Phaze Doubt

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is the second Author’s Note in this series of no-note novels. Don’t froth at the mouth; you read this novel for better or worse.

One of the criticisms of my Author’s Notes has been that a novel should stand on its own and not need to be explained separately. I suspect that such critics read neither the novels nor the notes with much comprehension, because normally my notes discuss not the novels, but my life and times during the writing of the novels, or they may give credits to particular readers who suggested notions used in the novels. Well, muster your ire, because this time I shall discuss the novel.

Two names were borrowed from those of readers who wrote to me, though the characters surely bear little resemblance to the originals: Alyc and Jod’e. Another went the other way: Icy turned up in real life as a reviewer in an amateur magazine, Fosfax.

I was accused of doing a poor presentation of a lesbian, in the second Adept novel, Blue Adept. It must have been poor, because I had no lesbian character there, or in any of my novels. Apparently some readers assumed that a woman who hated men had to be a lesbian; I don’t see it that way. But in this novel I do have a lesbian, and any of that persuasion may now chastise me for doing it wrong. Certainly homosexuality is not one of my stronger subjects, but I felt that it wasn’t fair to exclude a sizable segment of the human population—about ten per cent—from representation in my fiction. Do I think that such folk are misguided, and that appropriate therapy will show them the error of their ways? No. No more than therapy would turn me gay. I would resent anyone, however well intentioned, trying to reverse my sexual orientation, so I follow the Golden Rule and leave the gay community alone. No, I don’t exclude them from friendship, and yes, I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one. Fair enough?

There were several problems in the course of the writing of this novel. For example, in the interest of developing new games for the game sections, I subscribed to World Game Review—and then didn’t use it. The novel led me in other directions than I expected. This sort of thing happens to writers. Sometimes characters take over their roles, too, and enlarge their parts, as Icy the demon chief’s daughter did. She was supposed to be a bit part, but she played me for a sucker with that sweater. You know, the one with the mountain contours.

I had intended to present the Master Game Grid layout here, so that interested readers could see exactly how every game was derived from the assorted grids and subgrids. But when I checked, I discovered no Master Grid. Oops! Two things, actually three, had happened. Years back I had worked out the full grid, and spent three hours one morning perfecting its details—then made an error on the computer that wiped out everything. I was never able to re-create it as I had had it. I can get very upset by such things, and I labor to see that they happen only once. Then I changed from CP/M to MS-DOS, and got everything set up—and a hard disk crash took it out. Later I changed computers, and my old one glitched. In sum, I couldn’t get anything that might have been salvaged. I was dependent on prior printouts. But I had also moved to a new house, and my back papers were buried somewhere in the refuse, where we are slowly cleaning up a decade’s worth of neglect. Eventually we’ll find those printouts, under a pile of other manuscripts. But I had a novel to do now. Which meant I had to do it without the Master Grid. Aarrgh!

Ah, now you understand. I faked it. This will be no news for reviewers, who have been privy to the fact that I faked any ability as a writer from the outset of my career. But I am sorry that I was unable to provide the Master Grid; it was my pride.

I try to benefit from anything that happens. Sometimes it’s a struggle. I received a letter from a reader, Ben Mays, who said that his play group would be putting on a show in my county at such and such a date. I hate to take time off from writing to sleep, let alone for anything else, but I do have an interest in drama. I acted in college, and while I’m sure I was not a great actor, it benefited me by helping me to abolish stage fright and teaching me how to make myself heard by an audience when there was no mike. I support the arts, and acting is one of them. So I made myself to go the play.

It was a disaster. Oh, the play was all right, I’m sure; it was Red Fox/Second Hanging, and was of the kind where stage and costuming are minimal. In fact there were only three actors, all male, covering perhaps a dozen parts. They changed parts almost in midsentence, going from scene to scene without pause. It started as a dialogue with the audience and worked seemingly by accident into the content of the play, but was actually highly integrated. It was a story of backwoods Kentucky, corruption and law enforcement and odd histories. The whole thing was the kind that you don’t see on mass market television, and yes, I think it’s great that small groups maintain the tradition and bring this sort of art to communities like ours. Attendance was free, even.

So what’s my gripe? Well, I was dead center in the audience, and the acoustics were such that the sound came at me from left and right, overlapped and garbled, and I could barely make out one word in ten. It was like watching TV with the sound turned down, or with interference that made the sound unintelligible: you can’t get much of the sense of it, but do have a glimpse of what you are missing. I suffered about two hours of that, thinking how I could have been home working on this novel instead. What a waste! Others heard it, and there was a standing ovation at the conclusion, which I didn’t join, because it would have been hypocrisy; I don’t do something just to conform. If only I hadn’t been stuck in that dead spot.

After the play I located Ben Mays and explained why I couldn’t say anything about the play. He said that that is a problem in some theaters, and wondered why I hadn’t moved to a better spot. Well, I should have, but I hadn’t realized how big a difference location can make; I might have made a scene by moving, only to be in a worse spot. He also said that they had it on video cassette. Oh, okay. He sent me the catalog, and I ordered that and some records and audio tapes while I was at it. As I said, I support the enterprise, and one good way to support it is to buy their productions.

At this writing I haven’t listened to any of it, because I have to assemble my new record and cassette tape players and I was determined to finish this novel before taking a break for anything else. But the material has had an effect on me, because one of the records, Heartdance, put out by a group called Song of the Wood, has a beautiful wraparound cover painting showing monstrous stone musical instruments cracking and being overgrown at a shoreline, as if some giant left them there millennia ago, and a girl dancing at the top of the fifty-foot-high hammered dulcimer. Beyond is a bucolic countryside, a village hamlet, and a distant castle on a hill. That picture fascinates me. In fact it set my fevered brain working, and I may use that as the setting for a future novel. Girl tunes in to the music of the ancient gods and dances to it, there at their ruins, and life stirs in the great old instruments that none alive can play, and—

But I don’t mean to bore you. My point is that via this devious channel I did gain something of value to me: a compelling picture and an idea. However, I did try to use the experience of attending the play in this novel. When Purple played the game of the Cretan mystery with the BEM, that was really an unstructured play. Of course it didn’t resemble the play I had seen, because I hadn’t heard it, but it was what came out after the experience slopped around in my cranium for a while. So if you liked that scene, then you can say I benefited, and if you didn’t like it, you can say I didn’t.

When I got into that scene, I had a real headache working out the devious ploys and counterploys. I set it in ancient Crete because that is one of the aspects of ancient history that fascinate me. You may have noticed that I sneak bits of history into my novels, because my love is for the far future and far past; only the present bores me. Fine; I completed the scene and moved on. Then when I came through on my editing sweep, I got into trouble again.

You see, there are two pillars at the main gate to the great Palace at Knossos. One is round in cross section, the other square. I called the round one a cylinder, but what’s a square one? It took me forty-five minutes to run that down (an ornery writer just doesn’t know when to quit), and then I couldn’t use the word. It’s a right parallelepipedon (or you can leave off the last two letters). Technically, a polyhedron with right-angled parallelograms as faces. That is, a figure with four rectangular sides and two square ends. If all six sides were squares, it would be called a cube. Why couldn’t they have had a simple four-letter word for a stretched-out cube? I decided on “block-shaped” and I do feel like a blockhead for wasting so much time on it. I mean, what idiot would spend three quarters of an hour editing a single word? Sigh; the worst of it is that I know that next time such a thing occurs, I’ll do it again.

Yet in the course of that spot research I ascertained that the fabled land of Atlantis was in fact Crete (I looked in the book that showed the square columns, you see), destroyed by the eruption of Thera about 3,500 years ago. Those of you who have spent your lives searching for Atlantis may now relax; my forty-five minutes has serendipitously solved your problem. No, don’t thank me; I do this sort of thing routinely for my readers.

Thus the troubled course of this novel, which is typical for me. Those who believe that great works of literature spring full-formed from the head of the author and that lesser ilk requires even less effort will want nothing to do with me, because I struggle and sweat over even indifferent material, as in this case. Most real writers do. But how I love that struggle!

This is the conclusion of the seven-novel Adept trilogy. To forestall the screams of outrage by fans of the series who never want it to end, and the sighs of relief by critics who never wanted it to start, let me explain that I regard some series as open, meaning they can continue as long as the market tolerates them, and some as closed, meaning that when their tales are told they are allowed to retire. This series is the latter type. This does not mean that I am abandoning fantasy, just that I am making way for a new series, Virtual Mode, whose framework is such that the whole of the Proton/Phaze frames can be considered a subset of it. That means in turn that should I some day suffer an irresistible urge to write another Adept novel, I could do so in the Mode context. That’s neither a promise, fans, nor a threat, critics; merely a clarification I hope allows each of you to relax. This series has been phased out. Of course I have been wrong before, when I thought it was complete as a three-novel set; like a tropical tree, a series can sometimes regenerate from the roots. But I think it’s done.