All posts by Lars Walker

Writing

The Year of the Surrender

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Just so you won’t have to enter the new year sick with worry over how the Walker Christmas gathering went, I’ll note here that it went just fine. The weather was utterly perfect, in accordance with the demands of the genre. You know how Christmas looks in those Hallmark Theater TV specials? All the deep, snow-covered scenery, with big, fat flakes falling? It was just like that on Saturday. But the snow wasn’t heavy enough to interfere with travel. (I probably shouldn’t have described it to the Youngest Niece, when she called from China. I think she was homesick enough without having to listen to a description of Postcard Christmas Weather.)

The great advantage of having the family gather at my place for holidays (aside from the motivation it gives me to dust once a year) is that I’m more or less centrally located, so that the brother in Iowa doesn’t have to drive up to the North Woods, and the brother from the North Woods… well, you follow the logic. The drawback is that once we’re all in the house there isn’t actually any room to move around, so we all have to stand in one place for the entire length of the visit, employing an elaborate choreography to allow us to visit the bathroom in rotation. However, we overcame that difficulty, even making room for the Oldest Nephew’s girlfriend, by sucking our stomachs in. I can only assume it’s serious, if he was willing to put her through such an ordeal.

We took the cowards’ way out with food, and ate Kentucky Fried Chicken, with heavy side orders of chocolates and pies and cookies.

I’ll tell you about my favorite Christmas gift in a later post. I want to share pictures, and I have other plans for just now.

Some people think of the New Year’s season as a time to look forward and make resolutions. I prefer to make it a time for looking back, for evaluating the events of the past twelve months and beating myself over the head about every mistake, real or imagined.

2007 was a big year in my history. I will always remember it, I suspect, as the Year of the Surrender. This was the year I admitted defeat. I haven’t talked about this, at least directly, in this space before, but I’ll do it now, because it seems time.

I’ve had a strategy for my life from the time I was a boy. It was a fairly simple strategy—one that made sense to me, considering the circumstances of who I am and what I wanted to do.

This first step was to get published and be a famous novelist. This, I assumed, would provide me the validation I needed to get some woman to marry me.

I’m not what you’d call a fighter. Faced with human opposition, I generally fold my hand and walk away. But in matters of living, where it’s just me against Life, I’m pretty stubborn. I take my lumps and continue doing what I was doing before. It’s actually a lot like that classic definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. So it’s taken me 57 years to realize that my Grand Strategy isn’t a winner.

Losing my publisher didn’t convince me. Even my agent going out of business didn’t quite do it. (It’s often said among writers that everybody wants to be an author, but nobody wants to actually write. The irony of my position is that I’m perfectly willing to write. It’s the being an author thing—the business and relationships and self-promotion—that kill me.)

Anyway, there’s serious talk at the seminary where I’m librarian. The Board is going to ask me to get my Master’s in Library Science, online. This will be very useful for their institutional plans, and also ought to make me better able to competently do my job, which any honest employee wants to do.

But it also means I can’t go to an agent and promise him that I’ll be turning out fiction in a steady manner. There just won’t be time for that.

So for now, I officially declare myself a former novelist.

This may change. It should only take two or three years to get the degree, and then I’ll have time to write books again. And maybe God will open the door.

But right now, it’s the time in my life (it comes to everyone, I think) when I have to bow to God, and lay down my own plans, and embrace His.

I guess that’s my New Year’s Resolution.

Have a blessed new year.

Reading

Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel DeFoe

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My plecostomus died today. Or last night. (In case you joined us since my last fish update, we have a fish tank in the library where I work. The plecostomus is an ugly, brown fish which eats scum, and I’ve kept a series of them in the tank, with greater and lesser success). This specimen had lasted a fair amount of time, but he’d gotten fussy lately, liking neither his native algae nor the commercial wafers they sell you to vary his diet. This morning I found him on the floor next to the tank, dried up and stiff like a plastic novelty fish. So the algae will accumulate over the New Year’s break, and I’ll have to buy a replacement soon.



I just finished reading Robinson Crusoe. I ran out of reading material over Christmas, when all the stores and libraries were closed. I’d been watching three versions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, as is my Christmas tradition, and there’s a scene in the original book (and in the George C. Scott TV movie) where Ebenezer recalls the books he enjoyed as a boy, and one of them is Robinson Crusoe. I had a copy on my bookshelf (a paperback left behind by a long-ago roommate, stamped as property of “English Resource Center, Bemidji High School”), so I figured I’d go ahead and add it to my reading achievements.

I think it was fairly rare for a bookish boy of my generation to miss reading R.C. I seem to recall trying it once, but it failed to grab me. I have more patience now.

Novels were written differently in the 18th Century (which isn’t surprising. Robinson Crusoe is considered by many the first English novel, so DeFoe was making it up as he went along). Today they teach writers to start with an action scene, to get the reader engaged immediately. Back-story can be added later. DeFoe began in the natural, logical manner that modern writers have to un-learn, by starting at the beginning. Robinson Crusoe tells us more than we really want to know about his birth, education and early life. We’re told from the beginning the chief lesson DeFoe has in mind to teach us—stay at home. Don’t have adventures. Crusoe bewails his youthful folly in insisting on going to sea instead of remaining in York, to be set up in business by his father.

We all know the bulk of the story—the shipwreck, the salvaging of the ship’s supplies by Crusoe, the sole survivor. His years of solitude until he sees a footprint in the sand, and finds a friend in the native he calls Friday, whom he rescues from cannibals. I had been unaware of the shorter exploits before and after the island episode—Crusoe’s early adventures at sea, including slavery in North Africa, and afterwards a harrowing winter journey through Europe on his way home to England. Any competent editor today would have advised the author to leave that stuff out. Or save it for the sequels.

The prose was pretty vivid and engaging in the early 1700s. Today it’s a little tougher to follow, though that’s mostly the fault of our inferior educations. Even so, the story remains compelling, and once I was into it, I turned the pages eagerly.

If you only know the story from a cartoon or a children’s book version, you may not be aware how religious it is. Robinson Crusoe sees himself as living proof of God’s providence in the world, and his story as a series of lessons in faith and trust in God’s plan.

The chief problem with the story, for the modern reader, is its primitive, unself-conscious racism. Although Crusoe bewails the wickedness of his early life, before the shipwreck brought him to repentance, the fact that he was on a slave-hunting expedition at the time of the disaster does not seem to count in his mind as one his sins. Although he has the highest praise for Friday’s courage and character (in one place he judges him a better Christian than he himself is), his assumption seems to be that dark-skinned people (like dogs) are happiest when they are owned by kindly white people.

Which means, sadly, that this book will probably not be read by anybody except scholars for a while. Perhaps the day will come when we’ll have gotten past the race thing sufficiently to be able to evaluate a book like this in the context of its own culture and time. Because it’s an important classic, and a very good story with a large “footprint” in English-speaking culture.

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Mountaintop shopping

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Since the Walkers are doing Christmas this Saturday, I haven’t actually gotten much in the way of presents yet (special thanks, though, are due to Cousin Trygve in Norway, who sent a chocolate Santa from the inimitable Freya Company). One gift I have gotten was a fifty dollar grocery store card from the dominant local chain.

Since I have to get ready for Saturday, I figured I’d use the card to get what I needed, and do some stocking up, too. I mean, fifty bucks! I’ve never spent fifty bucks at the grocery store in my life. The very idea of spending that much seemed to me an all but impossible task. Do they make grocery carts that big, I wondered.

So when I went through the check-out line with my laden cart, imagine my surprise when the total came to more than a hundred dollars.

I was able to pay the balance. That’s not a problem. And I wasn’t throwing away money on non-essentials, by and large. Mainly I was stocking up on my usual staples.

And I realize that, when I deduct the value of the card, I got a really good deal.

It’s just that I’m not used to spending money at the grocery store the same way you folks with families do. I’m not used to shopping at that… altitude.

The oxygen’s a little thin up there, isn’t it?

Reviews

Christmas report, and The Husband by Koontz

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Hope you had a good Christmas. I’ll be celebrating (if anything I do can properly be described by that word) with my family here on Saturday.

So how did I spend the holiday? Mostly shoveling snow, as best I recall. We got another couple inches on Christmas Eve night, and my renter and I cleared that out. Christmas Day snow was predicted to be light, but Mother Nature was in a giving mood, so we got a couple more inches on Christmas Day and overnight. My renter being at work today, I shoveled all that by myself. My neighbor, who generally does our shared driveway with his snowblower, continued his tradition of perfect timing by being out of town. (Traditions mean so much at Christmas, after all.)

But I found time to stretch out on the couch with a book too. (Actually I had little choice after all that snow shoveling.) I read Dean Koontz’ The Husband. Good book. I won’t make this reading report an actual review. I think most of you know (and I’m figuring out by now) what to expect of a Dean Koontz book. He appears to be improving as a writer with the years, from what I can tell, but I wouldn’t rate him as a great novelist. But I’ve discovered that he’s an author I can go to and pretty much count on for a good experience—even a moving experience. The Husband is about a man who’s a husband in two senses. He’s married to a woman he loves, and he also runs a lawn service (which makes him a “husbandman” in the traditional English parlance). He lives a conventional middle class life and is happy in it. So it makes no sense when he gets a call telling him the caller has kidnapped his wife, and wants two million dollars in ransom.

Great story. Not (I think) a typical Dean Koontz thriller in that the supernatural element is almost entirely absent. But the tension never lets up, and the morality is excellent. There’s also some insightful social commentary. Enjoyed it very much.

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We children at Christmas

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I suppose it wasn’t my first Christmas. I would have been about five months old then. And almost certainly not my second either. But it’s one of my earliest memories. A dark winter morning. My father woke me and carried me down the stairs into the living room. And there was a tree decorated with colored lights and glittering ornaments. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. In fact, I’m pretty sure that that was the moment when the category “beautiful” entered my conceptual world. The tree was wonderful in itself. But then he showed me that there were brightly wrapped packages under the tree. Presents! Toys for me! My joy was total, unmarred by philosophy or irony or trauma or experience.

And someday—and fewer years are left between today and that day than now have passed since that first remembered Christmas—my Father will take me, not down the stairs, but up the stairs, through the dark into a place full of lights and color and beauty. And there will be gifts there too, wonderful enough to make me forget all the wrong lessons I’ve learned in the course of sabotaging my own life.

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3) We often say that Christmas is for children, but we forget that we are all to be children, when it comes to receiving the Gift.

Merry Christmas.

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A Child of the Snows

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Once again I share a Chesterton poem for Christmas. Unfortunately, this year it’s the same poem as last year. This is because of something I learned last night.

I have DVDs of three of the movie versions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I have the Sim version (of course), the George C. Scott version, and the musical “Scrooge” with Albert Finney (a little silly, but that’s the function of musicals). It’s my practice to view all three during the Christmas season.

Last night I watched the Scott version, and because it’s relatively faithful to the text, I followed along with my copy of The Annotated Christmas Carol, edited by Michael Patrick Hearn. In Stave Three, there’s a passage that goes, “All this time the chesnuts (sic) and the jug went round and round; and by and bye they had a song, about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny Tim….” Hearn says in a footnote here, “Apparently Dickens had no specific carol in mind; no such song has been found in Sandys’ or any other collection. G. K. Chesterton apparently realized this omission; in his Poems (1926) he included a verse, ‘A Child of the Snows,’ which might stand for Tiny Tim’s song until another might be found.”



It goes like this:

A Child of the Snows

There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim,

And never before or again,

When the nights are strong with a darkness long,

And the dark is alive with rain.

Never we know but in sleet and in snow,

The place where the great fires are,

That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth

And the heart of the earth a star.

And at night we win to the ancient inn

Where the child in the frost is furled,

We follow the feet where all souls meet

At the inn at the end of the world.

The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,

For the flame of the sun is flown,

The gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold,

And a Child comes forth alone.



Merry Christmas. Glade Jul.

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Winter Solstice

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Tomorrow, I guess, is the Winter Solstice. There was some discussion on the subject on Dennis Prager’s show today, and the conclusion seemed to be that the solstice came on the 21st last year, but will be on the 22nd this year. Sounds fishy to me. I suspect it’s a plot by the Global Warming conspiracists, intended to give them an excuse to release fiery press releases tomorrow, condemning the Bush administration for delaying the rotation of the earth for the benefit of Haliburton.

I’ve always been happy that we have a holiday featuring lots of colored lights at this particular time of the year. I go to work in the dark, and come home in the dark. I need colored lights. I’m confident any competent health professional would agree.

Incidentally, this is St. Thomas’ Day, the anniversary of the killing of Erling Skjalgsson, hero of my novel, The Year of the Warrior. It was a dark day when Erling died, not least for St. Olaf Haraldsson, who had some culpability in his death. But that’s a story for another novel, which (alas) will probably never be written.

The days are even shorter in Norway than here in Minnesota, this time of year. The Norwegians used to think of Jul (Christmas) as an old woman who came to visit now. Today she took a seat in the chimney corner. Tomorrow and the day after she would sit in two other kitchen corners. Christmas Eve she got the “high seat,” the best seat in the house, where she would be the guest of honor all the way to Epiphany. It was believed that there was no point doing any work today. If baking was done, the dough would rise wrong. In the oven, the cakes or cookies would move around, and you’d never get them out again. So give Mom a break.

At the precise moment when the sun “turned” (it was believed), the horns of the cows would loosen—but just for that moment. Also at that moment, all water turned to wine, then to poison, and then back to water again.

You’ve been warned.

Reviews

Book review: Vengeance, by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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I picked up Vengeance at a used book store, thinking that it was one of the few Lew Fonesca novels I haven’t read yet. Turns out I’d done this one already, but I read it again anyway, just because Lew is a guy I like to hang out with.

Lew Fonesca is a Florida detective, but (aside from courage and personal integrity) that’s about all he has in common with Travis McGee or Doc Ford. Lew came to Florida a couple years back, ending up on the seedy side of Sarasota because that’s where his car broke down when he drove south after the death of his wife. He’s not technically a private detective. He makes a marginal living as a process server. He lives in one half of his two-room office next to a Dairy Queen. He doesn’t own a car anymore, and usually travels by bicycle. He’s short and skinny and bald, and has a large nose. People frequently comment that he “looks sad.”

But sometimes a problem comes up, and he looks into it for someone. More than once he puts himself into insanely dangerous situations, and he isn’t sure why, though his psychiatrist has theories.

In this first book in the series, Lew is approached by a woman from Kansas who has come looking for her fourteen-year-old daughter, who ran away to join her father in Sarasota. There’s good reason to think the father has been molesting the daughter. Lew agrees to look into it for a small retainer.

Immediately afterward he meets with a very different client, a big-time real estate developer, an aging man whose beautiful young wife has disappeared. He can’t live without her, he says. He’s confident she still loves him, and doesn’t know why she went away. He wants Lew to just deliver a message, to ask her to talk to him. Lew agrees to search for her too.

The investigations very quickly put him in danger, and he has to call on his friend Ames McKinney for help. Ames is a tall Texan who was once a millionaire and now makes his living sweeping out a bar (you may recall my theory of the Psycho Killer Friend™ in mystery fiction. Ames isn’t really a psycho, but he fulfills the function). Ames is a good man to have along in a tight place, but Lew doesn’t always call on him when he needs him. Lew also meets a compassionate female social worker with whom he begins a tentative, cautious relationship. In the end the two mysteries intertwine in a heartbreaking fashion.

The plot seemed to me far-fetched at times, but contained such believable proportions of tragedy and hope that it never lost my sympathy. I suppose you could call the Lew Fonesca books “soft-boiled mysteries.” Kaminsky writes with his characteristic concern for basic right and wrong, and compassion for the human condition. He’s one of my favorite writers and I enjoyed this book almost as much on the second reading.

Publishing

Book news: Brandon Sanderson will finish Wheel of Time series

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News from SFWA today:

Brandon Sanderson to finish Jordan’s Wheel of Time series

Tor Books announced today that novelist Brandon Sanderson has been chosen to finish the final novel in Robert Jordan’s bestselling Wheel of Time fantasy series. Robert Jordan died September 16th after a battle with the rare blood disease amyloidosis.

The new novel, A Memory of Light, will be the twelfth and final book in the fantasy series which has sold over 14 million copies in North America and over 30 million copies worldwide. The last four books in the series were all #1 New York Times bestsellers, and for over a decade fans have been awaiting the final novel that would bring the epic story to its conclusion.

Jordan had known the ending of the series for a long time and, according to a blog posting by his cousin, Wilson W. Grooms, Jr., had a few months ago revealed secret details about the end of the series to close members of his family which he had never discussed before.

Delivery of the manuscript is scheduled for December 2008, with a planned publication in Fall 2009.

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End of term

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The concert of Sissel and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is scheduled for tonight on my PBS station. Be on the watch for it in your own market.

I’m feeling better, thanks for asking. Not actually well, but I’m slogging back up the trail to my normal level of health, which (come to think of it) isn’t that high a climb.

Today was the last day for classes at the Bible School and Seminary. Students were stressed over their final tests and excited about going home for the holidays. We also had a farewell for my African assistant, who’s going home now. No doubt he’ll be relieved to give up working for me in exchange for going back to being the bishop of an entire diocese in his home country.

The more I think about that, the more bizarre it appears. Sometimes it’s necessary for God to teach His children humility, but using me as the instrument seems excessive.