If one is writing in the modern world, this isn’t so much of a problem. One can presume one’s readers will be familiar with the real-life infrastructure that exists, so one can pretty much ignore it unless or until one needs a convenient pothole to blow out a tire during a chase scene, or a critical call to be dropped in the middle.

If one is writing historical fiction – even fairly near-past, like twenty years ago – one needs to pay a lot more attention. A lot more, because infrastructure is something we almost all take for granted…and that makes it a prime place where authorial blind spots come back to bite them.

I was reminded of this recently when reading a student manuscript set in the late 80s, in which the student cheerfully assumed the existence of pocket cell phones and text messaging because he’d never, ever lived in a world without them.

One can, occasionally get away with this sort of thing by establishing that one’s characters are early adopters and very happy with the changes all this cool new technology has brought to their lives, but this, too, requires that the author notice that certain things simply weren’t available at certain points in the past. It also requires that the author think about (or research) how fast new technologies and infrastructure spread. The real world doesn’t work like the old John W. Campbell SF stories, where the heroes would invent a cool new gadget, and within two weeks they’d have produced and distributed enough of them for everyone in the world to have one.

But that’s all near-term stuff. What I wanted to talk about is the infrastructure of your average medieval fantasy novel. Which tends to be skeletal, if it’s there at all.

For example, consider the healing professions in the modern world. We have doctors, pharmacists, dentists, nurses, LPNs, chiropractors, acupuncturists, nurses’ aides, surgeons, med techs…and that’s even before you start in on specializations like cardiologists, pediatricians, anesthesiologists, radiologists…the list goes on and on. In most medieval fantasy novels, there are Healers and maybe midwives, and that’s it. Granted, real life medieval Europe didn’t have as wide a variety of medical practitioners as we do today, but they had more than “doctor” and “midwife.”

Physical infrastructure, such as transportation, is likewise frequently taken for granted in fantasy. When the rare wine that only the king drinks is poisoned, the author will likely spend a lot of time researching the poison, but often very little thinking about just why the wine is rare, and exactly how it got from the vineyard several countries over to the king’s table. Is there water transport, or really good roads, or are dragons common enough (and tamed enough) to haul freight like barrels of wine from city to city? Where did those roads or ships or dragons come from? How long have they been around?

Lots of medieval European cities have walls; lots of medieval fantasy novels therefore give their cities walls without thinking much about why the walls are there. Walled cities imply war, and not just one, but enough battles and seiges and attacks to make it worthwile putting up a wall. Also, if it’s been there for a while and the city is a living one, the city is likely to expand beyond the wall. If the wars and so on are still going on, that means the town will need, first, somewhere for all those folks outside the wall to stay during an attack, and, eventually, a second wall. And of course there’s the question of maintenance – somebody has to repair the wall after every attack, and check for various sorts of weather damage. It’s a lot of work, and expensive and time-consuming, and the town is likely to keep it up only if it really needs the protection.

A lot of the time, it won’t be necessary for the story to say much about the roads or ships or walls, or to go into the whole chain of people (grape pickers, vintners, coopers, carters, glass-blowers, bottlers, etc.) who have to exist behind the scenes in order for the king to have a bottle of wine on his table. Every once in a while, though, paying a little attention to this stuff can keep a writer from accidentally creating a tremendous plot hole. Alternatively, thinking about ways the wine can cover the thousand miles from vineyard to king’s table can lead to the invention of the dragon freight haulers, which could go a long way toward making a run-of-the-mill medieval fantasy into something with an interesting and unique feel.

When I was first invited to the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival, I knew nothing whatever about it. My agent, however, did, and strongly recommended that I attend. The Children’s Reading Festival is one of the two book festivals held annually in Sharjah, and according to my agent, they are fast becoming the Bologna Book Fair and Frankfurt Book Fair of the Middle East. (For those of you who’ve never heard of any of this, those two are the premier places that agents and publishers’ reps go every year in order to sell translation rights. The Bologna fair focuses on children’s and YA; the Frankfurt fair covers everything.)

So I was excited. Also nervous – I haven’t done any of the international book fairs before, though there are quite a lot of them and some authors book a lot of Frequent Flyer miles making appearances at them. But definitely excited, both by the opportunity to visit a part of the world I hadn’t been to before and also, let’s be honest here, by the opportunity to get away from the SNOW we’ve still been having here. (I had to shovel my walk the Tuesday before I left; my flight home was delayed because there was a blizzard in Minneapolis and the plane that was supposed to go round-trip from Minneapolis to New York and back had deicing problems and got in to NY two hours late…but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

Anyway, after a brief false start (I realized one block from the house that I’d forgotten to pack any copies of my books; fortunately, we had time to turn around and collect them), I was off. I left for the airport at 9:30 on Saturday morning and arrived at the hotel at 8:30 Sunday evening. Even with a 9-hour time difference and a five-hour layover in Dallas, it was a very long trip. Luckily for me, Emirates Air Lines is extremely comfortable.

The weather, on the other hand, was a bit of a shock. It was in the upper 80’s every day, with a nighttime low of 72 – that was about 60 degrees warmer than Minnesota (snow, remember? In April! Aaargh!), and it took some adjusting. Then I discovered that the day before I arrived, one of the other writers had had his school visit canceled on account of rain. Like a snow day, only…different. It makes sense when you consider that the streets aren’t designed for drainage, so an inch or two of rain ends up causing two-foot-deep puddles that stall cars, but it certainly drove home that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Or Minnesota.

Sharjah and Dubai impressed me as probably the most cosmopolitan place I have ever been, and that includes New York, London, and Paris. I shouldn’t have been surprised – after all, the Middle East has been the crossroads of the world for thousands of years. The main reason, I think, is that in Sharjah nearly everything operated on the assumption that there would be people of multiple cultures and languages to deal with. Nearly all the signs and billboards were in both English and Arabic; several also included Japanese. The buffet meals always had at least one Western-style entrée and one Indian, Thai, or Japanese entrée, as well as the Middle Eastern dishes (plus the salads, the sandwich fixings, and the deserts from around the world…I’m amazed I didn’t gain fifty pounds).

The Children’s Reading Festival was similarly international. OK, about 80-90% of the book dealers were Arabic publishers, but many had books in English (I picked up one on local history), and there were several who clearly act as distributors for American, British, or Japanese publishers (possibly others as well; I didn’t manage to examine all the booths as thoroughly as I’d have liked). The art display included children’s book illustrators from Mexico, Sweden, Canada, Germany, and Japan, as well as Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt (which I’d expected).

Monday I was part of a panel on “Great Stories Around the World” with a British writer, a writer and scholar from one of the U.A.E.’s universities, and a well-known Arabic children’s writer. The panel was both the same and different from those I’ve been on before. The similarity was most noticeable in the way nothing anyone said had much to do with the supposed topic. The panel followed the academic model, where each panelist gives a five or ten-minute presentation, rather than the SF-convention model, where the moderator asks questions and everyone answers them. As is fairly common with such panels, the university scholar’s presentation ran at least twice as long as any of the writers’ speeches; what was much less common was that it was thoroughly fascinating, and the gentleman’s passion for his subject (designing books to appeal to as many senses as possible, so as to involve children more fully in reading, especially kids who have trouble with the traditional ways they’re taught to read) came across even in translation.

I had a little difficulty with the translation earphones, which I hadn’t used before. (I found it extremely distracting and disorienting to be listening to someone speaking in Arabic while I was trying to think of what to say next.) I finally took the headphones off when anyone was speaking in English, and put them back on when someone was talking in Arabic and I needed the translation. I found out later that there was an on/off switch I could have used, which would have been much less intrusive.

I did one thing right, and that was to remember to speak slowly enough for the translator to keep up. It was a bit tricky, as I tend to talk faster and faster when I’m nervous. I was glad I’d been warned about that in advance; one of the other presenters went so quickly that the translator kept getting lost, and I missed about 25% of what he said.

The school visit I did later in the week was much like any school visit. I’d worried about needing a translator for that, too, but evidently many of the schools teach English by immersion, and I was sent to one of those. The students were very bright and eager and asked lots of good questions, and I was able to present their library with some of those books I’d nearly forgotten to bring.

The rest of the trip, I split between napping (I never did adjust to the time change), doing touristy stuff, and hanging around the Festival. I signed an enormous amount of stock for the dealer who had copies of my books, sat in on a couple of other panels, watched some of the demos and presentations (the storyteller sounded amazing, even if I couldn’t understand a thing he said, and he must have been good because the kids in the audience were absolutely enthralled).

The other foreign authors who, like me, had been invited to present at the festival were from all over – Sweden, Germany, England, Wales, Egypt, Jordan … and those were just the ones who were there at the same time I was. It was both fun and frustrating to meet them, as we were all on different schedules, so half the people I met Monday were leaving Tuesday morning, and new writers arrived every day. After a while, I lost track of who was coming and who was going.

And then, just when I was finally starting to adjust to the time change, I had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to catch the flight home. If I ever go again, I want to stay longer (and start adjusting to the time change in advance, so it’s not so much of a shock).

The slight time lag in finding out about it didn’t make the event any easier to process. In fact, it brought up a whole lot of unpleasant memories of hearing about earlier disasters of one sort or another, from Sandy Hook and Columbine to 9/11, from the tsunamis in Japan and the Indian Ocean to Columbia and Challenger, all the way back to Kennedy’s assassination. Some of those horrors were man-made and deliberate; some were the result of terrible mistakes or accidents; some were just nature being nature.  Apart from the fact that people died every time, there’s no connection between them except for the personal one: I remember the same sinking feeling combined with shock as I heard about each of them.

There are a whole lot of known psychological reactions to unexpected tragedy, starting with shock, disbelief, and feeling helpless, but I think the psychologists miss something when they look only at the emotions people have. They miss what people do.

People didn’t panic (which could have caused a lot more injuries, given the crowd). Some of them ran towards the explosion, and not only the police and firefighters and medical personnel who were on the job. A lot of people who were there as spectators did, too, and worked to help the injured. Some of them we know about, and some we don’t.

People who live in Boston signed on to web sites to offer their spare rooms to strangers who were stranded, or who suddenly needed a place to stay while a friend or family member was in the hospital. Others turned up with bottles of juice, water, and sweaters for the bewildered slower runners who weren’t allowed to finish because of the explosions. People who don’t live in Boston coordinated “random acts of pizza,” sending food to the police, firefighters, EMTs, anyone who needed it.

And people talked about what happened, and their reactions to it.  Some of us aren’t in a place where we can do anything but talk…and watch the news, and hope that the death toll doesn’t rise and that they catch whoever planted the bombs. But even that little is doing something, of a sort.

And as far as I’m concerned, doing what one can is important, whether that’s running toward an explosion in order to help, walking calmly away from it so that the EMTs will be able to get in and do their job, or donating $10 worth of pizza to feed the people who are in the thick of things.

 So my sister decided she wanted to see “The Hobbit” before she goes off on vacation with my Dad, and we rounded up the usual suspects and made arrangements for Friday, two days ago. After much discussion we all decided to meet in the middle (geographically speaking), which had the significant benefit of allowing us to go have Indian food at the good spot four blocks away from the movie theater.

 Lois and I had seen the movie the week before (and our reaction was to immediately come home and watch “The Fellowship of the Ring” on Lois’s TV). Setting aside technical questions about frame rates and the desirability (or not) of 3D filming, the discussion brought up a lot of interesting things about working with a series in both literary and visual formats, and the difficulties inherent in translating from one to the other.

 The first interesting point is that Tolkien wrote The Hobbit first, and at the time it was first published he did not know the significance the ring – and Gollum – would have in the later books. The movies were made in reverse order: The Lord of the Rings came first, and now we’re getting The Hobbit.

 This difference creates some interesting storytelling problems. The first is in tone. The Hobbit was written as a children’s book; it became an introduction to the epic trilogy that followed, but that was later. Moving from the tone of a children’s book to that of the adult fantasy is a little tricky, but only a little. It does, after all, follow the natural chronological flow, from child to adult, from children’s story to adult sequel.

 You don’t get the same effect, obviously, when you go the other way (from adult epic fantasy to children’s story), as the films do. The movie-makers chose not to try: the movie The Hobbit is filmed in much the same tone as The Lord of the Rings, and I can’t really see it working any other way.

 The question of tone blends into the question of continuity. The makers of the movies opted for continuity of tone and presentation movie-to-movie, rather than for consistency of book-to-movie tone and presentation.

 I’ve heard people grumble about this, but do bear in mind: the movie-makers had the choice. They had all four books right there in front of them before they ever started working on the first movie. Tolkien did not have that choice, because when he wrote The Hobbit he hadn’t yet made up all the things that came up later in The Lord of the Rings. Yes, he made some continuity changes to later editions of The Hobbit, but he could not have chosen to change the tone without doing a complete, massive rewrite of the book.

 It is, of course, possible that even if Tolkien had known the story was leading to The Lord of the Rings and the end of the age, he would still have chosen to write The Hobbit as a lighter children’s book. I take leave to doubt it, but authors have done stranger things. That choice, however, remains firmly in the realm of speculation, because Tolkien did not know. And I personally do not think that it would be right for a modern movie-maker to pretend that he is in the same position as Tolkien – that he’s making a children’s movie that those other books and movies don’t inform.

 Series continuity, whether in film or in print, is always a tricky business. Whether you write in chronological order, as Tolkien did with The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings, or whether you tell one story and then back up and write a prequel, as Tolkien did later with The Silmarillion, there will be people who encounter the story out of order. I read The Two Towers first, because it was the only fantasy on the airport book rack when my family was heading out on vacation (I knew perfectly well it was the middle book of a trilogy; I simply didn’t care). I then galloped through The Return of the King, followed up with The Fellowship of the Ring, and only then discovered that there was an earlier book called The Hobbit.

 Similarly, one very-much-not-a-fantasy-fan acquaintance heard that The Return of the King had been nominated for Best Picture Oscar, so he went blithely off to see it without having seen (or read) The Fellowship of the Ring or The Two Towers. Needless to say, he was deeply puzzled by the experience.

There is nothing whatever that a writer or a movie-maker can do to prevent this. You don’t have a choice in the matter. The only choices you have relate to how you tell the story: whether you try to make it accessible to people who may not have all the background, or whether you don’t.

Conjecture was great fun; I recommend it to the attention of anyone in the San Diego area around this time next year. The hotel was a big of a maze, and their internet was “undergoing upgrading” and therefore wildly unreliable, but the staff was very nice and the convention space worked really well, I thought.

Among the standout moments were the Chowder Hour in the consuite, the joint Star Wars Reading (in which voice actor Mark Biagi and I, with some helpful volunteers from the audience, did a joint reading from the Star Wars novelizations, with Mark doing the voices and me reading the narration), the Iron Hack event (in which four of us composed a story on the fly, incorporating various people, places, and objects suggested by the audience, including Conan the Librarian, the Ark of the Covenant, William Gladstone, and Captain Nemo’s Hideout, among other things), and the Enchanted Tea, to which everyone was encouraged to come in Regency costume (I really must get around to making myself something more suitable to wear to such an event).

Following the convention, we had a long and very wiggly drive home, with stops at White Sands National Monument (where I was pleased to discover Green Glass Sea, Ellen Klages’ excellent YA about Los Alamos and the development of the first atomic bomb, on sale in the gift shop) and Carlsbad Caverns, where we got to walk around the cave and then stayed to watch the bats come out. Dad allowed as how White Sands was a lot more interesting now than it was when he was 18 and thought it was just a lot of sand and kind of boring.

One of the things I did during part of the drive was listen to the first part of a batch of recorded lectures I purchased recently. As many of you know, I never took any English, Literature, or Creative Writing classes after I got out of high school. I was a Biology major, and while my college required a certain number of distribution credits, English was in the same group as History, so I filled mine in with classes in the history of places that my high school didn’t cover, like China and India. I figured that reading books was something I’d do anyway, but I’d have a lot harder time figuring out what the best history texts were without a bit more background.

On the whole, I’ve never been sorry I made that choice, though I have often wished I hadn’t needed to make it. It would have been so much nicer to have had enough time to take both sets of courses… Anyway, after years of complaining about what I missed, I finally decided to take advantage of the availability of lectures on tape and the internet to fill in a bit of what I missed.

So I’m now about halfway through a lecture series that’s about twelve hours of what I’d call an overview of English Literature and the way college-level classes look at it. It’s been enlightening on a number of accounts, mostly in understanding how academics, who are by and large not themselves creative writers, view fiction, and how it is and isn’t helpful to people who actually want to write the stuff.

For starters, the first three lectures are mainly about authors and their relationship with readers. It’s very clear from the references and terminology that the lecturer is throwing around that this is considered a normal, maybe even fundamental, aspect of thinking about literature. He even poses (but does not answer) the question: How much does the reader need to know about an author in order to appreciate their work properly?

Now, I can see that sometimes it is useful to know things about an author, specifically when a) the author makes a habit of including in-jokes and references in his/her work that no one unfamiliar with his/her life can get, and b) when the book was written far enough in the past that it takes a certain amount of historical knowledge to understand it because things that were common knowledge at the time no longer are.

But does knowing stuff about the author really make a difference to a reader’s enjoyment of a book? If so, why don’t all books come with an authorial biography before or after, in order to enhance every reader’s experience? Oh, a lot of folks are interested in what their favorite authors are like, and want to meet them or read their blogs or send fanmail/email to express their appreciation, but that’s not quite the same thing. The “favorite author” part – reading and liking the books – comes first, and the interest in the author derives from that. Also, there are far more people who just read the books and don’t much worry about what the author is like.

It’s a tricky question, because I have noticed that for a lot of folks, knowing the author does change their judgement of a work…but not predictably. For some, knowing the actual author makes them less critical and more tolerant of flaws that would have them tossing a stranger’s book in the discard pile; for others, knowing the author makes them pickier and more inclined to object to minor problems they’d never notice in a random library book.

For myself, I don’t write novels in order to “create a relationship with my readers.” I write to tell stories, and it’s the stories that matter, not me. Thinking too hard about “the audience” is absolutely deadly when I’m writing. It’s a distraction I don’t need.

Actually meeting people at conventions and autographings and so on is fun and I certainly do enjoy it. Talking to people through this blog is also fun. But it’s not the reason I write novels, and the relationship that I have with the fans I meet here or at cons has nothing to do with how and why and what I write.

I’ll probably have more to say about this series of lectures as I work my way through the course. There are some on plot and subtext coming up that look interesting…

Some things I expected to hear on this trip:

“Nebraska is very flat.”

“Didn’t we already cross the Platte River? Twice?”

“Did you remember the charger for the iPad? I forgot mine.”

Some things I didn’t expect to hear:

Dad: “This isn’t the right place! There’s a lake here, I don’t remember a lake!”

Me: “Dad, when was the last time you were here?”

Dad: “1938.”

Me: “So that would probably be BEFORE they built that nice new-looking dam over there?”

Also, while I’m driving on a twisty mountain road with a sheer drop on one side:

Dad: “I can drive if you want.”

Me: “Not now, there’s nowhere to pull over. Why do you want to drive?”

Dad: “I like this road. It looks just like the spot where your Uncle Richard and I ran over the edge when our steering went out.”

Me: “Why are you still alive?”

Dad: “Oh, there were some pine trees that caught us about twenty feet down and some guy came by in a truck and pulled us out.”

Me (with some trepidation): “Who was driving when you went over the edge?”

Dad: “Oh, I was! But it wasn’t my fault.”

Me: “I think I’ll just keep driving for a while.”

So far, we’ve been to Estes Park and driven the high road through Rocky Mountain National Park, then spent a couple of hours at Bryce Canyon before we got to Zion National Park this afternoon. Which seems like a lot to me, but apparently Dad and my uncle hit 32 national parks in a 2-month driving trip in 1938 that should, from the sound of it, have killed both of them several times over. So he’s showing me the high spots. Literally, in some cases; according to the signage, we were 2 miles above sea level at a couple of points on the trip. He’s currently peeved because he bought a lifetime National Parks membership about 30 years ago when he turned 62, and didn’t remember to bring it (that’s assuming he could FIND it, which I doubt, but it’s really kind of a moot point).

If the hotel internet connection I’m currently using were more reliable, I’d probably try to twist this into some sort of writing point, but I’m afraid of losing it (again), so that’ll have to wait. With luck, I will be able to return you to your regularly scheduled blog post by Wednesday, by which time we should be in LA or San Diego, which I trust will be a bit more reliable as far as connection goes.

As near as I can tell, no one on either side of any issue in this election wants to admit that the other side even has a point of view, let alone actually consider it for a few seconds. And while this may be effective in politics, it tends to make for pedestrian writing, at the very best. At worst, ignoring “the other side” (whatever side that may be) results in fiction that’s didactic, preachy, and only enjoyable by people who already agree with the writer’s position.

Even if the number of people who agree with a particular stance is large (and thus the presumed audience and sales will be equally large), not considering the other side of the argument – and treating it, and the people who hold it, seriously – is nearly always a prescription for a second-rate book.

The reason is that obstacles that are too easy for the protagonist to overcome are almost always boring to read about (unless they’re a deliberate parody, e.g., the hero’s dreadful battle wound turning out to be a paper cut). Too-easy victories imply that the problem wasn’t really that bad to begin with. A protagonist who spends an entire book slaughtering paper tigers isn’t going to qualify as a hero for the reader, no matter how many medals the folks in the book pin on him.

And all that applies just as much to political, intellectual, and moral arguments in fiction as it does to physical obstacles. If Sleeping Beauty’s prince was faced with a neatly trimmed, foot-high “hedge” that he could step over instead of with an impenetrable forest of briars, it wouldn’t be nearly as memorable a story. If the protagonist of the story never doubts her purpose or her moral position, and always has an irrefutable answer for the weak and flimsy objections and challenges raised by her misguided and/or evil-and-corrupt opponents, it starts to look as if she’s in the proverbial battle of wits with an unarmed opponent – obviously, nobody even halfway rational, smart, or sane would ever take that other position.

Yet “everyone is the hero of their own story” – and that applies as much to the corrupt, evil, stupid antagonist as it does to your favorite main character. I know a number of writers who pay lip service to this idea, but who can’t seem to deliver when it comes to really understanding the antagonist’s view and portraying it without a secret sneer (which never seems to be quite as secret as the writer ought to have wished). I’m not really surprised by this. Putting oneself on the other side of an argument is hard, especially if one is passionately involved with one’s actual beliefs on the subject.

I don’t know any easy way to learn to do this. One has to make a deliberate, conscious choice to look at things from an unfamiliar (and usually extremely uncomfortable) angle…and one has to keep making that choice, noticing whenever one starts slipping back into thinking that no reasonable person would ever think that way or do that thing. Sometimes, it is easier to start with something that one isn’t quite so passionate about, something that doesn’t hit one’s personal hot buttons quite so hard. Other times, one simply has to change one’s plot (and/or the character of the antagonist) so that he doesn’t do that thing, think that way, believe that nonsense. Still other times, what works is to take the “opposite” viewpoint and give it to the hero (and not just to convert him to the “right” side at the end!), or do an ensemble cast story in which every one of the “good guys” has a different, not-altogether-palatable slant on whatever the question is.

In the long run, seeing the other side clearly, and being able to see (and, ideally, understand, and maybe even to some extent sympathise with) the reasons why the antagonists might think that or behave that way, is vitally important for anyone who wants to write realistic antagonists. And if it has a little real-world application as well, so much the better, I say.

Yesterday, we went to the State Fair. Minnesota has a really, really amazing state fair, and it was actually cool enough in the morning that my cousin who had knee surgery last year and my father who is 92 and sensitive to high temperatures could both walk around all morning (and into the afternoon) without any real problems. We saw the butter heads and got milkshakes at the dairy barn, then went looking for the bacon ice cream (didn’t find it), had honey ice cream at the agricultural building in the section devote to bees (if you’re seeing a pattern here, I’m not surprised; yes, my Dad is very fond of ice cream). We saw the crop art, (which is made by gluing different seeds to a board…and it is amazing the fine detail some people can get that way), went through the Arts & Crafts building admiring the knitting (me), the quilting (my cousin), and the woodwork (my Dad, with my sister going “…and you can make me one of those, Dad, and one of those, and…”

We all admired the pirate ship done in folded paper, but agreed that it was too fragile to survive in any of our respective abodes. We went through the Fine Arts building, where the piece de resistance was a marble bust of a Native American in full feather headdress carved and polished with amazing care and attention to detail. Lunch at the Lutheran Evangelical kitchen (because you could sit down) and then we took the sky tram back to the bus. Yes, that wasn’t even half of what was available, and it took us about five hours and by then we were all bushed.

It did get me thinking, though. I’ve lived in Midwestern farm states all my life, and even though I’ve always lived in suburbs and my stomping grounds of choice have been urban, I’ve always been aware of the vast acreage of corn and soybeans and wheat outside the small area in which I circulate. When I was growing up in suburban Chicago, if you woke up too early and turned the radio on, you got the farm report, even if the rest of the day it was a music channel playing rock and roll, and even though they don’t do that any more, there’s still that awareness – you can’t listen to a weather report (even in a normal year when there’s no drought) without hearing a reference to soil moisture and how the rain or sun is going to affect the crops.

One of my sisters now lives on the coast of Maine. When I visit her, there’s a similar awareness, but it’s about the fishermen, how the fish and lobsters are doing, and how the weather and other trends will affect them. In Alabama, my sister and nieces there hear about hurricanes and the tornadoes they spawn, as well as regular updates on the condition of the Gulf of Mexico.

All of this stuff is almost subliminal, but it’s part of what gives each area of the country its own unique feel, even in major cities. It’s not just that the weather is different; it’s a sense that what people do for a living, the things that feed the city both literally and symbolically, are different. Even in metropolitan areas that are so enormous that some of that sense of being in touch with more rural areas seems to have been lost, there’s still a difference in the feel of the city. New York has Wall Street and Broadway, and Los Angeles has Disneyland and the film industry; you can’t tell me that doesn’t make any difference.

But I don’t see a lot of this in fantasy or science fiction, unless it’s in a story that’s set in a real-world city that the writer happens to love and have a feel for. Even with a real venue like Chicago or New York or L.A., a lot of writers seem to slap the name on a generic urban setting (it’s a big city; you can tell because it’s got skyscrapers, freeways, lots of traffic, lots of people living in generic apartment buildings, and maybe a couple of ethnic restaurants). There often isn’t much attention paid to major-but-strictly-local events like the Minnesota State Fair (heck, half the time there isn’t much attention paid to planet-wide events like elections or their version of Christmas or Independence Day. Lois Bujold’s Vorkosigan books have their Midwinter Festival and the Emperor’s birthday, but I’m drawing a blank for other examples).

And there especially isn’t a lot of attention paid to that subliminal awareness of the stuff that ought to make every planet, and a wide variety of specific areas of each planet, unique. When I visit my sister in Maine, she goes down to the docks and we have fresh lobster for dinner; when I visit my sister in Alabama, she makes southern shrimp boil; when I visit my friends in New York they take me to dozens of tiny, phenomenal restaurants (ethnic, fusion, traditional…world cuisine, sort of). In Chicago, the first place we stop is for the hot dogs at Hot Doug’s. I took my cousin and my Dad to the State Fair for honey ice cream and cheese curds and food-on-a-stick, and if it hadn’t been so hot during the early part of their visit, I’d have taken them to see Minnehaha Falls and the Minnesota zoo.

Where do your characters take their visiting friends to show off their town/planet? And what do they eat that can’t be had anywhere else?

Wednesday

Me: Cazaril, that’s about six too many hairballs. I’m calling the carpet cleaners.

Cazaril: Hmmm? Did you know there’s a bird outside this window? I bet if you let me out I could catch him.

Nimue: <bored sniff> You have no claws and almost no teeth. You’d never survive. <thinks a minute> Yes, slave human, let him out.

Me: No. He has no claws and almost no teeth and there are raccoons and foxes around. I’ve seen them.

Nimue: Whatever. I have more important things to do. <naps>

Me: Right. Now I get to move the office furniture around and make sure all the computer cords are out of the way.

Cazaril: Yay! Cords! Can I play with the mouse?

Friday

Me: Cazaril, that is my knitting. It is not a cat toy.

Cazaril: What? You didn’t get out the fishing pole toy the very instant you came into the room. <looks pathetic> Without a fishing pole toy, I have to make my own fun.

Me: <sighs> <retrieves fishing pole toy from library, where it has mysteriously relocated><plays with cat>

Cazaril: You know, I really like it with all the furniture pushed out to the edges of the room like this.

Me: Enjoy it while you can. It’s only still like that because the carpet is still damp.

Nimue: Speaking of damp carpet, my favorite sun spot is still wet. Make a lap, slave human, so I have somewhere warm to sit.

Me: You’ve taken over the couch. Isn’t that big enough for one small cat?

Nimue: Lap. Now.

Me:…

Nimue: <naps>

Saturday noon

Me: Well, that’s the dishes and three loads of laundry and some work on the book done. I’m going to sit down for a minute with the iPad.

Cazaril: Weren’t you going to move the furniture back and write that blog post?

Me: I have a couple of hours yet before I have to leave for the concert. I can take a few min… Hey!

Nimue: You have made a fine lap, slave human. I will deign to sleep on it.

Me: I thought you settled on the couch.

Nimue: I am tired of the couch cushion.

Me: There are three of them.

Nimue: I am tired of all of the couch cushions. I have shed on all of them. Now I will shed on you.

Me: Don’t settle in. I’m getting up in a minute.

Nimue: That’s what you think.

Me: I’m bigger than you are.

Nimue: <stretches, unsheathing long, sharp, curved claws> Nice slacks you have, slave human. And nice furless skin under them. Be a shame if anything were to happen to them.

Me:…

Nimue: <naps>

Cazaril: Oooo, laps! Well, a lap. Can I share?

Nimue: <opens one eye> Try it and die. I have claws and you don’t.

Cazaril: Um, yeah. How about if I sit on the top half of the slave human?

Nimue: I suppose. <naps>

Me: Wait a minute, what… Mmmpf! Cazmpgh…furry mplbf…wah! Phew!

Cazaril: You don’t like me being a neck warmer?

Me: Neck warmers are supposed to wrap around the back of the neck, not the front. They are also and especially not supposed to interfere with breathing.

Caz: Oh, all right, I’ll move down a bit, but you have to shift your arm so I won’t slide onto the Nimmie-cat. She’s scary.

Me: Now look…

Caz: <purrs>

Me: Well, at least I have a hand free for the iPad.

Cazaril: You know, you could scratch my ears any time now.

Saturday, several hours later

Me: Aack! I have to leave for the concert! Move it, cats!

Saturday, midnight

Cazaril: You’re back! Finally! I’ve been sitting here for hours.

Me: I am fatootsed.

Nimue: Fatootsed enough to forget my medication?

Me: Not quite. Open up.

Nimue: <does imitation of furry eel and slides into miniscule opening under couch>

Me: Come back here!

Me: <several hectic minutes later> Gotcha! <pills cat> Now for bed.

Cazaril: Yes, come and make a warm spot for me to sleep on. I’ve been waiting days.

Nimue: Weren’t you going to write that blog post?

Me: Aaack!

Cazaril: It’s one in the morning and I want my sleeping spot. Do it tomorrow.

And that, folks, is why I have no proper writing blog post this morning.

The thing that 4^th Street always does for me, and this year especially, is to remind me how much fun it is to talk to people who are real, deep experts in their particular field. Writers tend to have an extremely broad range of knowledge, because we have to, to make stories work, but it’s not that deep expertise that you get from digging into, say, the development of Han dynasty bronzework for twenty or thirty years. It is a Good Thing for me to be occasionally reminded of just how much I don’t know.

Friday night, a bunch of us went to the Chinese restaurant around the corner – Elise Matthesen (art jeweler extraordinaire), Ellen Klages (auctioneer an author of The Green Glass Sea), two Swedish visitors who’d read one of my Swedish translations (it was really nice to find out that the traslation was good), and me. We had a yummy meal and lots of good wide-ranging talk, and of course at the end, they brought us fortune cookies. I was busy talking and waving my arms around as usual, so I ended up with the last of the fortune cookies. It read:

“You will become an accomplished writer.”

I laughed so hard I couldn’t even read it out to the rest of the table. Still, it’s good to know I’ll get there eventually… 

I don’t think I’m going to try to talk about the panels, but the list of books that got recommended, by panel topic, is here: https://sites.google.com/site/4thstreet2012/ along with a couple of good quotes from various people. I forsee another bookshelf (for the new to-be-read acquisitions) in my future…

Most of what I remember clearly is conversations – there was a really good one about ways of looking at viewpoint, several what-are-you-working-on-now things that got off into various eras of history and how much most people don’t know about them, one on families and accounting, one that I overheard part of that seemed to be about color perception and anthropology. LizV and I missed two panels and the lunch break talking about query letters and synopsis (which I will be addressing more in future posts, by request).

It’s interesting to me that the more stripped-down 4th Street gets (no GOH, no dealer’s room, no art show, no media room, etc.), the more intense and interesting the discussions seem to get. It isn’t for everyone, but for me…well, there’s nothing else quite like it. And there were scores of people I wanted to talk to and didn’t get the chance – even in three days, you just can’t get around to an in-depth conversation with 100+ different people.

Ah, well – there’s always next year.