June 2003 – Kelley Eskridge

New cover

This one is for everyone here… And for the occasion, I’ve brought a huge punchbowl of lime jello (it’s spiked). However, there’s a catch: There is only one spoon. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be communal. I did bring a package of plastic spoons for the seriously cootie conscious. But I must say that it’s not as fun that way.

I was just wondering what everyone thought about the rumored cover change for the 2004 paperback Solitaire.

I like the cover the way it is, but something about it has always (well, since the day I picked it up) reminded me of Tori Amos. I think it’s the little open square. There’s nothing wrong with Tori Amos (two words: Kate Bush. I’m being cursed by a Tori fan right now, I’m sure). Has anyone else felt that way about it? Perhaps it wouldn’t look so “Tori” if half of her face was being pulled away…like the painting (the one that was in the style of Munch’s, The Scream) in Solitaire. Or, if half of her face was white with a black smudge for an eye…like the other painting. I think it will be interesting to see what changes, if any, are made in the cover.

In the 3rd grade, my mom got rid of cable. I got in trouble at school for drawing inappropriate Halloween scenes. It was an art project – we had to cut out a haunted house. This was done with black construction paper. Then we had to paste it onto Manila paper. The houses had windows with shutters. In each window, we had to draw something scary… for Halloween. While everyone else had pumkins, bats and witches behind their shutters, I had a severed head on a platter, a blood stained crucifix on a blood spattered mattress, a hand clenching a bloody machete, etc., etc…. My brother, who is seven yrs. older than me, let me watch the movies he and his friends watched. We didn’t even get the movie channels, but everyone knew that if you undid the cable box and stuck a pin in a strategic location, you’d get them. So, I saw “Friday the 13th”, “Halloween”, “The Exorcist”, “Heavy Metal”, “The Wall”, “Trilogy of Terror”… you name it. Needless to say, I had a different idea of “scary”. And maybe, for more personal reasons than I thought, I’d like to see a more dramatic cover (minus all the blood, of course) – something in the style of Estar.

Anyway, that is all.

Lindsey

I’ve just recently seen the new cover and it rocks. I think you will not be disappointed. It’s fantastic, I love it, and it’s very different from the current cover.

It’s designed by Archie Ferguson, an artist and designer who works for Knopf and has designed a truckload of wonderful covers including William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.

This could have come out of Estar’s brain, for sure. I will be interested to hear what people think of it. I’m feeling quite fortunate. I’ve had two great covers with very different images – two chances to reach different audiences.

The Scariest Movies In The World for me have been Alien, Jaws, and The Haunting Of Hill House (the original, not the silly remake). Anyone who enjoys great writing and has never read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, yikes, do yourself a favor. She wrote beautifully. Other scary novel favorites: Ghost Story by Peter Straub, The Shining by Stephen King. It’s always a treat when a writer is good enough to tell a frightening story without having to serve up a buffet of body parts. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any other of the million billion Grade-B horror movies or novels running loose in the world just don’t do it for me. Graphic violence is no substitute for good writing or good storytelling.

A sad and lonely pig

Thanks for the round! It’s great that you had so much fun at your reunion. I didn’t go to my 5th or my 10th. As much as I loved my school, I couldn’t wait to leave. A girl I had a crush on found out about it and the last six months of senior year were a bit unpleasant. I don’t know what I ever saw in that girl. She wasn’t a nice person to begin with. And I ate pickled herring for her!

I’m so happy that you’re curious about the project. I don’t get to discuss it much with my friends because they’re not really into it. They don’t understand why I get so excited over something as simple as diffusion spray.

I get what you mean about process. I think that a year and a half ago, we had some “bad process”. Each of us had a specific need that wasn’t being met. But we didn’t communicate our needs. And that led to a lot of frustration. Then Alx (how he spells it) wanted to hurry up and film. I didn’t see the point in rushing, especially since the characters weren’t fully developed. And Rich was a “Silent Bob” of sorts.

Now, things are different. We have a master plan. So, when stupid shit pops up (and it has), we work through it more efficiently.

Wayfarer 1 is a full length digital film. But, we have to film it in parts because we don’t have a lot of money. We refer to each part as an episode (i.e. Wayfarer 1: The Search for Devil’s Tower). Even then, the “episode” is broken down…to a 15 min. short. We hope to put one out every 3 months, but we’ll be happy with one every six. And we’ll be even happier if we can create a little underground buzz.

That being said, our first short is almost finished. We have to re-shoot the first two scenes and the last scene. Then Alx will compose the soundtrack (he was in a band once upon a time…big in Germany and Japan). We borrowed music from The Matrix, Aliens, Sneakers, etc. for our “in house” copy. It will be a few months before we pass it out to people at the sci-fi convention. Oh, and the Renaissance fair. Then we’re going to set up a website where everyone can watch it if they want to.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote five new scenes and made up two new characters (Agent Savage and Agent Tallent. They’re the elite members of the Recovery Team. And they just so happen to be remote viewers). Now, I do believe what you said about good process, but I have to tell you that there’s nothing like a good sign to go along with it. I was on the phone with Alx, discussing my idea and explaining why I thought Nate (lead female) should refer to Savage and Tallent as “the Swanns” (after Ingo Swann) – I got a call waiting beep. Normally, I’d ignore it. But for some reason, I clicked over. It was my neighbor from across the street. “Lindsey, you have to come outside! There’s a swan in my front yard!” I had just said, “swann” to Alx and now there’s a swan. I’m not embarrassed to say that I took it as a sign.

Anyway, one of the ideas I came up with has something to do with a response you gave here in the pub. Our main characters work for Mr. Timm. He’s the head of the spy ring, but no one actually sees him. His spy ring is called, “the gameboard”. There are two kinds of spies and they are called, “players”. Then we have our tactical remotes and recoverers. And then there’s Mr. Timm’s right hand woman. She runs the show from behind the scenes. One day, I was thinking, where the hell are these people operating from? Then I came up with the idea of EXALISSE… a company that manufactures boardgames and trading cards. It’s a front, obviously. And it makes sense. That’s not stealing anything, right? I hope not because it’s so perfect.

Until July, that’s pretty much it for Wayfarer 1. In the meantime, I have to grow some hair. Right now, I have what I like to call a “feminine fade”… it’s what I have to tell the hairdresser to keep her from squaring off the back of my head. I’ll be playing Tallent. She’s going to have a “dragonballZ” kind of thing going on. Oh, Wayfarer 1 is our spaceship. I don’t think I mentioned that. And yes, it’s a really cool set. We built it ourselves.

Just one more thing… I liked your response to that question about what you hoped to accomplish in the next 25 years. I think all of it is possible. Even the U2 thing. Screenwriting, once you have a vision, is pretty easy (somebody probably wants to shoot me for that). And it’s even easier if you have Final Draft software. It’s the rules that are tricky sometimes. But we’re not sending our script to anyone (though we are getting a copyright), so I’ve broken quite a few of them. Our actors are not professionally trained, so I use more description than what is allowed, in hopes that it will get them to that place. If that makes sense.

Well, take care.

Lindsey

Oh, yeah! What was that 4th grade teacher like???

Well, this all sounds pretty cool and I hope it’s working out, although I’m trying to imagine where one builds a spaceship set without upsetting the neighbors. If you will let me know when your website is live, I’ll be happy to link to it. And if your superspies want to use a games company as a front, more power to them: it’s certainly a chaotic enough business to hide any amount of ulterior motive or general wackiness.

My 4th-grade history teacher was a mean and angry woman. She also seemed, even to my nine-year-old self, sad and lonely and confused by a world that had backwashed her into a dead-end situation. In the 1960s it was hard for suddenly-divorced or widowed women in their 40’s and 50’s to find lucrative, soul-satisfying ways of taking care of themselves. My grammar school was a place where some of them ended up. Some of my teachers were there because they loved their work, and they made a huge impact on me. But some of them were there because they lived in small windowless apartments and made daily choices between the electricity bill and the new timing belt for the car. And they’d never even heard of a timing belt before, because their men had always handled that, and maybe the car mechanic was bullshitting them about the whole thing. How to know? They didn’t have college degrees or special skills or even much practice at mapping out a life, and they understood that there weren’t many options for them. Those people had a huge impact on me too.

Anyway, long story short: my history teacher disliked me intensely. Maybe she didn’t like any of us, I’m not sure, but I’m positive about me. One day I was in the girls’ bathroom alone. I had tooth that was just loosening, but not nearly ready to come out – just at the point where it moved slightly and bled a little if I poked it with my tongue or finger, which of course I was doing all the time. This teacher came into the bathroom and found me in front of the mirror with my mouth open, poking. So she took some dental floss out of her purse, pinned me in a corner while she wrapped it around my tooth, tied the other end around the doorknob, and slammed the door. It hurt, it bled, it scared me, I cried, and she was happy. She may have been a nice person in some other areas of her life, but that day she was a pig.

Reunion

Greetings and cheers to everyone in the Dream Pub. This one is my round, while I explain where I’ve been – up to my ears in ASL studies and events, banging my head against the new book, and working on a project, more about which below. Lots of doing with not enough time for thinking or feeling or just being, until recently.

Some of it’s just timing, the conjunction of: end of the term in ASL school with the attendant papers and exams and commitments; the latest issue of the newsletter that I do layout for; a certain number of happy but inconvenient social activities; and emotional and practical preparations for a Big Event.

Last weekend I went to my 25th high school reunion at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. Exuberance alert: my years at school were an incredibly special time and place for me, and I am still bubbling from my reunion experience. I will not dwell on the relative unhappiness of grammar school, although if anyone really wants to hear the story of the 4th grade history teacher, just ask… And from that, I went to four years of living and learning and growing in a place of privilege and dreams. To this socially isolated low-income kid from the South, it was Narnia. I walked through an unexpected door into a magical place where I could dare to connect, learn how to think, practice autonomy, flex my imagination, use my brains. Challenge my assumptions. Invent a self I liked better. Change my prospects. A place where I had some measure of personal power. All of this tucked away in nearly 2,000 acres of old brick buildings and woods and lakes and sky, where it was dark enough at night to see the stars and I always felt safe.

Of course, it mattered that I didn’t have the right clothes or vacation destinations. I learned some hard lessons about different worlds, about class and status and behavior. I experienced the impact of other people’s assumptions. I made a lot of assumptions of my own. Blah, blah. Going there was one of the five best decisions I’ve ever made. It shaped me in ways I’m still learning to understand.

So: it’s 25 years later and here comes the reunion. There was no question about going: it’s been on my radar for a couple of years. I decided several months ago that I’d like to give a gift to my Form (i.e. my class, the Form of 1978) – a compilation CD of music that was playing in our dorms, our dances, in the Coffeehouse where we went to smoke cigarettes at night. The organizers liked the idea well enough that it became one of the official reunion mementos. So for the last couple of months I’ve been selecting music (my choices and suggestions from classmates), editing the mix into a 2-CD set, and making an insert booklet and labels. The booklet includes a high-school photo of everyone I could find, roughly 125 people.

I had a great time doing this. It was a huge amount of work, but that’s what makes it a gift. And it helped me be ready to go into the reunion with my arms and mind and heart wide open, and no expectations. Even though I didn’t exchange more than a few words with some of these folks for the entire time we were in school, we were still a part of the fabric of each other’s daily lives. We lived in dorms together. We ate our meals in each other’s company. We were on teams and in clubs and at the Coffeehouse together. We passed each other in various stages of inebriation on the way to or from the woods on Saturday nights. We grew up together, and what I learned this weekend is that it matters. In some ways these people are my family.

So here we came, more than half of us, mostly happy with ourselves, eager to see each other, with the adolescent divisions seemingly dissolved, or at least in abeyance. I heard so many fascinating stories and had a glimpse of such different lives. Some of the re-connections will last, and some will not survive the daily distractions of all our lives, but that’s just details: the bottom line is we had so much fucking fun that it makes me smile to write about it, and it was the kind of fun that comes from being connected, even on the most tenuous level, for more than half our lives. Another lesson: the wheel goes around.

Unreformed: SPS 1978 – Disc 1

Do You Feel Like We Do (edit) – Peter Frampton
Born To Be Wild – Steppenwolf
Don’t Fear (The Reaper) – Blue Oyster Cult
Riders On The Storm – The Doors
Dream On – Aerosmith
White Rabbit – Jefferson Airplane
Dreams – Fleetwood Mac
All Along The Watchtower – Jimi Hendrix
Can’t Find My Way Home – Blind Faith
Kashmir – Led Zeppelin
Truckin’ – Grateful Dead
Get Down Tonight – K.C. & The Sunshine Band
Just What I Needed – The Cars
Suffragette City – David Bowie
Play That Funky Music – Wild Cherry

Unreformed: SPS 1978 – Disc 2

Fantasy – Earth Wind & Fire
Moondance – Van Morrison
Layla – Derek & The Dominos
Landslide – Fleetwood Mac
Happiness Is A Warm Gun – The Beatles
Time – Pink Floyd
The Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys – Traffic
The Needle And The Damage Done – Neil Young
Sultans of Swing – Dire Straits
I Wish – Stevie Wonder
Brown Sugar – The Rolling Stones
Rebel Rebel – David Bowie
Born To Run – Bruce Springsteen
Free Bird – Lynyrd Skynyrd

In praise of process

Leroux’s blackberry brandy in celebration of one of my own projects (a group project actually)!!!!!

I just had to let you know that, two weeks ago, I reread, “The Hum of Human Cities”, way too many commas here, I’m sure…I was distracted the first time I read it and couldn’t enjoy it the way I wanted to. Anyway, it got me thinking about a project that me and some friends had been working on. Oh, our thing was nothing like your short story, so I don’t even know why it made me think of it. I guess it got me thinking back to a more creative time.

It’s a film project, sort of. My friend came up with this idea in 1993, but it didn’t start taking shape until 2000 (that’s when we met and became friends). I suggested that some of the dialogue could be better so he gave me what he had and told me to rewrite it. So, I did (I’m not a writer. Just an okay ear.). This got him and an other friend thinking up even more ideas. So, the three of us spent hours writing together…and drinking blackberry brandy. We rewrote the thing 17 times because we kept coming up with better ideas (that and one of the locations we wrote around got torn down).

We broke up. What started out as fun became a pain in the ass. People who said they’d act for us, showed up when they wanted to. We took on the roles of the main characters ourselves. We had to get rid of characters because there was nobody to play them…more rewrites. We argued all the time. It was a mess. And we walked away from it with silent fuck you’s. That was a little over a year ago. We haven’t seen or spoken to each other since.

After rereading your short story, my friends were on my mind more than ever. For two weeks, all I thought about was the needless death of our project. Then my friend called and said he was sorry for being an asshole and could we give it another shot. So I said sorry too and yesterday, we met up with our other friend and had blackberry brandy.

Maybe it would’ve happened sooner or later, but for now, I’m chalking it up to “The Hum of Human Cities”. So…thanks.

Don’t worry, I’m not a pub stalker. I’m just really excited about the project and thought to pass the joy along. After all, it was your story that got me thinking so hard.

Thanks again.

Lindsey

Oh, I almost forgot… If anyone is curious, it’s a pg-13 sci-fi, action-adventure, comedy, spy, romance series. It’ll be a whole bunch of 15min. shorts. Sort of like watching a comic book. Fun not deep or enlightening.

I’m curious! It’s been a while since you sent this in (my bad, sorry) – any developments?

Passing joy along is a Good Thing. I appreciate it. It would be nice to think that Hum had something to do with it, but in the end you and your friends made the choice to reconnect. Choice is what it’s about. Choosing to pick up the phone. Choosing to have the conversation. Or choosing not to. You did the work, you get the blackberry brandy (smile). I hope everyone has a great time together, whether the project gets done or not.

This got me thinking about process (Lindsey, this isn’t about your specific story… just me wandering off into the woods of management theory). There’s an assumption down deep in our culture that if people have the burning desire to achieve a particular result, it will happen as if by magic… and if it doesn’t, it’s because someone screwed up or wasn’t really committed, or whatever. And that’s just not always the case. Bad process brings bad results, even with all the goodwill in the world among the players. How we do things may not be the sole priority, but it’s important.

The biggest conflicts I had in my corporate life revolved around this issue: I worked with some executives who were adamant that process was bullshit: it didn’t matter how chaotic our everyday was as long as we made the numbers and did the deals. These same folks were so surprised that the Project Management team of 26 people could manage half a billion dollars of product development in a year with fewer mistakes and less stress and more workplace happiness than ever before. Huh, they said, scratching their heads. What’s the secret? And when it turned out the secret was in communication, process negotiation and re-negotiation, accountability without abuse, clear descriptions of who was responsible for what, etc… oh, the horror! I could never do that! To which my response was (and still is), what an asshole. Anyone can do it. It’s just a job skill.

But whose fault is this? Our culture has historically valued independence and bootstrapping more than collaboration and community. “Everyone knows” that results without process is better than process without results. My question is, who decided this had to be an either/or equation? And my thinking, more subversively, is that sometimes process is more important. Sometimes it’s better to have agreements about working together so that people don’t have to disconnect in order to maintain their own boundaries or manage their disappointment. If Nicola and I ever collaborate on something, what counts more: the published book (or screenplay, that’d be fun!), or the next 50 years of our relationship? Well, duh.

So why, why, why aren’t these skills part of a child’s basic education? We teach our kids how to be competitive and encourage them to assert their individuality, and then wonder why they grow up with fractured notions of community and the belief that winning is an exclusive activity rather than an inclusive one. It seems that recently a balancing force has come into play in schools – I hear more about kids being exposed to conflict management skills, collaborative activities, etc. I hope this is true. I don’t think we should raise a bunch of polite robots – just people who understand that if we’re all going to take so much pride in being individuals, it means we have to do a little more bridging work in order to get a group result. That’s my vision. Have our cake and eat it together.

Rant off (grin). This is all coming up for me in part because of my learning more about Deaf history and Deaf culture, and the particular assumptions that exist in American (hearing) culture about what is language, what is communication, and how do we assign class and status based on those things? We read a book called Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language by Nora Ellen Groce that was instructive. She’s a researcher who traced the origins of hereditary deafness on Martha’s Vineyard, where for most of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century a huge percentage of the population was deaf. During that time, everyone in the community, hearing and deaf, was multi-lingual in some combination of spoken English, written English, and sign. She was able to talk to elders who were alive during this time, and without exception they didn’t differentiate between deaf and hearing status. When asked to remember people who were “handicapped,” they would pull out examples of people losing limbs or with some sort of mental disability. When asked specifically about deafness, one woman said, “Those people weren’t handicapped. They were just deaf.” No one was denied access to the community based on language modality.

Yikes, I’m not going to get started again. Rant control engaged. But my corporate skills and my cultural learning and my concerns as a writer (story, connection, the human heart) are beginning to mesh in some pretty interesting ways.