. So much tear gas was fired in Portland, and with such impunity, later studies showed that protestors were exposed to CS gas at a level more than 50 times what federal regulators consider “immediately dangerous to life or health.”[1] People had their arms and legs broken with batons, had their skulls fractured. You’d find tear gas canisters and bean bag projectiles in the gutter the following morning. People were being pulled off the street into unmarked, rented vans and brought into the bowels of the Justice Center for interrogation.[2] The Federal Courthouse and PPB police union buildings were broken into and lit on fire. Again, madness, and while so much of it felt like the world was careening out of control, it also felt like some notion of justice was being metered out against malevolent institutions that felt impervious and untouchable. Like these untouchable entities might actually face some modicum of change or alteration in the face of this massive, global upheaval. I went to protests, marched, had friends who were “legal watchdogs” for the ACLU and had to crowdfund for a bulletproof vest after getting with munitions, watched countless acts of police violence on social media; the vast majority of injuries committed during those protests were by law enforcement officers without identifying marks on their uniforms or helmets. And to this day the Portland Police Bureau, despite being rocked with scandal after scandal and bucking multiple federal orders regarding use-of-force protocol or tear gas/munitions allowances, have not faced any significant consequences for their actions during the protests.

That notion of overstep? Of agencies tasked with protecting us instead stomping over any measure of legality to get what they want? What they deem is right?

All of that sure as hell made it into the book. Writing – with Fever House, at least – really did serve as a kind of osmosis for me, an emotional tacking-on of a bunch of stuff that was happening at the time. The claustrophobia of lockdown, the panicked trial-by-fire of new parenthood, and the egregiousness of government agencies that believe might makes right.

I held the book in my hands. Those puzzle pieces interlocking, but that remains the quiet wonder of writing. When it goes well, when it works, it feels like magic.

Fever House: Bookshop | B&N | Powells | Amazon

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[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2023/apr/17/teargas-effect-portland-police-investigation

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland

Hey, I’m updating the blog theme a little bit here (er, maybe more than a little bit) so forgive any digital debris. Bless this mess, as the cross-stitch in the Southern home might say. The site has long been sort of… erm, crappy looking since I ditched the vulnerable theme of the past, and so I’m messing around and maybe settled on this design? Though more tweaks may be inbound. I am not entirely thrilled with the font here in the individual posts and may try to futz with that. Which probably means I’ll break it. Shrug.

Anyway, so I’m also thinking of doing shorter form content here — a lot of my posts here end up being REALLY LONG (much like my books, zing), and as such I figure some shorter-form stuff might be nicer. Less stressful on my part to hop here and write three paragraphs instead of, I dunno, 300.

As such, here is a short-form thing:

The Super Mario Brothers movie was absolute dogshit. I don’t usually like to write negative reviews because, who cares? Not everybody likes everything, nothing to learn there. So what. It’s fine. You may have also like this movie I’m about to punch in in the neck, and that’s also totally okay. You should like the things you like. There is nothing wrong with you for that.

But it sucked bad and I figured I’d talk about it a little just because from a storytelling vantage, I think it’s instructive to me. And here’s why: the narrative structure of the movie suffers from what I call the AND THEN THIS HAPPENED mode of storytelling. It’s basically the same kind of storytelling quality you would receive from, say, a four-year-old. And not a very savvy four-year-old, you feel me? Your basic, mid-level four-year-old is what I’m talking here. And that kid will tell a story like this:

AND THE KNIGHT FOUGHT THE DRAGON AND THEN KILLED THE DRAGON AND THEN HE WAS HUNGRY SO HE ATE A SANDWICH AND THE SANDWICH WAS MADE OF SCORPIONS AND HE ATE THEM ANYWAY AND THEN

This type of story is essentially a value-less, consequence-free flow of abstract information. It is a sequence of events hung like pretty lights; they hang together in the gentlest dip and look nice and illuminate the patio but that’s it. There’s no there there. The saying, “put a hat on a hat” is one that indicates that you’ve maybe put too fine a point on something, right? This is the opposite. There’s no hat on a hat because there’s no first hat. And that’s the Super Mario Brothers movie. Things happen. They mean nothing. There’s no IF/THEN consequence, there’s no BUT WHAT IF questions, there’s no emotional stakes, there’s no arc, there’s just lights hung on a line, in a row, gently glowing. It’s kind of dogshit.

(And here you might say, well, what did you expect? It’s a game based on a really simplistic video game where a mustachioed Italian plumber punishes angry dickheaded mushroom men with turtle shells he violently ripped from his Koopa foes. It’s a linear video game and not much happens, and so no, I didn’t expect much. But the Sonic movie, which… listen, I dunno that it’s great, but it’s at least a story. Things happen, things matter, it’s a lot better than you’d think. So they could’ve done something here. But didn’t. It’s fine. It’s all good. It made a bajillion dollars until Barbie kicked it in the mustache. Whatever. There you go. Enjoy. Bye. Oh. Buy my apple book. Thanky.)

I said it a little while ago, but it bears repeating: being a writer right now is both weird and worrisome.

And in the short time since I wrote that other thing, it’s only gotten weirder and more worrisome. Consider:

Jane Friedman finding AI spoofers stealing her name and selling garbage content with it on Amazon, which Amazon initially wouldn’t take down until the bad publicity washed up on their shore?

Simon & Schuster sold to investment firm KKR for $1.62 billion, the same firm that also bought Toys R’ Us, a place that is definitely still around ha haha haa haahaha *nervous laughter*? (A note here that the KKR acquisition might be the best case scenario, and the fact that there is some employee ownership going into the deal seems like a good thing, and ultimately this is certainly better than PRH having scooped them up so that they get turned into a Kaiju MegaConglomerate, stomping over everything.)

Whatever that Prosecraft thing was? (I cannot speak to the legality of what that guy was up to, and I’m going to guess that his assertions of it being “AI” were more marketing than anything, but it doesn’t change the fact that he somehow had 27,000 books — many new, which were as-yet-inaccessible digitally — that he was using to create a site whose usefulness was definitely in the toilet, given that it made absolutely dubious assertions about passive voice, vivid prose, emotional beats, and the like. Storytelling isn’t math and we can’t wish it into becoming that way. Also, the English language is total chaos. It’s a flock of birds drunk on berries flying into an airplane turbine. Good luck divining narrative truth from the spray of blood and feathers, everyone.)

The AV Club using AI to put together their articles, but then also writing articles like, “Even The Merovingian from the Matrix movies doesn’t trust AI,” where you can find this sentence: “If a guy who played an evil computer program is warning us about the potential evil uses of a computer program, let’s listen to him!” Which sounds a whole lot like, “AI is really bad, except when we use it!”

We’re finding AI-generated imagery in weird places (D&D! Book covers! Your spouse! That’s right, your spouse was generated by artificial intelligence and that’s why they have seven fingers on their left hand! You fool!), we’re watching new social media sites pop up and fall down faster than coked-up gophers, the book banning has continued until morale has improved (it has not), Amazon has screwed up its subscription services so much that some SFF fiction magazines had to close shop, we’re seeing AI language pop up in boilerplate contracts that need to be cut down by diligent agents, and all around us the costs of living are going up up up while advances are staying the same or are going down and nobody knows what the fuck is going on anymore.

I mean, it’s not all bad, I get that. The economy hasn’t crashed (uhh, yet, anyway). The industry seems to me somewhat up (excepting YA and other children’s sales). I know some new bookstores that have opened. B&N, though they’re taking a bite out of hardcover sales, seem to be opening new stores at a better clip than before. And there are, of course, still really great books coming out (yesterday alone brought us scarily-awesome new work by Alma Katsu, Lauren Beukes, Daniel Kraus, Catriona Ward, Kiersten White, plus the exceptional horror guide by Sadie Hartmann, 101 Horror Books To Read Before You’re Murdered). But we’re still in a place where it’s getting harder to reach our audiences while at the same time we’re trying to swat away the flying goblins of so-called “artificial intelligence” and culture war book-ban bullshit, and if we complain about it some fuckface online will call us an “idea landlord” as if we’re the ones who built the system that is currently falling on our heads.

So, if we seem tired? If we seem like we’re a broken tooth with a squirming nerve poking out of it? If we look like we just crawled out of a sweaty bed after a night of no-sleep? Yeah, that’s all of this. We’re tired. We’re wired. We’re feeling weary and weird. We just want to write our little books and stories and articles and hope you read them. FILL OUR GRUEL BOWL WITH YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE.

That’s all.

And here I would be remiss if I did not remind you: I have Wayward coming out in paperback at the end of this month, and on 9/26, the harvest of evil apples arrives and the cult of Black River Orchard rises. So if you’re so inclined to seek them out and pre-order, I’d sure love you forever. Or at least until the next book release, when I’ll show up at our door again, looking like a feral Scottish terrier. If you need a good place to preorder the books — and get them signed and personalized! — you should look to my local Doylestown Bookshop, for both Wayward and for Black River Orchard. I will be doing a tour for Black River Orchard, as well (with bonus apple tastings!). Dates firming up soon, but my expectation is, I’m going to do a big ol’ happy loop of New England, and then also some other dates, potentially in the West / Northwest. More when I know it!

Hey, COVID is shitty! You already knew that, I assume, but I figured, just in case, I’d remind you. Two weeks ago, COVID colonized my body, and like all colonizers, it’s a real fucking asshole. I took Paxlovid, and it did a very quick job at knocking the thing to the ground, and I thought, yay, I fucking did it, but then a few days ago, I guess Thursday? I started to feel shitty.

And then I learned the joys of the PAXLOVID REBOUND, which is to say, it hit worse than it did before I took the Pax in the first place.

(I do not consider this a knock against the drug, to be clear — the goal with taking it for me was to file the teeth off of COVID and ideally push back the chances of Long COVID. Which, so far, knock on wood, seems to have been the case. And I also am to understand that a COVID rebound is just as likely without taking an antiviral as having taken one. So, shrug. Who knows.)

Got a fever, head-cold, cough. Fever was short-lived, and never scary-high, and the overall effects have probably been less than when I’ve had a flu. That isn’t me saying “oh COVID isn’t bad,” or “oh it’s just a flu,” it’s just me telling you my experience here, which luckily (so far) was not severe, and ultimately fairly mild. My family has it, too — kiddo had almost no illness to speak of (again, knock on wood), wife was a little worse than me all throughout, so fingers crossed this thing is mostly headed out to sea. I expect to have this rough voice and cough for a little while, which should be interesting given that I have to do a virtual talk this weekend and then the following weekend I’m delivering a keynote address at the Writer’s Digest conference in New York! Soooo, fingers crossed I am not hacking up BRONCHIAL GOO while trying to dispense my dubious brand of vigorous-air-quote “writing wisdom.”

Anyway! COVID sucks, it’s definitely surging right now as I know a whole lotta fucking people who caught it suddenly. Mask up, be smart, pray to whatever weird gods you hold dear. Or something.

More soon!

Before iron helmets and steel swords, when dragons roamed the world, was an age of bronze and stone, when the Gods walked the earth, and people lived in terror.

A scribe, a warlord, a dancer, a mute insect and a child should have no chance against the might of the bickering gods and their cruel games. But the gods themselves are old, addicted to their own games of power, and now their fates may lie in the hands of mere mortals . . .

By divine plan a plague of cannibals has been unleashed across the world, forming an armada which preys on all who cross their path. Meanwhile the people who allied against the gods have been divided, each taking their own path to attack the heavens – if they can survive the tide of war which has been sent against them. All they need is the right distraction, and the right opportunity, to deal a blow against the gods themselves . . .

An original, visceral epic weaving together the mythologies of a dozen pantheons of gods and heroes to create something new and magical, this tale of the revolt against the tyranny which began in Against All Gods is a must read from a master of the fantasy genre.

***

I like to think of myself as a method writer. I come from a family of actors, and the term ‘Method actor’ was around the house throughout my childhood, and in addition, my dad, who was both a playwright and a prolific author of fiction, used to do things like building medieval handgonnes and making Tudor era clothing as part of his writing system. Let me add that this is great fun if you are a young person; everything was exploration and discovery, although I still remember the experiment with urine as a mordaunt for dyes, and my mother put her foot down on experimenting with seventeenth century poisons when dad was writing about the court of Louis the XIV…

Anyway, I learned from them. When I get stuck in to a book idea, long before the first word is typed, there are things I need to know. I’ve now done this often enough that I have a method within my method, so the learning process is structured, which I hope will still be entertaining. When writing fantasy, I get to pick and choose my cultural references, which is fun all by itself, and do. With my ‘Age of Bronze’ books, as the series title might suggest, I was picking and choosing from the Bronze Age, right across the world, from the Pre-Inca South Americans called we call Poche to the Indus Valley Culture in what is now India and Pakistan.

And finally, because I wrote what I call ‘immersive detail’ and may be considered ‘really boring detail’ by some, I want to know about cooking, dance, literature, architecture both grandiose and vernacular, music, trade, politics, religion, and martial arts. Probably other things too, but that gives you an idea of the foundations of my ‘method.’

How Bronze Age combat worked

I teach various forms of historical swordsmanship; sometimes I even compete in tournaments. Years ago, I stood at the display cases in Heraklion, on Crete, looking at the hundreds of bronze swords on display; looking at the damage evident on some of them, trying to imagine how they were used, and whether there was a system I could discern from forensic examination, but only while I was writing Storming Heaven did I finally come into possession of an accurate reproduction of a Mycenaean ‘Type G’ sword. I played with it for weeks, and I learned more than five things just from that one artifact; because I write fight scenes, and because I have some background in swords, perhaps I’ll go into too much detail, but here goes:

First, the grip of the type G is so modern that once a sword person grips one, he or she is likely to smile and comment. I’ve now seen this with a dozen trained people. What look like quillons, or ‘guards’ for the hand on the grip, are really spurs, like modern fencing foils have; a spur for your index finger, to make sure you grasp the sword exactly right each time.  The grip also orients you hand; this is a thrusting weapon, and it is now comfortably available for thrusting, although there’s also a nice area to rest your thumb on the widest portion of the blade, for small, controlled slashes, like under a shield.

I also cut a bunch of things with my bronze sword, and I thrust at others. Let me say that I do know a little about the metallurgy of bronze; bronze can be complex, and most modern bronzes aren’t very much like ancient bronze in their alloy. Regardless, what I learned was that with work hardening the edges, I could get the sword very sharp indeed; but that the edge was, compared to steel, somewhat fragile, and that I needed to keep my cuts very straight; I needed to deliver them (in mechanical terms) with my edge aligned with my arm and body structure, so that I didn’t bend the blade when I cut. That suggests to me that first, they didn’t make Hollywoodesque, round-house blows against each other’s shields, and second, that they were well-trained to use these weapons, because in this case, training could overcome most of the apparent fragility.

From the artifact, then, I was able to move a long way towards reconstruction of the martial art that it was produced to support. And that was fun. Speculative, resting on some questionable evidence, but luckily, I’m writing fantasy. 

There’s always new inspiration to be found, even in places you’ve been before

I love to travel to see the hard evidence of the past, and so the second thing came to me at the so-called ‘Treasury of Atreus.’ If you haven’t been, it’s a magnificent, enormous beehive tomb constructed of stone blocks, some of them so huge that even though I’ve been there five times I’m literally awed each time. The Lion Gate of the fortress town is impressive, but the tomb is… incredible.

I was just about to start writing Storming Heaven last year, and I had just completed a reenactment in Greece (the Battle of Plataea, and you can see some of our pictures at www.plataea2022.com) and I’d promised my daughter and her friend a few days on beaches. I had no pans to visit Mycenae again, but that’s how it worked out; a rushed visit on a Tuesday morning. There’s a great deal to see at Mycenae, but I found myself standing in front of the Treasury of Atreus, just looking at the lintel and the entrance way. I’ve read articles on how it was built, or how it might have been built. Then I walked inside, still in a state of awe, wondering to myself as to why this one monument had such impact; I peeked in the side chamber, and there was a smell…

I can’t say it was the smell of death, or mortality. But it was more than the smell of slightly damp earth; it was very evocative. Smell is, for me, one of the most important senses; maybe it is for everyone, but the smell of the side chamber wasn’t something I’d encountered before, and in that moment, the structure and narrative of Storming Heaven changed. I needed the ‘Treasury of Atreus’ in my book, and I needed… death. More than death. A grandiose God of Death.  Someone who might live in something like the ‘Treasury of Atreus.’ And I knew how he should smell.

To be fair, I also learned that the beehive tomb at Mycenae was the largest arched vault in the world for over fifteen hundred years; I learned that no one knows for whom it was built; I learned that its construction was unique among the hundreds of beehive tombs in Bronze Age Greece. I also stared in wonder at the artifacts in the museum; there’s something about Linear B tablets, which are quite small and were only preserved because everything ended in flames, routine documents of a modestly efficient bureaucracy; something very real. People really lived then. They really paid taxes. They really had babies.  The gold artifacts don’t bring that to me like the linear B tablets do.

Practical and sensory experiences can add to your understanding

I’ve already mentioned that I was at a reenactment of the Battle of Plataea. Now, Plataea happened in 479BCE according to our best evidence, and that’s long after the collapse of the Bronze Age, which is set variously in the eleventh or tenth centuries BCE. Nonetheless I learned something there, in my bronze panoply and my wool chiton in forty-degree Greek heat. I learned that light wool is very comfortable in high heat; I learned that it doesn’t seem to pick up sweat like cotton or even linen, and I learned that a big, but light, wool ‘gown’ made an excellent layer under bronze armour. All of that was interesting, but what I really learned was, again, olfactory.

I learned that bronze armour has a smell. It’s not a good smell; its coppery, and it resembles the scent you get in your nose when you break it or have a nosebleed. Interesting? To me it was fascinating, because is my ‘style’ is immersion, the more scents I can include, the better, and the idea that bronze armour smells like spilled blood was virtually thematic. I’m pretty sure I amused my tent mate, Giannis, standing in the evening light, with half my thorakes in my hands, smelling it. 

Violence isn’t always the answer

Very early in the research for Storming Heaven I discovered the ‘Indus Valley Culture,’ one of the most interesting of all the Bronze Age civilizations I examined, and I’m ashamed to say that before I stumbled across it while looking up something on Babylon, I’d just barely heard of it. So my fourth thing might be the whole of the Indus Valley civilization, but one thing sticks out, and that is something worth everyone’s attention: there are very, very few weapons associated with the Indus Valley Culture. There are so few weapons, in fact, that some theorists have proposed that they were pacifistic, or even proto-Jains. Amidst the cloud of spears, swords, sickles, axes, arrow points and chariots of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt and Mycenae, the paucity of weapons really stands out. 

I was lucky enough to be an a Fantasy Con last year where a group of us, all writers who like writing a good fight scene, all began to discuss the purpose of violence in any literature; the over-representation of heroic violence in fantasy, and the sheer difficulty of representing heroism and epic without resort to violence. I won’t pretend I hadn’t thought about all this before; I’ll just say I walked away determined to show some heroic pacifism, and here, before my eyes, was a whole culture that at least archaeologically speaking seems to have eschewed violence. Maybe that was the most important thing that I learned while writing Storming Heaven. Maybe.

The Big monuments weren’t built without a price

I was almost done writing Storming Heaven, which, if you don’t know, is about a group of mortals banding together to overturn some particularly loathsome (but sometimes funny) gods. I had all my cultural references in order, pages of outlines and notes, and I’d written about three hundred pages. For Christmas, my partner gave me a copy of a new book by two anthropologists called The Dawn of Everything. 

Let me be brief; I read it and discovered that I don’t know anything. It’s a wonderful book; I’m sure it is full of flaws, and I saw a few things that, even as an amateur, I saw as questionable, but the authors’ contention that the growth of government and kingship and tyranny and war is not inevitable, and that early societies managed quite well without, thanks, and that some civilizations have turned their backs on the excesses of oppression as firmly as the Japanese turned their back on gunpowder in war, all of that was new to me. And wonderful, and allowed me to reexamine everything I thought I knew about Egypt and Sumeria, Babylon, and the Mayans. A single thought will encapsulate what I learned…

All the archaeological monuments that we use to symbolize ancient cultures, every pyramid, every temple, and every obelisk, is dedicated to someone’s ‘great project,’ that involved forced or at least coerced labour by thousands of people under the direction of a few or a single person; whereas successful communal cultures mostly leave uniform small houses, and maybe a public bath, difficult to date and not particularly imposing. Academic and popular history are drawn to the great monuments; who goes to see an early Bronze Age seaside trading town like Thermi on Lesvos? There’s almost nothing to see!

Bonus thing

I went to Thermi on Lesvos. There’s very little to see except the outlines of some private houses set in modern concrete; it’s nothing like visiting the great fortresses of Orchomenos or Mycenae, the Pyramids of Giza, the magnificent ruins of the Mayans or the Inca. But it does tell a story; small houses, close together; people living together, and choosing to do so, without much in the way of gold, or weapons (one copper knife, I believe) or statues, or temples. It looks like a nice place to live.  For everyone.

Storming Heaven: Bookshop | Amazon

Hey!

Guess what?

I have COVID, of the 2019 vintage but blended with a soupcon of whatever the latest variant/subvariant combination is. As I just returned from overseas, I like to think it’s a fancy European variant — the Champagne to America’s sparkling COVID. Bubbly and effervescent. And such terroir.

Point is, I’m a little down for the count at present — feeling mostly okay, have the Paxlovid (which is to say, my mouth tastes of hairspray and robot ass), but the rest of the family has it too, so we’re hunkering down. If you need something from me at present, you are unlikely to get it.

More as I know it!

Bye!