I was proceeding through a green light one morning in late November last year when a DO²V (translation = Driver Of Other Vehicle, because I wish to remain polite and earn a G rating on this post) ran a red light and hit the rear passenger corner of my little red Kia Soul. Am I sensing a subconscious hostility to the color red, here—or a serious lack of caffeine, which impaired cognitive processes on the part of the DO²V?

Regardless, the impact sent the car, and me, into a spin! I ended up in the middle of the road facing the way I’d been coming from.

I walked away—in a state of shock. And while the insurance company has classified the results in the Minor Injury Category, there’s been nothing minor about the recovery process.

I became well acquainted with the Epley maneuver. Used to reduce or even eliminate dizziness, it helped during the next several weeks that my brain felt like it was back in that spinning car. I still get dizzy spells when I overtire and now do daily exercises to retrain the receptors hidden at the back of my head near the top of my spine that help with balance.

I was also diagnosed with whiplash, which has affected the entire left side of my body from neck to thigh. I’ve since discovered areas of my body I didn’t know I had and wish I’d never met (stifled yelps of agony during physio sessions aren’t a pretty sound), like the IT (iliotibial) band, a group of tough fibers that run along the outside of the thigh. The IT band acts as a stabilizer during running, so many runners suffer from pain in that area due to inflammation of said IT band. My rotator cuff (the muscles and tendons in the shoulder that connect your upper arm with your shoulder blade) has also been protesting ever since the accident.

That said, I’m feeling much better and, per instructions from the Physiotherapist, Occupational Therapist and Kinesiologist, I’m slowly but steadily resuming daily routines—punctured by lots of breaks and my daily exercise regimen. But success has also led to setbacks. I now have de Quervain’s tenosynovitis, diagnosed via the Finkelstein test.

De Quervain’s is caused when the tendons located on the wrist below the thumb become irritated and swell. 

Oddly enough, this is a common condition among pregnant women and people who perform repetitive activities—like typing, which is my current problem! However, I believe my wrist was initially strained because of the fierce grip I had on the steering wheel during that spin. I can now discuss the merits of ultrasound and paraffin wax treatments (neither helped) versus acupuncture (which has).

So there you have it—medically speaking.

She was steaming at full speed, about 20 knots or 40 miles per hour, standard procedure at the time, despite having received warnings about icebergs and growlers from other ships.

Had Captain Edward Smith slowed his speed by half—

Had the ship steered straight for the looming mountain of ice instead of trying to turn away from it—

The Titanic’s maiden voyage would have been nothing more than another, ordinary news story.

Instead, 100 years ago today, the White Star Lines’ Olympic class ocean liner sank at 2:20a.m. (ship’s time) in the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg just two hours and forty minutes earlier. About fifteen hundred of the just over twenty-two hundred passengers died in the frigid waters that morning. The RMS Carpathia steaming at full speed to the rescue arrived at about 4:00a.m. to pick up the seven hundred or so survivors.

The unsinkable ship sank, but the story of those few days of sailing and the final few hours have been the subject of speculation, keen interest, and obsession and spawned countless books and quite a few movies (beginning with one in 1912 months after the disaster) ever since.

Why are we still so fascinated by the Titanic one hundred years later?

A glittering pre-war era, many famous, very rich passengers, unsurpassed luxury and hubristic pride in the technological accomplishments of man—prime story elements brought together and then thrust into a battle so few would survive against a harsh random act of nature.

In this post, I’m doing a 180° flip and offering a reverse message—sometimes the translation, in this case a television show, is better (read more creative) in some respects than the original book.

This past season, after catching the pilot on Bones, I started watching The Finder. After suffering brain damage in an IED explosion during the Iraqi war, veteran Walter Sherman (Geoff Stults) acquires the obsessive ability to find people and things. He is ably assisted by a fairly standard trio of sidekicks—bar owner and legal advisor Leo Knox (Michael Clarke Duncan), US Deputy Marshal Isabel Zambada (Mercedes Masöhn), and teen parolee and gypsy Willa Monday (Maddie Hasson)—that, from a marketing standpoint, appeal to a wide range of target viewers.

The ensemble team generate the chemistry and work well together. But what makes the
show is the innovative portrayal of the paranoid Walter Sherman who refuses treatment so he won’t lose his “gift.” And what a gift it is. Take Episode 7, Eye of the Storm—a hurricane hits Florida stranding most of the team, Willa’s probation officer and gypsy non-boyfriend, along with some locals at the bar, which includes the obligatory power outage. Denied a computer for his research, he creates his own live internet, getting feedback to his questions from his team and friends. Then there is his scale model, made out of items from the kitchen that recreates the scene so he can test a hypothesis.

The show’s concept is based on two Locator books written by Richard Greener. But the Walter Sherman found within the pages of, say, The Knowland Retribution, the first of the books, is nothing like his television alter ego. He may be known as The Locator from his time in Vietnam, has the reputation according to other characters in the book, and continually touts his ability to locate (missing) people, but the skills that are shown throughout the story are pretty standard fare. As he himself notes, one of his biggest assets is that he isn’t tied to or bound by the bureaucracy of government agencies. He’s a free agent who answers to his client only.

Quite frankly, I was more far more intrigued by the antagonist, who was a well-developed character with complex motivations. I also enjoyed the character of the idiosyncratic reporter Isobel.

Want to read a half decent thriller? Check out The Locator books.

Want to meet a character who truly thinks outside the box? Watch The Finder.

“I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never ages as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty.”

John Carter first made his appearance within a serialized version of A Princess of Mars in 1912, which makes him exactly one hundred this year as he makes his debut in the Disney film named for him.

A fan of the books, I admit to giving in to my curiosity. I’ve watched several trailers and a few TV commercials advertising this newly released movie. I also admit to being impressed with the vision of Barsoom (AKA Mars) and its CGI enhanced indigenous inhabitants that I’ve seen in those brief glimpses.

But that’s as far as I’ll go. I’m not watching the movie.

For one thing, I vividly remember my first meeting years ago with the John Carter found within the pages of A Princess of Mars. There he is described by his “nephew” Edgar Rice Burroughs as: “a splendid specimen of manhood, standing a good two inches over six feet, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, with the carriage of a trained fighting man. His features were regular and clear cut, his hair black and closely cropped, while his eyes were of steel gray, reflecting a strong and loyal character, filled with fire and initiative. His manners were perfect, and his courtliness was that of a typical southern gentleman of the highest type.”

It is that combination of fierce warrior and chivalrous though awkward suitor, so typical of many of Burroughs heroes that attracted me to John Carter. That and the description of his arrival on Mars: “It was midday, the sun was shining full upon me and the heat of it was rather intense upon my naked body…” (hey, I am a romance writer!). I stayed for the sheer volume of gripping adventures that befell him on his beloved Barsoom.

And that’s really why I won’t see the film There are some books that capture the
imagination so intensely that anyone else’s translation of that vision just isn’t
going to do it justice. For better or worse, John Carter, and any of the planned
sequels, is now added to my Books I Will Not See As Movies list.

I spent most of this past week wrestling with a scene. I knew who my characters
were and where they were going (the action). Reaching that final hook took some
effort, though. That’s because, and here’s the truth of it, writing is hard
work. But it is oh so satisfying when it does come together.

That is why the plagiarism scandal that hit the blogosphere last weekend is yet
another reminder that, in the face of the above truth, stealing someone else’s
words is, apparently, sometimes just too tempting a way to avoid said hard
work.

I’m not here to rehash old news—you can read about it at Dear Author and
Smartbitches. Or debate the merits, or lack of, of the plagiarist’s apology to
Liz Fielding.

There is no debate. Plagiarism is ugly.

The bad news is the publishing industries’ explosion onto the internet makes it all
that much easier to find material and steal it.

But, as the recent scandal reveals, there’s as flip side. It is now also that much
easier to uncover the nasty deed. Google search, anyone?

Meanwhile, tomorrow the three of us—my imagination, my computer, and I—will be back in the office working on the next scene.

In the past seven weeks, I’ve read two hard cover book. Period. No paperbacks. The first book was about Ant/arctic exploration—see my last post. The other related to research for my current work-in-progress.

While I can admit to bouts of writing and the intrusion of life itself, I also need to admit that I have been reading. A lot!  You see, I bought a black KOBO e-reader shortly after Christmas, which I accessorized with its own red zippered case. Very cool. 

Since then I have:

Read 15 books, not including instruction manuals,

Read for a total of 93.9 hours,

Completed 27% of my library (the figure would be higher, except I keep adding to said library! I currently have 53 books on file.)

I’ve won numerous awards through the Reading Life program, including the Juggernaut—I’ve turned 10,000 pages! Now well plus that amount.

One of the fabulous benefits of the e-reader is that I can slip it into my purse and take it anywhere. Thus relieving the tedium of waiting room waits and allowing me to read even more.

Of course, one of the ironies of finally embracing this latest technology is that it has given me access to all the classics of literature that no longer have copyright restrictions. 

That means:

Only 9 of those 53 books are ‘modern,’ and

Only 3 of those 53 books have actually been purchased.

What a reading life!

One hundred years ago today, during the period known as the “Heroic Age” of polar exploration, Captain Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole along with his four companions—Edward Wilson,  Edgar Evans, Lawrence Oates and Henry “Birdie” Bowers.

Bowers was a last minute addition to the team, which meant that equipment and rations intended for four were stretched to accommodate five. But the problematic issues with Scott’s expedition began long before that decision.

Used with success by fellow British explorer Ernest Shackleton, Scott had hoped to utilize ponies to haul supplies to the proposed depots along the route he would later take to the pole. However, the Manchurian ponies purchased by the dog expert for Scott’s expedition proved to be of poor quality and ill-suited to Antarctic conditions. One consequence of this was that Scott opted to establish One Ton Depot at 79°29´S, significantly short of the original destination, when the pony transport failed.

A “modern technology” that Scott also chose to employ to transport supplies was the motor sledge. One fell through the ice and sank while being off-loaded. The other two broke down during their foray to the proposed depot point, forcing the motor team to man-haul the load to the site.

Although Scott took dogs with him on this expedition, his previous experience with dogs had not been positive, plus he lacked adequate knowledge about sled dogs. As a result, he never seriously intended to use them in his “race to the pole.” In fact, Scott had, early on, decided to rely on man-hauling for most of the journey—a true test of endurance given the loads each man had to pull and the arduous terrain.

Despite the tremendous achievement in reaching the South Pole, Scott and his team were not the first. The Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen and his companions—Olav Olavson Bjaaland, Hilmer Hanssen, Sverre H. Hassel and Oscar Wisting—using skis and dogsleds had arrived at the South Pole on December 14, 2011!

It should be noted that other factors, including unusually low temperatures, affected Scott’s journey. Sick and starving, Scott and two of his companions (Evans and Oates had died earlier) eventually reached what would be their final camp—a location eleven miles short of One Ton Depot, but well past the original site intended for this reserve of supplies. Blizzards prevented them from leaving the tent and all three men died. Their bodies were discovered by a search party in mid-November.

Happy New Year!

The title of this blog states my plan for this year’s blog posts. I have no wish to be a Luddite, but the sheer amount of new technology is overwhelming at times.

What do I plug into? What do I opt to ignore…at my peril?

 And how much new “stuff” can one white-haired person learn? Okay, I’m not that old. I started going grey when I was sixteen, so the white hair has been here for a while. But still. Am I getting whiter scrambling to keep up with the 21 century?

Late last year, I reported that I bought a new computer. Love the shiny black tower and the new matching keyboard and mouse. The inner workings will take a bit longer to get used to—more on that in posts to come.

My current concern is printer capability.  One of the things I asked the tech guy before I ordered my new system was whether or not my two existing printers would still work. Guess what the answer was? And guess what happened? 

My HP all-in-one is, indeed, compatible and up and running. My workhorse laserjet printer…presents a challenge. It is so old it doesn’t have a usb port. Tech 1, who came in to set up the new system, told me he just needed to order a certain compatibility cable and I’d be okay.

Just before the holidays, the cable came in, so I scheduled a visit this past week. Tech 2 arrived took one look at the printer, and announce he’d won his bet with Tech 1. The cable he’d bought was the wrong one! But he knows exactly what cable will work. Just to be doubly sure, can he take the printer with him to test out with said cable at the shop before arriving here today.

Meanwhile, my To Be Printed list continues to grow. Even though my all-in-one prints, I try to limit its use so it won’t suck up the color cartridge.

I don’t care how old it is, I love my laserjet. Keep your fingers crossed. I’ll let you know how it all turned out next time.

I’m a day late—on purpose—with this post. Yesterday was the season finale of Battle of the Blades.

Eight hockey players are paired with eight figure skaters. Each week they learn a new routine and skate it with the goal of winning the grand prize—money for the charity of their choice. The routines are judged by a panel of three and, most importantly, voted on by the Canadian public.

So, how well can hockey players skate on figure skates?

By the first show, most hockey players admit that figure skating is a lot tougher than it looks. But what is great to watch, is how these players embrace the challenge.

This is perhaps best epitomized this year by Bryan Berard who, with his large frame, tattoos and shoulder-length hair looks exactly like a hockey player and anything but a figure skater. Surprise! Actually, it isn’t a surprise that Berard and his partner, Marie-France Dubreuil came in second.

Watch a fun skate by Marie-France and Bryan to see what I mean.

This year the first female hockey player, Tessa Bonhomme joined the cast. Teamed with pairs legend David Pelletier, she astounded audiences with her willingness and ability to conquer the challenging moves. No wonder she and Pelletier won.

Watch the skate that Tessa and David did to avoid elimination.

One final note. Part of this year’s skating journey included a very difficult life lesson. One of the original hockey players, Wade Belak committed suicide weeks before the show premiered. It is a testament to the remaining cast members, and Russ Courtnall, who stepped in to replace Belak, that show went on.

It’s that time of year—jack-o-lanterns, treats, and the requisite skeletons, zombies, vampires and other creatures from the horror pantheon appear for a night.

What exactly is horror?

Merriam Webster defines horror as a “painful and intense fear” and a horror story as “an account of an unsettling …occurrence.”

Both these definitions epitomize one of the greatest German Expressionist—and horror—films ever made.

Directed by Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a 1920 silent film that still evokes a sense of horror—that is, intense fear, 91 years after its release. The Expressionist style of the distorted set design combined with the subjective perspective of the narrator Francis, who relates the story of a visit he and his friend Alan make to a town fair in Holstenwall, creates a mood ripe for horror.

But it is Francis’s story of a traveling hypnotist, Dr. Caligari and his exhibit, the somnambulist Cesare that truly evokes a sense of unease. Cesare is perhaps one of Conrad Veidt’s finest roles, though he is probably better remembered for playing Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca. (Veidt btw was a staunch anti-Nazi in real life, having fled Germany with his Jewish wife in 1933.) ]

Veidt’s portrayal of Cesare perfectly captures the restraint of a man caught under the spell of the mad doctor Dr. Caligari (skillfully played by Werner Krauss) who orders him to kill. Cesare’s lithe, controlled movements as a somnambulist tool of the doctor contrast sharply with his “reawakening” when he manages to regain control of himself in a pivotal scene with Jane, Francis’s fiancée whom he’s been sent to kill, but kidnaps instead.

Many of what are now classical horror movie images appear in this film. Perhaps the most cliché and yet enduring is that of the monster pursued by angry townspeople as he carries off the heroine. That sometimes all too real image is horrific in itself. But what makes it so intense and unsettling is the glimpse the viewer has had of the innate humanity beneath the monstrous façade.

Coincidentally, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was one of the first examples of both a framed story—the main narrative is told in flashback—and a twist ending.

Check it out—and have a Happy Halloween.