I Met John Dillinger!

John Dillinger (center) with two members of his gang

I like that almost everyone in this shot is dressed in period.

No, I didn't, but I spoke with the guy who played Dillinger outside the Hotel Congress this afternoon. A good time was had by all. More later.

Karen

All Input, No Outgo

There are nights on which I dither for hours, messing about on Wikipedia and blogs and message boards and watching DVDs in the hope that something I see is going to spark an idea for that night's blog entry. Here we are at 4 AM and counting, and the only idea that's occurred to me is the cliche of a writer looking for ideas. Still, I have come up with an angle, and may yet manage to build a coherent essay around it.

Have you ever seen the Short Circuit? It's a fairly lightweight Steve Gutenberg film about a little military robot who achieves sentience and becomes a fun-loving peacenik, more or less. Early in the film he's in someone's kitchen, demanding "Input."

Input is a good and sometimes important thing for a writer. Put someone in a bare room for years on end with no tv, newspapers, books, Internet or friends, and he or she isn't going to have much to talk about. Well, maybe. If the person had some experience of the world before that, it could still find its way into dreams, and be built on from there. But the point's the same. We need input, grist for our personal idea mills. That's what Internet memes are, after all. They're just another form of input.

Problem is, those mills don't grind away smoothly and consistently. Today at work I finished one stage of a project compiling 1600 lines of color-coded data, and had fun doing it. At lunch I read a couple pages of my stalled Joshua Wander mystery, and realized that the world knew about dragons but not humanoid mythical creatures. I spent tonight reading about yet another dust-up over trollish sockpuppets and disemvoweling, theories about the process and stylistic differences between two screenwriters, and two different Doctor Who location shoots, while intermittently watching Series Two of Doctor Who and, when I wasn't doing those other things, messing working my way through Chapter Five of Heirs. All that stuff got crammed into my brain, and nothing of note spilled out the other end.

Maybe it's not the right input. Or maybe the grinder needs the lubricant of sleep to work properly.


But meanwhile I took a peek at Whatever, and there was a thread of hundreds of comments, supplying fictional biographical details about the nonexistent John Scalvi, son of a typo. Most of them were intricate and brilliant, and I thought, "I can't begin to compete with these." But then I added my own anyway. The gag was simply going to be a claim that Scalvi is afraid of the letter Z, and advice not to mention Pluto to him. But I ended up writing about Scalvi celebrating Dillinger Days, rescuing me from a sinkhole near the train station, settling Doc Holliday's karmic debt, and then carving me up as punishment for mentioning Pluto. And everything in that little fantasy comes from some kind of outside input, most notably my trip downtown last weekend. The celebration of Dillinger's capture at the Hotel Congress turns out to be today, but I didn't consciously realize that when I wrote the bit.

It's still not remotely the best whimsical vignette in that particular comment thread, but 'twill do.

As will this essay.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #199: When Do You Sleep?

Given that sleep deprivation is an ongoing issue for me, I thought it might be interesting to find out about everyone else's sleeping patterns. To wit:

Weekend Assignment #199: What is your usual sleep schedule on weeknights? Are you an "early to bed, early to rise" sort of person, or do you stay awake far into the night (voluntarily or otherwise), and get up as late as your work schedule permits? Do you give priority to getting adequate sleep? If so, how is that working out for you?

Extra Credit: If you had no work or family scheduling obligations, would your sleeping pattern change substantially?


As for myself, it should be obvious to all that I'm a night person. This is when I do my writing, my blogging, my reading and most of my tv watching, mostly on DVD. I do know the downside of sleep deprivation all too well, and the health benefits of the opposite. Intellectually, I really, really do know all about it. But somehow it always seems that another paragraph or two in the blog essay, another scene of Doctor Who, another chapter of that book in the bathroom are all more compelling than walking into the bedroom. And when I do go to bed, it often takes me several attempts (got to get up for an allergy pill, a swig of Mylanta, a dose for the dog, another paragraph of my novel edit, or a last glance at my email) before I'm in bed to stay.

I'll reform eventually. At least, that's what I keep telling myself!

And yes, if I didn't have to work, I would sleep from 5 AM to 2 PM daily. Then I'd be well rested!

Your turn! Write about your sleep schedule in yoour journal or blog, and then come back here and leave the link in comments. I'll post a roundup of results a week from now. I'm curious to see whether any of us are doing this sleep thing "right!"

Karen

Weekend Assignment #198: Your Winter Favorites

An aloe is unfazed by a rare Tucson snowfall, 2007.

For last week's Weekend Assignment, I asked what you like and dislike the most about winter. Here's what you came up with. Please click on the links for everyone's full remarks.

Mike: "I think the best part is just after a fresh snow...."

Carly: "Winter is beautiful, and a bit challenging to this amateur photographer."

TexasPatrick: "Winter in Texas is more annoying than behavior altering."

Becky: "Mostly, I love winter because it's not HOT."

A.B.: "So, it's winter in Los Angeles, and you know what that means: shorts and t-shirts!"

Arachne Jericho: "Bainbridge Island: home of very tall trees that merge and mingle with what civilization exists, sometimes to fall in high winter winds over power lines and cause everyone to rethink priorities temporarily."

Laura: "We call it great sleeping weather."

saqib: "It really is a site to behold when your entire neighborhood is covered with mounds of white."

Duane: "First, the sky is so crystal clear at night that it seems as if you can see the entire universe."

Julie: "I suppose winter is a time when I tend to get things done."

Florinda: At the risk about sounding really obnoxious, these days I have to admit that what I like best about winter is the fact I don't really have to deal with it; I moved to Southern California five years ago.

Unfocused Me: "That's what I love about winter: the possibility of snow days."

Kiva: "With the clouds and the moisture, the air just vibrates when the sun shines."

The responses this week seem to have a less consistent pattern than for last week's assignment. Generally, people who live where winter is mild or absent are happy about this; but people who live where it gets genuinely cold have a great variety of reasons for liking or disliking it. One thing I'm grateful for, aside from the volume and quality of the response: not one of you resorted to saying "I like best that it's over by April!"

Thanks, folks! I'll be back with this week's Assignment in the next hour or so.

Karen

In Which I Try Not to Moan and Groan

Tonight's sky is unedited.

Okay, first off, the usual excuses: distracted by Doctor Who (and Torchwood), blah, blah; must sleep (yeah, yeah); another sunset photo (ho hum). The sunset was tonight's and it's just as well I photographed it from the parking lot at work, because the color was almost completely gone by the time I reached Safeway. I've tried hard to smudge out a rather obvious feature of the background, and even so I've very nearly given the game away about where I work. But the sky is exactly as the camera captured it. I think I had it set on "Vivid" for this particular shot, but it's pretty close to what my eyes saw.

Through the usual mysterious means, tonight I saw the first episode of Series Two of Torchwood, Doctor Who's darker, sexier spin-off. The guest star was James Marsters, who played Spike on BtVS. He had dark hair for this, and looked a bit older ('cause he is), but even so, John rightly remarked that the character, Captain John Hart, was pretty much Spike. Early Spike, mind you, not the lovesick, ensouled, redeemed version. He and Captain Jack have a history together as partners, Time Agency colleagues and lovers, but Jack has clearly outgrown the amoral bad boy. And guess what: it's not a one shot role, as was previously assumed. He turns up in the season preview trailer as well. Cool.

Other than that, listening to a three hour BBC radio show to get to a five minute interview, and reading the Doctor Who Forum all night, I've actually managed to accomplish a few things. For one thing, I've rearranged the sidebar a bit, and added a box with links to the most current editions of the three memes I'm involved with. Assuming I keep up with it, you'll always be able to easily get to the the announcement entries so you can play along, and see who else has done so. My readership has dipped a little since last summer, so if you detect a whiff of desperation in all the cross-promotion, your virtual nose is not deceiving you. It's not about my personal ego (much); I'm just trying to get enough people aware of the continued existence of the Weekend Assignment and Monday Photo Shoot to drum up sufficient participation to keep the two memes going. That said, I should know better than to look at my blog stats. No good ever comes of it.

The other accomplishment of the evening was getting through eleven pages of editing on Chapter Three of Heirs of Mâvarin. I'm sorry to say I have missed working on the book one night already this year, but other than that I've spent at least a little time on it every night. Tonight's big problem was the scene that follows on from another scene that I cut entirely. I'm not good about making largish deletions, but even I knew that previous scene was lame and didn't need to be there. Five minutes later, though, I rescued the first sentence of it to lead off the next scene about those characters. I then fussed and agonized, agonized and fussed, trying to get a decent transitional sentence or two in behind it. The current version is, um, acceptable.

Karen

The More "Things" the Merrier! Or Something.

Hooray! John Scalzi has a meme! It's a rerun of something he posted on both By the Way and Whatever in 2005, but what the heck. This time he asks for ten MORE things we've done that others probably have not.

My response from 2005 is here. Now, what can I come up with for tonight that I haven't already mentioned repeatedly?

1. I've asked author E.R. Braithwaite (To Sir With Love) a lame question about tropical fish. I was in fifth or sixth grade at the time.

2. I've met two wrestlers in connection with their acting gigs: my semi-namesake Terry Funk (co-star of Tequila & Bonetti) and a Quantum Leap walk-on who called himself "Jay York, the Alaskan."

3. I've written a short (unproduced) film that combines time travel with sex education. I don't remember the plot; it was over thirty years ago.

4. I've stood next to Joe Strummer and played one coin-operated video game while he played another in some Ohio hotel. Can't remember which of us was playing Pole Position, nor whether it was in Akron or Kent (as in Kent State).

5. I've been frightened, while running a fever, of the imagined image of the kind of clothespin that doesn't clamp shut. I think it was when I had the mumps.

6. I've had nightmares about trying to determine debits and credits in aspects of life that have nothing to do with financial accounting.

7. I've seen O.J. Simpson run through an airport. No cameras were present.

8. I've seen an osprey (a relative of the eagle that lives on fish) perched in a saguaro cactus in the desert.

9. I've called the BBC at 3 AM Tucson time, right after being frightened by a Talking Moose. (The latter was an early Mac program, not a Captain Kangaroo sidekick. It startled me.)

10. I've driven about fifty miles on a scooter with no working headlight, half of that after sunset; and 1100 miles roundtrip (Columbus OH to Syracuse with two stops at Niagara Falls) on a scooter with a broken speedometer.

The scooter in question, sans speedometer cable, 1985

Karen

Two from Tombstone

Janet of fondofsnape.com expressed an interest in Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, whose statues guard the back patio of the old railroad depot here in Tucson. I actually have some more material on them, some from a 2004 journal entry, the rest not previously online. So let's run with that, shall we?


Here's the best picture I got on Saturday of Wyatt and Doc. Wyatt Earp is presumably the one with the big mustache, as you can see from the portrait below.


This marker was also at the depot. I didn't actually read it, so now I must Google to find out what the story is. As you might expect, it all ties in with the feud between the Earp brothers and the Clanton gang, which seems to have been more a faction than an actual criminal gang. Certainly there was plenty of murder carried out by both the Clantons and the Earps, and the Earps didn't always have the law on their side. Based on an excellent article I just found about little brother Warren Earp, here's the gist of what happened:

The three who fell at or near OK Corral. Photo by KFB.

• July 1881: deputy U.S. Marshall Virgil Earp takes a posse to "investigate" cattle rustling by Old Man Clanton. Gunplay ensures. It is thought that the senior Clanton was killed (among others) and Warren Earp injured.
• October 26, 1881: the Earps and their friend Doc Holliday have it out with the Clantons and McLaurys in the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Frank and Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton are killed.
  
• December 28, 1881: Ike Clanton, Frank Stillwell and others try to shoot Virgil Earp as he crosses Allen Street. Virgil Earp is injured. The shooters are eventually acquitted, and Wyatt Earp becomes U.S. deputy marshal.
  
• March 18, 1882: Morgan Earp is shot in the back while shooting pool in Tombstone. Stillwell as suspected of being one of the group that killed him.
• March 20, 1882: the surviving Earps, Doc Holliday and others leave Tombstone, ostensibly to join family in California. The train stops in Tucson, where the Earps hear that members of the Clanton faction (notably Ike Clanton and Frank Stillwell) are waiting to shoot them down. Wyatt reportedly spies both men at the Tucson depot. He, Doc and the rest get off the train. The next morning, Stillwell's "bullet-filled body" is found near the tracks. A warrant goes out for the Earps' arrest, and there are Clantons in the posse. The Earps return briefly to Tombstone for supplies and then ride out, killing three more of the Clanton faction in what becomes known as the Earp Vendetta Ride.
• April 15, 1882: about this date, the Earps reteat to Colorado.
  
• And so on: Wyatt and Doc are suspected of returning to Arizona that summer, long enough to kill Johnny Ringo. Others of the Earp faction kill Billy Claiborne and Frank Leslie before the whole sorry mess is over. Holliday dies of T.B. in Colorado. Warren Earp ends up in Willcox, Arizona, where he sporadically picks fights with people until he eventually gets himself killed. One of his surviving brothers, probably Virgil, is thought to have avenged his death. Wyatt drifts around the country, gambling and prospecting, and lives until 1929.
  

What a waste of human life. Seriously.


Of course, most of this takes place in and around Tombstone which Google Maps places exactly 66 miles from my house, or 1 hour 18 minutes. It's not exactly close by. I've been there a few times, but probably not since 1990. It's a memorable place, though. Some of the attractions are laughably dated and low-tech, but all the more endearing because of it. And it's real history, in a real place that hasn't changed all that much in the last fifty years or so. If you get a chance to go there, I recommend it.

My dad hangs out with the famous gunslingers, March 2005.

Karen