The Boy Who Cried "There is no wolf"

On a grassy green hill in the countryside overlooking a quiet little hamlet, a boy tended to the sheep which had been placed in his care for a penny a week. The night was peaceful and calm, and the boy grew restless. So he made up a game near the edge of the meadow by hitting rocks into the forest with swings of his shepherd’s crook. He had such fun, in fact, that during the night – while he should have been tending to the sheep – some of the sheep went missing.

Before the sun came up, he wandered back to the flock and noticed that there were not twenty and five sheep as he had counted at sunset, but twenty and three. Shrugging, he led the nervous sheep back to their pen and went inside his parent’s home to eat and go to bed.

When he came back to the farm who owned the sheep, the farmer approached him.

“Boy, there were twenty and five sheep in your care last night, and now I count three less. What happened to the three?”

The boy shrugged. “You must have counted wrong. I only had twenty and two sheep all night.”

And with that, the boy opened the gate and marched the sheep back up onto their grazing hill.

During the night, he quickly became bored again, and went back down to the town to kiss a girl he fancied. When he went back up to the hill in the morning, he now counted only ten and seven sheep. Not caring for this new number, he brought the sheep back to their pen and went home for food and another day of sleeping.

That evening, the farmer and his wife ran out to him as he prepared to lead the sheep away.

“Now see here, boy, there were only ten and seven sheep this morning, when I know I counted twenty and two. Where are the sheep?”

But the boy gestured to the remaining flock. “They’re all right here, old man. I don’t know what you’re doing while I’m asleep, but I know I brought back all your sheep. You should check your fences and find out how they’re getting out.”

He opened the gate again and led the sheep up to their hill to eat the lush grass.

That night, he grew hungry, and killed one of the smaller sheep, cooked it, ate a few tender lamp chops and threw the remains into the forest. When he came back from disposing of the remains, six additional sheep were gone as well.

His hunger satisfied, he led the ten remaining sheep down to their pen, but went home without closing the gate behind him.

The boy was awakened later in the day by the angry farmer and half the village, demanding to know what had happened to the sheep the boy had been charged with watching.

“What sheep?” the boy said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “You just woke me from my nap.”

“I’ve been paying you a penny a day to watch my sheep – and now they’re all gone! That’s my livelihood, and now it’s all gone!”

“Your livelihood?” the boy asked. “Must not be too important if you let someone else do it.”

One of the other villagers stepped forward. “I tend my sheep up in the hills as well. If you know what took his sheep, tell us so we can deal with it ourselves.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,”, the boy said. “I think this farmer was just careless and let his sheep run off.”

The old farmer’s face turned a darker shade of red. “I went up on the hill and saw blood and tracks from a wolf. At least tell me if it was wolves what got my sheep and we can hunt it down.”

“It might have been a wolf,” the boy said. “But if it was a wolf at all – and I’m not saying it was – I’m sure it’s nothing worth your time. In fact, I’m sure if it was a wolf, it will just wander away and be gone, just like a miracle. Nothing worth your time or energy. I’m going back to bed now.”

But the town was not satisfied. “Tell us if we’re safe! Tell us what we need to know!”

The boy looked out on the angry, fearful faces as they demanded that he help them.

“No,” he said, and closed the door.

Why Do I Do This?

I’ve probably told you the Spider-man story, yeah? How I wanted to be Spider-man when I grew up, but then learned that Spidey wasn’t real but that he was invented, written and drawn by a few guys in New York City? And then I realized that maybe I could even be one of those guys?

So, really, from about the age of seven, I loved the concept of storytelling. Bardic traditions, oral legacies, word of mouth, what have you - the idea of ideas being shared back and forth from person to person, generation to generation, nation to nation, and so forth - - that’s just kind of godsmackingly delightsome to me. I remember the stories my father told me, about being a tough guy on the streets of Modesto that helped in some small way to inform the stories of what became “American Graffiti”, or of being in the army, or being a fireman, or the stories he told me about the settlers and trappers of the untamed west. Or of him starting me on my appreciation of modern storytelling like Star Trek and Star Wars, westerns and war movies. Or taking note of the little details like the “suicide doors” in the old 1940s cars, how to tan an animal’s hide (hint: every animal has just enough brains to tan their own). My parents taught me the magic of words. They taught me about adventures.

My first favorite things were stuffed animals - all of mine had names, and they all had their own way of looking at the world, and I made up little stories for them all. And then I found books - the words that stay - and fell in love with Richard Scarry’s books, and Dr Seuss’ books, and Where the Wild Things Are. Then I moved up to Lord of the Rings, the Hardy Boys mysteries, and then Dragonlance and more comic books and more books, and eventually the storytelling attributes of music like Sting and Genesis and all those musical, lyrical storytellers.

Music, for those following at home who may have noticed this, plays a tremendous part in my love of storytelling - because to me, music is like the great blue sea. When your words bring you as far as they can, you find yourself at the unfathomable deep, and that’s where music takes over. To me, dwelling between the mountains and the sea has always been one of those impossible contentions. Nobody wins, nobody loses, you just toil there in the foam and hope you neither drown nor perish from thirst.

But that has always been a pretty internalized metaphor for me. It is there I wrestle.

A while back - about a decade now - I had that conversation with my child, who dared me to tell a story about a girl who kicks butt. I had the perfect character in mind, an eleven year old girl who found out she was a monster hunter. An angel of death. A reaper. Her story began with “Reaper’s Return”, to which I was surprised to learn brushed up against the genre of Steampunk. And that book turned into six.

It sort of started out as an effort to describe a new mythology - another way to look at life and death, in a way which was based more upon the sense of relative prioritization and self-determination, and less about religious tenets or political affirmation. It was just about the pressures of the world being placed upon a young girl’s shoulders, and her rising to the task.

From out of that whole endeavor, more stories emerged. More ideas, more concepts, more metaphors. Some darker, some much lighter. Children’s stories, dark post apocalyptic nightmares and some I haven’t even begun yet to quantify.

And I’ve been doing that all with one hand tied behind my back the entire way. And now, that hand is loosed and we can truly see what my stories are worth. Both to myself, and, my friends, to you.

You know that old homily, where when god closes a door, she also opens a window? Well, I kind of feel now like she’s done more than open a window - it feels like the whole west side of the house is gone, and an addition is being added on, and in the meantime there’s a lovely sunset out there, and… is that a red panda in the back yard? Let’s go find out.

In other words…. let’s go for an adventure, my fellow travelers. Bring me that horizon.

Anachronology

Time’s a funny thing. On the one hand it’s almost subjective - it flies when we’re having fun, it drag when we’re not. And yet it’s a measurable, quantifiable entity. Seconds tick by, months and years and decades seem impossibly forever, and, yeah, everyone wants to argue about whether or not we’re now in the “twenties” - spoiler: we are.

Carl Sagan made a lot of discussion about time, helping us comprehend is as the fourth dimension; length, width, height and time. The reason why we do not understand this fourth dimension is because we exist firmly locked within the first three - we cannot perceive this additional dimension other than by crafting a 3-dimensional “shadow” of 4th dimensional objects. For an example of this, we can take a straight line (one dimension - a length), make it into a square by extending its endpoints by equally long lines along 90 degree angles into a second dimension of width, and then extend that into a cube by extending its endpoints again to their 90 degree third dimension. A three dimensional object - like this cube - can be somewhat expressed in two dimensions - it can be drawn by truncating the third dimension extensions, or, if you had a clear cube held above a piece of paper, you can draw its shadow to achieve the same effect.

Now here’s where it gets wild. You can represent the “shadow” of a fourth dimensional object - a cube with an additional (fourth) dimension is called a tesseract - but when shown in three dimensions, it looks like a cube within a larger cube, with their associated corners connected by shorter lines.

Anyway, now that I’ve bent your brain a little, let me share an observation I’ve made about time recently. As we just passed through the great annual calendar replacement, everyone’s thinking about resolutions, reviewing what the previous year’s accomplishments are, etc. And at the same time, we are considering Big Moves, Big Accomplishments, whether it be weight loss, alcohol consumption, book publishing, or whatever floats your respective boats.

And somewhere along the line, these goals either run away from us, or scare us into submission, and we end up ending the year feeling a bit disappointed in ourselves. It just so often feels like we just don’t have the time - and the world tells us to solve this by making the time, but honestly that’s always seemed far too simple an answer to me. Time can be fun for us, it can be our friend and not be our enemy.

So my personal goal has been, sure, to have those big goals, and to more or less derive a strategy for getting there, but accepting that things are gonna change along the way. It’s like how I write my books. I start with the ending and know how I want things to resolve, and then I figure out where the starting point is, and then I develop a casual framework that tells me who is the focus of what chapter, where they are in their quest for their ultimate goals, and so forth. That’s the outline, but it isn’t the story. I don’t always know the story until I’m slogging through my first drafts. The characters make choices I didn’t consider, and suddenly we’re off on a tangent. Sometimes those tangents are awesome and make the story so much more interesting than I’d originally planned, and sometimes it gets trimmed out and put into a collection of short stories. But it always informs my as to the journey of the characters themselves.

And you know what? Life is like that, too.

Sometimes the things we thought were so important have to sit on the back burner and simmer a bit longer, and sometimes things jump in and take center stage. In the end, it’s just how life is, and we rarely get to control many of the experiences with which we are confronted. But that’s why it’s exciting. That’s what makes life such a grand adventure.

From the perspective of time, because we are travelling through it, its as if we exist within the threads of a great tapestry, and from where we stand, we only see the threads that surround us. The goal would be to rise higher and see the entire pattern, but that is the vision for another day, after all.

For now, we dance among the seconds and minutes, viewing the film frame by frame until we can understand the entire presentation. Whether we can guess how it ends or simply be thrilled with the show, it’s the journeys we all face.

So pick a second. Ponder a moment. Find joy in those single frames of life, and glean what love we can whenever the chance befalls us. Those are the moments worth living for, and which carry us on to the next one.

Or as my kindergarten teacher used to say, “hold hands everyone, lets go have ourselves an adventure!”

Pseudobiographies

One of the most common and perhaps cliched bit of writing wisdom takes the form of “write what you know”. This is usually misinterpreted to mean ‘write about the things you know’, which, as a science fiction and fantasy author, would really tie my hands.

But the phrase means more than it seems to mean. Because if you are limited to telling stories about things that happened to you…. well, that is really bound to cut most authors careers pretty damn short. Plus, then it turns writing into more a process of just finding good words and a clever way to string events in a narrative form. Don’t color outside the lines. Don’t imagine. Don’t dream.

No, writing what you know means in part that you draw upon your own experiences, yes, but it also often means draping your emotional remembrances in other people, other places, other times, other realities.

An interesting neuroscience (science? Theory? I don’t care. Whichever.) I came across some years back is called “pseudobiography”, which implies that every story written is really about the author - that you can draw connections to every aspect of a story - no matter how incredible - back to a founding emotional moment in the author’s life.

And this, to me, really does reflect the idea that writers should write what they know. Now, granted, I’ve written quite a few books now on a fantastical world which has seen the wildest evolution of retrofuturist science rise to herculean altitudes, alongside the more ephemeral aspects of magic, and tried my best to balance them out in as much of a sense of reality as I could. My goal was not just to tell a wonderful story, but also to embed a touch of reality in it. Something to tap into that sense of history and “this world” to let the other wonders be seen as credible, if not slightly familiar.

On the one hand, a lot of my friends are in these characters. My late cat friend Karma is and always shall be Mulligan, for example, and many of the other characters aspects - a bit of personality here, a touch of mannerisms there - come from the amazing people who have been for however long a part of my life. And of course, there’s Favo Carr, who is too much a fragment of my own unbridled Id, and don’t think it doesn’t worry me a great deal, that.

This is probably why these novels have always meant so much to me. They are me. They’re as much a diary as any I could have kept. When the characters suffer, they are crying my own tears shed for one anguished moment or another. When they are victorious, I cheer right along with them.

Their stories are my stories. And that’s why I’m both nervous but joyous to share them with you.