More Pictures from A Scrapbook of Impossible Travels

"So, Karen," said Ariel Allegra. "After all your whining last week about my not taking you to see the Beatles at the Cavern Club, I find out in your blog today that you've been much further than 1961 Liverpool. You've impersonated an alien and met a Dalek. I'm not so sure about that black hole, though. It could be a wormhole, maybe, but not a black hole per se."

"Oh, it's fake," I said. "It's all fake. The bald alien prosthetic was part of an attraction at Universal Studios over a decade ago. The Dalek belongs to a fan who was at the Gallifrey One convention in 2003. The vortex wormhole thing was a camera flash in a mirror."

"In other words, you lied," Ariel said. "You lied with pictures."

I have visited the Old West.

"Did you read the text at all?" I asked. "I didn't lie. Not exactly. The Weekend Assignment was to edit a photo into looking different and unusual. I tried to edit them into being illustrations for A Journal of Impossible Travels, or, failing that, photos in A Scrapbook of Impossible Travels. It's not a lie if you tell people you're being deceptive."

I am a Leaper - or possibly I'm immersed in the Time Vortex.

"I see you're doing more of the deceptive photo editing tonight," Ariel said. I'd already uploaded my pictures by that point, after several prior attempts ended in failure due to a Blogger glitch.

Walking on the Moon is much easier
with a force field than a space suit.

"That's right," I said. "I was up way too late last night, and I wanted more time to mess around with the topic."

"And these five pictures are the result," Ariel said. "You overused that cowgirl pose rather badly, don't you think?"

Thomas Jefferson and I relax during a three hour tour.

"Yes, I did, but it saved me a lot of time, and I don't have all that many pictures of myself to work with," I said. "What do you think otherwise?"

Walt Disney shows fourteen-year-old Karen
a maquette of an animatronic pirate.

"Oh, they're passable, I suppose," Ariel said. "But what you've done is more an exercise in wish fulfillment than in photo editing."

"It shows, huh?" I said. "But that's what I do. I can't really travel in time and space, so I invent ways to do it vicariously, with words and pictures."

"And fictional daughters of pandimensional wizards," Ariel said.

"If you like, yes," I said. "As far as this world knows, you exist only as a foil for my ideas."

"Flatterer. See if I take you to meet James Thurber after this."

"But you weren't going to do that anyway."

"Probably not."

"If I am your foil, how is that working out for you?" Ariel asked. "I turned up tonight without Kate, and now I can't help but notice you're stuck for an ending to this blog entry."

"Yes," I said. "I blame you."

"That's gratitude for you," Ariel said.

Karen (with Ariel)

Real sources:

• photo of Karen at Little Painted Desert County Park, 1986
• photo of an Old Tucson tour guide, 2005
• Little Painted Desert again, originally without Karen
• 1970 photo of Karen and her dad, with Thomas Jefferson portrait previously used in this old blog entry.
• 1971 photo of Karen by Joel R. pasted into a scene from the Disneyland 10th Anniversary‎ show.

Stop MDC

Black Rose Kate has no problem dispatching history's villains

"Aye, I thought ye'd be at the computer," Black Rose Kate announced. I looked up, startled. There she was, standing in front of my L'Engle books, my semi-fictional pirate friend, looking down at me with her usual air of amused tolerance. It was Thursday night, ten minutes past one in the morning. "Ariel said that you wanted to see me," she explained.

"Hi, Kate," I said. "Yes, I did. But how did Ariel know that?" Our mutual friend Ariel travels in time and between universes, meanwhile attending Croatoan College, which is itself transdimensional.

Kate shrugged. "She reads your blog. You mentioned me in tomorrow's entry. And that black cloth rose of yours was in one of your photos this week, so we knew you were already thinking of me. So tell me. Am I here for a particular reason, or is this a social call only? Did you want my expert opinion on that Johnny Depp movie Ariel has spoken of for the better part of an hour tonight?"

"Oh, I didn't go on about it that long," Ariel said, coming into the room behind Kate. "Hi, Karen."

"Hi, Ariel. And no, it's not about Pirates of the Caribbean. I have a Weekend Assignment to do, and I thought Kate might be able to help. You too, Ariel."

"Oh, one of those," Kate said, looking none too pleased.

I pasted the relevant text into this entry, and let them read it over my shoulder:

Weekend Assignment #168: For reasons best left unexplained, you have been allowed to excise one and only one person from the course of history. Which person would you choose to remove from history and why? That's right: Any one person you think history would be better without, you can now expunge. So who would it be -- and how do you think history would be changed with their absence? See. Told you it was one that would make you think.

Extra Credit: Favorite historical-themed movie. Because why not?


"I see," Kate said as she finished reading. "Because I have dispatched my share of enemies on the high seas and elsewhere, it pleases you to seek my advice before murdering some historical villain before he is ever born. Is that it?"

"Pretty much, yes," I said. "And you're right. I do think that preventing Nero or someone like that from being born is a kind of murder."

"But you don't have a problem with--" Ariel began. I was starting to think she was a mind-reader.

"Shh," I interrupted. "I don't want to talk about that. The point is, I wouldn't have the right to stop someone from ever existing."

"And you think that I, the bloodthirsty pirate, would be more ruthless about such things, and thus could give Scalzi an answer in your stead," Kate said.

"Yes," I said. "And if not, you can at least discuss the idea with me, and I can report on that."

"As I notice ye be doing already," Kate observed.

"Your problem with this is that you lack perspective," Ariel said. "There are plenty of worlds in which there was no Hitler, or no John Wilkes Booth, or no Nero. On the multiverse level, it's not that big a deal."

"It is if you're in a world where he did exist, and now you decree that he doesn't," I insisted. "That creates a whole new universe, right? And that's on top of the loss suffered by family and friends."

"I have known several families," Kate said, "that benefited greatly from the death of a father or brother or son. A woman my own age once thanked me for killing her husband, who had chained her and beaten her. Pick someone sufficiently awful, and the world is certain to benefit."

"Well, I did think about choosing someone whose nonexistence would mean lives saved," I said. "I could go with Adolf Eichmann or Josef Mengele, but that violates the spirit of disallowing Hitler."

"Who were these people?" Kate asked.

"Eichmann helped Adolf Hitler, the ruler of Germany, organize the murder of millions of Jews and Romany and other people," Ariel said. "Mengele conducted horrific medical experiments on some of their victims before killing them."

"Right," I said. "But it's all part of the same horror. And I don't think there is an equivalent person in more recent examples of genocide. Usually it's groups of people killing other groups for the crime of being a 'them'. So I was thinking along the lines of a Richard Speck, or Timothy McVeigh - you know, someone who personally killed a lot of people."

"Aye, that makes sense," Kate said. "But ye didn't need me to figure that out."

"I still don't like it, though," I said. "I still wouldn't do it. Would you?"

"Aye, with hardly a moment's thought, nor any regrets," Kate said. "Oliver Cromwell is another one I would not mind seeing gone from the world."

Ariel was rereading the text of Scalzi's assignment. "You know, I don't think you read this very carefully," she said. "It doesn't specify that one person was never born. It only says excised from history. There might be other ways to do that."

That got me thinking. "Such as?" I prompted. I was starting to have a few ideas, but wondered what Ariel had in mind.

"Lock the person up so he or she can do no harm," she suggested. "Send the person back in time, or forward, or to another universe."

"Where the person can do even more harm in unknown ways," I said. "That's no good. But if we can stop the person from becoming crazy or evil or both, that would take him out of the history we know."

"Mark David Chapman," Ariel suggested.

I nodded. "I suppose I should go with McVeigh or someone like that anyway," I said, "or the older of the two DC snipers, or one of the serial killers up in Phoenix last year. But Chapman...I don't know. If you could catch him young, get him the right treatment, keep him on the right medication and away from the Dakota, that still only saves one man's life, technically."

"Yes, but what a life you'd be saving," Ariel said.

"Whose?" Kate asked.

"John Lennon," Ariel and I said together. "Of the Beatles," I added.

Before I could explain further, Kate pointed at me, a look of triumph on her face. "Aye, that's the one!" she said. "I like the Beatles. Ariel even took me to the Cavern once."

This made me angry. "Why didn't you take me with you? You know how much I want to go."

Ariel shook her head. "We bend the rules quite a bit even just coming to see you, even for a quick conversation. Your version of the world isn't meant to have time travel, and I can't let you go wandering the multiverse with me. We're pushing the fiction boundary as it is."

"Fiction boundary? What's that?"

"It's a way of gauging relationships between realities, and the relative safety of certain kinds of interactions," Ariel explained. "As my supposed creator in the context of this reality, you can receive my visits, as long as they can be passed off as fiction. But the moment you actually go into the past with me, or off into a world in which the Beatles have been reunited for the past twenty years and are currently in the studio, you damage every timeline you touch. Sorry."

"Whereas I have no such restriction," Kate said. "Say the word and I will take this Chapman person from history, my way."

"You know I won't condone that," I said. "Much as I'd like to."

"And anyway, you can't do that either," Ariel told Kate. "John Lennon wrote a song about you. That makes you fictional to him, too."

"He did? When was that?" I asked.

"1982."

"But he died in 1980," I said.

Ariel looked thoughtful. "Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Kate does go after Chapman," she said.

"Then that's my choice, if I have to choose someone," I said. "Just don't actually kill him if you can help it."

For a moment Ariel looked tempted. Then she shook her head. "No, sorry," she said. "His death is too well established in your world. But we might be able to do it in another world, a few universes over. Are you game for it, Kate?"

"Aye, always. Let's go, then."

"Bring me back a CD," I said.

Ariel laughed. "Can't do that, either," she said. "but if you're very good, I'll find a way for you to at least hear a later album, at least once."

They left, then, and I was alone again, finishing up this entry. I don't know how serious Ariel was. She could easily have been making up all those rules as she went along. And I'm still a little worried that Black Rose Kate will kill Chapman rather than try to get him into treatment, or at least locked up.

Imagine there's no murder.

But oh, wouldn't it be something, having another 26 1/2 years and counting of new music by John Lennon?

Oh, drat, I didn't ask my guests about the Extra Credit. I'm not big on historical movies, unless you count Back to the Future or Camelot. Lawrence of Arabia was kind of amazing, although the long version really is too long. Oh, I know. My Favorite Year. That's based on a very specific history period: the days of early television, and the live comedy variety show.

Karen

Portrait of a Fictional Friend

Here's the result of my silly project of the evening: a photograph of Ariel Allegra. You may remember her as the interdimensional traveler who brought Black Rose Kate here for a visit on Halloween night. Ariel is the 20-year-old daughter of a wizard and a ghost - at least, that's the short version of who they are. Ariel has black hair like her father, but it's less curly. Her eyes are green, and occasionally they glow a little.

"Yes, yes," Ariel says impatiently. "They can see for themselves that I have black hair and green eyes, even if you didn't catch them glowing. What else are you going to tell them about me?"

"Well, I mentioned your parents."

"They're my parents. I asked what you have to say about me personally."

"Well...."

Ariel sees my hesitation, and pounces on it. "You don't know what to say, do you? You named my fictional counterpart nearly thirty years ago, but you still know practically nothing about me. You mostly think of me as a multidimensional taxi service for your pirate friend, and secondarily as Joshua Wander's only daughter. I think I'm insulted."

"All right, then tell me what you want me to know about you. And while you're at it, tell my readers."

Ariel chuckles. "That's one way to get out of it."

"Fine, we'll do it together, interview style. Fair enough?"

"Right," Ariel says. "Are you interviewing me, or am I interviewing you?"

"Troublemaker. First question: do you really attend something called Croatoan College, as I wrote at the end of Mall of Mâvarin? Or is that apocryphal?"

"No, it's as real as I am, in quite a few universes."

"Meaning you've been to more than one version."

"No. One version, multiple universes. "

"So you can't change which Croatoan College you attend, in case you get a bad grade or something?"

"There's only one Croatoan College. It's kind of hard to explain, but it vibrates through a whole series of similar timelines, so that it's accessible from all of them."

"What do you study there?"

"You mean, do I study potions with Professor Snape? No. There is a series of four courses in Applied Magic, but overall Croatoan has nothing in common with Hogwarts or Mâton or any other fictional school for wizards. We have comparative physics, and biology, and literature, all the normal courses other schools have, except that they take into account the variations among the worlds Croatoan touches."

"But who would go to a school like that? Wouldn't that curriculum be inappropriate for anyone other than a time traveler?"

"You mean an interdimensional traveler. Yes, it's a little weird, but it turns out there are quite a few of us. Plus Croatoan has a very good reputation. A number of heads of state graduated from there."

"Which reminds me. What about Carl and Cathy, the students who almost became Carli and Cathma? I seem to recall your mentioning them in a note to me. Do they really go to Croatoan with you?"

For the first time, Ariel looks a little embarrassed. "Ah, well, that was sort of a joke." I read about them in Mall of Mâvarin."

"So they're not real."

"To say that for sure, I'd have to visit every universe there is. But the Carl and Cathy I go to school with never traveled via shopping mall."

"I see. Is there anything else you'd like to add?"

"Yes. It's five o'clock in the morning. Stop watching the Benson marathon and go to bed."

"Will you still be here tomorrow?"

"Oh, I never know that. Good night, Karen."

"Good night, Ariel."

And good night, gentle reader.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Photos, Writing, Fiction, Reality

Just My Imagination

Whenever I write about an encounter with Black Rose Kate, as I did last night, I get a little worried that the casual reader will think I've completely lost touch with reality. You do know better, don't you? Well, don't you?

The odd thing about Kate and Ariel is that they are the only fictional characters I've ever created (aside from childhood, and setting aside for a moment the multiverse view of reality) who know I exist. I've never had a conversation with Rani or Cathma or any of the Mâvarin characters, even as a writing exercise in the privacy of my own head. Despite the fact that Mages of Mâvarin (and the serial Mall of Mâvarin, which probably isn't canonical) depicts characters traveling between different versions of reality, it's important to me that they be completely real within their milieu. To have them interact with me, their creator, would be to cheapen their verisimilitude. They would become like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, talking back to the camera (or to Leon Schlesinger). "Breaking the fourth wall" is usually pretty amusing, and it works well for cartoon characters, the tv series Moonlighting and so on. But it also means that you can never quite suspend your disbelief in the world of such characters. If Bugs knows he's on a movie screen, then nothing around him can be regarded as real, even to Bugs himself. Mâvarin needs to be completely real to Cathma and Carli and Rani and the rest, so that they can behave naturally and the reader can believe in them. Any interaction between them and me would call that into question. Besides, they just don't have anything to say to me.

But Kate is different, and so is Ariel Allegra. Part of what's interesting about Kate as a character is her ability to be placed in a fish out of water situation (i.e. in another century) and thrive there. She is self-confident, observant and opinionated, which gives her the ability to comment on the modern world with an outsider's perspective. Having her interact with me, her putative creator, doesn't make her less "real" because the interaction is part of her backstory. The whole premise is that somehow an eighteenth-century pirate has managed to travel from a universe in which she's real and I'm not to one in which I'm real and she's not. Ariel, being theoretically the person who caused Kate to "visit" me in the first place, is entitled to pull the same trick. As the daughter of Joshua Wander, a character who travels between universes on a regular basis, Ariel can inhabit almost any version of reality without losing believability, as long as she behaves believably and consistently herself. She's not as effective a commentator as Kate, however, because she's seen too many versions of the modern world to consider ours all that strange.

Do I really believe in this multiverse, infinite timelines idea, the concept that makes it possible for Kate and Ariel to "really" exist in some universe somewhere? The best answer I can give you is that I do and I don't. Apparently there's a fair amount of support in the world of physics for the idea of an infinite multiverse, where every possible variation is played out. But I never took physics in school, and I've never quite been able to grasp the technical explanations. Nor do I really like the idea, taken to its logical extreme. If every single possibility is played out, then every time I do something good, some Karen somewhere is doing something bad (and another one is doing nothing, and one is doing something even better, and one is doing something even worse, and so on). At the macro level, an infinite multiverse is a zero sum game. If every possibility must be played out somewhere, then free will is problematic at best.

Also, "every possibility" does not include impossibilities. If all universes obey the same scientific principles, then none of them contain real wizards, or talking rabbits in planes that stop falling when they run out of gas, or tengremen, or time traveling sports cars. Phooey on that. I prefer a more limited and freeform multiverse, where anything we create as fiction can and does exist in another version of reality, and other possible realities don't necessarily exist. I can't justify this idea scientifically, and I'm not sure I really believe it's true. But my fiction is predicated on it.

So I hope you don't mind if I indulge in this conceit from time to time, and talk to the few fictional characters who know I exist. That is, after all, what they're here for.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Imagination, Writing, Multiverse

Round Robin: This Year's Werewolf, Questioned

Pat (DesLily) chose "The Creative Side Of You" as the theme for this week's Round Robin Challenge. I've been preoccupied with Halloween the last couple of days, but let's see if this will serve. Tonight, John and I built a haunted forest in front of our house. I proceeded to hang out there with a few entirely fictitious friends. Or are they? Black Rose Katie Specks always gets annoyed with me when I claim that I created her. But according to my research, she never existed in this version of reality. Ariel Allegra is more philosophical about it. "I don't mind your calling me fictional," she says, "as long as you understand that in most of the worlds I move through, you're no more real than I am here."



"Tell me again why you perform this Halloween ritual each year," Black Rose Kate ordered. The eighteenth century pirate scribe has taken to dropping in on me lately, wherever I happen to be, aided by her dimensional vagabond friend, Ariel Allegra, Joshua Wander's daughter. The two of them were hanging out by my front door, eating our mini-Snickers and critiquing the kids' costumes. Except that this year, we weren't getting many kids. "As I understand it, you are not attempting to ward off evil spirits," Kate continued. "If anything, you are inviting them."

"I may have invited you, but you aren't what I would call an evil spirit," I said. "Merely piratical. And hungry."

"Good one," Ariel said.

Kate frowned. "I speak of the spirits of the dead and the undead. Clearly I am neither."

"That's debatable," I said. "Most likely you've been dead for centuries, but you haven't stopped moving yet." Kate started to protest, but I held up my hand. "No, don't get mad. You know it's only a joke. Besides, you're right. This has nothing to do with warding off spirits. Modern Halloween is a celebration of the human imagination."



Ariel, who had just taken my picture for this entry, asked, "Whose imagination? Yours or the children's?"

"Both."

"So you aren't doing it for the children. At least not entirely."


"No. Mostly I'm doing it for me. And a little bit for John, and a little bit for the kids."

"Then tell me this," Kate said. "For whom did you hold your two imitation bats on strings and prepare to launch them through the air, when I told you there was not a child within a furlong of your house?"

"You could have been wrong," I said. "I thought I heard some."

"Who can hear distant children with any accuracy when your street is so noisy?" Ariel asked.

"Aye," said Kate. "Aside from present company, all I have heard this past half hour is that dreadful music about Jesus, and a man talking about a cake walk."


"Yes, that's all coming from the church on the other side of Wilmot."

"Why do they sing about Jesus, tonight of all nights?" Kate asked.

"They aren't singing. They're just playing a very bad recording," I said. "It's all part of a party that church is throwing, an alternative to Halloween. They want children to think about Jesus instead of ghosts and werewolves. And pirates," I could not resist adding.

"In truth, it is no bad thing to consider God and the state of one's soul," Kate said. This surprised me a little. She certainly didn't act as though she worried about such things.



"Is there something wrong with thinking about werewolves and pirates, ghosts and vampires?" Ariel asked. "In your time and place, nobody believes in those things, do they?"

"Some people still believe in ghosts," I said. "The rest, not so much."

"So none of these children will leave your yard believing in werewolves," Kate concluded. "Do the people in that loud church believe otherwise? Would they say it is a sin for you to don the mask of a monster?"



I shrugged. "Maybe. Some people might. It's wrongheaded, though. As I said, it's not about promoting belief in the supernatural. It's about being creative, and having fun."

"And candy," Ariel added.

"Did you have fun, scattering your toy rats and spiders and snakes?" Kate asked.

"Oh, yes. Yes, I did," I said.

Kate shook her head. "I shall never understand this century," she said.


Round Robin Linking List

DesLily - POSTED!
Here, There and Everywhere 2nd Edition
http://herethereandeverywhere2ndedition.blogspot.com

Carly - POSTED!
Ellipsis...Suddenly Carly
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com/

boliyou
Percolation
http://boliyou.blogspot.com/

Janet - POSTED!
Fond of Photography
http://fondofphotography.blogspot.com/

Karen - POSTED!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com/

Sara - POSTED!
Animated Seasons
http://animatedseasons.artshelf.us/

Linda - POSTED!
Blah Blah Blog
http://blahblahblog.wordpress.com/

Suzanne R - POSTED!
New Suzanne R's Life
http://newsuzannerslife.blogspot.com/

Teena - POSTED!
It's all about me!
http://purple4mee.blogspot.com/

Steven - POSTED!
(sometimes) photoblog
http://sepintx.blogspot.com/

Marie - POSTED!
Photographs and Memories Too (AOL)
http://journals.aol.co.uk/mariebm56/PhotographsMemoriesToo
&
Photographs and Memories Too (Blogger)
http://photographsmemoriestoo.blogspot.com/

Robin - POSTED!
R's Musings
http://rs-musings.blogspot.com/

Julie - POSTED!
Julie's Web Journal
http://www.barrettmanor.com/julie/journal.aspx

Chris - POSTED!
It's all about me...I think!
http://itsallaboutmeithink.blogspot.com/

Sassy - POSTED!
Sassy's EYE
http://journals.aol.com/sassydee50/SassysEYE

John - POSTED!
Personal Effects
http://personaleffects.blogspot.com

Brad G - POSTED!
We Is
http://we-is.blogspot.com/2006/11/round-robin-photo-challenge.html

Gattina - POSTED! ***Welcome New Member***
Keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com

Technorati Tags: Photos, memes, Creative, Round Robin Photo, Halloween, Black Rose Kate, Fiction