I decided to give “Chock Full O’ Nuts” brand coffee a try. Ugh. I am not impressed. This stuff makes a wimpy, weak cup — and this is the second time I’ve brewed it. I used less water this time, and it’s still weak. So I’m going right back to grinding my own beans when this can is done. Chock Full O’ Nuts? Well, it sure ain’t Chock Full O’ Flavor.

(I was actually going to return to bean-grinding anyway, but I decided to get some pre-ground coffee just to take a break from grinding beans every morning. That, and when the can is empty I can use it to store the whole-bean coffee in the freezer.)

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Mike, of Mike’s Baseball Rants, turns his attention this morning to my beloved Pirates, and the results ain’t pretty. It looks like Lloyd McClendon will be done soon, and in all likelihood he’ll be replaced by a safer, mediocre, white guy. Can’t wait.

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One of my favorite literary characters is Professor Roderick Childermass, from a series of children’s novels by John Bellairs. Professor Childermass is a cranky teacher of literature who has adventures involving ghosts and other nasty things with his young friend, Johnny Dixon, and much of the humor of these books is derived from the Professor’s temper and his inability to keep it reined in when he should. The Professor has in his house something called a “Fuss Closet”, which is a small walk-in closet which the professor has equipped with gymnasium-style padding on the floor and walls. Thus, when he is in his home and feels a tantrum coming on, he takes off his glasses, goes into the Fuss Closet, and proceeds to get it all out of his system.

Last night I could have used a Fuss Closet.

I mentioned earlier in the week that I mailed out four short stories on Monday. (Actually, three went out in the mail; the fourth was an electronic submission.) Last night, I went to do one last quick check of my e-mail before going to bed, and I discovered not one but two rejections from that batch of stories, from the e-sub market and one of the postal-mail markets (in the latter case, now I’m wondering what they’re going to do with my SASE). Both messages came in the space of about forty minutes.

A Fuss Closet would have come in very handy just then.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

A German A4 rocket lifting off from the test facility at Peenemunde.

Peenemunde was the site of Germany’s secret rocketry program, where they developed their V2 rockets that Hitler hoped would win World War II for them. Of course, the V2 rockets did not prove to be Germany’s salvation, and eventually the Peenemunde complex was found and destroyed. But a number of its scientists, including Wehrner von Braun, found their way to the United States where they provided the invaluable technical expertise that got the American space program rolling.

The image links to a profile of Peenemunde today.

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I’m finding Jane Galt‘s “Diogenes-looking-for-an-intellectually-honest-person” act a bit cloying lately. First, she takes EJ Dionne to task for making an unverifiable statement (that, if Gore were President, he’d be pilloried by the press if he did the same things that Bush has done), and then turns around and prints a long e-mail containing a medical horror story whose sole purpose is to make another unverifiable statement (that this person’s medical care would have been disastrous under the Hillary Clinton healthcare plan).

And then there is another instance of her “wink-wink-nudge-nudge” defense of that book, The Bell Curve, in which she sharply criticizes the book’s critics while first saying, “I’ve read it, but I have no opinion on it”. This could be true, of course, but I find it hard to believe that someone as intelligent and well-read as Jane could read that book without forming an opinion of its merit, or that she would expend so much effort to taking on the book’s critics (this is not her first post on this subject) also without having an opinion on it. She seems to be expending an awful lot of mental energy on an issue on which she has no opinion. I mean, if she knows the book and its arguments well enough that she can castigate Steven Jay Gould’s attack on it as consisting of “egregious selective quotation”, how can she at the same time profess to not knowing the book and its arguments well enough to have an opinion on it? What gives?

(For the record, I have not read The Bell Curve, and I have no opinion at all about it. Whenever that book comes up in conversation, my general tactic is to nod sagely and reach for the pretzels.)

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I’m not sure yet, but I may have actually managed to write a genuine short story. I wrapped up the first draft my baseball-centered story this morning, and while I’m not sure yet, I think it may be the shortest thing I’ve done yet (except for “The City of Dead Works”, which exists in the archives here — see “Notable Dispatches” at left). Last night I was thinking about how to make the transition into the story’s ending, when I realized that a transition wasn’t actually necessary. I just went right into the ending, then and there. I can’t do a word-count until I actually type the thing — I do all first drafts in longhand, remember — but I’m very sure it’s my new record for shortness. I’m expecting a word-count of around 7000 words. For me, that’s brevity.

(A secondary hope of mine as I spend a month reading short fiction, as opposed to novels, is that I’ll finally recalibrate myself so as to actually be able to tell a story in less than 10,000 words.)

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Send Greg some good cheer. He got some bad news this week. (Of course, being from Indy, I’m still not letting him off the hook for sending all that crappy weather here a few days ago.)

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“Short Fiction Reading Month” is off to a good start. Here are the initial results, from the last couple of days.

First, two stories from the current issue of Realms of Fantasy: “The Man Who Did Nothing”, by Karen Traviss, and “Alephestra” by Bruce Holland Rogers. RoF has been one of my favorite magazines for years (despite my track record of failure in actually selling stories to them). The magazine is obviously focused on fantasy, but their range is broad within that spectrum: not only is there adventure-oriented, imaginary world fantasy, but they also do a lot of urban fantasy, “mythic” fantasy, and occasionally they do downright horror. These two stories were both excellent. “The Man Who Did Nothing” is about the old axiom that “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.” In this tale, the administrator of an apartment bloc comes into some difficulty when the people living in his neighborhood become convinced that the new neighbor is, in fact, the Anti-Christ. Rogers’s “Alephestra” is a different story, inspired by astrology and Roman myth. Rogers spins a very brief tale about a Greek deity named Alephestra (whom I am pretty sure is not an actual Greek mythic figure, but a concoction of Rogers’s, but I’m not entirely sure on this point). Alephestra is the second moon that Earth once had, but she incurs the wrath of Jupiter, who throws her from the sky. What she becomes after that is unexpected and haunting. (Rogers is known to me as the writer of a very remarkable story from a few years back, “The Dead Boy At Your Window”.)

And yesterday I dipped into Neil Gaiman’s short-fiction anthology, Smoke and Mirrors. The book contains a grab-bag of differing styles and formats, of which I took advantage. First I read the hundred-word “Nicholas Was…”, which is a dark Christmas story; then I read a story-poem called “Bay Wolf”, which is an odd combination of Beowulf and BayWatch (and it actually works, somehow); and finally there is “Snow, Glass, Apples” which may be the darkest telling of the “Snow White” story I’ve ever encountered. I’ve always found something pretty compelling about the story of Snow White, and I have my own spin on the tale that I’m planning to write when I finish the current baseball story. Gaiman’s version is, well, pure Gaiman: it’s exactly what I would expect of a Neil Gaiman-“Snow White” story.

Further updates as stories warrant.

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(Warning: Spoilers herein for last night’s episode of The West Wing.)

Well, no one can accuse Aaron Sorkin of not going out with a bang. Wow. I wonder if, when he decided that he would be leaving, if he said something like, “I gotta leave a good mess for the new writers to clean up…so I’ll leave President Bartlet’s daughter in the clutches of unknown kidnappers, and I’ll leave the Presidency itself in the clutches of the Republican Speaker of the House! Mwooo-hooo-hoo-hahahahaha!!!” While I’m sorry to see Sorkin go, I’m actually thinking that things can be OK with new writers on board, as long as they’re good ones. A lot of folks are saying that the show is doomed and won’t be worth watching anymore, but I’m not willing to go that far. Executive Producer John Wells is still on board, and he’s had pretty good results with keeping ER consistent over the years (despite a lull a few years back), and while I’m not a Third Watch viewer, that show’s stuck around for long enough to indicate that it’s doing something right.*

While I’m on the subject of The West Wing, I’ve seen the comment on a number of message boards and such this morning that of course the Republican Speaker is a big, uncaring, mean guy because that’s the only kind of Republican Aaron Sorkin is capable of writing. And I’m thinking, what show are these people watching? Because they clearly missed the character of Ainsley Hayes over the previous two seasons, who was anything but an uncaring, meanie, evil Republican. Ditto Joe Quincy, the Republican lawyer played by Matthew Perry who appeared in two episodes just a couple of weeks ago. And ditto that Republican lawyer who Donna dated early in the third season. And ditto several Republican congressmen and other characters who have shown up on the show over its run. There have been some meanie Republicans, but there have also been some myopic and dorky Democrats on the show. Nobody ever mentions them, however.

A recurring motif of Sorkin’s, in the course of The West Wing, is that the people who oppose us frequently don’t equal the mental image we concoct of them for the sake of political convenience. The idea that The West Wing depicts a world where Democrats are always good and Republicans are always evil simply doesn’t hold up to any actual scrutiny of the show. It’s a complaint of convenience, not of reality.

(And speaking specifically of John Goodman’s Speaker of the House last night, no, he doesn’t come off as being particularly warm and friendly. But then, he’s on screen for something like four minutes; and considering the viewpoint of his character, his lack of warmth is understandable. Here’s a guy who is being forced to forsake his own political career by temporarily assuming the office of the Presidency, and he’s assuming that office on the behalf of a President he’s just spent five years of his life opposing at every turn, and he has to do it in front of the very White House staff he’s spent that five years attacking and being attacked by. I would have found it utterly false if he’d been portrayed in any light other than the light in which he was shown last night.)

*Speaking of Third Watch, how many regular characters exist on this show? I’m asking because the show’s been around for three or four years now, and yet it seems like every time I see a preview for it, the announcer is saying “This week, one of their own will die…” They should have run out of regulars to kill off by now, shouldn’t they?

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Just in case you missed it on WWDN, here is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read: Ten Reasons to Hate Star Trek.

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