Glaxus the Hawk

One day we were blessed with a small hawk in our yard.

Hawks visit us often as we have many bird feeders, many bird feeders bring many birds and other seed eaters (chipmunk, squirrel, the occasional neighbor, …), and much prey brings predators, hence hawks (among others)

I did not know this hawk’s name when I took the video and have since learned he is Glaxus.

Proud name for a hawk, don’t you think, Glaxus?

A name of power, a name of honor, a name of command.

Names are a fascinating study, especially to authors who must forever come up with names for characters.

And if you’re based in one culture and writing about someone from another culture, do you give the alien individual a name with meaning in your culture or one with meaning in the other’s culture?

And if you do the latter, you’ll need to explain the significance of the name in it’s original cultural setting.

Example: Ng Bao, literally “Seven Bread.” Who names their son (it’s a male name) “Seven Bread”?

In it’s original cultural setting, it denotes someone who’ll bring good luck and great favor onto the family.

Glaxus, the aforenamed hawk, will bring worlds to his fledglings.

Glorious children, they.

Enjoy.

 

Flashback as Story Frame

I wrote about using one-line story summaries to craft craft better stories in Using One-Line Summaries to Write Better Stories.

The next question is “How does the story come together on the page?” Note: we’re continuing with the work we did in Using One-Line Summaries to Write Better Stories.

Give the reader a reason to read your story.

 
You have to give the reader a reason to read the story. Reasons to read a story are varied and pretty much all come down to the reader asking themselves these questions:

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Ruminations Part 3 – Sensitivity Readers, Part 1

The ambiguously unidentifiable individual of non-specific ethnic persuasion drove up in a vehicle demonstrative of no specific class or financial status. Exiting their vehicle, they partook in an activity anyone of any belief system would partake in.
In a vertically challenged metaphoric way, they were boring as hell.
However, their PCness exuded from their ambiguously tinted and textured dermatic stoma like a semi-viscous fluid from an unclosed trauma site.
(it didn’t matter that nobody understood what the story)
But the book about this uninteresting individual sold like relatively warmed flour-baking soda-moisture mixtures to the politically correct sensitivity crowd who read it several times with glass objects which increased the text’s relative size for better ocular interpretation and still managed to find it offensive on so many levels it was considered a building of exceptional vertical dimension.

The same day I learned my eyes are completely healed, I asked a writing group to help me understand “Sensitivity Readers.”

The “Sensitivity Reader” concept challenges me for many reasons. First, unless some “sensitive” aspect of a character is necessary to the plot, it doesn’t belong in the story. Second, I’ve yet to be given a definition of sensitive that’s not so full of holes it couldn’t be used to drain wet spaghetti. When I ask for a definition I get a response along the lines of “You know, sensitive.”

Unless some “sensitive” aspect of a character is necessary to the plot, it’s a distraction. Get rid of it. Edit it out.

 
Somebody told me they wrote a story with a gay couple in the lead. They grew concerned their depiction of the gay couple would offend some gay readers and removed the gay aspects from the story.
Continue reading “Ruminations Part 3 – Sensitivity Readers, Part 1”

Search Chapter 10 – Thursday, 17 January 1974

Search is loosely based on a real incident. The incident remains, the story is greatly different.

Enjoy. And remember, it’s still a work in progress. These chapters are rough drafts. I’ve completed thirty chapters so far and it seems I’ll complete the novel this time. We’ll see.

Read Search Chapter 9

 

Search Chapter 10 – Thursday, 17 January 1974

The raven stared at Gio from its branch across the freshly snowed lawn from his dorm room. Gio rubbed his eyes. An exam tomorrow and he would fail it. He already knew, why bother. Physics made no sense to him. Not all of it. Some of it was…wrong? Inaccurate? How to phrase it. Once he walked Singing Beach alone, a night early in the school year, before meeting Jeri. Stars made a mosaic of the sky and the full moon shone like a quiet, nocturnal sun. It spoke to him. He fought not to listen.

Then the sky shimmered and he was high in the cosmos with them, the earth passing beneath him. The moon whispered, “This is how you make antigravity. This is how you make faster-than-light travel. This is how you make teleportation. This is how you make time-travel.”

He watched, fascinated, unable to look away.

The moon showed him something, a small machine, like a circuit board but not, the pieces changing places as the moon spoke. “You see? They are all the same thing, just arranged differently.”

Always the same pieces, just arranged differently.

All things modern science said couldn’t be.

“That’s how it is with all things. We are all the same, just arranged differently.”

Then he was back on the beach wondering what happened.

The raven looked out to the marsh and Gio followed its gaze.

A figure stood in the water. A woman’s shape. Female. Made of water. Standing, watching him.

He shook his head. It was gone. He looked back to the raven. It, too, was gone.

A dorm mate knocked on his open door. “You got a visitor downstairs in the lounge, Gio. Young lady. Quite the looker.”

Jeri? Jeri wasn’t suppose to come by.

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Opossums Love OBach

What can be more wonderful than dining out on freshly offered seeds?

Why, dining out on freshly offered seeds while listening to Glenn Gould play OBach, of course.

So says Ogilvie the Opossum

Sometimes I encounter people who say Gould wasn’t that good.

I smile, nod, and walk away.

If I dare, if the individual making such a statement seems willing, I’ll ask what their statement is based on.

Being honest, more often than not their statement is based on hearsay (a third cousin to “heresy” linguistically) or a profound incompetence and ignorance of music.

Okay, sometimes it’s not so profound.

It’s still incompetence and ignorance.

Fortunately, such does not deter Ogilvie, who is a wise, if somewhat aged, Opossum.

Enjoy.