I didn’t know that surfing was an Olympic sport until I saw a story with a fantastic picture. Surfing was included in the Olympics for the first time in Japan in 2020, and the competition this year is taking place in French Polynesia. It is a judged sport, as opposed to racing or throwing things or swimming, where the winner is objectively first. Gabriel Medina, a surfer from Brazil, is proud of his Christian faith. The picture shows him in the air pointing upward and the story quotes him as saying. “I can do everything through him who strengthens …” Take a look. (And sorry. It’s a really annoying website. But the picture will make you happy.)
https://www.ocregister.com/2024/07/30/whats-the-story-behind-this-insane-viral-olympic-surf-shot/
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Next, I’m working on a novel about teachers in a Catholic school, involving good food, dastardly plots to destroy said school, and a Science Fair. The story is not cooperating with me. According to principles of good writing, if there is a really bad thing that happens, you’d better have warned your readers somehow. Otherwise, they dance along in the sunlight, and when the monster jumps out they just toss your book against the wall, because they don’t mind monsters but that’s not what they thought they were getting in This book.
So, currently, a bad thing that happens in my new Work-In-Progress comes about three-quarters of the way through the book, and I have slowly realized that it simply can’t happen quite that way. I have also slowly realized that ‘the book’ is fighting me. That is where the incident belongs as far as ‘the book’ is concerned, and my problems in making it work are irrelevant to ‘the book’.
It was helpful then to discover an old version of Jessamyn’s Yarn**, the story I published in December, 2023. In the published version, Jessamyn’s Great Uncle Duncan is wise and helpful, but in the first version he had temporary amnesia, and could only speak Polish. I guess I won that wrestling match.
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I’ve been slightly under the weather so I read some murder mysteries from the 1920’s on Project Gutenberg. A bunch of stories are coming out of copyright as they pass the 95 year mark. These particular stories were written by J. J. Connington, the nom-de-plume for Alfred Walter Stewart. Stewart was a chemist, and I guess he had a pen name because writing under his own name wasn’t quite respectable.
The stories were … quite something. Which is to say, I read them because I kept being astonished though not necessarily in a good way. One of the stories features kleptomania, sleep-walking, getting into debt playing bridge, and a single woman on a yacht. In another, a car vanishes swiftly into quicksand and so does a person. Boom, they are gone, and no-one cares. Me, neither. The lack of care comes partly from a total inability to keep track of the characters. In one story, Connington introduces all the characters of a house party in the first maybe ten paragraphs. I didn’t even try to keep them straight. In a couple of the books, the detective is named Inspector Driffield. Ugh.
Connington also wrote an apocalyptic story about the world being destroyed by a biological disaster, and then saved by someone discovering atomic energy. It involved thirty or forty coal mines being deliberately collapsed at some point, and everyone in the mines dying. They might not have minded. Earlier, it was said that they were being worked beyond their capacity, day and night, no time off, because … I don’t know. The point might have been that, in order to get the atomic reaction off the ground, so to speak, you needed a massive burst of energy. After that the reaction would be self-sustaining and all troubles would be solved. That’s from reading the first chapter and skimming the last two, so possibly I missed some of the “finer” points. Not going back.
Somewhere in all that indigestible mass I came across a few phrases that looked interesting enough to use in my own writing, but I forgot to note them down. Also, I forgot to mention that the whole apocalyptic biology deal was set off by some Saint Elmo’s fire.
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I think the moral is, Don’t get a summer cold. It makes you do stupid things. And remember Gabriel Medina floating in the air.
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