Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: October 2006
Interview: Tamara Siler Jones (part 1)
Don’t forget the contest to win a signed copy of Valley.
Halloween brings us the release of Tamara Siler Jones‘ third forensic fantasy, Valley of the Soul (available from Amazon, or — buy blue! — Barnes and Noble). For those of you unfamiliar with the series, Tam’s stories focus on Dubric Byerly, the Castellan (think Chief of Police) of Faldorrah. Dubric’s task is to keep the people safe. For Dubric, failure carries a special sting: he’s haunted by the ghosts of murder victims whose killers have not been brought to justice.
In the first novel, Ghosts in the Snow (reviewed here), Dubric and his staff face a killer of young women. In Jones’ second novel, Threads of Malice (reviewed here), sexual abuse and murder pose an even more twisted threat to the Castellan’s team.This time around, ritualistically slaughtered animals begin appearing in Faldorrah. Prank or something far more ominous? I’ll give you one guess.
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the neat things about Jones’ novels is that each is self-contained. You needn’t read them in sequence (and I didn’t).
On to the interview!
A crucible indeed
We can be reasonably confident that this high schooler didn’t download her essay from the Internet.
I have reprinted it verbatim.
“the crucible”
umm the character ima use in this Essay is John Proctor because ahh he was like the main dude in the story yeah. John proctor has three children & ahh I think proctor has made the right choice.
That’s it. That’s the whole essay. I wonder what grade my sister gave?
Oh, well. I’ve often thought “The Crucible” sucked; undoubtedly, that’s why this student has authored such an anemic essay. “Macbeth” might have inspired her to loftier heights.
Don’t forget the Valley contest (see below)!
D.
Contest: win a signed copy of Valley of the Soul
Halloween will soon be here*, and with it the release of Tamara Siler Jones’ third forensic fantasy, Valley of the Soul. I’ll be interviewing Tam tomorrow and Wednesday, so stay tuned.
But you’re wondering how you can win a signed copy, right? Here are the rules:
1. Between now and Friday, post a true-life scary story on your blog. Doesn’t have to be supernatural, and I guess it doesn’t even have to be true (like I’m going to check your facts?) But, damn it, try to creep us out.
2. To qualify, you’ll need to link back to this contest post and link to Valley‘s page either at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
3. I will post a link back to your site at the bottom of this post, and (of course) I will be hyping this contest all week.
4. In the comments, let me know when your post is up.
5. I’ll choose a winner by drawing and announce the name this Saturday.
Tam has a contest of her own, too!
D.
*OMG. Check out Lyn Cash’s kitty litter cake. Oy.
Doctor in the House?
USA is having a House marathon today; Karen has been watching (“because there’s nothing else on but crap”) and I’ve been listening in.
Not long ago, my sister suggested I do a Thirteen on “why I hate medical drama shows.” This is not entirely true, by the way. I have fond memories of St. Elsewhere, particularly since the writers nailed the dynamics between residents and attendings. Plus — Alfre Woodard, Denzel Washington, Ed Begley Jr.? That show had one hell of a cast.
But, yeah, I’ve had it in for medical shows ever since ER opened with the following gem. This guy is crashing in the ER. Trauma to the neck, perhaps — in any case, the ER resident is having trouble securing the airway.
What does he say?
“Wake up ENT!”
Well, eff that actor and eff the writers. Our ER residents worked shifts. On call, we never slept. I never watched another episode (and I only watched the first minute of that one).
Back to House. I like Hugh Laurie, but I like him like this:
or this:
That’s A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Blackadder, respectively. But like so many fine comedians (Steve Martin comes to mind), I guess Laurie got tired of doing his fine comic shtick and took to more serious pursuits. It’s a shame.
Laurie’s House is monotone, monochromatic. His dynamic range extends from nasty to snide and his wit is about what you would expect from a team of writers with modest talent. I would forgive all of that if the team dynamics felt right, or if they got the medicine correct, but (based on the fifteen-second snips I’ve picked up here and there while editing my romance) these writers do neither.
Yeah, yeah, I’m not being fair, you say. I ought to sit through an episode or two. But it pains me, it really does. House’s brilliant deductive skills are the stock and trade of any internist worth his or her salt. At any tertiary care center, the docs are faced with comparable mysteries on a daily basis. (Well, maybe not wives poisoning their husbands with gold-containing arthritis meds from Mexico, but close enough.) But we the viewers are supposed to think this guy is the love child of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
I guess what really bugs me is the heavy-handed use of drama in a medical setting. Illness and cure are intrinsically dramatic provided the writer takes care to characterize all the players. Case in point, Alan Rickman’s Something the Lord Made, which I have hyped before (please, please rent this movie). Those writers didn’t need murderous wives, bubonic plague, or herpes encephalitis to capture their viewers’ interest.
Of course, those writers had Alan Rickman and Mos Def on hand to bring their characters to life. As much as I like the (comic) Hugh Laurie, he’s no Alan Rickman.
D.
Remember, live blogging tonight
I’m shooting for 7 PM PST, but that depends on a lot of stuff (like when I manage to feed my family). See ya there.
UPDATE: make that 8. Sorry!
UPDATE: Y’all have lives tonight, I see 😉 Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.
D.
Healer
Seems like Corn Dog and I are trading wacky childhood stories. Here’s another . . . kinda, sorta.
As a child, my first love was a woman who imagined herself perpetually on the verge of death. I am not a well woman! she would holler, and what did I know? I believed it.
The irony is, she wasn’t a well woman. Axis II diagnoses aside, my mother was a breast cancer survivor in the pre-chemo, pre-radiation, pre-tamoxifen era. She beat the odds.
Somehow, I was responsible — for the loss of her breast, her health, her youth. You took the best years of my life. Did she say that to me or to my father? Doesn’t matter; four- or five-year-old Doug took the blame.
I woke up early one Saturday morning (kids: in those days, we only had cartoons on Saturdays. I had no intention of missing a single one) to find a hole in our den’s screen door. My older brother woke up soon afterward and convinced me I had done it. It didn’t take much convincing; I felt certain I was responsible for everything. And so I made up a lie to deflect my mother’s inevitable anger.
“It was a bird!” I told her when she woke up and came into the den. “It, it flew in, and then it flew out, and it made that hole –”
“That bird was your father’s fist,” my mother said.
You mean it’s not my fault?
(Smart guy, my dad. A dumber man would have punched the wall and broken a few fingers.)
Yeah, it was all my fault. And I was always trying to make it better.
***
Who would have thought . . .
this
could lead to this
Ignoring that brief Crooks and Liars spike, I had been averaging 300 to 400 hits a day for a long time; and then, the search engines discovered my (wondrous and beautiful) cameltoe post. Now I’m topping 600 hits a day, mostly because of the public’s insatiable desire for more cameltoe.
And what’s not to like about cameltoe?
You know, sometimes I get discouraged by life; I guess all of us do. But when I do, I meditate on the MooreToeâ„¢, and I think, Boy, you’re gonna make it after all.
D.
Karen gets outwitted
Another Jake story, courtesy of the boy’s mom. I’ll tell it as she told it to me:
Why I’ll Never Again Tell Jake I’m Smarter Than He Is
Before Jake turned two, we began struggling over food. I wanted to steer him towards a healthier diet but he objected. He objected by putting his finger down his throat, thus throwing up the objectionable food item.
After a while, he learned he could get his way by faking it. He would put his finger to the side of his mouth, which (at least at first) still got the desired reaction out of me but didn’t have that nasty barf side-effect.
But I figured out his little trick.
“HAH!” I said. “I’m smarter than you. I see what you’re doing — you’re putting your finger to the side of your mouth! Well, it’s not going to work.”
Whereupon he stuck his finger down his throat and threw up all over me.
Behold the face of cold cunning:
D.
Thirteen memories of Jake
I would have posted a lot more pictures, except the HP Scanner Gremlins are disgruntled this evening. Oh, well.
1. Karen was given a “3% lifetime chance” to conceive. In preparation for IVF, she had to get a baseline ultrasound to look for fibroids, etc.
The infertility doc’s partner did the ultrasound. “Well,” he said, “there he is.”
“There who is?” Karen asked in what I imagine was her Must Be Aggressive With Doctors voice.
There was Jake, of course. And there was egg on the infertility doc’s face. Um, so to speak.
2. Jake was a real kicker. Get me the hell out of here! he would scream.
Here’s a picture of Karen and her good friend Kira. Karen’s the pregnant one:
3. Karen had a relatively easy delivery. By the time she asked for the epidural, her doc told her, “Give me another five minutes and he’ll be out.”
Sorry, no crotch shots of the delivery. I remember thinking, No, for the love of God no, get him the hell out of there already. I suspect that was the last time Jake and I ever agreed about anything.
How big? 5 pounds, 2 ounces. For a comparison, this is a normal-sized pacifier:
4. Karen and I are hyper-rational types. We thought of ourselves as scientists back then, even though neither one of us made much dent on the world of science. Imagine our surprise when the post-partum parenting instincts kicked in.
Wow.
We argued over who would get the job of changing diapers — we both wanted to do it. (Yeah, that didn’t last.) We were like toddlers fighting over a new toy.
5. Jake had the best nanny. Julietta had raised three daughters of her own, and she treated Jake as if he were her fourth child. We wouldn’t have survived those first seven months without her.
6. Jake’s first word. Soon after arriving in San Antonio, the three of us were having lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant. Or, rather, Karen and I were having lunch, and Jake was having a bottle.
I pointed at a young couple at a neighboring table: 20-something gal in short-shorts, guy with handlebar moustache and baseball cap. “Bubba,” I said to Jake. “Buh . . . buh.”
“Bubba!” said Jake, who had never before uttered a syllable.
“Great, Jake!” we said. “Do it again! Buh . . . buh.”
Nothing.
Nothing at all for another two years. Now we can’t shut him up.
7. When he was about eighteen months, we took him to the San Antonio mall to buy new shoes. The saleswoman was a Hispanic gal with a low-cut top and ample cleavage. Karen and I watched open-mouthed as Jake grabbed two handfuls.
I imagine he was curious, never having seen anything quite like that before. The saleswoman laughed it off and seemed a whole lot less embarrassed than Karen or I. Afterwards, I told Jake, “You know, once you turn two, you won’t be able to get away with that anymore.”
8. Before he turned three, he figured out how to do things with the TV remote that we couldn’t do. Not content with Total Control Over Television, he tried to use the remote to shut off the room lights and the swamp fan. Then he pointed it at us, hit the off button, and laughed maniacally.
9. The kid has always had an amazing mind. You know that game, Tower of Babel? That’s the one with a stack of seven disks, one smaller than the next. You’re supposed to transfer the stack from one post to another, one disk at a time, never putting a larger disk on top of a smaller one.
Unbelievable would have been if he’d figured the puzzle out at age 2. Sorry, he’s not unbelievable. Amazing, however, was watching Jake play with it for two hours nonstop. Most adults don’t have an attention span like that.
10. And then there’s that puzzle with pegs and holes. You’re supposed to put the square pegs in the square holes, round pegs in the round holes, and so forth. Before he was one year old, he figured out how to do it the right way, but he did it that way only once. Forever after, he kept trying to figure out how to get the pegs to go into the wrong holes.
If we hadn’t seen him do it right that one time, I suppose we would have been pretty worried.
11. Remember Comet Hale-Bopp? I do. For two or three nights, I took Jake outside, put him on my shoulders, and pointed out the comet to him. I doubt he remembers this, but at the time, it seemed like an important thing to do.
12. Early religious instruction. One of the San Antonio synagogues had a fair — a Purim fair, if I remember correctly — so I took Jake to the fair to soak up some Yiddishkeit.
To this day, I regret not having a camera. They had set up a Jonah and the Whale ride: little kids climbed into the whale’s mouth, bounced around inside his stomach, and then slid out . . . well, you can guess how they slid out.
13. Twelve memories, and we haven’t even scratched Jake’s fourth year. I wanted to close on a recent photo, however. Here’s Jake, today, practicing Tae Kwon Do at the dojo (do they call ’em dojos?)
You know what to do. Leave a comment below and I’ll give you some linky lurve.
Next week: Thirteen Things I Learned from Cosmo, Part Quatre.
Lyvvie? Gene Tierney. Definitely Gene Tierney. (Not Lyvvie’s most recent post, but how could I resist?)
Pat goes a-voting (don’t you Canadians know the election is in November?)
See Dean choke the bald giraffe
Darla introduces us to author Jim Butcher
Placate May’s screaming dreamer
Trish’s Thirteen Ghosts of Toronto
D.
Best picture ever.
Click on the photo to see the full-size, full-color pic.
We took this photo in April, ’96, at Huntington Gardens, one of the nicest places in LA (and about the only redeeming feature of the notorious robber baron’s villainy). Karen looks so happy in this, and Jake has such a precious “WTF?” expression, as if he were debating the wisdom of this whole life thing.
Had another cud-chewing memoirist bit in mind today but then I thought, Eff it. What’s really important? These two are really important.
Today is Jake’s day. No homework, except we’re “making him” watch Scotland, PA. (He read Macbeth earlier this year, so this movie should be a nice tie-in. Plus, it’s funny as hell.)
Afterwards, we’ll pick up cat food, make a run to the bank (the kid never spends any of his money. He likes to say he’s richer than we are. He certainly has less debt), and buy fudge.
And for once, tomorrow’s Thursday Thirteen is a chip shot: Thirteen Memories of Jake — with more photos.
D.