Daybook

Descriptions of what I did recently; what most people think of when they imagine a “diary entry.”

Small Town Life, With Bombers

Hey! We’re here again! Where’s here? Heh. Guess.

It was a boring trip, and when I’m driving, boring is good. It was so boring, in fact (64 degress, clear skies, no wind to speak of) that I just kept on going and did 480 miles the first day, taking us all the way through Fat Dogs country and out the other side. My driving maniac friends may grin to think of 480 as a lot of miles, but with four dogs’ worth of potty breaks (and a few for us) it got to be a drag by 6 PM. And so we stopped for the night at Grand Island, Nebraska.

Just before dawn, a front carrying rain and cold air caught up with us, and we played tag with it the rest of Day 2. Getting out in front of it was easy, and while we were out in front we stopped for most of an hour to walk the dogs and look around in Ashland, Nebraska, population 2,200. The Midwest Homebrewers and QRP Group meets there, in part because it’s about halfway between Lincoln and Omaha. That’s also the reason I wanted to take a look: Carol and I have thought of renting a small house for a month or so as a pied a terre and exploration base in interesting places like eastern Nebraska. Being less than an hour from both Lincoln and Omaha, Ashland would be almost ideal.

First Congregational Church, Ashland, Nebraska

And it’s a great town, maybe just a hair smaller than what I consider the ideal size for human communities. Tidy older homes along streets lined with big trees, a cobbled Main Street, riverside park with walking trails, ham radio club, an aerospace museum full of classic bombers (plus an Atlas missile), broadband–what else could a man need? (And if I do need a megalopolis for some reason, Omaha is just a short trot out I-80.) Remember: Boredom is a choice.

We met my friend Darwin Piatt W9HZC for lunch in downtown Omaha at the Old Market, where I signed his copy of The Cunning Blood and we BSed about homebrewing and much else before the front caught up with us and it started to drizzle again. Then it was back on the road, where we eventually got out in front of the rain and made it to Iowa City before packing it in. Day 3 is always short, and we rolled into Crystal Lake about 3 PM.

We’ll be spiffing up the dogs for the Bichon Nationals the end of next week, but in the meantime I have a few days to gather my thoughts, take notes, visit with my sister and her girls, and maybe write a little. It’s been a long, cold, ugly winter (and let us pray that the current volcanic tantrum in Iceland doesn’t dump us into yet another Little Ice Age) so I’m greeting spring with an enthusiasm I don’t think I’ve felt for twenty years or more. For the moment, life is good, and I’m savoring it.

Hail the New Champion!

Apr 11th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Well, I’m dog tired and don’t have a lot of time tonight (and I hurt my back packing the car for the trip home) but the short form is this: Aero nailed it. He won Winners Dog the second day of the Terry-All Kennel Club dog show outside Denver, and because one of the other male bichons entered on Saturday but not Sunday, there were only two points to be had.

However, two points were all that he needed.

So now Aero is Ch. Jimi’s Admiral Nelson. We stopped at McDonalds and bought a cup of frozen custard to celebrate, and everybody got some, though Aero the Conquering Hero got more than his packmates. Furthermore, he got to ride the whole 90 miles home in Carol’s lap, a rare privilege shared only occasionally by QBit.

Before the gang packed up and went home, we took a group photo down in the cow pens. Left to right: Carol (with Aero’s winning ribbons), Aero, Lindsay Van Keuren, her 9-month puppy Beanie, Grace Van Keuren, Mona Lisa, and Mona’s owner Mary Provost.

What’s next? Aero’s becoming a champion this weekend (which was hoped for but hardly assumed) may change our strategy at the 2010 Bichon Nationals in Indianapolis. Carol needs to consult the bichon experts a little, but one thing is certain: It’s time to get Dash into more show classes and teach him some discipline. He likes everybody, and in fact he liked the judge in the 6-12 Month Puppy Dog class so much that he put his front feet up on the judge’s chest and tried to lick his nose. He will technically be a puppy for seven more months (even though he’s already full-grown and reproductively mature) but once you’re competing in Open Dog, licking the judge won’t score you any points.

Overall, it was a fine, fine (if exhausting) weekend. And on that note, I think I’m going to take another dose of Tylenol and go to bed.

Bichon Freeze

Apr 10th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

We’re at the Terry-All Kennel Club dog show at the Adams County Fairgrounds, just outside Thornton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. And we’re back in the cattle pens, just as we were at the big Denver dog show in February. The difference, of course, is that the cattle pens at Denver’s National Western Complex are inside.

When we rolled into the fairgrounds at 8:30 this morning, the 4Runner’s thermometer read 36 degrees. We brought light jackets only (the dogs have their fur coats) which was, well, a mistake. We are working in a grubby 9′ X 12′ cattle pen with an uneven dirt-and-manure floor, rolling steel-tube doors, and gappy wooden plank walls going up a hair over seven feet. Past that there’s nothing but a freestanding tin roof another eight feet higher, complete with flocks of small birds roosting on the girders and dirty light fixtures that we (fortunately) do not need.

(The photo above was taken standing outside the red-painted barn entirely, looking in at our stall.) It was a cold, cold morning. Fortunately, we have a hair dryer, and every so often while blow-drying the no-rinse shampoo we have to use to get the day’s dirt off of the Pack, we stuck the snout of the hair dryer into our jackets for a second or two. A chill wind blowing freely through the stall didn’t help.

We now understand why Jesus was born between an ox and a ass. It was that or hypothermia.

It took until lunchtime for the sun to warm up the surroundings comfortably, and by then we were done. The guys were clean, fluffed, and expertly trimmed, and Carol took the quarter mile to the show hall carrying Jack, with me close behind, Aero and Dash each under one arm. If they had walked, they’d have been brown long before the quarter mile was over. (Anyone who has ever been to a county fair or a rodeo anywhere on the Great Plains will understand.)

Two people showing three dogs is an interesting exercise in logistics. Carol handled Aero and Dash in the first round (they being in different classes) and I handled Jack. As usual, Jack would not keep his tail up, and Aero beat him handily. Dash was no angel: We’re not quite sure how but he squirmed out of his show lead and would have leapt off the judging table had Carol not grabbed a hind leg in time. He thus narrowly avoided disqualification, and being the only entry in the 9-12 month Puppy Dog class, won his class by default.

In the subsequent Winners Dog round, Aero was up against Dash and a beautiful older male puppy, who had earlier won the 12-18 Month Puppy Dog class. Aero won the round, and thus (having beaten three male bichons) got three points. And because for male bichons three points is considered major, Aero bagged his second major win, of the two required for championship. In the Best of Breed round, Aero was up against the Winner’s Bitch and a male special (a previous champion competing for higher honors) and the special got it, afterward going on to Best of Group for Nonsporting. The special did not place in Best of Group, so at that point the bichon action was over, and we packed our stuff and toodled back to the hotel.

Aero clearly knows he’s hot stuff, and has been lording it over Jack and Dash here in the room ever since. (QBit is taking it easy for the weekend back at Sunrise Kennels, as he does not compete.) All Aero lacks now are two more points. If he wins tomorrow as he won today, he’ll go home a newly minted champion.

The tension is palpable. Tune in again tomorrow!

I Plum Forgot…

Mar 19th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

…to tell you that we’d gone to Hawaii. Sorry. Actually, not sorry. But after five years without a real vacation (and by “real” I mean “with a salt-water beach and palm trees”) we just packed up and went, no regrets and little time spent packing. I mean, they have Wal-Marts in Hawaii, so whatever we might fail to bring can be had without much anguish.

No anguish necessary. We brought everything we had to have (like, how badly does anybody need socks in Hawaii?) and Maui suits me just fine: Ten minutes after we got into our room overlooking Polo Beach, Carol was out on the balcony staring at the blue ocean, when she yells, “A whale!” And by cracky, one of them 40-ton bass yodelers had just thrown itself out of the depths and most of the way up into the sunlight. For another half an hour we watched, and they were out there in force, frolicking, flapping their flukes, and finding it all a fine, fine time.

Didn’t expect whales. And after five years, I’d forgotten a certain amount of beach discipline. That blue water looked so damned good after a deep frozen winter that simply won’t end (and still hasn’t) that I just waded in, forgetting I was wearing my expensive titanium-frame prescription sunglasses until a seven-foot wave crested over my head and knocked them off, simultaneously sending twin columns of high-pressure saline solution up my nose. Once I could breathe again I realized that my sunglasses were nowhere to be seen, and Carol and I spent another half an hour examining the ocean bottom during the wave troughs. We found a hotel key card and then somebody else’s sunglasses, as well as a heavily corroded penny and a sea urchin spine, before Carol sang out that she had them. That was a helluva break, considering how the waves were stirring up the sand on the bottom. The lenses picked up a few pits and scratches but are otherwise intact, and that is a mistake I doubt I will make again any time soon.

To celebrate our unlikely victory, I returned to my hard-drinking ways at dinner that evening, and had not one but two margaritas with my grilled walu.

Not much more to report. You all know what Hawaii looks like, and if I had had the presence of mind to install a photo editor on my new laptop before we left, I might have been able to post a picture or two here. The weather has been perfect, if a little windy. The food’s good, the bed’s great, the company sans pareille. I vacation as men might choose, though if I do get to choose, I choose not to wait another five years to do it again!

EntConnect 2010

Feb 22nd, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

7 comments

I don’t know how many of you remember Midnight Engineering magazine, founded and edited during its life by the other Bill Gates, William E. Gates. From 1990 to 1998, the magazine covered the soft issues of technical entrepreneurship and the challenges faced by “midnight engineers” developing and selling products from their spare rooms. Bill and I were in the magazine startup business at about the same time and spoke often, and I wrote an article or two for the magazine down the years. In 1992 Bill started an idiosyncratic ski party and bull session here in Colorado, which grew into EntConnect, a small but intense skull-session kind of conference held every March near or in Denver.

I moved to Colorado in 2003, and Midnight Engineering alum Jack Krupansky has been bugging me to attend the conference ever since. I don’t know why it’s taken so long, but barring rogue asteroids or invading aliens I will be attending, and presenting a short session on POD publishing. Admitting that I’ve never been to an EntConnect, I can’t tell you much about it from personal experience, but everyone I’ve spoken to who’s ever gone says it’s been a wild time and well worth it. Don’t think Comdex. Think a geeky tech retreat with go-karts, trap shooting, snow skiing, and freewheeling interchange among a modest-sized crowd of very smart people who aren’t famous for taking “no” for an answer. (I’ll post photos and a wrapup here after the conference.)

This year, the conference will be held on March 25-28, 2010, at the Crown Plaza Hotel at 1450 Glenham Place in downtown Denver, just off the 16th Street Mall. The full 2010 conference schedule has not been posted yet, but I’ll be on it, along with Matt Trask on virtual machines and Chris Seto discussing recent innovations in tablet computing. Other stuff will be on the menu as well, but the real win I think is just the face time with other people who think small is better.

Here’s the conference home page. You can jump off to the registration page from there, and when the schedule is firmed up that’s where it’ll be.

Now, I’m not a skier, at least not on frozen water, but there will be a ski outing on Thursday, and lordy-lord, we have snow here to spare. However, I should be there for the rest of it. (How long has it been since I’ve even sat on a go-kart? Only my dear sister knows…)

Sounds like a riot. If you’re within striking distance of Denver, consider joining us!

Yapstravaganza: Catchup and Wrapup

Feb 15th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

Ok. I had hoped to post an update each night we were up in Denver at the dog show, but hotel connectivity is evidently a lot less reliable than most people think. (It went away after the first night and I did not have the time nor the energy to pursue a fix or alternatives.) So much for the Cloud–like I ever believed in reliably pervasive connectivity.

Anyway. We got into the dog show routine fairly quickly, and it was pretty aerobic: Awaken at 5 AM, scramble into clothes, pile dogs into kennels, pile kennels onto the rolly cart, pile grooming bins on top of kennels, top off with the grooming table (one of three; the other two are the scruffy ones that we leave in the cattle pens) and bungie the whole mess together. Then roll the laden cart into the elevator, get it down to parking ramp, pull it all apart, and stuff everything into its appointed place in the 4Runner. Run through the drive-up window at McDonalds, get McMuffins, and eat in the car, with the engine running when it’s less than 20 degrees out. (Which it was on Days 3 and 4.) Fight early rush-hour traffic on I-70 for the six miles to the National Western Complex. Wait in line for a spot at the unloading docks, which are ironically plastered with signs reading ABSOLUTELY NO DOGS ALLOWED. (Dogs are not a good fit at cattle and horse shows.) Haul everything out of the 4Runner and pile it on the rolly cart. Roll the cart in the doors and through the fetid vastness of the cattle pens to the open grooming area we’ve staked out for the local bichon club. Then I get to run back to the car, drive it what seems like three counties east to the big parking lot, and walk back. While Carol gets her gear laid out, I carry each dog to the public potty pens, which are bedroom-sized chicken-wire enclosures ankle deep in fresh wood chips. Unlike the area surrounding the complex, the potty pens are grime-free and won’t make a pure-white dog’s paws turn gray. Even walking them on the cattle pen floors makes short work of a bath and groom job, so we carry them everywhere they have to go. (Walking them on pavement gives them a condition we call “pave paws,” which is an aerospace joke I expect almost none of you to get.)

Finally (and by now it’s maybe 7 and just about sunrise) we get one dog up on each of our three tables and start spiffing them. The other club members arrive about then, but since they have only one dog apiece, there’s less for them to do. I hold the blow dryer while Carol spritzes, combs, brushes, and tips (scissor trims) three bichon haircuts. She’s good; she can chitchat with her friends all through the process, and although it takes about two and a half hours, we generally have the dogs looking about as good as they’re capable of looking well before ring time.

Ring time for bichons is mid-morning, from ten to eleven-thirty. Each class is judged separately: Puppies, Open Dog, Open Bitch, and specialty classes like Bred By and Amateur Owner/Handler. Then the winner from each class re-enters the ring by sex for the Winners competition, which results in a Winners Dog and a Winners Bitch. Finally, Winners Dog and Winners Bitch compete against one another (and against “specials,” which are dogs and bitches who are already champions but are still showing) for Best of Breed. Later in the day, Best of Breed goes up against Best of Breeds for the other breeds in the group (which for bichons is Non-Sporting) for Best of Group. Finally, the Best of Groups compete for Best in Show.

There are not a lot of bichons as a rule, at least not compared to French Bulldogs (39 this weekend!) and Dalmatians. So judging is fairly quick, and may take all of fifteen minutes to go from individual classes to Best of Breed. After Best of Breed is decided, we all go back down to the cattle pens (dogs tucked under arms or riding in baby strollers) and hang out in the grooming area. Senior club members pass along tips for grooming and handling to junior members (like us) and all the local dog gossip trades around. Lunch is had, though the food at the Complex is legendarily awful. (The Denver locals brown-bag it.) After lunch, people shop at the huckster tables upstairs or just hang out. Dog show attendees come down and wander around the grooming area, petting the dogs, taking pictures, and sometimes asking after puppies. By three or three-thirty, Carol and I begin to retrace our morning steps: We throw the dogs into their kennels, throw the kennels onto the rolly cart, pile whatever we need for the evening on top of the cart, and Carol waits by the docks while I fetch the car. In the early evening, Carol washes some or all portions of Certain Dogs Who Can’t Keep Their Noses Off the Floor (nothing like gray-black whiskers on a bichon) and I go fetch Chinese from Panda Express. Come 8:30, we take them to the cleanest patch of grass we can find out beside the hotel, then kiss them good night, jump in the shower, and collapse into bed by 9.

Whew. I’m a congenital insomniac, but at dog shows, I sleep like a rock.

As for how we did, well, not as well as we’d hoped, but not as badly as we (occasionally) feared, especially when the pack was misbehaving, getting filthy when we weren’t looking, or making a racket. Aero took Winners Dog and picked up two points on Saturday. One other male dog withdrew from the show, so we didn’t have a major, alas. On Sunday, something a little odd happened: The judge was one who simply liked large dogs. So Jack beat bantamweight Aero in Open Dog, and then in Winners Dog, Dash beat Jack, largely because Jack was still a little show-shy and wouldn’t keep his tail up. So our rowdy, scruffy, eight-month puppy bested his pack mates to become Winners Dog and win his first two points. Again, we did not have a major, but then we did not think Dash would take Winners Dog, either. As we expected, Dash was beaten for Best of Breed by a past-champion special, but we didn’t think he’d get even that far.

At today’s judging, Aero again took Winners Dog and the two points, giving him four for the weekend. He now has ten out of fifteen, and needs only those five points and one more major win to become a new champion. Carol is delighted. We’re both exhausted. The dogs are glad to be back home and are already fast asleep. Next show? The four-day Bichon Frise National Specialty (which I call Bichonicon) in Indianapolis, over the first full weekend in May. I expect to sleep well there, but still–that’s about as soon as I could handle it!

Yapstravaganza, Day 1

Feb 12th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

We pulled into the National Western Complex at 8 this morning, with a 4Runner full of dogs and associated paraphernalia. We had staked out a grooming area down in the cattle pens yesterday afternoon, and with machine-gun efficiency Carol got Aero, Jack, and Dash up on their grooming tables and started in on their coats. Jack, as is his habit, threw up in his kennel on the way here from the hotel, so he had to have a session with the no-rinse shampoo. (He’s riding in the front seat with Carol tomorrow. He may still hurl, but Carol will have a towel in her lap and can keep him from walking in it. Barf management is one of the essential skills of the dog show circuit.)

My back has been giving me some grief the last few days, and when I pulled out a Tylenol I fumbled it, and it landed on the floor. Even though I watch MythBusters and am a firm believer in the power of my immune system, this is a cattle show complex and we’re in a cattle pen. They hose it down every so often, but when you walk in the door you know what sorts of animals hang out here most of the time and what they use the floor for. That Tylenol went in the trash. (We have lots more.)

Carol did her magic, and come 10:30 we marched upstairs, Carol holding Jack, and me with Aero and Dash each under an arm. Compared to all the grooming, the showing happens in a flash. Aero and Jack both had first-day syndrome: Overwhelmed by the crush of humanity and caninity, they were edgy and whiny and neither would keep his tail up. And so when the dust settled, another bichon took Best Dog. Aero got second, and Jack third.

This has happened before with Aero. However, by tomorrow he’ll be a lot more at ease in the show environment, and we expect the tail to be back up where it belongs. Furthermore, losing can sometimes be useful: The dog who beat Aero took today’s major, and (as it happened) by doing so became a new champion. That means that he’s out of the running for the next three days of the show, giving Aero and perhaps Jack a shot at the major and three points that will be on the table each of tomorrow, Sunday, and Monday. Aero needs 9 points and a second major, so if he takes Open Dog for the next three days, he’ll be a new champion too.

And the bichon who vanquished Aero in the first round fell in the second, when our friend Mary Provost took Best of Breed with her bitch Cameo Gallerie of Mona Lisa. Mona has all the points she needs to become a champion, and now lacks only a second major. If Aero takes Best Dog tomorrow and Mona beats him for Best of Breed, Mona becomes a new champion–but because she’s of the opposite sex, Aero still gets a major win for having beaten three males. Mona gets a major as well for having beaten four bichons, including Aero.

Dash didn’t do as well. He’s a hunter, and his heart’s in the highlands, a-chasin’ the deer. (When we encounter deer on one of our walks, he looks over his shoulder at me as though to say, “Hey, Boss! I’ll kill ’em if you cook ’em!) He wouldn’t keep his nose off the floor, and the only other puppy entered took Best Puppy Dog.

So it goes; this show is his first, and necessary calibration. Behavior issues are a puppy’s stock in trade, and what he won’t grow out of we’ll deal with using bacon and stern words.

Carol is coming into her own as a bichon groomer, and the guys look fantastic. The dog who beat Aero today is owned by a woman who has been breeding and grooming bichons for over 25 years. Carol will have her day, and Aero will get his championship, if not this show then fairly soon. I’m down here in the cattle pen writing this up and will post it later today. (Cattle pens rarely come with free Wi-Fi.) Carol’s tweaking Dash’s coat under Mary’s expert tutelage, and we’ll all get another chance tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Daywander

Feb 10th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

Boy, I’ve never been gladder that I no longer live in Baltimore. Local snow totals there went well over 40 inches, which is pretty scary. Right before we moved to California, we had a freak late-season storm (it was mid-March!) that dumped 24″ or so, and the movers had to dig a path between the van and the front door. We got about 8″ here across the last two days, but it was a slow and steady fall that I blew out of the driveway twice, as our little mini-blower won’t chomp that much snow in one gulp.

The neighborhood is now a winter wonderland, which is great as long as you don’t have to go anywhere. City government is currently throwing a raging tantrum because we told them to stuff it when they demanded a huge tax increase, so they’re not plowing anything, and have turned half our streetlights off. There will be no familiar faces there after November, trust me.

But if you ever wanted to live in a palace on the slopes of a mountain, here’s your chance: A house right around the corner from us and probably 1500′ from my front door went into foreclosure, and you can now get it for $690K, and probably less. It’s a weird house, once the most expensive in the neighborhood (originally listed at $1.2M!!) but whoever built it put all the money into interior touches like marble columns and art niches. (Check out those stairways!) The exterior is plain as can be, and the house does not look anywhere near as large nor as luxurious as it actually is. Great city lights views off the back deck, and you get a free beehive in one of the pines close to the street. We walk the dogs past it almost every day, at least when it’s not a winter wonderland here. The bees are courteous, as bees go.

Dogs, yes. Tomorrow afternoon we take QBit over to Sunrise Kennels and blast north to Denver with the other three, for the Rocky Mountain Cluster Dog Show, a 4-day all-breed yapstravaganza. (QBit is not show-quality, but is still Lord of the Pack.) Carol has shown Aero intermittently over the last two and a half years, but this is the first time we have ever tried to show more than one dog at a show. And we have three. Yes indeedy, Dash makes his debut in the 6-9 mo. Puppy Dog category, with Aero and Jack competing in Open Dog. (“Dog” in dog show jargon specifically means “male dog” and “bitch” is an ordinary word without any negative connotations.) Carol is in the laundry room even as I type, touching up Jack’s hairdo. Aero is next. (Dash’s turn was yesterday.)

The show is actually four consecutive one-day shows, and thus four opportunities to win points, with four “major wins” on the table. Aero has one major win and six points. He needs a second major win and another nine points to be declared a champion. Given that there are at least four points at stake each day, Aero could come home the champ we always knew he could be. In fact, although very unlikely, Jack could do the same thing, even though he has neither points nor major wins to his credit. He would have to grab all points all four days, which would be something of a grand slam for a dog who is about 15% larger than most judges would like him to be. Sure, we’d prefer Aero get the points, but we’re curious to see what Jack can do. He’s always been something of a “practice dog” in the past (I learned to handle in the show ring by showing Jack two years ago, and Carol practices grooming on him) but he’s never looked better and could do well, especially if Aero shies away from the judges, as he often does.

There is always a bichon frise grooming area somewhere in the vast cattle pens of the National Western Complex, and that’s where we’ll be. So if you’re in the Denver area and have some time on your hands, come see us. Watch for the blinding white off the dogs, or the glint off the top of my head. Early is better, and ring time for bichons is 9:30, unless I misrecall.

We still need effective “query by humming,” as the formidable David Stafford once put it. Carol and I don’t watch much TV, and what we watch consists mostly of Weather Channel forecasts. Every so often they’ll play a piece of music I like during a forecast, but they don’t say what it is. There’s supposedly a list online, but January wasn’t added to it until last night. All through January I heard a rousing piece that sounded like John Williams movie music, and vaguely familiar at that. I quickly memorized it, and whistled it for several people, to no avail. Finally, the list went live last night, and I discovered that the mystery song was in fact a John Williams piece, composed for the 1988 Summer Olympics. Amazon sells a DRM-free MP3 for 99c. In less than 90 seconds, I had it on disk and it was coming out my speakers. They had my dollar. Everybody’s happy.

Heh. That ain’t tricky. That’s the way you do it: You sell an unencumbered MP3. No, that ain’t tricky, that’s the way you do it: Get a dollar fer nuthin’; stampin’ bits is free!

“A Meetup Group That Matches Your Interests…”

Jan 28th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

Today is Delphi Meetup day, and, peculiarly, I got an email from Meetup.com a few minutes ago. It was peculiar because although we still call it Delphi Meetup, we dropped Meetup.com like a hot rock years back after it started charging $100+ per year to coordinate a monthly meeting. (Like that takes anything even close to $100 worth of cycles or storage or bandwidth.) Meetup.com keeps trying gamely to get me to come back by promising me interesting groups to join…just as soon as somebody ponies up that hundred bucks. Wi-Fi and New In Town were the ones I used to belong to circa 2003, when I was working on my Wi-Fi book and we were still new in town. I guess they gave up, as I haven’t heard from them in most of a year.

Until today, when I got an email with the breathlessly overcapitalized subject line: “A New Meetup Group That Matches Your Interests Has Started!” Hmm. Wi-Fi? Ebooks? Ham radio? Kites? Contrarianism?

No. Only inside the message do they reveal the group’s name: “Paranormal Erotic Romance Book Club of Colorado Springs.”

Wow. I never even knew that there were paranormal erotic romance books. Lesbian pirate novels, sure–a woman who used to work for me brokered foreign rights in that genre for awhile. So I guess anything’s possible…but I have to wonder how they fingered me as a potential member. Was it a mistake, or simple desperation?

In truth, I’m quite sure I don’t want to know.

Synthesizing a Functional Cardinal

Jan 21st, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

I haven’t done any new fiction in over a year, largely because I took ten months out of my life to update Assembly Language Step By Step, and another three months to catch up on all the stuff that didn’t happen while I was doing the update. Today was the first day in ages that I had both a reasonably clear schedule and a solid night’s sleep behind me, so I sat down this morning after a bacon & cheese omelette to see what would happen.

Much good did. I got 2,000 words down on Old Catholics, which is about as much fiction as I generally crank out in an uninterrupted day. So far I’ve got 6 1/2 chapters completed, out of 18 planned, for a total of 32,000 words. The target is 90,000 words, with a hard ceiling of 100,000. I mean to impose whatever discipline is necessary to stay under that ceiling; I set myself the same ceiling for The Cunning Blood and ended up with 145,000 words of novel, which I don’t think helped me at the big presses during the five years that I shopped it.

The current chapter represents a difficult point in the telling of the story. I’m about to introduce the last of the major characters: Cardinal Peter Paul Luchetti of the Archdiocese of Chicago. The problem is that while I’ve met a fair number of Roman Catholic seminarians and priests, as an adult I’ve never been within striking distance of a Roman Catholic bishop, much less a cardinal. (It is true that Cardinal Albert Meyer came within striking distance of me when I was 12, as some of my Roman friends of a similar age may understand.) I generally design characters by drawing on people I’ve met and talked to, but in this case I came up completely empty.

The entire novel is an attempt to design and portray better characters than I have in my SF so far, in a setting where I’m unlikely to get distracted by gunfights, hyperdrives, or berserk nanomachines. Creating a convincing Roman Catholic cardinal is probably the toughest characterization issue I’ve ever faced, simply because cardinals exist. People can call me on the details. I can’t just make things up on a whim. It’s the issue SF people call “offending the known,” and, as I’ve discovered, offending the known is much easier in non-fantastic fiction set in the current day.

I did my best, and used a technique I learned from my SF mentor, Nancy Kress: I wrote a 1,500-word fictional dossier on the man. Only a little of that will actually make it into the story, but filling in the details of Peter Luchetti’s life forced me to consider his strengths and weaknesses and special talents and record them in a coherent way. I’m drawing on the few books I’ve found that speak honestly and in detail about cardinals without mythologizing them: Peter Hebblethwaite’s The Next Pope (1995) and I Am Your Brother Joseph (1997) by Tim Unsworth, a short biography of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who was by far the finest cardinal Chicago has had or probably ever will have.

Perhaps I should worry less. The book is a sort of fantasy, in that what I describe is whimsical, outrageous, and almost certainly impossible. That said, I’ve managed to work in almost everything I’ve ever learned about Catholic life, worship, and history, from Benediction, Tenebrae and Holy Hour to apostolic succession, Arminianism, and the Council of Constance (1414-18). Both liberals and conservatives within Catholicism will likely be annoyed at me, and if they are, I’ll call the book a resounding success.

As for the feeling of sitting down to write fiction again: Damn, it’s good to be back!