FERRETS UNDERGROUND 3

I had an idea a decade ago, to do a story about black-footed ferrets in the style of Ursula K. Le Guin’s CATWINGS books. The first one I wrote…was from the MOTHER’S point of view. I had committed one of the chief blunders of writing for children – the main character was someone’s mom. What kid would want to read about a triumphant mother? It took me a while, but I feel like I’m ready to try this now! Comments are ALWAYS welcome!

The sun was well up, spilling light red as blood on the prairie as two ferret kits slid down a burrow that lead to the family den. They scurried, following the clear scent trail of their mother, Windtoe and their brothers and sisters. “Mother!” Prairieheart cried out.

“Mother!” Rockfoot whined.

Mother rocketed out of the nest, curled around both of them and rose up hissing in fear, “You smell like the Haunted Burrows!”

Rockfoot chittered, “Prairieheart made me go!”

Windtoe nipped her son’s ear and he squeaked into silence. Still on her haunches, she turned to Prairieheart. Even though they could not see each other, with sensitive whiskers and face fur, each could feel the other’s warm breath. Prairieheart’s nose twitched, knowing her mother was angry. “Daughter?” she barked.

Prairieheart’s fur stood on end, making her look larger in fear. “Yes, mother.” She didn’t know for sure how much to tell her. But Rockfoot would tell everything soon, so she said, “I’ve been going into the Haunted Burrows.”

“Why?”

“Because the prairie dogs are afraid to go into them, even we’re afraid to go into them.”

“None of us are afraid…”

“Yes you are. None of the ferrets go into them.”

“There is nothing in the warrens! There’s no reason to go…”

“No one even sleeps there,” she paused. “I have good ears, Mother. I hear what others say when they pass in the night on the prairie.”

“Those were coyotes,” she said.

“They were ferrets! We are afraid of the Haunted burrows. Just like the prairie dogs!”

“You don’t know…”

Prairieheart interrupted her mother, “The King of the Prairie Dogs sent you a message.”

Windtoe moved forward until they touched noses. “What did he say?”

Prairieheart repeated the message. Her mother nipped her ear and said, “Go back to the nest. Look after your brothers and sisters. I am going to call a Great Litter.”

“What?” Prairieheart exclaimed.

“What’s a Great Litter?” Rockfoot asked.

In the darkness below, as the sun rose above, she said softly, “When things are very, very bad, all ferrets might act together if one calls a Great Litter. Long, long ago, we were all in a Great Litter, children of the first doe and buck.” She moved away. “I go to call a Great Litter.” Then she was gone.

Prairieheart waited a moment then said, “Quick! We have to follow.”

“We can’t,” he said. Then she had hold of his ear and dragged him after herself. He was so scared, he didn’t say a word as they followed their mother.

WRITING ADVICE: Jack McDevitt 6: Use Wooden Dialogue

(The Twelve Blunders are used with permission of Jack McDevitt, from his webpage: http://jackmcdevitt.com/Writers.aspx)

This is one thing in my writing for which I have been praised. In the many times my work has been rejected, I have half as many compliments directed at my dialogue.

Maybe it’s because of an exercise I do when I teach a summer school class for elementary through high schoolers called, Writer To Get Published. When we reach the day for dealing with dialogue, I send the students into the hallways and classrooms to eavesdrop on what people are saying – AND TO WRITE IT DOWN.

Fifteen minutes later, we come back to the classroom to talk about what people REALLY say and what authors REALLY right. For my students, I call it “realistic fake conversation”, but I like McDevitt’s phrasing better: “the illusion of living conversation”. He points out earlier in the article: “Real people interrupt one another constantly, deliver irrelevancies, squint, change the subject, shake their heads, often fail to use complete sentences, and sometimes lose their train of thought altogether.”

While this is entirely true, some authors either don't notice it in their own writing or ignroe the injunction against it. The field of speculative fiction is especially prone to writing stilted dialogue. It's even got it's own name: purple prose.

In SF, we like to think that we are beyond the purple prose of the Golden Age of SF where characters uttered sentences like “As you know, Captain, the space warping technology we possess is very different than the type possessed by the invading aliens because we base our technology on the original theories of Hawking where the invading aliens base theirs on the theories of their equivalent of Einstein, which, as you know…” I tried to do a search on collected examples of SF writers who used an obvious info-dump in a recent book. No one seems to be willing to collect them, perhaps because they don’t want to embarrass the genre. After a quick glance at the next book in my “SF TO READ” pile, I find the second sentence in Wolf and Myers’ SPACE VULTURE. It comes very close to what McDevitt warns against: “These mushrooms after being processed and formed into pills, let users eat all they wanted without gaining weight.”

While that snippet isn’t dialogue, the following bit three pages later alleges to be: “ ‘Interplanetary Statute 462, paragraph 93, subparagraph 4 makes what you did illegal. As to the ethics…’” Just that brief skim has done nothing to entice me to read the book. I know that if a character I enjoyed in a novel abruptly gave an infodump at some point, I might be willing to overlook it once -- but not any more than that. Better to leave the infodumping to Wikipedia.

The best way to check for such ridiculous mistakes in dialogue is to read it out loud. I encourage my students to do it, and I usually do it myself. McDevitt recommends it and asks that you examine it as you read: “How does it sound? If it’s awkward, long-winded, pompous, or formal, get rid of it. One of the pro writer’s most valuable attributes is a willingness to heave material over the side.”

If you happen to have a sample of wooden dialogue or purple prose from a recent speculative fiction novel written by a famous person, share it here. Just for the fun of it, the next time I read a Jack McDevitt novel, I’m going to keep a pen handy to see if he’s followed his own advice. I’ll certainly keep the pen handy for to use on my own novel!

A SHORT LONG JOURNEY NORTH 3: July 3, 1946-July 4, 1946

(This series is a little biography and a little imagination. The biography will detail a month long trip my dad took in the summer of 1946 when he and a friend hitchhiked from Loring Park to Duluth, Minnesota. The motivation, names and details all come from my imagination though. For example, I don't know if Dad ever made it to Lake Minnetonka or rode in a 1938 Ford pickup, but you neve know! I plan on interviewing Dad for more details as time goes on...Enjoy.)

Freddie Merrill glared at Tommy Hastings and finally said, “You sure we ain’t gonna get lost? Real sure?” They were standing in front of the tailgate of Leo Hartkopf’s pick up.

Tommy laughed nervously. “How can we get lost walking from the beach here to Leo’s pick up? He’ll probably even drop us off on the other side of Loring Park if we ask nice.

Freddie looked through the back window of the truck at the older boy. He was busy ogling girls lying on the beach. Freddie took a deep breath then said, “All right. I’ll go.”

Tommy vaulted onto the bed of the pickup, scurried forward and slapped the roof. He leaned around the cab and shouted in Leo’s open window, “Let’s go!”

The truck roared noisily to life and Leo ground the gears backing out. A few moments later, they were on the road. Leo would honk at girls in sun dresses and bathing suits and all three boys would wave wildly, Tommy and Freddie standing, pressed against the cab and hanging on for dear life.

In the announced ten minutes, they were on the south shore of the gigantic Lake Minnetonka. Even in the hot sun, they could feel the cool breezes whipping in off the vast body of water. Below them, Leo slowed suddenly, throwing Freddie and Tommy forward. Both boys let out loud whoops! of joy. Leo drove to a parking spot and pulled in. He jumped from the pickup and looked up at them and said, “Have a good time, boys?”

“Great!” Tommy shouted. They vaulted the sides of the truck bed and landed on the ground.
“Let’s go meet the gang,” Leo said, waving them along.

A huge swimming area, close to shore and layered with light gold sand stretched for hundreds of feet. Four white docks jut into the blue waters and hundreds of men, women and children played. Dozens of girls in wet bathing suits sunned themselves or sat under broad umbrellas. A volleyball game was going on a ways up shore, with mostly boys on the court and girls cheering and jumping around. Freddie grabbed Tommy’s shirt and said, “Let’s go there!”
Tommy said, “Leo! Can we go watch volleyball?”

Smiling, he met up with two boys his own age who had four girls tagging along behind them. He waved, “Knock yourselves out!”

Freddie sprinted and called over his shoulder, “First one there gets to dunk the last one there five times!” Tommy surged after him, but Freddie had always been faster – it came from keeping out of his dad’s drunken reach.


By the time the sun started its slide to setting, twenty boys, girls and teens were ringed around a blazing fire on Greenwood Beach. The great pile of driftwood roared, sending fountains of sparks into the cooling night air to shower down on screaming and laughing kids. Tommy was trying to convince a dark-haired young lady to sit beside him – close beside him – on his now very dirty towel. “I can’t sit there,” she said, giggling. But she didn’t hesitate much when her girlfriends pushed her from behind and she ended up close enough for Tommy to snag her hand and pull her down beside him.

A few feet away, Freddie glowered, planted on a log, his skin flaming red and agonizing. Two girls sat with their backs to him, one brushing the other’s hair, both of them shooting darts at him with their eyes. He surged to his feet and said, “We gotta go. Come on, Tommy.”
“We don’t have to…” Tommy began then looked up at Freddie’s face. He scrambled to his feet muttering apologies to the girl and hurried after Freddie as he stalked off for the parking lot.

When he caught up, he said, “What’s wrong, buddy? What’d I do…”

“It wasn’t you. I’m just tired. And sunburned. And those girls were getting’ on my nerves.”
Tommy laughed, “Girls always get on your nerves…” Freddie shot him a dark look as they reached the parking lot. It was cold now away from the fire.

Freddie stopped suddenly. “Where’s the pickup?”

The parking lot was practically empty. Of the few cars there, none were pickups. Tommy stared, mouth open. He said, “He said he’d tell us when he left!”

“When did he say that?” Freddie asked. He scanned the parking lot five times, his head sweeping back and forth, back and forth. “Where is he?” he exclaimed, his voice cracking.

“Hey, don’t worry. I’m sure he just went away for a little while. He’ll be back…”

Freddie whirled and ran into the parking lot, shouting, “Leon! Leon! Where are you?”

Tommy chased him down, but when Freddie took a swing at him, Tommy ran at him and tackled him in the grass along the edge of the lot. Freddie was crying by the time they hit the ground, covering his head and rolling back and forth, moaning, “He’s gonna beat me! He’s gonna beat me!”

Tommy pinned him to the ground, but it was like Freddie didn’t even notice the knee in his chest, bawling louder and harder. Finally Tommy grabbed the front of his shirt, dragged him to his feet and got him walking. From Minnetonka, he could see the faint glow of the massed lights of Minneapolis in the sky and with the wailing Freddie by his side, he started off along the asphalt strip of Highway 7, knowing that even though they weren’t lost, he might lose Freddie to his drunken father’s rage when they got home.

If they ever got home.

My Blog on another site: Heinlein's Heirs

I sometimes write essays for another website that belongs to science fiction writer, Bruce Bethke. Go here:

http://thefridaychallenge.blogspot.com/

if you want to read my blog!

Slice of PIE: Interstates Over Park Reserves; Postmodernism Over Original Faith

Driving south on US 169 west of Minneapolis, is a 21st Century bridge that spans a piece of the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. This concrete expanse allows no exit into the Refuge below and except for a brown highway sign marking its existence and the expanse of trees and swamp (note: this is an unkind way to say "marshland"), lake and river. You pass over it in a matter of moments and there are no lights pointing down into the Refuge pointing out the sights.

If you aren't interested in the Refuge, you wouldn't even know it's there. I would venture a guess and say that the vast majority of people passing over this section of the National Wildlife Refuge pay no attention whatsoever to the wildlife below because the "wildlife" of the typical commuter rush occupies their attention. I would boldy venture to say that to most people, the Refuge doesn't matter at all -- what's important is what is on US 169. The fact that it passes over a National Wildlife Refuge is insignificant compared to the fact that it carries a huge number of people to and from their homes to work and from their work to home each day.

What does an interstate and a wildlife refuge have to do with postmodernism and original faith?

The connection should be obvious! If not, let me illuminate.

By definition, postmodernism is, in plain English, a "system of observation and thought that denies absolutes and objectivity" and "rejects a notion of universal truth but emphasises that meaning is in appearance and interpretation". Maybe that wasn't plain enough. This is my own defintion given what I've learned and experienced of the postmodern church: "Scripture, God and Jesus can be interpreted by the people within a culture based on what can be seen and thought because we can't be objective about our faith".

Though some postmodern Christian movements claim that their "interpretation" is closer to the origins of St. Augustine than 21st Century evangelical or conservative Christianity, I would dispute that. Liberal theology, Christian existentialism, radical orthodoxy, hermaneutics and weak theology -- all schools of thought of postmodern Christianity -- may lay claim the same roots as the faith of the early church, but I believe that they pass over those roots just as the shiny new 21st Century bridge passes over the wildlife refuge. The practitioners of such thought have much in common with the commuters on the US 169 bridge over the Minnesota Valley Wildlife Refuge: none of them believe that the original below them is of any importance to the shining newness above.

Neither of them seem interested in considering the roots -- the real roots -- of the postmodern bridge they so blithely travel over. Neither of them seems interested in noticing the reality of what lies below the construct they've worked so hard to build and whose ultimate future lies in crumbling ruin and reabsorption by the original reality from which both sprang.

image from: http://www.johnweeks.com/bridges/pics/bf10.jpg