About Lodestar

About Lodestar Part IV
Lodestar, up to this point, was written from more or less one viewpoint per part.
This fourth installment is in effect a series of short installments (novellas, probably) where some of the main minor characters are sidelined and others drawn forward. One or two important characters are only just now being introduced.

The various people whom I asked to critique the series fifteen years ago, advised against introducing important new characters at this late stage. I thought it through at the time, but quailed at the work involved in the restructuring. Put The Lodestar series aside. Years passed while I worked on a new series. Different, I thought.

But my ‘unconscious’ a marvelous entity I am only now learning about, was well and truly in charge, and encouraged me to write multiple stories featuring a main character being invaded and controlled by a foreign influence.

I’m laughing now when I read those lines, knowing that I am absolutely ruled by my unconscious, as you are by yours whatever you may believe. Fifteen years ago, I wasn’t writing unknowingly about my own personal unconscious mind, but about an alien, about an invasive computer program, and about the implant.

Without me realizing, which is the part that still amazes me. Until I had three mostly polished novels, ready to be professionally edited. That’s when I realized. At the time I was poor and troubled, and could afford to have only one of them edited professionally. So I decided to forward the most recent work, which was ‘Mongrel’.

Five years ago my life fell apart as long-time readers will know, and after the chemo, when I set about picking up the pieces, I decided I was done with marketing. The stress of dealing with giant corporations was not doing me any good. I decided that life is too short to hanker after the pittance that I would earn for not writing in the mainstream.

That’s not to say I won’t publish them at all. They’d be a lot easier to read as novel lengths than a chapter at the time.

Fast forward to the idea of the ‘story-debt’. It really grabbed me, for after I labored over The Lodestar world for ten years, its characters and their lives stayed with me. It’s like they are real people somewhere out there. I wondered if by paying off my story-debt, by ‘publishing’ them here, on my blog, these characters would then stop haunting me?

t’s a work in progress. Below a snippet …

The Implant, 1
‘I can almost feel the textures of the nutrient jelly I rest in. I’ve imagined them so often it must be that I now feel them. The heat of my skin melts the material near me, making it silky and fluid. It’s firmer further out. A spider webbing of fibrous supports grows among and between my miniaturized cables.

Fresh nutrient mix is added to the bottom of my housing, its floor is gridded and sits on a saucer, the whole is very like the design for a bird-feeder I have somewhere in my memory banks, though the action of the nutrient mix is opposite to that in the bird-feeder.

I don’t like remembering that I don’t have a skin and that I still don’t have a body. It is not my imagination that I feel a frizzle of anger pass along my synapses. If I’d had a body to use, I would’ve been able to express myself more satisfactorily. Where is that minx Ahni? The speaker fitting is clogged and I cannot call out. I’m not happy with the level of carelessness in this place. Who is on duty? I shouldn’t have to worry about utilities. That was always the work of the host.’

Gone to Feed the Fish

The unfortunate vertical ripples, which barely show when I’m looking at it with only my specs between my eyes and the painting, are due to a paper working well above its pay-grade.

I’m trying to finish my stock of less than ideal ‘parchments’ before I acquire more.

You’re right if you think that this painting seems pretty well unintelligible seen from a distance. Zooming-in helps. It’s always surprising when and what meanings can be wrung from a few splotches, and unplanned application of color, and a few well-chosen words.

‘I don’t speak binary…’

One of my favorite lines in The Mandalorian, which I’ve been watching one last time before I cancel my subscrition with Disney+. Cross my fingers that I can achieve that this time.

That punch line only seems paradoxical. In a scene with the maximum amount of technology being used, Din Djindarin tells his droid don’t complain to me I don’t speak binary.

Binary? A language made up of noughts and ones? On and off? Speaking it would be quite a feat. I think it’s hilarious, that idea. Always laugh when I hear it.

Originally, I signed up to rewatch the Star Wars timeline right through. That was last year sometime. Tried to cancel my subscription then, but Disney is one of those ‘sticky’ businesses. It’s hard to get loose once you signed up.

So, OK, I’ve gotten involved in a few other shows. The Bear was good. I rewatched Avatar, then tried to get into part two.

The minute one of the baddies said that they had to leave Earth because it had died, I was over it. I switched it off.

Turns out I can watch any amount of pretend fisticuffs and sword play but keep your so-called fictional future-telling off my Earth. The present day real life predatorial delays are bad enough.

A vague shot of the mythosaur .. he’s an archetype of course. I’d love to see a bit more of him if Disney+ ever does a third series.

Screen Saver

Today I learned how to ‘play’ my screen saver. It’s the kelp forest and the diver, drone, or camera moves slowly through it. This is the few seconds before I start the day.

Then I hit ENTER on my password and I have to live with whatever area it stops at. For a while all I could see all day was huge swags of kelp behind all my directories.

Got sick of the boring view. Went through all the other available screen savers, didn’t like any of them. Re installed the kelp forest.

This morning I thought to view the whole loop. Duh, people will be saying. I hit ENTER at a place I liked and hey presto … a whole new and different wallpaper. I’ve got fish now, swimming between the folders.

Flowers

This excellent gerbera… in the wilderness that was the original village here.

When I take a photo from my balcony there is always first the roof over the BBQ area that I aim to miss, then the old olive green grey roofs of the single storey cottages that made up the old village, Carinya.

While only a few people still live there and itis generally a ghost town, the name is still often used, and a number of activities are run in Carinya’s community complex.

I haven’t explored over there yet although the Librarian at Parkland (the new community complex) said to me that if I liked old books, there are hundreds at Carinya. Kind of a red rag to an old reader, if you know what I mean.

Communications

This book, that I tripped over this morning in my longtime search for independent blogs, hooked my attention with its appendices.

Books On Books Collection – Timothy Donaldson

Since my fictions range over many cultural groups and therefore different languages, and I have the main characters moving from group to group, I’m always looking for ways to write language learning …

This is the taster, as I’m on my mobile. Later, when I move onto my laptop with its bigger screen and I can see what I’m doing, I’ll write the expansion if the original idea allows itself to be expanded.

Sometimes I have two or three posts on the go being drafted due to needing more info. Like, for instance, the expansion on the mysterious stone that needs me to dig around in geological areas.

The word ‘expansion’ is really starting to bother me, it needs rephrasing. Never mind, I have a thesaurus on my laptop.

This blog seems to be the best medium to record my ideas as they arise, as I usually allow myself an hour or so of screentime on my mobile first thing in the morning. While I have my breakfast, imbibe my coffee and drink a liter of salted water.

‘Testament of Youth’ …

By Vera Brittain, first published in 1933, and with a long publishing history thereafter, has kept me reading for over a week.

This is not a book review in the formal sense as I’m sure thousands of those have been written over the ninety-one years of existence of this … what we nowadays might call a memoir. (If I understand correctly that such a thing is an autobiographical account of a period of time)

Vera Brittain was of the same generation as my grandparents, who all four were also born in the 1880s to 1890s. Brittain was born in the provincial middle class hinterland of what is now the UK, my grandparents were born and raised in the provincial middleclass hinterland in the Netherlands.

There the comparison ends, for neither of my grandmothers were rebels, and due to their nation’s neutrality, they did not experience the 1914-1918 years in the same way as most other people in Europe.

According to the histories I’ve read, it suited the powers surrounding the Netherlands to allow that nation’s neutrality to continue through the whole of the war, for their convenience.

While German troops crossed and recrossed Dutch territories at will, millions of Belgian refugees made their homes in the Netherlands through the war. Coal and other minerals from the Dutch colonies warmed British homes and kept factories going.

But there was no historical, personal detail from the four families, how they were affected by the fighting on their very doorsteps, they surely would’ve been close enough to hear the guns in Belgium?

And while I’ve read a few historical novels about the Great War, I’d never read an account written from a woman’s point of view. So ‘seized’ the opportunity.

The first most noticeable thing reading a book written in the 1920s is the brand of tortured English. Well, I’m calling it that.

There are always ten words where we, nowadays, can make ourselves understood with a mere five or six. All ten, or however many there are, of the English language’s verb tenses get a good work-out.

It’s noticeable in Brittain’s account when a noun is unadorned by one or two adjectives or a verb with at least one adverb. It feels bare then. Most sentences have more than thirty words. It’s exceedingly verbose and towards the end I skipped many half page paragraphs.

Why did I even keep going, you’ll be wondering? Brittain’s experiences during the war and her incredible, through thick and thin, correspondences with her lover, her brother and two friends of theirs until they died, either in action or after being wounded is the real story here.

How the Army kept the postal service going to all areas of the front would make an amazing read. The logistics to keep that going boggles my mind.

It’s astounding, the numbers of letters written by soldiers at war, sent, and received by relatives if Vera Brittain’s experiences are anything to go by. At one point she mentions that there were daily letters or postcards or even brief notes from men stuck in the trenches.

Brittain’s own experiences as a war nurse, working in hospitals right next to various battle fronts, where they triaged men with horrific wounds make you thankful to live now. I learned more about mustard gas than I knew. More about infection when there were no antibiotics. About gangrene. About … Medicine has come a long way in a hundred years.

I understand there have been a film and TV series made. If I’d seen the film first, I’d probably not bother to read the book. It is quite heavy going. But then I wouldn’t have read the rain of little diamonds sprinkled throughout the text. The words and images that I will treasure.

Such as when Vera visits first Roland’s grave and a few years later her brother’s grave. On the way there so many broken tree-trunks lay along the road bearing witness, that only the Omniscient Mmathmatician could count them.

There was a great deal to enjoy.

But have you noticed how unconsciously influenced I was by the wordy turgidity of Miss Brittain’s style? That passive voice will haunt me.

Typed one-fingered on my mobile, this will have to go out un checked and un-proofed. I’ll do that tomorrow.