November: Military Theme

Since I’m doing”Basic Training on Military Culture” over at Forward Motion’s Back to School for Busy Writers starting November 5, I thought I’d do a military theme for the month for anyone interested in more information.

Photo courtesy of http://www.army.mil

This is a quick look at the theme’s topics:

• Life as a Single Soldier
• The G.I. Party – No, this isn’t something fun!
• What’s it like on a military post?
• Veteran’s Day – A veteran visiting a war memorial
• An Officer, An Actor, a Gentlemen – On my meeting William Windom, guest star from Star Trek and World War II veteran (he died earlier this year)
• Thanksgiving During War
• For the writers, a list of ways to get military wrong in fiction

Plus –

I will be guest posting on Sherry Isaac’s “Nancy’s November Nine” series on Nancy Drew and doing two posts on Unleaded Fuel for Writers.

Plus Liv Rancourt will be dropping in for a guest post over here at Soldier, Storyteller.  Might also have one more.

Meanwhile, I’ll taking the theme direction for December.  Since I don’t want to do any of the standard themes like Home for the Holidays, I’m going to do “silver.”

 

Mashup: Writing Injuries, Saving Manuscripts, and Star Trek

This week, I’ve been dealing with Golfer’s Elbow, so Elena Aitkins’ post on Writer’s Wrist and Other Afflictions hit home.  By the way, no, I wasn’t golfing.  That would be scary.  Me and a golf club.  No.  I’ve had to put off writing, but after a little over a week, it’s much better.

From John Gilstrap on saving the hand-written edits of a manuscript.  Do you save yours?  John’s a fellow member of American Independent Writers and critted my synopsis at one point.

And for a little nostalgia going into the weekend, a very cool mash up of The Love Boat theme with Star Trek.  If anyone is a SF fan, it’s worth a look just for the guest cast.

 

4 Links for Awesome Description

Description is one of those great things that can enhance a story and make it stand out.  Doing it can be tricky, but there’s some good information out there.  Check out the links below.

Denise Robbins: Description in Fiction.  This is a great list of tips, many of them going further than typical ones.  When she says “Be specific, but not too specific. Do not let the details you write limit the reader’s imagination.” the first thing I thought of was a writer I critiqued who tried to control the reader’s picture be being extremely specific.  Particularly check out the last tip: When is description too much?

Robert Sawyer.  The veteran science fiction writer uses the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture as example of how not to do description of a pivotal scene.  Reading the book isn’t necessary; he provides all the context.  Though I don’t agree with him on first Star Trek movie.  Honestly, it was wasted opportunity!

TeacherWriter: Writing Effective Description is Not a Sin:  The first thing I thought when I saw the title was exactly what this blog was about — how everyone tells us: “Description is boring.  Use it sparingly!”  TeacherWriter makes some great points worth reading.

Ms. Garrett Online:  The name reminds me of Mrs. Garrett, the motherly caretaker on the Facts of Life, but this Ms. Garrett works for a library in Oregon, one of the places being hit by the Pacific Coast snowstorms.  The site has an extensive list of descriptive words, including the five senses.  Great for a bit of inspiration in a stuck moment.  Be forewarned though — the site is an eye popping yellow.

Got any favorite links for description?

 

Meeting My Favorite Actor

My favorite actor is David Hedison.  If the name’s not familiar, he was on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and James Bond.  That’s where most people know him from.  I first got hooked on him when KTLA began running a science fiction afternoon of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea at 4:00 and Star Trek at 5:00 (hey, I’m an equal opportunity action girl).  He was tall, dark, and Armenian.  Classic leading man looks.  This was when the Fonz was popular.  I thought Henry Winkler was not really good looking, and all he said was, “Heeyyy!”  David Hedison played a military man, and there were great action scenes.  He even did his own scuba diving for the underwater scenes — most aired in beautiful color.

I eventually started hunting through the TV Guide to find other shows he was on so I could watch them.  The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Charlie’s Angels, Wonder Woman.  I just couldn’t get enough of seeing him on the screen.

But I never thought I would have the opportunity to actually meet him …

He was going to be in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, in a theatre in Massachusetts, starring with Juliet Mills.  Two friends came to join me, one from Canada and one from England, and we drove up the East Coast.  We were attending the last two nights because that’s when the best performances are.  The actors are constantly working on the roles, and it’s an ongoing process of improvement over the course of the play.  We went to two because it’s a live performance, so no two are alike.

Because we’d called ahead and said we were friends of David — he knew we were coming — the theatre gave us good seats. On the first day, we were in the second row, and the stage was right there, so close we could have touched it.

I was really nervous.  I felt like my clothes were breaking out in wrinkles.  As I waited for the play to start, waited for the moment when I would see David Hedison in person, I was so tense.  I was afraid I was going to need to race out of the theatre in the middle of the play to use the bathroom.

Then the play started, and he walked out on stage.

My first thought?  He’s in 3D!  I never realized how flat television makes an actor until I saw David Hedison live.

Then he turned and his gaze fell on us.  He didn’t recognize me obviously, but he did the other two women.  There was a second where he froze, and the women I was with swore he dropped a line.

My nervous continued to jangle throughout the first act, and I was certain everyone must be able to see it.  By the time I’d returned from the first intermission, I’d calmed down a little so I could enjoy the play.  There was a scene that was pure fun to watch.  The other cast members were the focus of the scene, and David’s character had retreated by the fireplace.  He had a cigarette with him — character smoked, actor didn’t.  While the cast conversed, the things he did with that cigarette stole the scene.

After the play, he came out to greet us — even me — like old friends.  Coffee, tea, soda?  He checked with my Brit friend on how his accent was.  Then he brought Juliet Mills over, and she told tall true tales about David to us.  When it was time to close up, David drove us out to my car, since it was dark out.

Wow.

The next day, I was able to relax during the performance and enjoy it.  We were in the front row this time.  With live performance, anything can happen, and during this one, one of the actors had to eat a sandwich on stage.  She swallowed the wrong way and choked.  It became part of the performance.  David came to her side, but she cleared the sandwich and the play went on.  After the performance ended, we got to watch a promotional photo shoot.  David and Juliet posed in costume for numerous pictures.  We were there until almost midnight, and it almost seemed sad to let to fairy tale end when we finally had to leave.

Have you ever run into your favorite celebrity?  What was it like?

 

21st Anniversary: Women at War

Twenty-one years ago today I was deployed to Desert Shield/Desert Storm and what is now known as the First Persian Gulf War.  Women soldiers then were more of an oddity.  Though women had been nurses in Vietnam — China Beach starring Dana Delaney was airing in prime time– there was nothing like what the military was experiencing for Desert Shield.  We would be truck drivers, supply sergeants, fuel handlers, clerks, and any other job the military could put us to work on.

From the day the news announced that Saddam Hussein had invaded Iraq, everyone in my company knew we were going — just not sure when.  No one would tell us anything.  There was this unspoken acceptance among all the soldiers that it was in our future, despite all the rumors that flew about so fast that it put Star Trek‘s warp speed to shame.

Getting deployed overnight is better than waiting for it to come.  Newspapers and TV news shows sensationalized everything.  Makes for great ratings, but hard on soldiers who are thinking about what might happen to us.  We were treated to a non-stop parade of news about Iraq planning to gas the soldiers.  One particularly memorable op-ed drawing in USA Today showed a soldier in a kevlar helmet and uniform with a skull where the face should be.

And we were going over to that?!!

The women soldiers were also given briefings by an Arab male soldier who told us what we would be facing once we landed in Saudi Arabia.  Even showing our forearms was considered a big no-no, and the covers on romance novels — well, my best buddy lamented the future destruction of her book covers.  Threaded through the instructor’s training was how much he disapproved of women going over there at all.  He didn’t say it, but it came across in way he talked.  We were all outraged by his attitude.  It wasn’t that he wanted to protect women; he thought we weren’t capable of being on the battlefield at all because we were women.

On October 25, we all got up for our final formation in the United States and marched to a nearby gym.  USO workers were standing by with lunches for us as we boarded a bus for a nearby Air Force base.  We were a quiet bunch.  Gone was the false bravado the guys had displayed while we waited for deployment news.  We were going, and we didn’t know what would be there when we arrived.

It was a little like leaving home for the first time — that fear that the lines have been cut, and we’re on our own.

The only difference was that the unknown we were going into might kill us.

Have you ever been in a situation where you didn’t know what you were getting into until you got there? What did you experience?  Tell us about in the comments.

 

How Star Trek Got Me into Writing Fantasy

It looks like I might not have a writer’s conference to attend next year, or coordinate, for that matter.  The organization appears to have folded — web site is gone, and no one is answering emails.  I was coordinating the conference itself, but it doesn’t appear good.  Since I still want to get out and network, hopefully with agents, I’m thinking of trying a science fiction convention.  I used to go to them a lot but stopped going when I didn’t want to collect photos any more.  Now I have a different reason.  That’s got me thinking about how Star Trek got me into Science Fiction and then Fantasy in the first place.

In 1976, it was a big time of transition for women.  The first women went to West Point that year, and it was exciting.  As a big reader of fiction, I wanted to see books that were for me — about girls having adventures.  These women got into the military, and were doing something more than getting married or becoming a stewardess, teacher, or nurse.  But there really wasn’t anything in fiction, and it would be quite some time before there was.

Along comes Star Trek.  This was right about the time the fandom started to snowball.  Star Trek went into syndication on local channels, including KTLA.  Somehow, I ran across, and one thing really drew my attention.  No, it wasn’t Mr. Spock.  It was Lieutenant Uhura (played by Nichelle Nichols).  She was a woman officer in the military in a major leadership role.  She even got a bit of action now and then.  That was a whole lot more than I was finding in any book.

So I started reading science fiction.  The adult books were not really for me — they were more cerebral than about action-adventure, and most didn’t even have women.  I tried the books for kids.  Those were about action-adventure, but the same problem still existed.  Nothing for girls.  It was purely a men’s domain.

In comes the 1980s and an anthology called Sword and Sorceress, by Marion Zimmer Bradley.  MZB created it for the very reasons I was frustrated about –  no women protagonists.  Suddenly I had a book for me, and it had women + action-adventure.  Mystery would appear with a women protagonist about the same — Sue Grafton‘s Kinsey Milhone.  But mystery didn’t have a lot of action like what I was looking for.  Heck, I would have settled for a male protagonist and a female sidekick if she got action-adventure.

Urban fantasy was introduced in the 1990s, and has continued the evolution of the role of women in action-adventure roles in books.

 

Myths of Fantasy and Science Fiction

When I was in junior high school, I got hooked on Star Trek. Fandom was just starting to gain momentum, and conventions were popping up everywhere. Because Star Trek was science fiction, I started reading science fiction. There was something very magical about reading about adventures in space. Then I went to fantasy, for a very different reason–because fantasy has started to give us women chararacters having adventures.

Over on Apex & Abyss, there’s an interesting discussion about the Line Between Literary and Genre Fiction where an editor not only discusses the gray area of literary and genre but the myths of what science fiction and fantasy is.

She notes this about fantasy:

There is also the erroneous impression that fantasy equals children’s fairy tales, and again that’s simply not true. It dates back to Victorian ideas about fantasy being all about such things as THE BLUE FAIRY BOOK; perhaps the worst example of talking down to children ever published. To that, all I can say is that most of the fans of Harry Potter are adults.

I wouldn’t quite say fantasy equals children’s fairy tales, but books for children.  In the 1980s, a fantasy author I was regularly reading suddenly disappeared.  The publisher stopped printing his books and stopped selling them.  Odd for an author who had been on best seller lists and had written 30 books.  About ten years ago I finally found out why.  His books had more adult content, and in the 1980s, fantasy suddenly started being associated as a genre for teenage boys!  Curiously, that was at the same time we started seeing women characters taken on action roles in fantasy.

I think also there’s this myth about fantasy that it’s all about swords, sorcery, dragons, and unicorns.  One of the best fantasies I read didn’t have any of those elements.

On science fiction:

There seems to be a myth that all written science fiction and fantasy is like television and movie science fiction and fantasy: “Lost in Space,” Star Trek,” or “Star Wars” – or kiddie cartoons. The truth is that Hollywood tends to simplify good science fiction or fantasy stories and rely heavily on special effects, and they dumb down most of their plots as a result.

It’s odd that what drew me to read science fiction in the first place is the reason for this myth.  But I also think it’s true that many people think science fiction is all about space battles with spaceships.  In a movie, this makes for a great impact of sound and sight for viewers.  It’s also true that TV shows like Lost in Space were intended to bring kids in–no doubt to convince their parents to buy the products for the commercials being shown.  Even Star Trek, which deemed very cerebral in some circles, was often reduced to kiddie fare in the newspaper.  Whenever there was a convention, the reporters found a little boy dressed up as Spock to photograph.  It lends to the image that science fiction is for kids.

But here’s an interesting truth about both these genres:  Because they are set in a different place/time, the authors can do commentary on difficult subjects that otherwise might be impossible to broach.  Not the trendy political stuff, but the ones that people won’t talk about it.  Star Trek did that, and it’s one of the reasons it became more than it started out.  It stepped sideways and presented the issue in a different environment that wasn’t so threatening.   When I came home from Desert Storm, I was angry at some of the things that happened over there.  I wanted to write about them, but I couldn’t because I was still in the army.  They would have seriously frowned on a soldier writing non-fiction articles showing dirty laundry or even short stories showing the army itself.  I ended up doing fantasy because it was a safe place to bring in some of those things.

After all, fantasy is for teenage boys.  And female soldiers.