Happy birthday, Dave!

My friend, Dave, held his annual birthday pig-picking today, and it was a fun affair indeed.  Many, many people attended, many brought food to share, and Dave provided the cooked pig.  Kyle and I broke it down and sent tray after tray of meat upstairs to the hungry crowd, folks mingled and chatted, and everyone seemed to have a very good time.

I've been going to this party for something like 32 years, give or take.  People have come and gone from the party crowd, but many regulars have stayed throughout the years.  Some people I met there as kids now attend with their children.  The party serves as a reminder and celebration of not just age but also of the value of being part of a community, however odd that community may be and however infrequently it may gather.

So, Dave, happy birthday, and for both of us--for all of us who attend--I hope you keep holding the pig-picking for years and years and years to come.

The birthday pig-picking

At a time near his birthday each year, Dave holds a celebratory pig-picking.  A group of us gather at his house to enjoy an entire slow-cooked pig, as well as various dishes that people bring as contributions to the meal.  This year's pig-picking took place today, and it was a fine example of its type.

Dozens of folks showed up to enjoy the party and the meal, and I have to say that it was a particularly delicious pig.  Kyle and I cut up the meat today, a process that involves standing over a low table and hacking away at a beast that deserves better butchering skills than we possess--but that was incredibly tasty nonetheless.  I meant to take pictures, but I messed up and failed to do so.  Sorry about that.

I've been going to these events for a few decades now, and I've always enjoyed them.  Most of all, I'm struck time and again by how very lucky I am to have friends with whom I get to enjoy a broad range of traditions.

Happy birthday, Dave!

This year's pig

looked good and tasted better.

Click an image to see a larger version.

I'm talking here about the pig a large group of us enjoyed today at Dave Drake's annual birthday pig-picking.  The cut bit in the shot above is where Dave

and several others, including me, enjoyed early tastes of the slow-cooked meat.  Wow, was it good--possibly the best one I've ever had at Dave's.

Many people brought dishes to share, we all talked, Dave opened presents, and everyone seemed to have a great time.  Among the dishes were many delicious desserts, including the main birthday cake, which Jo baked.

I hope to be lucky enough to share many, many more birthday celebrations with Dave.

Happy Birthday, Dave!

My friend David Drake turned 70 today.  A small group of friends and family--really, extended family--celebrated the occasion with him at a very good local restaurant.  On Sunday, a much larger group will gather for his traditional birthday pig-picking.  A lot of folks like and care for Dave.

Dave and I met in 1984 and became friends in 1985.  That's 30+ years, half of my life, nearly half of his.  I owe Dave a lot for all his years of friendship.

The SF field also owes Dave, but not for friendship; he'd keep writing regardless of whether anyone liked his work.  No, the field owes him for telling the truth about his experiences in war and the experiences of other vets.  Dave's been accused of writing war porn, but only by those who either haven't read his books or weren't paying attention.  Showing the reader the way it really was and is in battle, as Dave does, is neither pro-war--quite the opposite--nor porn of any sort; it's the most serious way to create cautionary tales.  Dave knows exactly what war costs those on the sharp end, and he quite understandably wants the rest of us to have at least some inkling of the toll war takes on those we send to battle.

Dave's influence on other writers is what made it so easy to quickly fill the Onward, Drake! tribute anthology that I've discussed before and that goes on sale soon.  Check it out, if for no other reason than his two stories, and you will be glad you did.

I'm going to hope for 30 more years of friendship with Dave, 30 more years of hearing his amazing laugh, 30 more years of reading his work, 30 more years of having a friend who really gets the things that trouble us both--as unlikely as those hopes are to materialize.

Happy birthday, my old friend.

Another reason you need Onward, Drake!

I've mentioned this book before, but I'll be discussing it again many times between now and its early October release.

If the names on the cover aren't enough to persuade you to buy this nifty tribute to Dave, consider this:  the book contains the first new Hammer's Slammers story in nearly a decade.

Oh, yeah.

The story, "Save What You Can," is an excellent piece that in my opinion ranks among the best of the Hammer's Slammers tales--and that's saying something.

Yup, you need this book.

So do your friends.  Spread the word.

Pig-picking 2013

Today, in keeping with another of our annual traditions, something approaching a hundred of us gathered at Dave's to celebrate his birthday with his annual pig-picking, an event he has been holding since before I met him.  We gather, chat, consume all sorts of foods that we bring, and chow down on the main attraction, a full pig.

Click on a photo to see a larger version.

Later, Kyle and I carved the pig and turned it into chunks and strings of pork on huge platters full of meat, but right after the pig arrived the only way to taste it was to cut a piece yourself, as Dave and Kyle are doing here. 

The bits we've already cut are parts of the tenderloin, the most amazingly delicious, moist meat you can get from this pig.

As the expression on Kyle's face suggests, he was a happy camper, as were the rest of us who had early tastes.  Damn, that meat was good.

Bill has, from time to time, mocked me for being "tradition boy," and in some ways he is right:  a great many traditions mark the passage of my years.  I'm okay with that, though, because the traditions are good things, grounding forces that connect me to this place, to these people, to this bit of land where I live. I love to travel, and I plan to do so frequently for the rest of my life, but I also love having a home, a place where I have those connections, those roots.  I don't see the two, travel and connection, as at all contradictory, so I embrace being both tradition boy and travel boy. 

I thank Dave and Jo for hosting this tradition, and I sincerely hope to get to enjoy it for many, many years to come.

An illuminating correspondence about Dr. Efficient's posts

David Drake (Dave) and Dr. Efficient (Kyle) recently exchanged a set of email messages on the topic of the Dr. E columns. They CC'd me, in part because I'm involved and in part because the original goal was to have this happen through the Comments section of the blog. I found the correspondence interesting, so I asked their permission to reprint it here. They agreed.

Dave

I am intellectually and emotionally in tune with sociobiology, and there's lots of empirical support for it. That said, I have a feeling in reading your answers that we're missing something. I think we're Newtonians in an Einsteinian universe. Everything we can see reacts in the fashion we think it should, but there's more out there.

Obviously if I could see what I was missing, I wouldn't be missing it. Intuitively, though, I believe we may be understating--ignoring--the role of our higher processing faculties in viewing our behavior as only that of beasts. I think that throws enough of a variable into your (our; let me emphasize, I'm very much in your camp) calculations to seriously bias the result in a direction we have difficulty in seeing, let alone accepting.

Kyle

Humans are somewhere between apes and angels. Anybody who's seen a dog playing with a toddler realizes that other animals are straightforward predictable creatures and that humans, even little ones, aren't. If I spend a lot more time focused on our apish than angelic natures, there are three reasons for that:

1. Most people seem to think that we are angels--that is, that we're creatures of godlike intellect and airy emotion who act out of love or reason rather than animal need. If that's what humans were, our species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Maybe that's what we'll become after the Singularity. In the meantime, I emphasize our apish past as a counterpoint to the conventional wisdom.

2. Most of the things people care about most deeply are rooted in our evolutionary past. Love, war, fidelity, family, mortality... I can't think of any of Shakespeare's plays that wouldn't have made as much sense to a paleolithic hunter-gatherer as they do to us.

3. As you say, we're Newtonians in an Einsteinian universe. Or maybe Einsteinians in a Heisenbergian universe, since Einstein at least thought that truth was knowable. Every year at the beach there comes some point when I wander upstairs to find the women deep in conversation with each other about families I didn't know they had or concerns that I didn't know existed, and I'm reminded that I'm surrounded by this web of human connections that I simply lack the sense organs to perceive. It's like being blind, but feeling the warmth of the sun on your face, and knowing that there does exist such a thing as light even though you'll never be able to see it.

Tigger's now answering the same questions that I answered. I don't disagree with her answers, and I don't think that she'd disagree with mine. They just come from different places. My answers come from painstaking research.

Her answers come from blowing lots of dudes. I mean, life experience.

Dave

Apes/Angels implies a good/bad dichotomy, where I really think it's just different--or rather, much more complex.

Yes, the blind man in the sun is a very good analogy. I wish I understood better, since apparently about half my species does understand better; but hell, that's life.

Kyle

I don't intend for apes/angels to imply a good/bad dichotomy. Because we are apes. Genetically we have more in common with chimps and bonobos than gorillas and orangutans do. Certainly, I wouldn't be too surprised if I ran into this fellow at WalMart one day.

As for angels, I've never assumed that they have our best interests at heart. Lucifer was, of course, an angel. The rest of them didn't seem like a particularly trustworthy lot, either. I'm not trying to connote goodness, merely transcendence.

Whatever else you may think about the Dr. Efficient columns, I encourage you to consider also this: though entertaining and frequently outrageous by design, they also represent more serious consideration and examination than may be initially apparent. As I hope this dialog makes clear.

A few thoughts on Veterans Day

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, an armistice brought an end to the heavy fighting of the war to end all wars, World War I.

Would that it had been the last, but of course, many wars have followed it.

Today, we celebrated Veterans Day, though few people seem to remember that once it was Armistice Day, and few with whom I spoke today bothered to note the holiday.

I always note it, because though I never served in the military, many people I care about did. I'm going to focus on two.

One is my friend, Dave. He served in Viet Nam, and it messed him up. It still does. You can read his take on it here. He didn't believe in this war, but he did what he felt was his duty as a citizen. He paid a huge price. He still does.

The other is my stepfather, Edmund D. Livingston, Sr. Eddie died on July 19, 2000, while on vacation at the beach with all of us. He was a Marine in World War II. The day he died, he visited a Marine Corps base and an old battleship. In the war, he went ashore at Okinawa. He was wounded twice, but thanks to paperwork mess-ups, he received only one Purple Heart--a fact that angers me to this day. He was part of the occupation of Japan. The shrapnel he carried would still sometimes set off metal detectors over fifty years after he left the Marines. Ed paid hugely and many times for his service, but he wouldn't have dreamed of not serving when his country called.

Neither Dave nor Ed is the type of person who would seek a doctor's diagnosis, but I'd be stunned if PTSD didn't afflict them both. PTSD is a bitch; I know.

On this holiday, I don't want us just to thank the vets we know, or to think of those now gone. I want us to help those vets among us. I want all of us and our government to fully and openly acknowledge the traumas they endured and allocate enough funds to help them make it back to our world. (For a longer take on this topic, check out Aaron Sorkin's piece here.) It's not enough to say "thank you" to those who do the jobs most of us never want to touch; we must show that gratitude by welcoming them into the world they protected and helping them feel, after and despite all they've endured, that they finally once again belong.

My reading/signing at McIntyre's

One of the crueler lessons of writing is that unless you're quite well known or you have someone heavily shilling for you, you tend not to draw many people to a reading. So, on the one hand, the attendance of 14 at McIntyre's yesterday was quite respectable. You can see many of them in this photograph, courtesy of Gina.


For those wondering, the guy with his back to the camera who is taking his own shot of the space is my friend and fellow author, David Drake.

The true story, however, is that 13 of the 14 people were friends, folks who quite graciously showed up to support me (well, one came primarily for the food, but she sat through the reading as well). I am lucky to have such good and loyal and supportive friends.

That left me, of course, with only one person to whom I might sell a book--the ultimate purpose of these gigs. I don't know if I convinced her to purchase Children No More, but I did try. I read both a couple of chapters from the novel and a few other short pieces, and I talked about the charity program and the plight of child soldiers, as well as my own related background. In the past, with only one person I didn't know in the crowd, I would have considered blowing it off, but I vowed a while ago that if anyone at all showed up, I would give it my best.

The good news for the bookstore is that my friends predictably all love books, so even though we didn't move much of my stock, we made a lot of money for the store.

I'm going to hope--and work--for a much better result at Thursday's event.

The day after the day after

was, as Dave noted when he sent me this photo, rather impressive in its own right. Parts of the ash pile were still glowing hot.



As I trust is obvious, the show and the party are a great deal of work for me--and for a lot of other folks. It's also expensive: my share of the fireworks plus various party foods (e.g., hot dogs and hamburgers for a hundred people) and supplies runs about $1.5K. Many folks who are aware of these facts have asked me why I keep doing it.

The short and easy answer is that it's awesome and it's clearly worth what it costs me.

The longer version sounds dopey, but I'll tell you anyway: it touches my heart profoundly and in many ways at once.

I scream with primal release during some of the rounds. I smile and laugh with joy during others.

My world reduces to the glorious, exploding sky.

I paint the sky and my art--the art of all of us in the field--blazes and shrieks and stuns dozens and dozens of friends.

Time compresses amazingly; forty minutes in the real world feels like ten when you're out there under the fireworks.

The danger rush is always present at a cellular level; even though your brain knows you're doing everything safely, your body is convinced you're at severe risk.

I could stand under those shooting stars all night long.

Some Fourth pictures

As many of you pointed out, the link I posted did not work. It appears that Kodak's gallery, which Gina uses for her photos online, does not want to let her share those pictures with the world. So, while she looks around for another Web-based home for her lovely photographs, I thought I'd pass on a few that are available now.

Almost all come courtesy of Steve, who posted over a dozen on a Flickr page. Check them out here.

The exception is this lovely day-after photo, which Dave supplied.



Dave sets up the launch area before we arrive, which is a nice treat. A far bigger treat, however, is the work he does after every show: he hauls in the tarps and launch pallets, polices the area, and then burns the trash. As you can probably tell from this picture, the burn pile is impressive.

I'm already looking forward to next year's show!

Remember that rule

I said I had, the one about not showing my work to anyone except Dave before the book or story is completely ready for publication? Well, I'm about to break it, and I thought it might be useful to explain why.

I've finished the first draft of the original, brand-new, never-before-seen solo Lobo story--the Lobo Christmas story--for Jump Gate Twist. I'm running it by Dave for a quick check before I do a final polish and send the entire book to Publisher Toni, who will be especially glad to have it because it's due to the printer about, oh, now.

I'm also, though, going to show it to Bill for a reason I consider sufficiently important to break my SOP: He possesses in-depth domain knowledge that I need. I'm not going to say what that domain is, at least not yet, because I don't want to affect anyone's perception of the story, but if you remind me after the book appears, I'll explain then.

My more general form of this exception goes like this: If a person really knows a specific subject that affects your work, and if that person is willing to lend you their expertise, then I think it's perfectly fine both to ask questions of that person during the writing of the work and to show the relevant sections of the not-fully-published prose to that person.

Which is what I'm doing now.

In directly related news, I can tell you that I will be the one person in the world who will be happier than Publisher Toni to see this book head into production. I am tired of being behind schedule and look forward to a return to writing normalcy.

Why I show my work to Dave

Several folks have asked why I break my "nobody sees my work before I finish it" rule with Dave. The short answer is that he always makes my books, stories, and essays better. The longer answer is perhaps more interesting.

Dave's spent a lot of years building complex plots. I'm still relatively new to that art, so on that front alone, he has taught me a great deal. I always look forward to learning from him in this area.

What's even more useful is that he is good at seeing the story I'm trying to tell and for the most part directing all of his comments toward helping me produce that story. He does sometimes genuinely think I should take the tale in a different direction, but when he makes comments toward that end, he always states his intent. This clarity of focus and communication is invaluable to me.

Finally, after dozens of books he simply possesses a strong, almost instinctual understanding of how to fix certain classes of problems.

For example, while writing Children No More, I hit a point at which I had a problem but no great ideas for solving it. I called Dave, told him just enough of the plot that he could see the problem, and literally in seconds he gave me a very rough--intentionally so, I should note--solution. I refined it considerably and adapted it to my purposes, and then I wrote the bit in question. No one will ever be able to identify this issue from the text alone, and I probably could have solved it on my own, but his approach was better than my best idea at the time, and the book is better for his contribution. That's what matters most, of course. My ultimate loyalty and commitment in each book must be to that book--and not to my ego, a prospective audience, or any other damn thing.

As I write more books, I ask Dave fewer questions, but all my books have been better for his contributions--and in the end, that's why I show the second drafts of them to him.

On the road again: TEDActive, day 2

Today began unfortunately early with a work phone meeting at 7:30 a.m., which, as anyone who knows me will tell you, is way too damn early for me. (Don't give me any grief about how it's much later in NC; I worked until the single digits Pacific time last night, so it was still early.) After a morning of work and then a nice lunch with Bill, I set out on my first TED activity: a tour of the huge local wind farm.

I had a very good time. We mostly sat on the bus and listened, but that was fine; our guide was incredibly knowledgeable and a good storyteller.

We got out twice. The first time brought me a bit of magic: We stood in the rain in the desert and listened to the wind turbines sing. I know the noise is not song, and I realize that even though it wasn't very loud, people who live very close to it quite reasonably probably hate it. I still found it magical.

On the second stop, we got fairly close to some turbines and had clear skies for picture taking. The first photo here is an example of one of the large wind turbines. The second photo helps put it in scale: note that in the first you barely even notice the truck is present.

One of my favorite terms I learned today is "wind gypsies," the name for the groups of people who travel around the country cleaning turbines and doing training. The concept is natural and obvious, but I wouldn't have thought of it on my own. Expect something like it to show up in a book one of these years.

Speaking of books, I continue to charge ahead on my latest, Children No More. Today, Dave finished his review of the second draft. He gave me many good points to consider, for which I am quite grateful. He also called it a very good and important book, for which I'm also grateful.

A few folks have asked me to explain The Big Red Binder. Here it is, sitting on a chair in my hotel room. I do my third draft by printing the book on three-hole-punch paper, putting it in a binder, and editing it with a red pen. Seeing the book on paper is somehow still different to me than seeing it online, so this draft takes advantage of that different experience. As you can tell from the second picture of TBRB, I make a fair number of changes at this stage.

On the fourth pass, I will key in all these changes and re-read key sections and edit them as necessary.

I don't think I'll need a fifth pass this time, so after the fourth, I will send it to Publisher Toni.

Earlier this evening, I wandered out of my room and followed the music I'd been hearing faintly through my windows. I ended up in the bar, where Jill Sobule and a band of TEDsters were playing. I caught the last two numbers, including the finale, "What the World Needs Now."

Wind turbines singing, people signing, magic.

As I head off to edit the book, here's a tiny reward for those who've bothered to read this far: If you click on any photo, you'll see a bigger version of it. Do that to the last picture, and you can read a still-not-final, don't-expect-it-to-stay-the-same (I've already spotted a word I didn't like and changed it), random page of the book; the picture is clear enough to make that possible. Enjoy.

Yum: pig

Yesterday was Dave's annual birthday pig-pickin', a time when a lot of us get together to celebrate with him and eat a great deal of good but fatty food. The pig was particularly tasty this year, and more people than usual indulged in the old-fashioned approach to sampling the pork: take out your pocketknife, and cut a bit off the pig while it's still sitting on the cooker. I certainly did, and the meat was juicy and delicious.

The weather cooperated by providing a truly beautiful day: clear, warm but not hot, and vibrant with life as the field and flowers and trees glowed with life from the previous day's rainstorms.

I enjoyed a wide variety of conversations with an equally wide variety of people. A few were actually fans of and interested in my books and writing, something that still catches me off guard. I always worry about boring those folks, because if you get a writer started on his or her writing, he or she can talk forever. I tried to control those impulses, but I'm not sure I did a very good job. I need to do a better job of listening.

The sheer quantity of fat I consumed this past weekend is stunning (and nap-inducing), so to help you do the same, let me pass along this article on secret menu items of fast-food restaurants, which Bill first showed to me. The Fatburger Hypocrite is wonderful, and the notion that at In-N-Out Burgers you can order meat like lumber (a 4X4 is four hamburger patties and four slices of cheese) is simply amazing. Go, America!

What are you doing this coming Sunday, August 23?

If you live in the Triangle area, I know what you should be doing: Attending my reading at Fearrington's lovely McIntyre's Fine Books store. I'll be reading to support the sales of Overthrowing Heaven, but if we can get a decent-size crowd I'm considering doing something I've never done before: reading a goodly bit of the novel in progress, Children No More.

If that's not enough to tempt you to attend, and if the lovely McIntyre's won't do it, then perhaps the prospect of eating brunch at Fearrington's The Old Granary restaurant or wandering the lovely grounds or checking out the Belted Galloway Cows will do it.

Finally, if none of that is enough to lure you, then perhaps this will: Dave and Jennie have pledged to do a joint stripper pole dance if the crowd is huge and enthusiastic.

Okay, that's a lie, an utter fabrication of my demented brain and actually not a scene I'd like to witness, but who knows what we could talk others into doing if enough of us beg and plead?

Maybe I should stop now.

Yeah.

Okay, so come on out and hear me read this Sunday.

More on the Fourth

A few folks have been kind enough to share some of their photos of yesterday's fireworks party.



Steve Burnett sent me copies of these three photos, which nicely capture some of the fireworks in the sky and, in the last picture, from the ground view.






































Dave, who also does the thankless job of cleaning up after the show, donated this shot of the assembled wreckage; the chair provides a sense of scale.
















Finally, for a collection of lovely photos by Paul Cory, check out his flickr page for the party (a link he also provided in a comment to yesterday's entry). From some of Paul's pictures I think you can get a reasonable sense of the scale of the show.

It was awesome, and I thank these folks for capturing images of parts of it.

An excellent show indeed!

I love the Fourth of July. I love celebrating our nation's independence, and I love thinking about the people who set on course what I still believe is the greatest nation in the world.

And, of course, I love blowing up a lot of fireworks.

We gathered at the Drake's, where we always hold our party. Step 1 was unloading all the fireworks from the deathmobile; as you can see here, Kyle and I did indeed survive the ride, and so did the many boxes of 'works.

After helping with party setup, we all then sat about, chatted, drank, sampled various tasty foods, and generally took it easy until it was time to grill the meat.

For a party with about a hundred people, we grill a lot of food: about 84 hamburgers, 72 hot dogs, and 12 veggie burgers. We used to do it on my household grill, but it was really inadequate to the task.

A neighbor of Dave's saved us a huge amount of time and hot, sweaty work by loaning us a very large cooker, which we now use. Having this enormous cooking surface makes it possible for us to grill all the food in about an hour. The photo here shows but one of several times we fully loaded the grill.

By the way, Kyle and I had the best burgers of all: double cheeseburgers fresh from the grill. Wow, were they good!

After a little rest, we did show prep, then waited, lit sparklers, and finally it was dark enough for the show itself. I have no photos to share--I'm hoping someone there will email me a few--but from my vantage point directly under the fireworks it was awesome and primal and amazing and wonderful and worth every cent.

I am always amazed that anyone who sees this show does not beg to join the launch team, but I guess most people are considerably smarter more sane more reserved than I--and that's a good thing, because without them, we'd have no audience.

I hope your holiday was every bit as good.

Ever wondered

what two grand of highly explosive fireworks would look like, should it come squatting on your walkway?

Wonder no more. It would look about like this:

Jesse and Jennie are, in my admittedly rather out-of-focus photo, standing both to provide a sense of scale and because they wanted a last photo in case in the course of transporting the 'works into Jennie's house we all went up in a huge and colorful smoke cloud.

Fortunately, we did not.

The pallet is deeper than it is wide, by the way.







Speaking of moving the fireworks, here's what they look like resting in Jennie's library--the very things everyone wants near their books!

The intrepid Maggie, aka Doodle, provides a different sort of scale as she rests atop Mt. Spazzatron (yes, that is the real name of one of the fireworks) after an arduous hike through the carboard mountains. Respect and fear the Doodle, for she is heavily armed and unafraid.

In just two short days, we will in the space of one hour turn the contents of all of these boxes into beautiful screaming shapes in the night--and then into one very large pile of trash for Dave to burn.

I am, as I've said, quite looking forward to it.

Dropping stitches

Between my company being crazy busy, the demands of the holidays, and my daily work on Overthrowing Heaven, I'm not sleeping a lot these days. I'm doing fine on the jobs, but I'm making a lot of errors in personal areas. Tonight I made a doozie: I forgot to invite Dave and Jo to our annual tree-trimming party. I've made similar email list errors recently as well. I hate screwing up, and I really hate it when my friends pay for my errors.

The party itself was as it should be: low-key but fun. Because we shopped late, this year's tree is smaller than usual, but it has a good shape, is well over seven feet tall, and looks great decorated. We hung ornaments and lights on it; ate spaghetti, garlic bread, salad, and apple cake; chatted about this and that; and generally had a nice time.

My plotting work on Overthrowing Heaven continues. I'm grooving on the book, because it's coming together (albeit slower than I would like). I expect to be typing up an outline by January and writing for real before that month is out. I look forward to being at the stage of staring at a blank screen until drops of blood appear on my forehead.